Setting aside the
retouched plays, we find on the list one tragedy, two histories, and four
if not five comedies, which the least critical reader would attribute to
this first epoch of work. In three of these comedies rhyme can hardly be
said to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on the whole equal to
the unrhymed in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, and in one of
the two histories, we may say that rhyme fights hard for life, but is
undeniably worsted; that is, they contain as to quantity a large
proportion of rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part bears no
proportion whatever to the unrhymed. In two scenes we may say that the
whole heart or spirit of _Romeo and Juliet_ is summed up and distilled
into perfect and pure expression; and these two are written in blank
verse of equable and blameless melody. Outside the garden scene in the
second act and the balcony scene in the third, there is much that is
fanciful and graceful, much of elegiac pathos and fervid if fantastic
passion; much also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were) of wordy
melody, which flows and foams hither and thither into something of
extravagance and excess; but in these two there is no flaw, no outbreak,
no superflux, and no failure.
Pages:
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47