less correct
than Jonson and less popular and modern than Beaumont and Fletcher, yet
is "the man who of all Moderns, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the
largest and most comprehensive soul."

[Page Heading: The Seventeenth Century]

The Restoration was in some doubt about Shakespeare, for while it found
in him much to admire, it also found much to condemn. His plays now had
the advantage of women actors for the female parts, but they
encountered changed fashions in the theater. The romantic comedies were
not to the taste of the time, and disappeared from the stage until
toward the middle of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, _The Merry Wives
of Windsor_ was the most popular and most highly esteemed of his
comedies. The tragedies attracted the genius of Betterton and were
constantly acted, but these were subject to revision of various kinds.
_Hamlet_ and _Othello_ held their places without alterations, but Nahum
Tate's tame version of _King Lear_ and Cibber's version of _Richard III_
superseded the originals for many years. _Romeo and Juliet_, too, gave
way to Otway's _Caius Marius_, 1692, which kept large portions of
Shakespeare's play; and _Antony and Cleopatra_ yielded place on the
stage to Dryden's fine _All for Love_ (1678), in the style of which he
professes to imitate the "divine Shakespeare." By 1692, adaptations had
also been made of _Troilus and Cressida_, _The Tempest_, _Macbeth_, _The
Two Noble Kinsmen_, _Timon_, _Richard II_, _Coriolanus_, _Henry VI_,
_Cymbeline_, _Titus Andronicus_, _Julius Caesar_. A great deal of
contempt has been visited upon these revisions of Shakespeare, and their
attempts to improve on him are usually feeble enough; but sufficient
recognition has not been given to the testimony that these revisors bear
to a great appreciation and admiration of Shakespeare. They tried to
adapt him to current metrical conventions, to current literary fashions,
to an idea of art quite foreign to his, but they made these efforts
because they admired his genius. If they did not admire everything in
his thirty-seven plays, they admired a great deal.

Further, these revisions are the outcome of critical strictures on the
plays which were then common and, in essence, have been frequently
repeated. Critics objected to the irregularity and confusion of their
structure, to their disregard of the unities of action, their mixture of
tragic and comic, their obscurity and archaism of diction, their mixed
and con