The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3441]
Of one-volume editions of the unannotated text, the best are the Globe, edited by W. G. Clark and Dr. Aldis Wright (1864, and constantly reprinted—since 1891 with a new and useful glossary); the Leopold (1876, from the text of Delius, with preface by Dr. Furnivall); and the Oxford, edited by Mr. W. J. Craig (1894).
XX—POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION
Shakespeare defied at every stage in his career the laws of the classical drama. He rode roughshod over the unities of time, place, and action. There were critics in his day who zealously championed the ancient rules, and viewed with distrust any infringement of them. But the force of Shakespeare’s genius—its revelation of new methods of dramatic art—was not lost on the lovers of the ancient ways; and even those who, to assuage their consciences, entered a formal protest against his innovations, soon swelled the chorus of praise with which his work was welcomed by contemporary playgoers, cultured and uncultured alike. The unauthorised publishers of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ in 1608 faithfully echoed public opinion when they prefaced the work with the note: ‘This author’s comedies are so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. . . . So much and such savoured salt of wit is in his comedies that they seem for their height of pleasure to be born in the sea that brought forth Venus.’
Ben Jonson’s tribute.
Anticipating the final verdict, the editors of the First Folio wrote, seven years after Shakespeare’s death: ‘These plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals.’ Ben Jonson, the staunchest champion of classical canons, noted that Shakespeare ‘wanted art,’ but he allowed him, in verses prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among all dramatists, including those of Greece and Rome, and claimed that all Europe owed him homage:
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes [i.e. stages] of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time.
In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on ‘the great heir of fame:’
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?
Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a lifelong monument.
A writer of fine insight who veiled himself under the initials I. M. S. contributed to the Second Folio of 1632 a splendid eulogy. The opening lines declare ‘Shakespeare’s freehold’ to have been
A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear
And equal surface can make things appear
Distant a thousand years, and represent
Them in their lively colours’ just extent.
It was his faculty
To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,
Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates
Of death and Lethe, where (confused) lie
Great heaps of ruinous mortality.
Milton and I. M. S. were followed within ten years by critics of tastes so varied as the dramatist of domesticity Thomas Heywood, the gallant lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic and ‘ever-memorable’ John Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage and