PART I “THESE THREE HUNDRED YEARS” (continued 2)

For a passage on Shakespeare as a “philosophical aristocrat” who “never promulgates any party tenets,” see “Notes on the Tempest.”

FRANCIS LORD JEFFREY, 1817 (1773-1850)

More full of wisdom and ridicule and sagacity, than all the moralists and satirists that ever existed—he [Shakespeare] is more wild, airy and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world:—and has all those elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties so temperately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason—nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or ingenuity. Every thing in him is in unmeasured abundance, and unequalled perfection—but everything so balanced and kept in subordination, as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn, without loading the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not less, but more rapidly and directly than if they had been composed of baser materials. All his excellences, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together; and instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his fruits crushed into baskets—but spring living from the soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth; while the graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share, in their places, the equal care of their Creator.

The Edinburgh Review, August 1817. Art. IX. “Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, by William Hazlitt.” Vol. xxviii. p. 474.

WILLIAM HAZLITT, 1818 (1778-1830)

The striking peculiarity of Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had “a mind reflecting ages past,” and present:—All the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius alone shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: “All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,” are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies nodded to him, and did him curtesies: and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of “his so potent art.” The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, “subject to the same skyey influences,” the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality.

“On Shakespeare and Milton,” Lectures on The English Poets. 1818, pp. 91-3.

For a comment on this passage by William Minto, see p. 189.

The following occurs in Hazlitt’s essay “On Dryden and Pope” (ib., pp. 137-38):—The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe.

See also The Round Table, 1817—“On Posthumous Fame—whether Shakespeare was influenced by a love of it.”

JOHN KEATS, c. 1818 (1795-1821)

The genius of Shakespeare was an innate universality—wherefore he had the utmost achievement of human intellect prostrate beneath his indolent and kingly gaze. He could do easily Man’s utmost. His plans of tasks to come were not of this world—if what he purposed to do hereafter would not in his own Idea “answer the aim,” how tremendous must have been his Conception of Ultimates!

Note on Troilus and Cressida, I. iii. Marginalia from the Shakespeare Folio of 1808. (Works, ed. H. Buxton Forman. 1901, iii. p. 254.)

c. 1818

“Sonnet on sitting down to read King Lear once again.”

Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, edited by Richard Monckton Milnes. Vol. i. p. 96.

JOHN WILSON, 1819 (1785-1854)

Shakespeare is of no age. He speaks a language which thrills in our blood in spite of the separation of two hundred years. His thoughts, passions, feelings, strains of fancy, all are of this day, as they were of his own—and his genius may be contemporary with the mind of every generation for a thousand years to come. He, above all poets, looked upon man, and lived for mankind. His genius, universal in intellect, could find, in no more bounded circumference, its proper sphere. It could not bear exclusion from any part of human existence. Whatever in nature and life was given to man, was given in contemplation and poetry to him also, and over the undimmed mirror of his mind passed all the shadows of our mortal world. Look through his plays and tell what form of existence, what quality of spirit, he is most skilful to delineate. Which of all the manifold beings he has drawn, lives before our thoughts, our eyes, in most unpictured reality? Is it Othello, Shylock, Falstaff, Lear, the wife of Macbeth, Imogen, Hamlet, Ariel? In none of the other great dramatists do we see anything like a perfected art. In their works, everything, it is true, exists in some shape or other, which can be required in a drama taking for its interest the absolute interest of human life and nature; but, after all, may not the very best of their works be looked on as sublime masses of chaotic confusion, through which the elements of our moral being appear? It was Shakespeare, the most unlearned of all our writers, who first exhibited on the stage perfect models, perfect images of all human characters, and all human events. We cannot conceive any skill that could from his great characters remove any defect, or add to their perfect composition. Except in him, we look in vain for the entire fulness, the self-consistency, and self-completeness of perfect art.

“A few words on Shakespeare, May 1819.” Essays Critical and Imaginative. 1866, vol. iii. pp. 420-21.

CHARLES SPRAGUE, 1824 (1791-1875)

Prize Ode recited at the representation of the Shakespeare Jubilee, Boston, February 13, 1824.

CHARLES LAMB, 1824 (1775-1834)

“Epilogue to an amateur Performance of Richard II.,” ll. 10-24. Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Ed. E. V. Lucas, 1903-4. Vol. v. p. 128.

JULIUS CHARLES HARE, 1827 (1795-1855)

Shakespeare “glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.” All Nature ministers to him, as gladly as a mother to her child. Whether he wishes her to tune her myriad-voiced organ to Romeo’s love, or to Miranda’s innocence, or to Perdita’s simplicity, or to Rosalind’s playfulness, or to the sports of the Fairies, or to Timon’s misanthropy, or to Macbeth’s desolating ambition, or to Lear’s heart-broken frenzy—he has only to ask, and she puts on every feeling and every passion with which he desires to invest her.

