Many years ago, I was retained in the great case of The Critics against Shakspere, the most celebrated on the calendar of history during three centuries. Unlike other cases, it has been repeatedly decided, and as often reopened and reheard before the most eminent judges, who have again and again non-suited the plaintiffs. Appeals have availed nothing to reverse those decisions. New actions have been brought on the ground of newly discovered evidence; counsel have summed up the testimony from all lands, from whole libraries and literatures, and the great jury of mankind have uniformly rendered a verdict of no cause of action.

Ben Jonson said that Shakspere "wanted art"; the highest appellate court decided that "Lear" was a greater work than Euripides or Sophocles ever produced. Voltaire, the presiding Justice in the court of French criticism, decided that Shakspere was "votre bizarre sauvage;" the world has reversed his decision, and everywhere, except perhaps in France, the "Henriade" is neglected for "Hamlet."

During the seventeenth century, English criticism sought to put Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Otway, Wycherly, Congreve, Cowley, Dryden, and even the madman Lee, above Shakspere. Denham in 1667 sings an obituary to the memory of the "immortal" Cowley—

One knows not which to admire most, the beauty of the poetry or the justice of the encomium.

James Shirly, whom Shakspere has not yet been accused of imitating, said in 1640 that he had few friends, and Tateham, an obscure versifier, in 1652, that he was the "plebeian driller."

Philipps, the pupil of Milton, refers to Shakspere's "unfiled expressions, his rambling and undigested fancies, the laughter of the critical." Dryden "regretted that Shakspere did not know or rarely observed the Aristotelian laws of the three unities," but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. "He is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling, into bombast."

Thomas Rymer, another disciple of the unities, in 1693, declared "Othello" to be a "bloody farce without salt or savor," and says that "in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is a lively expression, and … more humanity, than many times in the tragical flights of Shakspere." How much humanity may be shown in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a mastiff may be left to the impartial judgment of the jockey or the dog fancier, but the world has got beyond the criticism of Rymer. In his view, "almost everything in Shakspere's plays is so wretched that he is surprised how critics could condescend to honor so wretched a poet with critical discussions."

John Dennis and Charles Gildon, whose books are forgotten under the dust of more than two centuries, in 1693 and 1694 denied that Shakspere's plays had any excellence, any wealth in profound sentences or truth to nature, any originality, force or beauty of diction; and placed him far below the ancients in all essential points—in composition, invention, characterization.

Dennis says Shakspere paid no heed to poetic justice … "the good and bad perishing promiscuously in the best of his tragedies, so that there can be either none or very weak instruction in them." Gildon sums up his opinion by the sententious remark that "his beauties are buried beneath a heap of ashes, isolated and fragmentary like the ruins of a temple, so that there is no harmony in them."

Against all this arraignment by the imitators of the French drama, we have that loving tribute of the great Milton:—

Pope could not resist the charm of his unacknowledged master. But Pope praises Dryden, Denham, and Waller—never a word of commendation for Shakspere: "he is not correct, not classic; he has almost as many defects as beauties; his dramas want plan, are defective and irregular in construction; he keeps the tragic and comic as little apart as he does the different epochs and nations in which the scenes of his plays are laid; the unity of action, of place, and of time is violated in every scene."

The eighteenth century was notable for its corrections and remodellings, reducing the grandeur of the originals to the levels of the critics. Lord Lansdowne degraded Shylock into the clown of the play; it was "furnished with music and other ornamentation, enriched with a musical masque, 'Peleus and Thetis,' and with a banqueting scene in which the Jew," dining apart from the rest, drinks to his God, Money. Gildon mangled "Measure for Measure" and provided it with "musical entertainments." The Duke of Buckingham divided "Julius Cæsar" into two tragedies with choruses. Worsdale reduced "The Taming of the Shrew" to a vaudeville, and Lampe "trimmed 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' into an opera." Garrick adapted "Romeo and Juliet" to the stage of his time, by allowing Juliet to awake before Romeo had died of the poison, "The Tempest" by furnishing it with songs, "The Taming of the Shrew" by cutting it down to a farce in three acts.

Even the great Samuel Johnson said that Shakspere "sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose." … "His plots are often so loosely formed that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design."

"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 labor to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced and imperfectly represented."

