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Updated: June 7, 2025
Whoever only proposes to himself to remove that which offends him, falls short; for good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it happened in Caesar's killers, who brought the republic to such a pass, that they had reason to repent their meddling with it. 'I fear there will a worse one come in his place, says a fellow in Shakespear's crowd, at the first Caesar's funeral; and that his speech made the moral of the piece, we shall see in the course of this study.
In order to extricate my old friend, I immediately sent for the three directors of the Play-house, and desired they would in their turn, do a good office for a man, who in Shakespear's phrase, often filled their mouths; I mean with pleasantry and popular conceits. 'My kindness to the agreeable Mr.
Taylor and Hessey told me that they had sold nearly two editions of the Characters of Shakespear's Plays in about three months, but that after the Quarterly Review of them came out they never sold another copy. The public, enlightened as they are, must have known the meaning of that attack as well as those who made it.
More people, in fact, fail from a multiplicity of talents and pretensions than from an absolute poverty of resources. I have given instances of this elsewhere. Perhaps Shakespear's tragedies would in some respects have been better if he had never written comedies at all; and in that case his comedies might well have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret.
This therefore is a proper Machine where the Business is dark, horrid, and bloody; but is extremely foreign from the Affair of Comedy. Subjects of this kind, which are in themselves disagreeable, can at no time become entertaining, but by passing through an Imagination like Shakespear's to form them; for which Reason Mr. Dryden would not allow even Beaumont and Fletcher capable of imitating him.
This play was originally Shakespear's, and revised, and altered by Mr. Dryden, who added several new scenes. The plot taken from Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, which that poet translated from the original story written in Latin verse, by Lollius, a Lombard. Secret Love; or the Maiden Queen, a Tragi-Comedy, acted at the theatre-royal, and printed in 4to, 1697.
"I should have been much more pleased," continues Rowe, "to have learned from some certain authority which was the first play he writ; it would be without doubt, a pleasure to any man curious in things of this kind, to see and know what was the first essay of a fancy like Shakespear's."
If they have since outwrit all other men, 'Tis from the drops which fell from Shakespear's pen. The storm which vanished on the neighb'ring shore Was taught by Shakespear's Tempest first to roar. That innocence and beauty which did smile In Fletcher, grew in this Inchanted Isle. But Shakespear's magic could not copied be, Within that circle none durst walk but he.
This seems shocking to us; but our objection to it is quite a recent development: no longer ago than Shakespear's time it was thought quite natural that litigants should give presents to human judges; and the buying off of divine wrath by actual money payments to priests, or, in the reformed churches which discountenance this, by subscriptions to charities and church building and the like, is still in full swing.
The story is related at large in Taverner's voyages to the Indies, vol. i. part 2. This play is written in heroic verse. The Tempest; or the inchanted Island, a Comedy, acted at the duke of York's theatre, and printed in 4to. 1676. This is only an alteration of Shakespear's Tempest, by Sir William Davenant and Dryden.
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