Ironically, William Warburton, the acerbic bishop of whom John Nichols wrote, “In his youth he was a member of the debating society. It was a skill he never lost,” was the first editor of Shakespeare's Works to stress the beauties of the pastoral passages in The Winter's Tale.¹ Nicholas Rowe, the writer of she-tragedies, attempted to intensify the dramatic, potentially tragic, early sections of the play by adding punctuation.² Alexander Pope, from whom Warburton learned the value of indicating preferred passages, commended to his readers only two speeches, both from the first half of the drama.³ Lewis Theobald and Sir Thomas Hanmer, on the other hand, provided important links to the pastoral emphasis in Warburton's edition by focusing his attention on specific areas of text. Neither of these predecessors, however, seemed as intellectually committed to the second half of the play as was Warburton. Responding to the intensified debates on the Sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque that dominated the period, he sent their echoes reverberating through his text.

Warburton's edition appeared eight years after the publication of William Smith's popular translation of Longinus' On the Sublime.⁴ The English work that went into several editions challenged previously accepted standards for literary excellence, demolishing the primacy of neo-classical rules. In the “Notes and Observations” section, Smith, relying on Longinian precepts, found new and hitherto unacclaimed beauties in Shakespeare's writings.⁵ As Atkins observes,

By 1740 the tentative challenge of the preceding years gathered strength and assurance; and critics, extending their view over wider fields of literature, influenced also by suggestions from various quarters, now prepared the way for the ultimate rejection of that [neoclassical] body of theory.⁶

Affected by the debates among critics, poets too re-examined their aims. Men like Collins, Gray, and the Wartons turned to the outdoors—to external nature and to simple rural characters—for their material.⁷ Seeking to evoke from their readers an emotional response approximating the sublime experience described by Longinus, they indulged in vivid descriptions of nature's minutest changes. Their work, along with much of the other poetry of the mid-century, has been described as characterizing

The “sublime style” … one in which descriptive words, especially adjectives, verbs turned into adjectives, and long periodic passages of description predominate; action is at a minimum; wit and irony disappear.⁸

To compensate for the diminution of action and wit, these poets expanded their work to include philosophical musings, discovering analogues to man's behaviour in the constantly changing cycles of nature. Descriptions of natural phenomena are interspersed with contemplative passages on life and death and the transitoriness of man's existence.

Peripherally the aesthetic upheaval also affected the graphic arts. Painters, like poets, looked at the countryside around them or invented landscapes of awe-inspiring proportions. Seeking to translate Longinian precepts visually, they attempted to interpret the sublime by relying on wild, exciting, or terrifying subject matter. They also created more intimate outdoor scenes populated by rural characters. Landscapes, enthusiastically purchased by the wealthy to decorate their homes, predominated. Elizabeth Manwaring describes this:

Never … was understanding of art, or pretense of understanding it, so essential for the well-bred English person as from 1740 on through the opening of the nineteenth century; and the new art of landscape painting occupied a position of increasing importance. … It is hard for us today to realize the importance of the print in determining the mode in which the eighteenth century regarded nature.⁹

The vogue for landscapes permeated book illustration as well. In the editions of Shakespeare's Works published in the early 1740s, outdoor scenes, rather than single portraits of individual characters or highly charged emotional confrontations between two principals, dominate. The visual as well as the literary arts helped entrench “nature,” and Warburton, in his edition of The Winter's Tale, responded to their frequently merged power in the passages he chose to commend, in his few brief incursions into character criticism, and in his overview of the text.

Introducing almost every play with a general statement which his subsequent comments substantiate, Warburton writes of The Winter's Tale:

This play throughout is written in the very spirit of its author. And in telling this homely and simple, tho' agreeable, country tale

“Our sweetest Shakespear, fancy's child,
Warbles his native wood notes wild.”

Milton.

