NOTES. PREFACE. I. It is observed by Mr Pope. From the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, 1725. Had all the speeches been printed without the very names. Cf. Addison's criticism of Homer (Spectator, No. 273): "There is scarce a speech or action in the Iliad, which the reader may not ascribe to the person that speaks or acts, without seeing his name at the head of it." Mason. Hazlitt here confounds George Mason, author of An Essay on Design in Gardening, 1768, with Thomas Whately, author of Observations on Modern Gardening, 1770. It was Whately, not Mason, who was the author of Remarks on some of the Characters of Shakespeare, 1785. Mason the poet. William Mason (1724-1797), the author of many odes, and the friend and biographer of Thomas Gray. 2. Richardson's essays. William Richardson (1743-1814), Professor of Humanity at the University of Glasgow. He wrote two series of essays entitled Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of some of Shakespeare's remarkable Characters, 1774-1789. Schlegel. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), the eminent German critic and poet and translator. His Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature were delivered at Vienna in 1808. Hazlitt's view of the priority of German appreciation of Shakespeare is no longer tenable, and his statement of the case here was mainly responsible for the long continuance of the erroneous idea that English men of letters of the eighteenth century were blind to Shakespeare's merits. (Cf. Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. by D. Nichol Smith, 1903, Intro. passim.) Certainly no writer among ourselves. This exaggerated statement takes no account of Dryden's great eulogy or of the work of a long line of eighteenth-century editors and commentators including Rowe, Dennis, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, Farmer, and Morgann. 3. Caliban. Prospero's savage-slave in The Tempest. Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the eminent German critic and miscellaneous writer (1729-1781). He was the first continental critic to extol Shakespeare above Corneille as the model for all dramatic writing. Johnson. In his Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, 1765, Johnson remarked, "What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He is not long soft and pathetick without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity." 4. Indignation gives wit. Cf. Juvenal, 1. 79: "Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum.' 5. Johnson has not been so favourable to him. It has to be remembered that Johnson's Preface near the beginning observes that "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life," and near its end endorses the splendid eulogy of Dryden, no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself above the rest of poets, 66 Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi." "Those who are not for him." "He that is not with me is against me." S. Luke xi. 23. "To do a great right etc." Merchant of Venice, IV. 1. 216. "Alone is high fantastical." Twelfth Night, I. I. 15. 6. Irene. Johnson's stilted and conventional tragedy (1749). "Swelling figures." From the Preface to Shakespeare, 1765. "Such as he could measure." Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace, II. p. 6. 7. Procrustes' bed. The highwayman of Greek mythology, named Polypemon or Damastes, who placed his captives on a bed and racked or amputated them until they fitted it exactly. (Gr. πрокρоÚσтηs, the stretcher.) 8. Each character is a Species. "In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species." Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare. mighty world of ear and eye." Wordsworth, Lines composed above Tintern Abbey, 1. 105. Dover cliff. Lear, IV. 6. Description of flowers. The Winter's Tale, IV. 4. Mourning Bride. A tragedy (1697) by William Congreve, the 66 greatest writer of English Comedy of Manners." The passage alluded to by Hazlitt is quoted by Johnson in his Life of Congreve. "If I were required to select from the whole mass of English poetry the most poetical paragraph, I know not what I could prefer to an exclamation in The Mourning Bride: Almeria. It was a fancied noise; for all is hush'd. Leonora. It bore the accent of a human voice. Almeria. It was thy fear, or else some transient wind We'll listen Leonora. Hark! Almeria. No, all is hush'd and still as death.-'Tis dreadful! Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, He who reads these lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before; but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty and enlarged with majesty." IO. In another work. In The Round Table. 12. CYMBELINE. Johnson is of opinion. "It may be observed that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts when he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented." Preface to Shakespeare, 1765. 13. Cibber. Colley Cibber, actor and dramatist (1671-1757). His Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian, is one of the greatest of English autobiographies. In 1730 he became poetlaureate, and thirteen years later he was the victim of Pope's malice in The Dunciad. to play the parts of women. Until some years after the Restoration, when the English theatre was brought into line with that of France, female characters of all ages were acted by boys and men. Of all Shakespeare's women...the most tender. Cf. Schlegel, "In her character no one feature of female excellence is omitted; her chaste tenderness, her softness, her virgin pride, her boundless resignation, and her magnanimity towards her mistaken husband, by whom she is unjustly persecuted, her adventures in disguise, her apparent death, and her recovery, form altogether a picture equally tender and affecting." 15. Fidele. The name assumed by Imogen when in boy's disguise. Cf. Collins's ode, Fidele: A Dirge in Cymbeline, beginning "To fair Fidele's grassy tomb Soft maids and village hinds shall bring And rifle all the breathing Spring.' 16. Cythera. Cythera or Cerigo, the southernmost of the seven Ionian islands, was sacred to Venus as the land that received the goddess when she arose from the sea. the ancient critic. Aristophanes of Byzantium. 18. The Forest of Arden. As You Like It, Act II. et seq. 19. "Under the shade of melancholy boughs." As You Like It, II. 7. III. "Stoop, boys! this gate." Hazlitt quotes the line as boys! etc." 20. Journal course. i.e. diurnal or daily custom. "See, MACBETH. 21. "The poet's eye etc." Midsummer Night's Dream, v. I. 12. "Your only tragedy-maker." Cf. Hamlet, III. 2. 131. 22. "blood-boultered." Smeared with blood. 25. 'metaphysical aid." Supernatural help. Mrs Siddons. Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), England's greatest tragic actress. From 1782 to her retirement in 1812 Mrs Siddons was the acknowledged queen of the stage. It was in the character of Lady Macbeth that she appeared at her farewell performance at Covent Garden in 1812. 29. metaphysical aid. vide supra, note referring to p. 25. "Fil'd my mind." Defiled. 31. Foris. Forres. Filch...Beggar's Opera. A comic operetta by John Gay, 1727.. Its success was such that it was said to have made Rich (the manager) gay, and Gay rich. Hazlitt elsewhere describes it as a masterpiece of wit and genius, not to say of morality." 66 Lillo. George Lillo (1693-1739), author of a number of tragedies of which the best known is George Barnwell, founded on an older ballad dealing with the life and death of an “idle apprentice." The Witch. A play by Thomas Middleton, one of the most prolific of later Elizabethan dramatists (1570 ?-1627). The Witch was first published in 1778. JULIUS CAESAR. 33. Earl of Hallifax. Charles Montagu, first Earl of Halifax (1661-1715), one of the literary and political leaders of our Augustan age. Himself a minor poet (he fills a niche in Johnson's Lives of the Poets), he was the most eagerly sought after patron by the poets and pamphleteers of his time. His only claim to literary recollection is his collaboration with Prior in The City and Country Mouse, if we except the innumerable dedications and references to him in early eighteenth-century literature. Fletcher. John Fletcher (1579-1625), the famous collaborator with Francis Beaumont in the great series of dramas bearing their A King and no King, printed in 1619, was one of the names. joint plays. Maiden Queen. Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, a tragicomedy by Dryden, 1668. It contains one of his famous Prefaces discussing the question of how far a poet can be a judge of his own productions. 41. "It comes home directly etc." "I do now publish my Essays; which of all my other works have been most current: for that, as it seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms." (Prefatory Letter to the Duke of Buckingham, Bacon's Essays, ed. 1625.) 43. "Flows on to the Propontic." This is a typically inaccurate "Hazlitt" allusion to the lines in Othello, III. 3. 452. "Like to the Pontic sea Where icy current and compulsive course |