The mirror. (Stillwater, Minn.) 1894-1925, 1902-02-20

resistless growth from more to more,
as we grasp his song with intense
strength, all that stimulates the
illuminative faculty, all that enables
us to look eye to eye upon the poets
inner self as upon an open book, is in
eager request; the student and the
amateur, alike, find comfort and move
from high to higher in the illimitable
ranges of Shakespeare's art.
Several essential elements must be
scrupulously taken into account in the
endeavor to explain so strange and
unique phenomenon as Shakespeare.
Above all other considerations, that of
personality is supreme; it is the man
behind the book. In this personal force
lies the abiding characteristic of litera-
ture as differentiated from science; the
latter impersonal, technical, abstract;
the former aglow with human hearted
ness, concrete aims, sympathies and as
piratiOns. Compare treatise on ge-
ometry with Hamlet or the Divine
Comedy, and the distinction is evident
at glance.
In order to be intelligently apprecia-
tive of the spirit of Shakespeare, wide
and discerning acquaintance with the
life and genius of Elizabethan times is
an essential condition. Whatever pecu-
liar phase the titanic personality may
have assumed in Lear, Macbeth, or in
any of his purely English plays, the
quickening impulse, the suggestive
force, was drawn in large measure
from the special environments that
were the aggressive and objective life
of the Elizabethan era.
First of all the period was an incen-
tive to action; it was of itself drama,
a grim and sometimes ghastly tragedy
unfolding itself to the eyes of Shakes
peare's contemporaries. Mary Stuart
met death with supreme courage at
Fetheringay in 1887, almost simulta-
neously with Shakespeare's removal to
London from his early home at STRAIT
ford-on-Avon. Sidney, the perfect mir
rOr of Elizabethan grace and knight
liness, had died in 1886; the Armada
came in 1888, and war with Spain was
the chronic and normal attitude of
England. The uniformed Occident"
was becoming dimly known to the Eliz-
abethan mind, through the prophetic
vision and relentless energy of Sir Wal
ter Raleigh, the Summers nightingale,
the Shepherd of the Ocean," the real
founder of the Anglo-American EN-
pire. Gilbert, Grenville, Drake, had
traversed unpathed waters, undreamed
shores; the language was adapting it's
energies to the rare and unprecedented
demands to which it was subjected.
Let us endeavor to illustrate our gen.
eral proposition, in regard to the inter-
pretative force of historic environ
ments, by special application to the
play of The Tempest. This one of the
latest of Shakespeare's creations, ap-
pearing in 1911 or 1912. Its cause or oc-
casion was an actual tropical storm or
tempest, occurring in December, 1909,
which wrecked upon the Bermuda
islands part of fleet bound for the
English colony at jamestown, Va. 1t
is grounded in contemporary history;
and when critically scrutinized unfolds
its richness of meaning. The Tempest
is an allegory, a symbolical exhibition,
designed TO reveal the early contact of
civilized European races with the ma
tive savage, ,unreclaimed and untouched
by the peculiar vices of more cultured
people. The intelligent and rejecting
mind of Shakespeare's day could not
have failed to penetrate beneath the veil.
The poets own countrymen are repre-
sented in no enviable light, for the
Neapolitan or Italian disguise does not
conceal the satire, not overdrawn or
hyperbolical, upon the tastes, manners
and tendencies of his contemporaries.
In this play Shakespeare comes most
nearly into harmony with the dawn or
faint arisings, the light of early Ameri-
can history. A. RS.