NOTE BY WILLIAM J. ROLFE, Litt.D.
It is a tribute of no slight significance to Shakespeare’s skill in the delineation of character that we instinctively regard the personages in his mimic world as real men and women, and are not satisfied to think of them only as they appear on the stage. We like to follow them after they have left the scene, and to speculate concerning their subsequent history. The commentators on Much Ado, for instance, are not willing to dismiss Benedick and Beatrice when the play closes without discussing the question whether they probably “lived happily ever after.” Some, like Mrs. Jameson and the poet Campbell, have their misgivings about the future of the pair, fearing that “poor Benedick” will not escape the “predestinate scratched face” which he himself had predicted for the man who should woo and win that “infernal Até in good apparel,” as he called her; while others, like Verplanck, Charles Cowden-Clarke, Furnivall, and Gervinus, believe that their married life will be of “the brightest and sunniest.”
Some have gone back of the beginning of the plays, like Mrs. Cowden-Clarke in her Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, and Lady Martin (Helena Faucit) in her paper on Ophelia in Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters.
Others, like Mr. Adams, have made the experiment of continuing a play of Shakespeare in dramatic form. Ernest Renan, in France, and Mr. C. P. Cranch, in this country, have both done this in the case of The Tempest, mainly with the view of following out the possible adventures of Caliban after Prospero had left him to his own devices.
These and similar sequels to the plays are nowise meant as attempts to “improve” Shakespeare (like Nahum Tate’s version of Lear, that held the stage for a hundred and sixty years) and sundry other perversions of the plays in the eighteenth century, which have damned their presumptuous authors to everlasting infamy. They are what Renan, in his preface, calls his Caliban,—“an idealist’s fancy sketch, a simple fantasy of the imagination.”
Mr. Adams’s Sixth Act of The Merchant of Venice is an experiment of the same kind; not, as certain captious critics have regarded it, a foolhardy attempt to rival Shakespeare. It was originally written for an evening entertainment of the “Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association.” No one in that cultivated company misunderstood the author’s aim, and all heartily enjoyed it. I believe that it will give no less pleasure to the larger audience to whom it is now presented in print.