Romantic Readers by Jackson H. J

Author:Jackson, H. J. [Jackson, H. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300129496
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2005-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Here one sensitive critic challenges another on his own ground, assessing the emotional effect of the scene by subjective experience.

Keats responded to the editors and textual critics of Shakespeare less favorably than to Hazlitt. Zachariah Jackson’s proposed emendations of Shakespeare’s lines, under the title Shakespeare’s Genius Justified, contains no marginal lines of approval. Keats enters into the debate about Shakespeare’s diction, as other readers of his time (and of this volume) did, by rejecting Jackson’s alternatives and explanations and offering a few of his own. The idea that Cleopatra should have said that Antony’s “reared arm clefted “ the world (as opposed to “crested”), for example, gets a cross and a mild rebuke, “Doltish—’tis a glorious simile from heraldry,” with a little drawing of an heraldic raised arm (313). Jackson, however, was easy to dismiss; Samuel Johnson less so. In the tiny volumes of the 1814 set of Shakespeare that Keats bought in 1817 and took with him to Italy, there is no room for textual notes and very little for editorial apparatus of any kind, but the publishers did include the final judgment of Johnson or Steevens, extracted from their comprehensive edition, at the end of each play.35 There is likewise little room for manuscript notes by a reader, except for whatever blank space there might be following their brief statements. In these little volumes, besides making a handful of brief and conventional remarks about the text, Keats did a curious thing. In response to Johnson’s or Steevens’s verdicts on nine plays, he wrote not his own opinion in his own words but a line or two from the play, turning Shakespeare ‘s words against the critic. (The one exception is Titus Andronicus, defended with a line from Julius Caesar) In most cases he also roughly crossed out the objectionable criticism. This game is not entirely fair, for the editors were often defending Shakespeare against still harsher judgments, but their remarks were too cautiously balanced for Keats, and in any case the game is amusing. Keats may have added quotations as he reread each play, building up a little collection: the four quotations from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, are not in the order in which they appear in the text of the play. Sometimes he had to adapt a line to make it work, so “Such tricks hath strong imagination” in that play is converted to “Such tricks hath weak imagination,” and Audrey’s question in As You Like It III iii, “I do not know what ‘poetical’ is: is it honest in deed and word? is it a true thing?” becomes “Is Criticism a true thing?”—an allusion rather than a quotation—in Keats’s note. The selection is subtle: Keats does not pick out casual abuse but makes a clever application of dialogue. For Antony and Cleopatra, for example, he chooses Charmian’s lines from V ii: “Your Crown’s awry/I’ll mend it.” Keats eventually gave these volumes to Severn, who could be counted on to appreciate the whimsy of the

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