Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.
From George Edward Woodberry
A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.
Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.
Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.
A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.
A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.
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