From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (Buffalo, NY: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 564-77. [This section was prepared and proofread by Deborah Hill.]
Of the several works of Shakespere -- plays and poems--there were prior to 1616 in circulation, in all, no fewer than between sixty and sixty-five editions. Some of these reached as many as six editions within a period of not more than twenty-one years. This argues of itself an extensive popularity, especially when we reflect on the small number of the reading public of his day. If we take the lowest estimate of the editions (sixty) and suppose each issue to have consisted of the lowest possible paying number (300 say), we should have in circulation no fewer than 18,000 copies of the productions of the great dramatist in print during his lifetime. -- NEIL, SAMUEL, 1861, Shakespere, A Critical Biography, p. 59.
He stands, in his relations to English literature, in the same position that the great Greek sculptors stood with respect to ancient art, embodying conceptions of humanity in its various attributes with indescribable skill, and with an exquisite agreement to nature. -- DRAPER, JOHN WILLIAM, 1861-76, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. II, p. 24.
Nor even in his plays is Shakspeare merely a dramatist. Apart altogether from his dramatic power he is the greatest poet that ever lived. His sympathy is the most universal, his imagination the most plastic, his diction the most expressive, ever given to any writer. His poetry has in itself the power and varied excellences of all other poetry. While in grandeur, and beauty, and passion, and sweetest music, and all the other high gifts of song he may be ranked with the greatest, -- with Spenser, and Chaucer and Milton, and Dante, and Homer, -- he is at the same time more nervous than Dryden, and more sententious than Pope, and more sparkling and of more abounding conceit, when he chooses, than Donne or Cowley, or Butler. In whose handling was language ever such a flame of fire as it is in his? His wonderful potency in the use of this instrument would alone set him above all other writers. -- CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. I, p. 591.
Although the dialect of Shakespeare does not exhibit the same relative superiority as that of Chaucer over all older and contemporaneous literature, its absolute superiority is, nevertheless, unquestionable. I have before had occasion to remark that the greatest authors very often confine themselves to a restricted vocabulary, and that the power of their diction lies, not in the multitude of words, but in skilful combination and adaptation of a few. This is strikingly verified by an examination of the stock of words employed by Shakespeare. He introduces, indeed, terms borrowed from every art and every science, from all theoretical knowledge and all human experience; but his entire vocabulary little exceeds fifteen thousand words, and of these a large number, chiefly of Latin origin, occur but once or at most twice in his pages. The affluence of his speech arises from variety of combination, not from numerical abundance. And yet the authorized vocabulary of Shakespeare's time probably embraced twice or thrice the number of words which he found necessary for his purposes, for though there were at that time no dictionaries which exhibit a great stock of words yet in perusing Hooker, the old translators, and the early voyagers and travellers, we find a verbal wealth, a copiousness of diction, which forms a singular contrast with the philological economy of the great dramatist. In his theory of dramatic construction, Shakespeare owes little -- in his conception of character nothing -- to earlier or contemporary artists; but in his diction, everything except felicity of selection and combination. The existence of the whole copious English vocabulary was necessary, in order that his marvellous gift of selection might have room for its exercise. -- MARSH, GEORGE P., 1862, Origin and History of the English Language, etc., p. 569.
In Shakespeare we admire the mighty power with which, after a brief introduction, he throws excitement in the way of his heroes and impels them swiftly in rapid upward stages to a momentous height. His method of leading the action and the characters beyond the climax, in the first half of the play, may also serve as a model to us. And in the second half, the catastrophe itself is planned with the sureness and scope of genius, with no attempt at overwhelming effect, without apparent effort, with concise execution, a consequence of the play, following as a matter of course. But the great poet does not always have success with the forces of the falling action, between climax and catastrophe, the part which fills about the fourth act of our plays. In this important place, he seems too much restrained by the customs of his stage. In many of the greatest dramas of his artistic time, the action is divided up, in this part, into several little scenes, which have an episodical character and are inserted only to make the connection clear. The inner conditions of the hero are concealed, the heightening of effects and the concentration so necessary here fails. It is so in "Hamlet," in "King Lear," in "Macbeth, " somewhat so in "Antony and Cleopatra." Even in "Julius Caesar," the return action contains, indeed, that splendid quarrel scene and the reconciliation between Brutus and Cassius, and the appearance of the ghost, but what follows is again much divided, fragmentary. In "Richard III.," the falling action is indeed drawn together into several great impulses, but yet these do not in a sufficient degree correspond in stage effect to the immense power of the first part. -- FREYTAG, GUSTAV, 1863-94, Technique of the Drama, tr. MacEwan, p. 185.
We are more intimate with Shakespeare's men and women than we are with our contemporaries, and they are, on the whole better company. They are more beautiful in form and feature, and they express themselves in a way that the most gifted strive after in vain. What if Shakespeare's people could walk out of the playbooks and settle down upon some spot of earth and conduct life there! There would be found humanity's whitest wheat, the world's unalloyed gold. The very winds could not visit the place roughly. No king's court could present you such an array. Where else could we find a philosopher like Hamlet? a friend like Antonio? a witty fellow like Mercutio? where else Imogen's piquant face? Portia's gravity and womanly sweetness? Rosalind's true heart and silvery laughter? Cordelia's beauty of holiness? These would form the centre of the court, but the purlieus, how many-coloured! Malvolio would walk mincingly in the sunshine there, Autolycus would filch purses. Sir Andrew Ague-cheek and Sir Toby Belch would be eternal boon companions. And as Falstaff sets out homeward from the tavern, the portly knight leading the revellers like a three-docker a line of frigates, they are encountered by Dogberry, who summons them to stand and answer to the watch as they are honest men. -- SMITH, ALEXANDER, 1863, Dreamthorp, p. 983.
