Shakespeare and His Critics

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Houghton Mifflin, 1909 - 386 pages

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Page 27 - Yet must I not give nature all ; thy art, My gentle SHAKESPEARE, must enjoy a part. For though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion : and, that he 278 Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses...
Page 57 - He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul, All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too.
Page 26 - Euripides, and Sophocles to us, Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova, dead, To life again, to hear thy buskin tread And shake a stage ; or, when thy socks were on, Leave thee alone for the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Page 179 - The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.
Page 184 - On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage ; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the "Malice of daughters and .storms.
Page 25 - To draw no envy, SHAKESPEARE, on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ; While I confess thy writings to be such, As neither man, nor muse, can praise too much.
Page 57 - I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him...
Page 34 - By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap, To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon, Or dive into the bottom of the deep, Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, And pluck up drowned honour by the locks...
Page 116 - Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety; by an unfailing power of exciting laughter...
Page 26 - And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line...

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