A Neglected Critic of Shakespeare: Walter Whiter

ERHAPS the most startling anticipation of modern Shakespeare criticism in the later eighteenth century is in the field of imagery. It has been known for some time that a Cambridge clergyman, Walter Whiter, had studied the imagery on the lines of Kellett, Rylands, and Spurgeon: the subject is so important that we shall be justified in giving an account of the critics who have been responsible for the discovery. R. W. Babcock (The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, I931) is generally allowed to have been "the first modern writer to call attention to Whiter's work",' but the claims of the great New Variorum edition of H. H. Furness appear to have been overlooked. It had given long extracts from Whiter for As You Like It and The Tempest and numerous short extracts for some of the other plays.2 Further, Babcock had no adequate realization of the significance of this eighteenth-century figure, whereas the Variorum editor had, though he had failed, as it seems, to make Whiter known. J. Isaacs, writing in the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (I934), referred to the work as "neglected and important"3; neglected it still was, for the Times Literary Supplement for September 5, i936, which gave the work a splendid introduction to the modern world, mentioned Babcock as almost the only man who had known its existence, overlooking Isaacs.4 Drawing attention to this omission in a letter which was published in the next issue of the Supplement (September I2, i936), Isaacs pleaded for a modern edition of the work; it is several years now that an edition was promised us by Mr. G. A. Over.5 The work is mentioned in the volume for Augustans and Romantics (i94o) in the Introductions to English Literature, a series edited by Bonamy Dobree.6 But F. P. Wilson, in the British Academy Lecture for i94i, Shakespeare and the Diction of Common Life, is the first critic, after the article in the Times Literary Supplement, to summarize some of the important conclusions of Whiter, and the very first to make use of Whiter's work in his own.' After this, recognition of its importance as a pioneer study has been