Lanterna Rally

Author: W. Hazlitt

Publisher:

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781503038363

From the PREFACE. When I proposed to myself the superintendence of a new edition of Langbaine, with the additional matter published by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, F.R.S., F.S.A., etc., in 1860, incorporated, I had no conception that beyond the entries and notes which I had gradually drawn together between 1860 and 1890, much would remain to be done. But during the process of amalgamating these insertions, I discovered on every page of the work a proof that my predecessor had discharged his task in a manner infinitely more negligent and perfunctory than I had supposed, and it became indispensable either to relinquish the undertaking, or to submit to the onerous duty of revising the volume from beginning to end. I was too warmly interested in my self-imposed labour to throw it up, and I had to face the sole honourable alternative. No one can even cursorily examine the two impressions side by side without perceiving how entirely the text has been castigated and improved; but, of course, it will be easy for many to point out where I have failed, or might have accomplished more. The Dictionary of Old English Plays of 1860 marked, of course, a great advance on Langbaine, but nothing in comparison with what it might have done in more careful and conscientious hands. There is, as the case stands, scarcely any form of error and misstatement from which the publication is free. The defects of every kind are rather those of the earlier book improperly retained than any for which Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is directly answerable. But that gentleman seldom put his whole strength into work not immediately associated with Shakespear, and we have here, no doubt, the result of casual and desultory jottings in an interleaved copy of Langbaine. The mischief is that a project of this sort, where the public demand is special and limited, however imperfect it may be, fills the room of a worthier book, and deprives those whose studies or researches are in a dramatic direction of the advantage of possessing a really useful Manual on the subject. The weakest portion of the original work, as it has so far appeared from time to time in print, is that which deals with the earlier dramatic literature. The group of productions nearest in point of date to Langbaine and his immediate followers is described with a fair degree of accuracy and completeness. But the remarkable feature in the edition of 1860 is that Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps should have not even attempted to improve a section of the undertaking which more directly lay within his favourite researches and sympathy, and should have permitted the grossest absurdities, corruptions, and fabrications to remain. While the 1860 volume fails to record a very considerable number of dramatic items of signal importance, and also omits essential particulars respecting many others which are given, a large amount of space is uselessly occupied by repetitions with slight differences of the same article under two or more heads, where a cross-reference at most would be sufficient ; and I may perhaps add that there is a great deal of inaccurate bibliographical detail, which is out of place in a descriptive catalogue of a literary cast, and can be obtained in a far more satisfactory shape in the present writer's Handbook and Collections Mid Notes, to which a General Index is nearly ready. It is as true of our dramatic literature, as it is of the general body of early English printed books, that the actual volume or output was not only far larger than our antiquaries in former days imagined, but that we shall probably never succeed in replenishing with all the treasures which it once possessed the old theatre and theatrical library, although it has fallen to our lot in the course of the last fifty years or so to regain much, which was either unknown or believed to be lost, both in type and in MS....