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1850), and Finnish (Helsingfors, 1892–5). In Spanish a complete translation is in course of publication (Madrid, 1885 et seq.), and the Spanish critic Menéndez y Pelayo has placed Shakespeare above Calderon. In Armenian, although only three plays (‘Hamlet,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and ‘As you like it’) have been issued, the translation of the whole is ready for the press. Separate plays only have appeared in Welsh, Portuguese, Friesic, Flemish, Servian, Roumanian, Maltese, Ukrainian, Wallachian, Croatian, Finnish, modern Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; while a few have been rendered into Bengali, Hindustani, Marathi, Gujarati, and Urdu, Kanarese, and other languages of India, and have been acted in native theatres.

No estimate of Shakespeare's genius can be adequate. In knowledge of human character, in wealth of humour, in depth of General
estimate.passion, in fertility of fancy, in soundness of judgment, and in mastery of language he has no rival. His language and versification adapt themselves to every phase of sentiment, and sound almost every note in the scale of felicity. Although sudden transitions, elliptical expressions, mixed metaphors, obsolete words, indefensible verbal quibbles, and a few hopelessly corrupt readings disturb the modern reader's equanimity, the glow of the author's imagination leaves few passages wholly unillumined. It is the versatile working of Shakespeare's intellect that renders his supremacy unassailable. His mind, as Hazlitt suggested, contained within itself the germs of every faculty and feeling. He knew intuitively how every faculty and feeling would develop in every conceivable change of fortune. Men and women—good or bad, old or young, wise or foolish, merry or sad, rich or poor—yielded their secrets to him, and his genius illumined in turn every aspect of humanity that presents itself on the highway of life. Each of his characters gives voice to thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that rouse in the intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they are overhearing men and women speak unpremeditatingly among themselves, rather than that they are reading speeches or hearing written speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination—fairies, ghosts, witches—are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. So mighty a faculty sets at naught the common limitations of nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life has penetrated Shakespeare's power is recognised. All the world over, language is applied to his creations that ordinarily applies to beings of flesh and blood. Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff, Brutus, Romeo, and Shylock are studied in almost every civilised tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their lips are rooted in the speech of civilised humanity.

[The scantiness of contemporary records of Shakespeare's career has been much exaggerated. An investigation extending over two centuries has brought together a mass of detail which far exceeds that accessible in the case of any other contemporary professional writer. Nevertheless many important links are missing, and at many critical points appeal to conjecture is inevitable. But if the general outline suggested by the fully ascertained facts be scrupulously respected, the result may be confidently regarded as true. Fuller, in his Worthies (1662), attempted the first biographical notice of Shakespeare, with poor results. Aubrey, in his gossiping Lives of Eminent Men (compiled before 1680; first printed in ‘Letters from the Bodleian,’ 1813, and re-edited for the Oxford Univ. Press by the Rev. Andrew Clark 1898), based his ampler information on reports communicated to him by William Beeston (d. 1682), an aged actor, whom Dryden called ‘the chronicle of the stage,’ and who was doubtless in the main a trustworthy witness. A few additional details were recorded in the seventeenth century by the Rev. John Ward (1629–1681), vicar of Stratford-on-Avon from 1662 to 1668, in a diary and memorandum-book written between 1661 and 1663 (ed. C. A. Severn, 1839); by the Rev. William Fulman, whose manuscripts are at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (with interpolations made before 1708 by the Rev. Richard Davies, vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire); by John Dowdall, who travelled through Warwickshire in 1693 (London, 1838); and by William Hall, who visited Stratford in 1694 (London, 1884, from Bodleian MS.). Phillips in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675), and Langbaine in his English Dramatick Poets (1691), confined themselves to criticism. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe prefixed a more ambitious memoir than had yet been attempted to his edition of the plays, and embodied some new local Stratford and London traditions with which the actor Thomas Betterton supplied him. A little fresh gossip was collected by William Oldys [q. v.], and was printed from his manuscript ‘adversaria’ (now in the British Museum) as an appendix to Yeowell's ‘Memoir of Oldys,’ 1862. Pope, Johnson, and Steevens, in biographical prefaces to their editions, mainly repeated the narratives of their predecessors. In the Prolegomena to the Variorum edition of 1821 there was embodied