Not only is Shakespeare the closest of all reasoners, but the web of his argument is always of a golden tissue. . . . The very sweepings of his genius are virgin gold. -- CLARKE, CHARLES COWDEN, 1863, Shakespeare-Characters, pp. 23, 119.
Given a shadow, Shakespere had the power to place himself so, that that shadow became his own -- was the correct representation as shadow, of his form coming between it and the sunlight. And this is the highest dramatic gift that a man can possess. But we feel at the same time, that this is, in the main, not so much art as inspiration. -- MACDONALD, GEORGE, 1863, The Imagination and Other Essays, p. 161.
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.
-- HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, 1864, Shakespeare Tercentennial Celebration.
If I preach about Shakespere, and the method of treatment should be somewhat unusual in your ear, I hope you will remember that this is the very thing which I am set to do. Why, then, I would ask, have we just cause to celebrate with a jubilee the feet that three hundred years ago Shakspere was born; or, in other words, why do we thank God that such a man has been among us? What is there we have read in his writings to render them an enduring benefit to us, -- a possession forever, -- such as we feel makes us richer, wiser, and, using it aright, better than we should have been without them? It is this question which we propose to discuss. Those who mould a nation's life should be men acquainted with God's scheme of the universe, cheerfully working in their own appointed sphere the work which has been assigned them, accepting God's world because it is His, with all its strange riddles and perplexities, with all the burdens which it lays upon each one of us: -- not fiercely dashing and shaking themselves like imprisoned birds against the bars of their prison house, or moodily nourishing in their own hearts, and in the hearts of others thoughts of discontent, revolt, and despair. Such a poet, I am bold to affirm, we possessed in Shakspere. -- TRENCH, RICHARD CHENEVIX, 1864, Sermon, Tercentenary of Shakspere, Stratford-upon-Avon, April 23.
In order to deal fairly with this former part of our investigation, It is necessary to remark, in the first instance, that while the whole contents and general language of the Bible would be known to our poet from translations previously in us in regard to particular words and modes of speech it is probable that our translators of 1611 owed to Shakspeare as much as, or rather far more than, he owed to them. . . . Take the entire range of English Literature; put together our best authors, who have written upon subject not professedly religious or theological and we shall not find, I believe, in the all united, so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have found in Shakspeare 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, Shakspeare is also, by general confession, the greatest and the best. -- WORDSWORTH, CHARLES, 1864-80, Shakspeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible, pp 9, 345.
Homer, Job, AEschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, St. John, St. Paul, Tacitus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare. That is the avenue of the immoveable giants of the human mind. The men of genius are a dynasty. Indeed there is no other. They wear all the crowns, even that of thorns. Each of them represents the sum total of absolute that man can realize. We repeat it, to choose between these men, to prefer one to the other, to mark with the finger the first among these first, it cannot be. All are the Mind. Perhaps, in an extreme case and yet every objection would be legitimate -- you might mark out as the highest summit among those summits, Homer, AEschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, and Shakespeare. It is understood that we speak here only in an Art point of view, and in Art, in the literary point of view. Two men in this group, AEschylus and Shakespeare, represent specially the drama. . . . His poetry has the sharp perfume of honey made by the vagabond bee without a hive. Here prose, there verse; all forms, being but receptacles for the idea, suit him. This poetry weeps and laughs. The English tongue, a language little formed, now assists, now harms him, but everywhere the deep mind gushes forth translucent. Shakespeare's drama proceeds with a kind of distracted rhythm, it is so vast that it staggers; it has and gives the vertigo; but nothing is so solid as this excited grandeur. Shakespeare, shuddering, has in himself the winds, the spirits, the philters, the vibrations, the fluctuations of transient breezes, the obscure penetration of effluvia, the great unknown sap. Thence his agitation, in the depth of which is repose. It is agitation in which Goethe is wanting, wrongly praised for his impassiveness, which is inferiority. This agitation, all minds of the first order have it. It is in Job, in AEschylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity. -- HUGO, VICTOR, 1864, William Shakespeare, tr. Baillot, pp. 66, 185.
He combines in one individual, and harmonizes, qualities apparently incongruous, his genius revealing to him their affinities. -- WHITE, RICHARD GRANT, 1855, ed., The Works of William Shakespeare, an Essay on Shakespeare's Genius, vol. I, p. ccxxxii.
Morning and night meet, as in Nature, in the poet's writings -- the comic and the tragic. In the full flush and luxuriance of his powers he rises upon us bright, lively, and jocund as the dawn; we know not where he will lead us in the abundance of his poetical caprice, what stores of mirth and wanton wiles, what brilliant and ever-changing hues will sparkle, dazzle, and allure us in his ambrosial course. But that bright morning -- unlike the morning of many of the poet's contemporaries -- goes down in a solemn and glorious sunset, canopied with clouds of gold and purple. -- BREWER, JOHN SHERREN, 1871-81, English Studies, ed. Wace, p. 249.
His was one of those delicate souls which, like a perfect instrument of music, vibrate of themselves at the slightest touch. . . . he had a sympathetic genius. I mean that naturally he knew how to forget himself and become transfused into all the objects which he conceived. . . . Shakspeare imagines with copiousness and excess; he spreads metaphors profusely over all be writes; every instant abstract ideas are changed into images; it is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves; they crowd within him, covering his arguments; they dim with their brightness the pure light of logic. He does not labour to explain or prove; picture on picture, image on image, he is forever copying the strange and splendid visions which are engendered one within another, and are heaped up within him. . . . Shakspeare never sees things tranquilly. All the powers of his mind are concentrated in the present image or idea. He is buried and absorbed in it. With such a genius, we are on the brink of an abyss; the eddying water dashes in headlong, devouring whatever objects it meets, bringing them to light again, if at all, transformed and mutilated. We pause stupefied before these convulsive metaphors, which might have been written by a fevered hand in a night's delirium, which gather a pageful of ideas and pictures in half a sentence, which scorch the eyes they would enlighten. . . . The most immoderate of all violators of language, the most marvellous of all creators of souls, the farthest removed from regular logic and classical reason, the one most capable of exciting in us a world of forms, and of placing living beings before us. -- TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. I, bk. ii, ch. iv, pp. 303, 307, 309, 310.