This was necessary to observe in mere justice to the Play, as the meanness of the fable, and the extravagant conduct of it, has misled some of great name [Dryden and Pope] into a wrong judgment of its merit; which as far as it regards sentiment and character, is scarce inferior to any in the whole collection.¹⁰

Although its neo-classical flaws—among them the extravagant conduct of the fable which ranges widely in time and place and defies the rules of probability—are still mentioned, they have receded in importance before an aesthetics which emphasizes external nature and wildness. We are asked to listen for Shakespeare's “native wood notes” as they resound throughout the play and to reexamine the characterization and “sentiment.” Neither the emotional conflicts between Leontes and Hermione, Leontes and Camillo, and Leontes and Paulina, nor Polixenes' thoughts of his son engage Warburton. His ears are attuned to the woodland notes of the natural and pastoral characters.

Logically, therefore, the first extended series of double commas, Warburton's designation for favored passages, coincides with the moment when Shakespeare, near the close of Act III, through the Old Shepherd's bouncing staccato-like phrases, dramatically rotates the emphasis of the play from serious drama with a potential for tragedy to “homely” pastoral romantic comedy. Although both the Clowne and Shepherd witness the deaths of Antigonus and the ship's crew, their involvement is with life not death. In contrast to the heavy characters with serious business of the early scenes, these rustics, through their patterns of speech, immediately identify themselves as comics. The passage, an assemblage of choppy, disconnected phrases with one observation breathlessly overtaking another, introduces us to the Shepherd (III.iii.66-81). We become aware of the natural elements—the weather, the animals, and the landscape—which impinge upon and shape his existence. Unlike Polixenes' reminiscences of his son (I.ii.198-204), marked as felicitous by Pope, this father's words are devoid of introspection or any deep philosophical meaning. Youth and age, the weather, disappearing sheep, and the behind-door misadventures of a gentlewoman follow in quick disorganized succession.

The scene continues with the entrance of the Clowne. Skipping the brief exchanges between father and son, Warburton next encloses with commas the entire description of the storm at sea and the death of Antigonus. We are treated to a speech emphasizing the insignificance and helplessness of man in relation to the vast and awe-inspiring in nature and the terribleness and ferocity of a wild animal. Comparable to some of Smith's examples of the sublime in his “Notes and Observations,” the passage (III.iii.95-108) seems tailored to the new aesthetics.

The Clowne, the child of rough, untamed, unrefined nature, responds to the conflict between man and his environment with both awe and terror, identifying first with man, then with the elements. “How he cride to mee for helpe … how the poore soules roared,” he sympathetically exclaims. Noting that their roars were to no avail, he then describes in far greater detail the natural phenomena, conveying an impression of admiration and praise for nature's wonders, and identifying himself almost equally with the human and animal aspects of his being. Both through its description and through the delineation of the character of the natural, the speech echoes theories of the sublime.¹¹

Further corroborating its timely appeal is the single illustration of the play in Theobald's second edition (1740).¹² Depicting the churning sea and tossing ship, although the caption deceptively reads “This is fairy gold, boy!” (III.iii.127), the illustration emphasizes not the three characters but the natural phenomena that surround and overwhelm them. The old man kneeling over the infant in the foreground, and the Clowne, standing unobtrusively on the left pointing to the sinking ship, are confined to the bottom third of the vertical space. The raging sea “flapdragonning” the ship predominates. Rather than attempt to represent pictorially a moment of conflict among the characters, the artist has chosen to translate graphically a speech that describes an awe-inspiring natural phenomenon. Unlike later illustrations for the play, the scene depicted with such intensity in the 1740 edition never actually occurs on the stage; it does, however, satisfy the contemporary craving for landscapes and testifies to the importance of illustration as a valuable nonverbal manifestation of contemporary literary theory.¹³

Warburton also seems to subscribe to contemporary aesthetic theories in his next scene extensively marked as “most deserving of the reader's attention.” Unlike the preceding one, it is written in verse, not prose, and it concentrates on intimate descriptions of nature with their possible analogues to human behaviour rather than on the sublime that satisfies the soul's “invincible love of grandeur.”¹⁴ And once again a parallel exists in the visual arts: the illustration in Hanmer's 1744 edition of Shakespeare.¹⁵ Like the Shepherd-Clowne scene, Perdita's distribution of the flowers is the only other passage for which a contemporary illustration exists. The engraving, drawn by Francis Hayman and executed by Gravelot, depicts the moment when Perdita presents rosemary and rue to Polixenes and Camillo. Eight characters, divided into three easily identifiable groups, distribute themselves in the foreground. The group on the left consists of a trio of shepherds: Mopsa and Dorcas stand slightly behind the seated Old Shepherd, whose gaze is directed at Perdita, the dominant figure in the central group. Flanked by the Prince on the left and the Clowne on the right, she appears to be addressing the disguised twosome of the third and final group, Polixenes and Camillo.

