Special Collections
Book of the Month, January 2007
Henry James Pye (1745-1813) was a poet; from 1790, poet laureate. While his output comprised chiefly didactic and descriptive poems in heroic couplets, including odes, wartime poetry (in keeping with the age) and translations from Latin, Greek, French, Italian and German, his publications varied from an improved and enlarged edition of The Sportsman’s Dictionary (1807) to a Summary of the Duties of a Justice of the Peace (1808). His Comments on the Commentators of Shakespear grew out of Sketches on Various Subjects, Moral, Literature and Political (1796), in which shorter remarks on Shakespeare occurred together with observations on the army, gardening and other matters.
The work begins unpropitiously with the words: “After so much that has been written on this subject … it is difficult to say anything new upon the subject. I shall therefore only throw together a few thoughts on it that have occurred to me during my perusal of those works, which, through the course of my life, has been a favourite amusement in my hours of leisure”. The observations on the criticisms of Shakespeare by George Steevens, Edmund Malone, Francis Douce and others are taken second-hand from Nichols’ eight-volume duodecimo edition (1797). They are, if arrogant, not intended to be bellicose: Pye writes in his introduction: “I trust no critic living will be offended with the freedom with which I have treated his opinions: where such persons as Dr. Johnson, Mr. Warton, Mr. Steevens, and Sir William Blackstone, have failed, it is not disgrace for any man to fail”. However, the observations can be sharp, e.g. with respect to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III,2: “This is a wonderful discovery of the critic’s, but it is a pity he had not made it sooner, he might then have spared his very foolish, and something prurient note about morning’s love” (p. 57). Douce retaliated publicly via The Gentleman’s Magazine (Oct. 1807) and privately by annotations in his own copy, now in the Bodleian Library.
The Senate House Library copy of the book is rendered individual by its grangerisation. The 21 added portraits are of Pye himself, of Shakespeare, and of monarchs, writers and artists of varying apparent relevance for the work, ranging from Francis Bacon and Mary Queen of Scots to Joshua Reynolds.
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