AcTORS IN Elizabethan England were, by statute, akin to beggars

and similar lowlife, which doubtless pained Shakespeare, who

worked hard to be able to go back to Stl,"atford as a gentleman.
Except for that desire, we know next to nothing about Shakespeare's
social outlook, except what can be gleaned from the plays,
where all of the information is ambiguous. As an actor-playwright,
Shakespeare necessarily depended upon aristocrats for patronage
and protection, and his politics-if pragmatically he had anywere
appropriate for the pinnacle of the long Aristocratic Age (in
the Viconian sense) that I have posited as going from Dante
through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and concluding
with Goethe. The politics of the young Wordsworth and of William
Blake are those of the French Revolution and herald the next
age, the Democratic, that touches apotheosis in Whitman and the
American canon and reaches its final expression with Tolstoy and
Ibsen. At the origins of Shakespeare's art, we are given as a fundamental
postulate an aristocratic sense of culture, though Shakespeare
transcends that sense, as he does everything else.
46 / THE WES TERN CAN ON
Shakespeare and Dante are the center of the Canon because
they excel all other Western writers in cognitive acuity, linguistic
energy, and power of invention. It may be that all three endowments
fuse in an ontological passion that is a capacity for joy, or
what Blake meant by his Proverb of Hell: "Exuberance is beauty."
Social energies exist in every age, but they cannot compose plays,
poems, and narratives. The power to originate is an individual
gift, present in all eras but evidently greatly encouraged by particular
contexts, national surges that we still study only in segments,
because the unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
Was Shakespeare an accident? Are literary imagination and the
modalities for embodying it just as quirky entities as the manifestation
of a Mozart? Shakespeare is not one of those poets who
need to undergo no development, who seem fully formed from
the start, the rare handful that includes Marlowe, Blake, Rimbaud,
Crane. These hardly seem even to unfold: Tamburlaine Part One,
Poetical Sketches, the Illuminations, White Buildings are already
upon the heights. But the Shakespeare of the early histories and
farcical comedies and of Titus Andronicus is only distantly prophetic
of the author of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.
Reading Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra together, I
sometimes can scarcely persuade myself that the lyrical dramatist
of the first has created the cosmological glories of the latter.