We all know the world of Shakespeare, how he ranges from Falstaff to Hamlet, from Bottom to Lear, from Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet to Rosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in a lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from mere dross into pure gold.  We say, and we say rightly, that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and we think of it as representing the splendid youth and the first maturity of a great nation.

But now, do we remember and understand that alongside of the English drama there is another drama, not indeed so great as that of Shakespeare, but greater, I think, than that of any other Elizabethan, the drama of Spain, of Lope de Vega and Calderon, a drama of the same character, inspired by the same spirit, living under the power of the same creative imagination, a drama in which the same vivid reality is informed by the same breath of magical romance.  In the tragedy of Lope de Vega, in the comedies of Calderon, with all the distinctive individuality of the great artists, and of each great work of art, we have a poetic drama which is in its essential characteristics the same as that of England.

And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell.  At the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening.  It had quickly lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and misery, and had driven out the Spanish power.  Indeed, so great, so overwhelming, was—­as we can now see it—­the ruin, that Philip II, who to the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel and masterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of the tragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainly striving to hold together the great empire which had been created by Ferdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V.

England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place as the mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the New World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was sending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands, from the frozen north to the Indies.

And again, Spain was possessed by a fierce and passionate love for the old religious order, it was the one country in which devotion to the forms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable, while England was the representative power of the new religious temper, and was soon to hold almost the foremost place in the new intellectual life of Europe.