--I cannot but think,
too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes
to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of
all Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more
trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to
"the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus."
We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far
other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's ripest
harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the "flowery
square" made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and
perfect comedy "beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind" of all happiest
and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brook
to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise. In the
garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed _All's Well that Ends Well_, we
are hardly distant from Eden itself
About a young dove's flutter from a wood.
The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few
subjects chosen by Shakespeare--as so many were taken by Fletcher--which
are less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrative
treatment.
Pages:
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153