A Study of Shakespeare | Page 6

to use with any likelihood of profit. It is at least

simple enough for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply:
whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an incongruity which
may be wholly imperceptible to eyes uninured to the use of their
spectacles, they assume at once the presence of another workman, the
intrusion of a stranger's hand. This supposition of a double authorship
is naturally as impossible to refute as to establish by other than internal
evidence and appeal to the private judgment or perception of the reader.
But it is no better than the last resource of an empiric, the last refuge of
a sciolist; a refuge which the soundest of scholars will be slowest to
seek, a resource which the most competent of critics will be least ready
to adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general application, there are
no lengths to which it may not carry, there are none to which it has not
carried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetence of
tamperers with the authentic text. Recent editors who have taken on
themselves the high office of guiding English youth in its first study of
Shakespeare have proposed to excise or to obelise whole passages
which the delight and wonder of youth and age alike, of the rawest as
of the ripest among students, have agreed to consecrate as examples of
his genius at its highest. In the last trumpet-notes of Macbeth's defiance
and despair, in the last rallying cry of the hero reawakened in the tyrant
at his utmost hour of need, there have been men and scholars,
Englishmen and editors, who have detected the alien voice of a
pretender, the false ring of a foreign blast that was not blown by
Shakespeare; words that for centuries past have touched with fire the
hearts of thousands in each age since they were first inspired--words
with the whole sound in them of battle or a breaking sea, with the
whole soul of pity and terror mingled and melted into each other in the
fierce last speech of a spirit grown "aweary of the sun," have been
calmly transferred from the account of Shakespeare to the score of
Middleton. And this, forsooth, the student of the future is to accept on
the authority of men who bring to the support of their decision the
unanswerable plea of years spent in the collation and examination of
texts never hitherto explored and compared with such energy of learned
labour. If this be the issue of learning and of industry, the most indolent
and ignorant of readers who retains his natural capacity to be moved
and mastered by the natural delight of contact with heavenly things is
better off by far than the most studious and strenuous of all scholiasts

who ever claimed acquiescence or challenged dissent on the strength of
his lifelong labours and hard-earned knowledge of the letter of the text.
Such an one is indeed "in a parlous state"; and any boy whose heart
first begins to burn within him, who feels his blood kindle and his spirit
dilate, his pulse leap and his eyes lighten, over a first study of
Shakespeare, may say to such a teacher with better reason than
Touchstone said to Corin, "Truly, thou art damned; like an ill-roasted
egg, all on one side." Nor could charity itself hope much profit for him
from the moving appeal and the pious prayer which temper that
severity of sentence--"Wilt thou rest damned? God help thee, shallow
man! God make incision in thee! Thou art raw." And raw he is like to
remain for all his learning, and for all incisions that can be made in the
horny hide of a self-conceit to be pierced by the puncture of no man's
pen. It was bad enough while theorists of this breed confined
themselves to the suggestion of a possible partnership with Fletcher, a
possible interpolation by Jonson; but in the descent from these to the
alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton and Rowley we have
surely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainable by the utmost
alacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to the bastard brood of
Scriblerus. For my part, I shall not be surprised though the next
discoverer should assure us that half at least of Hamlet is evidently due
to the collaboration of Heywood, while the greater part of Othello is as
clearly assignable to the hand of Shirley.
Akin to this form of folly, but less pernicious though not more
profitable, is the fancy of inventing some share for Shakespeare in the
composition of plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or caprice
could not venture to lay wholly to his charge. This fancy,
comparatively harmless as it is, requires no ground of proof