upon the life of his time. Until after his death
his influence was mainly direct, upon the play-goers,
and confined to his auditors. He had been dead
seven years before his plays were collected.
However the people of his day regarded him, it is safe
to say that they could not have had any conception
of the importance of the work he was doing. They
were doubtless satisfied with him. It was a great
age for romances and story-telling, and he told stories,
old in new dresses, but he was also careful to use
contemporary life, which his hearers understood.
It is not to his own age, but to those following, and especially to our own time, that we are to look for the shaping and enormous influence upon human life of the genius of this poet. And it is measured not by the libraries of comments that his works have called forth, but by the prevalence of the language and thought of his poetry in all subsequent literature, and by its entrance into the current of common thought and speech. It may be safely said that the English-speaking world and almost every individual of it are different from what they would have been if Shakespeare had never lived. Of all the forces that have survived out of his creative time, he is one of the chief.