The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous ProseLamb, Charles
General
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose
Lamb, Charles
English literature
_Antonio and Mellida._--The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the
first part of this tragedy, where Andrugio Duke of Genoa banished his
country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon the
territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants but
Lucio an old nobleman, and a page--resembles that of Lear and Kent in
that king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a kinglike
impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected resignation. The enemies
which he enters lists to combat, "Despair and mighty Grief and sharp
Impatience," and the forces which he brings to vanquish them, "cornets
of horse," &c. are in the boldest style of allegory. They are such a
"race of mourners" as the "infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect
might beget on some "pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The prologue
to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic
note of preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those
old tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which Milton has so highly
commended, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of
"intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in
without discretion corruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn a
preparative as the "warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse heard
cry."
_What you Will.--O I shall ne'er forget how he went cloath'd._ Act I.
Scene 1.--To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we must
advert to the days of Gresham, and the consternation which a phenomenon
habited like the merchant here described would have excited among the
flat round caps and cloth stockings upon 'Change, when those "original
arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were in fashion, not more
for thrift and usefulness than for distinction and grace." The blank
uniformity to which all professional distinctions in apparel have been
long hastening, is one instance of the decay of symbols among us, which,
whether it has contributed or not to make us a more intellectual, has
certainly made us a less imaginative people. Shakspeare knew the force
of signs: a "malignant and a turban'd Turk." This "meal-cap miller,"
says the author of God's Revenge against Murder, to express his
indignation at an atrocious outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon
the person of the fair Marieta.
AUTHOR UNKNOWN
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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