Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Stratford Shakspere, Vol. 1: The Life of Shakspere by the Editor, Histories; King John, King Richard II, King Henry IV Part I, King Henry IV Part II
I believe those words first made me a student of Shakspere. Wordsworth's lines embodied no idle boast. The connec tion between England's freedom and the name of England's greatest writer was not an imaginary one. The armoury that was hung in our halls was not the breast-plate and the helmet that our fathers wore at Agincourt. The armoury to which the poet alludes was the inheritance of thoughts and feelings which we had derived from the great minds who had gone before us. From him whose name 13 the greatest in our literature - it is the greatest in all litera ture we have received such a stock of household thoughts, gradually but surely entering into the national soul during successive generations, that we who speak the tongue which he spake must be free or die. Nor was it that we were to find in the mass of writings which Shakspere has bequeathed to us any specific exhortations to freedom, any rapturous declamations on our national greatness, any incense to that pride which all nations feel, and would be unworthy of the name of nation if they did not feel. There is much in Shakspere to excite, incidentally, a just patriot ism; but there is very little of what may be called patriotic poetry. There is, however, something better. Freedom, in.
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