APPENDED NOTES THE NAME SHAKSPEARE.-Page 17. MR. CAMPBELL, the latest editor of Shakspeare's dramatic works, observes that the "poet's name has been variously written Shaxpeare, Shackspeare, Shakspeare, and Shakspere"; to which varieties might be added Shagspere, from the Worcester Marriage License, published in 1836. But the fact is that, by combining with all the differences in spelling the first syllable all those in spelling the second, more than twenty-five distinct varieties of the name may be expanded (like an algebraic series), for the choice of the curious in mis-spelling. Above all things, those varieties which arise from the intercalation of the middle e (that is, the e immediately before the final syllable spear) can never be overlooked by those who remember, at the opening of The Dunciad, the note upon this very question about the orthography of Shakspeare's name, as also upon the other great question about the title of the immortal Satire,-whether it ought not to have been The Dunceiade, seeing that Dunce, its great author and progenitor, cannot possibly dispense with the letter e. Meantime we must remark that the first three of Mr. Campbell's variations are mere caprices of the press; as is Shagspere; or, more probably, this last euphonious variety arose out of the gross clownish pronunciation of the two hiccuping "marksmen" who rode over to Worcester for the license and one cannot forbear laughing at the bishop's secretary for having been so misled by two varlets, professedly incapable of signing their own names. The same drunken villains had cut down the bride's name Hathaway into Hathwey. Finally, to treat the matter with seriousness, Sir Frederick Madden has shown, in his recent letter to the Society of Antiquaries, that the poet himself in all probability wrote the name uniformly Shakspere. Orthography, both of proper names, of appellatives, and of words universally, was very unsettled up to a period long subsequent to that of Shakspeare. Still, it must usually have happened that names written variously and laxly by others would be written uniformly by the owners; especially by those owners who had occasion to sign their names frequently, and by literary people, whose attention was often, as well as consciously, directed to the proprieties of spelling. Shakspeare is now too familiar to the eye for any alteration to be attempted; but it is pretty certain that Sir Frederick Madden is right in stating the poet's own signature to have been uniformly Shakspere. It is so written twice in the course of his will, and it is so written on a blank leaf of Florio's English translation of Montaigne's Essays; a book recently discovered, and sold, on account of its autograph, for a hundred guineas.-[The controversy as to which of the many old spellings of the name Shakespeare ought to be preferred seems now to have narrowed itself finally into the single question between the short form Shakspere and the full form Shakespeare. The reason for Shakspere, here stated by De Quincey, has influenced some; but it seems to be overwhelmed by the reasons for Shakespeare. This was the poet's own spelling in the signatures of his name to the dedications of his first printed pieces,-the Venus and Adonis in 1593, and the Lucrece in 1594,-to the Earl of Southampton ; it is the almost uniform spelling of his name on the title-pages to the long series of his plays, &c., published in his lifetime (the hyphened variation Shake-speare occurring sometimes, but never the form Shakspere); it is the spelling used by the editors of the first folio; it is far more graceful in itself than Shakspere; and it conveys better what was undoubtedly the sound of the poet's name among his educated contemporaries, the final e remaining as a pleasant touch of the antique. These reasons have been conclusive with the best recent authorities,such as Mr. Halliwell Phillipps and the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare. De Quincey (who had not weighed the evidence well) is not uniform in his own spelling. Although in his present paper he favours Shakspeare (common a little while ago, but now properly discarded by all who do not argue for the Scottish pronunciation of the Shak), in other papers he has Shakspere. I am surprised that his usual good taste in such matters did not lead him to Shakespeare, and to the advocacy of that form.-M.] SHAKSPEARE'S REPUTATION.-Page 31. The necessity of compression obliges us to omit many arguments and references by which we could demonstrate the fact that Shakspeare's reputation was always in a progressive state; allowing only for the interruption of about seventeen years which this poet, in common with all others, sustained, not so much from the state of war (which did not fully occupy four of those years) as from the triumph of a gloomy fanaticism. Deduct the twenty-three years of the seventeenth century which had elapsed before the first folio appeared; to this space add seventeen years of fanatical madness, during fourteen of which all dramatic entertainments were suppressed: the remainder is sixty years. And surely the sale of four editions of a vast folio in that space of time was an expression of an abiding interest. No other poet, except Spenser, continued to sell throughout the century. Besides, in arguing the case of a dramatic poet, we must bear in mind that, although readers of learned books might be diffused over the face of the land, the readers of poetry would be chiefly concentrated in the VOL. IV G metropolis, and such persons would have no need to buy what they heard at the theatres. But then comes the question whether Shakspeare kept possession of the theatres. And we are really humiliated by the gross want of sense which has been shown, by Malone chiefly, but also by many others, in discussing this question. From the Restoration to 1682, says Malone, no more than four plays of Shakspeare's were performed by a principal company in London."Such was the lamentable taste of those times that the plays of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley, were much oftener exhibited than those of our author." What cant is this! If that taste were "lamentable," what are we to think of our own times, when plays a thousand times below those of Fletcher, or even of Shirley, continually displace Shakspeare? Shakspeare would himself have exulted in finding that he gave way only to dramatists so excellent. And, as we have before observed, both then and now, it is the very familiarity with Shakspeare which often banishes him from audiences honestly in quest of relaxation and amusement. Novelty is the very soul of such relaxation; but in our closets, when we are not unbending, when our minds are in a state of tension from intellectual cravings, then it is that we resort to Shakspeare; and oftentimes those who honour him most, like ourselves, are the most impatient of seeing his divine scenes disfigured by unequal representation (good, perhaps, in a single personation, bad in all the rest); or to hear his divine thoughts mangled in the recitation; or (which is worst of all) to hear them dishonoured and defeated by imperfect apprehension in the audience, or by defective sympathy. Meantime, if