. Generally, one chapter is devoted to each of thirty-seven plays, ranging from 3 pages for The Comedy of Errors
to over 50 for Henry V
. Three additional chapters treat larger themes. After the book was finished and had been accepted for publication, Dr. Goddard died without having named it; the title was provided by the publisher, the University of Chicago Press
. Originally published as one volume, it was later split into two.
For my part, I believe that we are nearer the beginning than the end of our understanding of Shakespeare’s genius.
To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and technician, we a living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it. … We want facts for the practical use we can make of them. We want the tree for its lumber, not, as Thoreau did, to make an appointment with it as a friend.
“We were saying the other night,” a college girl wrote to her mother, “that we probably know the members of our Shakespeare class, deep down, far better than we shall know any class again. You just can’t discuss Shakespeare without putting a window in your very soul.”
“We who dwell on Earth can do nothing of ourselves,” says William Blake; “everything is conducted by Spirits, no less than Digestion or Sleep.” But we can draw nearer such spirits when we sense their presence. “No production of the highest kind,” says Goethe, “no remarkable discovery, no great thought that bears fruit and has results, is in the power of anyone; but such things are elevated above all earthly control.” Yet we can take advantage of a wind that we a powerless to create.
Who can doubt that in just this condition of complete mental tranquility (this “soul of state”) Shakespeare has himself gazed into the spring of his own imagination and found gold at its bottom—into the world around him and found the future in its cradle, the “future in the instant” as Lady Macbeth calls it?
Shakespeare saw that the prolongation of innocence—of “infancy” as the biologists say—is the key to mature strength.
[Shakespeare] condenses his idea of complete regeneration, through the mouth of Posthumus in Cymbeline, into the words, “To shame the guise of the world, I will begin/ The fashion, less without and more within,” and his remedy for the conquest of Death itself, in the poem that comes closer than anything else in his works to being an expression of his own religious creed, the 146th sonnet, is: “Within be fed, without be rich no more.”