bethan writer[1] had so many and such intimate points of contact with the whole business of the theatre. A very important reason for Shakespeare’s superiority to his contemporaries is that he was not primarily a gentleman author like Lyly, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, but actually, as Greene called him, ‘an absolute Johannes factotum’ of the theatre, a man too absorbed in opening the world’s oyster—in holding the mirror up to life—to feel much the littlenesses and compunctions of the artist.
From these general, and rather trite, remarks two truths can be deduced. One is that Shakespeare is not, as he seems often to be thought, the summation of Elizabethan literary art. The student of Shakespeare will know much of human nature, but not a vast deal about the sixteenth-century mind. Shakespeare was indeed not of one age, and did not supersede Lyly and Spenser and Marlowe and Jonson as exponents of his era.
The other truth is that the problems of Shakespeare’s great plays are not to be settled triumphantly by frontal literary attack, by disquisitions upon his mind and art alone. The personality of Shakespeare has been so dismally disputed that students have sometimes been driven to wish the whole matter buried in Cimmerian gloom. Thus Dr. Furness[2] attempts to lighten ship by merrily bidding the man Shakespeare begone with all his mystery:
‘It is merely our ignorance which creates the mystery. To Shakespeare’s friends and daily companions there was nothing mysterious in his life; on the contrary, it possibly appeared to them as unusually dull and commonplace. It certainly had no incidents so far
- ↑ Thomas Heywood is his nearest competitor.
- ↑ Preface to Much Ado about Nothing, Variorum edition.
