Fifty Years of the Criticism of Shakespeare’s Style: A Retrospect

Summary

There is no question relating to Shakespeare as a writer which does not involve his style. His only art was that of dramatic speech: his thoughts and beliefs are known only through his art: he left no equivalent of Milton’s De Doctrina or Boswell’s private papers. Yet on this central problem comparatively little has been written. It is too vast and intimidating; critics evade it for topics of characterization, theatrical conditions, philosophic implications; or they nibble at a corner—imagery, punctuation, Euphuism. In Ebisch and Schücking’s Shakespeare Bibliography (1930), nineteen pages out of nearly three hundred suffice for Language, Vocabulary, Prosody and Style; C. H. Herford’s little sketch (1925) does not include the subject, ‘Mind, Art and Personality’ being his nearest approach. The earliest definitions of Shakespeare’s style—Webster’s “right happy and copious industry”, Heminge and Condell’s “easiness”, the tributes of Jonson, Milton and Dryden have not since been matched in comprehensiveness and assurance. Restoration poets showed their views of Shakespeare’s style by the freedom with which they ‘improved’ him; the adaptations of Rowe and Otway, Davenant and Tate and of Dryden himself are documents in the history of criticism (see Hazelton Spencer, Shakespeare Improved, 1927). Many editors of the eighteenth century allowed themselves almost comparable liberty of emendation, erasing such unheroic nouns as “hats”, “fishes” or “blanket”.