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It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents, that Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every Englishman of his time.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on the throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, “with great solemnity, but with greater lamentation.” Old Baker, who says of himself that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald’s, condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men of note of Elizabeth’s time. The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms, than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished with the statesmen (“an exquisite statesman for his own ends was Robert Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill, Lord Burleigh”), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned gentlemen and writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime been schoolmaster to Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in gaming and cock-fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned divines and preachers, he concludes: “After such men, it might be thought ridiculous to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our Nation. Richard Bourbidge and Edward Allen, two such actors as no age must ever look to see the like; and to make their Comedies compleat, Richard Tarleton, who for the Part called the Clowns Part, never had his match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as have been players themselves, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Johnson have especially left their Names recommended to posterity.”

Richard Bourbidge (or Burbadge) was the first of the great English tragic actors, and was the original of the greater number of Shakespeare’s heroes–Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III., Romeo, Brutus, etc. Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged scapegraces of social life, was regarded by his contemporaries as the most witty of clowns and comedians. The clown was a permitted character in the old theatres, and intruded not only between the acts, but even into the play itself, with his quips and antics. It is probable that he played the part of clown, grave-digger, etc., in Shakespeare’s comedies, and no doubt took liberties with his parts. It is thought that part of Hamlet’s advice to the players–“and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,” etc.–was leveled at Tarleton.

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.