The text of
the first folio was probably drawn from a ury copy in the theatre, from
which the quarto text had been adapted.
the first folio was probably drawn from a ury copy in the theatre, from
which the quarto text had been adapted.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v05
He published a new edition in
1793, with the sole object of displacing that of Malone. It was
obviously impossible for Steevens to surpass Malone in fidelity to
the quartos and folios; hence, he declares
a
8
it is time instead of a servile and timid adherence to the ancient copies, when
(offending against sense and metre) they furnish no real help, that a future
editor, well acquainted with the phraseology of our author's age, should be at
liberty to restore some apparent meaning to his corrupted lines, and a decent
flow to his obstructed versification.
Steevens took this liberty and emulated Pope in 'indulging his
private sense. ' Hallam's estimate of the two editors is just :
Malone and Steevens were two laborious commentators on the meaning
of words and phrases; one dull, the other clever; but the dulness was accom-
panied by candour and a love of truth, the cleverness by a total absence of
both.
A new edition of Malone's text was brought out by a son of
James Boswell, Johnson's biographer, in 1821. It contains an
accumulated mass of information, which has been of great service
to later editors. But the confused arrangement of its contents
and the bulk of its notes entailed upon Malone a reputation for
dulness and stupidity which approaches that of the first hero of
The Dunciad. Walpole said that Malone's notes were an 'extract
of all the opium that is spread through the works of all the bad
playwrights of that age’; and, among later writers, G. H. Lewes
has endeavoured to exaggerate this censure'.
1 Boswell's chief service to the text was his final vindication of the reading like
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
Singer, Hudson and Collier
277
Of detached criticism on Shakespeare's text, the Observations
and Conjectures of Thomas Tyrwhitt (1766) is worthy of mention.
Joseph Ritson shows some acquaintance with the original
authorities in his Remarks (1783) and in The Quip Modest (1788),
in which he criticises Johnson and Steevens's edition and Reed's
revision. Monck Mason's Comments (1785) and further Comments
(1807) contain some of the best detached criticism of the time.
Malone's text left nothing to be done which faithful adherence to
the old copies could achieve. But the variant quarto plays still
afforded scope for critical discrimination between the readings of
quarto and folio.
Nineteenth century editors may be distinguished broadly by
their attitude to these two texts. Samuel Weller Singer (1826)
mainly followed the text of Malone. He led a revolt against
superfluous notes and bulky volumes; but he went to the opposite
extreme. Out of scores of emendations incorporated in it, chiefly
from Theobald, only a few are assigned to their authors, while, in
the Life prefixed to the edition, we are told that “Theobald did
not wholly abstain from conjecture, but the palm of conjectural
criticism was placed much too high for the reach of his hand. '
Singer was the first to attempt a refutation of Collier's 'corrector. '
Hudson followed in his footsteps with another well printed and
convenient edition (1851-2). His introductions deal ably with
textual questions, but his chief merits lie on the literary side.
Payne Collier, in his first edition (1844), shows distinct bias in
favour of the quartos? The text is marred by the retention of
many errors, owing to a slavish adherence to the old copies.
Collier is quite supercilious towards former editors, expressing
doubts about 'a' babbled o' green fields,' and retaining strange
companions' for 'stranger companies' in the passage in A Mid-
summer Night's Dream, to the detriment of rime, metre and
When he does adopt a conjecture, he speaks of it as
though it were only the correction of an obvious misprint. Collier
now underwent as sudden and as complete a conversion as Steevens
the base Indian,' in Othello, by quoting, together with a passage from Habington's
Castara, from The Women's Conquest, by Edward Loward (1671):
-Behold my queen-
Who with no more concern I'le cast away
Than Indians do a pearl that ne're did know
Its value.
1 Thus, where Othello says
[Let] all indign and base adversities
Make head against my estimation!
he is almost alone in reading reputation' with the quartos.
<
sense.
6
{
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278
The Text of Shakespeare
had passed through before him. From a hopeless Tory among
editors, he now developed into a confirmed Radical. His own
Notes and Emendations appeared in 1853. Certain of these con-
jectures are amongst the best produced in the nineteenth century,
and some among them are quite in Theobald's style! But most
of the emendations in his book recall Warburton's eccentricities.
Nevertheless, had they been given to the world as his own sugges-
tions, Collier's fame would still be untarnished. As a matter of
fact, he deceived the very elect into believing that these emenda-
tions were corrections in a seventeenth century hand in his copy of
the second folio (the Perkins folio'), until Nicholas Hamilton, of
the British Museum, proved them to be fabrications.
A magnificent folio edition was begun in 1853 and completed
in 1865 by James Orchard Halliwell(-Phillipps). The text is very
conservative, but contains more conjectures than Collier had
admitted. Its chief value lay in the fact that, for the first time,
full materials for the study of the text were embraced in one
edition. Several old quartos are here reprinted, and facsimiles of
parts of other old texts; and the notes give a very full account of
variant readings. Though Halliwell-Phillipps will chiefly be remem-
bered by his antiquarian researches, his reproductions of the first
folio and the quartos were of immense service to the textual study
of Shakespeare.
Nikolaus Delius (1854) adopted the first folio as the standard
authority for the text of all the plays, and carried out his work
with a critical sagacity which makes his text valuable to all
scholars. This principle has been shown to be unsound, so far as
the duplicate and doublet quarto plays are concerned. The first
quarto, from which the folio text was derived, ought to be the
basis of the text of the duplicate quarto plays, and Delius is
compelled, at times, to depart from his principle. Thus, in The
Merchant of Venice (act II, sc. 5, 29), folios have the vile squealing
of the wry-neck'd fife. ' Delius reads ‘squeaking,' with the first
quarto. So, again, with the doublet quartos. In Hamlei (act I,
6
* In Polonius's speech (act 1, sc. 3, 109), Collier reads:
Tender yourself more dearly;
Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Running it thus—you'll tender me a fool.
(Quartos Wrong' and folios 'Roaming. ') Again, Coriolanus says (act 111, sc. 1, 131)
(according to the folios)
How shall this bosome multiplied digest
The senate's courtesy ?
Collier conjectured beson multitude,' which Dyce improved to . bisson. '
## p. 279 (#303) ############################################
Grant White and Dyce
279
sc. 1, 65), the quartos (including the defective quarto) read 'jump
at this dead hour. ' The folios have 'just. ' Delius followed the
quartos in his first edition, though he comes round to the folio
in his second. On the other hand, his principle rightly applies to
the variant quarto plays. His text of these plays is probably the
best extant from a critical point of view. But, in two pamphlets
on Richard III and King Lear—the best studies extant of the
relations between the quarto and folio text—he rejects the theory
of a later revision by Shakespeare. The quarto and folio text, he
concludes, both represent the same original; but the quarto is an
inferior pirated copy. Howard Staunton introduced many im-
provements into his edition (1860) from the text of Dyce. He
shows a sound judgment on textual questions, and considerable
resource in emendation. His notes contain a fairly full textual
apparatus in very brief compass. He followed the folio text
in the main for the variant quarto plays, except in the case of
Richard III, and introduced several fresh readings from the
defective quarto in Romeo and Juliet.
Grant White (1861) may be mentioned in the same connection,
inasmuch as he professed that his text was founded 'exclusively
upon that of the first folio,' which marks him as a disciple of Delius.
* The superior antiquity of the quarto texts,' he remarks, ‘is not infre-
quently brought to the attention of the critical reader of Shakespeare in
support of a reading taken from some one of those texts-as if the age of a
surreptitiously printed edition could supply its lack of authenticity! '
The plays in which the folio text is taken from the 'surrep-
titious' edition are here entirely ignored. Yet his text draws on
the quartos almost as much as on the folios. He is often even one
of a minority who follow the quarto. In spite of this inconsistency,
however, his textual studies have a distinct value. His opinions,
though always vigorously expressed, have often been hastily
formed, as when he prints ‘Judean’ in his text, but favours
Indian' in his notes.
Alexander Dyce's acuteness and soundness of judgment enabled
him to produce what his reviewer called 'the best text which has yet
been given to the world' (1857). He showed a fine discrimination,
with regard both to the quarto and folio readings, and to the con-
jectures which he admitted into the text. He was well versed
in Elizabethan literature, and thoroughly conversant with his
authorities. He had already given evidence of his ability in his
Remarks on Collier's and Charles Knight's editions; and, in 1859,
he mercilessly exposed the absurdity of many of the corrections'
a
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Text of Shakespeare
put forward by Collier. His conjectures are never wide of the
mark, and some have been generally adopted. One example may
be given from Part III of Henry VI, where the folios make
Henry say:
Let me embrace the sower Adversaries
For wise men say it is the wisest coursel.
Dyce restored a certain reading in 'Let me embrace thee, sour
Adversity. '
He paved the way for what has now become the standard text
of Shakespeare—The Cambridge Shakespeare, 1863–6, edited by
W. G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright. The introductions contain the
safest guide as to authorities for the text, and the notes form a
complete apparatus criticus of the text. The variant and doublet
quartos whose texts differ too widely from the folio to allow of
collation in the notes are printed in full. If this edition errs at all,
it is in exhibiting too great a partiality for the quartos in the case
of the variant quarto plays, and in giving to modern (mostly futile)
conjectures too much valuable space in the notes, which might
have been better filled by recording the coincidences of the chief
editions with the folio or quarto text-small flaws in a work which
is a monument of editorial judgment and accurate scholarship,
as well as of careful typography.
1 Act I, so. 1, 24.
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
APPENDIX
GENEALOGY OF THE TEXT OF RICHARD III
1
6
This play offers quite the most difficult problem in the criticism of Shake-
speare's text. It contains the variations usually found in the variant quarto
plays, but in far greater numbers (act 1, sc. 1, 13 lute F, love Qq; 26 see
F, spy Qq; 133 play F, prey Qq; 138 St John F, St Paul Qq; act 1,
sc. 2, 11 wounds Fholes Qq; 28 young F, poore Qq; 76 crimes F
euills Qq; 94 murd'rous F, bloudy Qa; 105 better F, fitter Qq; 175 brest Fi
bosom Qq; act 1, sc. 3, 5 eyes F, words Qq; 67 children F, kindred Qq; 125
spent F, spilt Qq; 147 soueraigne F, lawful Qa; 273 peace, peace F, have
done Qq; 305 muse why F, wonder Qq; act 1, sc. 4, 18 falling F, stumbling
Qq; 46 sowre Fi grim Qq; act 11, sc. 2, 46 nere changing night F, perpetuall
rest Qq etc. ).
The folio text seems to show that the editors not only introduced many
emendations but made some collation of the quarto copies.
(1) In act II, sc. 3, 43 ensuing dangers Qq Pursuing danger F, the catch-
word in the folio is ensuing. The editor therefore had the quarto text
before him, but altered it.
(2) In act 1, sc. 2, 19 to adders spiders toads
Or any creeping venom'd thing that lives Qq
to Wolves to Spiders toads etc. F,
The context plainly shows that the alteration has been made in the folio.
(3) Act 1, sc. 2, 212; act III, sc. 1, 190 Crosby Place Qq is altered to
Crosby House Fj. But in act 1, so. 3, 345 Crosby Place Qq Ff. Act 11, sc. 4,
35 perilous or perillous of Qq is altered to parlous F1; act III, so. 1, 154 F,
reads perillous as Qi Q2 Act 1, sc. 2, 27-28; act iv, so. 1, 76-77 As. . . As is
altered to More. . . then F. 137 slew Qq kill'd Ff; act 1, sc. 3, 119 slewest
Qq killd’st Ff. 282 princely Qq noble Ff; aot III, 8c. 4, 66 noble Qq princely
Ff. These examples point to systematic alteration, which was sometimes
omitted through oversight.
(4) Oaths and sacred names are, as usual, modified in the folio. But a
very unusual phenomenon is their presence in the folio, in some cases where
they are either omitted or toned down in the quartos (act 11, so. 3, 46 Marry
F, om. Qq; act 111, sc. 4, 99 God F, Heaven Qq). These must have come
from the other copy, from which the additional passages came.
