The words with which we seek to do him homage are his. We look for new celebration and find echo. Shakespeare has his mastering grip on the marrow of our speech. The shapes of life which he created give voice to our inward needs. We catch ourselves crooning desire like street-corner Romeos; we fall to jealousy in the cadence of Othello; we make Hamlets of our enigmas; old men rage and dodder like Lear. Shakespeare is the common house of our feelings. He has seen so exactly, so variously for us; he has struck the note of consciousness over so wide a range of human experience; he found for what he saw and felt such authority of statement—making his words not only a mirror of truth, but its vital, inexhaustible form—that we meet his voice around every corner of our sensibility. Even our cry and our laughter are only partly ours; we find them where he left them, and they bear his stamp.
Thus whoever tries to add something worth saying to the din of commemoration and affirm “how noble he was in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable,” is only quoting.
The hint of a power beyond rational account tempts our thought of him. We seek Shakespeare’s measure and come short of breath. A leap of invention, a technical resource which comprehend the moon-bright garden at Belmont and Lear on the convulsed rotundity of earth, the crow of the Danish cock at purgatorial dawn and sea-changes five fathoms five off the coast of Bohemia, challenge our scale of human gift. An instrument which can render, with equal truth and timbre, the acid needlings of Iago and the silences of Cordelia, Falstaff’s belly-talk or the high jingles of Ariel, seems to set a limit only to itself. Critics who are honest know what Cassius speaks for them:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
It was not always so. Ben Jonson, in whom justice strove with rivalry, spoke the first, enduring epitaph: “He was not for an age, but for all time!” Yet he asserted with no less conviction that “Shakespeare wanted art,” and that it had been better had he blotted a thousand of his lines. Dryden revered Shakespeare’s “comprehensive soul,” but did not regard him as incomparable; in signal respects, he preferred Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. To Milton, Shakespeare’s was a wild, untutored talent; he scorned to set it beside Sophocles. In editing Shakespeare, Pope found great virtues, but defects “almost as great.”
This sense of poise between genius and infirmity, between beauty and blemish, gives Samuel Johnson’s judgment its circumscribed but confident strength: “Shakespeare with his excellencies had likewise faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall shew them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or superstitious veneration.” To Johnson, Shakespeare was a very great writer, at moments unsurpassed. But his achievement was not, in essence, different from that of other poets; it posed no unique riddle of glory. Critic and playwright could meet on level ground.
The notion of transcendence, of a genius so apart that it solicits metaphors of supernatural power, is Romantic. It animates the impatient ecstasy of the Shakespearean criticism of Lamb and Coleridge: “but combine all—wit, subtlety and fancy, with profundity, imagination, and moral and physical susceptibility of the pleasurable—and let the object of action be man universal; and we shall have—O, rash prophecy! say, rather, we have—a Shakespeare!” Keats asked whether one could conceive of a superior being looking on Shakespeare, and finding in him weakness or nullity, and answered No. He added, echoing Hazlitt, that “Shakespeare is enough,” that his insight is sufficient to man’s day and labor.
The modern tone is more astringent. It rebukes mere rapture. But our essential stance is heir to that of Coleridge. We do not imagine that we look on Shakespeare as equal to equal; textual scholar and literary critic, actor and producer are as moths to his great flame. Those who would challenge Shakespeare’s stature do so with a betraying nervousness. There was a streak of uneasy clowning in Shaw’s subversions of Shakespeare, in his claim to match or improve on Shakespearean drama. T. S. Eliot has austere reservations; Hamlet is an artistic failure, and Shakespeare lacked a sustaining metaphysic. But the argument closes in homage: Shakespeare and Dante divide Western literature between them. There is no third. The only modern attack that discards the very premise of Shakespeare’s greatness, that sees his work as persistently and blindly overrated, is Tolstoy’s. And it is an attack mounted not from literature, but from an exterior ground of anarchic moralism.
This universality of homage makes it difficult to “see new.” An incessant tide of commentary and edition—it requires a fair-sized library to house what has been written and spoken about Shakespeare in 1964—bars us from the risks and privileges of novel impression. We no longer share the serene innocence of George III when he confided to Fanny Burney that he had read Shakespeare and found in him “a lot of twaddle.” We start from a legacy of reverence, from the assumption that the work before us is of unique grandeur and fascination.
