SECTION 9.OBSERVA TION. 75 



The succession of Shakespeare editors kept Shakespeare alive, 

 and contributed indirectly towards burying the other Elizabethan 

 playwrights. This double action had another serious conse- 

 quence. The already appreciated Shakespeare found a still 

 more effective populariser in Garrick, the intellectual actor- 

 manager. What the scholars planted, he brought to fruition, 

 the limelight of the stage incidentally still further obscuring 

 the neglected Elizabethans. 



Criticism had done its best or worst, and scholars turned from 

 criticism to appreciation. Here was ample scope for the analytic 

 faculty and for literary taste. With the other Elizabethan drama- 

 tists many feet below the soil of time, Shakespeare's plays 

 appeared justly so marvellous that criticism carping or judi- 

 ciousceased, and the present-day wholehearted Shakespeare 

 worship was slowly ushered into the world. 



However, Shakespeare was destined to find his greatest ad- 

 mirers abroad. The growing romantic movement of the later 

 eighteenth century in Germany was irresistibly attracted to 

 Shakespeare, and since the Elizabethan dramatists generally, 

 and the subsequent English criticism, were unknown to the 

 Germans, they could abandon themselves to unrestrained ido- 

 latry. Germany is thus said to have "discovered" Shakespeare; 

 England, with Charles Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, rather 

 tamely and lamely following. 



Charles Lamb, in his Specimens of the English Dramatic 

 Poets, sought to direct attention to the priceless treasures 

 embedded in many of the Elizabethan playwrights, and opened 

 thereby a new era. The pendulum, however, had swung too 

 far away from the centre of sanity. Shakespeare having 

 become men's idol, any resemblance to him was regarded 

 as puerile imitation, and any difference as an unwarrantable 

 departure from the ideal norm. Accordingly, Shakespeare, 

 contrary to the views marking his own age. and those of the 

 leading literary men of the eighteenth century, was regarded 

 as incomparable and as infinitely superior to the other Eliza- 

 bethan playwrights. Lamb's example exercised little influence, 

 and Swinburne's later series of appreciations were widely 

 ignored or discounted. The comparative method was hence 

 almost entirely neglected. For all intents and purposes, for 

 instance, Sir Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare, the articles on 

 Shakespeare in the Dictionary of National Biography, and the 

 chapters on Shakespeare in the Cambridge History of English 

 Literature that is, our leading sources in Shakespeare criti- 

 cism ignore the comparative method. For these writers, and 

 they are strictly typical of our time, with the laudable exception 

 of Professor Ward, Shakespeare lived and wrought as if no 

 other playwright of any distinction had existed in his day. 



We perceive that there is a very slender factual basis for this 

 extraordinary attitude in our generation towards Shakespeare 



