ON READING SHAKESPEARE THROUGH.

ONLY those who have done much correction of the press

for the vsorke of other persons can realize the possibility of reading a book, paying attention to every jot and tittle, to the placing of a comma, the correctness of a line, yet of having Little or no understanding of the argument or story of the whole. If this be carried back yet another step, it will genefally be found that, given habits of exceeding accuracy, the compositor who thinks least does his work the best, and that no good printer has any but the vaguest notion of what he has himself set up. Again, a reader may have to verify quotations and allusions, and will get into the way of fixing his attention with unerring cer- tainty ou these, leaving aside all else, by a semi-mechanical process.

The present writer has lately had a task, extendiug over several months, which has combined the experiences of both methods.

He has had to edit for the press a text of Shakespeare, in which the conditions were as follows. After careful consideration, an edition was chosen which should serve as the basis ; and this was itself corrected as copy for the printer of the new text.

The basis text was the work of a foreigner, and though, on the whole, it seemed the best, there were a few mistakes which arose

from incomplete knowledge of English; and could not possibly

have been made by an educated Englishman. Next to these, it was at once clear• that the punctuation needed most careful

revision. The points to be here remedied were of two kinds, —the excessive subdivision of sentences by iuterpunctuation, a matter simple enough ; next, such use of stops as changes the meaning of a sentence, and this had to be considered among other various readings.

The problem, themwas as follows :—To read the whole of Shake- speare with as great rapidity as was compatible with needful ac- curacy; to pass lightly over those great tracts of the work in which DO various readings occurred, but to dwell minutely on all such as gave occasion to doubt, whether or not in themselves important, cud. comparing all ingenious or authoritative readings, to come to a swift, yet thoughtful decision ; to pore with equal intensity on the speeches of Hamlet or Lear and those of the Dromios or Boult ; and consider the entrances or .exits of a Messenger as much as those of a King. The effect on the mind of the reader has been to bring several points into view not previously present to one always an earnest Shakespearian student, but apt, as all are, to dwell on favourite plays, and form his conception of the great dramatist mainly by those, with scant reference to the plays or scenes which his special taste led him to slur, it has

been as though one who knew his own county, its general features, hills, watercourses, and woods, were called on to take part in a cadastral survey, and give the same care to the new road, its long, unlovely lines, as to the winding bridle-path through copse and ford, and along green lanes.

The first impression, and. one quite unexpected, was of the acting value of plays, apart from their intellectual interest. In reading Shakespeare under ordinary circumstances, we do net consider how many attendants or troops may be on the stage, our attention is riveted on the spoken words alone. But an

equally close study of stage directions brings the scenic effect before the reader, and it is far more clear than before why Shakespeare lent his collaboration to certain plays, and drama- tised certain stories, which are in themselves of no special

interest. Pericles, for instance, is revolting in many of its details, and such incidents as are not so are often clumsily managed ; there is no sort of reason why Thaisa should have become "a votaress of Dian," without the smallest attempt to ascertain if Pericles were still alive, or to communicate with her father Simonides. But the drama is crowded with scenic effects, and all of a kind which might be highly telling, even on the Elizabethan stage. For though it is, no doubt, true that of scenery, strictly so called, there was next to nothing, the theatres were well provided with machinery, if rough, still splendidly rough and very effective. Bearing this in mind, the scenes in which Pericles commits his dead queen to the sea, and that, again at sea, where he himself is in a curtained pavilion on deck, and. the barge of Lysimachus comes and goes, must have had great pomp and beauty, and might well determine a stage manager to risk a less interesting plot, while the concluding scone, according to the stage directions for which Mr. Irving apparently grouped the second act of The Cup, must even in. those early days have been magnificent. All the great effects of the plays depend either on machinery, such as the ghosts in Macbeth and Richard III., Sze., the visions of Queen Katherine and Joan of Arc, or on the grouping of masses, and these not unfrequently in two stages of the scene, as when, in the histori- cal plays, persons appear on the walls in conference with those below.

In reading some of the plays in this manner, the interest and even excitement never flagged; in some, great tedium was felt, and this, as it seemed to the reader, independently of his own mood, or of the conditions of his task from day to day.

It was not always the worst plays that were the most tedious nor the best that were most interesting, when thus read, though it is not easy to do more than record the general impression, since no notes were kept on this particular point.

It is of course dangerous to dogmatize from one's own feelings on what parts or lines of given plays were or were not by Shake- speare, in those cases where there is good reason to think he was only a collaborator or refurbisher ; but there are tracts of the historical dramas, over which the brain and hand were plodding on somewhat wearily, when lines were reached which were like the sound of a trumpet, and the dull sensation was quickened by what must have been the words of the master himself. One could fancy him reading the copy which he was adapting for his own stage, and passing listlessly enough over the dreary list of reasons why the Salk Law should not bar the English title to the French Crown. The long recitation had somehow gained possession of the stage, and there was no special reason why it should be omitted ; but surely something might be done to lighten it, to crown the prose with a few lines of glorious poetry. Thus it would seem, and the assumption is perhaps not fanciful, that after such lines as,—

" King Pepin's title, and Hugh Capet's claim, King Lewis his satisfaction, all appear To hold in right and title of the female : So do the Kings of France unto this day ; Howbeit they would hold up this Salique law To bar your highness claiming from the female," and immediately following on,— " For in the Book of Numbers it is writ, When the man dies, let the inheritance Descend unto the daughter," we get such a bugle-call as this,— " Gracious Lord, Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag ; Look back into your mighty ancestors: Go, my dread Lord, to your great grandaire's tomb From whom you claim, invoke his warlike spirit, And your great uncle's Edward the Black Prince, Who, on the French ground played a tragedy, Making defeat of the full power of France; Whiles his most mighty father on a hill Stood smiling to behold his lion's whelp Forage in blood of French nobility."

