252.

     **  "Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late." Written
     by John Dryden, servant to his Majesty, London (4to) printed
     for Abel Small, at the Unicorn at the West End of St.
     Paul's, and Jacob Tonson, at the Judge's Head, in Chancery
     Lane, near Fleet street. 1679.

"I have undertaken to remove that heap of rubbish.... I new-modelled the plot; threw out many unnecessary persons, improved those characters which were begun and left unfinished,... made, with no small trouble, an order and connection of the scenes, and... so ordered them that there is a coherence of 'em with one another,... a due proportion of time allowed for every motion,... have refined the language, etc."

The same thing was done in 1672, by Ravenscroft, who produced an adaptation of "Titus Andronicus," and boasted "that none in all the author's works ever received greater alterations or additions; the language not only refined, but many scenes entirely new, besides most of the principal characters heightened, and the plot much increased." John Dennis, a critic of that day, declares that Shakespeare "knew nothing about the ancients, set all propriety at defiance,... was neither master of time enough to consider, correct, and polish what he had written,... his lines are utterly void of celestial fire," and his verses "frequently harsh and unmusical." He was, however, so interested in the erratic and friendless poet that he kindly altered "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and touched up "Coriolanus," which he brought out in 1720, under the title of "The Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Resentment." The play, however, did not prosper, and he attributed it to the fact that it was played on a Wednesday. Dean Swift, in his "The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris, concerning the Strange and Deplorable Frenzy of John Dennis," relates how the said Dennis, being in company with Lintot, the bookseller, and Shakespeare being mentioned as of a contrary opinion to Mr. Dennis, the latter "swore the said Shakespeare was a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which gave Mr. Lintot a very ill opinion of the said Shakespeare." Lord Shaftesbury complains, at about the same date, of Shakespeare's "rude and unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit." *

Thomas Rymer knows exactly how Othello, which he calls "a bloody farce, the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief," ought to have been done. In the first place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a-moor, and that the army should be insulted by his being a soldier. Of "Desdemona" he says: "There is nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen-maid—no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly." Speaking of expression, he writes that "in the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, I may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." He is indignant that the catastrophe of the play should turn on a handkerchief. He would have liked it to have been folded neatly on the bridal couch, and, when Othello was killing Desde-mona, "the fairy napkin might have started up to disarm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth. Then might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for dead; then might he, believing her dead, and touched with remorse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and truly represented in the theater. Then for the unraveling, of the plot, as they call it, never was old deputy recorder in a country town, with his spectacles on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so blundered and be doltified as is our poet to have a good riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. What can remain with the audience to carry home with them? How can it work but to delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt our appetite, and till our head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what all the parish clerks in London could ever pretend to?" He then hopes the audience will go to the play as they go to church, namely, "sit still, look on one another, make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they would a sermon." With regard to "Julius Cæsar," he is displeased that Shakespeare should have meddled with the Romans. He might be "familiar with Othello and Iago as his own natural acquaintances, but Cæsar and Brutus were above his conversation." To put them "in gulls' coats and make them Jack-puddens," is more than public decency should tolerate—in Mr. Rymer's eyes. Of the well-known scene between Brutus and Cassius, this critic remarks: "They are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. They are to play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reckoning." Rymer calls his book "A Short View of Tragedy, with Some Reflections on Shakespeare and Other Practitioners for the Stage." Hume thought that both Bacon and Shakespeare showed "a want of simplicity and purity of diction with defective taste and elegance," and that "a reasonable propriety of thoughts he (Shakespeare) can not at any time uphold." Voltaire thought the Shakespearean kings "not completely royal." Pope (who declared that Rymer, just quoted, was "a learned and strict critic"), to show that he was not insensible to the occasional merits of the plays, was good enough to distinguish, by inverted commas, such passages as he thought might be safely admired by the rest of mankind; while Richard Steele, in "The Tatler," * borrows the story of the "Taming of the Shrew," and narrates it as "an incident occurring in Lincolnshire," feeling, no doubt, that he did a good deed in rescuing whatever was worth preserving from the clutches of such obscure and obsolete literature!

And then came the period when scholars and men of taste were ravished with Addison's stilted rhymes, and the six-footed platitudes of Pope, and the sesquepedalian derivatives dealt out by old Samuel Johnson. The Shakespearean plays are pronounced by Mr. Addison ** "very faulty in hard metaphors and forced expressions," and he joins them with "Xat. Lee," as "instances of the false sublime."

Samuel Johnson is reported as saying that William Shakespeare never wrote six consecutive lines (he subsequently made it seven) without "making an ass of himself," (in which speech he seems to have followed his namesake without the "h," old Ben, in the "Discoveries")—backing up his assertion with some very choice specimens of literary criticism. Let any one, interested enough in the matter to see for himself, take down Dr. Johnson's own edition of Shakespeare, and read his commentaries on the Shakespearean text. Let him turn, for example, to where he says of "Hamlet":

We must allow to the tragedy of "Hamlet" the praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous that the argument of the play would make a long