Swan or Crow?

"Fantastic! and it was all written with a feather!," as Sam Goldwyn is supposed to have said about Shakespeare. In his own time, Ben Jonson addressed his fellow-dramatist as "Sweet Swan of Avon", but not all contemporaries felt so warmly. Robert Greene, detecting plagiarism, described "the only Shake-scene" as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers" having "his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide."

In later centuries, views were still mixed. John Dryden, at the end of the 17th century, commented that Shakespeare "is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other." Almost one hundred years later Horace Walpole's judgement was that "One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare, undoubtedly wanted taste." The French novelist Gustave Flaubert thought that, "He was not a man, he was a continent; he contained whole crowds of great men, entire landscapes," but George Bernard Shaw was characteristically crushing: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

Perhaps in the end we should turn back to the theatre for a verdict. Some views are idiosyncratic: the American actress Josephine Hull thought him "so tiring. You never get a chance to sit down unless you're a king." But the great Shakespearian actor Laurence Olivier called him "the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God,", and in our own century the director Richard Eyre sums up, "There is a sense in which every writer in English owes a debt to Shakespeare. He is our theatrical DNA."

Printer friendly version