"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 loos'e 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 marvelous 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.
Shakespeare knew that the play had little to do with the tides and currents of universal life—that Nature cares neither for smiles nor tears, for life nor death, and that the sun shines as gladly on coffins as on cradles.
The first time I visited the Place de la Concorde, where during the French Revolution stood the guillotine, and where now stands an Egyptian obelisk—a bird, sitting on the top, was singing with all its might.—Nature forgets.
One of the most notable instances of the violation by Shakespeare of the classic model, is found in the 6th scene of the I. Act of Macbeth.