Despite the number of figures, the illustration's major area is dominated by the outdoors. Huge trees, shading the thatched roof of the shepherd's cottage, sprawl beyond the limits of the space. As in the earlier engraving of the storm scene, the natural phenomena—in this instance the masses of foliage—first capture our attention. Again the artist relies on the simple compositional device of limiting his characters to the bottom third of the picture space without compensating for this limitation by such methods as the use of strong chiaroscuro around the figures. In the mode of the popular landscape painting of the period, he creates a picturesque rural landscape whose figures are incidental.

Thus the illustrations for the two editions of the 1740s preceding Warburton's have much in common. Both are rooted in nature—one stressing its sublimity, the other its picturesqueness—and both relate to aesthetic theories of the time. For the scene double-comma'd by Warburton is the central pastoral idyll in the long sheepshearing scene. Dominated by Perdita, and revolving around the art-nature debate, the scene—Warburton's (and Pope's) IV.v—opens with Florizel's announcement “See your guests approach” and closes with the Shepherd's promise “she shall bring him that / Which he not dreams of.” Warburton selectively edits the lines he encloses with commas and pares the passages down to the concentrated philosophical debate in which conversational patter is eliminated and diversity in external nature is seen as a mirror for man's existence.¹⁶

Quietly buried in this comparatively static pastoral scene are vivid descriptions drawn from nature. There is Perdita's apostrophe to the flowers, her analogy of the ages of man with the seasons of the year, and her debate with Polixenes. Nature, the flowers, the seasons, and man's relationship to them are intertwined: “rosemary and rue” sustain man through the cold and barren winter; marigolds, summer flowers, parallel his middle age, a period that speeds by consumed in sleepy forgetfulness, as do the hours between dusk and dawn. Like the flowers going to bed with the sun, man, at the youthful edge of middle age, rises at daybreak weeping for the elusive, lost years. And in the last speech, a joyous paean to spring—to its youth and hopefulness—the personification of “pale primroses,” injecting a note of melancholy, helps retain the interrelationship of nature and man.

Sherburn, characterizing the new tendencies that were beginning to appear in the poetry of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, observes that “descriptive poetry is habitually blended with moralizing.”¹⁷ He might with equal aptness have applied these words to Shakespeare's passages above. Distributing the flowers of the season according to their natural qualities, their length of life, their colors, their season of appearance, and the common associations which man has attached to them, Perdita too blends moralizing with descriptions. By introducing the words “death” and “birth” as well as “trembling winter,” she heightens the emotional force of a simple reference to autumn, while in her discussion of “gilly flowers” she is not interested in their shape, color, or scent, but only in their connotations. Polixenes, too, expostulating on revitalizing the race (ironic in view of the position he takes at the close of the scene), relies on metaphors from nature to cloak his ideas.

Here then are examples of the influence on Warburton of the visual material in texts that preceded his. While this correlation between illustrations and commended passages suggests the impinging of the new aesthetics on reactions to Shakespeare's texts, it does not indicate the more direct influence on Warburton of Theobald and Hanmer. For these men, with whom he corresponded and then argued, these men with whom he had hoped, at different times, to collaborate, eventually became his adversaries. As a result, he examined their texts most carefully. He debated their emendations and scoffed at their misinterpretations. When, on the other hand, he found their emendations or notes acceptable, Warburton's reactions took two major directions—to write, competitively, on an adjacent section of text, or to appropriate as his own some of the textual alterations. The former method he applied to Theobald's texts, the latter to Hanmer's.