(5) The coincidences between F, and Q, show that the first quarto was
used (act 1, sc. 1, 21 scarse Q. Q. F, om. the rest; act 1, sc. 2, 115 keen Q.
keene F, kind or kinde the rest; 206 devoted suppliant Qı devoted servant
F, suppliant the rest; act 1, sc. 3, 26 false accusers Q. Q. F, accusers the
rest; 178 faultless Q. Q. F, om. the rest; 246 poisonous Q. Fı poisoned the
rest; act 1, sc. 4, 139 purse Q. Q. Fı piece or peece the rest; act 11, sc. 4, 30
biting or byting Q, F, pretie, pretty, etc. the rest; act III, sc. 4, 45 sudden Fi
sodaine Qı soone the rest; 59 looks Q. F, face the rest; act 11, sc. 5, 42 form
Q. Q. F, course the rest; act iv, sc. 4, 25 Harry Q1 Q2 F, Mary the rest; 170
Thy prime of manhood daring bold and venturous Q. Q. F, om. the rest).
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282
Appendix to Chapter XI
1
(6) F, agrees with Q: in many cases in act wi and act v, showing that
Qs was probably collated for parts of the play (act 11, sc. 1, 63 seems Q1 Q2
thinkst Q: think’st F7; 78 all-ending Q. ending Q2 Q3 F2; 96 loving Q. Q:
noble Q3 F1; 97 dread Q. Q. deare Q. Fı; 120 heavy Q, waightie or weightie
Q2 Q3 Fı; act v, sc. 3, 351 helmes Q. Q2 helpes Q3 Fı; 255 sweate Q. Q. sweare
Q3 F1; 82 loving Q1 Q2 noble Q3 Fı; 125 deadly Q. om. Q2 Q3 F7; 222 see Q. Q.
heare Q: F7; 338, Fight Q. Q. Right Qs Fz; act v, sc. 5, 7 enjoy it Q1 Q2 om.
QF).
The omissions in the quarto text show that it was adapted for the stage
(act 1, sc. 2, 16; 25; 155-166; act 1, sc. 3, 116; 167-9; act 1, sc. 4, 36-37; 69-72;
84; 113-4; 166; 213; 257-260; 266; act 11, sc. 1, 25; 140; act 11, sc. 2, 16;
89-100; 123–140; act 11, 8C. 4, 67; act iii, sc. 1, 172-3; act III, sc. 3, 7-8; 15;
act III, sc. 4, 104-7; act 111, sc. 5, 7; 97; 103-5; act și, sc. 7, 8; 11; 24; 37;
98-99; 120; 127; 144-153; 202; 245; act iv, sc. 1, 2-6; 37; 98-104; act iv,
sc. 2, 2; act iv, sc. 4, 20-21; 28; 52–53; 103; 159; 172; 179; 221-234; 276-7;
288-342; 387; 400; 429; 432; 451; 523; act v, sc, 3, 27-8; 43).
The text of
the first folio was probably drawn from a ury copy in the theatre, from
which the quarto text had been adapted. The omissions in it are (with one
exception) unimportant (act I, . 2, 202; 225; act 1, sc. 3, 114; act 1, sc. 4,
133–4; 147; 148; 185-6; 209; 234; act 11, sc. 2, 84-85; 145; act iii, sc. 3, 1;
act 111, sc. 4, 10; 60; act 111, sc. 7, 43-44; 83; 220; act iv, sc. 1, 19; act iv, sc. 2,
103-120; act iv, sc. 4, 39; sot v, sc. 3, 212–4).
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
SHAKESPEARE ON THE CONTINENT
It is a tribute to the force and originality of the Elizabethan
drama that, while still at its prime, it should have found its way
to the continent. The conditions of the time could hardly have
been less favourable for interest to be felt in English drama
outside England itself; for all continental opinion, or, at least, the
continental opinion that prided itself on the possession of good
taste, had fallen under the spell of the classic traditions of
the renascence, and, in poetry, irregularity and lack of clearness
were abhorred above all things. There was, thus, no possibility of
compromise between Shakespearean drama and the literary ideals
of Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But, as
a matter of fact, English drama did not reach the continent by
way of literary channels at all. It was conveyed, not by books,
but by actors, and had little to do with literature in the strict
sense of that term.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, and throughout the
seventeenth, English actors from time to time crossed the channel
and played in Dutch, German and Scandinavian towns, wandering
as far north as Copenhagen and Stockholm, as far east as Danzig,
Königsberg and Warsaw and as far south as Vienna and Innsbruck.
They took with them the masterpieces of Elizabethan drama in
garbled acting versions, the more garbled, undoubtedly, owing
to the fact that the foreign audiences before whom they played
came to see even more than to hear. From the evidence of the
répertoire lists, as well as from German versions of English plays,
we are able to say with certainty that, of Shakespeare's works,
Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and
The Merchant of Venice were played in some form on the con-
tinent in the course of the seventeenth century; and it is highly
probable that this list may be increased by the addition of The
Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream (or, at least,
the comic interlude of that drama), The Taming of the Shrew,
.
## p. 284 (#308) ############################################
284
Shakespeare on the Continent
Othello and Julius Caesar. The success of these English com-
panies induced German actors to adopt their methods and to
translate their répertoire, and, in 1620, and again in 1630, there
appeared at Leipzig collections of German versions of the plays
which the Englische Comoedianten had in their list.
That English actors should also have tried their fortune in
France was natural, but we have only the vaguest references to
such visits; in 1604, an English troupe performed at Fontaine-
bleau, but it is impossible to say with what plays they attempted
to win the interest of the French court. In the absence of proof
and the still more significant absence of any knowledge of the
English drama on the part of French critics who had never visited
England, it seems probable that, in the metropolis of seventeenth
century culture, the main attractions on which English players
relied were acrobatic tricks and buffoonery.
In spite of the comparative popularity of Shakespeare's plays
in Germany in this early period, there is no evidence that the
English poet's name was known to any of his adapters or trans-
lators, or to any member of the public before whom the pieces
were acted. This, perhaps, is not surprising, so far as the crude
and vulgarised versions of the Comoedianten were concerned ;
but it is not unreasonable to expect that native dramatists, who
were eager enough to imitate the new English models, might have
evinced some curiosity with regard to the author or authors of
these models. This, however, was not the case; no trace of Shake-
speare's name is anywhere to be found. The only German of the
seventeenth century,' says Creizenach, 'who can be proved to have
taken an interest in the works of Shakespeare and his contem-
poraries was the elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate, who had
been in England in the years 1635—7. In his correspondence
'
with his sister, duchess Sophia of Hanover, he quotes from The
Merry Wives of Windsor, and she, in one of her letters, uses the
English words ‘he leads apes in hell,' which have been assumed
to refer to a passage in act II, sc. 1 of Much Ado about Nothing.
But even in this correspondence there is no mention of Shake-
speare's name.
The influence of Shakespeare on both the German and the Dutch
drama of the seventeenth century is, however, clearly demonstrable,
notwithstanding the lack of curiosity as to the name and person-
ality of the English poet. In the case of the oldest German
dramatist who imitated the methods of the Comoedianten, the
Nürnberg notary Jacob Ayrer, there are chronological difficulties
## p. 285 (#309) ############################################
Influence on German and Dutch Drama 285
in the way of describing this influence as Shakespearean ; the
resemblance which his Comedia von der schönen Sidea bears
to The Tempest, and his Schöne Phoenicia to Much Ado about
Nothing, seems to point rather to common sources than to
actual borrowing. It is, however, just possible that Shakespeare
obtained some knowledge of Sidea from English actors. In
any case, Ayrer did not stand on a much higher level than the
nameless German adapters, and it was hardly likely he should
have any greater curiosity as to the authorship of his models.
About a generation later, Andreas Gryphius based his comedy or,
rather, farce, Absurda comica, oder Herr Peter Squentz, on the
interlude of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The nature and
method of Gryphius's borrowing are still wrapped in mystery;
but it seems clear that his knowledge of the English comedy
was not immediate. He himself, if his statement is to be trusted,
obtained the materials for his Peter Squentz from the learned
Daniel Schwenter, professor at the university of Altdorf; but it
is not possible to say whether Schwenter actually knew Shake-
speare's work, or, as is more likely, became acquainted with
A Midsummer Night's Dream in a Dutch adaptation. Here
again, however, we find no mention of Shakespeare's name. Still
later, at the very end of the seventeenth century, Christian Weise,
a prolific writer of school dramas in Zittau, made a lengthy version
of The Taming of the Shrew, under the title Comödie von der
bösen Catherine, which goes back directly or indirectly to Shake-
speare. But he, too, is silent with regard to his source. The
hypothesis of a Dutch intermediary in the case of both Gryphius
and Weise receives some support from the fact that the two
comedies by Shakespeare which they adapted are also to be
found in Dutch seventeenth century literature. The Pyramus
and Thisbe episode from A Midsummer Night's Dream forms
the basis of Matthus Gramsbergen's Kluchtige Tragedie of den
Hartoog van Pierlepon (1650), and The Taming of the Shrew
was reproduced by A. Sybant in alexandrines as De dolle Bruyloft,
Bley-eyndend-Spel, in 1654.
A second period in the history of Shakespeare's fame and
influence outside England begins with the awakening of an in-
terest in the poet's name and personality. Jusserand has dis-
covered what is probably the earliest occurrence of the name
Shakespeare on the continent, in a manuscript entry in the
catalogue of the French king's library (1675—84) by the royal
librarian, Nicolas Clément. But the first printed mention of the
## p. 286 (#310) ############################################
286
Shakespeare on the Continent
name is to be found in a German book published in 1682, Unter-
richt von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie, by the once famous
Polyhistor of Kiel, Daniel Georg Morhof. Three or four years
later, the name appears for the first time in a printed French
book. So far, however, it is merely a question of Shakespeare's
name and nothing more; and, for the next few years, the con-
tinent's knowledge of Shakespeare extended little beyond isolated
remarks copied from Temple’s Essay on Poetry, which had been
translated into French in 1693. The earliest biographical lexicon
which took notice of Shakespeare was Johann Franz Buddeus's
Allgemeines Historisches Lexicon (1709); and, from Buddeus, the
ludicrously inadequate notice-copied from that in Collier's His-
torical Dictionary (1701–21)passed into the various editions
of Johann Burckhard Mencke's Gelehrten-Lexicon (1715, 1725,
1733). Shakespeare, however, is not mentioned either in Bayle's
Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697, 1702, 1740), or in the
German translation of Bayle published by Gottsched and his
coterie in 1741–4; but Moréri made good the deficiency by
briefly mentioning him in the 1735 edition of his Supplément.
The chief factor in spreading a knowledge of English literature
on the continent at the end of the seventeenth, and beginning of
the eighteenth, centuries was the revocation of the edict of Nantes,
in 1685, which, by expelling the French Huguenots from France,
forced them to settle in Holland, England and Germany. Such of
these men as were interested in literature turned their attention
to the books of the people among whom they were thrown,
thus opening up avenues for the exchange of ideas between the
different nations of Europe, and placing at the very outset a cos-
mopolitan stamp on the thought and literature of the eighteenth
century. The printing presses of Holland were especially called
into requisition in this internationalising' process ; English
literature was reprinted and translated into French at Amster-
dam and the Hague; French journals, especially those published
in Holland, contained regular correspondence from abroad on
literary matters, and their example was soon followed by German
and Italian learned periodicals. It would have been strange had
Shakespeare not benefited by this interchange of ideas between
England and the continent, and his name—in strangely varying
orthography-occurs with increasing frequency in French periodi-
cals of the time. Addison's Spectator, of which the first French
translation was published at Amsterdam in 1714 (frequently
reprinted in succeeding years), although not fully elucidatory
## p. 287 (#311) ############################################
Voltaire and Shakespeare
287
a
about Shakespeare, was at least adapted to awaken curiosity;
the 'Dissertation sur la poésie anglaise,' published in Le Journal
littéraire, in 1717, helped materially; and Béat de Muralt had
also something to say of Shakespeare in his Lettres sur les
Anglois (1725). But all these beginnings were soon to be
eclipsed by Voltaire; and, with the appearance of that writer's
Lettres philosophiques (or Lettres sur les Anglais), in 1733, the
tentative period of Shakespeare's continental fame comes to a close.
Voltaire's attitude to Shakespeare is one of the most difficult
problems calling for notice in the present chapter. On the one
hand, there is no doubt that Voltaire did more than any other
writer of the eighteenth century to familiarise the continent with
Shakespeare ; on the other, it is exceedingly difficult to do justice
to his pioneer work, by reason of the foolish, and often flippant,
antagonism to the English poet which he developed in later years.
