เ

their more serious plays which suits generally with all men's humours. Shakespeare's language is likewise a little obsolete, and Ben Jonson's wit comes short of theirs." Further, in his " Defence of the Epilogue," a postscript to his tragedies of the "Conquest of Granada," Dryden writes: "Let any man who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech or some notorious flaw in sense and yet these men are reverenced when we are not forgiven." He denounces "the lameness of their plots :" made up of some "ridiculous incoherent story. . . . . I suppose I need not name 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre,' nor the historical plays of Shakespeare; besides many of the rest, as the 'Winter's Tale,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' Measure for Measure,' which were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written that the comedy neither caused your mirth nor the serious part your concernment." He finds that Shakespeare "writes in many places below the dullest writers of our, or of any precedent, age. Never did any author precipitate himself from such heights of thought to so low expressions as he often does. He is the very Janus of poets: he wears almost everywhere two faces; you have scarce begun to admire the one ere you despise the other..... Let us, therefore, admire the beauties and the heights of Shakespeare, without falling after him into a carelessness and (as I may call it) a lethargy of thought for whole scenes together." The audiences of the time of Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden thus describes: "They knew no better, and therefore were satisfied with what they brought. Those who call theirs the Golden Age of Poetry have only this reason for it-that they were then content with acorns before they knew the use of bread," &c. Altogether, it must be said that Dryden's comments upon Shakespeare are not remarkable for their reverence, while they afford fair evidence of that comparative neglect of the poet to which Malone and Steevens had referred.

and

De Quincey, admitting it, passes lightly over the fact that inferior dramatists were sometimes preferred to Shakespeare. He argues that ordinary minds, in quest of relaxation, will reasonably prefer any recent drama to that which, having lost all its novelty, has lost much of its excitement, and that in cases of public entertainment, deriving part of their power from scenery and stage pomp, novelty is for all minds an essential condition of attraction. And this is certainly true. New things are often prized simply because of their newness, while old things are undervalued merely because they are old. In the course of time the plays of Shakespeare were classed in the established repertory of the theatre; they had become what the actors

call" stock pieces;" they no longer excited as once they did; their incidents and characters were now familiar; the element of surprise was removed from the entertainment. The public supporting the theatres were more interested in the new productions; they held the dramas they knew to be of less consideration than the dramas they had yet to make acquaintance with. Beaumont and Fletcher began to write in 1607, when Shakespeare had been for twenty years before the playgoing public. Nevertheless, Shakespeare had not ceased to produce in 1607; indeed, certain of his finest plays had yet to appear. Although Shakespeare is to be considered as the elder dramatist, the three poets may yet be viewed as contemporaries, producing plays side by side as it were. Beaumont even predeceased Shakespeare, and Fletcher survived him only nine years. It could hardly have been, therefore, on account solely of their greater novelty that the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher obtained the decided preference of the public. De Quincey, indeed, is constrained to account for this by allowing that "in some departments of the comic Beaumont and Fletcher, when writing in combination "—and this was only in the lifetime of Shakespeare-" really had a freedom and breadth of manner which excels the comedy of Shakespeare: " which is simply an admission that Beaumont and Fletcher were preferred to Shakespeare because they were, in truth, superior to him.

Fletcher appears, indeed, at one time to have been especially exalted at the expense of Shakespeare. Cartwright, esteemed "one of the best poets, orators, and philosophers of his age," in his panegyrical verses addressed to Fletcher, at once compliments the younger and affronts the elder poet :

Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies
I' th' ladies' questions and the fool's replies:
Old-fashioned wit which walked from town to town
In trunk-hose, which our fathers call the clown, &c.

Of course "Twelfth Night" is here contemptuously referred to.
And Birkenhead in his Address to Fletcher must needs write :
Brave Shakespeare flowed, yet had his ebbings too,
Often above himself, sometimes below;

Thou always best!

A more famous poet, Denham, is scarcely less laudatory of Fletcher:

When Jonson, Shakespeare, and thyself did sit,

And swayed in the triumvirate of wit,

Yet what from Jonson's oil and sweat did flow,

Or what more easy Nature did bestow

On Shakespeare's gentler muse, in thee full grown
Their graces both appear.

A certain disregard of Shakespeare on the part of the public is also evidenced by the prologue to Shirley's comedy of the "Sisters," acted at the Blackfriars Theatre probably about 1640:

You see

What audience we have; what company

To Shakespeare comes?-whose mirth did once beguile
Dull hours, and, buskined, made even sorrow smile;

So lovely were the wounds that men would say
They could endure the bleeding a whole day :
He has but few friends lately.

While the prologue to the same author's later comedy of "Love's Tricks; or, the School of Compliments," upon its performance in 1667, contains the lines:

In our old plays the humour, love, and passion,
Like doublet, hose, and cloak, are out of fashion;
That which the world called wit in Shakespeare's age
Is laughed at as improper for our stage.

And Malone cites a satire of 1680, of like purport:

At every shop, while Shakespeare's lofty style
Neglected lies, to mice and worms a spoil,
Gilt on the back, just smoking from the press,

The apprentice shows you Durfey, Hudibras, &c.

But this has carried us some years beyond the Restoration.

