For, after all, what is the secret of
the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible
or even interesting Shakespear, and the easy triumph of Mr Harris in
giving us both? Simply that Mr Harris has assumed that he was dealing
with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing
about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact,
tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection
in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material
that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about
Shakespear. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our
hands, we know much more about Shakespear than we know about Dickens
or Thackeray: the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress it
because it proves that Shakespear was not only very unlike the
conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the
same reckoning, even a respectable man. The academic view starts with
a Shakespear who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about "lousy
Lucy" cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the
plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags interpolated by
the actors.
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