No other man ever wrote verse like this; and it is hard to believe that words will ever again respond to such a magician.
This poetry is the fitting accompaniment of a characterization, the range and vitality of which, the world to wit, stand up peerless. While these are in general qualities of the Elizabethan drama, it is noteworthy that almost from the beginning Shakespeare outstripped his rivals. Launce, Richard III, Shylock, Juliet, were enough to establish a supremacy. The years that followed with their maturing thought and experience gave an amazing development to what was manifestly the native bent of his genius. Whatever else one may find in the plays, indeed whatever one finds there of wisdom or beauty, truth or art, it cannot be separated from their revelation of human nature.
It is this primarily that makes the dramas great and lasting. The histories, with all their pomp and movement and patriotism, reveal kings and lords and peasants as alike the subjects of changing fortune, alike human beings for our pity, admiration, or laughter. The comedies with their fancy and sentiment and fun, and their perennial sunshine on the self-deceived and selfish, are ruled by the most charming and refined of womankind. The tragedies with their presentation of the waste and suffering of life, though here depravity may seem to fill the scene and innocence share in the punishment and ruin, yet redeem us from the terror of their devastation by their assurances of both the majesty and the loveliness of men and women.
Shakespeare's methods in characterization have seemed to some haphazard and bewildering. He does not fit his men and women into an analysis of the constitution of society or into an obvious view of man's relations in the universe. Nor does he use his characters to illustrate fixed conceptions or processes of cause and effect. He usually started with an old story, with certain types of character, and he was not forgetful of theatrical necessities or dramatic construction. But as he went on he brought all his astounding interest in human nature to focus on the old plot and the stock type. Hamlet, the hesitating avenger, becomes the sentimentalist, the idealist, the thinker at war with himself, the embodiment of that conflict between circumstance and a nature unfitted to its task, which in some measure we have all encountered in life. An arrogant and doting old man, by the force of creative imagination, transcends the nursery tale from which he came, and Human Naturecarries to us all the implications of suffering and love that surround the aging of parents and the growth of children. Cleopatra is a wanton, but no analysis can explain the subtleties with which the idealism and animalism, the sacrifice and frivolity—and how much else—of human passion are bound together in the few hundred lines which she speaks. It is impossible to affirm that each of the great characters is thoroughly consistent or offers a strictly accurate motivation. Rather, they are magnificent portraits—like the Mona Lisa—crowded with a penetrating but question-provoking psychology. Into such parts and situations as the drama could afford are impressed every possible revelation of our motives; but his model was always reality and he never yielded truth to whim or prepossession.
Human nature, at its best or worst, droll or tragic, is thus given magnitude and potency. This idealization, rendered still more effective by the verse, persuades us as we read that here are our own attributes and conflicts exalted, now into serene beauty, again into torment and horror, and again into the Olympic warfare of unknown supermen. No doubt there is confusion because of the complexity of motives depicted and the multiplicity of impressions created, but there is also a final message of the greatness and comprehensiveness of human souls. In this world of sin and weakness and death, it is human beings, however mocked or maltreated by circumstance or by themselves, that are still triumphant and interesting. Out of his strifes and failures, the individual man yet emerges, the object of our contemplation and the assurance of our faith.
In periods or persons when interest in the individual gives way to thought about class or system or some form of organization, it is likely that admiration for Shakespeare's plays will suffer a decline. In periods or persons when the individual assumes a larger place in thought and his power to affect and dominate the world is emphasized, the plays are likely to acquire a new regard. As long, however, as the study of human nature is a chief occupation of mankind and as long as we believe that a great purpose of imaginative literature is to enlarge our knowledge and sympathy for our fellows, so long, we may be sure, these dramas will not lose their preëminence in literature.