We read, for example, Theobald's analysis of the concept that Time would both “make and unfold error” (IV.i.4). Guided by logic and the “clearest reasoning,” as he proposes in his “Preface,” Theobald emends to “maske and unfold Error.”¹⁸ Warburton, guided by the same clear reasoning as well as by Theobald's focus on Time's speech, chooses to emend the phrase “growth untride” (IV.i.8). “Growth of what?” he queries, altering to “gulf untry'd” (1747:I.ii.328), thus stumbling into an unnecessary emendation that arouses the scorn of his critics. “If he had … read the next four words,” writes Heath, “Shakespeare himself would have told him the growth of what, to wit, ‘the growth of that wide gap of time which had intervened.’ … that is sixteen years.”¹⁹

Hanmer's infamous “Bithynia” also probably had its roots in the fertile soil of dispute involving Warburton and Theobald. For the 1733 edition contains a note and suggested emendation by Warburton changing “Fertile the Isle” to “Fertile the Soil.”²⁰ In his usual tactless way, Theobald then extensively rebuts the note, observing that a far greater blunder exists—that of making Bohemia a maritime country. We know that during 1736-37 Hanmer and Warburton were on friendly terms.²¹ Is it not possible that Hanmer's “Bithynia” was nourished into existence during this period?

Credit for Hanmer's more acceptable comments and emendations, however, does not appear in late eighteenth or nineteenth-century editions. According to Giles Dawson, Warburton may have contributed to this anonymity and to Hanmer's skewed fame, one resting primarily on the “Bithynia” blunder rather than on any more modest and valuable comments.²² Writing at a time when there was a surge of interest in lexicography, Hanmer chose in his footnotes to explore archaisms in the text and obscure terms “not arising from words but from reference to some antiquated customs now forgotten.”²³ Because the language of comedy, being the vernacular speech of the period, tends to become obsolete more swiftly than that of tragedy, Hanmer's notes on language center on the speeches of Autolicus and the Rustics. We read, for example, Hanmer's explication of “unrold” in the Pedlar's line, “Let me be unrold, and my name put in the books of Vertue” (IV.iii.123-24):

Alluding to the societies into which the notorious cheats and gypsies inroll themselves.

(1744:II.556)

Competition, rivalry, and bitterness perhaps led Warburton to vary the note sufficiently to eliminate any references to the Oxford editor:

Begging gipsies, in the time of our author, were in gangs and companies, that had something of the shew of an incorporated Body. From this noble society he wishes he may be unrolled if he does not so and so.

(1747:III.336)

Hanmer's note fades into obscurity. Warburton's is adopted by subsequent editors.²⁴ Dawson believes that Warburton, not Hanmer, was the editor of the 1745 text. In that edition many of the silent emendations found in Hanmer's 1744 work have been carefully annotated. Frequently they have been attributed to Warburton. If, as Dawson claims, the work was Warburton's, the ascription of some of these emendations may be suspect. Furthermore, in that text, most other editors and critics are acknowledged, Hanmer's contributions are merely noted by the phrase “old edit.” Many of these same textual notes subsequently appear in Warburton's 1747 edition. Were the emendations and notes the result of correspondence between Warburton and Hanmer? No evidence to corroborate this exists. A comparison of the 1744 Oxford edition with the 1747 Warburton edition, however, reveals several similarities or silent borrowings. Thus did Warburton effectively obliterate the more positive contributions of the man with whom he had corresponded and who chose not to invite him into editorial collaboration.

Despite these flaws in his methodology, however, and his tendency to substitute for a well-authenticated reading “a fancy of his own,” Warburton, particularly in those passages marked for their “beauties,” is neither eclectic nor arbitrary. Nor does he choose disputatious passages. Rather, his edition seems to reflect a generally awakened interest in Shakespeare's nature poetry and in the rural scenes in the play. When he writes to Garrick, upon receipt of the latter's Florizel and Perdita, “You have in your additions … written up to the best scenes in the play,” he expresses his own convictions, and illustrates his compatibility with mid-eighteenth-century aesthetics.²⁵

Not only in those passages mentioned earlier, for which illustrations exist, but also in his choice of “beauties” for which no illustrations exist, he reveals this interest in the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. Varying in length, from isolated speeches to brief snatches of dialogue, and in style, from prose to verse, the passages remain concentrated in the countryside. Those in prose center upon the Clowne, illuminating his character through a series of contrasts. Like a painter's use of grays in which one tone becomes a light and the other a dark when contrapuntally set against one another, Shakespeare's Clowne, contrasted first with the old Shepherd and then with Autolicus, acquires a positive form through these relationships.

