76 PART II. -SOME IMPORTANT METHODOLOGICAL TERMS. 



and his fellows. His own time did not think of singling him out 

 as overwhelmingly superior and altogether different, nor did the 

 remainder of the seventeenth century. The first seventy years 

 of the eighteenth century recognised numerous limitations in 

 Shakespeare, and made no attempt at a comparative study of 

 the Elizabethan dramatists. The Germans of the same century 

 were without the necessary material for forming a discriminat- 

 ing judgment. And, similarly, the view prevalent to-day is 

 equally not the result of a sober, or even tentative, compara- 

 tive estimate of Shakespeare and his fellows. 



We have therefore no reason for surmising that the present 

 verdict on Shakespeare will be the final verdict of history. 

 For example, whilst Shakespeare is regarded as unapproachable, 

 and towering sky-high above his fellows, we are presented with 

 the ludicrous spectacle of interminable discussions as to whether 

 a play or a part of a play attributed to Shakespeare is his. Some 

 critics, for instance, assert that certain portions of The Two 

 Noble Kinsmen could only have been written by Shakespeare., 

 whereas other orthodox Shakespeareans deny this flatly. On 

 the other hand, parts of Henry VIII. , which had been singled out 

 as characteristic of Shakespeare at his best, are now admitted 

 to be by another playwright. Over a dozen plays of Shake- 

 speare have thus given rise to keen discussions regarding the 

 genuineness of certain portions thereof, without a clear, let 

 alone an instantaneous, verdict on the issue having been arrived 

 at. The doctrine of the uniqueness of Shakespeare may be 

 therefore an irrational dogma that has no relation to fact, and 

 is possibly due to comparatively uncritical thought and feeling 

 which further study is bound to destroy. 



The final pronouncement of history cannot far depart from 

 the estimate of his time. We ought to think of Shakespeare 

 as belonging to a great age, and as, on the whole, expressing 

 it slightly better than his fellow dramatists, whilst not un- 

 frequently falling below the others, and fairly frequently having 

 his best equalled. From the scientific standpoint the glory 

 belongs first and foremost to the Elizabethan drama as such, 

 or even more to his times which were directly responsible 

 for evoking this outburst of unparalleled dramatic splendour. 

 Critically considered, scarcely a characteristic in Shakespeare 

 can be mentioned which is not a characteristic of his time and 

 his fellow playwrights. The glowing panegyric extending over 

 several pages, which Johnson, in the Preface to his Shakespeare 

 edition, pronounced on Shakespeare, would hold true no less 

 of Beaumont and Fletcher and a number of other Elizabethan 

 and Jacobean playwrights. Another apt illustration is to be 

 found in Robert Greene's James the Fourth, published anterior 

 to any of Shakespeare's plays, which offers a surprising example 

 of what is said to be most distinctive of Shakespeare. Verse, 

 plot, motivation, men, women, humour, poetry, insight, philo- 



