'Romeo and Juliet, 'Hamlet,' and indeed most of his plays,
contain unnecessary scenes, interesting to the Elizabethans, which
Sophocles as well as Racine would have pruned away. Yet when Shakspere
chooses, as in 'Othello,' to develop a play with the sternest and most
rapid directness, he proves essentially the equal even of the most rigid
technician.
Shakspere, indeed, although as Ben Jonson said, 'he was not for an age but
for all time,' was in every respect a thorough Elizabethan also, and does
not escape the superficial Elizabethan faults. Chief of these, perhaps, is
his fondness for 'conceits,' with which he makes his plays, especially some
of the earlier ones, sparkle, brilliantly, but often inappropriately. In
his prose style, again, except in the talk of commonplace persons, he never
outgrew, or wished to outgrow, a large measure of Elizabethan
self-conscious elegance. Scarcely a fault is his other Elizabethan habit of
seldom, perhaps never, inventing the whole of his stories, but drawing the
outlines of them from previous works--English chronicles, poems, or plays,
Italian 'novels,' or the biographies of Plutarch. But in the majority of
cases these sources provided him only with bare or even crude sketches, and
perhaps nothing furnishes clearer proof of his genius than the way in which
he has seen the human significance in stories baldly and wretchedly told,
where the figures are merely wooden types, and by the power of imagination
has transformed them into the greatest literary masterpieces, profound
revelations of the underlying forces of life.
Shakspere, like every other great man, has been the object of much
unintelligent, and misdirected adulation, but his greatness, so far from
suffering diminution, grows more apparent with the passage of time and the
increase of study.
[Note: The theory persistently advocated during the last half century that
Shakspere's works were really written not by himself but by Francis Bacon
or some other person can never gain credence with any competent judge. Our
knowledge of Shakspere's life, slight as it is, is really at least as great
as that which has been preserved of almost any dramatist of the period; for
dramatists were not then looked on as persons of permanent importance.
There is really much direct contemporary documentary evidence, as we have
already indicated, of Shakspere's authorship of the plays and poems. No
theory, further, could be more preposterous, to any one really acquainted
with literature, than the idea that the imaginative poetry of Shakspere was
produced by the essentially scientific and prosaic mind of Francis Bacon.
As to the cipher systems supposed to reveal hidden messages in the plays:
First, no poet bending his energies to the composition of such masterpieces
as Shakspere's could possibly concern himself at the same time with weaving
into them a complicated and trifling cryptogram. Second, the cipher systems
are absolutely arbitrary and unscientific, applied to any writings whatever
can be made to 'prove' anything that one likes, and indeed have been
discredited in the hands of their own inventors by being made to 'prove'
far too much. Third, it has been demonstrated more than once that the
verbal coincidences on which the cipher systems rest are no more numerous
than the law of mathematical probabilities requires. Aside from actually
vicious pursuits, there can be no more melancholy waste of time than the
effort to demonstrate that Shakspere is not the real author of his reputed
works.]
NATIONAL LIFE FROM 1603 TO 1660. We have already observed that, as
Shakspere's career suggests, there was no abrupt change in either life or
literature at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603; and in fact the
Elizabethan period of literature is often made to include the reign of
James I, 1603-1625 (the Jacobean period [Footnote: 'Jaco'bus' is the Latin
form of 'James.']), or even, especially in the case of the drama, that of
Charles I, 1625-1649 (the Carolean period). Certainly the drama of all
three reigns forms a continuously developing whole, and should be discussed
as such. None the less the spirit of the first half of the seventeenth
century came gradually to be widely different from that of the preceding
fifty years, and before going on to Shakspere's successors we must stop to
indicate briefly wherein the difference consists and for this purpose to
speak of the determining events of the period. Before the end of
Elizabeth's reign, indeed, there had been a perceptible change; as the
queen grew old and morose the national life seemed also to lose its youth
and freshness. Her successor and distant cousin, James of Scotland (James I
of England), was a bigoted pedant, and under his rule the perennial Court
corruption, striking in, became foul and noisome. The national Church,
instead of protesting, steadily identified itself more closely with the