stresses in the words which better than any others explain what attracted Shakespeare to the study of human psychology:
‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty . . . in apprehension how like a god.’[1]
Shakespeare was as comparatively little interested in concrete incident as he was in abstract emotion. The overt act generally has no special significance for him. He was no pragmatist, as Bacon was, and would never have agreed with Bacon that ‘good thoughts (though God accept them) yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act.’[2]
The spectrum of life, running from dreams through thoughts into acts, was for the true Elizabethans brightest at the two ends. It was the glory and the weakness alike of Sidney, Spenser, and Ralegh, of Tamburlaine and Faustus, that they saw gorgeous emotional dreams passing directly into brilliant acts. The Scythian Shepherd speaks for them all when he says:
That if I should desire the Persian crown,
I could attain it with a wondrous ease.’
Their imaginations, in truth, were all clad in seven-league boots, and made but one careless step of the whole way from the violet of the earliest vision to the red of final accomplishment. It especially distinguishes Shakespeare that he kept his eye upon the middle of the spectrum, on that vital and revealing ‘interim’ of which Brutus speaks,
- ↑ Hamlet, II. ii. 323 ff.
- ↑ Of Great Place.
