What ailed the man or any man to write such a
manner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep it beside him
or let it out of his hands into stranger and more slippery keeping,
unacted and unprinted? A German will rush in with an answer where an
Englishman (_non angelus sed Anglus_) will naturally fear to tread.
Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in its most patent
splendours, this political and philosophic and poetic problem, this
hybrid and hundred-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and
derides all definitive comment. This however we may surely and
confidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare's offspring it is the one
whose best things lose least by extraction and separation from their
context. That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain--and
possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia--we
might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from
examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how
much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and
Hyblaean eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's
tooth! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evil
of his alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if
prepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles and
spiritualise the type of Ulysses.
Pages:
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206