Excerpt from Shakespeare After Three Hundred Years
For the time is one which calls on us to revise all our values. It calls on us to discard our formulae and break our idols.
Disrobe the images
If you do find them decked with ceremonies.
With what we have loved, as well as with what we have indolently accepted, this revaluation has to be made. Analysis and embroidery have for ages worked in or round Shakespeare. Now that both processes may seem, for the time being, to have reached exhaustion, it is worth while to try to stand back from them; to ask ourselves what Shakespeare really was, and what after three centuries he realty is. For doing so, the time is doubly apt. Industry and research have accumulated, one may say with some confidence, all the facts that are of any importance, besides many more that are of none; and have not only accumulated, but weighed and assorted them. Sir Sidney Lee's Life in its latest form, a monumental tribute to the anniversary which we are celebrating, sums up and sets forth the ascertained and ascertainable information. To the appreciation, the vital interpretation of Shakespeare, no like limit can be put; for the secret of art is never to be won from her. Yet even in this we may make a pause, and ask how, in effect, the matter stands.
'Let not my love be called idolatry,' Shakespeare wrote in the Sonnets, 'or my beloved as an idol shew.' It is a counsel to be borne in mind. ' Idolatry of Shakespeare,' said Gibbon, with that stately detachment which is often mistaken for sarcasm, 'is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an 'Englishman.' His canonization had already begun when Jonson broke out with his petulant but not unreasonable protest, 'I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.' It became a fixed doctrine within a century. Dryden had already given his magnificent praise: Pope, with a fine and discriminating touch, noted that ' men of judgment think they do any man more service in praising him justly than lavishly.' 'Poets,' he adds - and the words are an anticipatory comment on much later Shakespearian criticism - 'are always afraid of envy; but sure they have as much reason to he afraid of admiration.' Yet Pope himself says of him, in words no less true than noble, that 'he is not so much an imitator as an instrument of nature, and 'tis not so just to say he speaks from her, as that she spoke through him.'
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