Book vi. Epig. 17, pp. 150, 152, 154.

THOMAS FULLER, _c._ 1661

(1608-1661)

He was an eminent instance of the truth of that rule, _Poeta non fit sed nascitur_; one is not _made_, but _born_ a poet. Indeed, his learning was very little, so that, as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the earth, so nature itself was all the _art_ which was used upon him.

Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war: Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.

_The History of the Worthies of England: Warwickshire._ 1662, p. 126.

SAMUEL PEPYS, 1662-1667

(1633-1703)

1661-1662. March 1st. My wife and I by coach, first to see my little picture that is a-drawing, and thence to the Opera, and there saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted, but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard, and the worst acts that ever I saw these people do, and I am resolved to go no more to see the first time of acting, for they were all of them out more or less.

1662. September 29th. To the King’s Theatre, where we saw “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which I had never seen before, nor ever shall again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.

1666. December 28th. To the Duke’s House, and there saw “Macbeth” most excellently acted, and a most excellent play for variety. I had sent my wife to meet me there, who did come: so I did go to White Hall, and got my Lord Bellassis to get me into the playhouse; and there, after all staying above an hour for the players, the King and all waiting, which was absurd, saw “Henry the Fifth” well done by the Duke’s people, and in most excellent habit, all new vests, being put on but this night. But I sat so high and far off, that I missed most of the words, and sat with a wind coming into my back and neck, which did much trouble me. The play continued till twelve at night; and then up, and a most horrid cold night it was, and frosty, and moonshine.

1666-67. January 7th. To the Duke’s House, and saw “Macbeth,” which, though I saw it lately, yet appears a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable.

1667. October 16th. To the Duke of York’s House; and I was vexed to see Young, who is but a bad actor at best, act Macbeth, in the room of Betterton, who, poor man! is sick: but, Lord! what a prejudice it wrought in me against the whole play, and everybody else agreed in disliking this fellow. Thence home, and there find my wife gone home; because of this fellow’s acting of the part, she went out of the house again.

_Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, with a Life and Notes_, by Richard, Lord Braybrooke. 1888.

MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE, 1664

(1624?-1674)

I wonder how that person you mention in your letter could either have the conscience, or confidence to dispraise Shakespeare’s plays, as to say they were made up only with clowns, fools, watchmen, and the like; but to answer that person, though Shakespeare’s wit will answer for himself, I say, that it seems by his judging, or censuring, he understands not plays, or wit; for to express properly, rightly, usually, and naturally, a clown’s, or fool’s humour, expressions, phrases, garbs, manners, actions, words, and course of life, is as witty, wise, judicious, ingenious, and observing, as to write and express the expressions, phrases, garbs, manners, actions, words, and course of life, of kings and princes; and to express naturally, to the life, a mean country wench, as a great lady; a courtesan, as a chaste woman; a mad man, as a man in his right reason and senses; a drunkard, as a sober man; a knave, as an honest man; and so a clown, as a well-bred man; and a fool, as a wise man; nay, it expresses and declares a greater wit, to express, and deliver to posterity, the extravagances of madness, the subtlety of knaves, the ignorance of clowns, and the simplicity of naturals, or the craft of feigned fools, than to express regularities, plain honesty, courtly garbs, or sensible discourses, for ’tis harder to express nonsense than sense, and ordinary conversations, than that which is unusual; and ’tis harder, and requires more wit to express a jester, than a grave statesman; yet Shakespeare did not want wit to express to the life all sorts of persons, of what quality, profession, degree, breeding, or birth soever; nor did he want wit to express the divers and different humours, or natures or several passions in mankind; and so well he hath expressed in his plays all sorts of persons, as one would think he had been transformed into every one of those persons he hath described.... Who could not swear he had been a noble lover, that could woo so well? and there is not any person he had described in his book, but his readers might think they were well acquainted with them; indeed, Shakespeare had a clear judgment, a quick wit, a spreading fancy, a subtle observation, a deep apprehension, and a most eloquent elocution; truly he was a natural orator, as well as a natural poet, and he was not an orator to speak well only on some subjects, as lawyers, who can make eloquent orations at the bar, and plead subtly and wittily in law-cases, or divines, that can preach eloquent sermons, or dispute subtly and wittily in theology, but take them from that, and put them to other subjects, and they will be to seek; but Shakespeare’s wit and eloquence was general, for and upon all subjects, he rather wanted subjects for his wit and eloquence to work on, for which he was forced to take some of his plots out of history, where he only took the bare designs, the wit and language being all his own.

_CCXI Sociable Letters written by the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle._ 1664. Letter CXXIII.

JOHN DRYDEN, 1667

(1631-1700)

As when a tree’s cut down, the secret root Lives under ground, and thence new branches shoot; So, from old Shakespeare’s honour’d dust, this day Springs up and buds a new reviving play. Shakespeare who, taught by none, did first impart To Fletcher wit, to labouring Jonson art. He, monarch-like, gave those his subjects law, And is that Nature which they paint and draw. Fletcher reach’d that which on his heights did grow, Whilst Jonson crept and gather’d all below. This did his love, and this his mirth digest: One imitates him most, the other best. If they have since out-writ all other men, ’Tis with the drops which fell from Shakespeare’s pen. The storm which vanish’d on the neighb’ring shore, Was taught by Shakespeare’s _Tempest_ first to roar. That innocence and beauty which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. But Shakespeare’s magick could not copy’d be, Within that circle none durst walk but he. I must confess ’twas bold, nor would you now That liberty to vulgar wits allow, Which works by magick supernatural things: But Shakespeare’s pow’r is sacred as a king’s. Those legends from old priesthood were receiv’d, And he then writ, as people then believed.

_Prologue to the Tempest or the Enchanted Island, by Sir William D’Avenant and John Dryden._ 1676.

See also Dryden’s _Prologue to Troilus and Cressida_, spoken by Mr. Betterton representing the Ghost of Shakespeare.

1668

To begin, then, with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

_Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cupressi._

_Of Dramatic Poesie, an Essay_, 1668, p. 47.

The following is from Dryden’s _Defence of the Epilogue_:—Let any man who understands English read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; and yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven. That their wit is great, and many times their expressions noble, envy itself cannot deny.

——_Neque ego illis detrahere ausim Hærentem capiti multa cum laude coronam._

But the times were ignorant in which they lived. Poetry was then, if not in its infancy among us, at least not arrived to its vigour and maturity. Witness the lameness of their plots; many of which, especially those which they writ first (for even that age refined itself in some measure), were made up of some ridiculous incoherent story, which in one play many times took up the business of an age. I suppose I need not name “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” nor the historical plays of Shakespeare; besides many of the rest, as the “Winter’s Tale,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “Measure for Measure,” which were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.

ANONYMOUS, 1672

In country beauties, as we often see Something that takes in their simplicity; Yet while they charm, they know not they are fair, And take without their spreading of the snare; Such artless beauty lies in Shakespeare’s wit, ’Twas well in spite of him what ere he writ. His excellencies came and were not sought, His words like casual atoms made a thought: Drew up themselves in rank and file, and writ, He wond’ring how the Devil it were such wit. Thus like the drunken tinker, in his play, He grew a prince, and never knew which way. He did not know what trope or figure meant, But to persuade is to be eloquent; So in this Cæsar which this day you see, Tully ne’er spoke as he makes Anthony. Those then that tax his learning are to blame, He knew the thing, but did not know the name: Great Jonson did that ignorance adore, And though he envied much, admir’d him more. The faultless Jonson equally writ well: Shakespeare made faults; but then did more excell. One close at guard like some old fencer lay, T’other more open, but he show’d more play. In imitation Jonson’s wit was shown, Heaven made his men but Shakespeare made his own. Wise Jonson’s talent in observing lay, But other’s follies still made up his play. He drew the like in each elaborate line, But Shakespeare, like a master, did design. Jonson with skill dissected human kind, And show’d their faults that they their faults might find. But then, as all anatomists must do, He to the meanest of mankind did go, And took from gibbets such as he would show. Both are so great that he must boldly dare, Who both of ’em does judge and both compare. If amongst poets, one more bold there be, The man that dare attempt in either way, is he.

_Covent Garden Drollery, or a Collection of all the Choice Songs, Poems, Prologues, and Epilogues (Sung and Spoken at Courts and Theaters), never in Print before._ Written by the refined’st Witts of the Age, and collected by A. B. [? Alex. Brome]. 1672.

EDWARD PHILLIPS, 1675

(1630-1696?)

William Shakespeare, the glory of the English Stage; whose nativity at Stratford-upon-Avon is the highest honour that town can boast of: from an actor of tragedies and comedies, he became a maker; and such a maker, that though some others may perhaps pretend to a more exact decorum and economy, especially in tragedy, never any expressed a more lofty and tragic height, never any represented nature more purely to the life; and where the polishments of art are most wanting, as probably his learning was not extraordinary, he pleaseth with a certain wild and native elegance; and in all his writings hath an unvulgar style, as well in his _Venus and Adonis_, his _Rape of Lucrece_, and other various poems, as in his dramatics.

