been signally unfortunate when essaying to write of him from the chair of a literary dictator. The clearest light on this poet has often emanated, not from academic halls, but from the experience of those who have rather taken degrees in what old Gower calls the University of all the world—in Shakespeare’s university.
A chief reason why formal criticism has proved so barren is simply that Shakespeare—more even than most other romantic writers—attained his art by indirection. A straight line, indeed, is seldom the shortest line between a romantic poet’s inspiration and his accomplishment; but in Shakespeare the usual Elizabethan carelessness about rules of poetry may often seem magnified into carelessness about poetry itself. ‘The works of Shakespeare,’ says Coleridge, ‘are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama.’ But his romanticism requires to be distinguished from that of his great contemporaries. In the sense that the romanticist is one who ignores academic rules for writing, Shakespeare is a very type and pattern of the romantic dramatist; but he has nothing of that other, more advanced, romanticism which marks Spenser and Marlowe as conscious innovators and revolutionists, battling for ideas which they know to be strange and love therefor. He has nothing of the romanticism which produced Hernani. Shakespeare’s romanticism did not lead him to affect originality or to despise precedent; nor did it impel him to establish new rules for dramatic writing. Mr. Munro hardly exaggerates when he says in the preface to the Shakespeare Allusion Book: ‘Shakespeare, like all the great poets of the world, left no school behind him. He was not an initiator; he invented no new style; he introduced no new vogue.’
