appreciation of the romantic comedies. And yet Rowe, so thoroughly
saturated with Restoration criticism, lists character after character
from these plays as instances of Shakespeare's ability to depict the
manners. Have we perhaps here a response to Shakespeare read as opposed
to Shakespeare seen? Certainly the romantic comedies could not stand the
test of the critical canons so well as did the _Merry Wives_ or even
_Othello_; and they were not much liked on the stage. But it seems
probable that a generation which read French romances would not have
felt especially hostile to the romantic comedies when read in the
closet. Rowe's criticism is so little original, so far from
idiosyncratic, that it is unnecessary to assume that his response to the
characters in the comedies is unique.

Be that as it may, it was well that at the moment when the reading
public began rapidly to expand in England, Tonson should have made
Shakespeare available in an attractive and convenient format; and it was
a happy choice that brought Rowe to the editorship of these six volumes.
As poet, playwright, and man of taste, Rowe was admirably fitted to
introduce Shakespeare to a multitude of new readers. Relatively innocent
of the technical duties of an editor though he was, he none the less was
capable of accomplishing what proved to be his historic mission: the
easy re-statement of a view of Shakespeare which Dryden had earlier
articulated and the demonstration that the plays could be read and
admired despite the objections of formal dramatic criticism. He is more
than a chronological predecessor of Pope, Johnson, and Morgann. The line
is direct from Shakespeare to Davenant, to Dryden, to Rowe; and he is an
organic link between this seventeenth-century tradition and the
increasingly rich Shakespeare scholarship and criticism that flowed
through the eighteenth century into the romantic era.