The final group of plays, the Shakespearian part of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, all belong to the class of what may be called idyllic romances. They are happy dreams, in which all troubles and sorrows are ultimately resolved into fortunate endings, and which stand therefore as so many symbols of an optimistic faith in the beneficent dispositions of an ordering Providence. In harmony with this change of temper the style has likewise undergone another change, and the tense structure and marmoreal phrasing of Antony and Cleopatra have given way to relaxed cadences and easy and unaccentuated rhythms. It is possible that The IVinter's Tale and The Tempest, Shakespeare's last plays, with the unimportant exceptions of his contributions to Fletcher's Henry VIII. and The Two Noble Kinsmen, were written in retirement at Stratford. At any rate the call of the country is sounding through them ; and it is with no regret that in the last pages of The Tempest the weary magician drowns his book, and buries his staff certain fathoms deep in the earth. ( E. K. C.) The early editors were concerned with two points—to produce an eclectic text and to cure verbal difficulties by conjecture. Pope (1723-25) made the text "correct" and regular. Theobald (1733) reduced the "science of criticism" to three points, "the emenda tion of corrupt passages, the explanation of obscure and difficult ones, and an inquiry into the beauties and defects of composition." He collated the early texts and made some famous emendations, e.g., "a' babbled of green fields" in Henry V .,II. iii. 17. Warbur ton's uncritical method was satirized by Thomas Edwards (I747)• On the resort to conjecture Dr. Johnson finely said (1765) : "It has been my settled principle that the reading of the ancient books is probably true, and therefore is not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, perspicuity, or mere improvement of the sense." Capell (1768) was scholarly. The Johnson-Steevens text of 1773 was re-issued in 1786 by Isaac Reed. Edmund Malone (179o, 1821) exposed the corruption caused by misprints, igno rance of Shakespeare's phraseology, and ignorance of the texts Shakespeare used ; and he discussed critical problems such as the genuineness of the Henry VI. plays. Of later editors Alexander Dyce was sound and careful. But the Cambridge Shakespeare (by W. G. Clark, John Glover and Aldis Wright, 1863-66; re-issued by Wright, 1891-93) gathered up in a complete critical apparatus the results of the older learning and almost became a textus receptus.
The new scholarship is bibliographical. In 1908 W. W. Greg proved from the technical evidence of water-marks, devices and type, that nine quartos—The Merchant of Venice and A Mid summer Night's Dream (Roberts, "i600"), King Lear (Butter, "i6o8"), Henry V. ("i6o8") Pericles and The Merry Wives ("1619"), and the spurious Whole Contention, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Sir John Oldcastle—were printed by William Jag gard in 1619. In Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (19o9) A. W. Pollard rounded off the evidence with a new classification of the Quartos into "Good" and "Bad," showing that Heminge and Con dell in compiling the copy for the First Folio replaced the "Bad Quartos" by good playhouse texts, used independent mss. of four plays, but otherwise sent to press the texts of the "Good" First Quartos or of later editions of these then on the market. The authoritative text for each play was thus accurately determined.
The significance of the old rhetorical punctuation was shown by Percy Simpson in Shakespearian Punctuation (191r) and A. W. Pollard in King Richard II.: A New Quarto (1916).
In Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates (1917) A. W. Pollard showed the possibility that the "Good Quartos," some of which were printed from prompt-copies, were set up from Shakespeare's autograph.
Palaeography came in with Sir Edward Maunde Thompson's Shakespeare's Handwriting (1916). He identified as Shakespeare's the handwriting of one scene in the Book of Sir Thomas More (Harley ms. 7368, folios 8, 9). The evidence was restated and amplified in Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, edited by A. W. Pollard (1923). In this book J. Dover Wilson classified the peculiar spellings of the "Good Quartos," showed that misprints in them were misreadings of the English script which Shakespeare wrote, and produced parallels from the scene in the play. Sir Edward's claim has been criticized, but only one critic, Samuel A. Tannenbaum, in Problems in Shakespeare's Pen manship (1927), has attempted to tackle the handwriting.
(P. Sr.) THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE THEORY The thesis that the plays and poems ascribed to Shakespeare were the work of Francis Bacon appears to have been first thrown out in The Life and Adventures of Common Sense (1769) by Her bert Lawrence, without attracting critical attention. It emerged again in 1848, in J. C. Hart's The Romance of Yachting (N.Y.), taking stronger shape later in an article, "Who Wrote Shake speare?" in Chambers' Journal (Aug. 5th, 1852). In all forms it appears to proceed upon a priori belief that the "Stratford actor" could not have possessed the scholarly and other qualifications supposed to be revealed in the works ascribed to him. This pri mary negative position is taken for granted alike in the merely negative "anti-Stratfordian" polemic of later years, and in the series of recent theories which undertake to supersede the claim for Bacon by similar claims made for the earls of Rutland, Derby and Oxford, successively.
The negative position would appear to have been originally sug gested by the hyperbolical accounts given of the playwright by quite orthodox Shakespearians, as an accomplished classical schol ar and a trained lawyer, abreast of all the philosophy and science of his time. The definite claim for Bacon's authorship was first fully set forth by William Henry Smith, who published in 1856, in the form of a letter to Lord Ellesmere, what appeared in 1857 in extended form, but still as a small book, under the title, Bacon and Shakespeare: An Enquiry Touching Players, Playhouses and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth. Smith's procedure was to insist : (I) on the scantiness of our knowledge of Shakespeare's life, and at the same time to assume (2) that we know he cannot have possessed the culture required for the composition of the plays; noting further (3) that Bacon had the necessary culture; taking for granted (4) that he had all the requisite poetic and dramatic faculty; and assuming (5) that there need be no difficulty in believing that during 20 years he was secretly producing plays for Shakespeare's company at the risk of discrediting himself as a serious statesman. (6) For the rest, parallel passages (mostly irrelevant) in Bacon's works and the Folio are cited to suggest that the plays really came from Bacon's pen, though Smith did not claim to have proved this.