A Study of Shakespeare | Page 7

to go upon,
no prop of likelihood to support it; without so much help as may be
borrowed from the faintest and most fitful of traditions, it spins its own
evidence spider-like out of its own inner conscience or conceit, and
proffers it with confident complacency for men's acceptance. Here
again I cannot but see a mere waste of fruitless learning and bootless
ingenuity. That Shakespeare began by retouching and recasting the
work of elder and lesser men we all know; that he may afterwards have
set his hand to the task of adding or altering a line or a passage here and

there in some few of the plays brought out under his direction as
manager or proprietor of a theatre is of course possible, but can neither
be affirmed nor denied with any profit in default of the least fragment
of historic or traditional evidence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary
touch of his hand in plays of whose history we know no more than that
they were acted on the boards of his theatre can be but a diversion for
the restless leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars; it will give no
clue by which the student who simply seeks to know what can be
known with certainty of the poet and his work may hope to be guided
towards any safe issue or trustworthy result. Less pardonable and more
presumptuous than this is the pretension of minor critics to dissect an
authentic play of Shakespeare scene by scene, and assign different parts
of the same poem to different dates by the same pedagogic rules of
numeration and mensuration which they would apply to the general
question of the order and succession of his collective works. This
vivisection of a single poem is not defensible as a freak of scholarship,
an excursion beyond the bounds of bare proof, from which the
wanderer may chance to bring back, if not such treasure as he went out
to seek, yet some stray godsend or rare literary windfall which may
serve to excuse his indulgence in the seemingly profitless pastime of a
truant disposition. It is a pure impertinence to affirm with oracular
assurance what might perhaps be admissible as a suggestion offered
with the due diffidence of modest and genuine scholarship; to assert on
the strength of a private pedant's personal intuition that such must be
the history or such the composition of a great work whose history he
alone could tell, whose composition he alone could explain, who gave
it to us as his genius had given it to him.
From these several rocks and quicksands I trust at least to keep my
humbler course at a safe distance, and steer clear of all sandy shallows
of theory or sunken shoals of hypothesis on which no pilot can be
certain of safe anchorage; avoiding all assumption, though never so
plausible, for which no ground but that of fancy can be shown, all
suggestion though never so ingenious for which no proof but that of
conjecture can be advanced. For instance, I shall neither assume nor
accept the theory of a double authorship or of a double date by which
the supposed inequalities may be accounted for, the supposed

difficulties may be swept away, which for certain readers disturb the
study of certain plays of Shakespeare. Only where universal tradition
and the general concurrence of all reasonable critics past and present
combine to indicate an unmistakable difference of touch or an
unmistakable diversity of date between this and that portion of the
same play, or where the internal evidence of interpolation perceptible to
the most careless and undeniable by the most perverse of readers is
supported by the public judgment of men qualified to express and
competent to defend an opinion, have I thought it allowable to adopt
this facile method of explanation. No scholar, for example, believes in
the single authorship of Pericles or _Andronicus_; none, I suppose,
would now question the part taken by some hireling or journeyman in
the arrangement or completion for the stage of _Timon of Athens_; and
few probably would refuse to admit a doubt of the total authenticity or
uniform workmanship of the Taming of the Shrew. As few, I hope, are
prepared to follow the fantastic and confident suggestions of every
unquiet and arrogant innovator who may seek to append his name to
the long scroll of Shakespearean parasites by the display of a
brand-new hypothesis as to the uncertain date or authorship of some
passage or some play which has never before been subjected to the
scientific scrutiny of such a pertinacious analyst. The more modest
design of the present study has in part been already indicated, and will
explain as it proceeds if there be anything in it worth explanation. It