No poet comes near Shakespeare in the number of bosom lines,—of lines that we may cherish in our bosoms, and that seem almost as if they had grown there,—of lines that, like bosom friends, are ever at hand to comfort, counsel, and gladden us, under all the vicissitudes of life,—of lines that, according to Bacon’s expression, “come home to our business and bosoms,” and open the door for us to look in, and see what is nestling and brooding there.

Guesses at Truth. 1827.

JAMES HOGG, 1831 (1770-1835)

“To the Genius of Shakespeare.”

Songs. By the Ettrick Shepherd. Now first collected. 1831, p. 304.

CHARLES LAMB, 1833 (1775-1834)

I am jealous of the combination of the sister arts. Let them sparkle apart. What injury (short of the theatres) did Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery do me with Shakespeare?—to have Opie’s Shakespeare, Northcote’s Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli’s Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney’s Shakespeare, wooden-headed West’s Shakespeare (though he did the best in “Lear”), deaf-headed Reynolds’s Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody’s Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen’s portrait! To confine the illimitable!

Letter to Samuel Rogers, December 21, 1833. Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Ed. E. V. Lucas, 1903-4. Vol. vii.

HARTLEY COLERIDGE, 1833 (1796-1849)

“To Shakespeare.”

Poems. Sonnet XXVIII. 1833, p. 28.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1838 (1785-1859)

In the great world of woman, as the interpreter of the shifting phases and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakespeare stands not the first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, this is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, that is another. . . . In all Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but Shakespeare has found the power for effectually working this mysterious mode of being?

.......

A third fund of Shakespeare’s peculiar power lies in his teeming fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts, the deepest, subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the prerogative of Shakespeare to have thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow limits, than simply noticing it as one of the emblazonries upon Shakespeare’s shield.

Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, barely indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to offer any adequate illustrations) one mode of Shakespeare’s dramatic excellence, which hitherto has not attracted any special or separate notice. We allude to the forms of life, and natural human passion, as apparent in the structure of his dialogue. Among the many defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian drama, indeed, we may say of the Greek, the dialogue proceeds always by independent speeches, replying indeed to each other, but never modified in its several terminal forms immediately preceding. Now, in Shakespeare, who first set an example of that most important innovation, in all his impassioned dialogues, each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous passion; every form of hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been evaded; every form of scornful repetition of the hostile words; every impatient continuation of the hostile statement; in short, all modes and formulæ by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, impatience, or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb or modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of commencement,—these are as rife in Shakespeare’s dialogue as in life itself; and how much vivacity, how profound a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect as an imitation of human passion and real life, we need not say. A volume might be written, illustrating the vast varieties of Shakespeare’s art and power in this one field of improvement; another volume might be dedicated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural result from the opposite practice in the foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that were Shakespeare distinguished from them by this single feature of nature and propriety, he would on that account alone have merited a great immortality.

Encyclopædia Britannica. 7th edition, 1838. Article on Shakespeare.

The following fine apostrophe to Shakespeare occurs at the end of De Quincey’s essay “On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth”:—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 snow, rain and dew, hailstorm 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,—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident.

JOHN STERLING, 1839 (1806-1844)

“Shakespeare.”

Poems. 1839, p. 151.

HENRY HALLAM, 1839 (1777-1859)

Of William Shakespeare, whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know anything. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was manifested: he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello; but to us he is scarcely a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man Shakespeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of “the blind old man of Scios’ rocky isle,” an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakespeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character.

Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. 1839, ii. 382-3.

—— JOHNSTONE, 1840

Some men can only acquire knowledge by a careful process of painstaking investigation, while the minds of others descend at once, and with a swoop, as it were, upon the truth of which they are in search. Others, again, can not only do this, but having grasped the truth, they soar upward with it to the highest pinnacles of imaginative loftiness, or beyond these even, to the empyrean of thought, where the minds of ordinarily gifted men may not follow them. Of this last class was Shakespeare, the most wonderful of mere men that we know to have ever lived.

The Table Talker, or Brief Essays on Society and Literature. 1840, vol. i. p. 183.

THOMAS CARLYLE, 1840 (1795-1881)

“The Hero as Poet.”

It is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said; poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakespeare’s morality, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world! No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly level mirror;—that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthly, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakespeare: “His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.”

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Ed. H. D. Traill. 1898, pp. 104-5.

