But Shakespeare did NOT
do "all this"! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels
in one of which "Delphos" is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo;
Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North's Plutarch, done out
of the French; older plays, and the rest of it. Shakespeare does not
go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to
the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-
plays to the State Papers. Shakespeare did not, like William of
Deloraine, dig up "clasped books, buried and forgotten." There is no
original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and
popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day.
Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot
what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence. And the common
Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.
But Mr. Greenwood asks "what was the poetic output?" in Burns's case.
{100a} It was what we know, and THAT was what suited his age and his
circumstances. It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not
drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one
winter in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of
literature.
Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have
suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre.
I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all-
pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the
wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from
the great banquet of the classics,--with such history, wholly
uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English
chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners
mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current
popular Morte d'Arthur and Destruction of Troy.
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