The Puritans closed the theatres, and, practically, destroyed the Elizabethan drama. The Restoration brought with it plays of its own, as it brought its own manners, fashions, follies, and vices. It persistently disparaged Shakespeare; viewed him, indeed, very scornfully. Grave Evelyn noted: "To a new play with several of my relatives: the Evening Love,'-a foolish plot and very profane; it afflicted me to see how the stage was degenerated and polluted by the licentious time;" and he further remarked that "now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad." This was in 1662; he had been witnessing a performance of "Hamlet," supported by the great Mr. Betterton. There is significance, too, in the very low estimate of certain of Shakespeare's plays entertained by Mr. Pepys. He may not be accounted very wise, yet Pepys was a man of some taste and cultivation, and was probably in advance of the average playgoers of his time. Would he have found courage to hold the poet so cheaply if the general opinion had not been depreciatory? It may be remembered that he accounted "Romeo and Juliet" "a play of itself the worst that ever I heard ;" that to his thinking, in comparison with Tuke's" Adventures of Five Hours," "Othello" was "a VOL. CCXLVII. NO. 1797.

X

mean thing;" that he judged "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to be "the most insipid ridiculous play that I saw in my life," &c. &c.

Pepys, recording his first purchase of a Shakespeare, discloses a curious preference for other authors. He had gained, it seems, some three pounds by his stationer's bill to the King, in the way, presumably, of illicit commission or perquisite, and he resolved forthwith to lay out the money in books. He found himself at a great loss what to choose. He inclined towards "books of pleasure, as plays, which," he owns, "my nature was most earnest in; but at last, after seeing Chaucer, Dugdale's History of Paul's, Stow's London, Gesner, History of Kent, besides Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont's Plays, I at last chose Dr. Fuller's Worthies, the Cabbala or Collections of Letters of State, and a little book, Delices de Hollande, with another little book or two, all of good use or serious pleasure, and Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies." It is satisfactory to find, some six months later, an entry in his diary: "Home, calling for my new books, namely, Sir H. Spillman's Whole Glossary, Scapula's Lexicon, and Shakespeare's plays, which I have got money out of my stationer's bills to pay for." He had secured a Shakespeare at last, however he had given his original election to very inferior works.

Malone's statement, that "from the Restoration to 1682 no more than four plays of Shakespeare were performed by a principal company in London," is, of course, erroneous. But the Pepys manuscripts, from which so much information touching the stage of the seventeenth century has been derived, were not published until 1825; Malone died in 1812. In fact, "Othello," "Henry IV.," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," "Twelfth Night," "Henry VIII.," " Macbeth," and "King Lear," were all presented, and from the original text, within some five or six years of the Restoration. The system of altering or "adapting" Shakespeare commenced, perhaps, on the 18th of February, 1662, with the "Law against Lovers," an arrangement by Davenant of "Measure for Measure," introducing much dialogue of his own, and the characters of Benedick and Beatrice borrowed, for the occasion, from "Much Ado about Nothing." "Romeo and Juliet," revived on the following 1st of March, was, after a while, played, now with a happy, now with a tragical, conclusion the alteration being ascribed to the Hon. James Howard. No protest seems to have been uttered in regard to these mutilations of the poet; there was no cry of sacrilege! This literary cutting and wounding was deemed, indeed, a lawful occupation; the adapters were rather complimented upon their ingenuity than denounced

for their Vandalism. Nor did Shakespeare suffer alone. The "Two Noble Kinsmen" of Fletcher, materially altered by Davenant, appeared as the "Rivals" at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in 1664. De Quincey, while warmly denouncing "the degenerate taste which substituted the caprices of Davenant, the rants of Dryden, or the filth of Tate, or the jewellery of Shakespeare," yet charges the managers with responsibility, and acquits the public, who, he asserts, had no choice in the matter. It must be said, however, that the managers, who cater for the public, rather follow taste than lead it, and that players are very much what their patrons make them or would have them be. Many plays were brought back to the stage, after the reopening of the theatres, and performed in their original state. It may be assumed that they afterwards underwent alteration to meet the deteriorated tastes of the public. De Quincey, indeed, charges Malone with "the grossest folly" for accounting the numerous adaptations so many insults to Shakespeare, "whereas they expressed as much homage to his memory as if the unaltered dramas had been retained. The substance was retained," he proceeds, "the changes were merely concessions to the changing views of scenical propriety; sometimes, no doubt, made with a view to the revolution effected by Davenant at the Restoration in bringing scenes (in the painter's sense) upon the stage; sometimes also with a view to the altered fashions of the audience, during the suspension of the action, or perhaps to the introduction of after-pieces, by which, of course, the time was abridged for the main performance." This apology for the adaptation and garbling of the plays is certainly strained and disingenuous. The changes effected by Davenant, his fellows and followers, are inaccurately described. They are for the most part grossly wanton and capricious. De Quincey himself denounces Nahum Tate's "King Lear" as "the vilest of travesties," consecrating his name to "everlasting scorn." Yet the "Lear" of Tate is no worse than the "Macbeth" of Davenant, the "Tempest" of Dryden and Davenant, or the "Cymbeline" of Durfey. And Tate, it may be added, did not confine himself to "Lear.". He also operated upon "Coriolanus" and upon "King Richard II." Nor was he in his own time the "poor grub of literature" that De Quincey describes. It need hardly be mentioned that he succeeded Shadwell as poet laureate, and that, aided by Dr. Brady, he prepared the version of the Psalms that is still sung in many churches.

But the neglect of Shakespeare must surely have been very general, or Tate could not have written as he did in the dedication of his mangled edition of "Lear." He calmly mentions the original tragedy