anything except that they dress outrageously, outdrink the Dutch, and are stupidly given to staring at strange monsters.[1]
I
The greatest of the Elizabethan romanticists is, in fact, neither so conspicuously Elizabethan nor so transparently romantic as most of his contemporaries. Shakespeare’s difference from his fellows is apparent, indeed, in the difficulty we encounter when we seek adjectives to qualify his work. For Spenser and Marlowe, Sidney and Ralegh, it is not so hard to find expressive and satisfying characterizations: the critic of Shakespeare is thrown back upon paradox. The greatest English writer is in many ways one of the least literary; the most brilliant constructor of plot one of the least inventive; the most successful searcher of the human heart one of the least obviously subtle. Shakespeare was neither an artist in the sense in which Spenser was, nor a romanticist as Ralegh was, nor an intellectualist as Marlowe was. Wisdom is perhaps the only attribute which we can apply to him without need of qualification.
And Shakespeare’s wisdom was not of the kind which colleges supply. We need no biographical evidence to assure us that the author of the plays was not indebted to the universities; and the academic attitude on the part of his critics has often proved the least profitable of all. Ben Jonson and Samuel Johnson and Dryden, for example, have said splendidly true things of Shakespeare when they spoke, unofficially as it were, from the depth of their robust humanity; and each has
- ↑ Merchant of Venice, I. ii. 70 ff.; Othello, II. iii. 79 ff.; Tempest, II. ii. 29 ff.
