to solve this problem Emerson coolly assumed that the men of the
Elizabethan age were so great that Shakespeare himself walked about
among them unnoticed as a giant among giants. This reading of the riddle
is purely transcendental. We know that Shakespeare's worst plays were
far oftener acted than his best; that "Titus Andronicus" by popular
favour was more esteemed than "Hamlet." The majority of contemporary
poets and critics regarded Shakespeare rather as a singer of "sugred"
verses than as a dramatist. The truth is that Shakespeare passed through
life unnoticed because he was so much greater than his contemporaries
that they could not see him at all in his true proportions. It was
Jonson, the nearest to him in greatness, who alone saw him at all fairly
and appreciated his astonishing genius.

Nothing illustrates more perfectly the unconscious wisdom of the English
race than the old saying that "a man must be judged by his peers." One's
peers, in fact, are the only persons capable of judging one, and the
truth seems to be that three centuries have only produced three men at
all capable of judging Shakespeare. The jury is still being collected.
But from the quality of the first three, and of their praise, it is
already plain that his place will be among the highest. From various
indications, too, it looks as if the time for judging him had come:
"Hamlet" is perhaps his most characteristic creation, and Hamlet, in his
intellectual unrest, morbid brooding, cynical self-analysis and dislike
of bloodshed, is much more typical of the nineteenth or twentieth
century than of the sixteenth. Evidently the time for classifying the
creator of Hamlet is at hand.

And this work of description and classification should be done as a
scientist would do it: for criticism itself has at length bent to the
Time-spirit and become scientific. And just as in science, analysis for