The tendency of recent writers on the subject has been to ascribe
too much in that antagonism to purely personal motives and
injured vanity, and to overlook the forces that lay behind Voltaire.
For, after all, it was hardly a personal matter at all ; it was the
last determined struggle of the classicism of the seventeenth
century, with its Cartesian lucidity and regularity, to assert itself
against new and insidious forces which were making themselves
felt in literature and criticism. It was Voltaire's lot to fight in
this losing battle to the bitter end; he was himself too much
immersed in the spirit of the seventeenth century to discover, like
his contemporary Lessing, a way of reconciling new ideas with the
old classic faith.
Voltaire came over to England in 1726 without any direct
knowledge of Shakespeare, but prepared, to some extent, by the
utterances of emigrant journalism, to find English tragedy not
merely in childish ignorance of the rules of polite literature, but,
also, barbarous and sanguinary. He was filled with curiosity,
however, and eager to learn. He had opportunities of seeing
Shakespeare's dramas on the English stage, he noted the enthu-
siasm of English audiences and—in spite of the inward protests
of his better 'taste'-- he himself shared in that enthusiasm for
the wayward errors of genius. Either because of the exceptional
opportunities he had of seeing Julius Caesar on the stage, or
because that play, owing to its classic analogies, was more ac-
cessible to a mind that had been nurtured on seventeenth century
tragedy, it appealed with special force to Voltaire. Possibly, an-
other reason for his interest in Julius Caesar was the fact that two
## p. 288 (#312) ############################################
288
Shakespeare on the Continent
writers of the time, the duke of Buckingham and the Italian abbé,
Antonio Conti (Il Cesare, 1726), had already shown the possibility
of adapting that tragedy to the regular' stage. However that
may be, Voltaire was convinced that the best means of conveying
some knowledge of the English form of tragedy to his countrymen
was by a Roman drama. He began by writing Brutus, which was
played towards the end of 1730, and published in the following
year with a lengthy preface addressed to his friend Bolingbroke.
Here, his earlier assertions about Shakespeare were repeated with
more emphasis and point. A more direct attempt to familiarise
France with Shakespeare was La Mort de César (published in
1735, but written in 1731), in which, within the space of three acts,
he reproduced the gist, and at least some of the glaring 'impro-
prieties,' of the Shakespearean tragedy. After Julius Caesar, the
play which seems to have attracted Voltaire most—his knowledge
of Shakespeare, it must be remembered, was exceedingly limited-
was Hamlet. And just as the crowd in the former play had a
peculiar fascination for him, so the ghost scenes in Hamlet
suggested to him another means of widening the conventions of
the pseudo-classic stage by what was, after all, a return to a
favourite element of the early renascence tragedy on the Senecan
model. He introduced a ghost into the unsuccessful tragedy
Ériphyle (1732), and, again, into Sémiramis (1748). It was the
latter that gave Lessing the opportunity for his famous criticism,
in which he proved what might surely have occurred to Voltaire
himself, that the introduction of the supernatural was inconsistent
with the canons of French classic art, and only possible in the
chiaroscuro of a naturalism untrammelled by artificial rules. In
his Zaïre (1733), Voltaire endeavoured to utilise Othello for the
purposes of classic tragedy; and, in Mahomet (1742), he laid some
scenes of Macbeth under contribution.
For a time, Voltaire had it almost entirely his own way with
regard to Shakespeare on the continent. He had awakened
. curiosity; and, henceforth, every one who crossed the channel -
Montesquieu among others—was expected to bring back with
him impressions of England's interesting poet. In prefaces to
his tragedies and in his correspondence, Voltaire rang the changes
on the views he had already expressed in his Lettres philo-
sophiques, with more or less piquant variety. These views were
familiar to the entire continent, and the periodical press, especially
in France and in Holland, felt obliged to take up a critical attitude
towards them, either refuting Voltaire's modest claims in the
## p. 289 (#313) ############################################
able
trek
ale
1-
ܫܓeli
French and Italian Interest in Shakespeare 289
interests of 'good taste,' or espousing Shakespeare's cause with
a warmth which awakened mixed feelings in Voltaire himself.
Voltaire's dramas, too, were played on all stages that made any
pretension to be in touch with literature; and, although the
author himself was by no means ready to acknowledge his in-
debtedness, his Mort de César was generally regarded as the one
accessible specimen of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Among French admirers of Shakespeare, however, there was
one, abbé Prévost, whose knowledge of England and the English
was more profound than Voltaire's and whose enthusiasm was
much less equivocal. He visited England in 1728; he wrote
of the English theatre with warm appreciation in his Memoirs;
and, in 1738, he devoted several numbers of his journal Le Pour
et Contre solely to Shakespeare, whom he discussed with a
freedom from classic prejudice to be found in no other conti.
nental writer at that time. But Prévost seems to have been a
little in advance of his age, and his views made little impression
compared with the interest shown everywhere in Voltaire's utter-
ances on the subject of English tragedy. Louis Riccoboni, however,
in his Réflexions historiques et critiques sur les différents Théâtres
de l'Europe (1738), a book that was widely read throughout the
continent, gave Shakespeare——in spite of a rather distorted account
of the poet's life--his place at the head of English dramatic
literature. Abbé Le Blanc devoted a number of his Lettres d'un
Français (1745) to Shakespeare; and, although his views are
essentially bounded by the pseudo-classic horizon, he at least, as
Jusserand has pointed out, attempted to do justice to the charm
of Shakespeare's style. Lastly, mention should be made of Louis
Racine, son of the poet, who, in an essay on his father's genius
(1752), vindicated the greatness of the classic drama by a com-
parison of Shakespeare with Sophocles.
In Italy, so far as the Italy of this period had any views
about Shakespeare at all, Voltaire's opinions dominated. Abbé
Conti's Cesare has already been mentioned, and, in the intro-
ductory epistles to that tragedy, he acknowledged his indebtedness,
through the duke of Buckingham, to the famous English poet
Sasper'; Scipione Maffei referred to Shakespeare in 1736, while
Francisco Quadrio, who first really introduced Shakespeare to
the Italians, merely repeated in his Della Storia e della Ragione
ď ogni Poesia (1739—52) what Voltaire had written. In Germany,
on the other hand, there were some attempts, if not to subvert, at
least to modify, the Voltairean dogma. In fact, Germany stole a
19
a
谢
H
H
6
國
E. L. V.
CA. XII,
## p. 290 (#314) ############################################
290
Shakespeare on the Continent
march on France, in so far as she possessed, as early as 1741,
a real translation—the first translation of a Shakespearean drama
into any language-of Julius Caesar. The author, Caspar Wilhelm
von Borck, was Prussian ambassador in London between 1735 and
1738, and, doubtless, like Voltaire himself, experienced the piquant
charm of English representations of that tragedy. Possibly, the
translation may have been, in some measure, due to a desire on
Borck's part to show his countrymen that Voltaire's Mort de
César, in spite of its author's protestations, gave a very imperfect
idea of the original. But it is not to be supposed that, at heart,
Borck was at variance with the standard of dramatic excellence
set up by Voltaire, and he conformed to that standard by
translating Shakespeare into the German alexandrines which did
service for translations of Voltaire's tragedies. This version, Der
Tod des Julius Caesar, however, not merely gave men like
Lessing, and, doubtless, Herder also, their first glimpse of the
English poet, but it also led to the earliest German controversy
on Shakespeare's art. Johann Christoph Gottsched, the repre-
sentative of classicism in Germany at that time, asserted the
superior standpoint of Voltaire, with an intellectual arrogance be-
yond even that which distinguished the French critic's methods ;
but, in so doing, he awakened a certain respect for the 'drunken
savage' in one of his own disciples, Johann Elias Schlegel. This
young writer-Voltairean as he was-presumed to detect merits
in Shakespeare which, although admittedly at variance with the
requirements of French classicism, were at least justified by the
practices of a German dramatist of an older generation, Andreas
Gryphius. In Switzerland, about the same time, Johann Jakob
Bodmer instinctively felt that the 'Sasper' with whom his Italian
authorities had acquainted him, and whom he had found praised
in The Spectator, might be a useful ally in his controversy with
the Leipzig classicists concerning the legitimacy of the 'marvellous'
in poetry; but of Shakespeare's works, Bodmer, at this time, seems
to have known little or nothing.
A new development of the Shakespeare question on the con-
tinent began with the publication of the earliest French translation
of his works. In 1745, the year in which Le Blanc's letters ap-
peared, Pierre Antoine de La Place began his series of translations
of English plays by publishing two volumes containing Othello,
The Third Part of Henry VI, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth.
So acceptable were these volumes to the public that they were
followed by other two, containing Cymbeline, Julius Caesar,
## p. 291 (#315) ############################################
Translations of La Place 291
Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens (according to Shadwell)
and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In but one case, however,
did he translate the entire play, namely Richard III; for the
rest, he was content to summarise in a connecting narrative what
seemed to him the less important scenes. He also gave an
abstract of the plots of twenty-six other Shakespearean plays.
Moreover, he prefaced his translation with an introduction on the
English stage, in which he expressed very liberal views on the
legitimacy of Shakespeare's art. This work attracted wide at-
tention, not merely in France, but on the continent generally,
and the Mémoires de Trévoux devoted no less than seven articles
to its discussion. In one respect, La Place's translation brought
about an immediate effect; it awakened Voltaire's resentment.
Always sensitive where his personal vanity was concerned, he was
hurt to the quick by the presumption of this unknown author,
who wrested from him his laurels as the European authority
on Shakespeare and the sole judge of how much the continent
ought to know of the barbarian poet, and—what was worse
who ventured to speak of Shakespeare in terms of praise which he,
Voltaire, regarded as dangerous. As a matter of fact, La Place's
translation helped materially to undermine Voltaire's authority as
a Shakespearean critic; henceforth, Voltaire fell more and more
into the background, and was looked upon, even in otherwise
friendly quarters, as cherishing an unreasonable prejudice against
the English poet. And, as the years advanced, his antagonism to
Shakespeare became increasingly embittered and violent.
A more liberal spirit—thanks, mainly, to the initiative of
Voltaire himself—was making itself felt in French criticism ; and,
from about the middle of the century onwards, there was an ap-
preciable body of educated opinion, especially among the younger
writers, which regarded Shakespeare in a favourable light, and
cherished the hope that his example might break the stiffening
bonds of the classic canon. The anglomanie which set in with
considerable force after the middle of the century, the frequent
visits to England of Frenchmen interested in literature, and the
fame of Garrick, who had many French friends and correspondents,
were all in favour of a sympathetic attitude towards Shakespeare, or,
at least, ensured that the controversy about him should be carried
on with some kind of mutual understanding. On the whole, however,
the French standpoint towards the English poet held its own in
these years, and the drawing together of the two countries had
resulted in a nearer approach of English criticism to that of France,
19-2
## p. 292 (#316) ############################################
292 Shakespeare on the Continent
6
rather than the reverse. Still, Frenchmen began now to study
the English theatre historically ; Le Nouveau Dictionnaire his-
torique (a supplement to Bayle) devoted, in 1756, no less than
six pages to an article on Shakespeare, and the authors of the
Encyclopédie mentioned him repeatedly. It was thus no wonder
that a few bold spirits had even the temerity to prefer Shake-
speare to Corneille. Such, at least, was the implication in an
anonymous article, professedly translated from the English, entitled
'Parallèle entre Shakespear et Corneille,' which appeared in Le
Journal Encyclopédique in 1760. This article, together with a
second one in which Otway was held up as superior to Racine,
offended Voltaire deeply; he felt that the honour of France must
be vindicated at all costs, and, in the following year, he launched
his Appel à toutes les Nations de l'Europe. This appeal' does
not appear, however, either then or in 1764, when it was re-
published under the pseudonym of 'Jérôme Carré,' to have
awakened any widespread desire among the nations to bring the
rival poets before a French tribunal of Voltaire's making.
