ely, anybody else would have written
_Hamlet_. There was, it is true, a butcher's boy at Stratford, who was
thought by his townsmen to have been as clever a fellow as Shakespeare.
We shall never know what we have lost by his premature death, and we
certainly cannot argue that if Shakespeare had died, the butcher would
have lived. It makes one tremble, says an ingenious critic, to reflect
that Shakespeare and Cervantes were both liable to the measles at the
same time. As we know they escaped, we need not make ourselves unhappy
about the might-have-been; but the remark suggests how much the literary
glory of any period depends upon one or two great names. Omit Cervantes
and Shakespeare and Moliere from Spanish, English, and French
literature, and what a collapse of glory would follow! Had Shakespeare
died, it is conceivable perhaps that some of the hyperboles which have
been lavished upon him would have been bestowed on Marlowe and Ben
Jonson. But, on the whole, I fancy that the minor lights of the
Elizabethan drama have owed more to their contemporary than he owed to
them; and that, if this central sun had been extinguished, the whole
galaxy would have remained in comparative obscurity. Now, as we are
utterly unable to say what are the conditions which produce a genius, or
to point to any automatic machinery which could replace him in case of
accident, we must agree that this is an element in the problem which is
altogether beyond scientific investigation. The literary historian must
be content with a humble position. Still, the Elizabethan stage would
have existed had Shakespeare never written; and, moreover, its main
outline would have been the same. If any man ever imitated and gave full
utterance to the characteristic ideas of his contemporaries it was
certainly Shakespeare; and nobody ever accepted more thoroughly the form
of art which they worked out. So far, therefore, as the general
conditions of the time led to the elaboration of this particular genus,
we may study them independently and assign certain general causes. What
Shakespeare did was to show more fully the way in which that form could
be turned to account; and, without him, it would have been a far less
interesting phenomenon. Even the greatest man has to live in his own
century. The deepest thinker is not really--though we often use the
phrase--in advance of his day so much as in the line along which advance
takes place. The greatest poet does not write