VII.—­A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS

Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one fault.  It does not fit Shakespeare.  Shakespeare, however, is the single dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable.  “He was a savage,” said Voltaire, “who had imagination.  He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada.”  Had this been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there was something in it.  Again, Voltaire’s boast that he had been the first to show the French “some pearls which I had found” in the “enormous dunghill” of Shakespeare’s plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James except William Shakespeare.  One reads the average Elizabethan play in the certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically five acts high.  There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shakespeare’s that are as great as his third-best work.  But there are no Hamlets or Lears among them.  There are no Midsummer Night’s Dreams.  There is not even a Winter’s Tale.

If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare his claim would have been just.  Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire’s vanity.  He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as a patron:  he regarded himself as a follower.  Voltaire was infuriated by the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior.  Lamb was in this as wide of the mark as Voltaire had been.  His reverent praise has made famous among virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it.  Everyone goes to the Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long succession of sleeping beauties.  The average man retires disappointed from the quest.  He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays.  Many a man can read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb’s enthusiasm, however, who never could have read them with his own.

One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse’s books, he took down Lamb’s Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, and, turning to Mr. Gosse, said, “That book taught me more than any other book in the world—­that and the Bible.”  Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other men’s enthusiasms.  He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb.  He had not, as Lamb had, Elizabethan