It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude though prodigious genius.  Even Milton could describe him as “warbling his native wood-notes wild.”  But a truer criticism, beginning in England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist.  It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not every-where and at all points perfect.  But a great artist will contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like those of the public stage, with the finer requirements of his art.  Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in Shakspere’s plays; and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in a given case than that “the audience liked puns,” or, “the audience liked ghosts.”  Compare, for example, his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe’s procedure in Faustus.  Shakspere’s age believed in witches, elves, and apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery.  The ghost in Hamlet is merely an embodied suspicion.  Banquo’s wraith, which is invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience.  The witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human shape, so as to become actors in the drama.  In the same way, the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream are the personified caprices of the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes and dislikes they control, save in the instance where Bottom is “translated” (that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible world.  So in the Tempest, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man’s necessities.

Shakspere is the most universal of writers.  He touches more men at more points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe.  The deepest wisdom, the sweetest poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his plays.  He made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the history of literature.  Yet he is not an English poet simply, but a world-poet.  Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races, though at first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of classical taste, have at length learned to know him.  An ever-growing mass of Shakespearian literature, in the way of comment and interpretation, critical, textual, historical, or illustrative, testifies to the durability and growth of his fame.  Above all, his plays still keep, and probably always will keep, the stage.  It is common to speak of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists as if they stood, in some sense, on a level.  But in truth there is an almost measureless distance between him and all his contemporaries.  The rest shared with him in the mighty influences of the age.  Their plays are touched here and there with the power and splendor of which they were all joint heirs.  But, as a whole, they are obsolete.  They live in books, but not in the hearts and on the tongues, of men.