ABSTRACT
The striking peculiarity of William Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds – so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. The distinction William Hazlitt makes here is interesting and up to a point valid, though in the end it presents the same kind of difficulties as T. S. Eliot’s distinction between ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’ in Tradition and the Individual Talent, difficulties which are considered in F. R. Leavis’s essay on Eliot’s criticism in ‘Anna Karenina’ and other Essays. Hazlitt’s distinction has influenced modern criticism almost entirely through the medium of Keats’s letters, and in particular the phrase ‘negative capability.’
