Conclusion

Summary

Smiling Shakespeare, sovereign antagonist of philistinism, triviality and pretence; supreme ‘critic of life’ in the sense made familiar to English readers by Matthew Arnold; image and counter-image of other poets; reminder of the heights the human imagination might scale, and the depths to which it might penetrate, at a favourable moment of time; exemplar at once of psychological insight, wide human sympathy, esemplastic power, aesthetic distance and aesthetic tact – this, surely, is a conception significant in itself, which becomes more significant when we heed the way in which Heine presents it. He makes us look at Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and the English history plays, with the eyes of a man of the nineteenth century; yet he keeps us aware of Shakespeare's own place in history, showing how the political climate of Elizabethan times affected his portrait of Joan of Arc and his treatment of Henry V's wars against France. He practises what he once called ‘comparative anatomy of literature’ by contrasting Shakespeare's treatment of Greek heroes with that of Homer, the witches in Macbeth with the Norns and Eumenides. He refuses to draw unequivocal biographical inferences from Shakespeare's works, yet hints at the way they presuppose, and mask, personal experience. He shows himself aware of the after-life of these plays, of the opportunities they present to great actors, while remaining convinced that no stage-performance could ever do full justice to their poetry, power of characterization, and consciously shaped art – an art which never stifled the voice of natural feeling.