It would be a dreary business to construct a catalogue of all these modern slights to the memory of Shakspeare. They turn his plays into a system of theology. Some critics declare that his object was to make celibacy ridiculous and marriage honorable; some labor to prove that the plays are treatises upon the Christian doctrines of justification by faith and the salvation of man; some point to his Baconian method of induction; and others reject the whole over-done business of interpretation, because they simply claim for Bacon himself, the authorship of all the plays: as if Shakspeare were turned inside out, wrung dry, macerated and dispersed, by two centuries of vigorous comment, and it became necessary to begin operations upon a fresh person. These operations have enriched literature with its most grandiose specimens of futility.
With respect to this last effort of modern criticism, it might suffice with many to repeat an observation made by Lowell, who said that, if any person was disposed to believe that Bacon wrote the plays, he could set himself
- [Footnote: *man periodicals; the edition of Shakspeare translated by such men as
Bodenstedt, Delius, Gildemeister, Herwegh, Heyse, &c., many of them distinguished for poetic talent. The attack by Benedix upon the "Shakspeare mania" has brought out excellent comment from Noiré and Dr. Wagner. Wagner's editions of the plays, with notes and commentary, are good: so is Dr. Jacob Heussi's "Hamlet." The essays of Karl Elze, of E. Hermann, Kreyssig, V. Friesen, Otto Ludwig, and several other contributors to the Jahrbuch, cannot be neglected by scholars of Shakspeare: they are sharply distinguished from the dilettante work of Fulda and others, and from the subjective excess of the writers named above in the text. The English lover of Shakspeare cannot afford to indulge an indiscriminate dislike of the German revival. The Shakspeare-Lexicon of Dr. Schmidt is a magnificent piece of work.]
