Shakspere has unquestionably emerged
from the cold, paralyzing doubts of Hamlet into the human tenderness
and perfect love and faith of `The Tempest', a faith which can look clearly
upon all the wretched crimes and follies of the crew of time,
and still be tender and loving and faithful. In short, he has learned
to manage the Hamlet antagonisms, to adjust the moral oppositions,
with the same artistic sense of proportion with which we saw him
managing and adjusting the verse-oppositions and the figure-oppositions."*
--
* `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 260.
--
"Surely the genius which in the heat and struggle of ideal creation
has the enormous control and temperance to arrange and adjust
in harmonious proportions all these aesthetic antagonisms of verse,
surely that is the same genius which in the heat and battle of life
will arrange the moral antagonisms with similar self-control and temperance.
Surely there is a point of technic to which the merely clever artist
may reach, but beyond which he may never go, for lack of moral insight;
surely your Robert Greene, your Kit Marlowe, your Tom Nash, clever poets all,
may write clever verses and arrange clever dramas; but if we look
at their own flippant lives and pitiful deaths and their small ideals
in their dramas, and compare them, technic for technic, life for life,
morality for morality, with this majestic Shakspere, who starts in a dream,
who presently encounters the real, who after a while conquers it
to its proper place (for Shakspere, mind you, does not forget the real;
he will not be a beggar nor a starveling; we have documents
which show how he made money, how he bought land at Stratford;
we have Richard Quincy's letter to `my lovveinge good frend and contreyman
Mr.
Pages:
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205