4 Prosscr Hall Fryc 



And indeed it is not difficult to conceive that to such an age, as 

 to Jonson, Shakespeare should seem to have "wanted art." In 

 his Defense of the Epilogue Dryden remarks : 



"Malice and partiality set aside, let any man, who understands English, 

 read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare under- 

 take, that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or 

 some notorious flaw in sense. . . Poetry was then, if not in its infancy 

 among us, at least not arrived to its vigor and maturity : witness the lame- 

 ness of their plots ; many of which . . . were made up of some ridic- 

 ulous incoherent story, which in one play many times took up the business 

 of an age. I suppose I need not name Pericles, Prince of Tyre, nor the 

 historical plays of Shakespeare: besides many of the rest, as the Winter's 

 Tale, Love's Labour Lost, Measure for Measure, which were either 

 grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedy 

 neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment." 



While a little later he speaks of "bombast speeches of Macbeth,"^ 

 and eventually disposes of Shakespeare pithily in this fashion : 



"Shakespeare, who many times has written better than any poet, in any 

 language, is yet so far from writing wit always, or expressing that wit ac- 

 cording to the dignity of the subject, that he writes, in many places, below 

 the dullest writer of ours, or any precedent age. Never did any writer 

 precipitate himself from such height of thought to so low expressions, as 

 he often does. He is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere 

 two faces ; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise 

 the other.''" 



Now it must be confessed that these extracts do not represent 

 Dryden's best critical tone. They were written in support of 

 certain arrogances to which he had committed himself, when 

 flown with the insolence of success, in an epilogue to the second 

 part of the Coiiquest of Granada. But at the same time they do 

 represent the tendency of his criticism, and what is more impor- 

 tant in this connection, the temper of the time in which they were 

 written. And after all, indiscriminate as the criticism is, it has a 

 kind of general, justice. If there is one test by which the work 

 of an artist — for such is the modern equivalent of "wit" — may 

 be known, it is by its evenness, its being all of a piece, — in short, 



'Dryden. Defense of the Epilogue. 

 'Ibid. 