What philology and criticism have done since the fireworks and choral odes of 1864, is to make our admiration more exact. We know a little more of the source and nature of Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, of the general means that went into the particular devices of his art. If our judgment still moves in frequent doubt (and more is now known of Shakespeare than of many an Elizabethan figure), it moves more surely.
Shakespeare was marvelously lucky in his times. In England, the period from 1580 to 1640 represented a special constellation of emotional and intellectual energies. Though the new mercantile society and centralized state followed hard on the decay of feudalism, the old, close-woven patterns of medieval feeling, with its habits of imagery and allegoric statement, with its profound, subtle imaginings of a world-anatomy, was still vital. The scholarship of E. K. Chambers, of Tillyard, of Hardin Craig has taught us how much of the dynamism of Elizabethan drama derived from the survivance of medieval, popular values; how it was to a medieval precedent that the Elizabethan theater owed its characteristic yoking of farce with high tragedy, and its assumption that the natural world of tempest and heath, of blazing comet and portentous star, gives expressive attendance to the lives of men.
When Lorenzo tells Jessica, in The Merchant of Venice, that there is not an orb in heaven “But in his motion like an angel sings,” the precise doctrine of the music of the spheres, and the larger inference of animate, cosmic harmony, go back to their antique source through the Middle Ages, and through medieval legends of Pythagoras. When the branch and leaf-clad forces of redemption advance on Dunsinane, the castle of evil in a blighted land, we apprehend behind the action of Macbeth, though at far remove, an older pattern of ritual, of annual combat between winter’s barren dark and the coming of the Green Man. In the Morris dance or the dance of the horned maskers in the Elizabethan village, such patterns had their afterlife. A traditional coherence related the whole of the Elizabethan world-image, from insensate stone to burning star. It gave firm pivot to the individualism and passionate turbulence of the Elizabethan play.
Yet at the same time, the “new Americas” of mathematics and astronomy, of Galilean physics and global navigation, were transforming the contours of life and feeling at a fantastic pace. The heroic bias of Elizabethan tragedy, the representation of will and ambition at full stretch, dramatize the pressure of intellectual conquest. The Elizabethan spirit is dizzy with new horizons. And following on Marlowe, the playwrights sensed what was electric in the air.
As early as The Comedy of Errors, with its reference to “Lapland sorcerers,” Shakespeare was alert to material such as Giles Fletcher’s travels to the Russian arctic. If “poor Tom,” in King Lear, feeds on “Mice and rats and such small deer,” it may well be because that was the diet of Hawkins’ mariners after their disastrous repulse from the West Indies. Ulysses’ speech on order in Troilus and Cressida makes provisional use of the Copernican-Galilean design of planetary motion:
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other.
Thus Shakespeare could draw at will on medieval and modern, on the intricate weave of tradition and the forward motion of intellect. Many of his primary devices and conventions rely on this simultaneity of impulse. He could conjure the Ghost of Hamlet’s father and the Weird Sisters out of a reality of witchcraft and supernatural presence that were still urgent in Jacobean England. But such presences were, in Hamlet’s profound, ambiguous phrase, “questionable.” Shakespeare could play the speculative instincts of Baconian empiricism against the archaic authority of a daemonic world. His assent to the supernatural is, therefore, tentative—and the richness of the dramatic treatment springs from uncertitude.
It was a brief spell of creative imbalance between two worlds, between two modes of consciousness. After 1640, the achievements of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton made the old order unrecapturable. “The mischief,” wrote Yeats, “began at the end of the seventeenth century when man became passive before a mechanized nature.”
Shakespeare was lucky also in the quality of his playhouse and audience. Despite the important work of modern social historians and Alfred Harbage, we still do not know as much as we should like about the precise character of that audience. Marx’s challenge that one cannot account for the brilliance and profusion of Elizabethan drama without analyzing the economic and class structure of stage and public, has been admitted but only partially met. Unquestionably, Shakespeare’s genius, and the relationship of that genius to a large audience, are part of the history of pre-inflation. All but the destitute were able, now and again, to pay a penny to stand in the pit of the Globe; it was no more than the cost of a pint of ale. By the time modern mercantilism had been fully established in the eighteenth century, the price of a novel would feed a family for up to a fortnight. Thus Shakespeare’s playhouse embodied an exceptional range of economic and social interests. Aristocrat and tradesman, gentry and apprentice, lawyer and mercenary, stood side by side, or in crowded proximity, under the open sky. No other theater that we know of could command so wide a context of social response.
