ABSTRACT
It is something of a textbook topos that different national literatures have their own quite different national poets – father figures who are considered seminal or originary (the ‘origin without origin’) to the nation’s culture and world-view. What is less easily explained is how and why a certain national poet should appear on the scene precisely when he does. Why, for example, should Dante epitomize Italian Catholic culture in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, Shakespeare AngloSaxon culture in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, and Goethe German culture in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries? Clearly, the problem is more complicated than the serviceable apophthegm of genius ‘being in the right place at the right time’, for what we are dealing with in these special instances is the combination (two-way, mutually interpenetrating) of an individual and a culture/national identity both coming of age, and knowing or sensing, they are coming of age, at the same time. The young man who may have been involved in a libellous deer-poaching incident or the wealthy senior citizen who mysteriously wills his wife a ‘secondbest bed’becomes Shakespeare, going to his grave, as a recent biographer phrases it, ‘not knowing, and possibly not caring, whether Macbeth or The Tempest or Antony and Cleopatra ever achieved the permanence of print’ (S. Schoenbaum). Great contemporaries such as Spenser or Jonson become instead, on the scales of history, foils of genius – Laertes to the Hamlet whose play-within-the-play contains them, rather than the other way around.
