a few lines-nay, a good many— but introduces only a few of his own. The full shock of the charges laid against him seems concentred in this that when Catesby brings the great news of Buckingham's capture, Richard, instead of hiding his mighty malice in the calm triumphant words,

'Some one take order, Buckingham be brought

To Salisbury,' breaks out with the furious and terrible

'Off with his head!'

Garrick's unsparing manipulations of Shakespeare may be seen, by those who have the run of curious dramatic libraries, in a duodecimo acting edition of Romeo and Juliet, which is enough to make a Shakespearian purist's hair stand upright with horror. Till comparatively recent times, indeed, this was the version commonly followed on the stage-followed still, it may be, by some players, for aught I know to the contrary. By way of' piling up the agony,' Mr. Garrick brought poor Juliet to life before the poison

pleasantry,

'So much for Buckingham !'

which never fails to bring down the house, or at least the gallery.

There is a thin quarto, published in the year 1700, which bears testimony to the grave deliberation of Colley's deed. The book is called, on the title-page, 'The Tragical History of King Richard III. Altered from Shakespeare. By Colley Cibber.' In the palmy days of the British theatre, as we are generally minded to consider them, Shakespeare was no more likely to be played unaltered than rounds of beef were likely to be eaten raw. Garrick, whose published commentaries on the text of Shakespeare are among the most egregious in this amazing jungle of literature, never dreamed of acting any one of the characters as it was written. I am sorry that the great actor's stage-version of Hamlet has not been printed; but I think that, wanting such documentary evidence, we may yet conclude, from such testimony as lies near to the hand of any one who cares to investigate the matter, that the Drury Lane audience of 1771 had before them a Hamlet whom Shakespeare himself would never have known for the Royal Dane given to the world about a hundred and seventy years previously.

begun to take any effect on him: A quantity of blank verse, as unShakespearian as can possibly be imagined, is thus foisted upon the scene, otherwise a gem of exquisite pathos hardly matched by anything in Boccaccio. The sudden action of the drug, in the original play, is as appalling, though of course not so unexpected, as the instantaneous effect of the herb carelessly plucked and eaten by the young lover in the garden, for which beautifully tragic story I need scarce refer you to the Decameron. Romeo has

purchased a quick, not a slow poison: such soon-speeding gear as will disperse itself through all the veins, that the life-weary taker may fall dead;' in fact, as if shot or stabbed to the heart, as Romeo, in the language of poetry, proceeds to signify. And this is the sequel in the churchyard:

'Here's to my love! (Drinks.) O true apothecary!

Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.'

This is enough, one would think; but it was not enough for Mr. Garrick. The death of Romeo must be spun out, and the pang of parting slowly envenomed by the discovery that he has been precipitate, and might have lived for his living and loving Juliet.

It was Garrick, too, who altered

the Winter's Tale, calling it Florizel and Perdita; who altered Taming of the Shrew, calling it Katherine and Petruchio; who changed A Midsummer Night's Dream into an opera, which he called the Fairies; who did something of the same kind by the Tempest, though Shadwell had preceded him by eightythree years in that labour. Cymbeline, too, was altered by Garrick, and considerably altered for the worse; as we may be sure it could not have been altered by him or anybody else for the better. I do

not know that the great actor took upon himself the work of altering any more of Shakespeare's plays; but the fact is that most of them had been altered ready to his hand; so that he had only to play them in their changed shape, as he invariably did, in preference to playing them as they had been left by Shakespeare.

Romeo and Juliet was first taken in hand, for repairs, by a certain James Howard, Esquire, who turned it into a 'tragi-comedy,' let us hope to his entire satisfaction. Otway's tragedy of Caius Marcius owes its leading idea to Romeo and Juliet, the story having been taken by Shakespeare himself from a poem by Arthur Brooke, who had taken it from a dramatised version of La Giulietta, an Italian novel, written by a gentleman of Vicenza named Luigi da Porto. After Thomas Otway, at a long distance of time, I need hardly observe, Theophilus Cibber, the son of Colley Cibber, tried his hand on Shakespeare's work, and 'revised and altered' it unsparingly. Next came David Garrick; and after him Marsh, one of the tamperers also with Cymbeline and the Winter's Tale.

Dryden, whose genius dwindled from heroic grandeur only when he went out of his path to palter and peddle with Shakespeare's

plays, was, indeed, the arch-improver of these mighty productions. His Troilus and Cressida, or Truth found too Late, is almost a new play. He and Davenant dished up the Tempest with another halftitle, the Enchanted Island, and with an extra pair of lovers, Miranda having a brother, for whom is found a partner in the sister of Ferdinand, who comes ashore also from the wreck. New songs were introduced by Dryden, or at least a new song, 'Oh, bid your faithful Ariel fly.' Dryden and Davenant, twin poets-laureate, also took in hand together the Tragedy of Julius Cæsar, with the Death of Brutus and Cassius, prefixing thereto an abstract of the Life of Cæsar, from Plutarch and Suetonius. Dryden, single-handed, tackled Troilus and Cressida, bestowing the trivial second title of Truth found too Late. Davenant, on his part, undertook solus the task of fusing portions of Measure for Measure and Much Ado about Nothing; the product being a piece called the Law against Lovers. We have also, by the purblind Gildon, who published one of the spurious editions of Shakespeare's poems, a piece, the title-page of which is ast follows: Measure for Measure, or Beauty the best Advocate. As it is acted at the Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields; written originally by Mr. Shakspeare, and now very much altered; with Additions of several Entertainments of Music. By Mr. Gildon.'

