Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem, and its
instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesans under a
somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success,--'vrai succes de
scandale s'il en fut'--even the potent influence and unequivocal example
of Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected or
infected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taint
or touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs of
perception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan.
But on taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic pamphlets
which might first attract him either by its double novelty as a never
acted play or by a title of yet more poetic and romantic associations
than its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed, with his mind
full of the sweet rich fresh humour which he would feel a right to expect
from Shakespeare, could hardly have undergone less than a qualm or a pang
of strong disrelish and distaste on finding one of the two leading comic
figures of the play break in upon it at his entrance not even with "a
fool-born jest," but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of such
rank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips even
of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, on
application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over the
assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society.
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