More monstrous standing by; whereof I reckon
    The casting forth to crows thy baby daughter
    To be or none or little; though a devil
    Would have shed water out of fire ere done’t. 
    Nor is’t directly laid to thee, the death
    Of the young prince, whose honourable thoughts,
    Thoughts high for one so tender, cleft the heart
    That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
    Blemished his gracious dam.

Nowhere are the poet’s metaphors more nakedly material; nowhere does he verge more often upon a sort of brutality of phrase, a cruel coarseness.  Iachimo tells us how: 

                             The cloyed will,
    That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub
    Both filled and running, ravening first the lamb,
    Longs after for the garbage.

and talks of: 

an eye
Base and unlustrous as the smoky light
That’s fed with stinking tallow.

‘The south fog rot him!’ Cloten bursts out to Imogen, cursing her husband in an access of hideous rage.

What traces do such passages as these show of ‘serene self-possession,’ of ‘the highest wisdom and peace,’ or of ‘meditative romance’?  English critics, overcome by the idea of Shakespeare’s ultimate tranquillity, have generally denied to him the authorship of the brothel scenes in Pericles but these scenes are entirely of a piece with the grossnesses of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.

Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers?

says Posthumus when he hears of Imogen’s guilt.

                      We are all bastards;
    And that most venerable man, which I
    Did call my father, was I know not where
    When I was stamped.  Some coiner with his tools
    Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seemed
    The Dian of that time; so doth my wife
    The nonpareil of this—­O vengeance, vengeance! 
    Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained
    And prayed me, oft, forbearance; did it with
    A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on’t
    Might well have warmed old Saturn, that I thought her
    As chaste as unsunned snow—­O, all the devils!—­
    This yellow Iachimo, in an hour,—­was’t not? 
    Or less,—­at first:  perchance he spoke not; but,
    Like a full-acorned boar, a German one,
    Cried, oh! and mounted:  found no opposition
    But what he looked for should oppose, and she
    Should from encounter guard.

And Leontes, in a similar situation, expresses himself in images no less to the point.

                              There have been,
    Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now,
    And many a man there is, even at this present,
    Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
    That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence
    And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by