It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover.  One derives from the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to admire the amazing erudition of Steevens.  One sees the phases of the curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could breathe.  For a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authentic impress of the divine. Efflavit deus.  In a century, from being largely beneath criticism Shakespeare had passed to a condition where he was almost completely beyond it.

King John affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude.  The play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier and utterly un-Shakespearean production entitled The Troublesome Raigne of King John.  The only character Shakespeare added to those he found ready to his hand was that of James Gurney, who enters with Lady Falconbridge after the scene between the Bastard and his brother, says four words, and departs for ever.

  ’Bast.—­James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

  Gur.—­Good leave, good Philip.

  Bast.—­Philip!  Sparrow!  James.’

It is obvious that Shakespeare’s sole motive in introducing Gurney is to provide an occasion for the Bastard’s characteristic, though not to a modern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was at the time a common name for a sparrow.  The Bastard, just dubbed Sir Richard Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his former name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezy indifference.  The jest could not have been made to Lady Falconbridge without a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to the natural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which Shakespeare establishes between the Bastard and his mother.  So Gurney is quite casually brought in to receive it.  But this is not enough for the Shakespeare-drunken Coleridge.

    ’For an instance of Shakespeare’s power in minimis, I generally
    quote James Gurney’s character in King John.  How individual and
    comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!’

Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge’s title as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance.  He is the greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play.  In Act III, scene ii., Warburton’s emendation of ‘airy’ to ‘fiery’ had in Coleridge’s day been received into the text of the Bastard’s lines:—­