that infects not the hero only, but his uncle, and to a smaller extent his friend Horatio and his mother-a melancholy which is almost peculiar to them in the range of Shakespearian humanity-belongs to the type of mind which is reared in a land of mists and long nights, of leaden skies and cloud-darkened days. Such are the distinguishing features of the northern Danish climate. Shakespeare's historic sense would never have allowed him to give Hamlet a local habitation in Naples or Messina, any more than it would have suffered him to represent Juliet or Othello as natives of Copenhagen or London. Width of historic outlook. Another point is worth remarking. Shakespeare took a very wide view of human history, and few of the conditions that moulded human character escaped his notice. His historic insight taught him that civilisation progressed in various parts of the world at various rates. He could interpret human feeling and aspirations at any stage of development in the scale of civilisation. Under the spur of speculation, which was offered by the discovery of America, barbarism interested him hardly less than civilisation. Caliban is one of his greatest conceptions. In Caliban he depicts an imaginary portrait conceived with the utmost vigour and vividness of the aboriginal savage of the new world, of which he had heard from travellers or read in books of travel. Caliban hovers on the lowest limits of civilisation. His portrait is an attempt to depict human nature when just on the verge of the evolution of moral sentiment and intellectual culture. Shakespeare was no less attracted by the opposite extreme in the scale of civilisation. He loved to observe civilisation that was over-ripe, that had overleaped itself, and was descending on the other side to effeteness and ruin. This type Shakespeare slightly sketched at the outset in his por trait of the Spanish Armado in Love's Labour's Lost, but the painting of it only engaged his full strength, when he turned in later life to Egypt. Queen Cleopatra, the 'serpent of old Nile,' who by her time-honoured magic brings ' experience, manhood, honour,' to dotage, is Shakespeare's supreme contribution to the study of civilised humanity's decline and fall. X Shake relation to his era. But it was the thought and emotion that animated the living stage of his own epoch which mainly engaged Shakespeare's pencil. He cared not whether speare's his themes and scenes belonged to England or foreign countries. The sentiments and aspirations which filled the air of his era were part of his being and to them he gave the crowning expression. Elizabethan and the sance. Elizabethan literature, which was the noblest manifestation in England of the Renaissance, reached its apotheosis in Shakespeare. It had absorbed all the sustenance of the new movement-the enthusiasm for literature the Greek and Latin classics, the passion for Renaisextending the limits of human knowledge, the resolve to make the best and not the worst of life upon earth, the ambition to cultivate the idea of beauty, the conviction that man's reason was given him by God to use without restraint. All these new sentiments went to the formation of Shakespeare's work, and found there perfect definition. The watchword of the mighty movement was sounded in his familiar lines: 'Sure, He that made us with such large discourse, The capability and god-like reason, To fust in us unused.' Upon the new faith of the Renaissance in the perfectibility of man, intellectually, morally, and physically, Shakespeare pronounced the final word in his deathless phrases: 'What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!' Renaissance authors of France, Italy, and Spain expressed themselves to like intent. But probably in these words of Shakespeare is enshrined with best effect the true significance of the new enlightenment. Shakespeare's lot was cast by the silent forces of the universe, in the full current of this movement of the Renais Shake speare's foreign contem poraries. sance which was in his lifetime still active in every country of Western Europe. He was the contemporary of Tasso, Ariosto's successor on the throne of Italian Renaissance poetry and its last occupant. Ronsard and the poets of the French Renaissance flourished in his youth. Montaigne, the glory of the French Renaissance, whose thought on man's potentialities ran very parallel with Shakespeare's, was very little his senior. Cervantes, the most illustrious figure in the literature of the Spanish Renaissance, was his senior by only seventeen years, and died only ten days before him. All these men and their countless coadjutors and disciples were subject to many of the same influences as Shakespeare was. The results of their efforts often bear one to another not merely a general resemblance, but a specific likeness, which amazes the investigator. How many poets and dramatists of sixteenth-century Italy, France and Spain, applied their energies to developing the identical plots, and the identical traditions of history as Shakespeare? Almost all countries of Western Europe were producing at the same period, under the same incitement of the revival of learning, and the renewal of intellectual energy, tragedies of Julius Cæsar, of Antony and Cleopatra, of Romeo and Juliet, and of Timon of Athens. All countries of Western Europe were producing sonnets and lyrics of identical pattern with unprecedented fertility; all were producing prose histories and prose essays of the like type; all were surveying the same problems of science and philosophy, and offering much the same solutions. The diffu sion of the spirit of the Renais The direct interchange, the direct borrowings are not the salient features of the situation. Less material influences than translation or plagiarism were at work; allowance must be made for the community of feeling among all literary artificers of the day, for the looking backwards to classical literature, for the great common stock of philosophical sentiments and ideas to which at that epoch authors of all countries under the sway of the movement of the Renaissance had access independently. sance. National and individual idiosyncrasies deeply coloured the varied literatures in which the spirit of the Renaissance was embodied. But that unique spirit is visible amid all the manifestations of national and individual genius and tempera ment. Misappre hensions to be guarded against. When we endeavour to define the foreign influences at work on Shakespeare's achievement, we should beware of assigning to the specific influence of any individual foreign writers those characteristics which were really the property of the whole epoch, which belonged to the stores of thought independently at the disposal of every rational being who was capable at the period of assimilating them. Much has been made of the parallelisms of sentiment between Shakespeare and his French contemporary Montaigne, the most enlightened representative of the spirit of the Renaissance in France. Such parallelisms stand apart from that literal borrowing by Shakespeare of part of a speech in The Tempest from Montaigne's essay on cannibals.' The main resemblances in sentiment concern the two men's attitude to far reaching questions of philosophy. But there is little justice in representing the one as a borrower from the other. Both gave voice in the same key to that demand of the humanists of the Renaissance for the freest possible employment of man's reasoning faculty. Shakespeare and Montaigne were only two of many who were each, for the most part independently, interpreting in the light of his individual genius, and under the sway of the temperament of his nation, the highest principles of enlightenment and progress, of which the spirit of the time was parent. Direct foreign influences are obvious in Shakespeare; they are abundant and varied; they compel investigation. But no study of them can throw true and trustworthy light on any corner of Shakespeare's work, unless we associate with our study a full recognition, not merely of the personal preeminence of Shakespeare's genius and intuition, but also of the diffusion through Western Europe of the spirit of the Renaissance. That was the broad basis on which the foundations of Shakespeare's mighty and unique achievement were laid. |