_Theatrum Poetarum._ 1675. Preface. _The Modern Poets_, p. 194.

THOMAS OTWAY, 1680

(1652-1685)

In ages past (when will those times renew?), When empires flourish’d, so did poets too. When great Augustus the world’s empire held, Horace and Ovid’s happy verse excell’d. Ovid’s soft genius, and his tender arts Of moving Nature, melted hardest hearts. It did th’ imperial beauty, Julia, move To listen to the language of his love. Her father honour’d him: and on her breast With ravish’d sense in her embraces prest, He lay transported, fancy-full and blest. Horace’s lofty genius boldlier rear’d His manly head, and through all Nature steer’d; Her richest pleasures in his verse refin’d, And wrought ’em to the relish of the mind. He lash’d with a true poet’s fearless rage, The villanies and follies of the age; Therefore Mecænas, that great fav’rite rais’d Him high, and by him was he highly prais’d. Our Shakespeare wrote, too, in an age as blest, The happiest poet of his time, and best; A gracious Prince’s favour cheer’d his muse, A constant favour he ne’er fear’d to lose. Therefore he wrote with fancy unconfin’d, And thoughts that were immortal as his mind; And from the crop of his luxuriant pen E’er since succeeding poets humbly glean.

_Prologue to the History and Fall of Caius Marius. A Tragedy._ 1712.

“A PERSON OF HONOUR,” 1681

I can’t, without infinite ingratitude to the memory of those excellent persons, omit the first famous masters in’t, of our nation, venerable Shakespeare and the great Ben Jonson. I have had a particular kindness always for most of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and for many of his comedies, and I can’t but say that I can never enough admire his style (considering the time he writ in, and the great alteration that has been in the refining of our language since), for he has expressed himself so very well in’t that ’tis generally approved of still; and for maintaining of the characters of the persons design’d, I think none ever exceeded him.

“_An Essay on Dramatic Poetry_” appended to _Amaryllis to Tityrus, Being the First Heroick Harangue of the excellent pen of Monsieur Scudery. A Witty and Pleasant Novel._ Englished by a Person of Honour, 1681, pp. 66-67.

SIR CHARLES SEDLEY, 1693

(1639?-1701)

But against old as well as new to rage, Is the peculiar frenzy of this age. Shakespeare must down, and you must praise no more Soft Desdemona, nor the jealous Moor: Shakespeare whose fruitful genius, happy wit Was fram’d and finish’d at a lucky hit; The pride of Nature, and the shame of schools, Born to create, and not to learn from rules; Must please no more, his bastards now deride, Their father’s nakedness they ought to hide, But when on spurs their Pegasus they force, Their jaded Muse is distanc’d in the course.

_The Wary Widdow, or Sir Noisy Parrat. A Comedy._ By Henry Higden. Prologue by Sir Charles Sydley. 1693.

THE SECOND PERIOD

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

SIR RICHARD STEELE, 1709

(1672-1729)

The play of “The London Cuckolds” was acted this evening before a suitable audience, who were extremely well diverted with that heap of vice and absurdity. The indignation which Eugenio, who is a gentleman of just taste, has, upon occasion of seeing human nature fall so low in their delights, made him, I thought, expatiate upon the mention of this play very agreeably. “Of all men living,” said he, “I pity players (who must be men of good understanding to be capable of being such) that they are obliged to repeat and assume proper gestures for representing things, of which their reason must be ashamed, and which they must disdain their audience for approving. The amendment of these low gratifications is only to be made by people of condition, by encouraging the presentation of the noble characters drawn by Shakespeare and others, from whence it is impossible to return without strong impressions of honour and humanity. On these occasions distress is laid before us with all its causes and consequences, and our resentment placed according to the merit of the persons afflicted. Were dramas of this nature more acceptable to the taste of the town, men who have genius would bend their studies to excel in them.”

_The Tatler_, No. 8, 28 April 1709.

_The London Cuckolds_, by Edward Ravenscroft, first produced 1682.

NICHOLAS ROWE, 1709

(1674-1718)

The delicacy of his taste, and the natural bent of his own genius (equal, if not superior, to some of the best of theirs [the ancients]), would certainly have led him to read and study them with so much pleasure, that some of their fine images would naturally have insinuated themselves into, and been mixed with his own writings; so that his not copying at least something from them, may be an argument of his never having read them. Whether his ignorance of the ancients were a disadvantage to him or no, may admit of a dispute: for though the knowledge of them might have made him more correct, yet it is not improbable but that the regularity and deference for them, which would have attended that correctness, might have restrained some of that fire, impetuosity, and even beautiful extravagance, which we admire in Shakespeare: and I believe we were better pleased with those thoughts, altogether new and uncommon, which his own imagination supplied him so abundantly with, than if he had given us the most beautiful passages out of the Greek and Latin poets, and that in the most agreeable manner that it was possible for a master of the English language to deliver them.

_Some Account of the Life, etc., of Mr. William Shakespear_, p. iii. prefixed to _Works of Shakespeare_, ed. N. Rowe. 1709.

Of this passage and the question of Shakespeare’s knowledge of the ancients, Theobald, who favoured the view that his acquaintance with classical writings was not inconsiderable, remarks in his preface, “The result of the controversy must certainly, either way, terminate to our author’s honour: how happily he could imitate them, if that point be allowed; or how gloriously he could think like them, without owing anything to imitation.”

ELIJAH FENTON, 1711

(1683-1730)

Shakespeare, the genius of our isle, whose mind (The universal mirror of mankind) Express’d all images, enrich’d the stage, But sometimes stoop’d to please a barbarous age. When his immortal bays began to grow, Rude was the language, and the humour low: He, like the God of Day, was always bright, But rolling in its course, his orb of light Was sullied, and obscur’d, though soaring high, With spots contracted from the nether sky. But whither is th’ adventurous Muse betray’d? Forgive her rashness, venerable shade! May Spring with purple flowers perfume thy urn; And Avon with his greens thy grave adorn: Be all thy faults, whatever faults there be, Imputed to the times, and not to thee. Some scions shot from this immortal root, Their tops much lower, and less fair the fruit, Jonson the tribute of my verse might claim, Had he not strove to blemish Shakespeare’s name. But, like the radiant twins that gild the sphere, Fletcher and Beaumont next in pomp appear: The first a fruitful vine, in blooming pride, Had been by superfluity destroy’d, But that his friend, judiciously severe, Prun’d the luxuriant boughs with artful care; On various sounding harps the Muses play’d, And sung, and quaff’d their nectar in the shade. Few moderns in the lists with these may stand, For in those days were giants in the land: Suffice it now by lineal right to claim, And bow with filial awe to Shakespeare’s fame; The second honours are a glorious name. Achilles dead, they found no equal lord To wear his armour, and to wield his sword.

_An Epistle to Mr. Southerne, from Kent._ January 28, 1710-11.

JOHN DENNIS, 1712

(1657-1734)

Shakespeare was one of the greatest geniuses that the world e’er saw for the Tragic Stage. Though he lay under greater disadvantages than any of his successors, yet had he greater and more genuine beauties than the best and greatest of them. And what makes the brightest glory of his character, those beauties were entirely his own, and owing to the force of his own nature; whereas his faults were owing to his education, and to the age that he lived in. One may say of him as they did of Homer, that he had none to imitate, and is himself inimitable.

_An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear: with some Letters of Criticism to the SPECTATOR._ 1712, pp. 1, 2.

EDWARD YOUNG, 1712

(1683-1765)

To claim attention, and the heart invade, Shakespeare but _wrote_ the play th’ Almighty _made_. Our neighbour’s stage art too bare-fac’d betrays, ’Tis great Corneille at every scene we praise; On nature’s surer aid Britannia calls, None think of Shakespeare till the curtain falls; Then with a sigh returns our audience home, From Venice, Egypt, Persia, Greece, or Rome.

. . . . . .

And yet in Shakespeare something still I find, That makes me less esteem all humankind; He made one nature and another found, Both in his page with master-strokes abound; His witches, fairies, and enchanted isle, Bid us no longer at our nurses smile; Of lost historians we almost complain, Nor think it the creation of his brain.

_Epistle to the Right Honourable George, Lord Lansdowne._ 1712, ll. 295-302 and 313-20.

JOSEPH ADDISON, 1714

(1672-1719)

Our critics do not seem sensible that there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of the rules of art, than in those of a little genius who knows and observes them. It is of these men of genius that Terence speaks in opposition to the little artificial cavillers of his time:

_Quorum æmulari exoptat negligentiam Potius quam istorum obscuram diligentiam._

A critic may have the same consolation in the ill success of his play, as Dr. South tells us a physician has at the death of a patient, that he was killed _secundum artem_. Our inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the whole tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather read one of his plays, where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic, where there is not one of them violated? Shakespeare was indeed born with all the seeds of poetry, and may be compared to the stone in Pyrrhus’s ring, which, as Pliny tells us, had the figure of Apollo and the nine Muses in the veins of it, produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature, without any help from art.