Meanwhile, the sentimental movement, which set in in full
force with Rousseau, was distinctly favourable to Shakespeare's
reputation in France; Diderot felt the power of the 'Gothic
colossus' and expressed his views with that fervent emphasis
which was characteristic of him; and, in Sébastien Mercier, there
arose a critic of power and originality, whose influence was not
restricted to France. Mercier's treatise Du Théâtre, ou Nouvel
Essai sur l'Art dramatique (1773), in fact, put the entire Shake-
speare question in a new light; and, while Voltaire was still
fencing with Horace Walpole and others about La Place and
that translator's shortsighted policy in undermining good taste
by making the English ‘Gille de la foire' unnecessarily accessible
to French readers, another blow fell on him which kindled his
wrath anew. This was a new and much more ambitious translation
of Shakespeare by Pierre Félicien Le Tourneur; with this publica-
tion, the French appreciation of the poet entered upon a new
phase.
The first volume of Le Tourneur's work appeared in 1776; it is
a sumptuous quarto and opens with an imposing list of subscribers
headed by the king and queen. The quality of the translation-
which is in prose-is not of a very high order; but, compared
with that of La Place and other contemporary efforts, it marks a
very considerable advance. The introduction expatiates in no
measured terms on the greatness and universality of Shakespeare's
## p. 293 (#317) ############################################
Voltaire's Last Attacks on Shakespeare 293
genius, on his insight into the human heart and his marvellous
powers of painting nature. In this eulogy, Le Tourneur had not
omitted to mention as Shakespeare's equals the French masters of
the seventeenth century, Corneille, Racine and Molière ; but not a
word was said of the French theatre of the translator's own time.
Voltaire was not merely indignant at the disgrace to France
implied in placing Shakespeare on this pinnacle : he was incensed
that his own name should not even have been mentioned on the
French roll of dramatic fame. The Appeal to all the Nations
of Europe had failed; he felt he must now approach the custodian
1
of the nation's good name, the Academy. D'Alembert, secretary
of the Academy, was not unwilling to meet Voltaire's wishes; and
it was ultimately agreed that d'Alembert should read before a
public meeting a letter by Voltaire on the dangers of Shakespeare
to French taste. This actually took place on 25 August 1776.
The old battery was drawn up anew, and once more the untutored
mountebank was successfully routed ; d'Alembert's eloquent de-
livery of his friend's appeal to the good sense of France was
received with acclamation (broken only by an English boy of
twelve who wanted to hiss Voltaire). But to Voltaire even
this protest did not seem sufficient. A second letter followed on
7 October, and was published as the preface to his last tragedy,
Irène, the performance of which had been Voltaire's final triumph
in Paris. 'Shakespeare is a savage with sparks of genius which
shine in a horrible night. ' This was Voltaire's last word on the
Shakespeare controversy. As Jusserand finely remarks, he who,
all his life long, had been the champion of every kind of liberty
refused it to tragedy alone.
The dust raised by Voltaire's last skirmish was long in subsiding.
From England, naturally, came several protests : Mrs Montague,
who had been present at the meeting of the Academy when
Voltaire's letter was read, had her Essay on the Writings and
Genius of Shakespear (1764) translated into French, with a reply
to Voltaire; Giuseppe Baretti, an Italian residing in London, wrote
his Discours sur Shakespeare et M. Voltaire (1777); Lessing's
Hamburgische Dramaturgie was translated in the interests of
Voltaire's opponents, while La Harpe, on the other side, staunchly
upheld the classic faith. But nothing could now undo the effects of
the new force which had made itself felt in the French theatre, and
even dramatists of unimpeachable 'taste,' who abhorred irregulari-
ties, introduced elements—death on the stage, infringements of the
unities and the like-which pointed unmistakably to Shakespeare.
6
## p. 294 (#318) ############################################
294 Shakespeare on the Continent
In the later years of the eighteenth century, his plays were adapted
to the French stage by several hands and in many different ways;
but only one of these adapters need be mentioned here, Jean
François Ducis, who occupied Voltaire's seat in the Academy,
In his Hamlet (1769), Roméo et Juliette (1772), Le Roi Lear
(1783), Macbeth (1784), Jean sans Terre (1791) and Othello (1792),
Ducis succeeded in reconciling a very genuine enthusiasm for
Shakespeare with what now seems to us an extraordinary lack of
taste, in adapting him for presentation to the French theatre-goer.
He was himself, however, ignorant of English and obliged to draw
exclusively from French translations. But, in spite of these disad-
vantages, Ducis succeeded where no one had succeeded before
him: he made Shakespeare-mutilated, it may be, but still Shake-
speare-popular on the French and on the Italian stage; and it
was in the Othello of Ducis that Talma achieved one of his greatest
triumphs. However we may condemn these distorted adaptations,
we should at least remember to the credit of Ducis that his stage
versions of Shakespeare's plays outlived the French revolution,
were still popular under the first empire and were remembered
when Marie-Joseph Chénier's Brutus et Cassius (1790), a play that
may be described as the last attempt to reduce Julius Caesar to
the law and order of classic taste, was forgotten.
In the years when the French literary world was torn asunder
by controversies as to what should be admired and imitated in
Shakespeare, Germany was rapidly outdistancing France as the
real leader of continental appreciation of Shakespeare. A critic
had arisen here-a greater than Voltaire- who not merely made
Shakespeare a power of the first magnitude in his own literature,
but also discovered the formula which was to reconcile the un-
classic art of Shakespeare with the classic and humanitarian
strivings of the eighteenth century. This was Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. We must, however, avoid the mistake of overestimating
either Lessing's services to the appreciation of Shakespeare in
Germany, or his originality in judging the English poet. It is
usual to scoff at the slender knowledge with which Voltaire pre-
sumed to pass judgment on Shakespeare ; but, so far as Lessing's
printed work is concerned, he, also, gave no proof of any intimate
familiarity with the poet's works. To begin with, there is no
doubt that, until at least the year 1753, Lessing's actual acquaint-
ance with Shakespeare was limited to Borck's translation of
Julius Caesar ; of critical judgments of Shakespeare he had read
nothing more authoritative than Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques,
## p. 295 (#319) ############################################
2
Lessing and Shakespeare 295
of which he had just translated and published in his journal,
Beiträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters, the two letters
on tragedy and comedy. From about the year 1753, however,
Germany made rapid strides in her knowledge of Shakespeare;
indeed, this was inevitable, considering how carefully Germans, in
these years, followed the opinions of French writers and the French
press. An article vigorously remonstrating against Gottsched's
standpoint appeared in Neue Erweiterungen der Erkenntnis und
des Vergnügens, in 1753, and was followed, three years later, by
a prose translation of Richard III; while, in 1755, Lessing's friend
and later colleague, Nicolai, boldly put in a plea for the irregu-
larity of the English stage in preference to the artificial regularity
of the French stage. Lessing was willing enough to subscribe
to these opinions and to echo them in his writings; his own
interest in the English theatre at this time, however, was directed
not to Shakespeare, but to the tragedy of common life’; and, when,
in the winter of 1756—7, he devoted himself seriously to the study
of tragedy and its aesthetic basis, it was to Aristotle and to
Sophocles he turned in the first instance. Lessing's acquaintance
with Shakespeare in the original seems to date from the year 1757,
and fragments of dramas which have been preserved from that
period bear testimony to the deep impression which Shakespeare
had then made upon him. By 1759, Lessing had arrived at two
conclusions of far-reaching significance with regard to the English
poet. Neither was altogether new; but they were both expressed
with a vigour and piquancy which at once riveted the attention
of his contemporaries. One of these was that the drama of
Shakespeare was akin to the German Volksdrama; and, on the
ground of this affinity, Lessing hoped that Germany might be
assisted to a national drama of her own by imitating Shakespeare.
The other conclusion, which was similar to opinions that were
being freely expressed by iconoclasts in France itself, was parti-
cularly attractive to the German literary world, weary as it was of
the tyranny of classicism : it was to the effect that Shakespeare, in
spite of his irregularities, was a greater and more Aristotelian poet
in other words, more akin to Sophocles—than the great Corneille.
‘After the Oedipus of Sophocles, no piece can have more power
over our passions than Othello, King Lear, Hamlet. These bold
assertions, which form a landmark in the history of German Shake-
speare appreciation, are to be found in number 17 of Briefe die
neueste Literatur betreffend, published on 16 February 1759.
With this famous letter, Lessing's significance as a pioneer of
a
## p. 296 (#320) ############################################
296 Shakespeare on the Continent
Shakespeare in Germany reaches its climax. After 1759, he
occasionally turned to Shakespeare to demonstrate a point of
dramatic theory, or to clinch an argument, or to discredit the
French ; in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, which has disap-
pointingly little to say about Shakespeare, he insisted on Shake-
speare's mastery as a delineator of character, on his kinship with
the Greeks and on his essential observance of the Aristotelian canon;
not for a moment would Lessing have admitted that Aristotle was
a critic for all time because his theory of tragedy could be shown
to be equally applicable to Sophocles and Shakespeare; rather,
Shakespeare was a great poet because he could be proved to have
obeyed the Greek lawgiver instinctively. In his later years, how-
ever, Lessing--as his own Nathan der Weise shows—was, at heart,
more in sympathy with Voltaire's conception of tragedy than with
Shakespeare's. Leadership in matters of Shakespearean criticism
passed rapidly into other and younger hands.
A very few years after Lessing's famous letter, the Germans were
A
themselves in a position-and in a better position than their French
neighbours-to form some idea of the English poet. Between 1762
and 1766, appeared Christoph Martin Wieland's translation of
Shakespeare into prose. It was very far from being adequate; it
;;
was suggested, doubtless, in the first instance, by La Place's
French translations, and, like these, was in clumsy prose; but,
compared with what had preceded it in Germany-Borck's Caesar,
a few fragmentary specimens of Shakespeare's work in periodicals
and a bad iambic translation of Romeo and Juliet--it was an
achievement no less great than Le Tourneur's French translation
at a somewhat later date. And, in one respect, no subsequent
translation could vie with Wieland's, namely, in its immediate
influence upon German literature. Its faults are obvious enough ;
it is ludicrously clumsy, often ludicrously inaccurate. Wieland
was himself too good a Voltairean to extend a whole-hearted
sympathy to Shakespeare's irregularities and improprieties, and he
grasped at every straw which contemporary French criticism
or the notes of Pope and Warburton offered him, to vindicate
the superiority of classic taste. At the same time, his private
correspondence would seem to indicate that his feelings for Shake-
speare were considerably less straitlaced than his commentary
would imply. The consequences of the translation were more far-
reaching than Wieland had anticipated ; indeed, he, no less than
Lessing, was filled with dismay at the extravagances which followed
the introduction of Shakespeare to the German literary world-
## p. 297 (#321) ############################################
Shakespeare in the Sturm und Drang 297
perhaps this is even a reason why, in his Dramaturgie, Lessing
is reserved on the subject of Shakespeare. In that work, Lessing
had published a kindly recommendation of Wieland's translation ;
but, a few months earlier, another and more subversive critic,
Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, under the stimulus of the new
ideas of genius propounded in England by Young and Home, had
made claims for Shakespeare of which Lessing could not have
approved.
The new generation was no longer, like the latter critic,
interested in 'Shakespeare the brother of Sophocles': 'Shake-
speare the voice of nature' was the new watchword. The young
writers of the German Sturm und Drang did not criticise at all;
they worshipped ; they sought to 'feel' Shakespeare, to grasp his
spirit. They had not patience to study his art, to learn how to
write from him, as Lessing had recommended them to do, when, in
the Dramaturgie, he had lectured his quondam friend Weisse on
the lessons to be learned from Richard III. The five letters on
Shakespeare in Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg's Briefe über
Merkwürdigkeiten der Literatur are, perhaps, the most important
contribution to continental Shakespearean criticism of the entire
eighteenth century. It is not that much real critical discrimination
is to be found in them; but Gerstenberg's whole attitude to Shake-
n
peare's works is new; he regards them as so many 'Gemälde der
sittlichen Natur'-as things that we have no more business to
question than we should question a tree or a landscape. Judged
purely as criticism, Gerstenberg's letters on Shakespeare could not
have carried much weight in circles unaffected by the Sturm und
Drang; but his ideas fell on fruitful ground in Herder's mind, and
Herder, stripping them of their excesses and extravagances, made
them acceptable even beyond the pale of the literary revolution. His
essay on Shakespeare was one of the chief constituents of the little
pamphlet entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), with which
the new movement was ushered in. Herder had an advantage
over Gerstenberg in not approaching the subject in quite so naïve
a frame of mind; he had studied the Hamburgische Dramaturgie;
and, from 1769 to 1772, he had busied himself zealously with the
English poet.
