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Updated: May 5, 2025
Most of Shakspere's tragedies compel our thoughts to follow their persons across the bourn. They need, as Jean Paul says, a piece of the next world painted in to complete the picture, And this is surely nature: but it need not therefore be no design.
The people who lived in Shakspere's London might not have been so near to Shakspere as is Mr. Furness, the great Shakspere critic to- day, or Mr. Rolfe, of Cambridge. Physical proximity does not bring us close to a person. We may be near to a friend who is half-way round the world: there may be sympathetic heart-beats that shall make us conscious of his presence night and day.
Possibly the theme may have been suggested at Mannheim by the problem of staging Shakspere's 'Timon'. At any rate the theme was congenial for a man who had 'embraced the world in glowing passion and found in his arms a lump of ice'. At Weimar he returned to it several times, puzzled over the general plan, added a little here and there, but finally gave it up as a bad subject for dramatic treatment.
There was something of Shakspere's quickness and elegance in Willibert's methods; but Cotton Mather had the advantage in learning and in weight of argument. "It is unhistorical," he said, "to claim that there is only one proper way to catch fish. The facts are against you."
Not less boldly than social affairs were political matters treated; but in order to avoid a prosecution, these questions had to be cautiously approached in parable fashion. Never was greater cleverness shown in this respect than at Shakspere's time.
The most important of the dramatists who were Shakspere's forerunners, or early contemporaries, was Christopher or as he was familiarly called Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere , he died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original plays, except the Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost.
Timon of Athens is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, and Troilus and Cressida, said Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize. The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them.
The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless Titus Andronicus be his, was, doubtless, Romeo and Juliet, which is full of the passion and poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work.
It is most instructive to compare Julius Cæsar with Ben Jonson's Catiline and Sejanus. Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In Catiline he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline. Sejanus is a mosaic of passages from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play.
Greenwood, Shakespeare was taken from school at the age of thirteen. Those late long-descended traditions of Shakespeare's youth are of little value as evidence; but, if it pleases Mr. Greenwood, I will, for the sake of argument, accept the whole of them. According to the tattle of Aubrey the antiquary, publishing in 1680, an opinion concerning Shakspere's education reached him.
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