Shakespeare: A Lecture

by Robert Green Ingersoll

There is also an example of grim humor—an example without a parallel in literature, so far as I know. Hamlet having killed Polonius is asked:

"Where's Polonais?"
"At supper."
"At supper! where?"
"Not where he eats, but where he is eaten."

Above all others, Shakespeare appreciated the pathos of situation.

Nothing is more pathetic than the last scene in "Lear." No one has ever bent above his dead who did not feel the words uttered by the mad king,—words born of a despair deeper than tears:

"Oh, that a horse, a dog, a rat hath life
And thou no breath!"

So Iago, after he has been wounded, says:

"I bleed, sir; but not killed."

And Othello answers from the wreck and shattered remnant of his life:

"I would have thee live;
For in my sense it is happiness to die."

When Troilus finds Cressida has been false, he cries: