Work and Reputation.
And what was thought of him in those first days? Not overmuch; none looked upon him as largely overtopping his compeers of that day. His Venus and Adonis[18] was widely and admiringly known: so was his Lucrece; but Marlowe’s “sound and fury” in “Tamburlaine” would have very possibly drawn twice the house of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”
He had no coterie behind him; he was hail-fellow with Jonson; probably knew Peele and Marlowe well; undoubtedly knew Drayton; he went to the Falcon and the Mermaid; but there is, I believe, no certain evidence that he ever saw much of Raleigh, or of Spenser, who was living some years after he came to London. It is doubtful, indeed, if the poet of the Faery Queene knew him at all. Sidney he probably never saw; nor did he ever go, so far as appears, to dine with the great Francis Bacon, as Jonson without doubt sometimes did, or with Burleigh, or with Cecil.
His lack of precise learning may have made him inapt for encounter with school-men. But he had a faculty of apprehension that transcended mere scholastic learning—apprehending everywhere, in places where studious ones were blind. I can imagine that Oxford men—just up in town or those who had written theses for university purposes, would sneer at such show of learning as he made;—call it cheap erudition—call it result of cramming—as many university men do nowadays when they find a layman and outsider hitting anything that respects learning in the eye. But, ah, what a gift of cramming! What a gift of apprehension! What a swift march over the hedges that cramp schools! What a flight, where other men walked, and were dazed and discomfited by this unheard-of progress into the ways of knowledge and of wisdom!
Again, these Shakespeare plays do sometimes show crude things, vulgar things, coarse things—things we want to skip and do skip—things that make us wonder if he ever wrote them; perhaps some which in the mendings and tinkerings of those and later days have no business there; and yet he was capable of saying coarse things; he did have a shrewd eye for the appetites of the groundlings; he did look on all sides, and into all depths of the moral Cosmos he was rounding out; and even his commonest utterances, have, after all, a certain harmony, though in lowest key, with the general drift. He is not always, as some of his dramatic compeers were, on tragic stilts. He is never under strain to float high.
Then, too, like Chaucer—his noblest twin-fellow of English poesy—he steals, plagiarizes, takes tales of passion, and love, and wreck, wherever in human history he can find them, to work into his purposes. But even the authors could scarce recognize the thefts in either case, so glorified are they by the changes they undergo under these wonder-making hands.
As with story, so it is with sentiment. This he steals out of men’s brains and hearts by wholesale. What smallest poet, whether in print or talk, could have failed to speak of man’s journey to his last home? Shakespeare talks of
“That undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,”
and the sentiment is so imaged, and carries such a trail of agreeing and caressing thoughts, that it supplants all kindred speech.
“This life,” says Shakespeare, “is but a stage;” and the commentators can point you out scores of like similes in older writers—Erasmus among the rest, whose utterance seems almost duplicated; duplicated, indeed, but with a tender music, and a point, and a breadth, that make all previous related similes forgotten. Such utterances grow out of instincts common to us all; but this man, in whom the common instinct is a masterful alembic, fuses all old teachings, and white-hot they run out of the crucible of his soul in such beauteous shapes that they are sought for and gloried in forever after. Many a Hamlet has soliloquized—you and I perhaps; but never a Hamlet in such way as did Shakespeare’s; so crisp—so full—so suggestive—so marrowy—so keen—so poignant—so enthralling.
No, no; this man did not go about in quest of newnesses; only little geniuses do that; but the great genius goes along every commonest road-side, looking on every commonest sight of tree or flower, of bud, of death, of birth, of flight, of labor, of song; leads in old tracks; deals in old truths, but with such illuminating power that they all come home to men’s souls with new penetrative force and new life in them. He catches by intuition your commonest thought, and my commonest thought, and puts them into new and glorified shape.