A Critical History of English Literature II. [antikvár]

CHAPTER NINE Shakespeare William shakespeare (1564-1616) doubtless saw himself as merely another professional man of the theater who moved abnost casually from play acting to play writing. And indeed he was very much a man of his time, a man of the Elizabethan theater, who learned to exploit brilliantly the stagecraft, the acting, and the public taste of his day. It happens very rarely in the history of literature that a craftsman who has acquired perfect control of his medium and a masterly ease in handling the techniques and conventions of his day is also a universal genius of the highest order, combining with his technical proficiency a unique ability to render experience in poetic language and an uncanny intuitive understanding of human psychology. Man of the theater, poet, and expert in the human passions, Shakespeare has appealed equally to those who admire the art with which he renders a story in terms of the acted drama or the insight with which he presents states of mind and complexities of attitude or the unsui-passed brilliance he shows in giving conviction and a new dimension to the utterances of his characters through the poetic speech he puts in their mouths. It is a remarkable combination of qualities. Shakespeare has been praised for his "knowledge of the human heart," for his superb poetry, for his esthetic cunning in his disposition of the action, for his theatrical skill, and for his ability to create living worlds of people while himself remaining (as James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus said of the artist) "like the God of creation, within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Yet this was no poetic genius descending on the theater from above, but a working dramatist who found himself in catering for the public theater of his day. Unquestionably the greatest poetic dramatist of Europe, he was also Marlowe's successor, the heir to a tradition of playwriting which we saw developing in the preceding chapter. His contemporaries saw him as one dramatist among others 246