SHAKESPEARE BY EDWARD DOWDEN F AN Academy of Immortals chosen from all ages could be formed, there is no doubt that a plébiscite of the Englishspeaking peoples would send Shakespeare as their chief representative to that august assembly. He alone could speak on their behalf of life and its joys in the presence of Homer, of death and its mysteries in Dante's presence; he alone could respond to the wisdom of Goethe with a broader and a sunnier wisdom; he alone could match the laughter of Molière with a laughter as human and more divine. There is a grace in literature which corresponds to the theological grace of charity: he who loses his life in his vision of the world shall save it; he who does not clamor, or assert himself, or thrust forward his individuality, yet is forever operating over the entire field of nature like light,-illuminating, interpreting, kindling, fructifying, he it is who while remaining unknown is of all men. best known. We are familiar with the thews and bulk of Shakespeare's great contemporary Ben Jonson; we stand in his shadow and are oppressed by his magnitude; we know him as a huge and impressive, if somewhat ungainly, object. Shakespeare disappears from view, because he plays around us like the intangible air and sunshine, and has entered into us and become a portion of our own life. He came at a fortunate time, when it was possible to view the world in a liberal spirit, free from the harshness of the ascetic and the narrowness of the sectary. A mediæval Shakespeare might have found that seriousness implied severity, or that mirth meant revolt and mockery; he might have been forced to regard the mundane and the supermundane as hostile powers; he might have staggered under a burden of theology, or have thrown it off and become militant and aggressive in his vindication of the natural man. Had he lived when Milton lived, he could hardly have stood neutral between two parties which divided the people of England: yet transformed to a political combatant, Shakespeare must have given to party something that was meant for mankind; the deep human problems which interest him might have been replaced or obscured by temporary questions urgent for the moment, by theories of government, of popular rights, of ecclesiastical organization, of ceremony and ordinance, of Divine decrees, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, as formulated in dogma. Born in the eighteenth century, Shakespeare would have breathed with difficulty: for the higher enthusiasm of poetry, the age of Addison was like an exhausted receiver; the nobler wisdom of Elizabethan days had cooled and contracted into good sense. Even as a contemporary of Byron and of Wordsworth he would have been at a disadvantage: the poetry of social movement was turbid with passion or doctrinaire in its theories of revolution; serenity was attainable, as Wordsworth proved, but it was to be attained rather through the spirit of contemplation than by dealing with the insurgent forces of modern life. In the age of Bacon and Spenser and Shakespeare, three great streams, afterwards to be parted, had united to form a broad and exultant flood. The new ideals of the Renaissance, the new sense of the worth of life on earth, the new delight in beauty, had been deepened and enriched by the seriousness of the Reformation; the sense of national power, the pride of country,- suddenly enhanced by the overthrow of the naval might of Papal Spain,-had coalesced with these. For the imagination, the glories of Italy and of ancient Greece and Rome; for the conscience, the words of Hebrew prophets and singers and Christian teachers; for the heart, "This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This other Eden, demi-Paradise, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.» During one brief period, Englishmen discovered that gravity might be gay and gayety might be serious, while both gayety and gravity were supported by an energy of will which enabled them to do great things; they could be stern without moroseness, and could laugh aloud because such laughter was a part of strength, and of their strenuous acceptance of the world as good. It was a fortunate moment for a dramatic artist. The epic breadth and the moral purport of the medieval religious drama had not been lost; but they had submitted to the new and happier forms of Renaissance literature. Italian and classical models had served to make tragedy and comedy shapely, organic, vertebrate. But the pedantry of scholars had not suppressed the instincts of popular pleasure. The spectators of the theatre included both a cultured minority, and the ruder mass that desired strong appeals to pity and terror, and a frank invitation to mirth. The court favored but did not dominate the theatre; the stage remained essentially popular, but it showed how a common pleasure could be ennobled and refined. Shakespeare's predecessors had prepared the way for him in tragedy, comedy, and chronicle play. He received from Marlowe that majestic instrument of poetic expression, blank verse; it was his triumph to discover in time how to extend the keyboard, and to touch its various stops. The years from 1590 to 1610 were the high midsummer of the English drama, when the fruitage was maturing from its |