Throughout certain scenes of the third and
fourth acts I think it may be reasonably and reverently allowed that the
river of verse has broken its banks, not as yet through the force and
weight of its gathering stream, but merely through the weakness of the
barriers or boundaries found insufficient to confine it. And here we may
with deference venture on a guess why Shakespeare was so long so loth to
forego the restraint of rhyme. When he wrote, and even when he rewrote
or at least retouched, his youngest tragedy he had not yet strength to
walk straight in the steps of the mighty master, but two months older
than himself by birth, whose foot never from the first faltered in the
arduous path of severer tragic verse. The loveliest of love-plays is
after all a child of "his salad days, when he was green in judgment,"
though assuredly not "cold in blood"--a physical condition as difficult
to conceive of Shakespeare at any age as of Cleopatra. It is in the
scenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of agony, that we feel the
comparative weakness of a yet ungrown hand, the tentative uncertain grasp
of a stripling giant.
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