"But I will never be a truant, love,
Till I have learn'd thy language; for thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penn'd,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,
With ravishing division, to her lute."
Musical, too, are the pathetic heroines, such as Ophelia and Desdemona, and characters like Jaques in As You Like It, and the Duke and Viola in Twelfth Night. The last-named comedy, indeed, is entirely interpenetrated with music. The keynote of musical passion is struck in the opening speech:—
"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.—
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."
Here, too, Shakespeare's love of the folk-song finds expression, when he makes the Duke say (ii. 4):—
"Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,
That old and antique song, we heard last night;
Methought, it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs, and recollected terms,
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times:
Come; but one verse."
No less sensitive and devoted to music than the Duke in Twelfth Night or Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice must their creator himself have been in the short and happy interval in which, as yet unmastered by the melancholy latent in his as in all deep natures, he felt his talents strengthening and unfolding, his life every day growing fuller and more significant, his inmost soul quickening with creative impulse and instinct with harmony. The rich concords which bring The Merchant of Venice to a close symbolise, as it were, the feeling of inward wealth and equipoise to which he had now attained.
[1] Förster: Shakespeare und die Tonkunst, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, ii. 155; Karl Elze: William Shakespeare, p. 474; Henrik Schück: William Shakespere p. 313.