A History of English Literature

his master. At the end of the play he is released, and Prospero’s final words to the

audience also ask that he, like his servants, should be set free.

Conclusion

Shakespeare’s achievement

Shakespeare had extraordinary gifts, and the luck to find in the theatre the perfect

opening for them. What he achieved still seems wonderful. Like Mozart, he found

composition easy and did not repeat himself. He preferred to transform existing

plays and stories, inventing when he had to. He perfected the new genre of the

history play, and developed new forms of romance and sexual comedy.

Each play is different; this is especially true of his tragedies. To read through

Shakespeare’s plays is to meet an unprecedented range and variety of situations and

behaviour, and to improve understanding of human surfaces and depths, and to

experience and understand multiple human interactions from all sides. This is prob-

ably his greatest contribution. Dr Johnson pronounced in his Preface that by reading

Shakespeare a ‘hermit could estimate the transactions of the world’. Since Johnson’s

day the novel has added detail and breadth to our idea of the world’s transactions.

But the novel has also added length, and unless Johnson’s hermit had the patience of

a saint, he would miss the concentrated force of drama, and the play and metaphor

of Shakespeare’s language.

His supposed point of view

Keats was to praise Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’, his non-partisan and unideo-

logical capacity.Shakespeare has been claimed as a supporter of the most diverse

points of view, political and social, and actors’ lines cited in evidence. But a play does

not have a point of view – it is neither tract nor argument nor debate, but a play: a

co mplication of the initial set-up. The dramatist imagines and gives words to the

participants;ventriloquism is one of his skills. Shakespeare lived in contentious

times, and set only one play,The Merry Wives of Windsor, in the England of his own

day. Some since Keats have thought that they knew Shakespeare’s point of view;

earlier he had been suspected of not having had one. ‘He is so much more careful to

please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose’ (Johnson:

Preface to Shakespeare).

At the end of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), the hero is forced to read

aloud to a madman in the jungle the complete works of Dickens; once he has

finished he has to start again. To reread Shakespeare would be less of a penance.

Thanks to him we can better understand how we live and think. We also share in his

linguistic omnipotence; language was to him as Ariel was to Prospero – he could do

anything with it.

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson (1572–1632), eight years Shakespeare’s junior, knew him well; they acted

in each others’ plays. As playwright, poet, critic and man of letters, Jonson domi-

nated his own generation, as scholar and critic as well as poet and dramatist. Jonson

belongs with Shakespeare; other Jacobeans appear in the next chapter.

Jonson wrote that Shakespeare was the greatest of writers, and that he ‘loved the

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