That the propositions we have endeavored to establish have a direct bearing in various ways upon the qualifications of whoever undertakes to edit the works of Shakspeare will, we think, be apparent to those who consider the matter. The hold which Shakspeare has acquired and maintained upon minds so many and so various, in so many vital respects utterly unsympathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. That he has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own Falstaff was the cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of the foolishness that was in other men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon his metres, and Dr. Johnson on his imagination,) must be apparent to every one,--and also that his genius and its manifestations are so various, that there is no commentator but has been able to illustrate him from his own peculiar point of view or from the results of his own favorite studies. But to show that he was a good common-lawyer, that he understood the theory of colors, that he was an accurate botanist, a master of the science of medicine, especially in its relation to mental disease, a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and insight in politics,--all these, while they may very well form the staple of separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later parallel, are really outside the province of an editor.
That Shakspeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, we suspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it is inconceivable. That the "Tempest" was his latest work we have no doubt; and perhaps it is not considering too nicely to conjecture a profound personal meaning in it. Is it over-fanciful to think that in the master Prospero we have the type of Imagination? in Ariel, of the wonder-working and winged Fantasy? in Caliban, of the half-animal but serviceable Understanding, tormented by Fancy and the unwilling slave of Imagination? and that there is something of self-consciousness in the breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,--a sort of sad prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with neighbors? His thought had entered into every phase of human life and thought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found all empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works were as phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the rumor of the pit? However this may be, his works have come down to us in a condition of manifest and admitted corruption in some portions, while in others there is an obscurity which may be attributed either to an idiosyncratic use of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of intuition for a proper coalescence with which ordinary language is inadequate, to a concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the lighter links which bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a process of reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding them. We should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakspeare; second, enough logical acuteness of mind and metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite processes of thought; third, such a conviction of the supremacy of his author as always to prefer his thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling for music, and so much knowledge of the practice of other poets as to understand that Shakspeare's versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books; and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so great a familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in general, and of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakspeare, as will prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enable him to understand folly that the Gothic Shakspeare often superimposed upon the slender column of a single word, that seems to twist under it, but does not,--like the quaint shafts in cloisters,--a weight of meaning which the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly unjustifiable by correct principle.