Winter's Tale dramatized from a romance of Greene's. SHAKESPEARE.—First of all an Elizabethan and a child of the Renaissance. As dramatist unoriginal in both material and method. His comedy characterized chiefly by the union of the comic and romantic spirits. His tragedy Elizabethan in form, but akin to Sophocles in its sombre irony and profound sympathy. His dramatic interest primarily in personality; his characters normally created for a given story. The fallacy of viewing them as existing independently of their setting, due to their vivid individualization. This vitality sometimes apparently the cause of a distortion of the author's dramatic purpose. In the realm of ideas Shakespeare also unoriginal. The oppo- site impression due chiefly to the vitality and intensity with which his ideas grow to expression. His view of moral evil and individual responsibility, of the tragic fault and poetic justice; both sides recognized. His moral effects characteristically sound. Emphasis on courage, serenity, faithful friendship, readiness, kindness. His view of so- ciety representative rather than personal, and so impartial as to be debatable; neither democrat nor feudalist. His treatment of love touched by Renaissance platonism, but realistic rather than mystical; plain-spoken, but idealistic. The permanence of true love especially emphasized. No sys- tem of philosophy to be inferred from his works. The greater tragedies in a sense both pessimistic and optimistic. Shake- speare's religion not definable theologically; his attitude predominantly reverent but not other-worldly. His per- sonality but slightly revealed in detail. A humanist, more concerned with men and things than with his art. Com- bined wit and poetry, high seriousness and the comic spirit, objective keensightedness and subjective sympathy. His greatness due chiefly to his comprehensive thinking in PREFACE I HOPE it may not be judged an incompetent plea, in defense of the act of writing another book on Shakespeare, that the author had not meditated such a deed when it was proposed to him by the editor of the present series. On reflection, however, it seemed that there might be some justification of so agreeable an imprudence, even on the part of one who had no Shakespearean theories to propose, or perhaps for that very reason. In the first place, some need has been felt for a compendium of the known facts respecting Shakespeare, and of the prevailing critical judgments of modern scholarship, sufficiently untechnical for the purposes of the general reader, and at the same time uncolored by any desire to prove a case. In the second place, the history of Shakespeare criticism has perhaps reached a point where one may profitably attempt some restatement of the main issues involved in the effort to adjust our view of a world-genius, whose values are absolute and timeless, to the special relationship which his work bore to his immediate audience and age. The latter point deserves some further comment. The course of Shakespeare criticism, which began in anything like a formal way with the age of Dryden, may be roughly divided into three periods. In the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century Shakespeare's work was greatly admired, but it was observed to violate the rules of dramatic composition which prevailed in the neo-classical era; hence the common assumption was that he was a kind of inspired irregular barbarian, who through ignorance of the laws of his art failed to attain the perfection which his genius in itself would have led one to hope for. In the early nineteenth century, on the other hand, the progress of romanticism led to wholly different views of the nature of genius: it was now held that genius makes or realizes its own laws, and that any great artist must be a source for the knowledge of the rules of his art, instead of being subject to testing by rules already laid down. This doctrine (which in its milder form no modern critic would dispute) was exaggerated to the point of viewing a poet of Shakespeare's greatness as an inspired, even an infallible, artist. "He never introduces a word or a thought in vain or out of place," said Coleridge. "If we do not understand him, it is our fault or the fault of copyists. . . . He never wrote at random, or hit upon points of character and conduct by chance; and the smallest fragment of his mind not unfrequently gives a clue to a most perfect, regular, and consistent whole." And De Quincey closed one of his essays with this apostrophe: "O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art, but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert." Against this passionate orthodoxy of the earlier nineteenth century, the scientific and historical criticism of the later Victorians and their successors of the twen tieth century naturally reacted. Shakespeare's inerrancy, like that of the Scriptures, was suspected because of the application of newer methods of study; he came to be viewed increasingly as a man of his age, whose works are to be explained primarily by the intellectual, the theatrical, and even the economic conditions of the time. The notion that he was possessed of super-normal, if not positively supernatural, knowledge of the workings of the human mind and heart was now replaced by the assumption that, being an Elizabethan, he must have been limited by Elizabethan psychology. The conception of him as striking out his great creations by aid of the inner light gave way, in some quarters, to that of a business-like person who studied the theatrical market with all the keenness of a modern manager, and wrote precisely what would sell. Some keen and learned critics have gone so far in this prosaically historical method of interpretation that the sympathetic reader of Shakespeare actually trembles before their disillusioning strokes, or, when they occasionally admit some extraordinary beauty or power in Shakespeare's workmanship, feels a thrill of gratitude for the condescension, as with Biblical critics of the corresponding school. The scene of the bibulous porter in Macbeth, following close upon the murder, was so revolting to Coleridge that he would have none of it. Since it was not good, it could not be Shakespeare's; he therefore denounced it as "an interpolation of the actors." To De Quincey, on the other hand, the scene was tragically effective despite its grotesqueness, and he wrote his essay "On the Knocking at the Gate" to show how it exemplified Shakespeare's subtle and unerring psychology. The modern critic, ir |