It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives from the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to admire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of the curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could breathe. For a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authentic impress of the divine. Efflavit deus. In a century, from being largely beneath criticism Shakespeare had passed to a condition where he was almost completely beyond it.
King John affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude. The play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier and utterly un-Shakespearean production entitled The Troublesome Raigne of King John. The only character Shakespeare added to those he found ready to his hand was that of James Gurney, who enters with Lady Falconbridge after the scene between the Bastard and his brother, says four words, and departs for ever.
\'Bast.—James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?
Gur.—Good leave, good Philip.
Bast.—Philip! Sparrow! James.\'
It is obvious that Shakespeare\'s sole motive in introducing Gurney is to provide an occasion for the Bastard\'s characteristic, though not to a modern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was at the time a common name for a sparrow. The Bastard, just dubbed Sir Richard Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his former name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezy indifference. The jest could not have been made to Lady Falconbridge without a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to the natural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which Shakespeare establishes between the Bastard and his mother. So Gurney is quite casually brought in to receive it. But this is not enough for the Shakespeare-drunken Coleridge.
\'For an instance of Shakespeare\'s power in minimis, I generally quote James Gurney\'s character in King John. How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!\'
Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge\'s title as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is the greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play. In Act III, scene ii., Warburton\'s emendation of \'airy\' to \'fiery\' had in Coleridge\'s day been received into the text of the Bastard\'s lines:—
\'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
Some airy devil hovers in the sky.\'
On which Coleridge writes:—
\'I prefer the old text: the word \'devil\' implies \'fiery.\' You need only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on \'devil,\' to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton\'s alteration.\'
The test is absolutely convincing—a poet\'s criticism of poetry. But that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the modern Variorum. There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield\'s remarks upon the play: \'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, King John is an intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate the idea of treachery.\' We remember that Mr Masefield has much better than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon this sentence because it is set before us in the Variorum, and because it too \'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions illustrates his idea of criticism.\' Genetically, it is a continuation of the shoddy element in Coleridge\'s Shakespeare criticism, a continual bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object) after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer part of Coleridge\'s brain.
King John is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous influence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of a young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. The effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. The miracle is that anything should have been made of The Troublesome Raigne at all. The Variorum extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied the old play with Shakespeare\'s version, only Swinburne saw, or had the courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have made Shakespeare\'s Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that decrepit skeleton—that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination.
But \'ideas of treachery\'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been beguiled by Coleridge\'s laudanum trances? A limbo—of this we are confident—where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good) play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the influence and ravages of these \'ideas\' are certainly perceptible, but merely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every attempt at invasion by the \'idea\'-bacillus.
In considering a Shakespeare play the word \'idea\' had best be kept out of the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might be intelligibly used. You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare\'s idea of the play. It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the work of poetic creation—the necessary means by which a poet can conveniently explicate and express his manifold ?sthetic intuitions. This dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were first and most brilliantly formulated by Aristotle in terms that, in essentials, hold good for all time. You may investigate this skeleton, seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiated from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that Othello is a tragedy of jealousy, or Hamlet of the inhibition of self-consciousness. But if your \'idea\' is to have any substance it must be moulded very closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and in the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual characters.
On the other ha............