Shakespeare now stands alone the national bard; but hoary Time, which has decreed who are his inferiors, once saw them his equals; and when he mingled with his fellows, possibly the world looked up to a Coryphæus whose name was not Shakespeare. Two inquiries interest us: Was the pre-eminence of our national bard acknowledged by his contemporaries?—and, What cause occasioned the utter neglect of his own reputation?
Among his contemporaries, Shakespeare could not possess the pre-eminence of the present age, for who were then to be his judges? His rivals or his audience? Our gentle Shakespeare, as Jonson called him, perhaps at no time appreciated his own genius at its peculiar excellence, and therefore was not likely to discover his solitary pre-eminence among a formidable crowd of rivals, nor were they likely to acknowledge in their friend “Will” the prevailing charm which has now subdued the world. They have even occasionally darted a shaft of ridicule or a sharp parody at our immortal tragedian; the madness of Hamlet and Ophelia could serve these dramatic writers as a subject for raillery;[8] and the airy Fletcher, who would have emulated Shakespeare, was guilty of sneering at his inimitable master. The learned Jonson was apt to be critical; Chapman cast his Greek glances haughtily on the vernacular bard; Marston was caustic; and Drayton, his intimate, who had composed two or three tragedies, could hardly perceive any supremacy in Shakespeare, and for us, seems parsimoniously to commend his “comic vein” as strong
As any one that traffick’d with the stage;
while Ben Jonson is hailed as
| Lord of the theatre, who could bear The buskin, as the sock, away. |
It was not from his dramatic brothers that Shakespeare could have discovered his more than supremacy; and while the brotherhood had family quarrels among themselves, Shakespeare appears never to have moved offensively or defensively. Gifford tells us that he has never mentioned one of his contemporaries with commendation, and only once appears, with Jonson and others, to have contributed some commendatory lines to the volume of an obscure and whimsical poet.[9] As Shakespeare did not deal in this literary traffic of that day, he has received fewer tributes than some of the meanest of our poets. But if Shakespeare has not noticed any of his associates, neither has the poet ever alluded to himself in his works. He never exults in his triumphs, nor is querulous on those who oppugned them.
With his audience he was unquestionably popular; we hear of none of his plays having been condemned, though such mischances are recorded of his rivals, and, above all, of his great compeer Jonson. We know that he was fortunate in the personation of his characters; and those natural touches, listened to on the spot when nature was left free to act her part, fell on contagious and instantaneous sympathies. But if the poet charmed by his “many-coloured life,” his very faults were not less delightful. His audience revelled in bustle and bombast, and it is possibly in compliance with their stirring unchastised taste that we have received so much of his rude originals.
Our poet’s recklessness of the fate of his own dramas, and his utter disregard of posterity, is at least one unquestionable fact in the blank page of his life. He was utterly reckless of his personal reputation among his contemporary readers, or otherwise he would not have suffered in his lifetime mutilated dramas, or even their first draughts, surreptitiously procured, to pass under his own name;—huddled pieces without even the divisions of the acts, or crude and ridiculous dramas which he was incapable of having written. These were suicidal acts of his own fame, but they never broke his silence; and even in his retreat from the metropolis, in the leisure of his native bowers of Avon, Shakespeare felt not
| That last infirmity of noble minds, The spur of fame, |