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FOOTNOTES:
[1] The characteristics of this norm are well set forth by Wetz, Shakespeare, ch. v.
[2] The conflict of friendship with love was in general treated in England with a livelier sense of the power of love than in Italy. Boccaccio’s Palemone and Arcita, rivals for the hand of Emilia, courteously debate their claims (Teseide, V, 36, 39 f.); Chaucer makes them fight in grim earnest. Spenser in the spirit of the Renascence makes friendship an ideal virtue, but exposes it to more legitimate trials, as where the Squire of low degree repels the proffered favours of his friend’s bride. (Faerie Queen, iv. 9, 2.)
[3] ‘Perjured, murderous, ... savage, extreme ... rude, cruel, not to trust.’
[4] Goethe probably never heard of a less fortunate adventure in that kind by his English contemporary, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the Loves of the Plants, which had then been famous in England for ten years; a poem which suffices to show that it is possible to exploit in the description of natural processes all the figures and personifications of poetry, and yet to go egregiously wrong.
[5] To Knebel, 14 February 1821.
[6] I. 140 f.
[7] I. 922, 1.
[8] This and subsequent passages are freely compressed here and there.