THE NEW VARIORUM SHAKESPEARE.* ON a former occasion (December 6th,
1890), in a review of the eighth volume of the important work of Mr. Furness, we gave a somewhat detailed account of the old " Variorum " Shake- speare, the last edition of which is that of Malone, published in 1821, and of the relation in which the new " Variorum" of Mr. Furness stands to it. And now that a new volume (the ninth) lies before us, we will proceed to such examination as our space permits of this volume, only first saying that it follows in plan of criticism the method of the former volumes. The various readings of the text, actual or con- jectural, are first given with precision ; the explanatory and other criticisms of all the older commentators are given in a compressed form, and supplemented with the like criticisms, very considerable in number, since the date of Malone's edition ; while to these are added a large selection from those so-called esthetic criticisms which have formed so large a part of the critical apparatus of the student of Shake- speare during the present century, though their existence was hardly known to Malone. And we will here content ourselves with saying—and, as far as may be, showing—that the critical treatment of The Tempest in the present volume does not fall
• A. New Varioruna Edition of Shakespeare. Edited by Horace Howard Furness. Vol. I%.—The Tempest. Philadelphia and London : J. B. Lippincott and Co. 1E92.
short in thoroughness and excellence of those of the plays in former volumes.
But some persons ask, and always will ask, Why should we not be content to read Shakespeare himself, and by ourselves, without calling in Dryasdust and Smellfungus, and those Children of the Mist, the Germans, and men of German-like mind, to bestow their tediousness upon us P There always have been, and always will be, such haters of the commenta- tors among the men who undoubtedly admire and enjoy Shake- speare : men who accept Johnson's famous alternative of rising on the wing of imagination as they read, but who do not even agree with him, that commentaries are a "necessary evil," but rather think them an evil for which they see no necessity at all. We respect them, and their honest love of Shakespeare. But we ask them to grant us, the students of commentaries, the tolerance they demand for themselves. Let us assure them that among the readers of Shakespeare who rise highest on the wing of imagination, there are many to whom the learned investigations of the commentators are not even a necessary evil, but a necessary good. Analysis is often as truly the handmaid of poetry as of science, provided only that it is seen to be the means to an end, and not the end itself. No one could read this volume of criticisms on The Tempest with- out understanding The Tempest, and entering into the depths of its poetry better than he did before; and this whether he agrees with all the conclusions of the learned editor or not. Mr. Furness has the judicial mind. He knows that (to borrow the words of Grote) " the lesson must be learnt, hard and painful though it be, that no imaginable reach of critical acumen will, of itself, enable us to discriminate fancy from reality, in the absence of a tolerable stock of evidence." And, therefore, like an English (and doubtless, we may add, an American) judge, he does not give an absolute and tren- chant decision of his own, but sums up the case by an elabo- rate and complete statement of all the evidence on both sides, pointing out its strength or its weakness, and leaving his readers, like a jury, to come to their own conclusion, even while he suggests his own.
In the case of The Tempest, more than in that of most of Shakespeare's plays, this general summing-up of the facts and fictions of the commentators is limited to the question of its date. There is no quarto edition to raise a discus- sion as to variations between it and the folio. The text . of the folio is printed with a care and correctness not found in any of the other plays, except the Two Gentlemen of Verona, which immediately follows it. And the conflicts of conjec- tures and of speculations, with each other or among them- selves, have mainly ranged round the question of the date of the play. The Tempest stands first in the first folio. Was this because the editors knew—as they might have known if the fact was so—that this was the earliest of Shake- speare's plays ? Or was it because they—in anticipation of the esthetic method—saw in it an epitome of the whole drama of human life, and therefore a fitting introduction to Shake- speare's whole series of such representations ; or was it an unconscious instinct on their part, or even a happy accident, or a mere accident with no significance, and from which no in- ference can be drawn ? The list of Shakespeare's plays printed by Meres in 1598 proves, by the absence of The Tempest, that it was of a later date, unless we accept Hunter's suggestion that this play is meant by Love's Labours Won in that list, and that the earlier, not the later date, is thus established. Ben Jonson's reference to stage monsters and thunder and lightning is scoffed out of court by Giffard. And then there is mixed up inextricably with the other evidence, that as to the source of the play. Was the subject suggested to the poet by a German play, in which it is possible to find, or to fancy, some resemblances ; or by Raleigh's account of his adventures ; or by the stormy weather in London ; or by the narrative of the shipwreck of Sir George Somers on the coast of Bermuda ? And if the last, did Shakespeare write before or after the publication of the account by William Strachey, not published till 1612 ? The greater part of these arguments, pro and con, and of many like ones which we have not room to state, seem to us to belong to what we once called the method of the two "Ms " by which Captain Fluellen established the resemblance of Monmouth and Macedon, by showing that each has a river, "and there is salmons in both." The net result, as summed up by Mr. Furness, is that The Tempest was probably written between 1610-1611, and that although the description of the ship- wreck seems to correspond most exactly with that of William Strachey, published in 1612, and that although Malone shows much reason for the earlier date of 1610 for the play, there is no difficulty in supposing that Shakespeare had the story from the lips of Strachey, who lived at Blackfriars, a friend of Ben Jonson, and himself something of a poet.
Hunter, quoted by Mr. Furness, has found in Italian history an Alonzo, King of Naples, with his son Ferdinand, a banished Duke of Milan, and a marriage union between the two houses. The identity of the names makes it probable that we may add them to the material—and others also have been suggested—to which the art of Shakespeare " gave the fashion" in The Tempest. And he who has entered the Bay of Naples on a spring morning, after a day and a night spent in a Mediter- ranean storm, and felt the enchantment of the still, deep-blue sky and sea of "that piece of heaven fallen upon earth," will understand how he exercised his art. Like the conjurer-poet of Horace, or of Sa'di, transporting us from Thebes to Athens, or from Damascus to Constantinople, Shakespeare, "apart from place, withholding time," has brought together and fused into one the still-vexed Bermoothes, that " isle of devils," and fit home of Sycorax and Caliban, and the lovely island which we all know so well, the abode of Miranda and of Ariel, lying between the Naples and Tunis of our imaginations. Want of space forbids us to say more of the many important contribu- tions to the study of The Tempest which this volume contains, except to mention—for it is too long to quote—the very interesting criticism of Mrs. F. A. Kemble, now, as we under- stand, first printed.
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