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in letters, a prodigious wealth of invention and knowledge, and to
establish models of beauty and thought which changed the history of
the world, imparting to it a rationality from which derived all the
technical and scientific progress of the West, as well as the gradual
humanization of society.
It
has been said that the history of Greece is
the history of the triumph of reason over the irrational conditioning
characteristic of pre-Christian civilizations. No doubt this is so. But
the victorious awakening of reason over the armor of superstition and
taboo, which precipitated the unstoppable development of the West,
would not have been possible without that ease of thought and cre–
ation which Hellenic culture allowed its philosophers and its artists.
The triumph of reason was, above all, the triumph of freedom. Pos–
sibly for the first time in human history, the poet was not a man re–
sponsible for putting music and rhythm to what already existed - the
collective myths and legends, the enthroned religion - and for illus–
trating the established morality with fables. Rather, he was a sover–
eign individual, given free reign over his own powers, authorized to
explore the unknown through imagination, introspection, desire,
and reason, and to bestow citizenship papers upon the phantasms of
his spirit.
Nor would the genius of a Shakespeare be conceivable, without
the unlimited freedom he enjoyed, to display the human passions with
impunity, as Dr. Johnson wrote. By no means did all his contempo–
raries enjoy this liberty. Far from being tolerant, the Tudor age was
indeed brutal and authoritarian; so much so that, in referring to the
vandalistic destruction of images, paintings, architectural works, and
religious books that followed the first Reformation - that of Henry
VIII - the historian G. B. Harrison has compared the period to that
of Germany and Russia in the days of Hitler and Stalin. A rigorous
surveillance was exercised over the religious behavior of all persons,
and any symptom of heterodoxy, on the part of Catholics or Puritans,
led to prison, torture, or death. But the theater was considered too
common and plebeian a pastime, too far below the salons, academies,
and libraries where the reigning culture was produced and preserved,
to merit the scrupulous control that fell, for example, to religious or
political texts. Authority, in the days of Elizabeth I, forbade English
historical dramas; it closed the theaters several times. Fortunately,
however, playwrights were scornful of such measures, so that (again,
according to Harrison), the London theater was the only place the
common man could go, to hear direct and honest commentaries about
life. No one-not even his contemporary, Ben Jonson, who indeed
