ABSTRACT
Shakespeare the artist was pre-eminently a man of the theater. Above and before everything else, his aesthetic loyalty was given to his company and his stage. Nothing can be clearer than this, yet there has been a widespread popular impression that Shakespeare was debasing himself in writing for the theater. “Alas,” declared Thomas Carlyle, “Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould.” Carlyle was no Shakespeare scholar, of course; yet even among professional critics there has too often been a tacit assumption that Shakespeare should be understood primarily as a reflective or narrative poet, instead of as a dramatic poet, and the resulting critical interpretations often serve to distort rather than to illumine the plays.