In Carlyle’s essay on “Corn Law Rhymes” (Edinburgh Review, July, 1832, p. 342) occurs the following:—Foolish Pedant, that sittest there compassionately descanting on the Learning of Shakespeare! Shakespeare had penetrated into innumerable things; far into Nature with her divine Splendours and infernal Terrors, her Ariel Melodies, and mystic mandragora Moans; far into man’s workings with Nature, into man’s Art and Artifice; Shakespeare knew (Kenned, which in those days still partially meant Can-ned) innumerable things; what men are, and what the world is, and how and what men aim at there, from the Dame Quickly of modern Eastcheap to the Cæsar of ancient Rome, over many countries, over many centuries: of all this he had the clearest understanding and constructive comprehension; all this was his Learning and Insight.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1841 (1770-1850)

“Shakespeare and Goethe.”

He (Goethe) does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the classes of poets. At the head of the first class I would place Homer and Shakespeare, whose universal minds are able to reach every variety of thought and feeling without bringing their own individuality before the reader. They infuse, they breathe life into every object they approach, but you never find themselves. At the head of the second class, those whom you can trace individually in all they write, I would place Spenser and Milton. In all that Spenser writes you can trace the gentle affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes you find the exalted sustained being that he was. Now, in what Goethe writes, who aims to be of the first class, the universal, you find the man himself, the artificial man where he should not be found; so that I consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal, and yet constantly exposing his individuality, which his character was not of a kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make him anything but an artificial writer.

Memoirs of William Wordsworth, by Christopher Wordsworth. 1851, vol. ii. pp. 437-8.

The value of this estimate of Goethe is somewhat discounted by a remark made at another time by Wordsworth: “I have tried to read Goethe. I never could succeed. . . . I am not intimately acquainted with them [his poems] generally.” Memoirs, ii. p. 478.

THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY, 1843 (1800-1859)

Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet’s ruling passion? Or Othello’s? Or Harry the Fifth’s? Or Wolsey’s? Or Lear’s? Or Shylock’s? Or Benedick’s? Or Macbeth’s? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example, Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together as to be indifferent to the honour of his nation and the law of Moses? All his propensities are mingled with each other, so that, in trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us in real life. A superficial critic may say, that hatred is Shylock’s ruling passion. But how many passions have amalgamated to form that hatred? It is partly the result of wounded pride: Antonio has called him dog. It is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered him of half a million; and, when Antonio is gone, there will be no limit to the gains of usury. It is partly the result of national and religious feeling: Antonio has spit on the Jewish gabardine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath. We might go through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way; for it is the constant manner of Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he is in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.

Essay on “Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay,” Edinburgh Review, Jan. 1843. Art. IX. vol. lxxvi. pp. 560-1.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1844 (1803-1882)

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated, analysed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now read one of those skiey sentences—aerolites,—which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they match, if the former account in any manner for the latter: or, which gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material, that which describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,—on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Whoever read the volume of the Sonnets, without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, that forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare’s being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught State, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?

“Shakespeare; or, the Poet.” Representative Men. 1844, p. 154.

FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON, 1850 (1816-1853)

What I admire in Shakspeare, however, is that his loves are all human—no earthliness hiding itself from itself in sentimental transcendentalism—no loves of the angels, which are the least angelic things, I believe, that float in the clouds, though they do look down upon mortal feelings with contempt, just as the dark volumes of smoke which issue from the long chimney of a manufactory might brood very sublimely over the town which they blacken, and fancy themselves far more ethereal than those vapours which steam up from the earth by day and night. Yet these are pure water, and those are destined to condense in black soot. So are the transcendentalisms of affection. Shakspeare is healthy, true to Humanity in this: and for that reason I pardon him even his earthly coarseness. You always know that you are on an earth which has to be refined, instead of floating in the empyrean with wings of wax. Therein he is immeasurably greater than Shelley. Shelleyism is very sublime, sublimer a good deal than God, for God’s world is all wrong and Shelley is all right—much purer than Christ, for Shelley can criticise Christ’s heart and life—nevertheless, Shelleyism is only atmospheric profligacy, to coin a Montgomeryism. I believe this to be one of Shakespeare’s most wondrous qualities—the humanity of his nature and heart. There is a spirit of sunny endeavour about him, and an acquiescence in things as they are—not incompatible with a cheerful resolve to make them better.

Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson, M.A. Edited by Stopford A. Brooke, M.A. 1886, vol. i. p. 289, Letter LX.

LEIGH HUNT, 1851 (1784-1859)

“Associations with Shakespeare.”

