rom the epic and romantic
artists.

They are great artists, but it is also clear enough that their powers
and their insight into human life were limited. What they began was
carried out to its fulfilment by the great dramatists of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. For this is indeed the relation of the
tale-writers to the dramatists, that they furnish the materials upon
which the dramatists built up their presentation of human life, or
rather, the elements which are transformed by the imagination of the
great dramatists from bare 'realism' into the highest expression of
reality. No doubt the dramatists take into their work other materials
and influences, but the substantial quality whether of the tragedy or
the comedy is intimately related to that of the tales. How often were
the great dramas built up on materials which they drew from Bandello or
the other Italians who continued the tradition of Boccaccio, or from
similar northern sources. But the great dramatists gave their stories a
life, a passion, a breadth and fullness which is far removed from that
of their sources. In their hands, or rather in their creative
imagination, we see not merely the external circumstance, the bare fact,
but we see all the fullness and completeness, all the exquisite grace
and beauty, all the passion and terror of human experience. We may call
Boccaccio and Chaucer 'realists', but it is only in Marlowe and Webster,
and above all in Shakespeare, that we reach reality itself.

We all know the world of Shakespeare, how he ranges from Falstaff to
Hamlet, from Bottom to Lear, from Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet to
Rosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in a
lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and
Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing
which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform,
transmute, from mere dross into pure gold. We say, and we say rightly,
that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and we
think of it as representing the splendid youth and the first maturity of
a great nation.

But now, do we remember and understand that alongside of the English
drama there is another drama, not indeed so great as that of
Shakespeare, but greater, I think, than that of any other Elizabethan,
the drama of Spain, of Lope de Vega and Calderon, a drama of the same
character, inspired by the same spirit, living under the