Lawrenceville Branch, 279 Fisk Street West End Branch, Wabash and Neptune Streets Hazelwood Branch, 4748 Monongahela Street East Liberty Branch, Station Street and Larimer Avenue South Side Branch, Carson and Twenty-second Streets Homewood Branch, Hamilton and Lang Avenues Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Monthly Bulletin Published monthly, except in August and September, by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Forbes Street and Bellefield Avenue, Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, Pa. President, S. H. Church, Carnegie Library, Forbes Street and Bellefield Avenue; Secretary, J. D. Hailman; Treasurer, James H. Reed, 1027 Carnegie Building; Director, John H. Leete, Carnegie Library, Forbes Street and Bellefield Avenue. Subscription 50 cents a year. Vol. 26 May 1921 No. 5 Why a Modern Should Read Shakespeare An address by Lincoln R. Gibbs, Head of the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, delivered at the annual ceremony in honor of Shakespeare, observed by the Carnegie Library School, April 23, 1921. The lapse of three hundred years out-dates and out-modes almost everything. This applies, in the present generation, to fashions of thought as well as to fashions of dress and ways of life. Shakespeare endures this irreverence of the past better than the majority of writers, but even he suffers a loss of appreciation. A barrier of speech stands between our own time and that of Elizabeth. Barriers of sentiment and mental disposition prevent our thinking in full harmony with Shakespeare, without some effort of historical imagination. Disregarding the barrier of language for the moment, we may profitably consider the more intangible barriers of social sentiment and intellectual habit. Three of the most important of them are owing to the facts (1) that Shakespeare lived in a pre-scientific age, (2) that his social philosophy seems to have been aristocratic and monarchical, rather than democratic, and (3) that in his day no industrial revolution had transformed society, by making industry a prime factor in legislation, moral standards, and even religious sentiments. The ruling influences of Shakespeare's time were the monarchy, the church, and the humanistic education of the Renaissance period. The ideas that have most vogue in 1921 seem to be democracy, science and technology, and industrialism. These are large general terms, but they serve to point out broadly the difference between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. |