The Age of Shakespeare [antikvár]

GENERAL INTRODUCTION In introducing this Guide to English Literature, it is as well to remember that this is the age of the Digest and the Headline, of the Comic and the Tabloid, of the Bestseller and the Month's Masterpiece, an age when a 'deep-seated spiritual vulgarity lies at the heart of our civilization', in the words of the novelist L. H. Myers. Perhaps in response to this, the twentieth century has also been a period of unusually lively criticism, a time when a small number of writers and critics have made a determined effort to elicit from literature what is of living value to us today; to re-estabhsh, that is, a sense of literary tradition and to define the high standards that this tradition implies. At the same time it is also important that this feeling for a Uving Uterature and for the values it embodies should be given as wide a currency as possible, and that literature - both today's Uterature and yesterday's - should have a real and not merely a nominal existence among a comparatively large number of general readers. It is to meet this second need that the Guide has been planned and produced; and it is the general state of letters and reading today which has determined the shape that it has taken. For this Guide has been expressly designed for those thousands of people who might be described as something less than advanced and specialist students of literature, but who accept with genuine respect what is known as 'our literary heritage'. For many of them this amounts, in memory, to an unattractive amalgam of set texts and school prizes, and as a result they have come to read only current books - fiction and biography and travel. Though they are probably familiar with such names as Pope, George EHot, Langland, Marvell, Yeats, Dr Johnson, Hopkins, D. H. Lawrence, they might hesitate to describe their work intimately or to fit them into any larger pattern of growth and achievement. If this account is a fair one, it seems probable that very many people would be glad of guidance that would help them respond to what is living and contemporary in Uterature, for, like the other arts, it has the power to enrich the imagination and to clarify thought and feeling. Not that one is offering Uterature as a substitute religion or as providing a philosophy for Ufe. Its satisfactions are of their own kind, though they are satisfactions intimately bound up with the Ufe of each