Is to make midnight mushrooms that rejoice

To hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid -

Weak masters though ye be - I have bedimmed

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous

winds,

And twixt the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder

Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak

With his own bolt. The strong-based promontory

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

The pine and cedar. Graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let'em forth

By my so potent art. But his rough magic

I here abjure, and when I have required

Some heavenly music - which even now I do -

To work mine end upon their senses, that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

Beyond this the English language cannot reach.

Shakespeare shows no interest in insoluble questions. He has no curiosity in the ultimate incomprehensibles, but he has an insatiable zest for all varieties of men and women. The universe is man's stage, and man holds the centre. It is a sign that Hamlet has lost his balance in the depths of despair when he finds that he can no longer appreciate humanity:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me - no, nor woman neither.

Shakespeare had very little hope or interest in any glorious or unending immortality. His ghost in Hamlet, who comes back to report on conditions hereafter gives a very gloomy picture of the next world. To Hamlet, death is consummation devoutly to be wished so long as it means 'to die, to sleep, - no more'. Edgar in King Lear concludes:

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither.

Ripeness is all.

In the Tempest Shakespeare speaks directly and deliberately through Prospero. He sees the universe ultimately dissolving, to leave not a rack behind:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Life is a flicker of consciousness between two eternities of oblivion. The thought is not original but the expression is superbly his own. Shakespeare socially and politically believed that certain instincts lie deep in the Englishman's character - one is a horror of civil disorder. After the long Wars of the Roses, Henry's ascending to the throne, reigning of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (Henry's grandchildren), Queen Elizabeth symbolised peace at home. It is not, therefore, Surprising that Shakespeare believed in the divinity of kings. Nevertheless, he saw that kings were also human and seldom admirable; but yet they had a terrible responsibility and loneliness. Shakespeare was one of the very few Englishmen who saw that behind the pomp lay the intolerable burden:

Upon the King! Let us our lives, our souls,

Our debts, our careful wives,

Our children, and our sins lay on the King!

We must bear all. Oh, hard condition,

Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath

Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel

But his own wringing!

To Shakespeare, the universe was an ordered system, a chain or pyramid. At the apex it was God; on earth the Sovereign was God's own immediate deputy; and below, ranged degrees and orders down to the least, came lesser men. This fundamental belief he expressed in one of his finest philosophical utterances, Illusus' great speech on the degree of natural order in Troilus and Cressida. Everything, says Illusus, from the planets and the sun and downward, observes degree. Once the degree is broken, chaos follows:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe.

For the past three hundred and fifty years Shakespeare has been regarded as the greatest writer in the English tongue, and since it is unusual for one generation to worship the gods of its fathers, it follows that he has been admired for very different reasons, and that his writing possesses an enduring vitality. This quality in art is called universality. When we try to analyse the universality of Shakespeare, we find that he is not particularly original as a thinker, nor is he the only great English writer. Others, in various ways, have written poetry as memorable. But he seems to be the most universal of all, because he is the wisest; that is, he can understand and sympathise more than other men. He can see the whole picture of humanity and re-create it so that men of every kind, walk of life, country, creed, and generation understand. Knowing humanity as no one else ever did, he is nevertheless neither a mocking nor a weeping philosopher. He views life with zest, and he is so great that he can refrain from moral judgements.