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John Quincy Adams, who, talking to me about Desdemona, assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgement upon her for having married a 'nigger? I think if some ingenious American actor of the present day, bent upon realising Shakespeare's finest conceptions, with all the advantages of modern enlightenment, could contrive to slip in that opprobrious title, with a true South-Carolinian anti-Abolitionist expression, it might really be made quite a point for Iago, as, for instance, in his first soliloquy 'I hate the nigger, given in proper Charleston or Savannah fashion, I am sure would tell far better than 'I hate the Moor. Only think, E , what a very new order of interest the whole tragedy might receive, acted throughout from this standpoint, as the Germans call it in this country, and called 'Amalgamation, or the Black Bridal.
In Shakespeare's early youth it was the fashion to write lyrics about the delights of rustic life with sheep and shepherds. The Italians, freshly interesting in Vergil's Georgics and Bucolics, had taught the English how to write pastoral verse. The entire joyous world had become a Utopian sheep pasture, in which shepherds piped and fell in love with glorified sheperdesses.
The present landlord is a true Dickensian in knowledge and character, and endeavours to make everybody comfortable and welcome, no matter who he be. A glance at the visitors' book will show how the inn has been sought out by every grade of society from all over the world. Indeed, we doubt if Shakespeare's birthplace can surpass this inn in popularity. But it is not merely a Pickwickian inn.
For the Welsh fairies, King Puck and Queen Mab, know all about what is in the telegraphs, submarine cables and wireless telegraphy of to-day. Puck would laugh if you should say that a telephone was any new thing to him. Long ago, in Shakespeare's time, he boasted that he could "put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes."
In attending a University Extension Lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for.
This was as near as she ever came to marriage, and it was this love at least which makes Shakespeare's famous line as false as it is beautiful, when he describes "the imperial votaress" as passing by "in maiden meditation, fancy free."
But the question, then, arises, and it is one which, under the circumstances, must be answered, To what must we attribute the fact, that, of all the plays that have come down to us, written between 1580 and 1620, Shakespeare's are most noteworthy in this respect?
The Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand, their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality.
Though his alterations of Shakespeare shock us, they are nothing to those outrages committed by others, who deformed the poet beyond recognition. Garrick made Shakespeare's plays once more popular.
Likewise, that they must be stunned by a weighty inquiry whether there was internal evidence in Shakespeare's works, to prove that his uncle by the mother's side lived for some years at Stoke Newington, before they were brought- to by a Miscellaneous Concert.
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