Characters of Shakespeares Plays | Page 6

to be dramatic criticism, it is in reality a discourse on the philosophy of life and human nature, more suggestive than many approved treatises expressly devoted to that subject'. Well, for the second half of this pronouncement--constat. 'You see, my friend,' writes Goldsmith's Citizen of the World ,'there is nothing so ridiculous that it has not at some time been said by some philosopher.' But for the first part, while a priori Mr. Ireland ought to be right--since Hazlitt, as we have seen, came to literary criticism by the road of philosophical writing--I confess to finding very little philosophy in this book.
Over and above the gusto of the writing, which is infectious enough, and the music of certain passages in which we foretaste the masterly prose of Hazlitt's later Essays, I find in the book three merits which, as I study it, more and more efface that first impression of flimsiness.
(1) To begin with, Hazlitt had hold of the right end of the stick. He really understood that Shakespeare was a dramatic craftsman, studied him as such, worshipped him for his incomparable skill in doing what he tried, all his life and all the time, to do. In these days much merit must be allowed to a Shakespearian critic who takes his author steadily as a dramatist and not as a philosopher, or a propagandist, or a lawyer's clerk, or a disappointed lover, or for his acquaintance with botany, politics, cyphers, Christian Science, any of the thousand and one things that with their rival degrees of intrinsic importance agree in being, for Shakespeare, nihil ad rem.
(2) Secondly, Hazlitt always treats Shakespeare as, in my opinion, he deserves to be treated; that is, absolutely and as 'patrone and not compare' among the Elizabethans. I harbour an ungracious doubt that he may have done so in 1816-17 for the simple and sufficient reason that he had less than a bowing acquaintance with the other Elizabethan dramatists. But he made their acquaintance in due course, and discussed them, yet never (so far as I recall) committed the error of ranking them alongside Shakespeare. With all love for the memory of Lamb, and with all respect for the memory of Swinburne, I hold that these two in their generations, both soaked in enjoyment of the Elizabethan style--an enjoyment derivative from Shakespeare--did some disservice to criticism by classing them with him in the light they borrow; whenas truly he differs from them in kind and beyond any reach of degrees. One can no more estimate Shakespeare's genius in comparison with this, that, or the other man's of the sixteenth century, than Milton's in comparison with any one's of the seventeenth. Some few men are absolute and can only be judged absolutely.
(3) For the third merit--if the Characters be considered historically--what seems flimsy in them is often a promise of what has since been substantiated; what seems light and almost juvenile in the composition of this man, aged thirty-nine, gives the scent on which nowadays the main pack of students is pursuing. No one not a fool can read Johnson's notes on Shakespeare without respect or fail to turn to them again with an increased trust in his common-sense, as no one not a fool can read Hazlitt without an equal sense that he has the root of the matter, or of the spirit which is the matter.
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH 1916

TO CHARLES LAMB, ESQ.
THIS VOLUME IS INSCBIBED AS A MARK OF OLD FRIENDSHIP AND LASTING ESTEEM
BY THE AUTHOR

CONTENTS
PREFACE CYMBELINE MACBETH JULIUS CAESAR OTHELLO TIMON OF ATHENS CORIOLANUS TROILUS AND CRESSIDA ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA HAMLET THE TEMPEST THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ROMEO AND JULIET LEAR RICHARD II HENRY IV IN TWO PARTS HENRY V HENRY VI IN THREE PARTS RICHARD III HENRY VIII KING JOHN TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA THE MERCHANT OF VENICE THE WINTER'S TALE ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING AS YOU LIKE IT THE TAMING OF THE SHREW MEASURE FOR MEASURE THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR THE COMEDY OF ERRORS DOUBTFUL PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE POEMS AND SONNETS

PREFACE
It is observed by Mr. Pope, that 'If ever any author deserved the name of an ORIGINAL, it was Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of nature; it proceeded through AEgyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of Shakespeare was inspiration: indeed, he is not so much an imitator, as an instrument of nature; and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.
His CHARACTERS are so much nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to call them by