Aging & Wisdom Quote by M. H. Abrams

“Amazing” is doing double duty here: it’s praise, but it’s also a wink at how stubbornly Shakespeare refuses to behave like a period piece. Abrams, the great explicator of Romanticism, isn’t just handing down a tasteful compliment. He’s staging a miniature argument about how literary value gets made and remade. “Age after age” and “country after country” turns admiration into a stress test. If a writer survives not just time but translation, not just curricula but wildly different cultural needs, then the achievement starts to look less like inherited prestige and more like a recurring, almost inconvenient discovery.

The key word is “emerges.” Shakespeare doesn’t merely remain on top; he keeps reappearing, as if each generation digs him up for its own purposes. That verb smuggles in Abrams’s critic’s awareness that canons aren’t natural wonders; they’re institutions, propped up by schools, theaters, editors, and national mythmaking. Yet Abrams is also conceding the counterforce: even after you account for the machinery, something in the work keeps kicking back into relevance. Hamlet becomes a psychological case file, a political parable, a meme-able repertoire of lines; Othello is reread through race, gender, empire. The plays don’t just tolerate reinterpretation; they seem designed for it.

“In all languages” is the bravest claim and the slyest one. Translation is where style usually dies. Abrams implies Shakespeare is the rare writer whose complexity doesn’t collapse when the English is removed, which is another way of saying his dramatic architecture - motive, reversal, timing, moral mess - carries the freight. “Incomparable” lands as both verdict and dare: compare him if you want; the comparisons only keep proving the point.