_The Spectator_, No. 592, 10 Feb. 1714.

ALEXANDER POPE, 1725

(1688-1744)

If ever any author deserved the name of an _Original_, it was Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of Nature; it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of Shakespeare was inspiration indeed; he is not so much an imitator as an instrument of Nature: and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.

His _characters_ are so much Nature herself, that ’tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same image; each picture, like a mock rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakespeare is as much an individual as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; as such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will upon comparison be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character we must add the wonderful preservation of it, which is such throughout his Plays, that, had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker.

The power over our passions was never possessed in a more eminent degree, or displayed in so different instances. Yet all along there is seen no labour, no pains to raise them; no preparation to guide our guess to the effect, or be perceiv’d to lead toward it; but the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places. We are surprised the moment we weep; and yet upon reflection find the passion so just, that we should be surprised if we had not wept, and wept at that very moment.

How astonishing is it, again, that the passions directly opposite to these, laughter and spleen, are no less at his command! that he is not more a master of the _great_ than of the _ridiculous_ in human nature; of our noblest tendernesses, than of our vainest foibles; of our strongest emotions, than of our idlest sensations!

Nor does he only excel in the passions: in the coolness of reflection and reasoning he is full as admirable. His _sentiments_ are not only in general the most pertinent and judicious upon every subject; but by a talent very peculiar, something between penetration and felicity, he hits upon that particular point on which the bent of each argument turns, or the force of each motive depends. This is perfectly amazing, from a man of no education or experience in those great and public scenes of life which are usually the subject of his thoughts: so that he seems to have known the world by intuition, to have looked through human nature at one glance, and to be the only author that gives ground for a very new opinion: That the philosopher, and even the man of the world, may be _born_, as well as the poet.

It must be owned that with all these great excellencies, he has almost as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse, than any other. But I think I can in some measure account for these defects, from several causes and accidents; without which it is hard to imagine that so large and so enlightened a mind could ever have been susceptible of them. That all these contingencies should unite to his disadvantage seems to me almost as singularly unlucky, as that so many various (nay contrary) talents should meet in one man, was happy and extraordinary.

. . . . . . .

I will conclude by saying of Shakespeare, that with all his faults, and with all the irregularity of his _drama_, one may look upon his works in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as upon an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a neat modern building; the latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn. It must be allowed, that in one of these there are materials enough to make many of the other. It has much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments; though we are often conducted to them by dark, odd, and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.

Preface to _The Works of Shakespeare_. 1725.

De Quincey in his essay on Pope says of this preface: “For the edition we have little to plead; but for the editor it is but just to make three apologies. In the _first_ place he wrote a brilliant preface, which, although (like other works of the same class) too much occupied in displaying his own ability, and too often, for the sake of an effective antithesis, doing deep injustice to Shakespeare, yet undoubtedly, as a whole, extended his fame, by giving the sanction and countersign of a great wit to the national admiration. _Secondly_, as Dr. Johnson admits, Pope’s failure pointed out the right road to his successors. _Thirdly_, even in this failure it is but fair to say, that in a graduated scale of merit, as distributed amongst the long succession of editors through that century, Pope holds a rank proportionable to his age. For the year 1720, he is no otherwise below Theobald, Hanmer, Capell, Warburton, or even Johnson, than as they are successively below each other, and all of them as to accuracy below Steevens, as he again was below Malone and Reed.”

JAMES THOMSON, 1727

(1700-1748)

Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts, Inspiring vigour, Liberty abroad Walks unconfined, even to thy farthest cots, And scatters plenty with unsparing hand

. . . . . .

Thy sons of glory many! Alfred thine, In whom the splendour of heroic war, And more heroic peace, when govern’d well, Combine; whose hallow’d name _the Virtues Saint_, And his own Muses love; the best of kings!

. . . . . .

Fair thy renown In awful sages and in noble bards; Soon as the light of dawning Science spread Her orient ray, and waked the Muses’ song.

. . . . . .

For lofty sense, Creative fancy, and inspection keen Through the deep windings of the human heart, Is not wild Shakespeare thine and Nature’s boast?

_The Seasons: Summer._ 1727, ll. 1442-6, 1479-83, 1531-4, and 1563-6.

LEWIS THEOBALD, 1733

(1688-1744)

In how many points of light must we be obliged to gaze at this great poet! In how many branches of excellence to consider and admire him! Whether we view him on the side of art or nature, he ought equally to engage our attention; whether we respect the force and greatness of his genius, the extent of his knowledge and reading, the power and address with which he throws out and applies either nature or learning, there is ample scope both for our wonder and pleasure. If his diction and the clothing of his thoughts attract us, how much more must we be charmed with the richness and variety of his images and ideas! If his images and ideas steal into our souls, and strike upon our fancy, how much are they improved in price when we come to reflect with what propriety and justness they are applied to character. If we look into his characters, and how they are furnished and proportioned to the employment he cuts out for them, how are we taken up with the mastery of his portraits! What draughts of Nature! What variety of originals, and how differing each from the other! How are they dressed from the stores of his own luxurious imagination; without being the apes of mode, or borrowing from any foreign wardrobe! each of them are the standard of fashion for themselves: like gentlemen that are above the direction of their tailors, and can adorn themselves without the aid of imitation.

Preface to _The Works of Shakespeare, collated with the Oldest Copies and corrected; with Notes, Explanatory and Critical_. By Mr. Theobald. 1733, vol. i. pp. ii-iii.

JOSEPH WARTON, 1740

(1722-1800)

What are the lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct, to Shakespeare’s warblings wild? Whom on the winding Avon’s willow’d banks Fair Fancy found, and bore the smiling babe To a close cavern (still the shepherds show The sacred place, whence with religious awe They hear, returning from the field at eve, Strange whisp’rings of sweet music through the air): Here, as with honey gather’d from the rock She fed the little prattler, and with songs Oft sooth’d his wond’ring ears with deep delight. On her soft lap he sat, and caught the sounds.

_The Enthusiast: or the Lover of Nature_, ll. 168-79.

WILLIAM COLLINS, 1743

(1721-1759)

Too nicely Jonson knew the critic’s part; Nature in him was almost lost in art. Of softer mould the gentle Fletcher came, The next in order, as the next in name: With pleas’d attention ’midst his scenes we find Each glowing thought that warms the female mind; Each melting sigh and every tender tear, The lover’s wishes, and the virgin’s fear. His every strain the smiles and graces own, But stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone: Drawn by his pen, our ruder passions stand Th’ unrival’d picture of his early hand.

_Verses humbly address’d to Sir Thomas Hanmer on his Edition of Shakespeare’s Works._ 1743, p. 7.

Hanmer’s edition of Shakespeare appeared in 1744. See p. 93.

SIR THOMAS HANMER, 1744

(1677-1746)

If that rich vein of sense which runs through the works of this author can be retrieved in every part and brought to appear in its true light, and if it may be hoped without presumption that this is here effected; they who love and admire him will receive a new pleasure, and all probably will be more ready to join in doing him justice, who does great honour to his country as a rare and perhaps singular genius: one who hath attained an high degree of perfection in those two great branches of poetry, tragedy and comedy, different as they are in their natures from each other; and who may be said without partiality to have equalled, if not excelled, in both kinds, the best writers of any age or century who have thought it glory enough to distinguish themselves in either.

Preface to _The Works of Shakespear. Carefully Revised and Corrected by the former Editions, and Adorned with Sculptures designed and executed by the best hands._ Oxford, 1744, vol. i. pp. v-vi.

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1747

(1709-1784)

When Learning’s triumph o’er her barb’rous foes First rear’d the stage, immortal Shakespeare rose; Each change of many-coloured life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new: Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, And panting Time toil’d after him in vain: His powerful strokes presiding truth impress’d, And unresisted passion storm’d the breast.

Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the opening of the Theatre in Drury Lane, 1747.

“Drinking tea one day at Garrick’s with Mr. Langton, he [Dr. Johnson] was questioned if he was not somewhat of a heretic as to Shakespeare; said Garrick, ‘I doubt he is a little of an infidel.’—‘Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘I will stand by the lines I have written on Shakespeare in my Prologue at the opening of your Theatre.’ Mr. Langton suggested, that in the line

“‘And panting Time toil’d after him in vain,’

Johnson might have had in his eye the passage in the _Tempest_, where Prospero says of Miranda:

“‘. . . She will outstrip all praise, And make it halt behind her.’

Johnson said nothing. Garrick then ventured to observe, ‘I do not think that the happiest line in the praise of Shakespeare.’ Johnson exclaimed (smiling), ‘Prosaical rogues! next time I write, I’ll make both time and space pant.’”—Notes by Langton in Boswell’s _Life of Dr. Johnson_.

BISHOP WILLIAM WARBURTON, 1747.

(1698-1779)

Of all the literary exercitations of speculative men, whether designed for the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so much importance, or what are more our immediate concern, than those which let us into the knowledge of our nature. Others may exercise the reason or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart, and form the human mind to wisdom. Now, in this science, our Shakespeare is confessed to occupy the foremost place; whether we consider the amazing sagacity with which he investigates every hidden spring and wheel of human action; or his happy manner of communicating this knowledge, in the just and living paintings which he has given us of all our passions, appetites, and pursuits. These afford a lesson which can never be too often repeated, or too constantly inculcated.

