SHAKESPEARE CHAPTER I SHAKESPEARE EVERY age has its own difficulties in the appreciation of Shakespeare. The age in which he lived was too near to him to see him truly. From his contemporaries, and those rare and curious inquirers who collected the remnants of their talk, we learn that "his Plays took well"; and that he was a handsome, well shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit." The easygoing and casual critics who were privileged to know him in life regarded him chiefly as a successful member of his own class, a prosperous actor-dramatist, whose energy and skill were given to the business of the theatre and the amusement of the play-going public. There was no one to make an idol of him while he lived. The newly sprung class to which he belonged was despised and disliked by the majority of the decent burgesses of the City of London; and SHAKESPEARE CHAPTER I SHAKESPEARE EVERY age has its own difficulties in the appreciation of Shakespeare. The age in which he lived was too near to him to see him truly. From his contemporaries, and those rare and curious inquirers who collected the remnants of their talk, we learn that "his Plays took well"; and that he was a handsome, well shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit." The easygoing and casual critics who were privileged to know him in life regarded him chiefly as a successful member of his own class, a prosperous actor-dramatist, whose energy and skill were given to the business of the theatre and the amusement of the play-going public. There was no one to make an idol of him while he lived. The newly sprung class to which he belonged was despised and disliked by the majority of the decent burgesses of the City of London; and S. A OF though the players found substantial favour at the hands of the Court, and were applauded and imitated by a large following of young law-students and fashionable gallants, yet this favour and support brought them none the nearer to social consideration or worshipful esteem. In the City they were enemies, "the caterpillars of a commonwealth"; at the Court they were servants, and service is no heritage. It was not until the appearance of the Folio Edition of 1623, that Shakespeare's dramatic writings challenged the serious attention of "the great variety of readers." From that time onward, his fame steadily advanced to the conquest of the world. Ben Jonson in his verses prefixed to the Folio, though he makes the largest claims for his friend, yet invokes him first of all as the "Soul of the Age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our Stage." Milton, some nine years later, considers him simply as the author of a marvellous book. The readers of Shakespeare took over from the fickle players the trust and inheritance of his fame. An early example of purely literary imitation, by a close student of his works, may be seen in Sir John Suckling's plays, which are fuller of poetic than of dramatic reminiscence. While the Restoration theatre mangled and parodied the tragic masterpieces, a new generation of readers kept alive the knowledge and heightened the renown of the written |