tragic history.

There is a famous passage in Coleridge's "Essays on Shakespeare" which
illustrates what I mean. It begins: "In Shakespeare all the elements of
womanhood are holy"; and goes on to eulogize the instinct of chastity
which all his women possess, and this in spite of Doll Tearsheet,
Tamora, Cressida, Goneril, Regan, Cleopatra, the Dark Lady of the
Sonnets, and many other frail and fascinating figures. Yet whatever
gleam of light has fallen on Shakespeare since Coleridge's day has come
chiefly from that dark lantern which he now and then flashed upon the
master.

In one solitary respect, our latter-day criticism has been successful;
it has established with very considerable accuracy the chronology of the
plays, and so the life-story of the poet is set forth in due order for
those to read who can.

This then is what I found--a host of commentators who saw men as trees
walking, and mistook plain facts, and among them one authentic witness,
Jonson, and two interesting though not trustworthy witnesses, Goethe and
Coleridge--and nothing more in three centuries. The mere fact may well
give us pause, pointing as it does to a truth which is still
insufficiently understood. It is the puzzle of criticism, at once the
despair and wonder of readers, that the greatest men of letters usually
pass through life without being remarked or understood by their
contemporaries. The men of Elizabeth's time were more interested in
Jonson than in Shakespeare, and have told us much more about the younger
than the greater master; just as Spaniards of the same age were more
interested in Lope de Vega than in Cervantes, and have left a better
picture of the second-rate playwright than of the world-poet. Attempting