To hold such an audience against the distractions of bear-baiting or downpour, the Elizabethan play had to move at various levels of meaning and delight. It could not, as does the art of Racine, define a single, rigid code of statement. In the very same scene in Hamlet or Othello, the arcane flash of meditation or word-play, rousing the wit of the few, of the courtier or scholar, is borne on a current of intrigue and raw action broad enough to rivet the excitement of the unschooled. The humane largesse of Shakespearean drama, its essential commitment to a tragi-comic view of life, reflect the multiple instincts and demands of this wide audience. As soon as the playhouses moved indoors, into a medium of candlelight and courtly entertainment, as soon as the gathering strength of Puritanism made the urban middle class shy of the stage, drama lost its superb breadth. It left what Coleridge called “the high road of life” to play upon more special nerves. G. E. Bentley has shown how significantly the later Jacobean and Caroline theater differ from the popular genius of the Elizabethan. Shakespeare’s own late plays show this sophistication of art. He came just in time.
This is true, above all, of the condition of the language. Even as Elizabethan sensibility drew its tone from the conflict and weld of medieval and renaissance values, so English in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries realized a unique coherence of inheritance and innovation. The radical cadence of the language, its sinew of verb and strong solemnities, had come down from the Middle Ages and Caxton. The Authorized Version of the Bible, with its deliberate recourse to John Wyclif and fourteenth-century turns of speech, characterizes the Elizabethan and Jacobean awareness of the old lineage; but it also exhibits the resolve to enrich that lineage, to make it more pliant by the import of classic and European resources. It is these which tide into the Elizabethan vocabulary giving it its fantastic wealth of expression.
The Elizabethans ransacked Greek and Latin, the European vulgate, and the speech of the new worlds, as they did Spanish harbors. They took the Spanish brisa to make breeze; they borrowed indigo from Portugal, and gong from Malay. When an Elizabethan tragic personage confesses to forlorn hope, he is distorting the Dutch verloren hoop (a routed military unit) which men such as Sidney and Ben Jonson had heard during their battles in the Low Countries. But it was from Greek and Latin that the Renaissance took most avidly; here was ancient gold out of which to forge the very mettle of free minds (and as it enters the language in the 1580s the word carries its fine ambiguity and echo). It is at this point, using Greek and Latin forms, that much of the vocabulary of our politics and science, of our art and metaphysics, first came into play.
The ear of Spenser and Marlowe made of English verse an ideal medium of linguistic congruence. It was they who adopted the great trick of music and unity whereby the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin conjoin. That trick, with its formidable means of tension and resonance, is one of the keys to Shakespeare’s style. He hammered it out gradually. By the time of Henry IV, he has it perfect:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds.…
But language is far more than a currency of rational and emotional exchange. It stands in a vital, reciprocal relationship to the contours of society. Elizabethan England was still in close, natural contact with rural life; and even in the cities the technical modes of production and trade were still of an essentially personal, local character. A man knew whence his bread came and how it was baked; how his boots were shod and his cloth woven. In a day’s walk he could span the entire vista of the body politic (itself a metaphor of organic cohesion), from palace and law-court to open field. This meant that the words he used had immediacy and concreteness. He knew whereof he spoke by personal experience, and the names of things retained the subtle liveliness of that which we have held in hand.
In Shakespeare’s English the vocabularies of wheelwright and mariner, of soldier and apothecary, of law-clerk and midwife, have their specific weight and precision. Each embodies a closely observed and felt reality. It has often been noted that Shakespeare used more words than any other poet, and used them with more sensuous accuracy. But what matters is that the twenty thousand words at his reach give an all but total rendering of the Elizabethan world. Scarcely any sphere of action or thought is left out; scarcely anything was too remote or specialized for concrete, dramatic use. And it was a concreteness which, time and again, directs the mind to rural life and manual labor. Thus, as Dover Wilson has pointed out, the fierce harrowings of Hamlet and his mother in the bedroom scene—
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed
Stewed in corruption, honeying, and making love
Over the nasty sty—
are based on a set of technical yet banal terms taken from wool-dyeing. Himself the son of a wool merchant, Shakespeare had seen wool greased (enseamèd) with hog’s lard. Hence the pig-sty, and the characteristic awareness, an awareness central to the meaning of the play, that trough and honey-comb are only a step apart.