Preface to _The Works of Shakespear. The genuine Text (collated with all the former Editions and then corrected and emended) is here settled. Being restored from the Blunders of the first Editors, and the Interpolations of the two last. With a Comment and Notes, Critical and Explanatory._ By Mr. Pope and Mr. Warburton. 1747, vol. i. p. xxiv.

CHRISTOPHER SMART, 1751

(1722-1771)

Methinks I see with fancy’s magic eye, The shade of Shakespeare, in yon azure sky. On yon high cloud behold the bard advance, Piercing all nature with a single glance: In various attitudes around him stand The passions, waiting for his dread command. First kneeling Love before his feet appears, And, musically sighing, melts in tears. Near him fell Jealousy with fury burns, And into storms the amorous breathings turns; Then Hope, with heavenward look, and Joy draw near, While palsied Terror trembles in the rear.

Prologue to _Othello_, as it was acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on Thursday the 7th of March 1751 by Persons of Distinction for their Diversion. Ll. 21-32.

DAVID HUME, 1754.

(1711-1774)

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN, born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction, either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy. If represented as a POET, capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret, that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionate scenes intermixed with them; and at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties, on account of their being surrounded with such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse, than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts. And there may even remain a suspicion, that we over-rate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic, on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen. He died in 1616, aged fifty-three years.

Jonson possessed all the learning which was wanting to Shakespeare, and wanted all the genius of which the other was possessed. Both of them were equally deficient in taste and elegance, in harmony and correctness. A servile copyist of the ancients, Jonson translated into bad English the beautiful passages of the Greek and Roman authors, without accommodating to the manners of his age and country. His merit has been totally eclipsed by that of Shakespeare, whose rude genius prevailed over the rude art of his contemporary. The English theatre has ever since taken a strong tincture of Shakespeare’s spirit and character; and thence it has proceeded, that the nation has undergone from all its neighbours the reproach of barbarism, from which its valuable productions in some parts of learning would otherwise have exempted it.

_Appendix to the Reign of James I. History of England from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688._ 1754.

HORACE WALPOLE, EARL OF ORFORD, 1756

(1717-1797)

John and I are just going to Garrick’s with a grove of cypresses in our hands, like the Kentish men at the Conquest. He has built a temple to his master Shakespeare, and I am going to adorn the outside, since his modesty would not let me decorate it within, as I proposed, with these mottoes:

_Quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est._

That I spirit have and nature, That sense breathes in ev’ry feature, That I please, if please I do,— Shakespeare,—all I owe to you.

Letter to George Montagu, 14 Oct. 1756. _Letters_, ed. Peter Cunningham, 1857, vol. iii. p. 36.

JOHN ARMSTRONG, 1758

(1709-1779)

Shakespeare, who I will venture to say had the most musical ear of all the English poets, is abundantly irregular in his versification: but his wildest licences seldom hurt the ear; on the contrary, they give his verse a spirit and variety, which prevent its ever cloying. Our modern tragedy-writers, instead of using the advantages of their own languages, seem in general to imitate the monotony of the French versification: and the only licence they ever venture upon, is that poor tame one the supernumerary syllable at the end of a line; which they are apt to manage in such a manner as to give their verse a most ungraceful halt. But it is not want of ear alone which makes our common manufacturers of tragedy so insipidly solemn and so void of harmony: it is want of feeling.

“Of the Versification of English Tragedy.” _Works_, 1770, ii. 164-5.

Shakespeare, indeed, without one perfect plan, has perhaps excelled all other dramatic poets as to detached scenes. But he was a wonder!—His deep knowledge of human nature, his prodigious variety of fancy and invention, and of characters drawn with the strongest, truest, and most exquisite strokes, oblige you to forget his most violent irregularities.

Of the Dramatic Unities, _ib._, p. 242.

WILLIAM MASON, 1759

(1724-1797)

How oft I cried, “Oh come, thou tragic queen! March from thy Greece with firm majestic tread! Such as when Athens saw thee fill her scene, When Sophocles thy choral graces led: Saw thy proud pall its purple length devolve; Saw thee uplift the glittering dagger high; Ponder with fixed brow thy deep resolve, Prepar’d to strike, to triumph, and to die. Bring then to Britain’s plain that choral throng; Display thy buskin’d pomp, thy golden lyre; Give her historic forms the soul of song, And mingle Attic art with Shakespeare’s fire.” “Ah, what, fond boy, dost thou presume to claim?” The Muse replied, “mistaken suppliant, know, To light in Shakespeare’s breast the dazzling flame Exhausted all Parnassus could bestow. True, art remains; and if from his bright page Thy mimic power one vivid beam can seize, Proceed; and in that best of tasks engage, Which tends at once to profit, and to please.”

_Caractacus_, 1759.

THOMAS GRAY, 1759

(1716-1771)

Far from the sun and summer-gale, In thy green lap [_i.e._ Albion’s] was Nature’s darling laid, What time, where lucid Avon strayed, To him the mighty mother did unveil Her awful face: The dauntless child Stretch’d forth his little arms, and smil’d. This pencil take (she said) whose colours clear Richly paint the vernal year: Thine too these golden keys, immortal boy! This can unlock the gates of Joy; Of Horror that, and thrilling Fears, Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic Tears.

_The Progress of Poesy. A Pindaric Ode_, 1759, iii. 1.

DAVID MALLET, 1759

(1705?-1765)

Pride of his own, and wonder of this age, Who first created, and yet rules, the Stage, Bold to design, all powerful to express, Shakespear each passion drew in every dress: Great above rule, and imitating none; Rich without borrowing, nature was his own. Yet is his sense debas’d by gross alloy: As gold in mines lies mix’d with dirt and clay. Now, eagle-wing’d, his heavenward flight he takes; The big stage thunders, and the soul awakes: Now, low on earth, a kindred reptile creeps; Sad Hamlet quibbles, and the hearer sleeps.

_Of Verbal Criticism_, ll. 47-58. _Works_, 1759, vol. i. p. 21.

EDWARD YOUNG, 1759

(1683-1765)

Who knows whether Shakespeare might not have thought less, if he had read more? Who knows if he might not have laboured under the load of Jonson’s learning, as Enceladus under Ætna? His mighty genius, indeed, though the most mountainous oppression, would have breathed out some of his inextinguishable fire; yet possibly he might not have risen up into that giant, that much more than common man, at which we now gaze with amazement and delight. Perhaps he was as learned as his dramatic province required; for whatever other learning he wanted, he was master of two books unknown to many of the profoundly read, though books which the last conflagration alone can destroy: the book of Nature, and that of Man.

_Conjectures on Original Composition._ 1759.

MARK AKENSIDE, _c._ 1760

(1721-1770)

“_An Inscription._”

O youths and virgins: O declining eld: O pale misfortune’s slaves: O ye who dwell Unknown with humble quiet; ye who wait In courts, or fill the golden seat of kings: O sons of sport and pleasure: O thou wretch That weep’st for jealous love, or the sore wounds Of conscious guilt, or death’s rapacious hand Which left thee void of hope: O ye who roam In exile; ye who through th’ embattl’d field Seek bright renown; or who for nobler palms Contend, the leaders of a public cause; Approach: behold this marble. Know ye not The features? Hath not oft his faithful tongue Told you the fashion of your own estate, The secrets of your bosom? Here then round His monument with reverence while ye stand, Say to each other: “This was Shakespeare’s form; Who walk’d in every path of human life, Felt every passion; and to all mankind Doth now, will ever, that experience yield Which his own genius only could acquire.”

_Poetical Works._ 1805, ii. pp. 136-7.

ROBERT LLOYD, 1760

(1733-1764)

When Shakespeare leads the mind a dance, From France to England, hence to France, Talk not to me of time and place; I own I’m happy in the chase. Whether the drama’s here or there, ’Tis nature, Shakespeare, everywhere. The poet’s fancy can create, Contract, enlarge, annihilate, Bring past and present close together, In spite of distance, seas, or weather; And shut up in a single action What cost whole years in its transaction. So, ladies at a play or rout, Can flirt the universe about, Whose geographical account Is drawn and pictured on the mount: Yet when they please, contract the plan, And shut the world up in a fan.

_Shakespeare: An Epistle to Mr. Garrick._ 1760, ll. 37-54.

See also Lloyd’s _Ode to Genius_, 1760, ll. 1-14.

EDWARD CAPELL, 1760

(1713-1781)

It is said of the ostrich, that she drops her egg at random, to be disposed of as chance pleases; either brought up to maturity by the sun’s kindly warmth, or else crushed by beasts and the feet of passers-by: such, at least, is the account which naturalists have given us of this extraordinary bird; and admitting it for a truth, she is in this a fit emblem of almost every great genius: they conceive and produce with ease those noble issues of human understanding; but incubation, the dull work of putting them correctly upon paper and afterwards publishing, is a task they cannot away with. If the original state of all such authors’ writings, even from Homer downward, could be inquired into and known, they would yield proof in abundance of the justness of what is here asserted: but the author now before us shall suffice for them all; being at once the greatest instance of genius in producing noble things, and of negligence in providing for them afterwards.

