The Sun.
London, England, 1858-01-18 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Plays of Shakespeare. Rifted by Howard
Staunton. Vol. I. Routledge.
It is something to have proved oneself first of
all a perfect master among chess-players, and
afterwards a ripe Shaksperean. This feat—diffi-
cult though it may seem, though it really
is Howard Staunton has successfully accomp-
lished. His fame as a chess-player is not a
thing o' yesterday. His reputation as a poetic
critic and a dramatic commentator has, on the con-
trary, been only very recently sign diced. It is none
the less actual nevertheless. It is so entirely un-
deniable now that this goodly volume, of 746 pages,
imperial octavo, double columned and minutely
annotated, has been issued from the press of Mr.
Routledge, that we may henceforth regard Staun-
ton as one who has now permanently assumed his
place among men like Malone and Steevens, as he
had already done among men like Phillidore and
Delabourdonnaye. A duplex celebrity like this is,
certainly, to say the least of if, a very remarkable
achievement. It is an achievement, moreover,
entitled, by its very singularity, to an instant- and
cordial recognition. That recognition it com-
mands from ourselves forthwith and ungrudgingly.
According to Sir Wm. Jones, chess dates back to a
period removed from this by some 4,000 years. Yet
the science of that emperor of games has only in
very recent times, indeed, been even proximately
appreciated, tint is to say, appreciated with any
due regard to its elevated excellence. Insomuch
that we do not conceive that we are writing in any
way extravagantly when we assert that possibly
the greatest chess players IN ho have ever lived are
now living, are men of this present generation. It
is therefore, remember, at this crowning epoch in
the history of chess that Mr. Staunton has won for
himself his eminent and splendid reputation as a
chess player. And now, referring in turn to his
more recent but hardly less brilliant adventure, in
literature—we believe that, according to a far more
authoritative witness than even Sir Wm. Jones, to
wit,Cocker very nearly 242 years have now elapsed
since the death of rare and right excellent Master
William Shakspere, upon St. George's Day, in the
year of grace 1616, at his own mansion in New-
place, in the little Warwickshire borough of Strat-
ford-upon-Avon. In other words, it is only about
eight years short of two centuries and a half since
the greatest poet, the greatest dramatist, the greatest
inspired intellect (among writers) this world has
ever seen, breathed his last peacefully at the time
and in the spot just particularised—upon the very
day which was the fifty-second anniversary of his
birth, within arrow shot of the little tenement in
Henley-street, where his glorious eyes had first
opened to the light. During these 242 years whole
libraries have been printed and published in refe-
rence to the works of this extraordinary man, sim-
ply in the way of commentary. Authors themselves
of the greatest genius have written ponderous tomes
about Shakspere and his marvellous productions.
Illustrious dramatic poets, no less than others of
comparative insignificance, have striven to aid the

extension of Shalspere's popularity by alto rations
and (as they conceived them to be) emendations !
Dryden, not less adventurously than Colley Cibber,
dared with an almost sacrilegious audacity, to tam-
per thus with the integrity of th© original text.
And besides all this impertinence of adapters, and
all this loquacity of commentators, how affluent
since the life-time of Shakspeare has not literature
been of panegyrists both of himself and his incom-
parable masterpieces. Even during his life-time—
a career extending over the latter half of the reign
of Elizabeth and the first half of the reign of
James—earnest eulogies of the " Immortal Bard,"
the " Sweet Swan of Avon," were sung in thrilling
accents by Ben JOUSOIi and Elmund Spencer.
Afterwards the glory of his fame was celebrated
in the imperishable verse of Milton—was il-
lustrated by the authoritative pen of Johnson—was
recognisd more and more distinctly in his native land
by generation after generation. Until with the
dawn of this nineteenth century it may be declared

at fast to have been fully-and exultantly appreciated.
Nevertheless, there is perhaps not a t• ingle name in
the hi,tory of the literature of any time or of any
country that has been covered with greater obloquy,
either by jealousy or by ignorance, than that of the
grandest poet that ever breathed the music of genius
into human language. Pope said of him that "he
wrote better and worse than any other man." Hume

actually wrote of him (in his History of England)
" as one born in a rude age [the age of Bacon, and
Raleigh, and Sidney, and Spencer, and Burleigh],
and educated in the lowest manners, [cin,, James,
it is well known, wrote to Shakspere with his own
hand ; and Shakspere, it is no less well known,
wrote one or two of his plays expressly at her
Majesty's command, to be enacted, and they were
so enacted, at the Court of Queen Elizabeth] with-
out any instruction either from the world [!] or from
books." So much for Hume's sagacity. Again, has
nit Voltaire talked of Shakspere as an "inspired
barbarian ?" And even gone the length oillgiclaring
that to his mind Hamlet—Hamlet, that grand phi-
losophic and poetic masterpiece—appeared
r I"
the production of a "drunken savage . Nay, to to be
crown all—it was only the other day, just a year or
two ago—that we read for the first time, be it said
(in spite of all our profound admiration for this
wayward man's own resplendent genius) with feel-
ings of scorn and contempt the dignified estimate of
fliyporitainttlhyink wrote Shakspere formed by Lord Byron ! Au estimate
given to the world in one of the volumes of Moores
Memoirs, edited by Lord John Ruisell—the en-
lightened estimate estimate of Shakespere's genius formed
'Thomas
OmL oarsd Byron,moore .....w4 11, ). ell) onhe' t
Shak-
spere a d— d humbug 1" Notwithstand-
ing all which absurdities, twithstanding
the spleen of Pope, and the obtuseness
ito
and the envy ofYoltaire, and the
of Hume,
jealousy of Byron
—there, far above even those lofty_ heads, shine for
ever gloriously upon a pinnacle of renown those
great men could never with their united cele
brity have hoped tot a tain for themselves, the
name and fame of.Shakspere. Foremost among the
most genial of his •
.
s appreciators have been the gifted
critics of Germany
: witness this the views ex-
pressed upon this subject by Lessing, in his "Dra-
mat urgie," by Herder in the " Blattenivon deuts-
c er Art and Kunst," by Goethe in his " Wilhelm
hMeister," by Tieck in his " Poetisches Journal,"
and last, and best of all by Schlegel in his popular
" Lectures upon Dramatic Art and Literature."
As to our English commentators, it would be diffi-
cult to adventure upon the enumeration even of the
chief among their names—from Dryden, and Cib-
ber, and Rowe, downwards to Johnson and Ma-
lone, and Steevens, and Bowdler, and Ayscough—
bringing the catalogue gradually down to our own
days when the two rival illustrated editions were
embellished, one by the pen of Charles Knight and
the pencil of William Harvey, the other -by the