VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is!
HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it? I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen Revenge, d in that sight am grown a prouder monarch Than ever sate under the crown of Spain. Had I as many lives at there be stars,, As many heavens to go to as those lives, I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot, But I would see thee ride in this red pool. Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge, I cannot look with scorn enough on death.
KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth.
HIERON. Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you.
You had a son as I take it, and your son
Should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so?
You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew.
He was proud and politic—had he lived,
He might have come to wear the crown of Spain:
I think 't was so—'t was I that killed him;
Look you—this same hand was it that stabb'd
His heart—do you see this hand?
For one Horatio, if you ever knew him—
A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden—
One that did force your valiant son to yield," &c.—ED. ]
April 7. 1833.
LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.—GIFFORD'S MASSINGER.—SHAKSPEARE.—THE OLD DRAMATISTS.
I think I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. [1] In the drama alone, as Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life—as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.[2]
[Footnote 1: "In Shakspeare's Poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."—Biog. Lit. vol. ii. p. 21.]
[Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.—ED.]
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