United States or São Tomé and Príncipe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Shakespeare is wont to take some familiar story, to lay his scene in some place the name of which, at least, is familiar, well knowing the reserve of power that lies in the familiar as a background, when things are set in front of it under a new and unexpected light. But in the Tempest the scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. Nowhere, then?
I have often thought that if that man's story had only been rightly told, if there had only been a modern Shakespeare round about, there was the making of a new tragedy of Othello in it. His wife had run away with her paramour no fewer than three times, and each time he had followed her and fetched her back. But the last time she refused to come back and cruelly mocked him.
Matthew Arnold seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged English poetry. I wish he had! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself in "All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none dared tread but he.
At the old-fashioned school she had attended, few poets were considered fit for the girls' reading; Tennyson, of course, was included in the pupils' studies, and Shakespeare, carefully edited, was a standby; but of the works of Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, Keats, Toni was lamentably ignorant.
Would he, and should they, take among them men and women endowed only with practical, everyday talents, able to be honest and make shoes and sew garments; to strike with a sledge and a blacksmith's arm; to be adepts, maybe, in all the cares for the outward wants of the body, but who had never read Goethe or Schiller, and, possibly, neither Shakespeare, Scott nor Robert Burns; and might not care to read or study Latin, French, German or philosophy!
Instruction, to bring her its full profit, must be conveyed through the medium of moral emotion, but the mysterious power of feeling to stimulate intellect was with her immense. She turned now to the poets Shakespeare, Byron, Dante, Milton, Virgil, Pope.
The gift to touch the vitals of a subject is the test-gift of literary faculty; it is the soul-gift, the gift of fuller, livelier sympathy. Compare Wordsworth with Southey to learn the difference between inward and outward gifts. Poetry being in the mind, the man who has little poetry within him will find little in nature or in the world or in Shakespeare.
You fellows that want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab's got to be a statesman, he's bought all of Webster's works and is learning 'em by heart.
Of course, or you wouldn't be talking the English language though I've heard they talk it better in Boston than they do in England, and in Chicago they're making new English every day and improving on the patent. If Chicago can't have the newest thing, she won't have anything. 'High hopes that burn like stars sublime, has Chicago. She won't let Shakespeare or Milton be standards much longer.
James Burbage was owner of "The Theatre," and it was in his time, we may presume, that Shakespeare acted as ostler and call-boy. But he must have risen up from the ranks at no small pace when his gifts became well known, for not only do we find him a regular member of the company, but a friend of the leading members, men like Richard Burbage, son of the proprietor, and Augustus Phillips.
Word Of The Day