which shows that his editorial work had taught him the trick of an occasional line contrary to the normal rules of blank verse. Notwithstanding a brave prologue, he was not able to shake himself free from the rules, which tightened their grip on English tragedy till they choked it. His regard for Shakespeare did not give him courage for the addition of a comic element or an underplot. He must obey the "hampering critics," though his avowed model had ignored them. Accordingly, in his more deliberate prose criticism we find, amid his veneration of Shakespeare, his regard for the rules of the classical drama. The faults of Shakespeare, we read, were not so much his own as those of his time, for "tragi-comedy was the common mistake of that age,' and there was as yet no definite knowledge of how a play should be constructed.

The burden of Rowe's criticism is that "strength and nature made amends for art." The line might serve as the text of many of the early appreciations of Shakespeare. Though the critics all resented Rymer's treatment of the poet, some of them stood by his doctrines. They might appease this resentment by protesting against his manners or refuting his plea for a dramatic chorus; but on the whole they recognised the claims of the classical models. The more the dramatic fervour failed, the more the professed critics counselled observance of the rules. In 1702 Farquhar had pleaded quhar for the freedom of the English stage in his Discourse upon Comedy, but his arguments were unavailing. The duller men found it easier to support the rigid doctrines, which had been fully expounded by the French critics. The seventh or supplementary volume of Rowe's edition of Shakespeare was introduced by Charles Gildon's Essay on the Art, Rise, and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome, and

Our humble author does his steps pursue,

He owns he had the mighty bard in view;
And in these scenes has made it more his care
To rouse the passions than to charm the ear."

Gildan

England, which, as the title shows, was a laboured exposition of the classical doctrines. Gildon had begun as an enemy of Rymer. In 1694 he had published Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer's Short View of Tragedy and an Attempt at a Vindication of Shakespeare. Therein he had spoken of "noble irregularity," and censured the “graver pedants" of the age. By 1710 he is a grave pedant himself. In 1694 he had said that Rymer had scarce produced one criticism that was not borrowed from the French writers; in 1710 the remark is now applicable to its author. Gildon's further descent as a critic is evident eight years later in his Complete Art of Poetry. He is now a slave to the French doctrine of the rules. He confesses himself the less ready to pardon the "monstrous absurdities" of Shakespeare, as one or two plays, such as the Tempest, are "very near a regularity.' Yet he acknowledges that Shakespeare abounds in beauties, and he makes some reparation by including a long list of his finer passages. Gildon was a man whose ideas took their colour from his surroundings. In the days of his acquaintanceship with Dryden he appreciated Shakespeare more heartily than when he was left to the friendship of Dennis or the favours of the Duke of Buckinghamshire. His Art of Poetry is a dishonest compilation, which owes what value it has to the sprinkling of contemporary allusions. It even incorporates, without any acknowledgment, long passages from Sidney's Apologie. We should be tempted to believe that Gildon merely put his name to a hack-work collection, were it not that there is a gradual deterioration in his criticism.

John Dennis also replied to Rymer's Short View, and was classed afterwards as one of Rymer's disciples. In his Impartial Critick (1693) he endeavoured to show that the methods of the ancient Greek tragedy were not all suitable to the modern English theatre. To introduce a chorus, as Rymer had recommended, or to expel love from the stage, would, he argued, only ruin the English drama. But his belief in the classical rules

But

made him turn the Merry Wives into the Comical Gallant.>
As he found in the original three actions, each indepen-
dent of the other, he had set himself to make the whole
depend on one common centre.'
In the Dedication to
the letters On the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare we
read that Aristotle, "who may be call'd the Legislator of
Parnassus, wrote the laws of tragedy so exactly and so
truly in reason and nature that succeeding criticks have
writ justly and reasonably upon that art no farther than
they have adhered to their great master's notions."
at the very beginning of the letters themselves he says
that "Shakespeare was one of the greatest geniuses that
the world e'er saw." Notwithstanding his pronounced
classical taste, his sense of the greatness of Shakespeare is
as strong as Rowe's, and much stronger than Gildon's.
His writings prove him a man of competent scholarship,
who had thought out his literary doctrines for himself,
and could admire beauty in other than classical garb.
The result is that at many points his opinions are
at marked variance with those of Rymer, for whom,
however, he had much respect. Rymer, for instance, had
said that Shakespeare's genius lay in comedy, but the
main contention of Dennis's letters is that he had an
unequalled gift for tragedy. As a critic Dennis is
greatly superior to Rymer and his disciples. The
ancients guided his taste without blinding him to modern
excellence.

