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Page 2
Once again a Shakespearian publication was successful, and Tonson
incorporated the Curll volume into the third issue of the 1714 edition,
having apparently come to some agreement with Curll, since the title
page of Volume IX states that it was "Printed for J. Tonson, E. Curll,
J. Pemberton, and K. Sanger." In this edition Gildon omitted his
offensive remarks about Tonson, as well as the "References to Classic
Authors," in which he had suggested topics treated by both the ancients
and Shakespeare. This volume was revised by George Sewell and appeared
in appropriate format as an addition to Pope's Shakespeare, 1723-25.
Meanwhile, in July, 1709, Lintot had begun to advertise his edition of
the poems, which was expanded in 1710/11 to include the sonnets in a
second volume.[5] Thus within a year of the publication of Rowe's
edition, all of Shakespeare, as well as some spurious works, was on the
market. With the publication of these volumes, Shakespeare began to pass
rapidly into the literary consciousness of the race. And formal
criticism of his writings inevitably followed.
Rowe's "Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,"
reprinted with a very few trifling typographical changes in 1714,
survived in all the important eighteenth-century editions, but it was
never reprinted in its original form. Pope re-arranged the material,
giving it a more orderly structure and omitting passages that were
obviously erroneous or that seemed outmoded.[6] It is odd that all later
eighteenth-century editors seem to have believed that Pope's revision
was actually Rowe's own re-writing of the _Account_ for the 1714
edition. Theobald did not reprint the essay, but he used and amplified
Rowe's material in his biography of Shakespeare; Warburton, of course,
reprinted Pope's version, as did Johnson, Steevens, and Malone. Both
Steevens and Malone identified the Pope revision as Rowe's.[7]
Thus it came about that Rowe's preface in its original form was lost
from sight during the entire eighteenth century. Even in the twentieth,
Pope's revision has been printed with the statement that it is taken
"from the second edition (1714), slightly altered from the first edition
of 1709."[8] Only D. Nichol Smith has republished the original essay in
his _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_, 1903.
The biographical part of Rowe's _Account_ assembled the few facts and
most of the traditions still current about Shakespeare a century after
his death. It would be easy for any undergraduate to distinguish fact
from legend in Rowe's preface; and scholarship since Steevens and Malone
has demonstrated the unreliability of most of the local traditions that
Betterton reported from Warwickshire. Antiquarian research has added a
vast amount of detail about the world in which Shakespeare lived and has
raised and answered questions that never occurred to Rowe; but it has
recovered little more of the man himself than Rowe knew.
The critical portions of Rowe's account look backward and forward:
backward to the Restoration, among whose critical controversies the
eighteenth-century Shakespeare took shape; and forward to the long
succession of critical writings that, by the end of the century, had
secured for Shakespeare his position as the greatest of the English
poets. Until Dryden and Rymer, criticism of Shakespeare in the
seventeenth century had been occasional rather than systematic. Dryden,
by his own acknowledgement, derived his enthusiasm for Shakespeare from
Davenant, and thus, in a way, spoke for a man who had known the poet.
Shakespeare was constantly in his mind, and the critical problems that
the plays raised in the literary milieu of the Restoration constantly
fascinated him. Rymer's attack served to solidify opinion and to force
Shakespeare's admirers to examine the grounds of their faith. By 1700 a
conventional manner of regarding Shakespeare and the plays had been
achieved.
The growth of Shakespeare's reputation during the century after his
death is a familiar episode in English criticism. Bentley has
demonstrated the dominant position of Jonson up to the end of the
century.[9] But Jonson's reputation and authority worked for Shakespeare
and helped to shape, a critical attitude toward the plays. His official
praise in the first Folio had declared Shakespeare at least the equal of
the ancients and the very poet of nature. He had raised the issue of
Shakespeare's learning, thus helping to emphasize the idea of
Shakespeare as a natural genius; and in the _Discoveries_ he had blamed
his friend for too great facility and for bombast.
In his commendatory sonnet in the Second Folio (1632), Milton took the
Jonsonian view of Shakespeare, whose "easy numbers" he contrasted with
"slow-endeavouring Art," and readers of the poems of 1645 found in
_L'Allegro_ an early formulation of what was to become the stock
comparison of the two great Jacobean dramatists in the lines about
Jonson's "learned sock" and Shakespeare, "Fancy's child." This contrast
became a constant theme in Restoration allusions to the two poets.
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