If we compare them in this respect with their contemporaries in other
countries, we shall find in them the earliest complete expression of
modern European feeling. The question, be it remembered, is not to know
whether eminent men of other nations did not feel as deeply and as
nobly, but who first gave documentary proof of the widest knowledge of
the movements of the human heart.
Why did the Italians of the Renaissance do nothing above the second
rank in tragedy? That was the field on which to display human
character, intellect, and passion, in the thousand forms of their
growth, their struggles, and their decline. In other words: why did
Italy produce no Shakespeare? For with the stage of other northern
countries besides England the Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries had no reason to fear a comparison; and with the Spaniards
they could not enter into competition, since Italy had long lost all
traces of religious fanaticism, treated the chivalrous code of honour
only as a form, and was both too proud and too intelligent to bow down
before its tyrannical and illegitimate masters. We have therefore only
to consider the English stage in the period of its brief splendor.
It is an obvious reply that all Europe produced but one Shakespeare,
and that such a mind is the rarest of Heaven's gifts.
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