How naturally the idea of Shakespeare can be made to associate itself with anything which is worth mention! Take Christmas for instance: “Shakespeare and Christmas”; the two ideas fall as happily together as “wine and walnuts,” or heart and soul. So you may put together “Shakespeare and May,” or “Shakespeare and June,” and twenty passages start into your memory about spring and violets. Or you may say “Shakespeare and Love,” and you are in the midst of a bevy of bright damsels, as sweet as rosebuds; or “Shakespeare and Death,” and all graves, and thoughts of graves, are before you; or “Shakespeare and Life,” and you have the whole world of youth, and spirit, and Hotspur, and life itself; or you may say even, “Shakespeare and Hate,” and he will say all that can be said for hate, as well as against it, till you shall take Shylock himself into your Christian arms, and tears shall make you of one faith.

Table Talk. 1851, p. 154.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, 1852 (1818-1894)

We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of Shakespeare’s characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the poet, who has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are satisfied that Shakespeare’s great poetry is no more than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts.

Short Studies on Great Subjects. First Series. “England’s Forgotten Worthies.” 1878, i. 445-6, reprinted from Westminster Review. 1852.

DAVID MASSON, 1853 (b. 1822)

Shakespeare is as astonishing for the exuberance of his genius in abstract notions, and for the depth of his analytic and philosophic insight, as for the scope and minuteness of his poetic imagination. It is as if into a mind poetical in form there had been poured all the matter that existed in the mind of his contemporary Bacon. In Shakespeare’s plays we have thought, history, exposition, philosophy, all within the round of the poet. The only difference between him and Bacon sometimes is that Bacon writes an essay and calls it his own, while Shakespeare writes a similar essay and puts it into the mouth of a Ulysses or a Polonius.

Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays. 1874. Essay V. p. 242, reprinted from North British Review. 1853.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1853 (1822-1888)

“Shakespeare.”

Poems. 1853.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, 1853 (1775-1864)

“Shakespeare and Milton.”

The Lost Fruit off an old Tree. No. LVII.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, 1858 (1801-1890)

A great author, gentlemen, is not one who merely has a copia verborum, whether in prose or verse, and can, as it were, turn on at his will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences; but he is one who has something to say and knows how to say it. I do not claim for him, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experience of human life, though these additional gifts he may have, and the more he has of them the greater he is; but I ascribe to him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense the faculty of Expression. He is master of the twofold Logos, the thought and the word, distinct, but inseparable from each other. He may, if so be, elaborate his compositions, or he may pour out his improvisations, but in either case he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and is conscientious and single-minded in fulfilling. That aim is to give forth what he has within him; and from his very earnestness it comes to pass that, whatever be the splendour of his diction or the harmony of his periods, he has with him the charm of an incommunicable simplicity. Whatever be his subject, high or low, he treats it suitably and for its own sake. If he is a poet, “nil molitur inepte.” If he is an orator, then too he speaks, not only “distincte” and “splendide,” but also “apte.” His page is the lucid mirror of his mind and life:

He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can analyse his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous; when his imagination wells up, it overflows its ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.

Such pre-eminently is Shakespeare among ourselves; such pre-eminently is Virgil among the Latins; such in their degree are all those writers who in every nation go by the name of Classics.

“The Idea of a University defined and illustrated.” Literature, ix. 1873, pp. 291-3.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, c. 1858 (1819-1891)

Only Shakespeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,—that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impartiality,—that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action,—that power of verisimilar conception which could take away Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer,—and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as “great dramatists,”—as if Shakespeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with those faculties of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the loving union which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that Shakespeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call “a humour” till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakespeare’s standpoint as poet and artist.

Library of Old Authors. 1858-64.

For an interesting note on Shakespeare’s “artistic discretion” and the “impersonality” of his writings, see “Shakespeare once more” (Among My Books. 1870, pp. 226-7).

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1863 (1804-1864)

Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these volumes old already.

Our Old Home. 1863, i. 171.

In Our Old Home (i. 158-60) Hawthorne records his impressions on visiting Shakespeare’s house.

BISHOP CHARLES WORDSWORTH, 1864 (1806-1892)

Take the entire range of English literature; put together our best authors, who have written upon subjects not professedly religious or theological, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all united, so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have found in Shakespeare alone. This is a phenomenon which admits of being looked at from several points of view; but I shall be content to regard it solely in connection with the undoubted fact, that of all our authors, Shakespeare is also, by general confession, the greatest and the best. According to the testimony of Charles Lamb, a most competent judge in regard to all the literary elements of the question, our poet, “in his divine mind and manners, surpassed not only the great men his contemporaries, but all mankind.” And, looking at this superiority from my own point of view, I cannot but remark that, while most of the great laymen of that great Elizabethan age—Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burleigh, Ben Jonson—have paid homage to Christianity, if not always in their practice, yet in the conviction of their understanding, none of them has done this so fully or so effectively as Shakespeare.

