单项选择题

We know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564, so that somewhere between April 20 and April 23, four hundred years ago, was born an Englishman who possessed what was probably the greatest brain ever encased in a human skull.
William Shakespeare’s work has been performed without interruption for some three hundred and fifty years everywhere in the world. Scholars and students in every land know his name and study his work as naturally as they study their holy books—the Gospels, the Torah, the Koran, and the others.
For centuries clergymen have spoken Shakespeare’s words from their pulpits; lawyers have used his sentences in addressing juries; doctors, botanists, agronomists, bankers, seamen, musicians, and, of course, actors, painters, poets, editors, and novelists have used words of Shakespeare for knowledge, for pleasure, for experience, for ideas and for inspiration.
It is hard to exaggerate the debt that mankind owes. Shakespeare’s greatness lies in the fact that there is nothing within the range of human thought that he did not touch. Somewhere in his writings, you will find a full-length portrait of yourself, of your father, of your mother, and indeed of every one of your descendants yet unborn.
The most singular fact connected with William Shakespeare is that there is no direct mention in his works of any of his contemporaries. It was as though he knew he was writing for the audiences of 1964 as well as for the audiences of each of those three hundred and fifty years since his plays were produced.
On his way to the Globe Theater he could see the high masts of the Golden Hind in which Sir Francis Drake had circumnavigated the globe. He lived in the time of the destruction of the Spanish Armada, the era in which Elizabeth I opened the door to Britain’s age of Gloriana, and he must have heard of Christendom’s great victory at Lepanto against the Turks which forever insured that Europe would be Christian. Shakespeare’s era was as momentous as our own. Galileo was bom in 1564, the same year in which Shakespeare was born, and only a few years before John Calvin laid the foundation for a great new fellowship in Christianity. And yet Shakespeare in the midst of these great events, only seventy years after the discovery of America, did not mention an explorer or a general or a monarch or a philosopher.
The magic of Shakespeare is that, like Socrates, he was looking for the ethical questions, not for answers. That is why there are as many biographies of a purely invented man Hamlet, as there are of Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin D. Roosevelt.
We are not sure of many things in this life except that the past has its uses and we know from the history of human experience that certain values will endure as long as there is breath of life on this planet. Among them are the ethics of the Hebrews who wrote the Decalogue, the Psalms, and the Gospels of the Holy Bible, and the marble of the Greeks, the laws of Romans, and the works of William Shakespeare. There are other values which may last through all the ages of man—Britain’s Magna Carta, France’s Rights of Man, and America’s Constitution. We hope so, but we are not yet sure. We are sure of Shakespeare.
Ben Johnson was a harsh critic of Shakespeare during his lifetime. They were contemporaries and competitors. Johnson, a great dramatist, did not like it when his play Cataline had a short run and was replaced by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which had a long run. Yet when Shakespeare died, Johnson was moved to a eulogy which he called "Will Shakespeare":
Triumph my Britain
Thou has one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe Homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time.
The word "momentous" in the sixth paragraph means ______.