OUR ISLE MAY BE SCEPTRED, OUR PLOTblessed, but in one respect we English have been rather unlucky. In Dante the Italians have a poet who feels knowable: anyone who glances at the Divine Comedy becomes privy to his likes and dislikes, his tastes and his prejudices, who his enemies are and how he wants them to suffer. The Germans, for their part, have Goethe; and they are fortunate not only that Goethe’s character shines through his writing, but also that his sayings and mannerisms were preserved for posterity by Eckermann.
The English, however, are stuck with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare had no Eckermann. Nor did he ever really bare his soul in his plays, always disappearing somehow
