ABSTRACT
The man who wrote the poems and plays which we have had under review was first of all a child of his age, a son of Elizabethan England and the Renaissance. In breadth of intellectual curiosity and richness of emotional experience, in strength of national feeling and at the same time in world-wide humanism, he expresses the values of the time in the field of the imagination, as it was given to other men to express them in politics, exploration, and war. Shakespeare never explains his intentions, and we cannot be sure whether he will carry his structure to a beautifully finished conclusion, or dismiss it hurriedly with only such attention as to ensure a reasonably effective final scene upon the stage. Whether in tragic or comic drama, Shakespeare's chief interest seems to have been in personality. Shakespeare was an inductive, not a deductive, moralist, as he was an inductive maker of character.
