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    The Critics Versus Shakspere A Brief for the Defendant
    The Critics Versus Shakspere A Brief for the Defendant
    The Critics Versus Shakspere A Brief for the Defendant
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    The Critics Versus Shakspere A Brief for the Defendant

    By Francis Asbury Smith

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    The Critics Versus Shakspere A Brief for the Defendant

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      The Critics Versus Shakspere A Brief for the Defendant - Francis Asbury Smith

      Project Gutenberg's The Critics Versus Shakspere, by Francis A. Smith

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

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      Title: The Critics Versus Shakspere

      A Brief for the Defendant

      Author: Francis A. Smith

      Release Date: December 10, 2008 [EBook #27485]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRITICS VERSUS SHAKSPERE ***

      Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Carla Foust and the

      Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      (This file was made using scans of public domain works

      from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.)

      Transcriber's note

      Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved. Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer errors have been corrected, and they are indicated with a mouse-hover

      and listed at the end of this book.

      THE CRITICS

      Versus

      SHAKSPERE

      A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENDANT

      By

      FRANCIS A. SMITH

      The Knickerbocker Press

      New York

      1907

      Copyright

      , 1907

      BY

      FRANCIS A. SMITH

      Many years ago, I was retained in the great case of The Critics against Shakspere, the most celebrated on the calendar of history during three centuries. Unlike other cases, it has been repeatedly decided, and as often reopened and reheard before the most eminent judges, who have again and again non-suited the plaintiffs. Appeals have availed nothing to reverse those decisions. New actions have been brought on the ground of newly discovered evidence; counsel have summed up the testimony from all lands, from whole libraries and literatures, and the great jury of mankind have uniformly rendered a verdict of no cause of action.

      Ben Jonson said that Shakspere wanted art; the highest appellate court decided that Lear was a greater work than Euripides or Sophocles ever produced. Voltaire, the presiding Justice in the court of French criticism, decided that Shakspere was votre bizarre sauvage; the world has reversed his decision, and everywhere, except perhaps in France, the Henriade is neglected for Hamlet.

      During the seventeenth century, English criticism sought to put Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Otway, Wycherly, Congreve, Cowley, Dryden, and even the madman Lee, above Shakspere. Denham in 1667 sings an obituary to the memory of the immortal Cowley,—

      "By Shakspere's, Jonson's, Fletcher's lines,

      Our stage's lustre Rome's outshines.

      Old Mother Wit and Nature gave

      Shakspere and Fletcher all they have;

      In Spencer and in Jonson, art

      Of slower Nature got the start.

      But both in him so equal are,

      None knows which bears the happiest share."

      One knows not which to admire most, the beauty of the poetry or the justice of the encomium.

      James Shirly, whom Shakspere has not yet been accused of imitating, said in 1640 that he had few friends, and Tateham, an obscure versifier, in 1652, that he was the plebeian driller.

      Philipps, the pupil of Milton, refers to Shakspere's unfiled expressions, his rambling and undigested fancies, the laughter of the critical. Dryden regretted that Shakspere did not know or rarely observed the Aristotelian laws of the three unities, but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. He is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling, into bombast.

      Thomas Rymer, another disciple of the unities, in 1693, declared Othello to be a bloody farce without salt or savor, and says that in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is a lively expression, and ... more humanity, than many times in the tragical flights of Shakspere. How much humanity may be shown in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a mastiff may be left to the impartial judgment of the jockey or the dog fancier, but the world has got beyond the criticism of Rymer. In his view, almost everything in Shakspere's plays is so wretched that he is surprised how critics could condescend to honor so wretched a poet with critical discussions.

      John Dennis and Charles Gildon, whose books are forgotten under the dust of more than two centuries, in 1693 and 1694 denied that Shakspere's plays had any excellence, any wealth in profound sentences or truth to nature, any originality, force or beauty of diction; and placed him far below the ancients in all essential points,—in composition, invention, characterization.

      Dennis says Shakspere paid no heed to poetic justice ... the good and bad perishing promiscuously in the best of his tragedies, so that there can be either none or very weak instruction in them. Gildon sums up his opinion by the sententious remark that his beauties are buried beneath a heap of ashes, isolated and fragmentary like the ruins of a temple, so that there is no harmony in them.

      Against all this arraignment by the imitators of the French drama, we have that loving tribute of the great Milton:—

      "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 live-long monument."

      Pope could not resist the charm of his unacknowledged master. But Pope praises Dryden, Denham, and Waller,—never a word of commendation for Shakspere: he is not correct, not classic; he has almost as many defects as beauties; his dramas want plan, are defective and irregular in construction; he keeps the tragic and comic as little apart as he does the different epochs and nations in which the scenes of his plays are laid; the unity of action, of place, and of time is violated in every scene.

      The eighteenth century was notable for its corrections and remodellings, reducing the grandeur of the originals to the levels of the critics. Lord Lansdowne degraded Shylock into the clown of the play; it was furnished with music and other ornamentation, enriched with a musical masque, 'Peleus and Thetis,' and with a banqueting scene in which the Jew, dining apart from the rest, drinks to his God, Money. Gildon mangled Measure for Measure and provided it with musical entertainments. The Duke of Buckingham divided Julius Cæsar into two tragedies with choruses. Worsdale reduced The Taming of the Shrew to a vaudeville, and Lampe trimmed 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' into an opera. Garrick adapted Romeo and Juliet to the stage of his time, by allowing Juliet to awake before Romeo had died of the poison, The Tempest by furnishing it with songs, The Taming of the Shrew by cutting it down to a farce in three acts.

      Even the great Samuel Johnson said that Shakspere sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose. ... His plots are often so loosely formed that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design.

      "It may be observed that in many of his plays the latter

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