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Updated: May 5, 2025
Here, certainly, we have questions of religion! Shakspere's genius has known how to transport these most important questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy with the passionless, indifferent eyes of our century.
Henry VI. and the bloody tragedy of Titus Andronicus, if Shakspere's at all, are doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage. The Taming of the Shrew seems to be an old play worked over by Shakspere and some other dramatist, and traces of another hand are thought to be visible in parts of Henry VIII., Pericles, and Timon of Athens.
We know nothing of Shakspere's mood while he was writing this cruel piece, but I should imagine he must have been ready to quit the world in a veritable ecstasy of wild passion and contempt.
He thinks that Shakspere's play commenced with the entrance of Macbeth and Banquo in the third scene of the first act, and that the weird sisters who subsequently take part in that scene are Norns, not witches; and that in the first scene of the fourth act, Shakspere discarded the Norns, and introduced three entirely new characters, who were intended to be genuine witches.
Milton, Landor, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Ruskin are conspicuous examples of men who made shipwreck of marriage, but in contrast shine forth the names of Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Shakspere, for there is no evidence against the belief that Shakspere's marriage was a happy one; then add to these the American names, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Holmes, and the list is still incomplete.
If it be granted, then, that it is possible to follow thus the growth of Shakspere's thought through the medium of his successive works, there is only one small point to be glanced at before attempting to trace this growth in the matter of supernaturalism.
There are other Latin sentences on the same fly-leaf, pronounced by Sir Frederic Madden to be written by a later pen than Shakspere's. To us, at any rate, the above words and numbers appear to proceed from a different hand than the other sentences. Judgments thereon from persons well versed in the writings of that time would be of great interest. 36: Act iii. sc. 2.
As I mentioned before, the force that accompanied him was in forlorn case, reminding me strongly of Shakspere's description of Falstaff's ragged regiment.
Shakspere's sympathies are with a prince whom Nature has formed into a strong ruler; and such an aristocrat of the intellect is depicted in his 'Henry the Fifth. In this ideal of a king, all the good national qualities attain their apotheosis. This hero combines strength of character with justice and bravery.
These are the poles of Shakspere's thought in this respect; and in the centre, imbedded as it were between two layers of material that do not bear any distinctive stamp of their own, but appear rather as a medium for uniting the diverse strata, lie the great tragedies, produced while he was in the very rush and swirl of town life, and reflecting accurately, as we have seen, many of the doubts and speculations that were agitating the minds of men who were ardently searching out truth.
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