Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art
Dowden has pictured the rich life of the Elizabethans, over?owing with energy and endowed with a capacity for perceiving, for enjoying, and for reproducing facts and facts of as great variety as possible. Bacon realized the presence of physical law in the world, but failed to realize the inexorableness of the moral law; Shakspere, on the other hand, recognized the supremacy of the moral law in the minutest particular. Springing from the same soil, Bacon, Hooker, and Shakspere shared one character istic in common, a rich feeling for positive concrete fact. Proceeding then from the first poems and dramas, Professor Dowden has traced in a most interesting and sympathetic manner the growth of Shakspere step by step through the early tragedies and comedies, through the later tragedies and comedies, through the history plays and Roman plays to the romances of the later years, con cluding with a most discriminating chapter on Shakspere's humor. The book avoids the discussion of purely scholastic questions, but is rather an attempt to conceive of characters chie?y with reference to action in their respective spheres. Accepting the latest findings of re search in the sources of plays and their chronology, Professor Dowden assumes a sympathetic attitude toward philosophical criticism and shows how Shakspere leads his disciple away from the thin abstractions of the in tellect, from mere contemplative wisdom and directs him toward the world of human character, action and passion.
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