“On Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible.” 1864, pp. 291-2.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 1864 (1809-1894)

“Shakespeare Tercentennial Celebration, 23 April 1864.” Songs of Many Seasons. 1875.

CARDINAL WISEMAN, 1865 (1802-1865)

We may compare the mind of Shakespeare to a diamond, pellucid, bright, and untinted, cut into countless polished facets, which, in constant movement, at every smallest change of direction or of angle, caught a new reflection, so that not one of its brilliant mirrors could be for a moment idle, but by a power beyond its control was ever busy with the reflection of innumerable images, either distinct or running into one another, or repeated each so clearly as to allow him, when he chose, to fix it in his memory.

William Shakespeare. 1865, p. 50.

ARCHBISHOP RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, 1865 (1807-1886)

Poems collected and arranged anew. 1865, p. 83.

FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, 1865 (1824-1897)

Only three or four generations of fairly long-lived men lie between us and Shakespeare; literature in his own time had reached a high development; his grandeur and sweetness were freely recognised; within seventy years of his death his biography was attempted; yet we know little more of Shakespeare himself than we do of Homer. Like several of the greatest men,—Lucretius, Virgil, Tacitus, Dante,—a mystery never to be dispelled hangs over his life. He has entered into the cloud. With a natural and an honourable diligence, other men have given their lives to the investigation of his, and many external circumstances, mostly of a minor order, have been thus collected: yet of “the man Shakespeare,” in Mr. Hallam’s words, we know nothing. Something which seems more than human in immensity of range and calmness of insight moves before us in the Plays; but, from the nature of dramatic writing, the author’s personality is inevitably veiled; no letter, no saying of his, or description by an intimate friend, has been preserved: and even when we turn to the Sonnets, though each is an autobiographical confession, we find ourselves equally foiled. These revelations of the poet’s innermost nature appear to teach us less of the man than the tone of mind which we trace, or seem to trace, in Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and the Tempest: the strange imagery of passion which passes over the magic mirror has no tangible existence before or behind it:—the great artist, like Nature herself, is still latent in his works; diffused through his own creation.

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Yet there is, after all, nothing more remarkable or fascinating in English poetry than these personal revelations of the mind of our greatest poet. We read them again and again, and find each time some new proof of his almost superhuman insight into human nature; of his unrivalled mastery over all the tones of love.

Songs and Sonnets of William Shakespeare. Edited by Francis Turner Palgrave. 1865, pp. 238-9 and 243.

FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE, 1866 (1809-1893)

“To Shakespeare.”

Poems. 1866, p. 61.

JOHN RUSKIN, 1868 (1819-1900)

It does not matter how little, or how much, any of us have read, either of Homer, or Shakespeare: everything round us, in substance, or in thought, has been moulded by them. All Greek gentlemen were educated under Homer. All Roman gentlemen by Greek literature. All Italian, and French, and English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and by its principles. Of the scope of Shakespeare, I will say only, that the intellectual measure of every man since born, in the domains of creative thought, may be assigned to him, according to the degree in which he has been taught by Shakespeare.

The Mystery of Life and its Arts. Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art, delivered at Royal College of Science, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 1867 and 1868. 1869, p. 109.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, 1871 (1828-1882)

“On the Site of a Mulberry-Tree.”

Planted by William Shakespeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.

Academy, 15 Feb. 1871.[185:1] Collected Works. Ed. W. M. Rossetti. 1886, vol. i. p. 285.

BAYARD TAYLOR, 1872 (1825-1878)

“Shakespeare’s Statue, Central Park, New York, 23 May 1872.”

Poetical Works. Stanzas II.-III. 1880, p. 224.

WILLIAM MINTO, 1874 (1845-1893)

It is a favourite way with some eulogists of Shakespeare to deny him all individuality whatsoever. He was not one man, they say, but an epitome of all men. His mind, says Hazlitt, “had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were or that they could become.” Against such a degradation of Shakespeare’s character, or of any man’s character, it is our duty to protest. On trying to make Shakespeare more than human, the reckless panegyrist makes him considerably less than human: instead of the man whose prudence made him rich, whose affectionate nature made him loved almost to idolatry, and whose genius has been the wonder of the world, we are presented with plasticity in the abstract, an object not more interesting than a quarry of potter’s clay.

“William Shakespeare, his Life and Character.” Characteristics of English Poets. 1874, p. 350.

See the passage from Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets, p. 135.

