mentation of the Indies.’[1] Contrast the inspirational potency of maps and globes for Marlowe, Hakluyt, and Spenser! Finally Shakespeare offers belated and grudging acquiescence to the spirit of discovery by telling (in his last complete play) how a Duke of Milan and his daughter once went voyaging in the Mediterranean in
and how they found there an enchanted isle—forsooth, not far from Tunis and Algiers!
V
Shakespeare did not bring with him from Stratford a very plastic, or, as we should say, a trained, mind. He brought limitations and prejudices which he never outgrew. He also brought three things that matter more: an unaccountable genius; a tremendous capacity for hard work; and an extraordinary interest in men and women, based on a various, and not impeccable, experience of them.
He did not bring with him, as Horatio did (or said he did), a truant disposition, but one already fixed in the course it must pursue. Undoubtedly the emotionalist and the thinker had at one time struggled within him: Richard the Second with Bolingbroke, Romeo with Mercutio, Hotspur with Falstaff. Undoubtedly the time had been when emotion had held sway, and Shakespeare was both a sadder and wiser man thereby. But that time, we may be sure, was over before ever Shakespeare saw London and commenced dramatist. In all that he wrote for the stage, in the sonnets too,
- ↑ Twelfth Night, II. ii. 88
- ↑ Tempest. I. ii. 146.