Preface to _Mr. William Shakespeare, his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies set out by himself in quarto or by the Players his Fellows in folio, and now faithfully republished from those Editions in ten volumes octavo; with an Introduction, etc._ 1760, vol. i. pp. 1-2.

Of this preface Dr. Johnson remarked: “If the man would have come to me, I would have endeavoured to endow his purpose with words, for as it is, he doth gabble monstrously.”—Boswell’s _Life of Dr. Johnson_, iii. 251, 2nd ed.

CHARLES CHURCHILL, 1761

(1731-1764)

In the first seat, in robe of various dyes, A noble wildness flashing from his eyes, Sat Shakespeare.—In one hand a wand he bore, For mighty wonders fam’d in days of yore; The other held a globe, which to his will Obedient turn’d, and own’d the master’s skill: Things of the noblest kind his genius drew, And look’d through Nature at a single view: A loose he gave to his unbounded soul, And taught new lands to rise, new seas to roll; Call’d into being scenes unknown before, And, passing Nature’s bounds, was something more.

_The Rosciad_, 1761, l. 259.

WILLIAM WHITEHEAD, 1762

(1715-1785)

But chief avoid the boisterous roaring sparks, The sons of fire!—you’ll know them by their marks. Fond to be heard, they always court a crowd, And, though ’tis borrow’d nonsense, talk it loud. One epithet supplies their constant chime, Damn’d bad, damn’d good, damn’d low, or damn’d sublime. But most in quick short repartee they shine, Of local humour; or from plays purloin Each quaint stale scrap which every subject hits, Till fools almost imagine, they are wits. Hear them on Shakespeare! there they foam, they rage! Yet taste not half the beauties of his page, Nor see that art, as well as nature strove, To place him foremost in th’ Aonian grove. For there, there only, where the sisters join, His genius triumphs, and the work’s divine. Or would ye sift more near these sons of fire, ’Tis Garrick, and not Shakespeare, they admire, Without his breath, inspiring every thought, They ne’er perhaps had known what Shakespeare wrote; Without his eager, his becoming zeal, To teach them, though they scarce know why, to feel, A crude unmeaning mass had Jonson been, And a dead letter Shakespeare’s noblest scene.

_A Charge to the Poets._ 1762, ll. 167-190.

WILLIAM THOMPSON, 1763

(1712?-1766?)

“_In Shakespeare’s Walk._”

By yon hills, with morning spread, Lifting up the tufted head, By those golden waves of corn, Which the laughing fields adorn, By the fragrant breath of flowers, Stealing from the woodbine bowers, By this thought-inspiring shade, By the gleamings of the glade, By the babblings of the brook, Winding slow in many a crook, By the rustling of the trees, By the humming of the bees, By the woodlark, by the thrush, Wildly warbling from the bush, By the fairy’s shadowy tread O’er the cowslip’s dewy head, Father, monarch of the stage, Glory of Eliza’s age, Shakespeare! deign to lend thy face, This romantic nook to grace, Where untaught nature sports alone, Since thou and nature are but one.

_Garden Inscriptions. Poetical Calendar, 1763._ First reprinted in Anderson’s _Poets of Great Britain_, 1794, vol. x. p. 993.

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1765

(1709-1784)

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.

Preface to Shakespeare’s _Works_. 1765.

In _The Rambler_, No. 156 (14 Sept. 1751), Johnson wrote: “Instead of vindicating tragi-comedy by the success of Shakespeare, we ought perhaps to pay new honours to that transcendent and unbounded genius that could preside over the passions in sport; who, to actuate the affections, needed not the slow gradation of common means, but could fill the heart with instantaneous jollity or sorrow, and vary our disposition as he changed his scenes. Perhaps the effects even of Shakespeare’s poetry might have been greater, had he not counteracted himself; and we might have been more interested in the distresses of his heroes, had we not been so frequently diverted by the jokes of his buffoons.”

GEORGE KEATE, 1768

(1729-1797)

Yes! jealous wits may still for empire strive, Still keep the flames of critick rage alive: Our Shakespeare yet shall all his rights maintain, And crown the triumphs of Eliza’s reign, Above control, above each classick rule, His tutress Nature, and the World his school. On daring pinions borne, to him was given Th’ aerial range of Fancy’s brightest Heaven, To bid rapt thought o’er noblest heights aspire, And wake each passion with a Muse of Fire. Revere his genius—to the dead be just, And spare the laurels, that o’ershade the dust. Low sleeps the bard, _in cold obstruction laid_, Nor asks the chaplet from a rival’s head. O’er the dear vault, Ambition’s utmost bound, Unheard shall Fame her airy trumpet sound! Unheard alike, nor grief nor transport raise, Thy blast of censure, or thy note of praise! As Raphael’s own creation grac’d his hearse, And sham’d the pomp of ostentatious verse, Shall Shakespeare’s honours by himself be paid, And Nature perish ere his pictures fade.

_Ferney: An Epistle to Monsr. De Voltaire._ 1768. _Poetical Works_, 1781, pp. 136-7.

_Raphael’s Own Creation_:—The TRANSFIGURATION, that well-known picture of RAPHAEL, was carried before his body to the grave, doing more real honour to his memory than either his epitaph in the Pantheon, the famous distich of CARDINAL BEMBO, or all the other adulatory verses written on the same occasion.—KEATE.

DAVID GARRICK, 1769

(1717-1779)

“_Warwickshire._”

Ye _Warwickshire_ lads, and ye lasses, See what at our Jubilee passes; Come revel away, rejoice and be glad; For the lad of all lads, was a _Warwickshire_ lad, _Warwickshire_ lad, All be glad; For the lad of all lads, was a _Warwickshire_ lad.

Be proud of the charms of your county, Where Nature has lavish’d her bounty; Where much she has giv’n, and some to be spar’d; For the bard of all bards, was a _Warwickshire_ bard, _Warwickshire_ bard, Never pair’d; For the bard of all bards, was a _Warwickshire_ bard.

Each shire has its different pleasures, Each shire has its different treasures; But to rare _Warwickshire_, all must submit; For the wit of all wits, was a _Warwickshire_ wit, _Warwickshire_ wit, How he writ! For the wit of all wits, was a _Warwickshire_ wit.

Old Ben, Thomas Otway, John Dryden, And half a score more we take pride in; Of famous Will Congreve, we boast too the skill; But the Will of all Wills, was _Warwickshire_ Will, _Warwickshire_ Will, Matchless still; For the Will of all Wills, was a _Warwickshire_ Will.

Our Shakespeare compar’d is to no man— Nor Frenchman, nor Grecian, nor Roman; Their swans are all geese, to the Avon’s sweet swan; And the man of all men, was a _Warwickshire_ man, _Warwickshire_ man, Avon’s swan; And the man of all men, was a _Warwickshire_ man.

As ven’son is very inviting, To steal it our bard took delight in. To make his friends merry he never was lag; And the wag of all wags, was a _Warwickshire_ wag, _Warwickshire_ wag, Ever brag; For the wag of all wags, was a _Warwickshire_ wag.

There never was seen such a creature, Of all she was worth, he robbed Nature; He took all her smiles, and he took all her grief; And the thief of all thieves, was a _Warwickshire_ thief. _Warwickshire_ thief, He’s the chief; For the thief of all thieves, was a _Warwickshire_ chief.

“Warwickshire: a Song.” _Shakespeare’s Garland. Being a Collection of New Songs, Ballads, Roundelays, Catches, Glees, Comic Serenades, etc., performed at the Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon._ 1769, p. 2.

ANONYMOUS, 1769

“_To the Immortal Memory of Shakespeare._”

Immortal be his name, His memory, his fame! Nature and her works we see, Matchless Shakespeare, full in thee! Join’d by everlasting ties, Shakespeare but with Nature dies. Immortal be his Name, His memory, his fame!

_Shakespeare’s Garland. Being a Collection of New Songs, Ballads, etc., performed at the Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon._ 1769, p. 15.

WILLIAM RICHARDSON, 1774

(1743-1814)

No writer has hitherto appeared who possesses in a more eminent degree than Shakespeare, the power of imitating the passions. All of them seem familiar to him; the boisterous no less than the gentle; the benign no less than the malignant. There are several writers, as there are many players, who are successful in imitating some particular passions, but who appear stiff, awkward, and unnatural, in the expression of others. Some are capable of exhibiting very striking representations of resolute and intrepid natures, but cannot so easily bend themselves to those that are softer and more complacent. Others, again, seem full of amiable affection and tenderness, but cannot exalt themselves to the boldness of the hero, or magnanimity of the patriot. The genius of Shakespeare is unlimited. Possessing extreme sensibility, and uncommonly susceptible, he is the Proteus of the drama; he changes himself into every character, and enters easily into every condition of human nature.