EDWARD DOWDEN, 1875 (b. 1843)

There are certain problems which Shakespeare at once pronounces insoluble. He does not, like Milton, propose to give any account of the origin of evil. He does not, like Dante, pursue the soul of man through circles of unending torture, or spheres made radiant by the eternal presence of God. Satan, in Shakespeare’s poems, does not come voyaging on gigantic vans across Chaos to find the earth. No great deliverer of mankind descends from the heavens. Here, upon the earth, evil is—such was Shakespeare’s declaration in the most emphatic accent. Iago actually exists. There is also in the earth a sacred passion of deliverance, a pure redeeming ardour. Cordelia exists. This Shakespeare can tell for certain. But how Iago can be, and why Cordelia lies strangled across the breast of Lear—are these questions which you go on to ask? Something has been already said of the severity of Shakespeare. It is a portion of his severity to decline all answers to such questions as these. Is ignorance painful? Well, then, it is painful. Little solutions of your large difficulties can readily be obtained from priest or philosopher. Shakespeare prefers to let you remain in the solemn presence of a mystery. He does not invite you into his little church or his little library brilliantly illuminated by philosophical or theological rushlights. You remain in the darkness. But you remain in the vital air. And the great night is overhead.

Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. 1875, p. 226.

GEORGE MEREDITH, 1877 (b. 1828)

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great poetic imagination. They are, as it were—I put it to suit my present comparison—creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen—marvellous Welshmen!—Benedict [sic] and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the poetically comic.

On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit. A lecture delivered at the London Institution, 1 Feb. 1877. Published 1897.

FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL, 1877 (b. 1825)

Altogether “a manly man” (as Chaucer says) this Shakespeare, strong, tender, humourful, sensitive, impressionable, the truest friend, the foe of none but narrow minds and base. And as we track his work from the lightness and fun of its rise, through the fairy fancy, the youthful passion, the rich imaginings, the ardent patriotism, the brilliant sunshine, of his first and second times, through the tender affection of his Sonnets, the whirlwind of passions in his Tragedies, and then to the lovely sunset of his latest plays, what can we do but bless his name, and be thankful that he came to be a delight, a lift and strength, to us and our children’s children to all time—a bond that shall last for ever between all English-speaking, English-reading men, the members of that great Teutonic brotherhood which shall yet long lead the world in the fight for freedom and for truth!

Introduction to The Leopold Shakspere.1877, p. cxvi.

WALTER HORATIO PATER, 1878 (1839-1894)

As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this—in “Hamlet” and “King Lear”—as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought of the choicest material. Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet,” belongs to this group of Shakespeare’s characters—versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the

the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. A careful delineation of minor yet expressive traits seems to mark them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” is perhaps the most striking member of this group. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.

“Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Appreciations with an Essay on Style. 1889, pp. 174-5.

See also “Shakspere’s English Kings,” ib., pp. 201-2.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1879 (1822-1888)

Let me have the pleasure of quoting a sentence about Shakespeare, which I met with by accident not long ago in the Correspondant, a French review which not a dozen English people, I suppose, look at. The writer is praising Shakespeare’s prose. “With Shakespeare,” he says, “prose comes in whenever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited to the majestic English iambic.” And he goes on: “Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king of the realm of thought; along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has succeeded in giving us the most varied, the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks.” M. Henry Cochin, the writer of this sentence, deserves our gratitude for it; it would not be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single sentence, more justly. And when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so much to repel Goethe rather than to attract him, that “nothing has ever been done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as Samson Agonistes,” and that “Milton is in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all reverence,” then we understand what constitutes a European recognition of poets and poetry as contradistinguished from a merely national recognition, and that in favour both of Milton and of Shakespeare the judgment of the high court of appeal has finally gone.

Essays in Criticism. Second Series: Wordsworth. 1888, pp. 129-31. Reprinted from Preface to The Poems of Wordsworth, chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. 1879.

For a comment on Shakespeare’s double faculty of interpreting the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and the ideas and laws of man’s moral and spiritual nature, see Essays in Criticism, 1865, p. 108.

ANONYMOUS ?c. 1880

So much has been written, so much spoken about Shakespeare, that it would seem a needless, almost a presumptuous superfluity to say more, and yet from another point of view, the man is as strange to us to-day as though we had never heard his name. Johnson and Pope, Warburton, Steevens, Malone and Theobald, Chalmers, Dyce, and a host of foreign exegetes, have edited and annotated, emendated and obelised; but the figure of Shakespeare is clothed in mist, and whilst we laugh and wonder at the vanity and versatility of a Cicero, and stroll lovingly with a Horace about his Sabine farm, dead both of them two millennia, we still grope about in the dark for the meaning, the character, and the inner life of our wondrous poet. Like the ghost in Hamlet, he arose, and, having uttered his pregnant message, disappeared, unregarded at the time but by a few, and still unrealised by the many.

