fulsome enough to irritate Jonson into an express disavowal of it?
Jonson, the bricklayer, must have felt sore sometimes when Shakespear
spoke and wrote of bricklayers as his inferiors. He must have felt it
a little hard that being a better scholar, and perhaps a braver and
tougher man physically than Shakespear, he was not so successful or so
well liked. But in spite of this he praised Shakespear to the utmost
stretch of his powers of eulogy: in fact, notwithstanding his
disclaimer, he did not stop "this side idolatry." If, therefore, even
Jonson felt himself forced to clear himself of extravagance and
absurdity in his appreciation of Shakespear, there must have been many
people about who idolized Shakespear as American ladies idolize
Paderewski, and who carried Bardolatry, even in the Bard's own time,
to an extent that threatened to make his reasonable admirers
ridiculous.

Shakespear's Pessimism

I submit to Mr Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its
possible effect in making Shakespear think that his public would stand
anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation
of the faults of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that
Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady "cankered and took on proud
flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness." In
Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried
once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is
thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with
theoretical morality, actual law and administration with abstract
justice, and so forth. But Shakespear's perception of the fact that
all men, judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and
by which they justify their punishment of others, are fools and
scoundrels, does not date from the Dark Lady complication: he seems
to have been born with it. If in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer
Night's Dream the persons of the drama are not quite so ready for
treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to
mention the procession of ruffians who pass through the latest plays)
it is certainly not because they have any more regard for law or
religion. There is only one place in Shakespear's plays where the
sense of shame is used as a human attribute; and that is where Hamlet
is ashamed, not of anything he himself has done, but of his mother's
relations with his uncle. This scene is an unna