THE AGES OF MAN A SHAKESPEARE ANTHOLOGY THE AGES OF MAN Selected
and Arranged by GEORGE RYLANDS HARPER COLOPHON BOOKS HARPER ROW,
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND EVANSTON TO ARTHUR MARSHALL CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BOOK I YOUTH Childhood Magic and Faery Nature Sport
Love BOOK II MANHOOD War Civil Strife Kingship Government and
Society Passion and Character BOOK III AGE Death Sickness Sleep Man
against Himself - Old Age - Time - Finis ADDENDUM INDEX
INTRODUCTION 8 The late Mr. Sheridan, on being shown a volume of
the Beauties of Shakespeare, very properly asked But where are the
other eleven HaeKU SHAKESPEARES first anthologist was Dr. William
Dodd, chaplain to the King. He was executed in 1777, twenty-five
years after his publication of The Beauties of Shakespeare 9 for
forging a bond for 4,200 in the name of his former pupil, the fifth
Lord Chesterfield. In the same year William Henry Ireland was born,
forger of Shakespearian manuscripts and fabricator of two
pseudo-Shakespearian plays. There have been anthologists since Dodd
as there have been forgers but the study of Shakespeare has been
more usually associated with lunacy than with crime. Samuel
Johnson, most solemn of moralists, to whom none ever appealed in
vain, acted as Dodds apologist. I will do what I can he said,
walking up and down his chamber in extreme agitation. Dodds speech
at the Old Bailey, Dodds sermon delivered in Newgate Chapel, Dodds
Letter to His Majesty petitioning for exile, were penned by
Johnson. And on the night before the execution Johnson wrote a
letter to the condemned man asking to be remembered in his prayers.
The pages of Bos well which tell us these things are profoundly
moving. They serve to show why it is thatSamuel Johnson is in some
ways the greatest of all Shake speares critics. The biographer of
Savage, Pope and Gray, like the creator of Falstaff, Caliban and
Jaques, has as his device homo sum humani nil a me alienum puto.
For both THE AGES OF MAN these men forgiveness is the fairest of
virtues and ingratitude the meanest of sins. How different they are
and yet in their Englishness and insularity how essentially the
same They supplement one another. Shakespeare created language,
Johnson established it Johnson was a man of prodigious and
desultory learning, Shakespeare knew little Latin and less Greek
Shakespeare is the intuitive poet, Johnson the man of measured
prose and reasoned philosophy the one is modest and unassuming with
a certain feminine sensibility, the other is masculine and
assertive, although we must not make the mistake of ignoring the
bawdry of Shakespeare or Johnsons tenderness for his unattractive
Tetty. The one embodies the spirit of the age as the other is an
inspiration for all time. Of Johnson, we know everything, his
tastes and table manners, his politics and prejudices, his
conversation, his friendships, his religion. Of Shakespeare we know
only that we know next to nothing. The meagre facts fill a sheet of
notepaper, myth and conjec ture overstock a library. We know the
dates of his christen ing and his death we know that his father was
an alderman of Stratford that his son, a twin, died at eleven years
that he was a poor player that he prospered as a shareholder in the
Lord Chamberlains Company and acquired a coat of arms and became a
man of property. Every schoolboy has heard of his second-best bed.
And we may perhaps guess at what Shakespeare was not, as weturn
over the pages of the folio. Not a courtier or a Catholic or an
intellectual or a scholar or a satirist or an imperialist or,
indeed, Sir Francis Bacon. He must, says Tucker Brooke, have been
one of the last men in London with whom an up-to-date Elizabethan
would have thought of discussing politics, or religion, or
geography, or current affairs. Or, let us add, art for arts sake.
Shake INTRODUCTION speare Indeed is two things the man in a London
street, the man in a Warwickshire lane...
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