An imagination so creative, a reason so vigorous, a wisdom so clear and comprehensive, taking views of life and character and duty so broad and just and true, a spirit so fiery and at the same time so gentle, such acuteness of observation and such power of presenting to other minds what is observed -- such a combination of qualities seems to afford us, as we contemplate it, a glimpse of what, in certain respects, the immortal part of man shall be, when every cause that dims its vision or weakens its energy or fetters its activity or checks its expansion shall be wholly done away, and that subtler essence shall be left to the full and free exercise of the powers with which God endowed it. -- BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN, 1872, Shakspeare, Orations and Addresses, p. 372.
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!
-- TAYLOR, BAYARD, 1872, Shakespeare's Statue, Central Park, New York, May 23.
There is no room for comparison between him and any other man in Europe, from Chaucer before to Milton after, nor then, again (we hold,) till we reach Sterne and three or four writers of this century. -- PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1872, Thomas Watson The Poet, North American Review, vol. 114, p. 89.
A vision as of crowded city streets,
With human life in endless overflow;
Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets that blow
To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats,
Of sailors landed from their anchored fleets;
Telling of bells in turrets, and below
Voices of children, and bright flowers that throw
O'er garden-walls their intermingled sweets!
This vision comes to me when I unfold
The volume of the Poet paramount,
Whom all the Muses loved, not one alone;
Into his hands they put the lyre of gold,
And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount,
Placed him as Musagetes on their throne.
-- LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH, 1873, A Book of Sonnets.
By common consent his is one of the greatest names in literature. We recognize the following points in his intellectual supremacy: -- 1. His profound philosophical insight; his knowledge of human nature enabling him to seize unerringly upon the governing principle or master passion of a man or class of men. 2. -- The creativeness of his imagination; exemplified in the multitude of striking characters, embodiments of the laws his intuition has detected. He names more than a thousand, each of whom expresses the thought or sentiment in fitting language and conduct. 3. -- The skillful grouping of characters, arrangement of scenes, construction and development of plots. 4.-- His style; that marvellous copiousness and felicity conjoined, whereby is brought down to our midst the Shakespearian world, as perceived by an eye at once telescopic and microscopic, by an ear keenly sensitive to all harmonies and discords, by a mind at once the most piercing and the most comprehensive, by a heart tenderer than a mother's, yet stouter than that of Leonidas. 5. -- His wit and humor. Falstaff is the most comic character in literature; yet he is but one of a multitude. 6. -- His power of portraying deep emotion. Others may have equalled him in single instances, but their successes in this particular are few to his. -- SPRAGUE, HOMER B., 1874-8, Masterpieces in English Literature, p. 107.
To praise Shakespeare is unnecessary, at least in countries of Germanic language. It would be rudeness to suppose any cultivated man or woman to be ignorant of the works of the greatest poet of all times who shows the whole world and mankind as in a glass. . . . The high, lasting, and in some sense unique position Shakespeare occupies in the literature of the world has thus been acknowledged, but it would be wrong and foolish to exalt him above all other great poets; as has been done by some, in Germany especially. Shakespeare is indeed a poet "for all time;" but every great poet is that. We cannot understand why he should have a superior privilege to Homer, AEschylus, Aristophanes. Dante, Cervantes, Moliere, Goethe, Byron. Shakespeare was an Englishman of the Elizabethan era, every inch of him sharing the prejudices and superstition of his time and of his countrymen. We see that the true criterion for judging Shakespeare is his own time. Looking upon him in that light we shall be truly just to him. The form of his works, which is undoubtedly faulty at times, belongs to his time and to his country. The spirit of his poetry is and remains the precious possession of mankind, among whose teachers and prophets he will always occupy the front rank. -- SCHERR, J., 1874, A History of English Literature, pp. 73, 83, 84.
He is not certainly a religionist, he is not a moralist. He neither fashions precepts, nor makes it his business directly or indirectly to enforce them. Is he therefore immoral? Then is nature immoral human history and the record of daily life: for it is these that Shakespeare reproduces. If he does not so construct his plot, so manipulate his characters, as to give peculiar and brilliant light to moral issues, no more does he pervert and cover them up. He allows the moral forces, among other real natural forces, to flow on with events, to exercise their own share of control over them, and to come out, from time to time, in terrific thunder shocks of retribution. He merely fails, as a showman, to arrest the spectacle, invite attention and rehearse the unmistakable lesson. At bottom, Shakespeare, instead of being an immoral, is a moral writer, because he handles powerfully and truthfully natural, real forces; those which in the world shape character control its development, gather up its issues. . . . Shakespeare is the poet of natural religion, because he cannot otherwise present nature. -- BASCOM, JOHN, 1874, Philosophy of English Literature, pp. 124, 129.
The general public were really the first to recognize Shakespeare: no literary potentate bailed him out of obscurity. -- MINTO, WILLIAM, 1874-85, Characteristics of English Poets, p. 266.
Engrossed though he is with stirring events and thrilling emotions and powerful human characters, it is wonderful how many are the side-glances that he and his characters cast at the Nature that surrounds them. And these glances are like everything else in him, rapid, vivid, and intense. . . . There is hardly one of his plays in which the season and the scene is not flashed upon the mind by a single stroke more vividly than it could be by the most lengthened description. -- SHAIRP, JOHN CAMPBELL, 1877, On Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 174.
Another of the characteristics of Shakspere is his unerring common sense; his feeling of congruity, whether in manners or morals, in taste or in feeling. With all his inexhaustible wealth of imagination, and his daring use of it, he has always the fear of the ridiculous before his eyes, and never gets upon stilts. His imagery may be colossal, it is never disproportioned. . . . Closely connected with Shakespeare's artistic moderation and common sense is his moral uprightness, rectitude of judgment, and soundness of feeling. -- SIMPSON, RICHARD, 1878, The School of Shakspere, vol. II, pp. 396, 397.
Nor is it quite sound and sober criticism to say, of Shakspeare: "He was altogether, from end to end, an artist, and the greatest artist the modern world has known." Or again: "In the unchangeableness of pure art-power Shakspeare stands entirely alone." There is a peculiarity in Mr. Stopford Brooke's use of the words art, artist. He means by an artist one whose aim in writing is not to reveal himself, but to give pleasure; he says most truly that Shakspeare's aim was to please, that Shakspeare "made men and women whose dramatic action on each other and towards a catastrophe was intended to please the public, not to reveal himself." This is indeed the true temper of the artist. But when we call a man emphatically artist, a great artist, we mean something more than this temper in which he works; we mean by art, not merely an aim to please, but also, and more, a law of pure and flawless workmanship. As living always under the sway of this law, and as, therefore, a perfect artist, we do not conceive of Shakspeare. His workmanship is often far from being pure and flawless.
Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapped in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons --
There is but one name for such writing as that, if Shakespeare had signed it a thousand times, it is detestable. And it is too frequent in Shakspeare. . . . We ought not to speak of Shakspere as "altogether, from end to end, an artist;" as "standing entirely alone in the unchangeableness of pure art-power." He is the richest the most wonderful, the most powerful, the most delightful of poets, he is not altogether, nor even eminently an artist. -- ARNOLD, MATTHEW, 1879, A Guide to English Literature, Mixed Essays, pp. 193, 194.
The universality and inexhaustible versatility of our own Shakespeare are unique in all literature. But the very richness of his qualities detracts from the symmetry and directness of the dramatic impression. For this reason neither is Lear, nor Othello, nor Macbeth, nor Hamlet (each supreme as an imaginative creation) so typically perfect a tragedy as the Agamemnon. In each of the four there are slight incidents which we could spare without any evident loss. -- HARRISON, FREDERIC, 1879-86, The Choice of Books and other Literary Pieces, p. 30.
The drama is undoubtedly the most characteristic expression of the Renaissance. . . . Everybody wrote a play, either a tragedy or a comedy: among the writers are many names, which singly were great enough to have thrown lustre over any country -- Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford and Massinger, "rare Ben Jonson." But they all pale before Shakespeare: they are so infinitely below him, that they hardly seem to belong to the same race. And yet this brilliant flower sprang into being all at once. There is no hidden growth long enough to account for such a perfect development. Like Provencal poetry in the eleventh, like Dante's poetry in the fourteenth century, it was born full grown. We have seen that Shakespeare drew his plots from the classic ballads and from old stories; but where did he learn to make so many characters, each one of whom would be sufficient for an ordinary writer, -- to pierce the motives of every action, -- to create living beings? -- POOR, LAURA ELIZABETH, 1880, Sanskrit and its Kindred Literatures, Studies in Comparative Mythology, p. 426.
The Bible apart, Shakespeare's dramas are, by general consent, the greatest classic and literary treasure of the world. His text, with all the admitted imperfections on its head, is nevertheless a venerable and sacred thing, and must nowise be touched but under a strong restraining sense of pious awe. Woe to the man that exercises his critical surgery here without a profound reverence for the subject! All glib ingenuity, all shifty cleverness, should be sternly warned off from meddling with the matter. -- HUDSON, HENRY NORMAN, 1880, ed. Harvard Shakespeare, vol. I, Preface, p. xx.
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.
-- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1882, William Shakespeare, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems, p. 280.
"How weak are words -- to carry thoughts like mine!"
Saith each dull daughter round the much bored Nine.
Yet words sufficed for Shakespeare's suit, when he
Woo'd Time, and won instead Eternity.
-- WATSON, WILLIAM, 1884, Epigrams.
Shakespeare! -- To such name's sounding, what succeeds
Fitly as 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!" Naught 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.
-- BROWNING, ROBERT, 1884, The Names.
The perfect model of the perfect mind!
Within the spheric fullness of his sense,
Within his kingly soul's circumference,
The image of the Universe was shrined;
In lofty utterance, his tongue outlined
The golden orb of nil intelligence;
He touched the circle of omnipotence,
Defining things no other ere defined.
God made but one! the rack of centuries,
The rolling chariot of resistless years,
Leaves unbedimmed the amaranth he wears;
His fame is co-eternal with the skies,
His words are fadeless as our memories,
His influence as deathless as our tears.
-- MATTHEWS, JAMES NEWTON, 1884, Shakespeare.
Dante may over-top Milton, but Shakespeare surpasses both. He is our finest achievement, his plays our noblest possession; the things in the world most worth thinking about. To live daily in his company, to study his works with minute and loving care -- in no spirit of pedantry searching for double endings, but in order to discover their secret, and to make the spoken word tell upon the hearts of man and woman -- this might have been expected to produce great intellectual if not moral results. -- BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1884, Obiter Dicta, p. 146.
Shakspere's pre-eminence consists chiefly in this, that he did supremely well what all were doing. His touch on life was so unerringly true that the most diverse objects took shape and place together naturally in his atmosphere of art; even as in the full rich sunlight of a summer afternoon the many-moving crowds, the river, bridges, buildings, parks, and domes of a great city stand distinct but harmonized. No theatre is so rich in countless and contrasted types of womanhood. Shakespere's women have passed into a proverb. -- SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON, 1884, Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, p. 58.
His was the nectar of the gods of Greece,
The lute of Orpheus, and the Golden Fleece
Of grand endeavor; and the thunder-roll
Of words majestic, which, from pole to pole,
Have bourne the tidings of our English tongue.
He gave us Hamlet; and he taught us more
Than schools have taught us; and his fairy-lore
Was fraught with science; and he called from death
Verona's lovers, with the burning breath
Of their great passion that has filled the spheres.
He made us know Cordelia, and the man
Who murdered sleep, and baleful Caliban:
And, one by one, athwart the gloom appear'd
Maidens and men and myths who were revered
In olden days, before the earth was sad.
Aye! this is true. It was ordained so;
He was thine own, three hundred years ago;
But ours to-day; and ours till earth be red
With doom-day splendour for the quick And dead,
And days and nights are scattered like the leaves.
It was for this he lived, for this he died:
To raise to Heaven the face that never lied,
To lean to earth the lips that should become
Fraught with conviction when the mouth was dumb,
And all the firm, fine body tuned to clay.
-- MACKAY, ERIC, 1886, Love Letters of a Violinist and Other Poems, p. 107.
The plays in the Globe edition contain just a thousand closely-printed pages. I do not think that there are fifty in all, perhaps not twenty -- putting scraps and patches together -- in which the Shakesperian touch is wanting, and I do not think that that touch appears outside the covers of the volume once in a thousand pages of all the rest of English literature. -- SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 173.
The rough workmanship in Shakespeare puts me out and often quite repels me, whereas in the great Latin, French, and Italian writers, as in our own Milton, there is usually a high degree of finish in the literary workmanship itself which attracts me, and gives me a profound and unfailing satisfaction. -- HAMERTON, PHILIP GILBERT, 1887, Books Which Have Influenced Me, p. 63.
Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burden of my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression. -- STEVENSON, ROBERT Louis, 1887, Books Which Have Influenced Me, p. 4.
When I was fifteen, Dicks's Shakespear was published in penny weekly numbers. I had never read any of his plays, and as I have never to this day witnessed the performance of any stage play, I was then in absolute ignorance of what "Shakespeare" meant. The first number contained two plays, " Hamlet" and "Othello," at a halfpenny each. I shall never forget the shock -- the bewildering shock -- which I received from the last scene in "Hamlet." So invariably had novelists, and even romantic poets like Scott, brought their heroes and heroines happily together before they left the stage, that it was some time before I could realise that in "Hamlet" all was different. The death of Ophelia had startled me; that was irretrievable, no doubt; but Hamlet might still be saved. But when at last death swept the board, and the curtain fell on a universal shambles, I was dazed, angry, and incredulous. I read the play over again, not for the story this time, and then read "Othello." It was one of the turning-points of my life. I was fascinated. Every week, until the series were complete, I devoured the two new plays contained in each number. They enormously widened the horizon of life; they added new and vivid colour to existence, and they intensified my perception of the tragic issues of love and of death that are bound up in every human heart. But that was not all; Shakespeare was to me the key to all literature. In this way, in my enthusiasm for Shakespeare I greedily devoured criticisms of his plays wherever I found them. -- STEAD, W. T., 1887, Books Which Have Influenced Me, p. 28.
It remained for Shakspere to combine the idealism with the realism of Love in proper proportions. The colours with which he painted the passion and sentiment of modern Love are as fresh and as true to life as on the day when they were first put on his canvas. Like Dante, however, he was emotionally ahead of his time, as an examination of contemporary literature in England and elsewhere shows. . . . It is in the works of Shakspere that the various motives and emotions which constitute Love--sensuous, esthetic, intellectual -- are for the first time mingled in proper proportions. Shakspere's Love is Modern Love, full-fledged, and therefore calls for no separate analysis.-- FINCK, HENRY T., 1887, Romantic Love and Personal Beauty, vol. I, pp. 3, 178.
It is said that ten thousand different essays, pamphlets and books have been printed and published concerning the life and writings of William Shakespeare. This is something unparalleled in the history of literature. No other name among men of letters has created such an interest. What an amazing attraction, what a boundless fascination, must people find in the life and character of this man! Men of every nation, of every rank, are captivated by him. . . . People of foreign nations are so much interested in him, that they learn English merely to read his works in the original, and there is hardly a language capable of literary expression into which these works have not been again and again translated. He is called the father of German literature, and even at the present day is more read and studied in Germany than any native author. His birthplace, now the property of the English nation, has become a Mecca to which pilgrims from the four corners of the world resort, the relation and explanation of the events of his life form one of the great problems of modern times, and societies for the study and elucidation of his writings have been organized in every part of the civilized world. He is the glory of the English-speaking race, and every member of that race, from one end of the world to the other, is more or less indebted to him for what he is, for what culture or enlightenment he possesses, for what largeness of view, superior power of expression, or increased social and intellectual advantages he enjoys; indeed, I may say that mankind is indebted to him for a richer and more copious speech, a larger social and intellectual life, and a more abundant fund of rational amusement, than it ever possessed before. -- WATERS, ROBERT, 1888, William Shakespeare Portrayed by Himself, pp 1, 2.
Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective and physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds in Shakspere -- 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 Shakspere. 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 portray'd common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the elite 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 Shakspere has left us -- to criticise his infinitely royal, multiform quality -- to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams. -- WHITMAN, WALT, 1888, November Boughs, p. 56.
For my part, I believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays, like the conscientious playwright that he was, to fill the theatre and make money for his fellow-actors and for himself; and I confess to absolute scepticism in reference to the belief that in these dramas Shakespeare's self can be discovered (except on the broadest lines,) or that either his outer or his inner life is to any discoverable degree reflected in his plays, it is because Shakespeare is not there that the characters are so perfect, -- the smallest dash of the author's self would mar to that extent the truth of the character, and make of it a mask. -- FURNESS, HORACE HOWARD, 1890, ed. New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, As You Like It. Introduction, p. viii.
So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying -- standing all athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chronicles this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front, and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great castle -- brimful of life -- with which the lesser poets of the age contrast like so many out-lying towers, that we can walk all round about, and measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style, but this Shakesperean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal -- that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets, yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rainstorms that drenched poor Lear; and we see Jessica at her easement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince boy -- apart in his dim tower -- piteously questioning the jailer Huburt, who has brought "hot-irons" with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit balcony. These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. -- MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1890, English Lands, Letters and Kings, From Elizabeth to Anne, p. 57.
Herein Chaucer stands at the opposite pole from Shakspeare. The work of the latter abounds in coarse allusions, in filthy conceits, in double meanings. But these passages in the great dramatist's writings are supremely uninteresting. They are as tedious as they are vile. They cannot be called innocent, but they are innocuous, owing to the saving grace of stupidity. When Shakspeare appeals to the lower nature, he does it largely through the agency of verbal quibbles, which are, if possible, more execrable intellectually than they are morally. To trace the allusions contained in them, to unravel the obscurities inwrapped in them, involve a degree of labor which few are willing to bestow, or a previous acquaintance with human nastiness that few have qualified themselves to possess. The result is that these things are constantly passed over unnoticed. There is little attraction in the pursuit of knowledge peculiarly difficult to acquire, and with which, when obtained, the acquirer is more disgusted than pleased. -- LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1891, Studies in Chaucer, vol. III, p. 364.
I seldom refer to Shakespeare in these lectures, since we all instinctively resort to him as to nature itself; his text being not only the chief illustration of each phrase that may arise, but also, like nature, presenting all phases in combination. It displays more of clear and various beauty, more insight, surer descriptive touches, above all, more human life, -- than that of any other poet; yes, and more art, in spite of a certain constructive disdain, -- the free and prodigal art that is like nature's own. Thus he seems to require our whole attention or none, and it is as well to illustrate a special quality by some poet more dependent upon it. Yet if there is one gift which sets Shakespeare at a distance even from those who approach him on one or another side, it is that of his imagination. As he is the chief of poets, we infer that the faculty in which he is supereminent must be the greatest of poetic endowments. Yes: in his wonderland, as elsewhere, imagination is king. There is little doubt concerning the hold of Shakespeare upon future ages. I have sometimes debated whether, in the change of dramatic ideals and of methods in life and thought, he may not become outworn and alien. But the purely creative quality of his imagination renders it likely that its structures will endure. Shakespeare's imagination is still more independent of discovery, place, or time. It is neither early nor late, antiquated nor modern; or, rather, it is always modern and abiding. -- STEDMAN, EDMUND CLARENCE, 1892, The Nature and Elements of Poetry, pp. 229, 230.
Shakespeare is the first among the great English poets since the Old English period in whom the Teutonic spirit again overpoweringly asserts itself, and presses into its service all those elements of foreign culture which were assimilated by the national character. In him we find again that soul-stirring note of deep feeling, that simple boldness of poetic expression, which plunges us, without preparation or mediation, apparently without any effort at artistic effect, -- into the very heart of the subject; in short, he has that genuineness of sentiment which is a chief characteristic of Germanic poesy. -- TEN BRINK, BERNHARD, 1892-95, Five Lectures on Shakespeare, tr. Franklin, p. 33.
Shakespeare loved his England and so sounded her praises. The imagination of the poet seized Upon the skeleton of the chroniclers and clothed them with flesh and blood. From lying John to Henry VIII., from Magna Charta to the Reformation, whether conscious or not of the splendid scope of his achievement, the poet historian has sung an immortal epic of the English nation, having for its dominant note the passing of feudalism and the rise of the common people. The germ of this development has never died out of the souls of that hardy race whose forefathers crept across the gray waste of the German ocean in their frail boat of wood and hide, to grapple with unknown foes upon unknown shores, and to lay the cornerstone of that Great and free nation, of whose best life Shakespeare was the poet, chronicler, and seer. -- WARNER, BEVERLEY E., 1894, English History in Shakespeare's Plays, p. 1.
Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever brought more to it. There have been few joys for me in life comparable to that of seeing the curtain rise on Hamlet, and hearing the guards begin to talk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy imparts itself with out any material embodiment! It is the same in the w hole range of his plays: they fill the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul. They are neither worse nor better because of the theatre. They are so great that it cannot hamper them; they are so vital that they enlarge it to their own proportions and endue it with something of their own living force. They make it the size of life, and yet they retire it so wholly that you think no more of it than you think of the physiognomy of one who talks importantly to you. I have heard people say that they would rather not see Shakespeare played than to see him played ill, but I cannot agree with them. He can better afford to be played ill than any other man that ever wrote. Whoever is on the stage it is always Shakespeare who is speaking to me, and perhaps this is the reason why in the past I can trace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them.-- HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN, 1895, My Literary Passions, p. 75.
We cannot lay our hand on anything and say for certain that it was spoken by Shakespeare out of his own personality. He created men and women whose dramatic action on each other, and towards a chosen end, was intended to please the public, not to reveal himself. Frequently failing in fineness of workmanship, having, but far less than the other dramatists, the faults of the art of his time, he was yet in all other points -- in creative power, in impassioned conception and execution, in truth to universal human nature, in intellectual power, in intensity of feeling, in the great matter and manner of his poetry, in the welding together of thought, passion, and action, in range, in plenteousness, in the continuance of his romantic feeling -- the greatest poet our modern world has known. Like the rest of the greater poets, he reflected the noble things of his time, but refused to reflect the base. -- BROOKE, STOPFORD A., l896, English Literature, p. 140.
The first poet who recognized insanity as a disease and painted it as such is Shakespeare, whose fine power of observation far outstripped his age. He who could paint the world in all its truth and reality, who was able to reproduce the most diverse characters, unfalsified and true to Nature, succeeded also in painting in a masterly way mental derangements in all their typical phenomena, just as we observe them to-day, and this at a time at which science was far from a correct recognition of physical disorders. In Shakespeare, the derangements of King Lear, Hamlet, and Lady Macbeth are photographic reproductions of pure objective experience. They fill out certainly the world of the poet who painted all human passions with minute fidelity in his plays, and therefore undertook also to paint according to his observation the human mind under morbid obscuration. In these characters, therefore, we have neither the embodiment of any particular conception of the universe nor an artistic dressing up of any moral or doctrine. -- HIRSCH, WILLIAM, 1896, Genius and Degeneration, p. 321.
He is an author whom, however we read him, we can hardly read amiss. Yet, just because of this fact, which we may misunderstand as implying that any reading of Shakspere is as good as any other, we are in danger of approaching him in a way to shut up our sympathies and imaginations, and so cut ourselves off from the main avenues of his power. The earnest student, who sees the libraries that have grown up about the works of Shakspere, can hardly escape the inference that the great dramatist is properly an object only of study. Yet never was there conclusion that Shakspere himself would sooner have repudiated. What was the audience for whom Shakspere wrote his plays? Exclusively an audience that gathered to be amused. Entertainment, not instruction, was Shakspere's aim. Shakspere does teach us in a myriad ways, and may properly be made the object of almost innumerable kinds of study, but the fact remains that, until we have read his plays, or, still better, have seen them acted, with no other purpose than pure enjoyment, we have not yet known Shakspere. -- KOOPMAN, HARRY LYMAN, 1896, The Mastery of Books, p. 24.
In Shakespeare an heroic epoch culminates; he is the commanding peak of a vast group of mountains. It is therefore vain to consider him as though he stood alone, a solitary portent in a plain. More than any other of the greatest poets of the world, he rises, by insensible degrees, on the shoulders and the hands of a crowd of precursors, yet so rapidly did this crowd collect that our eyes are scarcely quick enough to perceive the process. Of those whose inestimable privilege it was to meet Shakespeare day by day, we have no evidence that one perceived the supremacy of his genius. The case is rather curious, for it was not that anything austere or arrogant in himself or his work repelled recognition, or that those who gazed were blinded by excess of light. On the contrary, it seemed to his own friends that they appreciated his amiable, easy talent at its proper value; he was "gentle" Shakespeare to them, and they loved both the man and his poetry. But that he excelled then all at every point, as the oak excells the willow, this, had it been whispered at the Mermaid, would have aroused smiles of derision. . . . For another century the peak of the mountain was shrouded in mists, although its height was vaguely conjectured. Dryden, our earliest modern critic, gradually perceived Shakespeare's greatness, and proclaimed it in his "Prefaces." Meanwhile, and on until a century after Shakespeare's death, this most glorious of English names had not penetrated across the Channel, and was absolutely unrecognized in France. Voltaire introduced Shakespeare to French readers in 1731, and "Hamlet" was translated by Ducis in 1769. Here at home, in the generations of Pope and Johnson, the magnitude of Shakespeare became gradually apparent to all English critics, and with Garrick his plays once more took the stage. Yet into all the honest admiration of the eighteenth century there entered a prosaic element; the greatness was felt, but vaguely and paint fully. At the end of the age of Johnson a generation was born to u hoary, for the first time, Shakespeare spoke with clear accents. Coleridge and Hazlitt expounded him to a world so ready to accept him, that in regarding the great Revival of 1800 Shakespeare seems almost as completely a factor in it as Wordsworth himself. In the hands of such critics, for the first time, the fog cleared away from the majestic mountain, and showed to the gaze of the world its varied and harmonious splendour. -- GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, Short History of Modern English Literature, pp. 100, 108.
Strictly speaking, there is no literary fame worth envying, save Shakespeare's -- and Shakespeare's amounted to this that Addison wrote "An Account of the Greatest English Poets" in which his name does not appear; and that, of the people one meets in the streets of any city, the majority will not even have heard of him. -- HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH, 1897, Favorites of a Day, Book and Heart, p. 78.
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. -- MEREDITH, GEORGE, 1897, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, p. 16.
I have not intended to compare the poetry of Shakespeare with the poetry of the Bible. Shakespeare has neither the eloquence of Isaiah nor the sublimity of Job. What Shakespeare does not profess to do Job and Isaiah do profess to do -- namely, to teach of God and duty. Nor have I intended to compare the merits of the great uninspired poets, or to call one greater and another less. It is better to call each great in his peculiar sphere. But in the creation of character Shakespeare so far surpasses all others, that by common consent we have come to regard him as the greatest secular poet of the world. Will the world ever see a poet who shall surpass him? It can only be by adding Dante's vision of God and Wordsworth's vision of nature to Shakespeare's vision of humanity. Until some inspired bard shall touch all these several strings with simultaneous and equal mastery, we may well content ourselves with Shakespeare. -- STRONG, AUGUSTUS HOPKINS, 1897, The Great Poets and Their Theology, p. 219.