Today, the more than half a million words available to current English fall increasingly short of the needs of a splintered, technological society. Where it is not mere commonplace, our usage grows more and more specialized. The mass jargon of the modern city is stranger to the names of stones and flowers, as it is stranger to the making of its bread. We communicate; but being second-hand and abstract, the modes of our communication do not achieve community.
This vivid immediacy of idiom, and the capacity of the individual to be in natural contact with the whole of the social condition, are crucial to Shakespearean drama. As Newton and Leibniz were among the last to apprehend the entire spectrum of the natural sciences, to experience knowledge as a complex unity, so Shakespeare appears to have been the last to enclose in poetic speech a total view of human action, a summa mundi. After 1640 the old unities break. Here again, the hour met the man.
But once we acknowledge the vital coincidence between the individual talent of the Elizabethan playwrights and the opportunities opened by economic, psychological, and linguistic circumstance, the fact of Shakespeare’s supremacy remains. He is greater than Marlowe or Jonson; much greater than Webster, Ford, or Tourneur. In what way?
It is in its attempt to answer this question that the modern reading, the quality of our present admiration, differ most from the Romantics and Victorians. Hazlitt focused his insight on Shakespeare’s “men and women,” on his creation of “living beings”; the Victorians anthologized Shakespeare’s “mastery of human wisdom,” they harvested his plays for intellectual guidance and precepts of feeling. By contrast, it is Shakespeare the organizer of language who is the pivot of modern criticism. L. C. Knights’s well-known essay How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933) summarized and argued the new approach.
The plays of Shakespeare consist of words chosen and arranged toward specific poetic and dramatic ends. These words are our sole evidence. To speak of Hamlet before the play, to evoke Falstaff in the lean sundown of his days, is mere verbiage. No character is “real” in any exterior sense. It exists within the statement of the play, and that statement is a particular marshaling of words. A different arrangement—a different order of image or rhetoric—would create a different personage and dramatic meaning. A true reading of Shakespeare, therefore (and producers and actors are, in fact, readers out loud), signifies a response of the utmost delicacy, of the utmost comprehension, to the text before us.
What emerges from such reading?
More than any other human intellect of which we have adequate record, Shakespeare used language in a condition of total possibility. What I mean is this: the great majority of men use language in an essentially unreflective, utilitarian way; they take words to have a fixed, single meaning. They regard speech as if its potential could be set down in a primer, in a pocket dictionary of basic usage. With education and the complication of our emotional needs through literature, we are made aware of the polyphonic structure of language, of the multiplicity of intents and implications, at times contradictory, latent in individual terms, in their placing and stress. We grow alert to the fact that none but the most formal or rudimentary of linguistic propositions has a single equivalence.
In Shakespeare, this alertness, this mastering response to the sum of all potential meanings and values, reached an intensity far beyond the norm. (One may, at least, raise the question whether Shakespeare was not harnessing more fully, more economically than other men, areas of the cortex in which speech functions are thought to be localized.) When using a word, or set of words, Shakespeare brings into controlled activity not only the range of definitions and current modes noted in the dictionary; he seems to hear around the core of every word the totality of its overtones and undertones; of its connotations and echoes. The analogy would be certain extreme subtleties and acuities of the musical ear. To Shakespeare, more than to any other poet, the individual word was a nucleus surrounded by a field of complex energies.
These reach back to the subconscious, to the obscure primary zone where human language emerges from a “pre-vocabulary” of biological and somatic stimulus or recognition. In Shakespeare, words often come to the surface with their full charge of pre-conscious association; their roots go unbroken to the dark. But the Shakespearean sense of total possibility also extends forward. Many of his words do not come to rest in any single meaning. They move like a pendulum sweeping a wide terrain of partial synonyms and analogues. Often, a word will shade, by pun or suggestion of sound, into an area of new definitions. In part, this vibrant action is due to Shakespeare’s ready use of the instabilities of the Elizabethan vocabulary, to the fact that before Dryden and before Johnson’s Dictionary definitions and syntax remain fluid.