Warburton commends to his readers the first meeting between Autolicus and the Clowne, their reencounter at the close of Act IV, and their final confrontation after the Clowne has been dubbed a “gentleman.” Emphasizing the contrast between the clown and the jester, between the true innocent whose naiveté amuses and the scamp whose antics entertain, he establishes the relationship in his first series of marked passages:

AUTOLICUS.
A fellow, Sir, that I have known to go about with trol-my-dames: I knew him once a servant of the prince; I cannot tell, good Sir, for which of his virtues it was, but he was certainly whipp'd out of the court.
CLOWNE.
His vices, you would say; there's no virtue whipp'd out of the court; they cherish it to make it stay there, and yet it will no more but abide.
AUTOLICUS.
Vices I would say, Sir. I know this man well, he hath been since an ape-bearer, then a process-server, a bailiff; then he compass'd a motion of the prodigal son, and married a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies; and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in a rogue.

(IV.iii.88-101)

When Samuel Johnson turned to this section, he presented a moral interpretation of the Clowne's lines.²⁶

I believe that Warburton's interest in them, however, is primarily for the insights they provide into the Clowne's character. I suggest this motivation because of the parallel that exists between the series of speeches of the Clowne and Autolicus marked for special reader attention and the few footnotes on character analysis, the first in a text, that Warburton introduces into The Winter's Tale. Both in those footnotes—on Perdita and the Old Shepherd—discussed later in this article, and in these marked passages the emphasis is on revealing character through antithesis. Here Warburton stresses the contrast between the natural man and the sophisticated conniver, between the response of the Clowne who protests Autolicus' reference to “virtues” being whipped out of court and the response of the nimble-tongued peddler who improvises an elaborate history of a rogue's progress—his own. The outlines of the portrait are set in Act III. Recollecting the Clowne's vivid, picturesque description of the shipwreck and contrasting it with his stumbling, inept observations to Autolicus, we conclude that he is more at home among the untamed elements, as of a man born to know them, than among his fellow men.

Further to illuminate the Clowne's personality, Shakespeare shifts from conversation as a mode of revealing character to direct observation within the framework of the text. Warburton seizes upon the altered perspective for double commas. He next encloses Autolicus' succinct appraisal of Shepherd and Clowne:

How bless'd are we, that are not simple men!
Yet Nature might have made me as these are,
Therefore I will not disdain.

(IV.iv.833-35)

Read either as total soliloquy or as broken line whose first half is addressed to the rustics, the speech sharpens the distinction between the sophisticate and the gullible—between the “civilized” and the “simple.”

Later in the same scene the Clowne counters Autolicus' observations above. If the peddler feels blessed that he is not a simple man, glorying in his worldliness and sophistication, the Clowne perceives these qualities differently. To him authority, greatness, and eminence have other associations. They are related to corruptibility; their external manifestations are easily discerned, lending themselves to imitation. Warburton commends these speeches, complements to Autolicus' earlier lines, to his readers:

He seemes to be the more Noble, in being fantasticall: A great man, Ile warrant; I know by the picking on's Teeth.

(IV.iv.839-41)

… and tho' authority be a stubborn Bear, yet he is oft led by the nose with gold. …

(IV.iv.888-89)

Finally, Warburton's double-commas indicate the ironic coming of age of the Clowne. Still an innocent but on his way to becoming corruptibly civilized, having been created a “gentleman” by act of the King, the Clowne asserts,

You denied to fight with me this other day, because I was no gentleman born: see you these cloaths? say, you see them not, and think me still no gentleman born.

