restraint, that buoyancy of spirit, that lively
interest in experience, which had their full course in the few years
when the old garment was off and the new not quite fitted. The immense
intellectual and imaginative activity of the period consists precisely
in this freedom from restrictions, partisanship, dogmas, or caste.
Things had lost their labels and some time and argument were required to
find new ones. Ideas were free and not bound to any school, party, or
cause. You grasped an idea without knowing whether it made you realist,
romanticist, or classicist; papist, puritan, or pagan. After centuries
of imprisonment, individuality had its full chance in the world of ideas
as elsewhere.

[Page Heading: An Age of Freedom]

In a few years this was all over, and your sphere of life and the ideas
proper to that sphere were prescribed for you. By another century,
England had fought out the issues of creed and government with expense
of blood and spirit, and had settled down to the compromise of 1688. In
Shakespeare's day there was also, of course, some movement toward fixity
of ideas, and there were great men who strove to convert others to their
ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a breathing spell
in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike, but individual,
and in which their motives and ideas revelled in a freedom from ancient
precedent. In this era of flux the modern drama found its panorama of
novel and varied experience making and marring character.

Shakespeare lived peaceably in the heyday of this change, nearly of an
age with Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe. Like Marlowe in the
soliloquies of Barabbas and Faust, he recognized the new possibilities
that the age opened through money or ideas. He made much out of the
commercial prosperity of the day, gained such profits as were possible
from his profession, raised his estate, and acquired wealth. He gave his
mind not to any cause or party but to the study of men. The drunkards of
the London inn, the yokels of Warwickshire, and the finest gentlewomen
of the land alike came under the scrutiny of the creator of Falstaff,
Dogberry, and Rosalind. And like his great contemporaries, he triumphed
over incongruities, for he translated his studies of the human mind into
verse of immortal beauty that yet delighted the public stage which was
located halfway between the bear dens and the brothels.

CHAPTER II

BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS AN