"Let me not live
After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff
Of younger spirits."
Can anything exceed the words of Troilus when parting with Cressida:
"We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other, most poorly sell ourselves
With the rude brevity and discharge of one.
"Injurious time now with a robber's haste
Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how;
As many farewells as be stars in heaven,
With distinct breath and consigned kisses to them,
He fumbles up into a loose adieu,
And scants us with a single famished kiss,
Distasted with the salt of broken tears."
Take this example, where pathos almost touches the grotesque.
"O dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair?
Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean, abhorred monster keeps thee here
I' the dark, to be his paramour?"
Often when reading the marvellous lines of Shakespeare, I feel that his thoughts are "too subtle potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness, for the capacity of my ruder powers." Sometimes I cry out, "O churl!—write all, and leave no thoughts for those who follow after."
IX.
SHAKESPEARE was an innovator, an iconoclast. He cared nothing for the authority of men or of schools. He violated the "unities," and cared—nothing for the models of the ancient world.
The Greeks insisted that nothing should be in a play that did not tend to the catastrophe. They did not believe in the episode—in the sudden contrasts of light and shade—in mingling the comic and the tragic. The sunlight never fell upon their tears, and darkness did not overtake their laughter. They believed that nature sympathized or was in harmony with the events of the play. When crime was about to be committed—some horror to be perpetrated—the light grew dim, the wind sighed, the trees shivered, and upon all was the shadow of the coming event.