Courtly Vice

In the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, published in 1725, Pope boasted of having evolved a ‘shorter and less ostentatious method of performing the better half of Criticism (namely the pointing out an Author’s excellencies) than to fill a whole paper with citations of fine passages, with general Applauses, or empty Exclamations at the tail of them’. Pope’s new method has all the merits of simplicity and economy; ‘fine passages’ are indicated by the editor’s marginal commas, while a striking scene is heralded by a star printed at its head. Some of Pope’s editorial preferences - the Dover Cliff speech in King Lear and the quarrel scene in Julius Ccesar, for example - faithfully reflect the prevailing climate of critical opinion; others would seem to represent a deliberate effort to reassess plays unjustly neglected by Pope’s contemporaries, as when he selects five passages from Antony and Cleopatra. But in many cases Pope is evidently responding to the satirist in Shakespeare. Thus in As You Like It he marks Touchstone’s summary of his life at Court: ‘I have trod a measure, I have flatter’d a lady, I have been politick with my friend, smooth with mine enemy, I have undone three taylors…’ ¹ Quite as predictably he marks also Corin’s complementary vindication of the way of life enjoyed by the shepherd: ‘I earn that I eat; get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm….’ ² This firm statement looks back to the exiled Duke’s first and famous speech in the forest of Arden, where the opposition 91between Court and country has already been sharply focused: ‘… are not these woods/More free from peril than the envious court ?’; of this speech, too, Pope approves. Again, in Cymbeline he commends Belisarius’s passionate and sustained defence of a quiet rural life as against the miseries and uncertainties of court and city. ¹ Pope’s editorial choices remind us of the well-established links between pastoral and satirical poetry, and point forward to his own creation, in To Bethel, of a poem that is at once satire and pastoral.