We may fancy that Mr. Gildon and Mr. Shakespeare between them. produced, if not a perfectly homogeneous, still a rather remarkable work; the more readily accepted, perhaps, by the audience of Lincoln's Inn Fields for the sake of the music. Much Ado about Nothing was played at Drury Lane in 1737, under the title, the Universal Passion, having been kneaded

into what was thought a popular form by one James Miller.

As for the Midsummer Night's Dream, I know not how many variations of that exquisite dramatic poem have been perpetrated for the stage of the Restoration and of later times. The Humours of Bottom the Weaver is a kind of farce by Robert Cox, published in quarto, without date. Then there was the Fairy Queen, an opera, represented by their Majesties' servants in 1692. Then came Pyramus and Thisbe, a comick masque,' written by Richard Leveridge, and performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields. A 'mock opera' of the same name, with music by Lampe, was produced at Covent Garden in 1745. Garrick's opera, the Fairies, I have already mentioned. It was, doubtless, the first glimpse of the Midsummer Night's Dream that the stage of Old Drury ever saw. A few years afterwards the comedy, with its proper name, but with the inevitable alterations and additions,' such as 'several new songs,' was presented on the same historic boards. Ten years later, that is in 1763, the stage of Drury Lane receded to a Fairy Tale in two Acts, taken from Shakespeare.

In speaking but now of Sir William Davenant I omitted to give him his due as the emendator and amplifier of Macbeth, to which tragedy he made several additions, whereof some were 'new songs.' Of course he made use of Middleton, as others have done. In the century succeeding that of Davenant, the Historical Tragedy of Macbeth was 'newly adapted to the stage' by Nathaniel Lee, and performed in Edinburgh. It is almost superfluous to observe here that Shakespeare himself must unquestionably have had Middleton's play of the Witches before him when he wrote Macbeth; and not only so, but that his appropriation of a

few ideas and passages was perfectly open, the Witches being a popular acting play at that time. Not to cite other evidences, the two songs, 'Come away' and 'Black spirits,' &c., which appear at full length in Middleton's work, are, in Macbeth, merely indicated. by the two first words of each, as if Shakespeare had known that the manager of the Globe Theatre must have had copies of the songs, for which reason it was unnecessary to repeat them. I do not refer to this matter in palliation of the barbarism of Davenant and his followers, who have essayed to make Macbeth an opera. Shakespeare, after his wont, took just so much from another work as was needed to make his own a perfect whole. If he had wanted more of Middleton, there is not the least doubt he would have taken it; but he knew exactly where to hold his hand.

Both Colley and Theophilus Cibber were busy dealers in Shakespearian shoeing-horns. The latter composed An Historical Tragedy of the Civil Wars in the Reign of Henry VI., from Shakespeare's trilogy, making it 'A Sequel to the Tragedy of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and an Introduction to the Tragical History of King Richard III.' But this was not till twenty years after his father, Colley Cibber, had perpetrated the famous alteration of the last-named play. Of Theophilus Cibber's meddling with Romeo and Juliet mention has already been made. Most work of this kind was undoubtedly done by the elder and abler of the two Cibbers, Colley, to whose facile pen the unthinking and the ignorant, who compose at least four-fifths of every audience, even at the present day, have been indebted, not only for the famous dish of Richard III., but for Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John,

a vulgar trap for Protestant popularity in 1744; and a good deal in the way of small and unconsidered tinkering at various times.

The historical plays of Shakespeare have been freely handled by all sorts of adapters at every period since his own. Nahum Tate, who assisted Dr. Nicholas Brady in turning the 'Psalms of David' into doggerel, and who wrote a supremely dull continuation of Dryden's' Absolom and Achitophel,' got into hot water by his impudent distortion of the History of Richard II., under the title of the Sicilian Usurper, the performance of which was prohibited; and he published his precious work in 1681, with a prefatory 'Epistle in Vindication of the Author.' This quarto is now valuable for its scarcity, and only for its scarcity, the reader may be sure. A thricedyed bibliomaniac must he be who would bid for a copy under the hammer of the auctioneer. Lewis Theobald, in 1720, altered this same tragedy of Richard II.; and about fifty years later another alteration was printed at Manchester, for James Goodhall, who tells us on his title-page that he has 'imitated the style' of Shakespeare in the interpolated matter.

