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The triumph at Cadiz, the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up his "Ecclesiastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius of Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre beside the Thames. The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund Spenser.
At first sight this may seem almost a truism; but we have only to remind our readers that one of the passages oftenest quoted with admiration, and indeed separately printed and illuminated, is "The Seven Ages of Man," a passage full of inhuman contempt for humanity and unbelief in its destiny, in which not one of the seven ages is allowed to pass over its poor sad stage without a sneer; and that this passage is given by Shakspere to the blase sensualist Jaques in "As You Like it," a man who, the good and wise Duke says, has been as vile as it is possible for man to be, so vile that it would be an additional sin in him to rebuke sin; a man who never was capable of seeing what is good in any man, and hates men's vices because he hates themselves, seeing in them only the reflex of his own disgust.
Lowell had a more cosmopolitan outlook on literature, when he discust 'The Five Indispensable Authors' Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere, and Goethe. "Their universal and perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence and insures their immortality."
That was a pleasant way we had of addressin each other when he was in the flesh. "Air you in the show bizniz, William?" sed I. He sed he was. He sed he & John Bunyan was travelin with a side show in connection with Shakspere, Jonson & Co.'s Circus. Occashunally Mr. Bunyan sung a comic song. The Circus was doin middlin well.
He is seen lying upon the floor habitually, and when not playing with cats the only boyish fondness told of him reading Shakspere, Milton, Thomson, the books of the household, not uncommon in New England homes, where good books were as plenty then as all books are now; and on Sundays, at his grandmother Hathorne's, across the yard, he would crouch hour after hour over Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," that refuge of boyhood on the oldtime Sabbaths.
He makes his most peculiar characters speak very much like other people; and it is only over the whole that their peculiarities manifest themselves with indubitable plainness. The one apparent exception is Jaques, in "As You Like it." But there we must remember that Shakspere is representing a man who so chooses to represent himself.
Milton, Landor, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Ruskin are conspicuous examples of men who made shipwreck of marriage, but in contrast shine forth the names of Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Shakspere, for there is no evidence against the belief that Shakspere's marriage was a happy one; then add to these the American names, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Holmes, and the list is still incomplete.
What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was men's impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their knowledge, if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often bad reprints, in quartos, of about half of the plays. Men also had Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly, and I do not wonder at it.
Indeed, if Bacon were the author, he might not care to divulge his long association with "a cry of players," and a man like Will of Stratford. But he had no occasion to avow it. He had merely to suggest to the players, through any safe channel, that they should collect and publish the works of their old friend Will Shakspere.
We in England are accustomed to read the serious and comic plays of Shakspere, Fletcher, Jonson, and to think that one poet could excel in either branch. The custom of the Elizabethan theatre obliged this double authorship; yet it must be confessed that Shakspere's comedies are not such comedies as Greek or Romnan or French critics would admit.
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