We know that it is necessary to make an effort of abstraction, to forget biographical details concerning the poets, in those cases where they abound, if we wish to enjoy their art, in what it possesses of ideality, which is truth. We know, too, that poets and artists have always experienced dislike and contempt for those gossip-mongers, who investigate and record the private occurrences of their lives, in order to extract from them the elements of artistic judgment. This is the reason why a poet's contemporaries and his fellow-countrymen and fellow-townsmen are said not to be good judges and that no one is a poet or prophet among his familiars and in the place of his birth.
The advantage of the lack of a bar to artistic contemplation, one of the good consequences of this lack of biographical detail relating to Shakespeare, is thrown away by these conjecturers, who, like the mule of Galeazzo Florimonte, bring stones to birth that they may stumble upon them.
We can observe the re-immersion of Shakespearean poetry in psychological materiality in the already mentioned book of Brandes (and also to some extent in the more subtle and ingenious work of Frank Harris) and in the case of Brandes, the readjustment of values that is its consequence, as with King Lear and Timon, both documents of misanthropy induced by ingratitude; and even the sinking of values into non-values, when he fails to effect his psychological reduction, even by means of those extravagant methods, as in the case of Macbeth, where he declares that this play, which is one of the dramatic masterpieces, appears to him to possess but "slight interest," because he does not feel "the heart of Shakespeare beating there," that is to say, of the Shakespeare endowed with certain practical objects and interests by his imagination.
This error is also to be found in the so-called "pictures of the society of the time," by means of which another group has striven to interpret the art of Shakespeare. These are not less extrinsic and disturbing than the others, assuming that they are composed with like historical ignorance. Taine, for instance, having got it into his head that the English of the time of Elizabeth were "des bêtes sauvages," describes the drama of the time as a reproduction "sans choix" of all "les laideurs, les bassesses, les horreurs, les détails crus, les mœurs déréglées et féroces" of that time, and the style of Shakespeare as "un composé d'expressions forcenées," in such wise that when one reads the famous Histoire de la littérature anglaise, it is difficult to say whether poets or assassins are passing across the stage, whether these be artistic and harmonious contests, or dagger-thrust struggles. The opinion of Goethe is opposed to all these deformations, to the Shakespeare who moans and shrieks on the wind of the wild passions of his time, to that other Shakespeare who reveals the wounds of his own sickly soul with bitter sarcasm and disgust. In the conversations with Eckermann, he gives as his impression that the plays of Shakespeare were the work "of a man in perfect health and strength, both in body and spirit"; he must indeed have been healthy and strong and free, when he created something so free, so healthy and so strong as his poetry.
In a calmer sphere of considerations, those who make the personages and the action of the plays depend upon the political and social events of the time commit a similar deterministic error—upon the victory over the Armada, the conspiracy of Essex, the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, the geographical discoveries and colonisation of the day, the contests with the Puritans, and the like.
Others err in tracing the different forms of the poetry to the course of his reading, to the Chronicle of Holinshed, to Italian novels, to the Lives of Plutarch, and especially to the Essais of Montaigne (where Chasles and others of more recent date have placed the origin of the new great period of his poetical work); others again have found it in the circumstances of the English stage of the time, and in the various tastes of the "reserved" and "pit" seats, as in the so-called "realistic" criticism of Rümelin.
The poetry, then, should certainly be interpreted historically, but in the proper sense, disconnected, that is to say from a history that is foreign to it and with which its only connection is that prevailing between a man and what he disregards, puts away from him and rejects, because it either injures him or is of no use, or, which comes to the same thing, because he has already made sufficient use of it.