THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF FAME
AVE SHAKESPEARE!
Three hundred years ago, on April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare, of whom Carlyle wrote as “the pink and flower of remembered Englishmen—the greatest thing we have yet done and managed to produce in this world,” drew his last breath at “New Place,” the home he had earned for himself in his native town of Stratford-on-Avon. The great bell of the Guild Chapel facing the garden side of his “pretty house of brick and timber” tolled for his passing; but the great voice of the world which acclaims him so loudly to-day was dumb.
In those Puritan times he was but little considered; and no hint or whisper of his coming renown stirred the sleepy quietude of the little country place where he was born and where he died. His fellow-townsmen of that period kept no particular record of him, nor did they dream of him as the future King of English Literature. He was laid to rest in the chancel of the Parish Church—an honoured place allowed to him, not because of his genius as a Poet, for this was as indifferent a matter then to the good bucolic folk of Stratford-on-Avon as it is now, but because he had, by purchase, become part owner of the tithes and as a lay-rector had right of interment there.
In his lifetime he assumed to be nothing but a simple industrious man of business who “adapted” and rearranged old plays to suit the requirements of the Globe Theatre; and he flung out the splendid rays of his dazzling poetic genius over these dry bones of romance and history as freely and with as grand an absence of self-consciousness as the sun which shines alike on the just and the unjust.
Nothing probably would have surprised him more or moved him to such incredulous smiling as to have been told that in three hundred years his fame would surpass that of any other Englishman ever born! He would have put aside the prophecy with good-humoured laughter and would never have given it another thought. For his wordly aims were perfectly straightforward and simple; they were, plainly—to earn a sufficient competence and to stand on an independent footing with his fellows, to live with his family in ease and comfort, and to end his days in peace in the town where he was born. No ideal could be more free from arrogance. His whole career is an object lesson of infinite Greatness to the infinitely Little!
The vital centre of Shakespeare’s marvellous power is surely his impersonality. His creative spirit moved behind the passing show of kings and queens and historic events, moulding them to his mood, but never displaying itself. Like light it shed colour on whatsoever it illumined. So little may we guess of Shakespeare’s personality from his writings that he has made of himself an Enigma. We cannot even tell what form of creed he professed, though we know and feel that the devout worship of an invisible and intelligent Force behind Nature filled him with highest faith and purest service towards God. We cannot find out his special likes or dislikes, save in slight indications here and there, such as his plainly indicated abhorrence of Jews—and Germans! Great as is the professed admiration of the Teuton for our English Master-Mind, we wonder how he can get over such lines as these:—
“A German from the waist downward, all slops!”
Much Ado About Nothing.