rstanding to appear so scant
and pitiful, was, I doubt not, better adapted to his career than if he
had been filled with all the learning of Verulam or Ben Jonson. But of
that anon.

The first happy circumstance was the epoch at which he saw the light.
In modern times two forms of poetry contend for the supremacy. The third
kind, the epic, is dead. No Homer or Virgil can ever more arise, unless
as a novelist in prose. Of the two perennial kinds, one is the
lyric--the consummate blending of language and music which utters the
cry of individual passion from the individual heart. The other is the
drama, the presentation of human life in visible form, realised in all
its complexity of motives, characters and moods. Both of these
flourished mightily in Shakespeare's generation. Lyric poets were
innumerable. The whole country rang with songs. The Elizabethan
Miscellanies and Rhapsodies and Dainty Devices are testimony stronger
even than the great names of Spenser and the sonneteers. No less did
drama appeal to high and low, the Puritan always excepted. But the day
of the Puritan had not yet dawned. The taste of society of every grade
was for the theatre, but a theatre without scenery, in which it was
required of the drama that it should be rich in high poetry. Poetry was
just then both a fashion and a passion of the nation, as it never was
before and never has been since. To a man born, like Shakespeare, with
both the lyric and the dramatic gift, the age was full of example and
stimulus, and, better still, full of challenge and exacting poetic
standards. There is an immense difference between writing an artistic
sonnet for a wide public which desires to read artistic sonnets, or
composing a poetic drama for a wide public which desires to see poetic
dramas, and doing these things for a narrow public which, after all,
rather tolerates your efforts than demands them.

We are not concerned with the question what Shakespeare might have been
if he had lived in his prime to-day. He might perhaps have become a
superlative novel-writer, since that is the field in which creation
appears to be playing its chief part. But our concern is to perceive
what causes helped to fashion him to that which he in fact became.

Let us first glance for a few moments at those spacious times of great
Elizabeth. Why so wondrously prolific in song and play? Why so
provocative of genius?

First, we may lay down the proposition that it is not times of n