continued to be applied to his plays with remorseless zeal during a long period of time. Songs were added to Macbeth; Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure were mingled, and out of the mingled material was produced Davenant's Law against Lovers. Dennis metamorphosed The Merry Wives into The Comical Gallant; Durfey altered Cymbeline; Richard II. became The Sicilian Usurper; Tate improved upon King Lear by introducing love-passages between Edgar and Cordelia, and giving the play a happy ending; Lord Lansdowne made a comic personage of Shylock; Colley Cibber rehandled Richard III., and introduced some of the rants and time-honoured hits which have been repeated on the stage until our own day. Dryden (to return to Restoration times) both praises and depreciates Shakspere, but as he grew older his admiration for Shakspere increased; the dramatic work of his own, which Dryden most highly valued, All for Love, is written in professed imitation of "the divine Shakspere;" and his prose prefaces, which are often critical essays, contain some admirable remarks upon the genius of his great predecessor. Some of Mr. Pepys's theatrical notes in his Diary, refer to plays of Shakspere, which he deals with in a most amusing spirit of superiority: "September 29, 1662. To the King's Theatre, where we saw Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life."

3. Shakspere Scholarship, 1700-1750.-In 1709 appeared the first critical edition of Shakspere's plays, that by Nicholas Rowe; he did something towards ascertaining the facts of Shakspere's life, and corrected a large number of the grosser errors of the folios. Rowe was succeeded as an editor by Pope in 1725; his six quarto volumes are more admirable from a bibliographical than from a literary point of view; his admiration of Shakspere was real, but his sympathy was imperfect; his emendations are in the spirit of

eighteenth century literature, not in the Elizabethan spirit. Theobald, the first hero of Pope's Dunciad, piddling Tibbald !" is infinitely a better editor than Pope; if he amended the text often arbitrarily, on the other hand he first collated in anything like a scholarly manner the early copies of the plays. To his ingenuity as an emendator we owe the celebrated "'a babbled of green fields," in the passage which tells of Falstaff's death. The merit of Theobald's edition, 1733, was recognised, and it sold largely. Hanmer's edition, remarkable like Pope's for its external splendour, followed in 1744, and three years later appeared that of Warburton. Warburton was learned, but arrogant, and treats Shakspere with the contemptuousness a harsh schoolmaster might exhibit toward a naughty urchin.

4. Garrick. Such were the editions of the first half of the last century. The second half was a period of laborious scholarship and of industrious research after everything which could throw light on Shakspere's life or illustrate his writings. Between the two periods rose suddenly to eminence the great actor David Garrick. The immediate successors of Betterton were Booth, famous for his Othello, his rival Wilks, who played Hamlet, and Cibber, who appeared as his own Richard III., as Iago, and as Cardinal Wolsey. On October 19, 1741, at the theatre in Goodman's Fields, a young actor played for the first time Richard III. In a few weeks Garrick had become famous. The following year in Ireland, the hot summer and the young actor between them, produced what was named "The Garrick Fever." "That young man," said Pope, never had his equal as an actor, and will never have a rival." In September, 1769, he assisted at a jubilee held in honour of Shakspere at Stratford-on-Avon. The Garrick fever had resulted in a Shakspere fever. Yet Garrick, it must be confessed, took unwarrantable liberties with the language and the plots of the plays, himself confessing that his adaptation of Hamlet was "the most impudent thing he ever did."

5. Shakspere Scholarship, 1750-1800.-The editions of the second half of the eighteenth century, begin with that of Dr. Johnson, 1765. Johnson saw some of the substantial excellencies of Shakspere, but his strong common sense was of a prosaic kind, and he often takes Shakspere to task for offences which only touch such prosaic common sense. As a moralist he was especially shocked at Shakspere's not rewarding virtue and punishing vice in the persons of his dramas with an orthodox regularity. Capell's edition in 1768, his "Notes and Various Readings," and his "School of Shakspere," were the labours of love of a very learned man, who obscured his merits by a strange and contorted style of writing. The work of Johnson was united with that of Steevens, five years later; Steevens was acute, witty, and sometimes brilliant, but conceited, utterly devoid of reverence for Shakspere, and without a true feeling for poetry. His adversary, Malone, was duller, but more industrious, more honest, and less vain. Steevens published a reprint of the quartos (1766), and Six Old Plays the originals on which Shakspere founded some of his dramas, in 1779. Malone's first edition appeared in 1790; it contained his own notes with those of his predecessors; and in 1803, 1813, and 1821, followed Variorum Editions, the last of these, called Boswell's Malone, being the most complete. Malone, unfortunately, had a very imperfect ear for verse.