* * * * *

Many dramatic writers of different ages are capable, occasionally, of breaking out, with great fervour of genius, in the natural language of strong emotion. No writer of antiquity is more distinguished for abilities of this kind than Euripides. His whole heart and soul seem torn and agitated by the force of the passion he imitates. He ceases to be Euripides; he is Medea; he is Orestes. Shakespeare, however, is most eminently distinguished, not only by these occasional sallies, but by imitating the passion in all its aspects, by pursuing it through all its windings and labyrinths, by moderating or accelerating its impetuosity according to the influence of other principles and of external events, and finally by combining it in a judicious manner with other passions and propensities, or by setting it aptly in opposition. He thus unites the two essential powers of dramatic invention, that of forming characters; and that of imitating in their natural expressions, the passions and affections of which they are composed.

_A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of some of Shakespeare’s remarkable Characters._ 1774. Introduction, pp. 39-42.

WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE, 1775

(1735-1788)

When Heaven decreed to soothe the feuds that tore The wolf-eyed barons, whose unletter’d rage Spurn’d the fair muse, Heaven bade on Avon’s shore A Shakespeare rise, and soothe the barbarous age: A Shakespeare rose; the barbarous heats assuage. At distance due how many bards attend! Enlarged and liberal from the narrow cage Of blinded zeal, new manners wide extend, And o’er the generous breast the dews of heaven descend.

Introduction to _The Lusiad, or the Discovery of India. An Epic Poem._ Translated, 1775.

WILLIAM HAYLEY, 1777

(1745-1820)

When mighty Shakespeare to thy judging eye Presents that magic glass whose ample round Reflects each figure in Creation’s bound, And pours, in floods of supernatural light, Fancy’s bright beings on the charmed sight, This chief enchanter of the willing breast Will teach thee all the magic he possessed. Placed in his circle, mark in colours true Each brilliant being that he calls to view: Wrapt in the gloomy storm, or robed in light, His weird sister or his fairy sprite. Boldly o’erleaping, in the great design, The bounds of nature, with a guide divine.

_A Poetic Epistle to an Eminent Painter_ [George Romney]. 2nd edition, 1779. Part II. ll. 472-84.

THOMAS WARTON, 1777

(1728-1790)

Avon, thy rural view, thy pastures wild, The willows that o’erhang thy twilight edge, Their boughs entangling with the embattled sedge; Thy brink with watery foliage quaintly fring’d, Thy surface with reflected verdure ting’d; Soothe me with many a pensive pleasure mild. But while I muse, that here the bard divine, Whose sacred dust yon high arch’d aisles enclose, Where the tall windows rise in stately rows Above the embowering shade, Here first, at Fancy’s fairy-circled shrine, Of daisies pied his infant offering made; Here playful yet, in stripling years unripe, Fram’d of thy reeds a shrill and artless pipe: Sudden thy beauties, Avon, all are fled, As at the waving of some magic wand; An holy trance my charmed spirit wings, And awful shapes of warriors and of kings People the busy mead, Like spectres swarming to the wizard’s hall; And slowly pace, and point with trembling hand The wounds ill-cover’d with the purple pall. Before me Pity seems to stand A weeping mourner, smote with anguish sore, To see Misfortune rend in frantic mood His robe, with regal woes embroider’d o’er. Pale Terror leads the visionary band, And sternly shakes his sceptre dropping blood.

“Monody written near Stratford-upon-Avon.” _Miscellaneous Odes._ 1777.

ANNA SEWARD, BEFORE 1782

(1747-1809)

“_On Shakespeare’s Monument at Stratford-upon-Avon._”

Great Homer’s birth sev’n rival cities claim, Too mighty such monopoly of Fame; Yet not to birth alone did Homer owe His wondrous worth; what Egypt could bestow, With all the schools of Greece and Asia join’d, Enlarg’d th’ immense expansion of his mind. Nor yet unrival’d the Mæonian strain, The British Eagle and the Mantuan Swan Tow’r equal heights. But happier Stratford, thou With incontested laurels deck thy brow: Thy bard was thine _unschool’d_, and from thee brought More than all Egypt, Greece, or Asia taught. Not Homer’s self such matchless honours won; The Greek has rivals, but thy Shakespeare none.

Dodsley’s _Collection of Poems by Several Hands_. 1782, ii. p. 315.

“The British Eagle,” _i.e._ Milton.

WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES, 1794

(1762-1850)

“_On Shakespeare._”

O sovereign master, who with lovely state Dost rule as in some isle’s enchanted land, On whom soft airs and shadowy spirits wait, Whilst scenes of faerie bloom at thy command! On thy wild shores forgetful could I lie, And list, till earth dissolved, to thy sweet minstrelsy!

Called by thy magic from the hoary deep, Aërial forms should in bright troops ascend, And then a wondrous masque before me sweep; While sounds _that the earth owned not_, seem to blend Their stealing melodies, that when the strain Ceased, _I should weep, and would so dream again_!

The charm is wound: I see an aged form, In white robes, on the winding sea-shore stand; O’er the careering surge he waves his wand: Upon the black rock bursts the bidden storm. Now from bright opening clouds I hear a lay, _Come to these yellow sands, fair stranger, come away_.

Saw ye pass by the weird sisters pale? Marked ye the lowering castle on the heath? Hark! hark! is the deed done? the deed of death! The deed is done—hail, king of Scotland, hail! I see no more;—to many a fearful sound The bloody cauldron sinks, and all is dark around.

Pity! touch the trembling strings, A maid, a beauteous maniac, wildly sings: “They laid him in the ground so cold, Upon his breast the earth is thrown; High is heaped the grassy mould, _Oh! he is dead and gone_. The winds of the winter blow o’er his cold breast, But pleasant shall be his rest.”

The song is ceased. Ah! who, pale shade, art thou, Sad raving to the rude tempestuous night? Sure thou hast had much wrong, so stern thy brow; So piteous thou dost tear thy tresses white; So wildly thou dost cry, “_Blow, bitter wind, Ye elements, I call not _you_ unkind_.”

Beneath the shade of nodding branches grey, And rude romantic woods, and glens forlorn, The merry hunters wear the hours away; Rings the deep forest to the joyous horn! Joyous to all, but him who with sad look Hangs idly musing by the brawling brook.

But mark the merry elves of fairy land! To the high moon’s gleamy glance, They with shadowy morris dance; Soft music dies along the desert sand; Soon at peep of cold-eyed day Soon the numerous lights decay; Merrily, now merrily, After the dewy moon they fly.

Let rosy laughter now advance, And wit with sparkling eye, Where quaint powers lurking lie Bright fancy, the queen of the revels, shall dance, And point to the frolicsome train And antic forms that flit unnumbered o’er the plain.

O sovereign master! at whose sole command We start with terror, or with pity weep; O! where is now thy all-creating wand? Buried ten thousand fathoms in the deep. The staff is broke, the powerful spell is fled, And never earthly guest shall in thy circle tread.

_Sonnets, with other Poems._ 3rd edition. 1794, pp. 67-70.

This poem appears in later editions of Bowle’s sonnets in a different form. Stanza 9 is omitted, and the remaining stanzas are arranged thus: 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 3, 4, 5, 10:

“Come to these yellow sands.” Ferdinand. See _The Tempest_.

“The weird sisters.” See _Macbeth_.

“A beauteous maniac.” Ophelia. See _Hamlet_.

“Blow, bitter wind.” See _King Lear_.

“Him, who with sad look.” Jacques. See _As You Like It_.

“Elves of fairy land.” See _Midsummer Night’s Dream_.

THE THIRD PERIOD

NINETEENTH CENTURY

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1802

(1770-1850)

It is not to be thought of that the flood Of British freedom, which, to the open sea Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity Hath flowed “with pomp of waters unwithstood,” Roused though it be full often to a mood Which spurns the check of salutary bands, That this most famous stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.

“Sonnets dedicated to Liberty.” _Poems._ 1807.

FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS, 1804

(1793-1835)

“_Shakespeare._”

I love to rove o’er history’s page, Recall the hero and the sage; Revive the actions of the dead, And memory of ages fled: Yet it yields me greater pleasure To read the poet’s pleasing measure. Led by Shakespeare, bard inspired, The bosom’s energies are fired; We learn to shed the generous tear O’er poor Ophelia’s sacred bier; To love the merry moonlit scene, With fairy elves in valleys green; Or borne on fancy’s heavenly wings, To listen while sweet Ariel sings. How sweet the native wood notes wild Of him, the Muse’s favourite child! Of him whose magic lays impart Each various feeling to the heart.

_Poems._ By Felicia Dorothea Browne, 1808, p. 48.

One of Mrs. Hemans’ earliest tastes—relates her sister in her _Memoirs_—was a passion for Shakespeare, which she read as her choicest recreation at six years old. The above lines were written when she was eleven years of age.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1814

(1771-1832)

The English stage might be considered as equally without rule and without model when Shakespeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius, in its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence. Such was the case with Shakespeare. With an education more extensive, and a taste refined by the classical models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient drama, might have mistaken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a genius as comprehensive and versatile, as intense and powerful, Shakespeare had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him; but he moved in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order, and vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantic restriction to classical rule. Nothing went before Shakespeare which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character of a national drama; and certainly no one will succeed him, capable of establishing by mere authority, a form more restricted than that which Shakespeare used.

