Shakespearian Criticism. 



nine years old ; none of these have heard of him, although Eubens 

 resided in England and painted numerous portraits there. Again, 

 many important events occurred in his supposed life-time, to none of 

 which he has alluded — as the battle of Lepanto, the St. Bartholomew 

 massacre, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the first circumnaviga- 

 tion of the globe, the gunpowder plot, the deliverance of Holland 

 from Spain, the invention of the telescope and the discovery thereby 

 of Jupiter's satellites. In an era of strenuous controversy between the 

 Protestant and Roman religions, no one can tell from his works 

 whether he was Catholic or Protestant. Unlike Dante, Milton, 

 Goethe, he left no trace on the political or even social life of his time." 

 His works display such an unprecedented universality of knowledge 

 in one man, that he has been conjectured to be pretty much every 

 thing — lawyer, physician, soldier, courtier, tailor. "In a time when 

 others collected and published their works, no collected edition of his 

 appeared until long after his death. Nothing that can be pronounced 

 an authentic portrait of him has come down to us, and the effigies 

 which we have are clearly of a formal and traditional type, with their 

 preposterous expanse of forehead." 



This is very fine reasoning, but by the same line of reasoning, if we 

 admit that Shakespeare lived, we might prove that Raleigh, Spenser, 

 Bacon, Coke, Burleigh, Hooker, Henry IV, Montaigne, Tasso, Cer- 

 vantes, Gallileo, Grotius, Milton, Cromwell, Descartes and Rubens 

 never lived, because Shakespeare says nothing of them. After all, 

 such omissions are no more singular than that Thucydides has noth- 

 ing to say of Socrates, his great contemporary, nor than that Plutarch, 

 though the contemporary in his youth or in his old age of Persius, 

 Juvenal, Lucan and Seneca, of Qnintillian, Martial, Tacitus, Sueton- 

 ius, Pliny the Elder and the Younger, does not cite them, and in 

 return his name is never mentioned by any Roman writer. 



The text of Shakespeare's plays has given rise to some very remark- 

 able conjectural criticism. The variorum edition is almost as good a 

 jest book as Joe Miller's. AVe might well exclaim, in the words of 

 Madame Roland, slightly altered, " Oh, criticism, how many follies 

 are uttered in thy name ! " Once in a great while an important and 

 sensible emendation is effected. Thus, in the description of Fal- 

 staff's death, the words "table of Greenfields" long stood as the 

 pom asinorum of the commentators. The scholar who suggested 

 " 'a babbled o' green fields," instead, conferred a boon on mankind. 

 But what a narrow escape from a leap out of the pan into the fire ! 

 Mr. Collier's folio would read, " on a table of green frieze," the pas- 

 sage then standing, "his nose was as sharp as a peu on a table of 



