It would be as easy and as
profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating
chimaera with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving
sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read the
riddle of Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this yet more
mysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on its production in
print it was formally announced as "a new play never staled with the
stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar," we know; must
we infer or may we suppose that therefore it was not originally written
for the stage? Not all plays were which even at that date appeared in
print: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play,
written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional
work of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he should
have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius
for the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so
designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German or
Germanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summary
ejaculation of Celia--"O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful
wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!"
The perplexities of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thicken
upon us at every step.
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