S WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1564-1616 BY HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER |HAKESPEARE was an Elizabethan playwright. Let us begin by emphasising that obvious, but often, as it would seem, that half-forgotten fact. He wrote plays which were lively and amusing, which were stirring and profoundly searching, and he wrote them to be acted in the theatre he knew. Our puritans destroyed that theatre and broke its traditions. And had it not been for the enterprise of literary pirates in his lifetime and the devotion of a few friends after his death, he might be little more than a name to us now. He himself published nothing but a couple of narrative poems. They were a young man's bid for fame, and a dozen other poets of the time wrote the same sort of thing about as well. But in the famous memorial volume of his collected plays, known as the First Folio, a contemporary could tell us that "He was not of an age, but for all time," could call him could say Soule of the age. The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!— Shine forth, thow starre of Poets, and with rage Or influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage; Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night, We may balance against the conventional use of hyperbole on such an occasion the fact that Ben Jonson both knew what he was talking about when it came to estimating plays and was as little apt, apparently, as any man to indulge his friends with flattery-even behind their backs. It is worth noting, too, in view of a later and as famous tribute, Milton's Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child Warbled his native wood-notes wild. that Jonson would have none of such appreciation.1 He insists that ". . . a good Poet's made, as well as born" and is careful to tell us that Shakespeare sweated hard at the Muse's anvil to produce his "well turned and true filed lines." In latter times Shakespeare has been all but deified. It is sufficiently terrible to become a classic, and that fate would anyhow have cast some shadow on the joyousness of his work. But the hierophants of this worship, to make a god, have killed a man, and, really, they do but repel people from such a frigid shrine. Shakespeare himself, it is true, had some contempt for the vulgarity of his audience; like most artists he hated a mob. But he would, one hazards, have been dumbfounded at some of the latter-day prophesyings in his name. So, when we begin by saying that he was a playwright, using particularly the craftsmanlike term, it is for a hint that we must base our knowledge of him, as far as can be, upon what he was in his age and to his own time. From that point leads the plain man's path, at least, to love of Shakespeare. There could, then, be no better way of approach than the simple one which was open to the Elizabethan playgoer when he rowed across to the Bankside to the Globe Theatre to see Hamlet played. But that way can no longer in completeness be provided us. Shakespeare still speaks from his pages "We need not, though, consider this Milton's last word on the matter. with an |