(V.ii.129-32)

In his challenge to Autolicus we hear the clown confronting the jester, the innocent natural of limited intelligence confronting the sophisticated comic who relies on guile and the gullibility of most men. Enid Welsford in her study of The Fool presents the ancestors of both these characters—the Clowne and Autolicus—who meet in The Winter's Tale and whose several confrontations Warburton chooses to emphasize.²⁷

Aside from this method of characterization that relies on the constant interplay between the two characters, Shakespeare occasionally pauses to paint, with broad strokes, a surface portrait, divorced from the general progression of his play but bringing to life a character who, through contrast with those on stage, illuminates the quality of the moment. When the Old Shepherd, reprimanding Perdita for her aloofness at the sheepshearing, introduces the description of his now dead but formerly very alive wife, he helps establish the idyllic pastoral quality of the scene—the antithesis of normal peasant festivities.

Fie, daughter; when my old wife liv'd, upon
This day she was both pantler, butler, cook
Both dame and servant; welcom'd all, serv'd all;
Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here
At upper end o'th'table, now i'th'middle:
On his shoulder, and his; her face o'fire
With labour; and the thing she took to quench it
She would to each one sip.

(IV.iv.66-73)

Warburton's choice has a dual significance. On the one hand, the editor is singling out a set speech, completely pictorial in nature, in which the rustic is celebrated and the rural life portrayed. On the other hand, he is directing us to an awareness of the basic conflict between Perdita and the Shepherd, a conflict between the natural Shepherd and this enigmatic child whom he has reared—a conflict between nature and nurture in which nurture cannot deny nature.

The passage, however, does more than describe a prototype. Though written in poetry, it retains the simple language of the peasant, exemplifying the Longinian theory that sometimes “vulgar” terminology may be more “significant than the most ornamental” language because it returns to the basic common truth, rejecting the sophistry of the more polished, less direct statement.²⁸ At a time when Joseph Warton is promising to “bring back poetry into its right channel,” Warburton, through this marked speech, is reminding readers of the timeliness of Shakespeare's verse.²⁹

Sensitive also to its uniqueness, Warburton occasionally deserts the rustics in his selection of “beauties,” choosing phrases and speeches by members of the court circle. Intensely aware of the subtle nuances of meaning of words, and responsive to the effectiveness of their unusual juxtaposition, he expands his horizon to include lines less earthbound than those of the Clowne and Shepherd: poetry from the mouths of Hermione, Florizel, and Leontes. The editor marks with commas Hermione's personification of tyranny in her defence at the trial. “And Tyrannie / Tremble at Patience” (III.ii.33-34), she exclaims prophetically in a line loaded with both a present and future meaning. During the course of the play, not only tyranny but also the tyrant, Leontes, will learn to “tremble at patience.” In another example, the most concise of the group, Warburton limits himself to the last phrase. Florizel, extravagantly praising Perdita's beauty, compares her hand in its softness to “a dove's down,” in its whiteness to the “Ethiopian's tooth,” and then, charging the simile with added drama, to “The fann'd snow / That's bolted by the northern blast twice o'er” (IV.iv.393-94).

In his “Preface” Warburton mentions the various areas into which Shakespeare's beauties fall: “Style, Thought, Sentiment, Character, or Composition” (1747:I.xvii-xviii). Since Florizel's line exemplifies stylistic brilliance Warburton could, without destroying the meaning, crop it to its most original phrase. When, however, the strength of a passage lies in the depth of thought or method of composition, the entire speech, not merely an artistically woven group of words lifted out of context, must be included. Therefore Warburton commends in its entirety Leontes' bitter speech of hate spewed out upon hearing of Camillo's secret, hasty departure. By creating the apparently simple analogy between knowledge of evil and susceptibility to a spider's poison, Shakespeare reveals the deceptive technique of the King:

                                                  There may be in the Cup
A Spider steep'd, and one may drinke; depart,
And yet partake no venome: (for his knowledge
Is not infected) but if one present
Th'abhor'd Ingredient to his eye, make knowne
How he hath drunke, he cracks his gorge, his sides
With violent Hests: I have drunke, and seene the Spider.

(II.i.54-60)

At this moment in the play the analogy seems to work. The long lines with their complicated thought development and equally complex syntax contrast with the short, simple, forcefully enunciated conclusion—“I have drunke, and seene the Spider”—obscuring the basic irrationality of Leontes' statement. For one cannot “drinke … / And yet partake no venome,” unless there is no poison. Leontes immerses an illusory spider into the cup—an apparition of a spider—and, drinking from an uninfected cup, poisons it with his imagination.

