while was not dependent on the caprice of crotchety stage directors,
but left to his own discretion to select and determine the mode of
theatrical representation, naturally cares much less for the closet of
the solitary reader. During the first formation of a national theatre,
more especially, we find frequent examples of such indifference. Of
the almost innumerable pieces of Lope de Vega, many undoubtedly were
never printed, and are consequently lost; and Cervantes did not print
his earlier dramas, though he certainly boasts of them as meritorious
works. As Shakespeare, on his retiring from the theatre, left his
manuscripts behind with his fellow-managers, he may have relied on
theatrical tradition for handing them down to posterity, which would
indeed have been sufficient for that purpose if the closing of the
theatres, under the tyrannical intolerance of the Puritans, had not
interrupted the natural order of things. We know, besides, that the
poets used then to sell the exclusive copyright of their pieces to the
theatre:[20] it is therefore not improbable that the right of property
in his unprinted pieces was no longer vested in Shakespeare, or had
not, at least, yet reverted to him. His fellow-managers entered on the
publication seven years after his death (which probably cut short his
own intention), as it would appear on their own account and for their
own advantage.

LECTURE XXIII

Ignorance or Learning of Shakespeare--Costume as observed by Shakespeare,
and how far necessary, or may be dispensed with in the Drama--Shakespeare
the greatest drawer of Character--Vindication of the genuineness of his
pathos--Play on words--Moral delicacy--Irony--Mixture of the Tragic and
Comic--The part of the Fool or Clown--Shakespeare's Language and
Versification.