ABSTRACT
Issuing from an historical moment characterized by a profound cultural veneration of Shakespeare, the poem’s references to the destructive textual interventions of writers the likes of Colley Cibber and Nahum Tate assume a particular urgency. Playwright, actor and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber, one of the maligned objects of Pope’s satire in the four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), was, by 1750, notorious for his tasteless adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays.3 Nahum Tate, the other textual meddler from whom the ghost of Shakespeare seeks protection in the poem, had wreaked havoc with the tragic ending of Shakespeare’s play in his version of The History of King Lear in 1680.4 As Robert D. Hume has argued, these and other such appropriations, reworkings and plagiarisms of Shakespeare were common practice in Britain until as late as the 1740s, that is, before the rise of Bardology and its subsequent apogee in such significant cultural events as the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford in 1769, Edmond Malone’s supplementary edition of Shakespeare in 1780, and the opening of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in 1789 (Hume 1997). By 1750, the interventions of Cibber, Tate and others could be poetically figured in ‘Shakespeare’s Ghost’ as forms of attack upon the Bard which could only be rectified through the specific performative instructions of a spectral father. The irony here, of course, is that, as Hume has pointed out, Garrick would turn out to be anything but a textual purist, the actor-
turned-playwright himself taking great liberties with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his adaptation of the play in late 1772 (Hume 1997: 47). And yet, the poem’s appropriation of the script of Hamlet in the defence
of Shakespeare was anything but an isolated example. In 1772, Arthur Murphy, though not without mildly satirical effect, would rework significant portions of Hamlet in order to replay the scene of a father’s ghostly visitation of his son as a dialogue between the spectre of Shakespeare and the Hamlet-like Garrick: ‘I am Shakespeare’s Ghost, / For my foul sins, done in my days of nature, / Doom’d for a certain term to leave my works / Obscure and uncorrected’ (Vickers 1979: 466, 1-4). Though forbidden ‘to tell the pangs, / Which Genius feels from ev’ry
blockhead’s pen’ (11-12), the chilling tale that the spectre of Shakespeare here unfolds is rather more specific than that recounted in the earlier poem ‘Shakespeare’s Ghost’. The blood of Shakespeare stains the hands of one French assailant in particular:
‘Tis giv’n out, that in a barb’rous age Shakespeare arose, and made th’unskilful stare At monstrous farces; so the ear of Europe Is by the forged process of a Frenchman Rankly abus’d. But know, ungrateful man! The serpent that did sting thy poet’s fame Has made his fortune by him.