To read Shakespeare is to be in contact with a verbal medium of unequaled richness and exactitude; with a mode of statement which does not, as in ordinary men, limit itself to a conventional, fixed pattern of significance, but persistently conveys a multiple, creative energy of thought and feeling. We speak as if words were a piano score; Shakespeare’s is the full orchestration.
The proof lies in the study of the plays and poems as a whole. I need give only one or two examples.
In Act I of Hamlet, a number of key words derive their power to rouse and control our attention from the fact that Shakespeare has made explicit the buried strength of their etymologies. Behind the primary meaning a larger resonance is brought into play. In Horatio’s narrative, disasters implies the literal chaos or ruin of the stars, an implication that prepares Hamlet’s confession that to him the star-studded heavens have grown “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.” In Horatio’s reference to extravagant spirits, the etymology—far-wandering—modulates into overtones of waste and tragic excess which were imminent in the usage of the 1590s. Together, the root and the overtones organize Horatio’s graphic use of confine in the following verse. Confine is both boundary and prison-house (and various intermediary nuances of restriction are active in the image); the Ghost has strayed from desperate captivity, all the extravagance of sensual life upon his soul. Or observe the self-betrayal in Claudius’ deference to obsequious sorrow, where obsequious carries the concrete force of its Latin etymology (funeral obsequies), together with the more modern hint of falsehood, of hollow gesture. Note too, how the phrase cuts back in irony to what we know of the hasty bestowal of Hamlet’s father.
There is a superb instance of how a single word shapes an entire complex of emotion and intelligence in the first speech of the Ghost. The “fretful porpentine,” Shakespeare’s simile of hair-raising fright, suggests an heraldic beast, the crest of a coat of arms, a suggestion faintly announced in Horatio’s earlier description of the Ghost, “Armèd at point exactly, cap-a-pe.” From it springs the Ghost’s admonition to Hamlet that the hideous truths of Purgatory must not be blazoned forth. Originally, blazon means a painted shield; by derivation, it comes to mean the action of disclosure which is the aim of heraldry. But in the very sound of the word, by an echo deeper than a mere pun, Shakespeare makes us hear the blaze, the purging fires in which the Ghost is doomed for a certain time to dwell. Did Shakespeare know—or need to know—that modern philology believes the two words to have a very remote, common origin? Hardly; but when he did so, he used a word with its totality of relevance.
Shakespeare’s plays have been described as the unfolding of certain primary metaphors. Because the words he chose for stress and deepening have an enormous potential, they give to the action of the plays their close-knit order. The entirety of King Lear, with its dramatic realization of a world in primal chaos, may be seen to develop from the Fool’s prophecy that Lear shall be used kindly by Regan. In that small word, terrible queries and subversions lurk. Is there kindness in our human kind; if each man deal after his kind, what then? Did Shakespeare, with his final sensitivity to linguistic values, implicate the common root which makes of kind the German word for child? Similarly, the intricate argument of Macbeth on unnatural proceedings in nature, politics, and private conduct, is concentrated in the opening tag: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
Shakespeare’s discernment of human motive, his fantastic divinations of historical atmosphere, his seeming foresight into modern psychology (the Freudian impact in the Clown’s farewell to Cleopatra: “I wish you well of the worm”)—all arise, in the final analysis, from an exhaustive realization of linguistic possibility. His plays are patterns of words used with a totality of ordered meaning. Through that completeness is achieved a medium, in Ben Jonson’s superb phrase—
so ramm’d with life
That it shall gather strength of life, with being.
Will that medium, and our understanding of it, endure? Can we imagine Shakespeare, as Carlyle did in 1840, “radiant aloft over all nations … a thousand years hence”? Will the Shakespeare anniversary of 2064 find laser beams carrying the sight and rejoicing of Stratford bells to all stations in space, or will it have diminished to an observance of textual scholars and antiquarians?
Each age has had its particular vision of Shakespeare. Each selects from the compass of his performance that which speaks most cogently to its own temper. As it moves through time, a work of art becomes barnacled with successive bearings and revaluations. The recent landscape of politics has lent to the image of unnatural hatreds and racked humanity in Lear a novel and specific reference. The contemporary bias toward psychological ambiguity gives such plays as Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida a prestige, a fascination, they never enjoyed before. By contrast, we set Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream much lower in the canon than did the nineteenth century. Our present concept of Shakespeare the poet, the master-builder of intricate verbal structures (a criterion which puts Coriolanus near the summit), may alter and lose authority.
