The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

7. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE “Dante,” said Voltaire, “was a madman, and his work is a monstrosity. He has many commentators, and therefore cannot be understood. His reputation will go on increasing, for no one ever reads him.” And he writes: “Shakespeare, who flourished in the time of Lope de Vega … is a barbarian” who composed “monstrous farces called tragedies.” The English of the eighteenth century agreed with the Frenchman. “Shakespeare,” said Lord Shaftesbury, “is a coarse and savage mind.” In 1707 one Nahum Tate wrote a drama called Othello, saying that he had “borrowed the idea of the play from a nameless author.” Alexander Pope, being asked why Shakespeare had written such plays, answered, “One must eat.” Such is fame. A man should never read his reviewers, nor be too curious about the verdict of posterity.

All the world knows Will Shakespeare’s story: how he married in haste and repented without leisure, how he fled to London, became an actor, revamped old plays with his own light and fire, and “did” the town with wild Kit Marlowe, believing that “all things are with more spirit chased than enjoyed” how he fenced with wit against Chapman and Rare Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern; how he declared war against the rising Puritans, and challenged them merrily—“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”—how he read Plutarch, Froissart and Holinshed and learned history, how he read Montaigne and learned philosophy; how at last through learning, suffering, and failure he became William the Conqueror to all the dramatists of his time, and has ruled the English-speaking world ever since.

His rich and riotous energy was the source of his genius and his faults; it brought him the depth and passion of his plays, and it brought him twins and an early death. He could not even go home to Stratford without doing mischief on the way; for always he stopped at Mrs. Davenant’s inn at Oxford (Street-ford and Ox-ford were fording places on the stagecoach route to Ire-land), and finally left behind him there a young William Davenant, who became a minor poet, and never complained of his paternity. Once the boy was running to the inn when a wit stopped him with the query, whither he was bound? “To see my godfather,William Shakespeare,” replied the lad. “My boy,” said the wit, “do not take God’s name in vain.”

Invited to present plays at court, he basked for a time in the sunshine of fair ladies and brave men, and fell madly in love with Mary Fitton, or some other “Dark Lady” of some other name. Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet disappeared from his plays, and stately Portia entered. His soul bubbled over with romance and comedy, and his spirit frolicked in creating Viola and Rosalind and Ariel. But love is never quite content; in its secret heart is a poisonous anxiety, a premonition of alienation and decay. “Love,” says Rosalind, “is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves a dark-house and a whip as madmen do.” “By heaven!” says Biron, “I do love, and it hath taught me melancholy.”

For this was the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and the nadir of his life, that his dearest friend, “W. H.,” to whom he had addressed sonnets of limitless love, came now and stole from him the Dark Lady of his new passion. He raged, and added to the Sonnets songs of madness and doubt; he sank into a hell of suffering, gnawed his heart out with brooding grief, and laid it bare for all to see in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth,Timon, and Lear. But his torture deepened him; now he passed from easy comedies and simple characters to complex personalities moving through intricate tragedies to black inevitable destinies. He became through despair the greatest poet of all.

What we like in him most is the madness and richness of his speech. His style is as his life was, full of energy, riot, color, and excess; “nothing succeeds like excess.” It is all hurried and breathless, this style; Shakespeare wrote in haste, and never found leisure to repent. He never erased a line or read a proof; the notion that his plays would some day be read rather than performed did not enter his head. Thoughtless of the future, he wrote with unrestrained passion. Words, images, phrases and ideas rush from him in an inexhaustible and astounding flood; one wonders from what turbulent springs they pour. He has “a mint of phrases in his brain,” and his fine frenzy is of imagination all compact.