LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 014 156 829 2 « Hollinger Corp. pH 8.5 Of "The Shakspere Festival" one thousand copies have been printed from type, of which this is Number SHAKSPERE FESTIVAL Community Celebration on the occasion of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of William Shakspere Consisting of a Pageant Depicting Some .Scenes from the Life and Times §f the Dramatist; the Performance of "Twelfth Night"; and an Address on the Universality of His Works ^ 'Jt Given at Newark, Delaware, on April Twenty-eight CS, Twenty-nine, Nineteen Hundred CS, Sixteen ^ ^ Under the di- rection §f the English Department ^ Delaware College (^ The Women's Col- lege of Delaware ^ %h Pageant: Frazer Field Play: Opera House Lecture: The Oratory "T^hese promises are fair, the parties sure, And our induction full of prosperous hope. " —I Henry IV, in. i. 1,2 A %r Ci,A431076 M/IY I6l9i6 FOREWORD FORTUNATE is this part of the Western world. Eiirope is in the throes of the most senseless and the most deadly war of modem times; America is free, tranquil within her own borders and at peace with the warring nations. England, our mother country, in the hearts and homes of her people has suffered the horrors of war", even though the "armed hoofs of hostile paces" have not yet bruised the flowerets on her soil. Private grief leaves no room for public commemoration. W^ere England not now engaged in bitter conflict with a sister nation, she would be celebrating the glories of the brightest star in her literary firmament; to America, far-distant in leagues but close in S5rmpathy of race and language, has been reserved the honor and responsibility of paying due respect to the memorj^ of the immortal Bard of Avon, Shakspere, the poet of England — the poet of the World. Three hundred years ago the Sweet Swan of Avon made "those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza, and our James." America was then in its infancy. To Shakspere it was a strange unpeopled country, the possibilities of which had been but timidly sounded. Today, in hamlet and city, from sea to sea, the descendants of English men and wom- en — some of whom he may have known — revere his name. As through the years our coxmtry has grown to be a great nation, so the fame of Shakspere has spread here and in all other parts of the world. His own age, of course, little rea- lized that one of its bright lights would shine thereafter with so great a radiance. W^ith Matthew Arnold, we may exclaim, "And thou, who didst the stars and sun- beams knovir, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour' d, self- secured, Didst walk on Earth unguess'd at." But Shakspere's own England, the America which was then but a dream, and all other nations have long since ceased to question. "With varying degrees of popularity^, Shakspere's plays have lived through the ages. The music of his verse and the splendor of his imagination and the greatness of his thought have been expressed, through the imperfect medium of the translator, in more than thirty tongues. It has been said that he was both of an age and for all time. He was likewise for all people. For where the means of communication makes it possible, Shakspere is read and acted. And here in America, as elsewhere, we think of his plays as embodying lastingly in beautiful lan- guage the deepest feelings and the loftiest conceptions of the human soul. Genius is ever inexplicable. Psychologists and scientists have done much to explain man — the normal and the ab- normal. The super-man has so far been beyond their grasp. To them and to us la5mien it is given in the final analysis but to wonder and revere. Shakspere the man, the poet, the dramatist, has yielded much to seekers after truth in details of character, of imaginative in- sight, of selective and constructive skill. He was a man among men, a gifted poet in a great creative age, a drama- tist who took the best of that which all men knew and moulded it to his liking in the crucible of his constructive talent. But of that which lay beneath character, beneath poetic and constructive talent, of the informing spirit which gave Shakspere the power to hold the world of men as in the hollow of his hand — to see and feel, to think and act v/ith Romeo or Desdemona, with Othello or Cleopatra, with Falstaff or Beatrice — of that heaven-sent gift which enabled him to understand and interpret human nature as no other man has done, the inystery" is open not to mortal eye. \ C/2oi.&