6. Ireland.-Volumes of notes and criticism, of which perhaps the best known is Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere, became numerous in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the last decade of that century Shakspere scholars were startled by the announcement of the discovery of Shakspere autographs, letters, conundrums, confession of faith, and what not, of inestimable literary value; finally, a drama by Shakspere Vortigern --was forthcoming, and was brought upon the stage by Kemble. The discoverer was a young man named W. H. Ireland, whose father, Samuel Ireland, was deceived not himself a deceiver Many people he

lieved for awhile in the Ireland discoveries, as many had believed in those of Chatterton; but Malone attacked the imposture, and W. H. Ireland himself soon after made and published his Confessions.

Kean.-To Gar

7. Mrs. Siddons. Kemble. rick's Shylock at Drury Lane, 1775, Portia was played by an actress announced simply as a_young lady." The young lady was the greatest of English tragic actresses, Sarah Siddons, who, with her brothers, John and Charles Kemble, sustained the glory of the Shaksperian drama upon the English stage until after 1810. Great and passionate parts were nobly rendered by Mrs. Siddons. John Kemble excelled chiefly in characters that are lofty and dignified; the Roman plays especially suited him; but his Wolsey, his Hamlet, his Macbeth, and his Lear were also great and admirable impersonations. In 1814, three years before Kemble's retirement, Edmund Kean played to a thin attendance at Drury Lane the part of Shylock : the applause was overwhelming. It was nearly twenty years later, when struggling to get through the part of Othello, his head sunk on the shoulder of his son, who played Iago, and he was borne away to his deathbed. Kean was the greatest tragic actor of our century; he was truly inspired, intense, passionate, and even in his faults there was something of genius.

8. Shakspere Study, 1800-1877.-A new era in the criticism of Shakspere was inaugurated by the lectures of S. T. Coleridge, 1814: this was the criticism of genius, of reverence, and of love. Unhappily, Coleridge's lectures have come down to us only in fragmentary forms. Charles Lamb and Hazlitt had led the way to such criticism, and others have followed in the steps of Coleridge. Nor has the nineteenth century been deficient in textual scholarship. The editions of Singer, Collier, Knight, Halliwell, Dyce, and Staunton, and the admirable Cambridge edition, have shown the devotion of contemporary English scholars to the works of our great Of late years America has taken an admirable

poet.

share in such studies. The editions of Hudson and of Grant White, and the magnificent Variorum Edition of Furness, now in process of publication, take their place beside the best work of English Shakspere students. From 1841 onwards for about ten years, the Shakespeare Society (of England) issued annually a series of valuable publications illustrative of Shaks pere's life and works. In 1852 Mr. Collier made the public aware of an astounding discovery-that in a copy of the Second Folio purchased by him some three years previously, existed a multitude of manuscript corrections, written, it might be supposed, in the first half of the seventeenth century, by someone connected with the theatre who had possessed the volume. A selection from these manuscript corrections was published by Mr. Collier, and they were commonly esteemed of high value; but it has been shown, beyond reasonable doubt, that the corrections are in reality a modern fabrication by some person possessed of considerable scholarship in Elizabethan literature. (See C. M. Ingleby's Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy.) In 1874 the New Shakspere Society was founded by the indefatigable English scholar, Mr. F. J. Furnivall; it has already done work of high value, and invites all persons interested in the writings of our chief poet to join its ranks. The tendency of recent inquiries has been towards the chronological study of the works of Shakspere, and characteristics of his versification have been examined by the Rev. F. G. Fleay, Professor Ingram, and other scholars, with a view to obtaining a clue to discover the order in which the plays followed one another in point of time.

9. Shakspere Study in France and Germany.-France and Germany have joined vigorously in the study of Shakspere. The greatest Frenchman of letters of the last century, Voltaire, spoke of Shakspere as un sauvage ivre. The greatest living poet of France, Victor Hugo, has celebrated Shakspere in a volume of eulogy almost unqualified, often injudicious,