A Shakespeare Anthology - The Ages Of Man (Paperback)

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...