It was essentially a dramatic age. He used the accumulated materials
of centuries. He was playwright as well as poet. His variety and
multiform genius cannot otherwise be accounted for. He called in the
coinage of many generations, and reissued it purified and unalloyed,
stamped in his own mint. There was a Hamlet probably, there were
certainly Romeos and Juliets, on the stage before Shakespeare. In him
were received the imaginations, the inventions, the aspirations, the
superstitions, the humors, the supernatural intimations; in him met the
converging rays of the genius of his age, as in a lens, to be sent onward
thenceforth in an ever-broadening stream of light.
It was his fortune to live not only in a dramatic age, but in a
transition age, when feudalism was passing away, but while its shows and
splendors could still be seriously comprehended. The dignity that doth
hedge a king was so far abated that royalty could be put upon the stage
as a player's spectacle; but the reality of kings and queens and court
pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the
imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune.
They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and
queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity. But,
besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the
language and the literary methods of his time.
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