This outbreak has been long preparing.  Seventy years before the War the German poet Freiligrath wrote a poem to prove that Germany is Hamlet, urged by the spirit of her fathers to claim her inheritance, vacillating and lost in thought, but destined, before the Fifth Act ends, to strew the stage with the corpses of her enemies.  Only a German could have hit on the idea that Germany is Hamlet.  The English, for whom the play was written, know that Hamlet is Hamlet, and that Shakespeare was thinking of a young man, not of the pomposities of national ambition.  But if these clumsy allegories must be imposed upon great poets, Germany need not go abroad to seek the likeness of her destiny.  Germany is Faust; she desired science and power and pleasure, and to get them on a short lease she paid the price of her soul.

For the present, at any rate, the best thing the Germans can do with Shakespeare is to leave him alone.  They have divorced themselves from their own great poets, to follow vulgar half-witted political prophets.  As for Shakespeare, they have studied him assiduously, with the complete apparatus of criticism, for a hundred years, and they do not understand the plainest words of all his teaching.

In England he has always been understood; and it is only fair, to him and to ourselves, to add that he has never been regarded first and foremost as a national poet.  His humanity is too calm and broad to suffer the prejudices and exclusions of international enmities.  The sovereignty that he holds has been allowed to him by men of all parties.  The schools of literature have, from the very first, united in his praise.  Ben Jonson, who knew him and loved him, was a classical scholar, and disapproved of some of his romantic escapades, yet no one will ever outgo Ben Jonson’s praise of Shakespeare.

  Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
  To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. 
  He was not-of an ago, but for all time!

The sects of religion forget their disputes and recognize the spirit of religion in this profane author.  He cannot be identified with any institution.  According to the old saying, he gave up the Church and took to religion.  Ho gave up the State, and took to humanity.  The formularies and breviaries to which political and religious philosophers profess their allegiance were nothing to him.  These formularies are a convenient shorthand, to save the trouble of thinking.  But Shakespeare always thought.  Every question that he treats is brought out of the realm of abstraction, and exhibited in its relation to daily life and the minds and hearts of men.  He could never have been satisfied with such a smug phrase as ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.  His mind would have been eager for details.  In what do the greatest number find their happiness?  How far is the happiness of one consistent with the happiness of another?  What difficulties and miscarriages attend the business