1793, with the sole object of displacing that of Malone. It was
obviously impossible for Steevens to surpass Malone in fidelity to
the quartos and folios; hence, he declares
a
8
it is time instead of a servile and timid adherence to the ancient copies, when
(offending against sense and metre) they furnish no real help, that a future
editor, well acquainted with the phraseology of our author's age, should be at
liberty to restore some apparent meaning to his corrupted lines, and a decent
flow to his obstructed versification.
Steevens took this liberty and emulated Pope in 'indulging his
private sense. ' Hallam's estimate of the two editors is just :
Malone and Steevens were two laborious commentators on the meaning
of words and phrases; one dull, the other clever; but the dulness was accom-
panied by candour and a love of truth, the cleverness by a total absence of
both.
A new edition of Malone's text was brought out by a son of
James Boswell, Johnson's biographer, in 1821. It contains an
accumulated mass of information, which has been of great service
to later editors. But the confused arrangement of its contents
and the bulk of its notes entailed upon Malone a reputation for
dulness and stupidity which approaches that of the first hero of
The Dunciad. Walpole said that Malone's notes were an 'extract
of all the opium that is spread through the works of all the bad
playwrights of that age’; and, among later writers, G. H. Lewes
has endeavoured to exaggerate this censure'.
1 Boswell's chief service to the text was his final vindication of the reading like
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
Singer, Hudson and Collier
277
Of detached criticism on Shakespeare's text, the Observations
and Conjectures of Thomas Tyrwhitt (1766) is worthy of mention.
Joseph Ritson shows some acquaintance with the original
authorities in his Remarks (1783) and in The Quip Modest (1788),
in which he criticises Johnson and Steevens's edition and Reed's
revision. Monck Mason's Comments (1785) and further Comments
(1807) contain some of the best detached criticism of the time.
Malone's text left nothing to be done which faithful adherence to
the old copies could achieve. But the variant quarto plays still
afforded scope for critical discrimination between the readings of
quarto and folio.
Nineteenth century editors may be distinguished broadly by
their attitude to these two texts. Samuel Weller Singer (1826)
mainly followed the text of Malone. He led a revolt against
superfluous notes and bulky volumes; but he went to the opposite
extreme. Out of scores of emendations incorporated in it, chiefly
from Theobald, only a few are assigned to their authors, while, in
the Life prefixed to the edition, we are told that “Theobald did
not wholly abstain from conjecture, but the palm of conjectural
criticism was placed much too high for the reach of his hand. '
Singer was the first to attempt a refutation of Collier's 'corrector. '
Hudson followed in his footsteps with another well printed and
convenient edition (1851-2). His introductions deal ably with
textual questions, but his chief merits lie on the literary side.
Payne Collier, in his first edition (1844), shows distinct bias in
favour of the quartos? The text is marred by the retention of
many errors, owing to a slavish adherence to the old copies.
Collier is quite supercilious towards former editors, expressing
doubts about 'a' babbled o' green fields,' and retaining strange
companions' for 'stranger companies' in the passage in A Mid-
summer Night's Dream, to the detriment of rime, metre and
When he does adopt a conjecture, he speaks of it as
though it were only the correction of an obvious misprint. Collier
now underwent as sudden and as complete a conversion as Steevens
the base Indian,' in Othello, by quoting, together with a passage from Habington's
Castara, from The Women's Conquest, by Edward Loward (1671):
-Behold my queen-
Who with no more concern I'le cast away
Than Indians do a pearl that ne're did know
Its value.
1 Thus, where Othello says
[Let] all indign and base adversities
Make head against my estimation!
he is almost alone in reading reputation' with the quartos.
<
sense.
6
{
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278
The Text of Shakespeare
had passed through before him. From a hopeless Tory among
editors, he now developed into a confirmed Radical. His own
Notes and Emendations appeared in 1853. Certain of these con-
jectures are amongst the best produced in the nineteenth century,
and some among them are quite in Theobald's style! But most
of the emendations in his book recall Warburton's eccentricities.
Nevertheless, had they been given to the world as his own sugges-
tions, Collier's fame would still be untarnished. As a matter of
fact, he deceived the very elect into believing that these emenda-
tions were corrections in a seventeenth century hand in his copy of
the second folio (the Perkins folio'), until Nicholas Hamilton, of
the British Museum, proved them to be fabrications.
A magnificent folio edition was begun in 1853 and completed
in 1865 by James Orchard Halliwell(-Phillipps). The text is very
conservative, but contains more conjectures than Collier had
admitted. Its chief value lay in the fact that, for the first time,
full materials for the study of the text were embraced in one
edition. Several old quartos are here reprinted, and facsimiles of
parts of other old texts; and the notes give a very full account of
variant readings. Though Halliwell-Phillipps will chiefly be remem-
bered by his antiquarian researches, his reproductions of the first
folio and the quartos were of immense service to the textual study
of Shakespeare.
Nikolaus Delius (1854) adopted the first folio as the standard
authority for the text of all the plays, and carried out his work
with a critical sagacity which makes his text valuable to all
scholars. This principle has been shown to be unsound, so far as
the duplicate and doublet quarto plays are concerned. The first
quarto, from which the folio text was derived, ought to be the
basis of the text of the duplicate quarto plays, and Delius is
compelled, at times, to depart from his principle. Thus, in The
Merchant of Venice (act II, sc. 5, 29), folios have the vile squealing
of the wry-neck'd fife. ' Delius reads ‘squeaking,' with the first
quarto. So, again, with the doublet quartos. In Hamlei (act I,
6
* In Polonius's speech (act 1, sc. 3, 109), Collier reads:
Tender yourself more dearly;
Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Running it thus—you'll tender me a fool.
(Quartos Wrong' and folios 'Roaming. ') Again, Coriolanus says (act 111, sc. 1, 131)
(according to the folios)
How shall this bosome multiplied digest
The senate's courtesy ?
Collier conjectured beson multitude,' which Dyce improved to . bisson. '
## p. 279 (#303) ############################################
Grant White and Dyce
279
sc. 1, 65), the quartos (including the defective quarto) read 'jump
at this dead hour. ' The folios have 'just. ' Delius followed the
quartos in his first edition, though he comes round to the folio
in his second. On the other hand, his principle rightly applies to
the variant quarto plays. His text of these plays is probably the
best extant from a critical point of view. But, in two pamphlets
on Richard III and King Lear—the best studies extant of the
relations between the quarto and folio text—he rejects the theory
of a later revision by Shakespeare. The quarto and folio text, he
concludes, both represent the same original; but the quarto is an
inferior pirated copy. Howard Staunton introduced many im-
provements into his edition (1860) from the text of Dyce. He
shows a sound judgment on textual questions, and considerable
resource in emendation. His notes contain a fairly full textual
apparatus in very brief compass. He followed the folio text
in the main for the variant quarto plays, except in the case of
Richard III, and introduced several fresh readings from the
defective quarto in Romeo and Juliet.
Grant White (1861) may be mentioned in the same connection,
inasmuch as he professed that his text was founded 'exclusively
upon that of the first folio,' which marks him as a disciple of Delius.
* The superior antiquity of the quarto texts,' he remarks, ‘is not infre-
quently brought to the attention of the critical reader of Shakespeare in
support of a reading taken from some one of those texts-as if the age of a
surreptitiously printed edition could supply its lack of authenticity! '
The plays in which the folio text is taken from the 'surrep-
titious' edition are here entirely ignored. Yet his text draws on
the quartos almost as much as on the folios. He is often even one
of a minority who follow the quarto. In spite of this inconsistency,
however, his textual studies have a distinct value. His opinions,
though always vigorously expressed, have often been hastily
formed, as when he prints ‘Judean’ in his text, but favours
Indian' in his notes.
Alexander Dyce's acuteness and soundness of judgment enabled
him to produce what his reviewer called 'the best text which has yet
been given to the world' (1857). He showed a fine discrimination,
with regard both to the quarto and folio readings, and to the con-
jectures which he admitted into the text. He was well versed
in Elizabethan literature, and thoroughly conversant with his
authorities. He had already given evidence of his ability in his
Remarks on Collier's and Charles Knight's editions; and, in 1859,
he mercilessly exposed the absurdity of many of the corrections'
a
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Text of Shakespeare
put forward by Collier. His conjectures are never wide of the
mark, and some have been generally adopted. One example may
be given from Part III of Henry VI, where the folios make
Henry say:
Let me embrace the sower Adversaries
For wise men say it is the wisest coursel.
Dyce restored a certain reading in 'Let me embrace thee, sour
Adversity. '
He paved the way for what has now become the standard text
of Shakespeare—The Cambridge Shakespeare, 1863–6, edited by
W. G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright. The introductions contain the
safest guide as to authorities for the text, and the notes form a
complete apparatus criticus of the text. The variant and doublet
quartos whose texts differ too widely from the folio to allow of
collation in the notes are printed in full. If this edition errs at all,
it is in exhibiting too great a partiality for the quartos in the case
of the variant quarto plays, and in giving to modern (mostly futile)
conjectures too much valuable space in the notes, which might
have been better filled by recording the coincidences of the chief
editions with the folio or quarto text-small flaws in a work which
is a monument of editorial judgment and accurate scholarship,
as well as of careful typography.
1 Act I, so. 1, 24.
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
APPENDIX
GENEALOGY OF THE TEXT OF RICHARD III
1
6
This play offers quite the most difficult problem in the criticism of Shake-
speare's text. It contains the variations usually found in the variant quarto
plays, but in far greater numbers (act 1, sc. 1, 13 lute F, love Qq; 26 see
F, spy Qq; 133 play F, prey Qq; 138 St John F, St Paul Qq; act 1,
sc. 2, 11 wounds Fholes Qq; 28 young F, poore Qq; 76 crimes F
euills Qq; 94 murd'rous F, bloudy Qa; 105 better F, fitter Qq; 175 brest Fi
bosom Qq; act 1, sc. 3, 5 eyes F, words Qq; 67 children F, kindred Qq; 125
spent F, spilt Qq; 147 soueraigne F, lawful Qa; 273 peace, peace F, have
done Qq; 305 muse why F, wonder Qq; act 1, sc. 4, 18 falling F, stumbling
Qq; 46 sowre Fi grim Qq; act 11, sc. 2, 46 nere changing night F, perpetuall
rest Qq etc. ).
The folio text seems to show that the editors not only introduced many
emendations but made some collation of the quarto copies.
(1) In act II, sc. 3, 43 ensuing dangers Qq Pursuing danger F, the catch-
word in the folio is ensuing. The editor therefore had the quarto text
before him, but altered it.
(2) In act 1, sc. 2, 19 to adders spiders toads
Or any creeping venom'd thing that lives Qq
to Wolves to Spiders toads etc. F,
The context plainly shows that the alteration has been made in the folio.
(3) Act 1, sc. 2, 212; act III, sc. 1, 190 Crosby Place Qq is altered to
Crosby House Fj. But in act 1, so. 3, 345 Crosby Place Qq Ff. Act 11, sc. 4,
35 perilous or perillous of Qq is altered to parlous F1; act III, so. 1, 154 F,
reads perillous as Qi Q2 Act 1, sc. 2, 27-28; act iv, so. 1, 76-77 As. . . As is
altered to More. . . then F. 137 slew Qq kill'd Ff; act 1, sc. 3, 119 slewest
Qq killd’st Ff. 282 princely Qq noble Ff; aot III, 8c. 4, 66 noble Qq princely
Ff. These examples point to systematic alteration, which was sometimes
omitted through oversight.
(4) Oaths and sacred names are, as usual, modified in the folio. But a
very unusual phenomenon is their presence in the folio, in some cases where
they are either omitted or toned down in the quartos (act 11, so. 3, 46 Marry
F, om. Qq; act 111, sc. 4, 99 God F, Heaven Qq). These must have come
from the other copy, from which the additional passages came.