one theatre played only four of Shakspeare's dramas, another played at least seven. But the grossest folly of Malone is in fancying the numerous alterations so many insults to Shakspeare, whereas they expressed as much homage to his memory as if the unaltered dramas had been retained. The substance was retained. The changes were merely concessions to the changing views of scenical propriety; sometimes, no doubt, made with a simple view to the revolution effected by Davenant at the Restoration, in bringing scenes (in the painter's sense) upon the stage; sometimes also with a view to the altered fashions of the audience during the suspensions of the action, or perhaps to the introduction of after-pieces, by which, of course, the time was abridged for the main performance. A volume might be written upon this subject. Meantime let us never be told that a poet was losing, or had lost, his ground, who found in his lowest depression amongst his almost idolatrous supporters a great king distracted by civil wars, a mighty republican poet distracted by puritanical fanaticism, the greatest successor by far of that great poet, a papist and a bigoted royalist, and, finally, the leading actor of the century, who gave and reflected the ruling impulses of his age. VALUE OF ASBIES.-Page 41. After all the assistance given to such equations between different times or different places by Sir George Shuckborough's tables, and other similar investigations, it is still a very difficult problem,-complex, and, after all, merely tentative in the results,-to assign the true value in such cases; not only for the obvious reason that the powers of money have varied in different directions with regard to different objects, and in different degrees where the direction has on the whole continued the same, but because the very objects to be taken into computation are so indeterminate, and vary so much, not only as regards century and century, kingdom and kingdom, but also, even in the same century and the same kingdom, as regards rank and rank. That which is a mere necessary to one is a luxurious superfluity to another. And, in order to ascertain these differences, it is an indispensable qualification to have studied the habits and customs of the several classes concerned, together with the variations of those habits and customs. REGARD FOR WOMANHOOD IN ENGLAND.-Page 48. Never was the esse quam videri in any point more strongly discriminated than in this very point of gallantry to the female sex, as between England and France. In France, the verbal homage to woman is so excessive as to betray its real purpose,-viz. that it is a mask for secret contempt. In England, little is said; but, in the meantime, we allow our sovereign ruler to be a woman; which in France is impossible. Even that fact is of some importance, but less so than what follows. In every country whatsoever, any principle has a deep root in the moral feelings of the people, we may rely upon its showing itself, by a thousand evidences, amongst the very lowest ranks, and in their daily intercourse and their undress manners. Now, in England there is, and always has been, a manly feeling, most widely diffused, of unwillingness to see labours of a coarse order, or requiring muscular exertions, thrown upon women. Pauperism, amongst other evil effects, has sometimes locally disturbed this predominating sentiment of Englishmen ; but never at any time with such depth as to kill the root of the old hereditary manliness. Sometimes at this day a gentleman, either from carelessness, or from over-ruling force of convenience, or from real defect of gallantry, will allow a female servant to carry his portmanteau for him; though, after all, that spectacle is a rare one. And everywhere women of all ages engage in the pleasant, nay elegant, labours of the hay field; but in Great Britain women are never suffered to mow, which is a most athletic and exhausting labour, nor to load a cart, nor to drive a plough or hold it. In France, on the other hand, before the Revolution (at which period the pseudo-homage, the lip-honour, was far more ostentatiously professed towards the female sex than at present), a Frenchman of credit, and vouching for his statement by the whole weight of his name and personal responsibility (M. Simond, now an American citizen), records the following abominable scene as one of no uncommon occurrence :-A woman was in some provinces yoked side by side with an ass to the plough or the harrow. And M. Simond protests that it excited no horror to see the driver distributing his lashes impartially between the woman and her brute yoke-fellow. So much for the wordy pomps of French gallantry. In England, we trust, and we believe, that any man caught in such a situation, and in such an abuse of his power (supposing the case otherwise a possible one), would be killed on the spot. SLANDER OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.-Page 58. In a little memoir of Milton which the author of this article drew up some years ago for a public society, and which is printed in an abridged shape, he took occasion to remark that Dr. Johnson, who was meanly anxious to revive the slander against Milton, as well as some others, had supposed Milton himself to have this flagellation in his mind, and indirectly to confess it, in one of his Latin poems, where, speaking of Cambridge, and declaring that he had no longer any pleasure in the thoughts of revisiting that university, he says,— "Nec duri libet usque minas perferre magistri, This last line the malicious critic would translate-" And other things insufferable to a man of my temper." But, as we then observed, ingenium is properly expressive of the intellectual constitution, whilst it is the moral constitution that suffers degradation from personal chastisement —the sense of honour, of personal dignity, of justice, &c. Indoles is the proper term for this latter idea; and, in using the word ingenium, there cannot be a doubt that Milton alluded to the dry scholastic disputations, which were shocking and odious to his fine poetical genius. If, therefore, the vile story is still to be kept up in order to dishonour a great man, at any rate let it not in future be pretended that any countenance to such a slander can be drawn from the confessions of the poet himself. SHAKSPEARE'S STATION IN LITERATURE.-Page 70. It will occur to many readers that perhaps Homer may furnish the sole exception to this sweeping assertion. Any but Homer is clearly and ludicrously below the level of the competition; but even Homer, "with his tail on (as the Scottish Highlanders say of their chieftains when belted by their ceremonial retinues), musters nothing like the force which already follows Shakspeare; and be it remembered that Homer sleeps, and has long slept, as a subject of criticism or commentary, while in Germany as well as England, and now even in France, the gathering of wits to the vast equipage of Shakspeare is advancing in an accelerated ratio. There is, in fact, a great delusion current upon this subject. Innumerable references to Homer, and brief critical remarks on this or that pretension of Homer, this or that 1 In the present volume, pp. 86-102.-M. |