THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
If his unconscious energy illuminates his vast accomplishment, it throws light as well upon his narrowest limitation. Since his genius at its typical moments reflected life in spontaneous, uncalculating speech, no wonder that his horizon was narrowly bounded by human birth and death. His thought attempted no other world, no other life, than this. His mind could not react happily on what could not be physically seen. Dante's imaginings or Milton's were therefore impossible to his temperament; indeed, the casual questions of any serious-minded contemporary of his as to a future existence were to him it seems strange and forbidding. In Hamlet and Measure for Measure, those dark adventures in the borderland of death, the practical wisdom of life is profound, but the brooding upon the hereafter is child-like, with a child's respect for angels
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