The central idea is the large, general objectivity of Shakespeare's
plays as contrasted with the narrow, selfish subjectivity of Ibsen's.
The difference bottoms in the difference between the age of Elizabeth
and our own. Those were days of full, pulsing, untrammeled life. Men
lived big, physical lives. They had few scruples and no nerves.
Full-blooded passions, not petty problems of pathological psychology,
were the things that interested poets and dramatists. They saw life
fully and they saw it whole. So with Shakespeare. His characters are
big, well-rounded men; they are not laboratory specimens. They live in
the real Elizabethan world, not in the hothouse of the poet's brain. It
is of no consequence that violence is done to "local color." Shakespeare
beheld all the world and all ages through the lens of his own time and
country, but because the men he saw were actual, living beings, the
characters he gives us, be they mythological figures, Romans, Greeks,
Italians, or Englishmen, have universal validity. He went to Italy for
his greatest love-story. That gave him the right atmosphere. It is
significant that Ibsen once thought it necessary to seek a suggestive
background for one of his greatest characters. He went to Finmarken for
Rebecca West.

Shakespeare's characters speak in loud, emphatic tones and they give
utterance to clear, emphatic thoughts. There is no "twilight zone" in
their thinking. Ibsen's men and women, like the children at Rosmersholm,
never speak aloud; they merely whimper or they whisper the polite
innuendos of the drawing room. The difference lies largely in the
difference of the age. But Ibsen is more decadent than his age. There
are great ideas in our time too, but Ibsen does not see them. He sees
only the "thought." Contrast with this Shakespeare's colossal scale.
He is "loud-voiced" but he is also "many-voiced." Ibsen speaks in a
salon voice and always in one key. And the remarkable thing is that
Shakespeare, in spite of his complicated plots, is always clear. The
main lines of the action stand out boldly. There is always speed and
movement--a speed and movement directly caused by powerful feelings. He
makes his readers think on a bigger scale than does Ibsen. His passions
are sounder because they are larger and more expansive.

Shakespeare is the dramatist of our average life; Ibsen, the poet of
the rare exception. To Shakespeare's problems there is always an answer;
underneath his storms t