There is no greater name in the literature of the English language (or in any language, for that matter) than William Shakespeare. Shakespeare crowns the glories of the Elizabethan Age by bringing English— which had been developing over a period of some thousand years—to a peak of poetic perfection. Moreover, Shakespeare was but the brightest diamond in a whole crown of sparkling literary jewels that came into being especially after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Posterity will always identify these with the triumphant later years of Good Queen Bess. During a span of some thirty years (actually overlapping into the reign of James I), London saw more great poets and dramatists than the combined populations of Great Britain and America have managed to produce in the last hundred years. Shakespeare and his great contemporaries Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh and Ben Jonson, appear to be the flowering of the Renaissance in England. They were to England what Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante were to Italy a century or so earlier, artists who shrewdly observed human life, with its comedy and tragedy, and painted the scenes with language—language which remains unsurpassed for its beauty and vitality. As Classical Humanists they were educated men in the finest sense of that word: educated in Greek and Latin literature (which they read in the original), ancient history, English history, chivalry and heraldry, and, of course, the Bible. Some of them may have been devout Christians personally, but unlike Donne and Herbert and Crashaw of the next generation, the gospel or personal holiness was not the primary concern of their writing.
From a Christian standpoint, however, the important thing about Shakespeare’s great dramas is that they assume the same kind of reality that the Bible assumes. In them, the natural world is one of created order:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority and place Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order. Man himself is the noblest work of nature: What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
While man is neither a god nor an angel, he alone in nature has the propensity for evil—sometimes an evil that is the outgrowth of some personal flaw, like an overpowering ambition (as Macbeth), or other (and rarer) times an evil that seems to be expressed for the sheer pleasure of it (as Iago in Othello). Good men and women are not gods or angels either, but merely individuals who, though flawed and human, are constant in their loyalty and love (as Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet). The noblest human trait of all, in fact, is that of mercy—the love of the New Testament gospel:
Mercy... ‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the heart of kings, It is an attribute to God himself, And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice.