The impersonal aspect of Shakespeare's art

by Sidney Lee

Excerpt from The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare's Art

I confine my present inquiry to the plays alone, and I ask, Does Shakespeare reveal himself to us there? I do not mean as Rousseau reveals himself in his Confessions, or as Johnson stands revealed in the pages of Boswell, but, say, as Cicero or Horace, as Burke or Shelley, lift the curtain on dominant predilections and prejudices in published words. Do Shakespeare's plays, like Cicero's or Burke's oratory, declare from time to time his precise likes or dislikes, his definite convictions and prejudices? Do we learn his private Opinions on religion, on politics, and the other matters which more or less occupy every thinking man's attention? From 'personality' I here exclude physical characteristics and biographical details. I am not concerned with the everyday virtues and repugnances which most men of repute share alike. My inquiry is directed to distinguishing idiosyncrasies, to individual characteristics, to peculiar experiences of mind or heart.

At a first glance the theme may look simple enough. An author gives in the written page an expression of what is in him. He can have nothing else to give. Consequently all, it may be thought, one who seeks knowledge of an author's particular personality has to do, is to extract it from the verbal receptacle to which he committed it. But this is a superficial aspect of a highly complex question. There is a quibbling conundrum which asks, How can a thing be lost, when you know where it is and has for answer that the thing is at the bottom of the sea, or in the bottomless crevasse of a mountain. It may or may not be that the question I ask to-night may fairly provoke some such repartee. At any rate the speculation is difficult, and before we part with it, it imposes on us the obligation of glancing at the manner in which poetic genius works, and at the intellectual processes which are more especially involved in the creation of great drama.

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20 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1974

About the author

Sir Sidney Lee (5 December 1859 – 3 March 1926) was an English biographer and critic. He was born Solomon Lazarus Lee at 12 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London and educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in modern history in 1882. In the next year he became assistant-editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1890 he became joint editor, and on the retirement of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1891 succeeded him as editor.
Lee himself contributed voluminously to the Dictionary, writing some 800 articles, mainly on Elizabethan authors or statesmen. His sister Elizabeth Lee also contributed. While still at Balliol he had written two articles on Shakespearean questions, which were printed in The Gentleman's Magazine, and in 1884 he published a book about Stratford-on-Avon. His article on Shakespeare in the fifty-first volume (1897) of the Dictionary of National Biography formed the basis of his Life of William Shakespeare (1898), which reached its fifth edition in 1905.
In 1902, Lee edited the Oxford facsimile edition of the first folio of Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies, followed in 1902 and 1904 by supplementary volumes giving details of extant copies, and in 1906 by a complete edition of Shakespeare's works.
Lee received a knighthood in 1911. Between 1913-24 he was Professor of English Literature and Language at East London College, what is now Queen Mary, University of London.
Besides editions of English classics his works include a Life of Queen Victoria (1902), Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth century (1904), based on his Lowell Institute lectures at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1903, Shakespeare and the Modern Stage (1906), and King Edward VII, a Biography (1925). There are personal letters from Lee, including during his last illness, in the T.F. Tout Collection, John Rylands Library, Manchester.