Betterton, the actor, made considerable alterations in both the first and second parts of Henry IV. He revived the first part at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1700, calling it a 'tragi-comedy,' and bringing into prominence on his bill the Humours of Sir John Falstaff.' I can find no record of his having produced the second part; but there is an octavo acting edition, without date, bearing this title, The Sequel of Henry IV., with the Humours of Sir John Falstaff and Justice Shallow; as it is acted by his Majesty's Company of Comedians at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Altered from

Shakespeare by the late Mr. Betterton. All the three parts of Henry VI. have been mangled and maltreated more or less. John Crowne doctored the first and second parts for the Duke's Theatre, bestowing on them additional titles, which, in the parlance of our time, would probably be called 'sensational.' Then came Ambrose Phillips, with his Drury Lane tragedy of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, in which 'a few speeches and lines only' were taken from Shakespeare. The Cibbers followed, as we have seen. I do not think that anybody but Colley Cibber dealt notably with Richard III. As for Henry VIII., its principal alterations belong to our own era, and are limited to curtailments. Sometimes it ends with the fall of Wolsey; sometimes with the death of Queen Katherine.

Timon of Athens was altered from Shakespeare by Shadwell; then altered from Shakespeare and Shadwell by James Love, and played at the Richmond Theatre, about the middle of the eighteenth century; then altered, more modestly, by Cumberland, for Drury Lane; and again altered from the Shadwell version by Hull, for Covent Garden, in 1786. Nahum Tate, as might have been expected from him, feebly styled a feeble hash of Coriolanus, which he served up in 1682, the Ingratitude of a Commonwealth, or the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus; but he was outdone in bathos of nomenclature, if in nothing besides, by crabbed old John Dennis, who called his rifazione the Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Resentment. That word 'resentment,' we must all agree, is rather neat as applied to the wrathful deeds of Coriolanus. We resent an affront or a slight at which we are scarcely angry, and our resentment is not often 'fatal.' Thomson, with more of the negligence than

the nature which, in an equal proportion, characterised the genius of that born, and certainly not made, poet, wrote a tragedy of his own on the history of Coriolanus. Taking this and Shakespeare's tragedy, as a juggler would take a cup and ball, Sheridan-not the clever onetossed the two about in a clumsy way, and produced for Covent Garden, between the years 1750 and 1755, a thing called Coriolanus, or the Roman Matron. That Julius Casar was adapted to the taste of early eighteenth-century playgoers by Dryden and Davenant has already been observed; and I may now add, that the same tragedy gave John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, hints for two plays-one being an alteration of the original, with the same name, and with a Prologue and Chorus; and the other, the Tragedy of Marcus Brutus. No play of Shakespeare's has escaped embroidery better than Anthony and Cleopatra, which, in the middle of last century, was 'fitted for the stage by abridging only,' and never at any time received gifts of clay from Tate, Shadwell, Cibber, Dennis, the renowned Marsh, or the illustrious Hull. Abridged, and only abridged, the splendid play has reached the very threshold of our de-poetised time, a practicable acting drama. There must have been alterations of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, for the stage; but I shall here confess my inability to adduce any instance of editorial dealing with this play, till within the past thirty years or so, when Mr. Phelps undertook the enormously difficult task of placing it upon the stage during his management of Sadler's Wells. With vast pains, and with a conscientious desire to retain as much as possible of the drama, Mr. Phelps made. something presentable out of this work; and a thankless office was that which, in his Shakespearian

VOL. XXI.

zeal, he had taken on himself. The ingenuity displayed in solving the problem, how to place Pericles on the stage without public scandal, and yet without importation of lines foreign to the author, was truly admirable. But it was all wasted labour, or nearly. Shakespearians were not, and could not be, satisfied; while non Shakespearians would perhaps have been better pleased with an adaptation departing widely from the original. Cymbeline and King Lear, if we may call them historical plays, being as remotely legendary as Hamlet itself, complete this category. Of Cymbe line four adaptations have been made. The first, in 1682, was by the farcical and licentious Tom d'Urfey, who, with ill-assumed gravity of sentiment, presented the town with the Injured Princess, or the Fatal Wager. The renowned Marsh followed, in another generation, with his idea of the play. Hawkins came quickly after with a version neither better nor worse; and lastly, Garrick. King Learwith everything made right and pleasant at the end, and only wanting the fairy's change of characters to harlequin, columbine, pantaloon, and clown-was given either by Nahum Tate in the seventeenth, or George Colman in the eighteenth, century. I cannot now certify which of the two did this cruel thing, though I know that both revised and altered King Lear. It was Hazlitt who supplied the best commentary on the change of climax, by simply echoing the words of the faithful Kent:

'Vex not his ghost! Oh, let him pass! He hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer.'

Whosoever thinks that Titus Andronicus was, or could have been, written by William Shakespeare is welcome to his opinion. The mon

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