The five plays, that are but one play, have, when played one after
another, something extravagant and superhuman, something almost
mythological. Those nobles with their indifference to death and their
immense energy seem at times no nearer the common stature of men than do
the Gods and the heroes of Greek plays. Had there been no Renaissance and
no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English
history would, it may be, have become as important to the English
imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by
many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as
those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like
swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the
Giants. English literature, because it would have grown out of itself,
might have had the simplicity and unity of Greek literature, for I can
never get out of my head that no man, even though he be Shakespeare, can
write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in
many lands. And yet, could those foreign tales have come in if the great
famine, the sinking down of popular imagination, the dying out of
traditional phantasy, the ebbing out of the energy of race, had not made
them necessary? The metaphors and language of Euphuism, compounded of the
natural history and mythology of the classics, were doubtless a necessity
also, that something might be poured into the emptiness. Yet how they
injured the simplicity and unity of the speech! Shakespeare wrote at a
time when solitary great men were gathering to themselves the fire that
had once flowed hither and thither among all men, when individualism in
work and thought and emotion was breaking up the old rhythms of life, when
the common people, no longer uplifted by the myths of Christianity and of
still older faiths, were sinking into the earth.
The people of Stratford-on-Avon have remembered little about him, and
invented no legend to his glory. They have remembered a drinking-bout of
his, and invented some bad verses for him, and that is about all. Had he
been some hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-riding, loud-blaspheming Squire
they would have enlarged his fame by a legend of his dealings with the
devil; but in his day the glory of a Poet, like that of all other
imaginative powers, had ceased, or almost ceased outside a narrow class.
The poor Gaelic rhymer leaves a nobler memory among his neighbours, who
will talk of Angels standing like flames about his death-bed, and of
voices speaking out of bramble-bushes that he may have the wisdom of the
world. The Puritanism that drove the theatres into Surrey was but part of
an inexplicable movement that was trampling out the minds of all but some
few thousands born to cultivated ease.
May 1901.