History & The Arts
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Shakespeare's craft
...communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he saw,--Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;--yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask...