OF THE THE purpose of this study is to present a coherent view of the generally accepted facts concerning the life and the work of Shakspere. Its object, the common one of serious criticism, is so to increase our sympathetic knowledge of what we study that we may enjoy it with fresh intelligence and appreciation. The means by which we shall strive for this end will be a constant effort to see Shakspere, so far as is possible at this distance of time, as he saw himself. Of one thing we may be certain. To himself Shakspere was a very different fact from what he now seems to the English-speaking world. To people of our time he generally presents himself as an isolated, supreme genius. To people of his own time- and he was a man of his own time himself - he was certainly nothing of the kind; he was no divine prophet, no superhuman seer, whose utterances should edify and guide posterity; he was only one of a considerable company of hard-working playwrights, whose work at the moment seemed neither more nor less serious than that of any other school of theatrical writers. Nothing but the lapse of time could have demonstrated two or three facts now so commonplace that we are apt to forget they were not always obvious. First of all, the school of literature in which his work belongs the Elizabethan drama - proves to have been one of the most completely typical phenomena in the whole history of the fine arts. It took little more than half a century to emerge from an archaic tradition, to develop into great imaginative vitality, and to decline into a formal tradition, no longer archaic, but if possible less vital than the tradition from which it emerged. In this typical literary evolution, again, Shakspere's historical position happens to have been almost exactly central; some of his work belongs to the earlier period of the Elizabethan drama, much of it to the most intensely vital, some of it to the decline. This fact alone that in a remarkably typical school of art he is the most comprehensively typical figure would make him worth serious attention. The third commonplace invisible to his contemporaries, however, is so much more important than either of the others that nowadays it obscures them, and indeed obscures the whole subject. This most typical writer of our most broadly typical literary school happened to be an artist of first-rate genius. Canting as such a phrase must sound, it has something like a precise meaning. In the fine arts, the man of genius is he who in perception and in expression alike, in thought |