And who did the retouching? Working, as the Elizabethans habitually did, with previous dramatic material their preferred quarry, revision, rewriting, manipulation, adaptation was as much the vogue of the playmakers as was the altering of costumes a function of the custodians of the wardrobe. Wherefore a justification for the existence of the "implacable geologist

. . detecting stratum after stratum in the upheaved mountain with an eye that grows yearly keener for the primeval non-Shakespearean basalt." Wherefore, too, Measure for Measure, for example, " offers problems to the bibliographical detective of quite exceptional interest and complexity"; and we learn, as a result of his labors in this case those of Dr. Dover Wilson that the text of this play has been abridged; secondly that it has also elsewhere been expanded; and that these two revisions were not simultaneous, but were " undertaken at some years' interval and possibly by different dramatists." Further even than this, "it is conceivable," we are told," that there may have been later revisions still, before the text reached the hands of the printer." Indeed, Dr. Wilson finds "at least a presumption that the folio text of Measure for Measure contains additions by a post-Shakespeare reviser," and concludes:

"If we imagine that the abridgment of 1604 was made from the existing players' parts and not on Shakespeare's MS, that this original unabridged MS. was afterwards lost, and that the prose adapter, therefore, constructed his text from the players' parts of 1604, hastily transcribing them and filling out the play with additions of his own, we are making a not unreasonable guess as to

the origin of the actual copy used for the printing of Measure for Measure as we have it." &

"A not unreasonable guess!" But is it no more than this that this busy formidable scholarship can do for us? And is this same puzzling play, with all the differences of opinion as to its personages and their conduct, really so disastrous a hodge-podge, when all is said? Moreover, if it is, could it produce the powerful effect which follows alike the reading or the seeing of it? It is one of the miracles of Shakespeare that with all this searching into his defects, with all this evidence as to the utter hopelessness of these helterskelter texts of his, corrupt, interpolated, carelessly abridged or stupidly expanded, we still contrive to read them and to get a pleasure out of them, corruptions and all, which the carefully groomed productions of later ages cannot afford us. As of two evils, so of two incredibilities, prefer the less. Those who are shaping for us anew the Shakespeare Canon demand of us a deeper faith in the results of their devastating inquisitions than genius has ever invoked of reader or auditor to excuse the inconsistencies of his resources or the inadequacy of his powers. It is difficult, in a word, to believe results so admirable the product of methods so chaotic and this even when we must qualify our admiration, as we must for disquieting Measure for Measure, unsatisfying All's Well, and bitter, disenchanting Troilus and Cressida.

Much more might be said of other means employed to shape anew the canon of the Shakespearean plays. 6 Cambridge Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1922, p. 113.

Bibliography has been powerfully invoked, indubitably to set us straight in much that appertains to the printed word. Especially have the relations of the texts of the quartos and the folios been revised in the scholarly work of Pollard, Greg, and others. And in one conspicuous example at least the canon has extended Shakespeare's range of authorship by the suggestion, not idly to be set aside despite the criticism of Schücking or Tannenbaum, that in one of the scenes of the manuscript play, Sir Thomas More, we have a piece of Shakespeare's authorship written by his own hand. In the wider reaches of the subject the question "what is the nature of the errors which given peculiarities in the handwriting of the manuscript are likely to beget in the printed copy" indicates, with other kindred queries, new possibilities for " the bibliographical detective," to say no more. The ingenuity of our age has invented many new tools. But sharp tools are useful only in trained and intelligent hands; and the sharpest are the most readily put to the most dangerous misuse. It is asking perhaps too much of this generation of ours that it come to a full realization of the truth as to two of its obsessions: that the methods of our triumphant science are not applicable with their "certainties of result" to everything under the sun; and secondly, that there are many questions the precise limitation of Shakespeare's authorship among them — - against which we can never hope to write the definitive Q. E. D.

7 See Review of English Studies, Jan. 1925; and Studies in Philology, 1925, xxii, 133.

V

BEN JONSON AND THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL

WITH

WITHOUT here threshing out again an old-time harvest which has been beaten to the last grain, it may none the less be not impertinently premised that the words, classical and romantic, those overworked counters in the small change of criticism, have been taken by the present writer, both here and elsewhere, to designate tendencies rather than opposed methods in art; and that the former, together with much else, seems to him to lean to the realization of artistic things along the line of tradition and correctness according to some previous standard, while the latter substitutes an effort after freedom from restraint and a realization of beauty and significance in things new, strange or at least out of the ordinary. A further canon of the present writer's acceptance is his conviction that literature has always partaken of both the tendency which conserves and the tendency which seeks after the novel and the strange; and that a literary age may be called classic or romantic, not in the absence of either, but in the domination of one tendency over the other at a given time. Indeed we may surmise that in the ebb and flow of these elements consists the very life of art, and that in an approximate

triumph of either over the other we can have either the death of stagnation or the annihilation of chaos. It is at least as old as Stendhal that every "classic" had once the novelty of the "romantic" in it. And even romantic excess, grown common, may become distasteful from the loss of that which once made it romantic. The romantic temper, in a word, studies the past, the classic neglects it. The romantic temper is empirical. In its successful experiments it lays the foundations for classics to come. It is the failures and excesses of romanticism that bring us trooping back to the classics to find with Matthew Arnold "The only sure guidance, the only solid footing among the ancients." 1

With these bases of dogmatism to stand on, we may note that the history of English literature since the Renaissance exhibits three periods of unusual interest in the models of the past, three notable returns to the classics as they were understood in each age. An important name is identified with each: Sir Philip Sidney, whose classicism was concerned with externals, and soon overwhelmed with the flood of romanticism on which he was himself" the first fair freight;" Ben Jonson, whose classicism came alike by nature and by study; and Pope, who long after stands for the culmination of a movement which, losing its aims and substituting too often mere form for living principle, is none the less worthy of a greater respect and consid

1 See the earlier formulation of these ideas on the basis of Pater's well known Appreciations in the first draught of this paper, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1898, xiii.