Once elsewhere, or twice only at the most, is any
such other sacrifice of moral beauty or spiritual harmony to the
necessities and traditions of the stage discernible in all the world-wide
work of Shakespeare. In the one case it is unhappily undeniable; no mans
conscience, no conceivable sense of right and wrong, but must more or
less feel as did Coleridge's the double violence done it in the upshot of
_Measure for Measure_. Even in the much more nearly spotless work which
we have next to glance at, some readers have perhaps not unreasonably
found a similar objection to the final good fortune of such a pitiful
fellow as Count Claudio. It will be observed that in each case the
sacrifice is made to comedy. The actual or hypothetical necessity of
pairing off all the couples after such a fashion as to secure a nominally
happy and undeniably matrimonial ending is the theatrical idol whose
tyranny exacts this holocaust of higher and better feelings than the mere
liquorish desire to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel of
cheap sugar on the tongue.
If it is proverbially impossible to determine by selection the greatest
work of Shakespeare, it is easy enough to decide on the date and the name
of his most perfect comic masterpiece.
Pages:
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159