Born in a country market town, educated at the grammar school, regarded by his villagers as capable of taking over, in time, his father’s business in beef and hides, he married Anne Whateley or Hathaway (the records are confused) and seemed to settle down as a burgher with a family. But then, inexplicably though perhaps precipitated by a tangle with the poaching laws, he set out for London with his friend Robert Davenport. Two decades later he had become the only writer of English whose imagination and mastery of words rivaled Chaucer’s. For the first time in the history of the West, the supreme poet was not Homer but Homer or Shakespeare, as you would. Homer had grasped the human spirit in its perennial truths. It is all there, the world agreed, all that need be said of man. It remained to Shakespeare to render another description of man, this time of his imagination and its inward world. Look at Telemachus; look at Hamlet. Listen to Hermes in The Odyssey; listen to Ariel. Compare Priam and Lear in their anguish; the one, we say, needing no other words, is Homeric, the other Shakespearean; and nothing has reached such greatness.
Bottom: On Shakespeare, by Louis and Celia Zukofsky. University of Texas Press, $12.50
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