(5) The coincidences between F, and Q, show that the first quarto was
used (act 1, sc. 1, 21 scarse Q. Q. F, om. the rest; act 1, sc. 2, 115 keen Q.
keene F, kind or kinde the rest; 206 devoted suppliant Qı devoted servant
F, suppliant the rest; act 1, sc. 3, 26 false accusers Q. Q. F, accusers the
rest; 178 faultless Q. Q. F, om. the rest; 246 poisonous Q. Fı poisoned the
rest; act 1, sc. 4, 139 purse Q. Q. Fı piece or peece the rest; act 11, sc. 4, 30
biting or byting Q, F, pretie, pretty, etc. the rest; act III, sc. 4, 45 sudden Fi
sodaine Qı soone the rest; 59 looks Q. F, face the rest; act 11, sc. 5, 42 form
Q. Q. F, course the rest; act iv, sc. 4, 25 Harry Q1 Q2 F, Mary the rest; 170
Thy prime of manhood daring bold and venturous Q. Q. F, om. the rest).
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282
Appendix to Chapter XI
1
(6) F, agrees with Q: in many cases in act wi and act v, showing that
Qs was probably collated for parts of the play (act 11, sc. 1, 63 seems Q1 Q2
thinkst Q: think’st F7; 78 all-ending Q. ending Q2 Q3 F2; 96 loving Q. Q:
noble Q3 F1; 97 dread Q. Q. deare Q. Fı; 120 heavy Q, waightie or weightie
Q2 Q3 Fı; act v, sc. 3, 351 helmes Q. Q2 helpes Q3 Fı; 255 sweate Q. Q. sweare
Q3 F1; 82 loving Q1 Q2 noble Q3 Fı; 125 deadly Q. om. Q2 Q3 F7; 222 see Q. Q.
heare Q: F7; 338, Fight Q. Q. Right Qs Fz; act v, sc. 5, 7 enjoy it Q1 Q2 om.
QF).
The omissions in the quarto text show that it was adapted for the stage
(act 1, sc. 2, 16; 25; 155-166; act 1, sc. 3, 116; 167-9; act 1, sc. 4, 36-37; 69-72;
84; 113-4; 166; 213; 257-260; 266; act 11, sc. 1, 25; 140; act 11, sc. 2, 16;
89-100; 123–140; act 11, 8C. 4, 67; act iii, sc. 1, 172-3; act III, sc. 3, 7-8; 15;
act III, sc. 4, 104-7; act 111, sc. 5, 7; 97; 103-5; act și, sc. 7, 8; 11; 24; 37;
98-99; 120; 127; 144-153; 202; 245; act iv, sc. 1, 2-6; 37; 98-104; act iv,
sc. 2, 2; act iv, sc. 4, 20-21; 28; 52–53; 103; 159; 172; 179; 221-234; 276-7;
288-342; 387; 400; 429; 432; 451; 523; act v, sc, 3, 27-8; 43).
The text of
the first folio was probably drawn from a ury copy in the theatre, from
which the quarto text had been adapted. The omissions in it are (with one
exception) unimportant (act I, . 2, 202; 225; act 1, sc. 3, 114; act 1, sc. 4,
133–4; 147; 148; 185-6; 209; 234; act 11, sc. 2, 84-85; 145; act iii, sc. 3, 1;
act 111, sc. 4, 10; 60; act 111, sc. 7, 43-44; 83; 220; act iv, sc. 1, 19; act iv, sc. 2,
103-120; act iv, sc. 4, 39; sot v, sc. 3, 212–4).
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
SHAKESPEARE ON THE CONTINENT
It is a tribute to the force and originality of the Elizabethan
drama that, while still at its prime, it should have found its way
to the continent. The conditions of the time could hardly have
been less favourable for interest to be felt in English drama
outside England itself; for all continental opinion, or, at least, the
continental opinion that prided itself on the possession of good
taste, had fallen under the spell of the classic traditions of
the renascence, and, in poetry, irregularity and lack of clearness
were abhorred above all things. There was, thus, no possibility of
compromise between Shakespearean drama and the literary ideals
of Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But, as
a matter of fact, English drama did not reach the continent by
way of literary channels at all. It was conveyed, not by books,
but by actors, and had little to do with literature in the strict
sense of that term.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, and throughout the
seventeenth, English actors from time to time crossed the channel
and played in Dutch, German and Scandinavian towns, wandering
as far north as Copenhagen and Stockholm, as far east as Danzig,
Königsberg and Warsaw and as far south as Vienna and Innsbruck.
They took with them the masterpieces of Elizabethan drama in
garbled acting versions, the more garbled, undoubtedly, owing
to the fact that the foreign audiences before whom they played
came to see even more than to hear. From the evidence of the
répertoire lists, as well as from German versions of English plays,
we are able to say with certainty that, of Shakespeare's works,
Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and
The Merchant of Venice were played in some form on the con-
tinent in the course of the seventeenth century; and it is highly
probable that this list may be increased by the addition of The
Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream (or, at least,
the comic interlude of that drama), The Taming of the Shrew,
.
## p. 284 (#308) ############################################
284
Shakespeare on the Continent
Othello and Julius Caesar. The success of these English com-
panies induced German actors to adopt their methods and to
translate their répertoire, and, in 1620, and again in 1630, there
appeared at Leipzig collections of German versions of the plays
which the Englische Comoedianten had in their list.
That English actors should also have tried their fortune in
France was natural, but we have only the vaguest references to
such visits; in 1604, an English troupe performed at Fontaine-
bleau, but it is impossible to say with what plays they attempted
to win the interest of the French court. In the absence of proof
and the still more significant absence of any knowledge of the
English drama on the part of French critics who had never visited
England, it seems probable that, in the metropolis of seventeenth
century culture, the main attractions on which English players
relied were acrobatic tricks and buffoonery.
In spite of the comparative popularity of Shakespeare's plays
in Germany in this early period, there is no evidence that the
English poet's name was known to any of his adapters or trans-
lators, or to any member of the public before whom the pieces
were acted. This, perhaps, is not surprising, so far as the crude
and vulgarised versions of the Comoedianten were concerned ;
but it is not unreasonable to expect that native dramatists, who
were eager enough to imitate the new English models, might have
evinced some curiosity with regard to the author or authors of
these models. This, however, was not the case; no trace of Shake-
speare's name is anywhere to be found. The only German of the
seventeenth century,' says Creizenach, 'who can be proved to have
taken an interest in the works of Shakespeare and his contem-
poraries was the elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate, who had
been in England in the years 1635—7. In his correspondence
'
with his sister, duchess Sophia of Hanover, he quotes from The
Merry Wives of Windsor, and she, in one of her letters, uses the
English words ‘he leads apes in hell,' which have been assumed
to refer to a passage in act II, sc. 1 of Much Ado about Nothing.
But even in this correspondence there is no mention of Shake-
speare's name.
The influence of Shakespeare on both the German and the Dutch
drama of the seventeenth century is, however, clearly demonstrable,
notwithstanding the lack of curiosity as to the name and person-
ality of the English poet. In the case of the oldest German
dramatist who imitated the methods of the Comoedianten, the
Nürnberg notary Jacob Ayrer, there are chronological difficulties
## p. 285 (#309) ############################################
Influence on German and Dutch Drama 285
in the way of describing this influence as Shakespearean ; the
resemblance which his Comedia von der schönen Sidea bears
to The Tempest, and his Schöne Phoenicia to Much Ado about
Nothing, seems to point rather to common sources than to
actual borrowing. It is, however, just possible that Shakespeare
obtained some knowledge of Sidea from English actors. In
any case, Ayrer did not stand on a much higher level than the
nameless German adapters, and it was hardly likely he should
have any greater curiosity as to the authorship of his models.
About a generation later, Andreas Gryphius based his comedy or,
rather, farce, Absurda comica, oder Herr Peter Squentz, on the
interlude of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The nature and
method of Gryphius's borrowing are still wrapped in mystery;
but it seems clear that his knowledge of the English comedy
was not immediate. He himself, if his statement is to be trusted,
obtained the materials for his Peter Squentz from the learned
Daniel Schwenter, professor at the university of Altdorf; but it
is not possible to say whether Schwenter actually knew Shake-
speare's work, or, as is more likely, became acquainted with
A Midsummer Night's Dream in a Dutch adaptation. Here
again, however, we find no mention of Shakespeare's name. Still
later, at the very end of the seventeenth century, Christian Weise,
a prolific writer of school dramas in Zittau, made a lengthy version
of The Taming of the Shrew, under the title Comödie von der
bösen Catherine, which goes back directly or indirectly to Shake-
speare. But he, too, is silent with regard to his source. The
hypothesis of a Dutch intermediary in the case of both Gryphius
and Weise receives some support from the fact that the two
comedies by Shakespeare which they adapted are also to be
found in Dutch seventeenth century literature. The Pyramus
and Thisbe episode from A Midsummer Night's Dream forms
the basis of Matthus Gramsbergen's Kluchtige Tragedie of den
Hartoog van Pierlepon (1650), and The Taming of the Shrew
was reproduced by A. Sybant in alexandrines as De dolle Bruyloft,
Bley-eyndend-Spel, in 1654.
A second period in the history of Shakespeare's fame and
influence outside England begins with the awakening of an in-
terest in the poet's name and personality. Jusserand has dis-
covered what is probably the earliest occurrence of the name
Shakespeare on the continent, in a manuscript entry in the
catalogue of the French king's library (1675—84) by the royal
librarian, Nicolas Clément. But the first printed mention of the
## p. 286 (#310) ############################################
286
Shakespeare on the Continent
name is to be found in a German book published in 1682, Unter-
richt von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie, by the once famous
Polyhistor of Kiel, Daniel Georg Morhof. Three or four years
later, the name appears for the first time in a printed French
book. So far, however, it is merely a question of Shakespeare's
name and nothing more; and, for the next few years, the con-
tinent's knowledge of Shakespeare extended little beyond isolated
remarks copied from Temple’s Essay on Poetry, which had been
translated into French in 1693. The earliest biographical lexicon
which took notice of Shakespeare was Johann Franz Buddeus's
Allgemeines Historisches Lexicon (1709); and, from Buddeus, the
ludicrously inadequate notice-copied from that in Collier's His-
torical Dictionary (1701–21)passed into the various editions
of Johann Burckhard Mencke's Gelehrten-Lexicon (1715, 1725,
1733). Shakespeare, however, is not mentioned either in Bayle's
Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697, 1702, 1740), or in the
German translation of Bayle published by Gottsched and his
coterie in 1741–4; but Moréri made good the deficiency by
briefly mentioning him in the 1735 edition of his Supplément.
The chief factor in spreading a knowledge of English literature
on the continent at the end of the seventeenth, and beginning of
the eighteenth, centuries was the revocation of the edict of Nantes,
in 1685, which, by expelling the French Huguenots from France,
forced them to settle in Holland, England and Germany. Such of
these men as were interested in literature turned their attention
to the books of the people among whom they were thrown,
thus opening up avenues for the exchange of ideas between the
different nations of Europe, and placing at the very outset a cos-
mopolitan stamp on the thought and literature of the eighteenth
century. The printing presses of Holland were especially called
into requisition in this internationalising' process ; English
literature was reprinted and translated into French at Amster-
dam and the Hague; French journals, especially those published
in Holland, contained regular correspondence from abroad on
literary matters, and their example was soon followed by German
and Italian learned periodicals. It would have been strange had
Shakespeare not benefited by this interchange of ideas between
England and the continent, and his name—in strangely varying
orthography-occurs with increasing frequency in French periodi-
cals of the time. Addison's Spectator, of which the first French
translation was published at Amsterdam in 1714 (frequently
reprinted in succeeding years), although not fully elucidatory
## p. 287 (#311) ############################################
Voltaire and Shakespeare
287
a
about Shakespeare, was at least adapted to awaken curiosity;
the 'Dissertation sur la poésie anglaise,' published in Le Journal
littéraire, in 1717, helped materially; and Béat de Muralt had
also something to say of Shakespeare in his Lettres sur les
Anglois (1725). But all these beginnings were soon to be
eclipsed by Voltaire; and, with the appearance of that writer's
Lettres philosophiques (or Lettres sur les Anglais), in 1733, the
tentative period of Shakespeare's continental fame comes to a close.
Voltaire's attitude to Shakespeare is one of the most difficult
problems calling for notice in the present chapter. On the one
hand, there is no doubt that Voltaire did more than any other
writer of the eighteenth century to familiarise the continent with
Shakespeare ; on the other, it is exceedingly difficult to do justice
to his pioneer work, by reason of the foolish, and often flippant,
antagonism to the English poet which he developed in later years.