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There is a grandeur about the poets of the world, and a reward for those that study them aright. Amid the hurricane of battle and the crash of empires, the calm pulse of life and the glories of the drama remain the same. Men are inclined to gaze upon the outward symbols of existence as though they were primary causes, when they are only the emblems of a deeper power. We have had our Constitution-builders, but where are they? Our Tamerlanes and our Attilas, but whither are they departed? The intellect that revolves a kingdom pales before a heart that speaks to the soul of man. All nations turn their faces toward a Hamlet, a Lear, or a Catherine of Aragon. The influence of these through the genius of the poet will spread and yield abundant fruit, when the havoc of a Cannæ or an Austerlitz is but dimly discernible in the skeleton of history.

The study of our finer literature is therefore the study of the soul; and the progress made will be upward and inward, and the result a purifying of the ideals and a chastening of the chords of man. Shakespeare gives us all this, he is ennobling as well as instructive; without paying homage in a measure to his memory by the maintenance of a certain form of excellence, no poet since his time has succeeded in being appreciated as great. For they all bear his mark, and although much below him, all dramatic writers since his day are modelled upon his plan.

Manuscript Note inserted before fly-leaf of copy of the 1602 quarto of Merry Wives of Windsor, now in Rowfant Library. Printed in A Catalogue of the Printed Books, etc., collected since 1886 by the late Frederick Locker Lampson. 1900, pp. 28-30.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1880 (b. 1837)

In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of human pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who first rendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and revolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in himself the strength of eyesight to read, and the cunning of handiwork to render those wider diversities of emotion and those further complexities of character which lay outside the range of Marlowe, he certainly cannot be said to have outrun the winged feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner. In the heaven of our tragic song, the first-born star on the forehead of its herald god was not outshone till the full midsummer meridian of that greater godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a pathway for the sun. Through all the forenoon of our triumphant day, till the utter consummation and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incarnate and transfigured in the master-singer of the world, the quality of his tragedy was as that of Marlowe’s, broad, single, and intense; large of hand, voluble of tongue, direct of purpose. With the dawn of its latter epoch a new power comes upon it, to find clothing and expression in new forms of speech and after a new style. The language has put off its foreign decorations of lyric and elegiac ornament; it has found already its infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous graces which encumbered the march and enchained the utterance of its childhood. The figures which it invests are now no more types of a single passion, the incarnations of a single thought. They now demand a scrutiny which tests the power of a mind and tries the value of a judgment; they appeal to something more than the instant apprehension which sufficed to respond to the immediate claim of those that went before them. Romeo and Juliet were simply lovers, and their names bring back to us no further thought than of their love and the lovely sorrow of its end; Antony and Cleopatra shall be before all things lovers, but the thought of their love and its triumphant tragedy shall recall other things beyond number—all the forces and all the fortunes of mankind, all the chance and all the consequence that waited on their imperial passion, all the infinite variety of qualities and powers wrought together and welded into the frame and composition of that love which shook from end to end all nations and kingdoms of the earth.

A Study of Shakespeare. 1880, pp. 77-9.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1882 (b. 1837)

“William Shakespeare.”

Tristram of Lyonesse and other Poems. 1882, p. 280.

See also Mr. Swinburne’s An Autumn Vision, October 31, 1889.

GEORGE MEREDITH, 1883 (b. 1828)

“The Spirit of Shakespeare.”

Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. 1883, pp. 161-2.

ROBERT BROWNING, 1884 (1812-1889)

“The Names.”

Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning. Cambridge edition, U.S.A. 1895.

Browning wrote this sonnet as a contribution to the Shakespearean Show-Book issued at the “Shakespearean Show” held in the Albert Hall, London, 29-31 May 1884, in aid of the Hospital for Women in Fulham Road. The sonnet is dated 12 March 1884.

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY, 1886 (b. 1819)

“The Mighty Makers.”

Poems. 1886, vol. ii. pp. 273-4.

THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, 1886 (1823-1887)

Shakespeare’s work alone can be said to possess the organic strength and infinite variety, the throbbing fulness, vital complexity, and breathing truth of Nature herself. In points of artistic resource and technical ability—such as copious and expressive diction, freshness and pregnancy of verbal combination, richly modulated verse, and structural skill in the handling of incident and action—Shakespeare’s supremacy is indeed sufficiently assured. But, after all, it is of course in the spirit and substance of his work, his power of piercing to the hidden centres of character, of touching the deepest springs of impulse and passion, out of which are the issues of life, and of evolving those issues dramatically with a flawless strength, subtlety, and truth, which raises him so immensely above and beyond not only the best of the playwrights who went before him, but the whole line of illustrious dramatists that came after him. It is Shakespeare’s unique distinction that he has an absolute command over all the complexities of thought and feeling that prompt to action and bring out the dividing lines of character. He sweeps with the hand of a master the whole gamut of human experience, from the lowest note to the very top of its compass, from the sportive childish treble of Mamilius, and the pleading boyish tones of Prince Arthur, up to the spectre-haunted terrors of Macbeth, the tropical passion of Othello, the agonised sense and tortured spirit of Hamlet, the sustained elemental grandeur, the Titanic force, the utterly tragical pathos of Lear.

