The People for whom Shakespeare Wrote | Page 6

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.
It was his fortune to live not only in a dramatic age, but in a transition
age, when feudalism was passing away, but while its shows and
splendors could still be seriously comprehended. The dignity that doth
hedge a king was so far abated that royalty could be put upon the stage

as a player's spectacle; but the reality of kings and queens and court
pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the
imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune.
They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings
and queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity.
But, besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in
the language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more
evident in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of that day.
They all delighted in ingenuities of phrase,