Shakespeare and the Ventriloquists

Summary

Relatively early in Shakespeare’s career the minor poet John Weever affirmed the devotion of ‘thousands’ of spectators or readers to Romeo, Richard and others of Shakespeare’s characters, his ‘children’ as the heavy–handed eulogist dubs them. In the movement of opinion that established Shakespeare as the supreme dramatic poet in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, progressively clearing him of reproach for offending against the neoclassical rules of construction, his gift of character portrayal was the outstanding theme for praise and wonder, and character study became the leading occupation of criticism. And the Elizabethan’s metaphor of fatherhood, biological creation, re–emerged as an accepted critical fiction, almost a critical doctrine. Pope had repeated that Shakespeare was an instrument of nature, not a mere copier, and had said that each of his people was as distinct as an individual in real life; Johnson added, with a different emphasis, that this lifelikeness was not the result of any searching after personal idiosyncrasies but of Shakespeare’s truth to typical human nature; others, like Morgann, began to treat the plays like psychological case–books, probing the depths of separate characters as if they were independent human beings. What impressed the commentators so forcibly was not merely the wealth of observation revealed by Shakespeare’s people but their air of spontaneity, of free–standing autonomy, uninhibited by theatrical contrivance.