The tendency of recent writers on the subject has been to ascribe
too much in that antagonism to purely personal motives and
injured vanity, and to overlook the forces that lay behind Voltaire.
For, after all, it was hardly a personal matter at all ; it was the
last determined struggle of the classicism of the seventeenth
century, with its Cartesian lucidity and regularity, to assert itself
against new and insidious forces which were making themselves
felt in literature and criticism. It was Voltaire's lot to fight in
this losing battle to the bitter end; he was himself too much
immersed in the spirit of the seventeenth century to discover, like
his contemporary Lessing, a way of reconciling new ideas with the
old classic faith.
Voltaire came over to England in 1726 without any direct
knowledge of Shakespeare, but prepared, to some extent, by the
utterances of emigrant journalism, to find English tragedy not
merely in childish ignorance of the rules of polite literature, but,
also, barbarous and sanguinary. He was filled with curiosity,
however, and eager to learn. He had opportunities of seeing
Shakespeare's dramas on the English stage, he noted the enthu-
siasm of English audiences and—in spite of the inward protests
of his better 'taste'-- he himself shared in that enthusiasm for
the wayward errors of genius. Either because of the exceptional
opportunities he had of seeing Julius Caesar on the stage, or
because that play, owing to its classic analogies, was more ac-
cessible to a mind that had been nurtured on seventeenth century
tragedy, it appealed with special force to Voltaire. Possibly, an-
other reason for his interest in Julius Caesar was the fact that two
## p. 288 (#312) ############################################
288
Shakespeare on the Continent
writers of the time, the duke of Buckingham and the Italian abbé,
Antonio Conti (Il Cesare, 1726), had already shown the possibility
of adapting that tragedy to the regular' stage. However that
may be, Voltaire was convinced that the best means of conveying
some knowledge of the English form of tragedy to his countrymen
was by a Roman drama. He began by writing Brutus, which was
played towards the end of 1730, and published in the following
year with a lengthy preface addressed to his friend Bolingbroke.
Here, his earlier assertions about Shakespeare were repeated with
more emphasis and point. A more direct attempt to familiarise
France with Shakespeare was La Mort de César (published in
1735, but written in 1731), in which, within the space of three acts,
he reproduced the gist, and at least some of the glaring 'impro-
prieties,' of the Shakespearean tragedy. After Julius Caesar, the
play which seems to have attracted Voltaire most—his knowledge
of Shakespeare, it must be remembered, was exceedingly limited-
was Hamlet. And just as the crowd in the former play had a
peculiar fascination for him, so the ghost scenes in Hamlet
suggested to him another means of widening the conventions of
the pseudo-classic stage by what was, after all, a return to a
favourite element of the early renascence tragedy on the Senecan
model. He introduced a ghost into the unsuccessful tragedy
Ériphyle (1732), and, again, into Sémiramis (1748). It was the
latter that gave Lessing the opportunity for his famous criticism,
in which he proved what might surely have occurred to Voltaire
himself, that the introduction of the supernatural was inconsistent
with the canons of French classic art, and only possible in the
chiaroscuro of a naturalism untrammelled by artificial rules. In
his Zaïre (1733), Voltaire endeavoured to utilise Othello for the
purposes of classic tragedy; and, in Mahomet (1742), he laid some
scenes of Macbeth under contribution.
For a time, Voltaire had it almost entirely his own way with
regard to Shakespeare on the continent. He had awakened
. curiosity; and, henceforth, every one who crossed the channel -
Montesquieu among others—was expected to bring back with
him impressions of England's interesting poet. In prefaces to
his tragedies and in his correspondence, Voltaire rang the changes
on the views he had already expressed in his Lettres philo-
sophiques, with more or less piquant variety. These views were
familiar to the entire continent, and the periodical press, especially
in France and in Holland, felt obliged to take up a critical attitude
towards them, either refuting Voltaire's modest claims in the
## p. 289 (#313) ############################################
able
trek
ale
1-
ܫܓeli
French and Italian Interest in Shakespeare 289
interests of 'good taste,' or espousing Shakespeare's cause with
a warmth which awakened mixed feelings in Voltaire himself.
Voltaire's dramas, too, were played on all stages that made any
pretension to be in touch with literature; and, although the
author himself was by no means ready to acknowledge his in-
debtedness, his Mort de César was generally regarded as the one
accessible specimen of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Among French admirers of Shakespeare, however, there was
one, abbé Prévost, whose knowledge of England and the English
was more profound than Voltaire's and whose enthusiasm was
much less equivocal. He visited England in 1728; he wrote
of the English theatre with warm appreciation in his Memoirs;
and, in 1738, he devoted several numbers of his journal Le Pour
et Contre solely to Shakespeare, whom he discussed with a
freedom from classic prejudice to be found in no other conti.
nental writer at that time. But Prévost seems to have been a
little in advance of his age, and his views made little impression
compared with the interest shown everywhere in Voltaire's utter-
ances on the subject of English tragedy. Louis Riccoboni, however,
in his Réflexions historiques et critiques sur les différents Théâtres
de l'Europe (1738), a book that was widely read throughout the
continent, gave Shakespeare——in spite of a rather distorted account
of the poet's life--his place at the head of English dramatic
literature. Abbé Le Blanc devoted a number of his Lettres d'un
Français (1745) to Shakespeare; and, although his views are
essentially bounded by the pseudo-classic horizon, he at least, as
Jusserand has pointed out, attempted to do justice to the charm
of Shakespeare's style. Lastly, mention should be made of Louis
Racine, son of the poet, who, in an essay on his father's genius
(1752), vindicated the greatness of the classic drama by a com-
parison of Shakespeare with Sophocles.
In Italy, so far as the Italy of this period had any views
about Shakespeare at all, Voltaire's opinions dominated. Abbé
Conti's Cesare has already been mentioned, and, in the intro-
ductory epistles to that tragedy, he acknowledged his indebtedness,
through the duke of Buckingham, to the famous English poet
Sasper'; Scipione Maffei referred to Shakespeare in 1736, while
Francisco Quadrio, who first really introduced Shakespeare to
the Italians, merely repeated in his Della Storia e della Ragione
ď ogni Poesia (1739—52) what Voltaire had written. In Germany,
on the other hand, there were some attempts, if not to subvert, at
least to modify, the Voltairean dogma. In fact, Germany stole a
19
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谢
H
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6
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E. L. V.
CA. XII,
## p. 290 (#314) ############################################
290
Shakespeare on the Continent
march on France, in so far as she possessed, as early as 1741,
a real translation—the first translation of a Shakespearean drama
into any language-of Julius Caesar. The author, Caspar Wilhelm
von Borck, was Prussian ambassador in London between 1735 and
1738, and, doubtless, like Voltaire himself, experienced the piquant
charm of English representations of that tragedy. Possibly, the
translation may have been, in some measure, due to a desire on
Borck's part to show his countrymen that Voltaire's Mort de
César, in spite of its author's protestations, gave a very imperfect
idea of the original. But it is not to be supposed that, at heart,
Borck was at variance with the standard of dramatic excellence
set up by Voltaire, and he conformed to that standard by
translating Shakespeare into the German alexandrines which did
service for translations of Voltaire's tragedies. This version, Der
Tod des Julius Caesar, however, not merely gave men like
Lessing, and, doubtless, Herder also, their first glimpse of the
English poet, but it also led to the earliest German controversy
on Shakespeare's art. Johann Christoph Gottsched, the repre-
sentative of classicism in Germany at that time, asserted the
superior standpoint of Voltaire, with an intellectual arrogance be-
yond even that which distinguished the French critic's methods ;
but, in so doing, he awakened a certain respect for the 'drunken
savage' in one of his own disciples, Johann Elias Schlegel. This
young writer-Voltairean as he was-presumed to detect merits
in Shakespeare which, although admittedly at variance with the
requirements of French classicism, were at least justified by the
practices of a German dramatist of an older generation, Andreas
Gryphius. In Switzerland, about the same time, Johann Jakob
Bodmer instinctively felt that the 'Sasper' with whom his Italian
authorities had acquainted him, and whom he had found praised
in The Spectator, might be a useful ally in his controversy with
the Leipzig classicists concerning the legitimacy of the 'marvellous'
in poetry; but of Shakespeare's works, Bodmer, at this time, seems
to have known little or nothing.
A new development of the Shakespeare question on the con-
tinent began with the publication of the earliest French translation
of his works. In 1745, the year in which Le Blanc's letters ap-
peared, Pierre Antoine de La Place began his series of translations
of English plays by publishing two volumes containing Othello,
The Third Part of Henry VI, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth.
So acceptable were these volumes to the public that they were
followed by other two, containing Cymbeline, Julius Caesar,
## p. 291 (#315) ############################################
Translations of La Place 291
Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens (according to Shadwell)
and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In but one case, however,
did he translate the entire play, namely Richard III; for the
rest, he was content to summarise in a connecting narrative what
seemed to him the less important scenes. He also gave an
abstract of the plots of twenty-six other Shakespearean plays.
Moreover, he prefaced his translation with an introduction on the
English stage, in which he expressed very liberal views on the
legitimacy of Shakespeare's art. This work attracted wide at-
tention, not merely in France, but on the continent generally,
and the Mémoires de Trévoux devoted no less than seven articles
to its discussion. In one respect, La Place's translation brought
about an immediate effect; it awakened Voltaire's resentment.
Always sensitive where his personal vanity was concerned, he was
hurt to the quick by the presumption of this unknown author,
who wrested from him his laurels as the European authority
on Shakespeare and the sole judge of how much the continent
ought to know of the barbarian poet, and—what was worse
who ventured to speak of Shakespeare in terms of praise which he,
Voltaire, regarded as dangerous. As a matter of fact, La Place's
translation helped materially to undermine Voltaire's authority as
a Shakespearean critic; henceforth, Voltaire fell more and more
into the background, and was looked upon, even in otherwise
friendly quarters, as cherishing an unreasonable prejudice against
the English poet. And, as the years advanced, his antagonism to
Shakespeare became increasingly embittered and violent.
A more liberal spirit—thanks, mainly, to the initiative of
Voltaire himself—was making itself felt in French criticism ; and,
from about the middle of the century onwards, there was an ap-
preciable body of educated opinion, especially among the younger
writers, which regarded Shakespeare in a favourable light, and
cherished the hope that his example might break the stiffening
bonds of the classic canon. The anglomanie which set in with
considerable force after the middle of the century, the frequent
visits to England of Frenchmen interested in literature, and the
fame of Garrick, who had many French friends and correspondents,
were all in favour of a sympathetic attitude towards Shakespeare, or,
at least, ensured that the controversy about him should be carried
on with some kind of mutual understanding. On the whole, however,
the French standpoint towards the English poet held its own in
these years, and the drawing together of the two countries had
resulted in a nearer approach of English criticism to that of France,
19-2
## p. 292 (#316) ############################################
292 Shakespeare on the Continent
6
rather than the reverse. Still, Frenchmen began now to study
the English theatre historically ; Le Nouveau Dictionnaire his-
torique (a supplement to Bayle) devoted, in 1756, no less than
six pages to an article on Shakespeare, and the authors of the
Encyclopédie mentioned him repeatedly. It was thus no wonder
that a few bold spirits had even the temerity to prefer Shake-
speare to Corneille. Such, at least, was the implication in an
anonymous article, professedly translated from the English, entitled
'Parallèle entre Shakespear et Corneille,' which appeared in Le
Journal Encyclopédique in 1760. This article, together with a
second one in which Otway was held up as superior to Racine,
offended Voltaire deeply; he felt that the honour of France must
be vindicated at all costs, and, in the following year, he launched
his Appel à toutes les Nations de l'Europe. This appeal' does
not appear, however, either then or in 1764, when it was re-
published under the pseudonym of 'Jérôme Carré,' to have
awakened any widespread desire among the nations to bring the
rival poets before a French tribunal of Voltaire's making.