SO, too, among the carnage and horror of Titus Andronieus comes up the blossom of pure poetry, marking Shakespeare's hand, if he wrote only a part; or giving promise of his future greatness, if, as some hold, it was his earliest play, and his 'prentice work, as all such must be, but an imitation of that other craftsman.

No reader of Shakespeare can be ignorant that he wrote whole scenes and created whole characters to raise a laugh from the coarser sort of those who frequented the theatre, and. that even in passages where we should least expect it are doubles entendres and questionable allusions. But we do not naturally seek to discover these, and perhaps a reading such as that we have described can alone make the vast amount of in-

decency which exists in Shakespeare fully apparent. It is especially marked in the use of certain words which had then a meaning now disused, and almost wholly forgotten. Some of these passages are, no doubt, to be explained by the greater free- dom of speech in Elizabeth's day ; neither she nor the ladies of her Court would have done more than laughed a hearty laugh at words which, to pronounce in women's hearing, would now be deemed an outrage. But this does not explain all. It is quite clear that Shakespeare, like Rabelais, or Swift, or Sterne, or Fielding, had a real delight in broad humour. But, unlike some writers of his own day, and still more unlike those of the Re- storation, he never employed indecency with a vicious intent. It is fun, and coarse fun, but there is nothing about it corrupting, or in its essence impure. The whole of the broader passages, brought together into a single volume, would do a girl less harm to read. through at a sitting than many a chapter in the works of some of our most famous lady novelists, or many

a scene from an adapted French drama in which may be no single expression which can shock a listening ear. It is commonly said, and would be considered almost a truism, that Shakespeare has presented all phases of human life. To this there is one noticeable exception. He has no children, or next to none. There are no little girls, there are next to no little boys, for William, in Merry TVives of Windsor, and Marnillius in Winter's Tale come like shadows, and so

depart. The one exception is the bright-witted and delightful Moth. Arthur, who is by age a mere boy, is raised. by the tragical circumstances in which he is presented to a passion and a dignity above his years, and does not appeal to us as a child, so much as a youthful prince whose boyhood has been prematurely taken from him. It may, of course, be said, and it is, no doubt, true, that children are not suited for stage repre- sentation; those of an age to pressent them lack, for the most part, dramatic faculty. Yet not always ; we have seen a Moth whose performance by a girl of twelve left nothing lacking ; and we cannot but believe that the circumstances of Shakespeare's own life hindered his study of children. He was clearly old for his age, when still a boy, and so would have associated, not with children, but with young men. His marriage as a mere lad, and the scanty legends of his youth, all tend in the same direction. The course of his life led him to live apart from his children in their youth, his busy life in London brought him into the interior of but few families ; his son, of whom he saw but little, died young. If our supposition be true, it is a pathetic thought that the great dramatist was shut out from the one kind of com- panionship which, even when it is in no degree intellectual, never palls. A man, whatever his mental powers, can take delight in the society of a child, when a person of intellect far more matured, but inferior to his own, would be simply insufferable.

But, on the other hand, Shakespeare has drawn fully front those whom no one has ever studied so fully as he, till Mr. Hardy, the one modern writer who has drawn the real English poor. Many have described the artisan, the town lower class. These Shakespeare did not like ; his Athenian clowns in A Midsummer Night's Dream, his Roman Plebs in Coriolanus, are painted from London originals, and are not done in flattering colours. But his clowns, his gravediggers, his soldiers, his country lasses are the inhabitants of his own Arden, the true English labouring class. It is a pity that he has been obliged to represent them mainly on their comic side,. needed as this was to serve as a foil to his tragic kings,. or masquerading ladies. It is a pity he has not given us, except in Winter's Tale, as Mr. Hardy for our own day, the pathos and the homely pleasures. But it matters the less, since what he has revealed. has shown us how unchanged is the labourer. What he was then he is now, and. we get a glimpse into his life, from which may be constructed. what is not seen.

Yet another impression, and these notes will draw to a close. We all say, and in a measure feel, how thoroughly the same is. human nature under all its trappings, and in all places. Nothing makes us realise this so completely as to study Shakespeare in the hurried, yet exhaustive, manner of which we have spoken. Though he is careless about details, he never strikes a false note;. his nobler Romans are Romans, and his Greeks are Greeks. He has consulted his authorities wisely and well, and been as true as. the knowledge of his age enabled him to be. But they are before all, men and women, and all different, each from other. Once or twice only he has deliberately repeated himself ; there are echoes of character in As You Like It from Love's Labour', Lost; Othello, is another and maturer Aaron. But as a rule, they are as different from each other as the men and women we meet, and. they are as real. It is difficult to believe we have not known those with whom we have conversed. so closely and so long, and. to become assured of this is a great shock to the confidence with which we see and hear all that is around us. Surely, Beatrice and Benedick, Lear and Cordelia, are more to us than the slight acquaintance to whom we bow in the street, or the tradesman who serves us across his counter. Shall we not wake to find. these last are but dreams and figments of the imagination, and the true world is that in which we have lived so closely and almost exclusively for some pleasant months ?