XIII
HAMLET[1]
I
Shakespeare died just three centuries ago, on the twenty-third of April, 1616. He died—and was forgotten, we may say, for a century, until in 1709 and 1710 Nicholas Rowe published the first approximately complete edition of his works. Then he came to life again, to a life more intense and more vivid than the life he had lived in the rough, confused age of the Virgin Queen. This new life of his has endured for two hundred years. It was initiated by a pre-Romantic impulse; it was carried to universal fame on that wave of Romanticism whose ripples have not yet subsided, that wave whereby Shakespeare was made to seem a fellow-citizen of Goethe, a brother of Schlegel, a contemporary of Victor Hugo.
But now a second night hangs over Shakespeare; this third centenary is perhaps the beginning of a second and a truer death. Today,
- ↑ Written in 1916, for the third centenary of Shakespeare’s death.
186