Meanwhile, the sentimental movement, which set in in full
force with Rousseau, was distinctly favourable to Shakespeare's
reputation in France; Diderot felt the power of the 'Gothic
colossus' and expressed his views with that fervent emphasis
which was characteristic of him; and, in Sébastien Mercier, there
arose a critic of power and originality, whose influence was not
restricted to France. Mercier's treatise Du Théâtre, ou Nouvel
Essai sur l'Art dramatique (1773), in fact, put the entire Shake-
speare question in a new light; and, while Voltaire was still
fencing with Horace Walpole and others about La Place and
that translator's shortsighted policy in undermining good taste
by making the English ‘Gille de la foire' unnecessarily accessible
to French readers, another blow fell on him which kindled his
wrath anew. This was a new and much more ambitious translation
of Shakespeare by Pierre Félicien Le Tourneur; with this publica-
tion, the French appreciation of the poet entered upon a new
phase.
The first volume of Le Tourneur's work appeared in 1776; it is
a sumptuous quarto and opens with an imposing list of subscribers
headed by the king and queen. The quality of the translation-
which is in prose-is not of a very high order; but, compared
with that of La Place and other contemporary efforts, it marks a
very considerable advance. The introduction expatiates in no
measured terms on the greatness and universality of Shakespeare's
## p. 293 (#317) ############################################
Voltaire's Last Attacks on Shakespeare 293
genius, on his insight into the human heart and his marvellous
powers of painting nature. In this eulogy, Le Tourneur had not
omitted to mention as Shakespeare's equals the French masters of
the seventeenth century, Corneille, Racine and Molière ; but not a
word was said of the French theatre of the translator's own time.
Voltaire was not merely indignant at the disgrace to France
implied in placing Shakespeare on this pinnacle : he was incensed
that his own name should not even have been mentioned on the
French roll of dramatic fame. The Appeal to all the Nations
of Europe had failed; he felt he must now approach the custodian
1
of the nation's good name, the Academy. D'Alembert, secretary
of the Academy, was not unwilling to meet Voltaire's wishes; and
it was ultimately agreed that d'Alembert should read before a
public meeting a letter by Voltaire on the dangers of Shakespeare
to French taste. This actually took place on 25 August 1776.
The old battery was drawn up anew, and once more the untutored
mountebank was successfully routed ; d'Alembert's eloquent de-
livery of his friend's appeal to the good sense of France was
received with acclamation (broken only by an English boy of
twelve who wanted to hiss Voltaire). But to Voltaire even
this protest did not seem sufficient. A second letter followed on
7 October, and was published as the preface to his last tragedy,
Irène, the performance of which had been Voltaire's final triumph
in Paris. 'Shakespeare is a savage with sparks of genius which
shine in a horrible night. ' This was Voltaire's last word on the
Shakespeare controversy. As Jusserand finely remarks, he who,
all his life long, had been the champion of every kind of liberty
refused it to tragedy alone.
The dust raised by Voltaire's last skirmish was long in subsiding.
From England, naturally, came several protests : Mrs Montague,
who had been present at the meeting of the Academy when
Voltaire's letter was read, had her Essay on the Writings and
Genius of Shakespear (1764) translated into French, with a reply
to Voltaire; Giuseppe Baretti, an Italian residing in London, wrote
his Discours sur Shakespeare et M. Voltaire (1777); Lessing's
Hamburgische Dramaturgie was translated in the interests of
Voltaire's opponents, while La Harpe, on the other side, staunchly
upheld the classic faith. But nothing could now undo the effects of
the new force which had made itself felt in the French theatre, and
even dramatists of unimpeachable 'taste,' who abhorred irregulari-
ties, introduced elements—death on the stage, infringements of the
unities and the like-which pointed unmistakably to Shakespeare.
6
## p. 294 (#318) ############################################
294 Shakespeare on the Continent
In the later years of the eighteenth century, his plays were adapted
to the French stage by several hands and in many different ways;
but only one of these adapters need be mentioned here, Jean
François Ducis, who occupied Voltaire's seat in the Academy,
In his Hamlet (1769), Roméo et Juliette (1772), Le Roi Lear
(1783), Macbeth (1784), Jean sans Terre (1791) and Othello (1792),
Ducis succeeded in reconciling a very genuine enthusiasm for
Shakespeare with what now seems to us an extraordinary lack of
taste, in adapting him for presentation to the French theatre-goer.
He was himself, however, ignorant of English and obliged to draw
exclusively from French translations. But, in spite of these disad-
vantages, Ducis succeeded where no one had succeeded before
him: he made Shakespeare-mutilated, it may be, but still Shake-
speare-popular on the French and on the Italian stage; and it
was in the Othello of Ducis that Talma achieved one of his greatest
triumphs. However we may condemn these distorted adaptations,
we should at least remember to the credit of Ducis that his stage
versions of Shakespeare's plays outlived the French revolution,
were still popular under the first empire and were remembered
when Marie-Joseph Chénier's Brutus et Cassius (1790), a play that
may be described as the last attempt to reduce Julius Caesar to
the law and order of classic taste, was forgotten.
In the years when the French literary world was torn asunder
by controversies as to what should be admired and imitated in
Shakespeare, Germany was rapidly outdistancing France as the
real leader of continental appreciation of Shakespeare. A critic
had arisen here-a greater than Voltaire- who not merely made
Shakespeare a power of the first magnitude in his own literature,
but also discovered the formula which was to reconcile the un-
classic art of Shakespeare with the classic and humanitarian
strivings of the eighteenth century. This was Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. We must, however, avoid the mistake of overestimating
either Lessing's services to the appreciation of Shakespeare in
Germany, or his originality in judging the English poet. It is
usual to scoff at the slender knowledge with which Voltaire pre-
sumed to pass judgment on Shakespeare ; but, so far as Lessing's
printed work is concerned, he, also, gave no proof of any intimate
familiarity with the poet's works. To begin with, there is no
doubt that, until at least the year 1753, Lessing's actual acquaint-
ance with Shakespeare was limited to Borck's translation of
Julius Caesar ; of critical judgments of Shakespeare he had read
nothing more authoritative than Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques,
## p. 295 (#319) ############################################
2
Lessing and Shakespeare 295
of which he had just translated and published in his journal,
Beiträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters, the two letters
on tragedy and comedy. From about the year 1753, however,
Germany made rapid strides in her knowledge of Shakespeare;
indeed, this was inevitable, considering how carefully Germans, in
these years, followed the opinions of French writers and the French
press. An article vigorously remonstrating against Gottsched's
standpoint appeared in Neue Erweiterungen der Erkenntnis und
des Vergnügens, in 1753, and was followed, three years later, by
a prose translation of Richard III; while, in 1755, Lessing's friend
and later colleague, Nicolai, boldly put in a plea for the irregu-
larity of the English stage in preference to the artificial regularity
of the French stage. Lessing was willing enough to subscribe
to these opinions and to echo them in his writings; his own
interest in the English theatre at this time, however, was directed
not to Shakespeare, but to the tragedy of common life’; and, when,
in the winter of 1756—7, he devoted himself seriously to the study
of tragedy and its aesthetic basis, it was to Aristotle and to
Sophocles he turned in the first instance. Lessing's acquaintance
with Shakespeare in the original seems to date from the year 1757,
and fragments of dramas which have been preserved from that
period bear testimony to the deep impression which Shakespeare
had then made upon him. By 1759, Lessing had arrived at two
conclusions of far-reaching significance with regard to the English
poet. Neither was altogether new; but they were both expressed
with a vigour and piquancy which at once riveted the attention
of his contemporaries. One of these was that the drama of
Shakespeare was akin to the German Volksdrama; and, on the
ground of this affinity, Lessing hoped that Germany might be
assisted to a national drama of her own by imitating Shakespeare.
The other conclusion, which was similar to opinions that were
being freely expressed by iconoclasts in France itself, was parti-
cularly attractive to the German literary world, weary as it was of
the tyranny of classicism : it was to the effect that Shakespeare, in
spite of his irregularities, was a greater and more Aristotelian poet
in other words, more akin to Sophocles—than the great Corneille.
‘After the Oedipus of Sophocles, no piece can have more power
over our passions than Othello, King Lear, Hamlet. These bold
assertions, which form a landmark in the history of German Shake-
speare appreciation, are to be found in number 17 of Briefe die
neueste Literatur betreffend, published on 16 February 1759.
With this famous letter, Lessing's significance as a pioneer of
a
## p. 296 (#320) ############################################
296 Shakespeare on the Continent
Shakespeare in Germany reaches its climax. After 1759, he
occasionally turned to Shakespeare to demonstrate a point of
dramatic theory, or to clinch an argument, or to discredit the
French ; in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, which has disap-
pointingly little to say about Shakespeare, he insisted on Shake-
speare's mastery as a delineator of character, on his kinship with
the Greeks and on his essential observance of the Aristotelian canon;
not for a moment would Lessing have admitted that Aristotle was
a critic for all time because his theory of tragedy could be shown
to be equally applicable to Sophocles and Shakespeare; rather,
Shakespeare was a great poet because he could be proved to have
obeyed the Greek lawgiver instinctively. In his later years, how-
ever, Lessing--as his own Nathan der Weise shows—was, at heart,
more in sympathy with Voltaire's conception of tragedy than with
Shakespeare's. Leadership in matters of Shakespearean criticism
passed rapidly into other and younger hands.
A very few years after Lessing's famous letter, the Germans were
A
themselves in a position-and in a better position than their French
neighbours-to form some idea of the English poet. Between 1762
and 1766, appeared Christoph Martin Wieland's translation of
Shakespeare into prose. It was very far from being adequate; it
;;
was suggested, doubtless, in the first instance, by La Place's
French translations, and, like these, was in clumsy prose; but,
compared with what had preceded it in Germany-Borck's Caesar,
a few fragmentary specimens of Shakespeare's work in periodicals
and a bad iambic translation of Romeo and Juliet--it was an
achievement no less great than Le Tourneur's French translation
at a somewhat later date. And, in one respect, no subsequent
translation could vie with Wieland's, namely, in its immediate
influence upon German literature. Its faults are obvious enough ;
it is ludicrously clumsy, often ludicrously inaccurate. Wieland
was himself too good a Voltairean to extend a whole-hearted
sympathy to Shakespeare's irregularities and improprieties, and he
grasped at every straw which contemporary French criticism
or the notes of Pope and Warburton offered him, to vindicate
the superiority of classic taste. At the same time, his private
correspondence would seem to indicate that his feelings for Shake-
speare were considerably less straitlaced than his commentary
would imply. The consequences of the translation were more far-
reaching than Wieland had anticipated ; indeed, he, no less than
Lessing, was filled with dismay at the extravagances which followed
the introduction of Shakespeare to the German literary world-
## p. 297 (#321) ############################################
Shakespeare in the Sturm und Drang 297
perhaps this is even a reason why, in his Dramaturgie, Lessing
is reserved on the subject of Shakespeare. In that work, Lessing
had published a kindly recommendation of Wieland's translation ;
but, a few months earlier, another and more subversive critic,
Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, under the stimulus of the new
ideas of genius propounded in England by Young and Home, had
made claims for Shakespeare of which Lessing could not have
approved.
The new generation was no longer, like the latter critic,
interested in 'Shakespeare the brother of Sophocles': 'Shake-
speare the voice of nature' was the new watchword. The young
writers of the German Sturm und Drang did not criticise at all;
they worshipped ; they sought to 'feel' Shakespeare, to grasp his
spirit. They had not patience to study his art, to learn how to
write from him, as Lessing had recommended them to do, when, in
the Dramaturgie, he had lectured his quondam friend Weisse on
the lessons to be learned from Richard III. The five letters on
Shakespeare in Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg's Briefe über
Merkwürdigkeiten der Literatur are, perhaps, the most important
contribution to continental Shakespearean criticism of the entire
eighteenth century. It is not that much real critical discrimination
is to be found in them; but Gerstenberg's whole attitude to Shake-
n
peare's works is new; he regards them as so many 'Gemälde der
sittlichen Natur'-as things that we have no more business to
question than we should question a tree or a landscape. Judged
purely as criticism, Gerstenberg's letters on Shakespeare could not
have carried much weight in circles unaffected by the Sturm und
Drang; but his ideas fell on fruitful ground in Herder's mind, and
Herder, stripping them of their excesses and extravagances, made
them acceptable even beyond the pale of the literary revolution. His
essay on Shakespeare was one of the chief constituents of the little
pamphlet entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), with which
the new movement was ushered in. Herder had an advantage
over Gerstenberg in not approaching the subject in quite so naïve
a frame of mind; he had studied the Hamburgische Dramaturgie;
and, from 1769 to 1772, he had busied himself zealously with the
English poet.
