itics of our classical
age, from Dryden to Johnson. "To begin then with Shakspere," says the
former, in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," "he was the man who, of all
modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive
soul." And, in the prologue to his adaptation of "The Tempest," he
acknowledges that

"Shakspere's magic could not copied be:
Within that circle none durst walk but he."

"The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr.
Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim
the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9]

"Each change of many-colored life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."[10]

Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about
Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs.
Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest
touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello." For if we look closer, we notice
that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his
praise by an emphatic disapproval of his methods. He was a prodigious
genius, but a most defective artist. He was the supremest of dramatic
poets, but he did not know his business. It did not apparently occur to
anyone--except, in some degree, to Johnson--that there was an absurdity
in this contradiction; and that the real fault was not in Shakspere, but
in the standards by which he was tried. Here are the tests which
technical criticism has always been seeking to impose, and they are not
confined to the classical period only. They are used by Sidney, who took
the measure of the English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; by
Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own day; by Matthew Arnold,
who wanted an English Academy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so
long a transmission, worked but mildly. Shakspere violated the unities;
his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small
Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing
anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough,
and failed of the grand style. He was "untaught, unpractised in a
barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules,
unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding--when he did succeed--by
happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were
"roughdrawn," his plots lame, his spe