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The deeds themselves mattered much less to Shakespeare. It is doubtful whether he would have cared to consider whether Hamlet actually did too little or Othello too much. Play after play shows in the carelessness of its closing scenes how rapidly his interest cooled when all the good thinking was over and it remained to reveal the tangible consequences of thought.

So in Shakespeare’s actual life he ignored the dreams of El Dorado and imperial England, and he ignored the facts of tobacco and the colonization of Virginia and the Fight of the Revenge, while scrutinizing day by day the thinking minds of the men and women about him. And thereby he gained a wisdom so deep that it concealed his plentiful lack of knowledge—a humanity so immense that we seldom note how completely he had failed to be Elizabethan.