Encyclopædia Britannica. 9th edition. Art. “Shakespeare.” Vol. xxi. 1886, p. 763.

GERALD MASSEY, 1888 (b. 1828)

The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 1888.

WALT WHITMAN, 1890 (1819-1892)

The inward and outward characteristics of Shakespeare are his vast and rich variety of persons and themes, with his wondrous delineation of each and all—not only limitless funds of verbal and pictorial resource, but great excess, superfœtation—mannerism, like a fine aristocratic perfume, holding a touch of musk (Euphues, his mark)—with boundless sumptuousness and adornment, real velvet and gems, not shoddy nor paste—but a good deal of bombast and fustian—(certainly some terrific mouthing in Shakespeare!).

Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective and physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds in Shakespeare—a style supremely grand of the sort, but in my opinion stopping short of the grandest sort, at any rate for fulfilling and satisfying modern and scientific and democratic American purposes. Think, not of growths as forests primeval, or Yellowstone geysers, or Colorado ravines, but of costly marble palaces, and palace rooms, and the noblest fixings and furniture, and noble owners and occupants to correspond—think of carefully built gardens from the beautiful but sophisticated gardening art at its best, with walks and bowers and artificial lakes, and appropriate statue groups, and the finest cultivated roses and lilies and japonicas in plenty—and you have the tally of Shakespeare. The low characters, mechanics, even the loyal henchmen—all in themselves nothing—serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The comedies (exquisite as they certainly are), bringing in admirably portrayed common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the élite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy.

But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from the riches Shakespeare has left us—to criticise his infinitely royal, multiform quality—to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams.

From Poet-Lore, July 1890. Complete Prose Works. Boston, Mass., 1898, p. 394.

Walt Whitman, when he says that “the comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy,” states rather what he considers ought to be, than what actually is. In his essay, “Poetry To-day in America,” he says of Shakespeare, “In portraying mediæval European lords and barons, the arrogant poet, so dear to the inmost human heart (pride! pride! dearest, perhaps, of all—touching us, too, of the States closest of all—closer than love), he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world.”—Prose Works, Boston, 1898, p. 283.

RICHARD WATSON GILDER, 1891 (b. 1844)

“The Twenty-Third of April.”

“Five Books of Song.” IV. The Two Worlds. 1894, p. 154.

MATHILDE BLIND, c. 1894 (1841-1896)

“Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare Sonnets, VII.” Poetical Works. Ed. Arthur Symons. 1900, p. 443.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, BEFORE 1892 (1809-1892)

There are three repartees in Shakespeare which always bring tears to my eyes from their simplicity.

One is in King Lear, when Lear says to Cordelia, “So young and so untender,” and Cordelia lovingly answers, “So young, my lord, and true.” And in The Winter’s Tale, when Florizel takes Perdita’s hand to lead her to the dance, and says, “So turtles pair that never mean to part,” and the little Perdita answers, giving her hand to Florizel, ”I’ll swear for ’em.” And in Cymbeline, when Imogen in tender rebuke says to her husband:

and Posthumus does not ask forgiveness, but answers, kissing her:

Life and Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson. 1898, vol. iv. pp. 39 et seq.

See also ib., pp. 39-43.

SIDNEY LEE, 1899 (b. 1859)

Shakespeare’s mind, as Hazlitt suggested, contained within itself the germs of all faculty and feeling. He knew intuitively how every faculty and feeling would develop in any conceivable change of fortune. Men and women—good or bad, old or young, wise or foolish, merry or sad, rich or poor—yielded their secrets to him, and his genius enabled him to give being in his pages to all the shapes of humanity that present themselves on the highway of life. Each of his characters gives voice to thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that rouse in the intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they are overhearing men and women speak unpremeditatingly among themselves, rather than that they are reading written speeches or hearing written speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination—fairies, ghosts, witches—are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. The creative power of poetry was never manifested to such effect as in the corporeal semblances in which Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air.

So mighty a faculty sets at nought the common limitations of nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life has penetrated, Shakespeare’s power is recognised. All the world over, language is applied to his creations that ordinarily applies to beings of flesh and blood. Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and Shylock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Caliban are studied in almost every civilised tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their lips are rooted in the speech of civilised humanity. To Shakespeare the intellect of the world, speaking in divers accents, applies with one accord his own words: “How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a god!”

Life of William Shakespeare. 1899, chap. xxi.