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Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 1837-1909

"A Study of Shakespeare"


{217} Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty
imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of
Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "careless
tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded" where she sat playing with flowers
for emblems at a game of love and sorrow--but liker in all else to
Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook of death.
{220} On the 17th of September, 1864.
{232} The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited on
the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realism
took actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604. Four
years afterwards the play was published as Shakespeare's. Eight years
more, and Shakespeare was with AEschylus.
{237} Written in 1879.
{239} Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes"; marking the change in
a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have usually
distinguished him from more daring and more famous editors.
{245a} The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many small
signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of this
play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the full
influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to mark it as an
instance of survival from that period of incomposite and inadequate
workmanship in verse.


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