The question is often asked, but I consider it an idle one, whether Shakespeare was appreciated in his own day as he is now.  That the age, was unable to separate him from itself, and see his great stature, is probable; that it enjoyed him with a sympathy to which we are strangers there is no doubt.  To us he is inexhaustible.  The more we study him, the more are we astonished at his multiform genius.  In our complex civilization, there is no development of passion, or character, or trait of human nature, no social evolution, that does not find expression somewhere in those marvelous plays; and yet it is impossible for us to enter into a full, sympathetic enjoyment of those plays unless we can in some measure recreate for ourselves the atmosphere in which they were written.  To superficial observation great geniuses come into the world at rare intervals in history, in a manner independent of what we call the progress of the race.  It may be so; but the form the genius shall take is always determined by the age in which it appears, and its expression is shaped by the environments.  Acquaintance with the Bedouin desert life of today, which has changed little for three thousand years, illumines the book of Job like an electric light.  Modern research into Hellenic and Asiatic life has given a new meaning to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and greatly enhanced our enjoyment of them.  A fair comprehension of the Divina Commedia is impossible without some knowledge of the factions that rent Florence; of the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline; of the spirit that banished Dante, and gave him an humble tomb in Ravenna instead of a sepulchre in the pantheon of Santa Croce.  Shakespeare was a child of his age; it had long been preparing for him; its expression culminated in him.  It was essentially a dramatic age.  He used the accumulated materials of centuries.  He was playwright as well as poet.  His variety and multiform genius cannot otherwise be accounted for.  He called in the coinage of many generations, and reissued it purified and unalloyed, stamped in his own mint.  There was a Hamlet probably, there were certainly Romeos and Juliets, on the stage before Shakespeare.  In him were received the imaginations, the inventions, the aspirations, the superstitions, the humors, the supernatural intimations; in him met the converging rays of the genius of his age, as in a lens, to be sent onward thenceforth in an ever-broadening stream of light.

It was his fortune to live not only in a dramatic age, but in a transition age, when feudalism was passing away, but while its shows and splendors could still be seriously comprehended.  The dignity that doth hedge a king was so far abated that royalty could be put upon the stage as a player’s spectacle; but the reality of kings and queens and court pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune.  They had no such feeling