Some heavenly music  

One reader is furious with the article on Shakespeare I linked to yesterday for its spotty scholarship, and in particular for this sweeping idea, which is apparently an extension of Coleridge, but with a new historical tint:

[H]is plays at their most powerful are out of sync with both Shakespeare's epoch and ours, and so can't be explained fully in terms of the past they sprang from or the present in which we encounter them. What drives his drama is the dream of a dispensation whose advent we still await, the prospect of a future free from the division and domination that crippled Shakespeare's world and continues to cripple ours.

And I agree that this idea isn't all that compelling on Shakespeare's universality -- why introduce an ideal (this dream of a future) against which to measure the most universal literature we have? It complicates matters needlessly. The best of Shakespeare needs no external ideals; in fact, it sets them aside in favor of something more human. Harold Bloom, in his big book on Shakespeare, is closer to the mark:

The idea of Western character, of the self as a moral agent, has many sources: Homer and Plato, Ariustotle and Sophocles, the Bible and St. Augustine, Dante and Kant, and all you might care to add. Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare's theatre of what might be called the colors of the spirit.

This is typical Bloom, probably also overreaching, but still getting at the powerful idea that Shakespeare helped define our sense of what it means to be a person in the first place -- and that he didn't need any external ideal to do it.