The first time I visited the Place de la Concorde, where during the
French Revolution stood the guillotine, and where now stands an
Egyptian obelisk--a bird, sitting on the top, was singing with all its
might.--Nature forgets.
One of the most notable instances of the violation by Shakespeare of the
classic model, is found in the 6th Scene of the I. Act of Macbeth.
When the King and Banquo approach the castle in which the King is to be
murdered that night, no shadow falls athwart the threshold. So beautiful
is the scene that the King says:
"This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses."
And Banquo adds:
"This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle.
Where they most breed and haunt,
I have observed
The air is delicate."
Another notable instance is the porter scene immediately following
the murder. So, too, the dialogue with the clown who brings the asp to
Cleopatra just before the suicide, illustrates my meaning.
I know of one paragraph in the Greek drama worthy of Shakespeare. This
is in "Medea." When Medea kills her children she curses Jason, using the
ordinary Billingsgate and papal curse, but at the conclusion says: "I
pray the gods to make him virtuous, that he may the more deeply feel the
pang that I inflict."
Shakespeare dealt in lights and shadows. He was intense. He put noons
and midnights side by side. No other dramatist would have dreamed of
adding to the pathos--of increasing our appreciation of Lear's agony,
by supplementing the wail of the mad king with the mocking laughter of a
loving clown.
X.
THE ordinary dramatists--the men of talent--(and there is the same
difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone-mason
and a sculptor) create characters that become types. Types are
of necessity caricatures--actual men and women are to some extent
contradictory in their actions. Types are blown in the one direction by
the one wind--characters have pilots.
In real people, good and evil mingle. Types are all one way, or all the
other--all good, or all bad, all wise or all foolish.
Pecksniff was a perfect type, a perfect hypocrite--and will remain a
type as long as language lives--a hypocrite that even drunkenness could
not change. Everybody understands Pecksniff, and compared with him
Tartuffe was an honest man. Hamlet is an individual, a person, an actual
being--and for that reason there is a difference of opinion ias to his
motives and as to his character. We differ About Hamlet as we do about
Cæsar, or about Shakespeare himself.
Hamlet saw the ghost of his father and heard again his father's voice,
and yet, afterwards, he speaks of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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