Warburton's sensitivity to the nuances of language, his disputatious nature, and his drive for textual logic contributed to the strengths and weaknesses of his edition. On the one hand they led to his overindulgence in emendation, on the other to his wide selection of commendable passages. Threading through his work, these “beauties” link contemporary aesthetic theories to new attitudes towards Shakespeare's plays. They also support an important innovation in 1747—the inclusion of character analysis in the footnotes.

Prior to Warburton's edition, criticism not directly linked with specific words and their meanings remained outside the sphere of the textual editor. Here, however briefly, Warburton incorporates criticism into the commentary. Coinciding with the publication of books on acting, with the increased seriousness with which managers were offering professional training to actors, and with the audible responsiveness of audiences to good or bad performances, Warburton's brief character notes also anticipate the later flowering of psychological analysis of motivation of character.³⁰ Through the lavish marking of felicitous passages in the scene in which these notes appear, he further attracts the readers' attention.

Only two characters—the Old Shepherd and Perdita—are scrutinized in any detail in this edition. Primarily the notes are found in the scene after the unmasking of Polixenes in Act IV (iv.493-511; 1747:III.351-52). They illuminate the contrasted responses of father and daughter to Polixenes' wrath. Warburton commends most of their speeches, then enlarges upon the differences between the characters in accompanying notes.³¹

The Shepherd's speech (506-11), a hysterical outburst of selfishness, stresses the pettiness of his mind. In the extremity of this self-pity, it also acquires a comic quality. Warburton briefly comments:

These sentiments, which the Poet has heighten'd by a strain of ridicule that runs thro' them, admirably characterize the speaker; whose selfishness is seen in concealing the adventure of Perdita; and here supported, by shewing no regard for his son or her, but being taken up entirely with himself, though “fourscore three.”

(1747:III.352)

Perdita is slightly more fully defined by Warburton, both indirectly and directly. The first reference grows out of his criticism of Hanmer's emendation of “sworn” to “swoon” in Perdita's line “I should blush / To see you so attired; sworn, I think, / To shew myself a glass” (IV.iv.17-18). The second is a more direct summary of her character, unattached to any emendation.

In refuting Hanmer's change, Warburton writes, “Perdita was not so much given to ‘swooning,’ as appears by her behaviour at the King's threats when the intrigue was discovered” (1747.III.337). Taking exception to the Oxford emendation while at the same time defining her character, he continues, “the sentiment is fine, and expresses all the delicacy, as well as humble modesty of the character” (Ibid.). When later in the act, Polixenes rips off his disguise, Warburton both encloses with commas Perdita's lines beginning “I was not so much afraid” (IV.iv.493) and supplements his earlier note:

To have made her quite astonished on the king's discovery of himself, had not become her birth; and to have given her presence of mind to have made this reply to the King, had not become her education.

(1747.III.351)

With the same attachment to veracity with which he blows life into the Old Shepherd, Warburton seeks to explain the psychology behind Perdita's behaviour.

Thus, although many of Warburton's notes have the bite of a Hogarth etching, the total effect of his edition of The Winter's Tale is one of airy lightness resembling a Watteau landscape. Guilty of much unnecessary tampering with the text—in his zeal for accuracy and in his drive for personal recognition as well as in his overambitious attempts to denigrate his predecessors' accomplishments—he was also responsible for endowing the play with a new life—one in which the pastoral prevailed—one which helped The Winter's Tale climb out of the closet onto the stage. In the sequence of the play's progress from text to stage, Warburton, a man of his times—sophisticated, cultured, but above all disputatious—provided the significant textual link. Theobald had raised the question of the time scene; Hanmer illuminated the freshness of the character of Autolicus; it remained for Warburton, immersing the reader in the outdoor landscape, to complete the cycle from the earlier to the later section of the play.

Notes

1. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812), V, 598.