Shakespeare's spirit is not to be assimilated; this is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment does not suit us, -- it is either too long or too short, or both together. One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man about as much as a lawyer's clerk, masquerading en mousquetaire, resembles d'Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his cafe in Stamboul. This tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off. It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English character in all its length and breadth, let him absorb and steep himself in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half centuries before. -- FILON, AUGUSTIN, 1897, The English Stage, tr. Whyte, p. l75.
The first edition of Shakespeare's Plays (folio, 1623) has been rising in price from the commencement of the nineteenth century, but the enormous prices now paid do not date further back than 1864, when a specially fine copy was bought by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts at George Daniel's sale for £716, 2s. This amount was paid on account of the height of the book and of its great beauty, and possibly the circumstance of the year being the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth had something to do with it, but this sale had the effect of raising the price of all copies permanently. . . . The following is a list of some of the copies which have been sold since the famous Daniel copy: -- In 1882 Beresford-Hope's copy, with verses inlaid, title repaired, in morocco by Clarke, fetched £238, and Ouvry's sound copy, in red morocco by Clarke and Bedford, sold for £420. The Earl of Gosford's copy, perfect, with title and verses mounted, and margins of leaves slightly mended, was sold in 1884 for £470. Hartley's copy was in poor condition, although very tall (138 by 85), title with portrait wanting, page with verses mutilated, and some leaves mended. It sold in 1887 for £255. Hartley gave £500 for it to those who had bought it at a knock-out for £75. The Earl of Aylesford's copy, wanting title, with verses from second edition, and five leaves stained, sold in 1888 for £200. In 1889 Perkins's copy, with title and verses mounted, sold for £415, and Halliwell Phillipps's poor copy, with portrait, verses, preliminary and last leaf in facsimile, for £95. W. H. Crawford's imperfect copy, with title, verses, prefatory matter, and "Cymbeline" reprinted in facsimilie, sold in 1891 for £16, 10s. In this same year Brayton Ives's copy, perfect, but rather short, was sold in New York for 4,200 dollars (£840). -- WHEATLEY, HENRY B., 1898, Prices of Books, pp. 223, 228.
The monarch of mankind! they are proud words those, but they do not altogether over-estimate the truth. He is by no means the only king in the intellectual world, but his power is unlimited by time or space. From the moment his life's history ceases his far greater history begins. We find its first records in Great Britain, and consequently in North America, then it spread among the German-speaking peoples and the whole Teutonic race, on through the Scandinavian countries to the Finns and the Sclavonic [sic] races. We find his influence in France, Spain, and Italy; and now, in the nineteenth century, it may be traced over the whole civilised world. His writings are translated into every tongue and all the languages of the earth do him honour.... All the real intellectual life of England since his day has been stamped by his genius, all her creative spirits have imbibed their life's nourishment from his works. Modern German intellectual life is based, through Lessing, upon him. Goethe and Schiller are unimaginable without him. His influence is felt in France through Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. Ludovic Vitet and Alfred de Musset were from the very first inspired by him. Not only the drama in Russia and Poland felt his influence, but the inmost spiritual life of the Sclavonic story-tellers and brooders is fashioned after the pattern of his imperishable creations. From the moment of the regeneration of poetry in the North he was reverenced by Ewald, Oehlenschlager, Bredahl, and Hauch, and he is not without his influence upon Bjorllson and Ibsen. -- BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. II, p. 411.
No estimate of Shakespeare's genius can be adequate. In knowledge of human character, in wealth of humour, in depth of passion, in fertility of fancy, and in soundness of judgment he has no rival. It is true of him, as of no other writer, that his language and versification adapt themselves to every phase of sentiment, and sound every note in the scale of felicity. Some defects are to be acknowledged, but they sink into insignificance when measured by the magnitude of his achievement. Sudden transitions, elliptical expressions, mixed metaphors, indefensible verbal quibbles, and fantastic conceits at times create an atmosphere of obscurity. The student is perplexed, too, by obsolete words and by some hopelessly corrupt readings. But when the whole of Shakespeare's vast work is scrutinized with due attention, the glow of his imagination is seen to leave few passages wholly unillumined. -- LEE, SIDNEY, 1898, A Life of William Shakespeare, p. 355.
Shakespeare could be idealistic when he dreamed, as he could be spiritual when he reflected. The spectacle of life did not pass before his eyes as a mere phantasmagoria. He seized upon its principles; he became wise. Nothing can exceed the ripeness of his seasoned judgment, or the occasional breadth, sadness, and terseness of his reflection. The author of "Hamlet" could not be without metaphysical aptitude, "Macbeth" could not have been written without a sort of sibylline inspiration, or the Sonnets without something of the Platonic mind. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that we should have to search through all the works of Shakespeare to find half a dozen passages that have so much as a religious sound, and that even these passages, upon examinations, should prove not to be the expression of any deep religious conception. If Shakespeare had been without metaphysical capacity, or without moral maturity, we could have explained his strange insensibility to religion; but as it is, we must marvel at his indifference and ask ourselves what can be the causes of it. For, even if we should not regard the absence of religion as an imperfection in his own thought, we must admit it to be an incompleteness in his portrayal of the thought of others. -- SANTAYANA, GEORGE, 1900, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, p. 153.
As the Spokesman of a race to which has fallen a large share of the government of the modern world, and as the chief exponent in literature of the fundamental conception of life held by the Western world at a time when the thought of the East and the west are being brought into searching comparison, Shakespeare must be studied in the near future with a deeper recognition of the significance of his work and its value as a source of spiritual culture. -- MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 1900, William Shakespeare, Poet, Dramatist, and Man, Preface, p. vii.
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