William Shakespeare: A Critical StudyBrandes, Georg
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William Shakespeare: A Critical Study
Brandes, Georg
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Criticism and interpretation
"Since, lady, that you like to honor me so much
As to accept me for your spouse, I yeld my selfe for such.
In true witness whereof, because I must depart,
Till that my deed do prove my woord, I leave in pawne my hart.
Tomorrow eke bestimes, before the sunne arise,
To Fryer Lawrence will I wende, to learne his sage advise."
[2] "A coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselves to
vnhonest desire, neglecting the anthoritie and aduise of parents and
frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes
and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of
unchastitie), attemptyng all aduentures of peryll for thattaynyng of
their wished lust, vsyng auriculer confession (the key of whoredom and
treason)...."
[3] See Dowden: _Shakspere: His Mind and Art_, p. 60.
[4] Edward von Hartmann, from the lofty standpoint of German
morality, has launched a diatribe against Juliet. He asserts her
immeasurable moral inferiority to the typical German maiden, both of
poetry and of real life. Schiller's Thekla has undeniably less warm
blood in her veins.
A Swedish professor, Henrik Schück, in an able work on Shakespeare,
says of Juliet: "On examining into the nature of the love to which she
owes all this strength, the unprejudiced reader cannot but recognise
in it a purely sensual passion.... A few words from the lips of this
well-favoured youth are sufficient to awaken in its fullest strength
the slumbering desire in her breast. But this love possesses no
psychical basis; it is not founded on any harmony of souls. They
scarcely know each other.... Can their love, then, be anything more
than the merely sensual passion aroused by the contemplation of a
beautiful body? ... So much I say with confidence, that the woman who,
inaccessible to the spiritual element in love, lets herself be carried
away on this first meeting by the joy of the senses ... that woman is
ignorant of the love which our age demands."
XIV
_LATTER-DAY ATTACKS UPON SHAKESPEARE--THE BACONIAN
THEORY--SHAKESPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE, PHYSICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL_
In one of his sonnets Robert Browning says that Shakespeare's name,
like the Hebrew name of God, ought never to be taken in vain. A timely
monition to an age which has seen this great name besmirched by
American and European imbecility!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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