And so it may be said that in England, after Shakspere's death, the Drama was devoted to the imitators of ancient models, under the leadership of Ben Jonson, and later, beyond the middle of the seventeenth century, to the imitators of French taste, for the amusement of Charles the Second, "Defender of the Faith," and the correct Nell Gwynn. Under the guidance of such imitators, from Davenant to Cibber, many of Shakspere's plays were reconstructed for the stage, until The Tatler quotes lines from Davenant's mangled version of "Macbeth," and N. Tate, in his edition of "Lear" "revived with alterations, as acted at the Duke's Theatre," refers to the original play as "an old piece with which he had become acquainted through a friend." Davenant and Dryden in 1670 improved "The Tempest"; Davenant corrected the errors of "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado" in 1673; Sedley cut out the immorality from "Antony" in 1677; Shadwell, in the following year, reformed the character of "Timon"; Tate restored "Lear" to his kingdom and Cordelia to life, and even made "Henry VI.," "Richard II.," and "Coriolanus" conform to the rules of dramatic art which Shakspere had so defiantly violated. Durfey corrected the imperfect plot, characterization, and diction of "Cymbeline," and administered just punishment to Iachimo; and finally, Betterton and Cibber, in 1710, added elegance to the wit of Falstaff and refinement to the bloody cunning of Richard.

"All these versions," as Ulrici says, "were essentially the same in character; as a rule, only such passages as were most effective on the stage were left unaltered, but in all cases the editors endeavored to expunge the supposed harshnesses of language and versification; powerful passages were tamed down and diluted, elegant passages embellished, tender passages made more tender; the comic scenes were provided with additional indelicacies, and it was further endeavored to make the aim of the action more correct by the removal of some supposed excrescences, or by the alteration of the scenic arrangement and the course of the action."

Yet, in spite of all these distortions of the great originals, in conformity with the taste of corrupt courts, the love and admiration of the English people for the dramas as Shakspere wrote them was attested by more than twenty complete and critical editions of his works before the end of the eighteenth century; and the high estimate of his genius during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was never questioned until 1904, when Professor Barrett Wendell, in his "Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature," discovered and revealed to the world that Shakspere, except as a "phrase-maker" and except as the inventor of "historical fiction" in "Henry IV." and "Henry V.," was "the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan dramatists," and "remained till the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set by others."

It had taken nearly three centuries of time and the researches of countless scholars to make the discovery, and they had all failed except Professor Wendell. During Shakspere's life and after his death, none of his contemporaries ever accused him of imitating "fashions set by others"; none of them, except the profligate Greene, of "beautifying himself with others' feathers."

Edmund Malone, by what may be called digital criticism, undertook to prove that Shakspere, in the second and third parts of "Henry VI.," stole 1771 lines from the "Contention," originally written by another hand, remodelled 2373 lines, and added 1899 of his own; but even Malone did not charge that Shakspere imitated the author of the "Contention"; his argument, if it had not been conclusively answered again and again, would prove that Shakspere was "the most unblushing plagiarist that ever put pen to paper."

But long before Malone came Lessing, who in 1759 led the successful attack upon the pseudo-classicism of the French dramatists, proved that the three unities were but the articles of an outworn creed, and in 1758, that Shakspere was something more than a successful playwright, more than the successful rival of Marlowe and Kyd and Dekker and Beaumont and Fletcher, more than "the master of the revels to mankind," and led critical opinion to the conclusion that he was the foremost man of his time and of all time, with power to search the secrets of all hearts, to measure the abysses of all passion, to portray the weakness of all human foibles, to create characters who act and speak and are as much alive to us as the men and women we daily meet, to teach mankind the profoundest philosophy, the littleness of the great, the greatness of humility and truth, and to inculcate by immortal examples the highest and purest morality.

And so England found at last the greatness of her greatest son in the "father of German literature," and the nineteenth century affirmed the judgment of Lessing. Among Germans, it needs only to name Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Ulrici, and Gervinus; among Englishmen, Coleridge, who said, "No one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shaksperean idiom"; and Charles Knight, who has exploded the traditions of Rowe and Stevens about the deer stealing, the wife desertion and the testamentary insult, and conclusively shown that "the theory of Shakspere's first employment in repairing the plays of others is altogether untenable, supported only by a very narrow view of the great essentials of a dramatic work, and by verbal criticism which, when carefully examined, fails even in its own petty assumptions."