VOL. CVIII

No. DCXLVIII

H

OW is it that upon this one play of Shakespeare's, so vast has been the body of criticism, that it forms a literature, and that, so various has it been, it may be said to express the opinions and also the whims and idiosyncrasies of the entire writing fraternity of the British Empire, of Europe, and of America? How is it, that, if all the printed words that have been scattered over it in the various languages of the modern world were inscribed upon a tape, that tape would form a black scroll of printer's ink reaching from the earth to the moon? And again, how is it that, notwithstanding all this industry, no editor, from Heminge and Condell downwards, has been able to give us a sensibly arranged text? Take, for instance, so elemental a matter as the dividing of the play into acts. Although the earliest authentic quarto, that of 1604, is not divided into acts at all, Shakespeare's artistic intent in regard to a proper sense-pause is in every case rendered clear enough by the very nature of the subject matter. No one will deny that-scenery or no scenery-a modern play (having no chorus) is properly divided into acts. This, at least, Heminge and Condell

knew, and into acts they began to divide it; but after Act II. they got tired of their task and left in one huge act the whole of the remainder of the play. It was not till the eighteenth century that an editor divided this matter into Acts III., IV., and V. And then how did that editor go to work? Of course it is the first principle of all literary art, whether in verse or in prose, that the artistic arrangement of the matter is as important as the matter itself. Even Carlyle, to whom matter was so much more than form, knew this, for he said of Hamlet, give a poet the subject matter of Hamlet, and it would still require a Shakespeare's genius to mould it into the play, or something to that effect. But this eighteenth-century editor, as my distinguished friend Professor Lewis Campbell has admirably pointed out, was governed in his principle of arrangement not by the sense-pauses indicated by Shakespeare, but by the inch measure. The letter-press left undivided by Heminge and Condell measured so many inches. "Divide these inches into three approximately equal parts," said this editor to himself, and there you are, "Acts III., IV., and V. Instead of making a

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division as the sense demanded, and as Shakespeare certainly meant it to be made, after the words in the fourth scene of Act IV., as it now stands,

My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth! where occurs the great pause in the action made by Hamlet's voyage to England -the eighteenth-century editor made it at a place where this very important change in the dramatic action is ruinously ignored by such an arrangement. The primary fact that the dramatic action is now going on while the protagonist is far away overseas seemed to this editor of less importance than the demands of the editorial inch measure. He was unable to see that everything said and everything done which follows the place in the play where the natural division comes in loses four-fifths of its effect.

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"But what can you expect," the modern reader will say, from an eighteenthcentury Shakespearian? Our present-day Shakespearian criticism represents the scholarship of more enlightened times." But what have our contemporary editors done? They have followed the clumsy jumble of Rowe, or of whoever first arranged the eighteenth-century text. So much for the mere mechanical arrangement of Shakespeare's text. And now a word as to the inner meaning of the play -its "hard acorn of thought," to borrow a wonderfully apt phrase from the old Icelandic Volsunga Saga. It seems to be an axiom nowadays that most bad things are made in Germany. And it may or may not be true: the poetical critic has nothing to say upon such a subject-in a general way. Yet if a tariff could be placed on German Shakespearian criticism, I know at least one student of English poetry who would become an ardent protectionist.

Some little time ago (when engaged in analyzing the plot of The Merchant of Venice for the forthcoming edition of Shakespeare to be published at Cambridge, Massachusetts), while comparing and contrasting the play with the Hindoo story of the trial of King Usinára and with the "Bond Story " in the Gesta Romanorum, upon which the plot of that marvellous play is based, I had occasion to comment upon this same German transcendental criticism. I said that al

though it is a matter of familiar knowledge that scarcely one of Shakespeare's plots was invented or partially invented by himself, this fact does not in any way prevent our German friends from writing long treatises upon the profound philosophical and allegorical intent of every Shakespearian plot. Of course these German vagaries would not be of any great moment to us islanders (for, after all, the best way to protest against commodities made in Germany is to refuse to accept them) if our English critics did not follow them. But because Goethe discussed Hamlet on German principles, and because Ulrici, Gervinus, and others discussed and discussed again Goethe's discussion, certain English critics-critics, let us say, far more capable of understanding the matter than any German who ever turned English poetry into abstractions-have held up their hands and exclaimed, "Wonderful is the wisdom of criticism made in Germany."

With regard to the story of Hamlet, our English critics all know well enough that Shakespeare did not invent it-did not invent any part of it. They all know well enough that he found it in whatsoever story or earlier play upon the subject he laid his royal hands upon when his theatre demanded a Hamlet for its own company. And yet they are as much dominated by Teutonic pretentiousness as though they themselves knew nothing about their own countryman. A wilder misconception about the genius and method of a great poet than that of the German writers who thus govern our English critics it is impossible to imagine. And it is ignorant, too. All imaginative writers, whether in verse or in prose, are divisible into two great tribes: first, those poets who do not work their imaginations, but whose imaginations work them, such as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais, Marlowe, Webster, Walter Scott, and, indeed, all those who may for convenience be designated "the tribe of Nature's children "; second, those who belong to "the tribe of Ben"-to use an affectionate phrase of Ben Jonson's followers; a tribe which, taking its origin long before Ben Jonson was born-taking its origin, indeed, in a very early stage of literature has produced many