compatible with clearness of
survey, became the recognized freehold of Dramatic Art.[10]

[10] At this time the Drama was recognized throughout Europe as
the poetic form most suitable to modern times and races. As it
occupied the _place_ of the epic poem, and did not merely, like
the ancient drama, stand _side by side_ with it, so, along with
the office of replacing it, it inherited also the task of
showing itself capable of managing, like the epopee, any matter
however extended. The materials presented to it were not common
property, like the many well-known myths of antiquity, handed
down in a ready-made poetical form; but they were those
rudiments formed in the religious dramas, those Mysteries
founded on vast actions, and those historical subjects, which
required a whole cycle of pieces for the mastering of the huge
matter. The things of the world had become complicated and
manifold: the variety of men, their nature, their passions,
their situations, their mutually-contending powers, would not
submit, in dramatic representation, to be limited to a simple
catastrophe: a wider horizon must be drawn; the actions must be
represented throughout their course; the springs of action must
be more deeply searched. Thus Art was put to the work of setting
forth the utmost fulness of matter in a corresponding form,
which, however, according to Aristotle's law, must not be
extended so far as to preclude an easy survey.--GERVINUS.

So that, as I have before observed, the English Drama was, in the
largest sense, a national growth, and not the work of any individual.
Neither was it a sudden growth, as indeed nothing truly national ever
can be: like the English State, it was the slow, gradual, silent
production of centuries,--the result of the thoughts of many minds in
many ages. The whole platform, and all that relates to the formal
construction of the work, were fixed before Shakespeare put his hand
to it: what remained for him to do, and what he was supremely gifted
for doing, was to rear a grand and beautiful fabric on the basis and
out of the materials already prepared. And where I like best to
contemplate the Poet is, not in the isolation of those powers which
lift him so far above all others, but as having the mind of the
nation, with its great past and greater present, to back him up. And
it seems to me, his greatness consisted very much