Article on “Drama,” _Encyclopædia Britannica_. 4th ed. 1814. 6th ed. vol. viii. p. 157.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1817

(1772-1834)

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare’s POEMS, the creative power, and the intellectual energy, wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the DRAMA they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or, like two rapid streams, that at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The “Venus and Adonis” did not, perhaps, allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in _Shakespeare’s_ management of the tale, neither pathos, nor any other _dramatic_ quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and, lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often _domination_, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say? even this: that—

Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power, which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, to one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, in the unity of his own IDEAL. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of MILTON; while SHAKESPEARE becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England! my country!

_Biographia Literaria._ 1817, chap. xv.

The following is from Coleridge’s _Literary Remains_, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1867, ii. pp. 68-69:—I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakespeare by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling _sui generis et demonstratio demonstrationum_) called the conscience, the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,—and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation; and then compare with Shakespeare under each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result? And ask your own hearts,—ask your own common-sense—to conceive the possibility of this man being—I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies,—but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What! are we to have miracles in sport? Or, I speak reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?

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._”

O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute! Fair-plumed Syren, Queen of far-away! Leave melodising on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute: Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay Must I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit: Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme! When through the old oak Forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream, But, when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phœnix wings to fly at my desire.

_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)

Who now shall grace the glowing throne, Where, all unrivall’d, all alone, Bold Shakespeare sat, and look’d creation through, The minstrel monarch of the worlds he drew?

That throne is cold—that lyre in death unstrung, On whose proud note delighted Wonder hung. Yet old Oblivion, as in wrath he sweeps, One spot shall spare—the grave where Shakespeare sleeps. Rulers and ruled in common gloom may lie, But Nature’s laureate bards shall never die. Art’s chisell’d boast and glory’s trophied shore Must live in numbers or can live no more. While sculptured Jove some nameless waste may claim, Still roars the Olympic car in Pindar’s fame: Troy’s doubtful walls, in ashes pass’d away, Yet frown on Greece in Homer’s deathless lay; Rome, slowly sinking in her crumbling fanes, Stands all immortal in her Maro’s strains; So, too, yon giant empress of the isles, On whose broad sway the sun for ever smiles, To Time’s unsparing rage one day must bend, And all her triumphs in her Shakespeare end!

O thou! to whose creative power We dedicate the festal hour, While Grace and Goodness round the altar stand, Learning’s anointed train, and Beauty’s rose-lipp’d band— Realms yet unborn, in accents now unknown, Thy song shall learn, and bless it for their own. Deep in the west, as Independence roves, His banners planting round the land he loves, Where Nature sleeps in Eden’s infant grace, In Time’s full hour shall spring a glorious race: Thy name, thy verse, thy language shall they bear, And deck for thee the vaulted temple there. Our Roman-hearted fathers broke Thy parent empire’s galling yoke, But thou, harmonious monarch of the mind, Around their sons a gentler chain shall bind; Still o’er our land shall Albion’s sceptre wave, And what her mighty Lion lost, her mightier Swan shall save.

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

CHARLES LAMB, 1824

(1775-1834)

In “sad civility” once Garrick sate To see a play, mangled in form and state; Plebeian Shakespeare must the words supply,— The actors all were fools—of Quality. The scenes—the dresses—were above rebuke;— Scarce a performer there below a Duke. He sate, and mused how in his Shakespeare’s mind The idea of old nobility enshrined Should thence a grace and a refinement have Which passed these living Nobles to conceive— Who with such apish, base gesticulation, Remnants of starts, and dregs of playhouse passion, So foul belied their great forefathers’ fashion! He saw—and true nobility confessed Less in the high-born blood, than lowly poet’s breast.

“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._”

Spirit all limitless, Where is thy dwelling-place? Spirit of him whose high name we revere, Come on thy seraph wings, Come from thy wanderings, And smile on thy votaries, who sigh for thee here!

Come, O thou spark divine, Rise from thy hallowed shrine; Here in the windings of Forth thou shalt see Hearts true to nature’s call Spirits congenial, Proud of their country, yet bowing to thee.

Here with rapt heart and tongue, While our fond minds were young, Oft thy bold numbers we poured in our mirth; Now in our hall for aye This shall be holiday, Bard of all Nature, to honour thy birth.

Whether thou tremblest o’er Green grave of Elsinore, Stayest o’er the hill of Dunsinnan to hover, Bosworth, or Shrewsbury, Egypt or Philippi; Come from thy roamings the universe over.

Whether thou journey’st far On by the morning star, Dream’st on the shadowy brows of the moon, Or linger’st in fairyland, ’Mid lovely elves to stand, Singing thy carols unearthly and boon;—

Here thou art called upon, Come thou to Caledon! Come to the land of the ardent and free! The land of the love recess, Mountain and wilderness, This is the land, thou wild meteor, for thee!

Oh, never since time had birth, Rose from the pregnant earth Gems such as late have in Scotia sprung;— Gems that in future day, When ages pass away, Like thee shall be honoured, like thee shall be sung!

Then here, by the sounding sea, Forest, and greenwood tree, Here to solicit thee cease shall we never: Yes, thou effulgence bright, Here must thy flame relight, Or vanish from Nature for ever and ever!

_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._”

The soul of man is larger than the sky, Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark Of the unfathom’d centre. Like that Ark, Which in its sacred hold uplifted high, O’er the drown’d hills, the human family, And stock reserved of every living kind, So in the compass of the single mind The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie, That make all worlds. Great Poet, ’twas thy art To know thyself, and in thyself to be Whate’er love, hate, ambition, destiny, Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart, Can make of Man. Yet thou wert still the same, Serene of thought, unhurt by thy own flame.

_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._”

How little fades from earth when sink to rest The hours and cares that moved a great man’s breast! Though nought of all we saw the grave may spare, His life pervades the world’s impregnate air; Though Shakespeare’s dust beneath our footsteps lies, His spirit breathes amid his native skies; With meaning won from him for ever glows Each air that England feels, and star it knows; His whispered words from many a mother’s voice Can make her sleeping child in dreams rejoice, And gleams from spheres he first conjoined to earth Are blent with rays of each new morning’s birth. Amid the sights and tales of common things, Leaf, flower, and bird, and wars, and deaths of kings, Of shore, and sea, and nature’s daily round, Of life that tills, and tombs that load the ground, His visions mingle, swell, command, pace by, And haunt with living presence heart and eye; And tones from him by other bosoms caught Awaken flush and stir of mounting thought, And the long sigh, and deep impassioned thrill, Rouse custom’s trance, and spur the faltering will. Above the goodly land more his than ours He sits supreme enthroned in skyey towers, And sees the heroic brood of his creation Teach larger life to his ennobled nation. O! shaping brain! O! flashing fancy’s hues! O! boundless heart kept fresh by pity’s dews! O! wit humane and blythe! O! sense sublime For each dim oracle of mantled Time! Transcendent Form of Man! in whom we read Mankind’s whole tale of impulse, thought, and deed; Amid the expanse of years beholding thee, We know how vast our world of life may be; Wherein, perchance, with aims as pure as thine, Small tasks and strengths may be no less divine.

_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._”

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil’d searching of mortality;

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguessed at.—Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

_Poems._ 1853.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, 1853

(1775-1864)

“_Shakespeare and Milton._”

The tongue of England, that which myriads Have spoken and will speak, were paralysed Hereafter, but two mighty men stand forth Above the flight of ages, two alone; One crying out, _All nations spoke thro’ me_.

The other: True; and thro’ this trumpet burst God’s word; the fall of Angels, and the doom First of immortal, then of mortal, Man, Glory! be glory! not to me, to God.

_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:

“Quo fit, ut omnis Votivâ pateat veluti descripta labellâ Vita senis.”

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)

O land of Shakespeare! ours with all thy past, Till these last years that make the sea so wide, Think not the jar of battle’s trumpet-blast Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride In every noble word thy sons bequeathed The air our fathers breathed!

War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife, We turn to other days and far-off lands, Live o’er in dreams the Poet’s faded life, Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,— Not his the need, but ours!

We call those poets who are first to mark Through earth’s dull mist the coming of the dawn,— Who see in twilight’s gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone; For him the Lord of light the curtain rent That veils the firmament . . .

With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved name Stamped once on dust that moved with pulsed breath, As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame Whose undimmed glories gild the night of death: We praise not star or sun; in these we see Thee, Father, only Thee!

Thy gifts are beauty, wisdom, power, and love: We read, we reverence on this human soul,— Earth’s clearest mirror of the light above,— Plain as the record on Thy prophet’s scroll, When o’er his page the effluent splendours poured, Thine own, “Thus saith the Lord!”

