Chapter X

The Course of English Poetry – 2

Elizabethan Drama

Shakespeare and the Poetry of the Life-Spirit

T

HE ELIZABETHAN age, perhaps the era of most opulent
output in the long history of English poetic genius, is
abundant, untrammelled and unbridled in its power, but
not satisfying in its performance. Beautiful as are many of its
productions, powerful as it is in the mass, if we look at it not
in detail, not merely revelling in beauty of line and phrase and
image, in snatches of song and outbursts of poetic richness and
creative force, but as a whole, in its total artistic creation, it
bears a certain stamp of defect and failure. It cannot be placed
for a moment as a supreme force of excellence in literary culture
by the side of the great ages of Greek and Roman poetry which
started with an equal, if different creative impetus, but more
self-knowledge. But, unhappily, it falls short too in aesthetic
effect and virtue in comparison with other poetic periods less
essentially vigorous and mobile in their plastic force; it has an
inferior burden of meaning and, if a coursing of richer life-blood,
no settled fullness of spirit and a less adequate body of forms.
The great magician, Shakespeare, by his marvellous poetic ren-
dering of life and the spell his poetry casts upon us, conceals this
general inadequacy of the work of his time: the whole age which
he embodies is magnified by his presence and the adjacent paler
figures catch something of the light and kinship of his glory and
appear in it more splendid than they are. But Shakespeare is an
exception, a genius that transcends all laws, a miracle of poetic
force; he survives untouched all adverse criticism, not because
there are not plenty of fairly large spots in this sun, but because
in any complete view of him they disappear in the greatness of