Sc. 2,
Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction.
He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare's easy
fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already touched
on. On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech--
So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile;
We lose it not so long as we can smile.
That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second flowering manner--the
style of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare's rhetorical
first period but one. It was no more possible to move the one passage up
to the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. Here,
then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied by
Shakespeare's assistants in the last three acts--miserably weak some of
it was--they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latter
work in which Iago was principally concerned. There was at least fifteen
years' growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the
poet's intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough
at them.
Pages:
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299