A Study of Shakespeare was published by Chatto & Windus in 1880. The book is Swinburne’s most sustained piece of literary criticism, covering Shakespeare’s entire career from the early poems and comedies through the historical plays, the great tragedies, and the late romances.
Swinburne’s approach to Shakespeare is primarily aesthetic rather than historical or biographical. He is interested in the plays as works of verbal art — in their language, their rhythms, their imagery, their structural principles — rather than as documents of Elizabethan society or expressions of Shakespeare’s personal psychology. His ear for verse is so acute that he can track Shakespeare’s development as a poet across the plays with a precision that purely academic critics cannot match.
The criticism is marked by Swinburne’s characteristic verbal extravagance — his sentences are long, complex, and richly decorated — but also by genuine analytical intelligence. His discussions of individual plays (particularly the tragedies) offer insights that subsequent critics have found valuable, and his placement of the plays in a developmental sequence remains influential.
Swinburne’s Shakespeare is a poet of absolute moral freedom — not a Christian moralist, not a national propagandist, but an artist whose imagination was capacious enough to contain all human experience without reducing it to a lesson. This emphasis on Shakespeare’s amoral comprehensiveness reflects Swinburne’s own aesthetic commitments: the belief that art’s purpose is not moral instruction but the full representation of human possibility.
Collecting A Study of Shakespeare
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1880): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $60–$150
- Very good: $25–$60