2. The lineation as well as the scene and act divisions throughout this article are from: Horace Howard Furness, ed., The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare, New Variorum, 6th ed. (Philadelphia, 1898). Reference is also made to Nicholas Rowe, ed., Works, by William Shakespeare (London, 1709). Rowe's most effective device was the dash. At times he employed it to help dramatize the interruption of one speaker by another or to indicate confusion in the mind of the character speaking. At other times, he inserted the dash to suggest the unexpressed, incompletely formulated thoughts lying behind the few phrases finally formalized into language, thus emphasizing the disjointedness between expressed ideas in a single speech. For further discussion of Rowe's technique, see Irene Dash, “Changing Attitudes Towards Shakespeare as Reflected in Editions and Staged Adaptations of The Winter's Tale from 1703 to 1762,” Diss. Columbia 1971, chapter II.

3. The speeches are Polixenes' nostalgic description of his relationship with his young son (I.ii.198-204) and Paulina's condemnation of Leontes (III.ii.223-30).

4. Dionysius Longinus, On the Sublime, translated from the Greek, with Notes and Observations by William Smith, 2nd ed. corrected and revised (London, 1743).

5. Ibid., pp. 135-40, 151-55, 169.

6. John William Hey Atkins, English Literary Criticism (London, 1951; rpt. London, University Paperbacks, 1966), p. 186.

7. See especially, James Thomson, preface to “Winter” (1726).

8. Ricardo Quintana and Alvin Whitley, eds., English Poetry of the Mid and Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 16.

9. Elizabeth Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925), p. 227.

10. William Warburton, ed., Works, by William Shakespeare (London, 1747) III,277. This edition will hereafter be cited as Warburton, Shakespeare. References to Warburton's edition in the text include date of publication as well as volume and page number.

11. Smith, Sublime, p. 170.

12. Lewis Theobald, ed., Works, by William Shakespeare (London, 1740), III.

13. Ralph Cohen, The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's “The Seasons” and The Language of Criticism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), pp. 2, 250-54.

14. Smith, Sublime, p. 84.

15. Sir Thomas Hanmer, ed., Works, by William Shakespeare (London, 1744), II, 502.

16. I am considering these passages sequentially as one unit: IV.iv.86-89, 93-99, 102-4, 106-14, 118-27, 130-49; 1747: III.339-41.

17. George Sherburn, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), p. 934.

18. Lewis Theobald, ed., Works, by William Shakespeare (London, 1733), I, xxxix, xliii, xl; III, 113.

19. Benjamin Heath, A Revisal of Shakespeare's Text wherein the alterations introduced into it by the more modern Editors and Critics, are particularly considered (London, 1765), p. 214.

20. Theobald, Shakespeare (1733), III, 98-99.

21. David Nichol Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (1928; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. liv-lvi.

22. Giles E. Dawson, “Warburton, Hanmer, and the 1745 Edition of Shakespeare,” Studies in Bibliography, II (1949), 35-48.

23. De Witt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes, The English Dictionary From Cawdrey to Johnson 1604-1755 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1946), pp. 117-126; Hanmer, Shakespeare (1744), I,v.

24. For other examples and a complete discussion of Hanmer's notes see Irene Dash, Diss., chapter V.

25. James Boaden, ed., Private Correspondence of David Garrick (London, 1831-33), I, 88.

26. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed., Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), VII, 302. Johnson skeptically observes that virtue is an elusive quality, at best a temporary resident in any one place. It may “sojourn” at court for a while, but it has no “settled habitation.”

27. Enid Welsford, The Fool (1935; rpt. New York: Anchor, 1961).

28. Smith, Sublime, p. 72.

29. Joseph Warton, Odes on Various Subjects (London, 1746), Advertisement [Preface].

30. David Nichol Smith, Eighteenth Century Essays in Shakespeare (1903; 2nd rev. ed., London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), xxxii-xxxvii; Arthur H. Scouten, ed., The London Stage, Part 3 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1961), I, cxxvi; The Prompter (London), The Prompter; A Theatrical Paper (1734-1736) by Aaron Hill and William Popple, eds. William W. Appleton and Kalman A. Burnim (New York: B. Blom, 1966), pp. 64-75, 83-84, 109-13.

31. This is IV.viii in both Pope's and Warburton's editions. Pope was the first to separate this duologue into a separate scene. For further discussion of Pope's technique, see Irene Dash, “The Touch of the Poet,” Modern Language Studies, 4 (1974), 59-65.