Shakespeare & the Eighteenth Century by Michael Caines, and: Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century by Fiona Ritchie (review)

During the eighteenth century, Shakespeare became “the Bard of Avon,” the most precious jewel of the English literary tradition. “By the end of the century,” Mr. Caines observes, “Shakespeare had become one of the basic conditions of cultural and intellectual life in the British Isles, and parts of Western Europe and Northern America.” He now helped to define the British nation, the emergent literary canon, the “middle class,” and even, as Ms. Ritchie adds, the idea of the modern woman.

In this new title in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, Mr. Caines, rather than opening new ground, provides a critical survey of scholarship on Shakespeare and the eighteenth century. He nonetheless resists the impression that he is simply offering “a Grand Tour of the cultural landscape of the eighteenth century” with the familiar landmarks of Shakespeare: the spate of new collected editions of his works, the erection of his monument in Westminster Abbey in 1741, Garrick’s rising fame as his dramatic interpreter, and Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford (1769). Attempts to forge Shakespeare’s letters and works late in the century reveal both the hunger for new information and, ironically, the obsession with documenting the “truth” of the bard’s life. Rival editors battled to establish Shakespearian texts. The best of these editors, Theobald, has been overshadowed by more famous editors such as Rowe and Pope, the latter relegating Theobald to the literary dungeon of The Dunciad while nabbing his annotations. Similarly overshadowed, Charles Macklin’s Shylock was as important as any of Garrick’s Shakespearean roles, restoring the original power of a role previously engulfed in anti-Semitic farce. Garrick’s significance has been exaggerated. The frequency of Shakespearean performances actually declined during Garrick’s tenure as manager of Drury Lane. Neoclassical prejudice against Shakespeare, a playwright indifferent to the three unities or to the purity of dramatic genres, endured far longer than we might suspect. It was still alive when Samuel Johnson attacked this critical tradition in the preface to his 1765 edition of Shakespeare. Very much attached to an older tradition, Garrick eliminated the entire fifth act of Hamlet with its unseemly grave diggers and fencing match. Meanwhile Shakespeare increasingly became the hero of everything anti-French, the champion of Anglo-Saxon freedom against Voltaire’s rule-bound Gallicism. In a fine section, however, Mr. Caines recalls the anglophile bardolatry of Shakespeare’s French translator Jean-François Ducis. Shakespeare’s fame was not only Anglo-Saxon.

Enjoyably written, Shakespeare & the Eighteenth Century will serve as a reliable starting point for any new reader. A helpful appendix contains principal dates in the theatrical and editorial history of Shakespeare during the eighteenth century, along with a guide to further reading. Nevertheless, Mr. Caines exaggerates standard conceptions of how Shakespeare’s reputation changed. For example, it has often been claimed that there was “a general indifference to Shakespeare’s name at the turn of the century.” But how, then, could Behn have written as early as 1673 that “We all well know that the immortal Shakespears Playes … have better pleas’d the World than Johnsons [sic] works”? Behn and her Restoration contemporaries such as Dryden, Pepys, and Shadwell certainly knew and greatly admired Shakespeare. The absence of Shakespeare’s name on numerous adaptations before 1700 does not necessarily imply indifference to his greatness (adaptations of Fletcher or Jonson were also generally unacknowledged). Rather, it indicates a different conception of authorship and literary borrowing along with a less idolatrous perception of his stature. Mr. Caines rightly stresses that adaptors like Cibber wished above all to make plays like Richard III more suited to theatrical performance. Yet contrary to Mr. Caines’s lengthy insistence at the beginning of this book, there is little deep mystery about what Princess Anne might have meant when she referred to her brother-in-law...