Any prophecy is rash. But certain possibilities of change and detraction are discernible. Mass-education has immensely widened Shakespeare’s audience. Never before have so many human beings had some measure of acquaintance with the plays. There is hardly a language or organized community, with access to mass-media, in which an occasional bit of Shakespeare is not read or acted. But what has been produced by popular education since the latter part of the industrial revolution is a special kind of semi-literacy, an ability to read and perceive in a very limited, utilitarian range. It is a literacy drastically out of touch with the verbal consciousness, with the habits of feeling and reference implicit in an Elizabethan text. The core of primary knowledge which Shakespeare shared with his audience, and with humanistic Europe—a familiarity with Scripture and classic myths, with the common trove of Christian symbolism and renaissance allegory—is receding into the confine of the scholar.
In Act II of Cymbeline, Iachimo climbs out of a trunk to spy on the sleeping Imogen. He compares himself to Tarquin “softly pressing the rushes ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded.” The young woman is “Cytherea”; the bracelet he steals off her arm is “slippery as the Gordian knot was hard.” Before falling asleep, Imogen has been reading
The tale of Tereus; here’s the leaf turned down
Where Philomel gave up.
Each of these classic allusions was natural to the literacy of an Elizabethan schoolboy; it was part of the rudiments of European bourgeois education until the early twentieth century. How many present readers can, without special help, follow the careful plotting of Iachimo’s intent? For the issue here is not one of critical refinement. These five references, and the order in which they are made, constitute the essential dramatic form. If one does not grasp, with an immediate sense of terror, the pointer to Ovid’s tale of rape and silence, the whole of Iachimo’s stance, of his shallow, embarrassed malignity, is made insignificant. Shakespeare is using an alphabet which we have largely lost.
The complete Shakespeare in inexpensive paperbacks, now being issued by the New American Library, is a triumph of editorial scruple and democratic hope. But it may mark one of the last historic moments in which a genuine text, supported by only a reasonable scaffold of explanations and gloss, will reach a mass audience; in fact, I wonder how many of those who buy these remarkable volumes actually read the plays. With each semi-literate generation, the distance between Shakespeare and reader will grow. So will the temptation to “modernize,” to prepare versions in digest form or colloquial paraphrase. Even as Shakespeare is translated into languages ever more remote from the world, from the conventions of meaning he knew, so he may come to be “translated” into an Anglo-American ever more unlike Elizabethan speech.
Indeed, the authority of the written text may yield increasingly to visual presentment. Three-dimensional television and the graphic transmission of the most realistic performances to every habitation may reduce awareness of the book to a minor role. The plays could become once more what they were before the innovation of the Folio: pure theater. And as is already the case with much classical music, a numerous public would follow in action works whose score they cannot read or genuinely judge. Shakespeare himself might not flinch at such a prospect. He was a man of the playhouse, mysteriously indifferent, if our evidence is right, to the survival of the written text.
Is there any set of circumstances, outside nuclear catastrophe, which could bring Hamlet or Othello into partial oblivion, which could reduce Shakespeare’s work to the concern of a few specialists?
What is involved here is the retreat from the primacy of the word, of linguistic authority. It is by no means evident that civilization will produce in future those constructs of verbal, syntactic representation, or mimesis, which we find in Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce. Simenon may be among the last to have taken an entire culture for his verbal canvas. If language, as we use it, were to lose part of its function and universality, the works of Shakespeare would become comprehensible only to a specialized caste of “interpreters.” They would preserve their secret radiance; but the ordinary man might find them as difficult to decipher, as mute, as are the cavern paintings of Altamira.
But this is mere conjecture. Only one thing seems strangely certain: that no other writer will surpass Shakespeare. To say that Shakespeare is not only the greatest writer who has ever lived, but who will ever live, is a perfectly rational statement. But it is, in the deepest sense, a shocking statement. It outrages the instinctive forward motion of human expectation. It sets a defiant limit to the hopes of any poet, of any man who seeks to master and render life on the written page. It insinuates into the study and criticism of literature a constant backward glance. There is a mustard-seed of truth in the slogan of the surrealists that if poetry is to be made new, if we are to grow innocent again before the magic of speech, the works of Shakespeare must be burned. We do him honor, also, if we recognize how heavy is the burden of his glory.