Even Lewis Theobald, whom some would consider Theobald Shakespeare's greatest friend in this century, believed in the rules. He complied with the taste of the town when he wrote pantomimes, but he was a sterner man when he posed as a critic. He would then speak of the "general absurdities of Shakespeare," and the "errors" in the structure of his plays. He passed this criticism both in his edition of Shakespeare and in the early articles in the Censor on King Lear, which are also of considerable historical interest as being the first essays devoted exclusively to an examination of a single Shakespearian

b

play. His complacent belief in the rules prompted him to correct Richard II. "The many scattered beauties which I have long admired," he says naïvely in the Preface, "induced me to think they would have stronger charms if they were interwoven in a regular Fable." No less confident is a note on Love's Labour's Lost: "Besides the exact regularity of the rules of art, which the author has happened to preserve in some few of his pieces, this is demonstration, I think, that though he has more frequently transgressed the unity of Time by cramming years into the compass of a play, yet he knew the absurdity of so doing, and was not unacquainted with the rule to the contrary." Theobald was a critic of the same type as Gildon. Each had profound respect for what he took to be the accredited doctrines. If on certain points Theobald's ideas were liable to change, the explanation is that he was amenable to the opinions of others. We do not find in Theobald's criticism the courage of originality. There is little about the rules in Pope's Preface. That Pope respected them cannot be doubted, else he would not have spoken so well of Rymer, and in the critical notes added to his Homer we should not hear so much of

Le Bossu's treatise on the Epic. But Pope was a discreet man, who knew when to be silent. He regarded it as a misfortune that Shakespeare was not so circum

1 The note has reference to Biron's remark, towards the end of the last scene, that a "twelvemonth and a day" is "too long for a play" (ed. 1733, ii., p. 181). In Mr. Lounsbury's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, 1901-which I regret I did not see before the present Introduction was in type-it is urged as "demonstration of Theobald's sagacity that he had the insight to see that Shakespeare's disregard of the unities was owing not to ignorance but to intention. Theobald's note, however, has a suspicious similarity to what Gildon had said in his Art of Poetry, 1718, i., p. 99. It is, says Gildon, "plain from his [Shakespeare's] own words he saw the absurdities of his own conduct. And I must confess that when I find that . . . he himself has written one or two plays very near a regularity, I am the less apt to pardon his errors that seem of choice, as agreeable to his lazyness and easie gain." 2 Cf. the Dunciad, i. 69-72, where the inducements of satire make him adopt a decided attitude in favour of the dramatic rules.

stanced as to be able to write on the model of the ancients, but, unlike the pedant theorists, he refused to judge Shakespeare by the rules of a foreign drama. Much the same is to be said of Addison. His belief in Addis the rules appears in his Cato. His over-rated criticism of Paradise Lost is little more than a laboured application of the system of Le Bossu. But in the Spectator he too urges that Shakespeare is not to be judged according to the rules. "Our critics do not seem sensible," he writes, "that there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of the rules of art than in those of a little genius who knows and observes them. Our inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the whole tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather read one of his plays where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic where there is not one of them violated?" The rigid critics continued to find fault with the structure of Shakespeare's plays. In the articles in the Adventurer on the Tempest and King Lear, Joseph Warton repeats the standard objection to tragi-comedy and underplots. In the Biographia Britannica we still find it stated that Shakespeare set himself to please the populace, and that the people "had no notion of the rules of writing, or the model of the Ancients." But one whose tastes were classical, both by nature and by training, had been thinking out the matter for himself. It was only after long reflection, and with much hesitation, that Johnson had disavowed what had almost come to be considered the very substance of the classical faith. In his Irene he had bowed to the rules; he had, however, begun to suspect them by the time he wrote the Rambler, and in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare suspicion has become conviction. His sturdy

1 No. 592. The quotation will prove the injustice of De Quincey's attitude to Addison in his Essay on Shakespeare. De Quincey even makes the strange statement that "by express examination, we ascertained the curious fact that Addison has never in one instance quoted or made any reference to Shakespeare" (Works, ed. Masson, iv., p. 24).