Hamlet and the Scottish Succession

Lilian Winstanley has observed that Shakespeare''s greatest figures are as essentially superhuman as the sibyls and prophets of Michael Angelo: all the elements are human but there is something in the total effect that is more than humanity. She is the only writer we know who has even begun to realize why this dramatist''s work is at once so powerful and so universal why aside from its moral and poetic beauty it has kept its deep and abiding appeal. As she points out:. Carlyle said ''In Dante thirteen silent centuries find a voice.'' The truth is that Homer is not a man but . . . a whole glorious and noble era of the human spirit which without him would have sunk into oblivion. . . . Dante also is not a man but an era. . . . It is the same with Shakespeare; he is not only a man he is an era of the human spirit; there is a sense . . . in which the whole of the sixteenth century and every country in Europe have helped to write his plays.. That this brilliant student of the sixteenth century has been almost completely ignored is one more regrettable evidence of the inertia of scholars. She has shown as no one else has done how the psychology of the Elizabethans and their European contemporaries differed from ours and how this difference must be considered in any informed and adequate interpretation of their work. Like countless other students she was seriously handicapped by supposing Shakespeare to have written nearly twenty years later than he did but one can feel her chafing at the restrictions and puzzled by the discrepancies inherent in this belief. We are indebted to her scholarship and to her studies for our understanding so far as it goes of the epic quality which gives to the dramas of the great poet of the English Renaissance their vital force and range.. Miss Winstanley makes the important point that sixteenth-century writers nearly always started from the type not from the individual. This was of course the method of Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripides. It was the method of the Shakespeare in his more serious work: scholar that he was he was writing in the great tradition and lesser writers of the time took their cueor it would be more accurate to say learned their artfrom him.