page_title: Timeline of Shakespeare criticism
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of Shakespeare criticism / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: Português: Retrato de Machado de Assis feito por Marc Ferrez. Deutsch: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Porträtfotografie von Marc Ferrez
context_page_description: Shakespeare enjoyed recognition in his own time, but in the 17th century, poets and authors began to consider him as the supreme dramatist and poet of all times of the English language. In fact, even today, no other dramatist has been performed even remotely as often on the British stage as Shakespeare
  Since then, several editors and critics of theater began to focus on the dramatic text and the language of Shakespeare, creating a study that focused on extracting all the power of his literary texts, being used in studies on the printed page rather than in the theater. This attitude reached a high point with the Romantics, which saw his figure as a genius, prophet, and Bard—and continued to be important into the last century, receiving analysis not only by poets and authors, but also by psychoanalysts, psychologists and philosophers.
context_section_description: Machado de Assis, 1896: "One day, when there is no more British Empire or North-American Republic, there will be Shakespeare; when we stop speaking English, we will speak Shakespeare."
  Charles Lamb, 1811: "We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere of humanity' he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and often mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same." On the Tragedies of Shakespeare
  Thomas de Quincey, 1823: "O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!" "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth".
  Thomas Carlyle, 1841: "Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real, marketable, tangibly useful possession. England, before long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another: 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him.'" On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
  Victor Hugo, 1859: "Two exiles, father and son, are on a desert island serving a long sentence. In a morning, sitting in front of the house, the young man asks: 'What do you think of this exile?' 'It will be long... ", replied the father. 'And how occupy it?', continues the young son. The old serene man reply: 'I will look the ocean, and you?' It is a long silence before the son's answer: 'I will translate Shakespeare.' Shekespeare: the ocean."
caption: Machado de Assis, 1896: "when we stop speaking English, we will speak Shakespeare."
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 (12.0x20100115 [20100115.m.998 2010/01/15:02:00:00 cutoff; m branch])  Windows", "Image DateTime": "2020:08:18 22:13:16", "Image ExifOffset": "236", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "374", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3752", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1395", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1880"}