This player was a prophet from on high, Thine own elected. Statesman, poet, sage, For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by; Sidney’s fair youth, and Raleigh’s ripened age, Spenser’s chaste soul, and his imperial mind Who taught and shamed mankind.

“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)

A counsellor well fitted to advise In daily life, and at whose lips no less Men may inquire or nations, when distress Of sudden doubtful danger may arise, Who, though his head be hidden in the skies, Plants his firm foot upon our common earth, Dealing with thoughts which everywhere have birth,— This is the poet, true of heart and wise: No dweller in a baseless world of dream, Which is not earth nor heaven: his words have passed Into man’s common thought and week-day phrase; This is the poet and his verse will last. Such was our Shakespeare once, and such doth seem One who redeems our later gloomier days.

_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.

. . . . . .

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._”

Shelter and succour such as common men Afford the weaker partners of their fate, Have I derived from thee—from thee, most great And powerful genius! whose sublime control Still from thy grave governs each human soul, That reads the wondrous record of thy pen. From sordid sorrows thou hast set me free, And turned from want’s grim ways my tottering feet, And to sad empty hours, given royally, A labour, than all leisure far more sweet. The daily bread, for which we humbly pray, Thou gavest me as if I were a child, And still with converse noble, wise, and mild, Charmed with despair my sinking soul away; Shall I not bless the need, to which was given Of all the angels in the host of heaven, Thee, for my guardian, spirit strong and bland! Lord of the speech of my dear native land!

_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._

This tree, here fall’n, no common birth or death Shared with its kind. The world’s enfranchised son, Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one, Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath. Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath Rank also singly—the supreme unhung? Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue, This viler thief’s unsuffocated breath!

We’ll search thy glossary, Shakespeare! whence almost, And whence alone, some name shall be reveal’d For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of years Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres; Whose soul is carrion now,—too mean to yield Some Starveling’s ninth allotment of a ghost.

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

FOOTNOTES:

[185:1] The last line in the earlier version—that printed in the _Academy_—has “tailor’s” for “Starveling’s.” Rossetti made the alteration from fear of offending sensitive members of the tailoring profession.

BAYARD TAYLOR, 1872

(1825-1878)

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

Here, in his right, he stands! No breadth of earth-dividing seas can bar The breeze of morning, or the morning star, From visiting our lands: His wit the breeze, his wisdom as the star, Shone where our earliest life was set, and blew To freshen hope and plan In brains American,— To urge, resist, encourage, and subdue! He came, a household ghost we could not ban: He sat, on winter nights, by cabin fires; His summer fairies linked their hands Along our yellow sands; He preached within the shadow of our spires; And when the certain Fate drew nigh, to cleave The birth-cord, and a separate being leave, He, in our ranks of patient-hearted men, Wrought with the boundless forces of his fame, Victorious, and became The Master of our thought, the land’s first Citizen! If, here, his image seem Of softer scenes and grayer skies to dream, Thatched cot and rustic tavern, ivied hall, The cuckoo’s April call And cowslip-meads beside the Avon stream, He shall not fail that other home to find We could not leave behind! The forms of Passion, which his fancy drew, In us their ancient likenesses beget: So, from our lives for ever born anew, He stands amid his own creations yet! Here comes lean Cassius, of conventions tired; Here, in his coach, luxurious Antony Beside his Egypt, still of men admired; And Brutus plans some purer liberty! A thousand Shylocks, Jew and Christian, pass; A hundred Hamlets, by their times betrayed; And sweet Anne Page comes tripping o’er the grass, And awkward Falstaff pants beneath the shade. Here toss upon the wanton summer wind The locks of Rosalind; Here some gay glove the damned spot conceals Which Lady Macbeth feels: His ease here smiling smooth Iago takes, And outcast Lear gives passage to his woe, And here some foiled Reformer sadly breaks His wand of Prospero! In liveried splendour, side by side, Nick Bottom and Titania ride, And Portia, flushed with cheers of men, Disdains dear faithful Imogen; And Puck beside the form of Morse, Stops on his forty-minute course; And Ariel from his swinging bough A blossom casts on Bryant’s brow, Until, as summoned from his brooding brain, He sees his children all again, In us, as on our lips, each fresh, immortal strain!

_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

“Nimble spirits of the arteries,”

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.

. . . . . . .

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._”

Not if men’s tongues and angels’ all in one Spake, might the word be said that might speak thee. Streams, winds, woods, flowers, fields, mountains, yea the sea, What power is in them all to praise the sun? His praise is this,—he can be praised of none. Man, woman, child, praise God for him; but he Exults not to be worshipped, but to be. He is; and, being, beholds his work well done. All joy, all glory, all sorrow, all strength, all mirth, Are his: without him, day were night on earth. Time knows not his from time’s own period. All lutes, all harps, all viols, all flutes, all lyres, Fall dumb before him ere one string suspires. All stars are angels; but the sun is God.

_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._”

Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell Of human passions, but of love deflowered His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well. Thence came the honeyed corner of his lips, The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips, Yet full of speech and intershifting tales, Close mirrors of us: thence had he the laugh We feel is thine: broad as ten thousand beeves At pasture! thence thy songs, that winnow chaff From grain, bid sick Philosophy’s last leaves Whirl, if they have no recompense—they enforced To fatten Earth when from her soul divorced.

How smiles he at a generation ranked In gloomy noddings over life! They pass. Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked, Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass. But he can spy that little twist of brain Which moved some mighty leader of the blind, Unwitting ’twas the goad of personal pain, To view in curst eclipse our Mother’s mind, And show us of some rigid harridan The wretched bondman till the end of time. O lived the Master now to paint us Man, That little twist of brain would ring a chime Of whence it came and what it caused, to start Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.

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

ROBERT BROWNING, 1884

(1812-1889)

“_The Names._”

Shakespeare!—to such name’s sounding, what succeeds Fitly as a silence? Falter forth the spell,— Act follows word, the speaker knows full well, Nor tampers with its magic more than needs. Two names there are: That which the Hebrew reads With his soul only: if from lips it fell, Echo, back thundered by earth, heaven and hell, Would own, “Thou didst create us!” Nought impedes We voice the other name, man’s most of might, Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love Mutely await their working, leave to sight All of the issue as below—above— Shakespeare’s creation rises: one remove Though dread—this finite from that infinite.

_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._”

Whose are those forms august that, in the press And busy blames and praises of to-day, Stand so serene above life’s fierce affray With ever youthful strength and loveliness? Those are the mighty makers, whom no stress Of time can shame, nor fashion sweep away, Whom Art begot on Nature in the play Of healthy passion, scorning base excess. Rising perchance in mists, and half obscure When up the horizon of their age they came, Brighter with years they shine in steadier light, Great constellations that will aye endure, Though myriad meteors of ephemeral fame Across them flash, to vanish into night.

Such was our Chaucer in the early prime Of English verse, who held to Nature’s hand And walked serenely through its morning land, Gladsome and hale, brushing its dewy rime. And such was Shakespeare, whose strong soul could climb Steeps of sheer terror, sound the ocean grand Of passions deep, or over Fancy’s strand Trip with his fairies, keeping step and time. His too the power to laugh out full and clear, With unembittered joyance, and to move Along the silent, shadowy paths of love As tenderly as Dante, whose austere Stern spirit through the worlds below, above, Unsmiling strode, to tell their tidings here.

_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)

Our Prince of Peace in glory hath gone, With no Spear shaken, no Sword drawn, No Cannon fired, no flag unfurled, To make his conquest of the World.

For him no Martyr-fires have blazed, No limbs been racked, no scaffolds raised; For him no life was ever shed, To make the Victor’s pathway red.

And for all time he wears the Crown Of lasting, limitless renown: He reigns, whatever Monarchs fall; His Throne is in the heart of all.

_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._”

A little English earth and breathèd air Made Shakespeare the divine; so is his verse The broidered soil of every blossom fair; So doth his song all sweet bird-songs rehearse. But tell me, then, what wondrous stuff did fashion That part of him which took those wilding flights Among imagined worlds; whence the white passion That burned three centuries through the days and nights! Not heaven’s four winds could make, nor round the earth, The soul wherefrom the soul of Hamlet flamed; Nor anything of merely mortal birth Could lighten as when Shakespeare’s name is named. How was his body bred we know full well, But that high soul’s engendering who may tell!

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

MATHILDE BLIND, _c._ 1894

(1841-1896)

“_Shakespeare._”

Yearning to know herself for all she was, Her passionate clash of warring good and ill, Her new life ever ground in Death’s old mill, With every delicate detail and _en masse_,— Blind Nature strove. Lo, then it came to pass, That Time, to work out her unconscious will, Once wrought the mind which she had groped to fill, And she beheld herself as in a glass.

The world of men, unrolled before our sight, Showed like a map, where stream and waterfall, And village-cradling vale and cloud-capped height Stand faithfully recorded, great and small, For Shakespeare was, and at his touch with light Impartial as the sun’s, revealed the All.

“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:

“Why did you throw your wedded lady from you? Think that you are upon a rock; and now, Throw me again!”

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

“Hang there like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die.”

_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.