Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 611 pages of information about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 611 pages of information about Shakespeare.

                                  “Mine enemy’s dog,
    Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
    Against my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father,
    To hovel thee with swine, and rogues forlorn,
    In short and musty straw?”

“We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage: 
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgivness:  so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of Court news; and we’ll talk with them too,—­
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out;—­
And take upon ’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies:  and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by th’ Moon.”

                                      “Henceforth
    The white hand of a lady fever thee,
    Shake thou to look on’t.  Get thee back to Caesar,
    Tell him thy entertainment:  look thou say
    He makes me angry with him; for he seems
    Proud and disdainful, harping on what I am,
    Not what he knew I was:  he makes me angry;
    And at this time most easy ’tis to do’t,
    When my good stars, that were my former guides,
    Have empty left their orbs, and shot their fires
    Into th’ abysm of Hell.”

With these collate the following from Troilus and Cressida and King Lear, where, for aught I can see, the interweaving of Saxon and Latin words proceeds with just as much ease and happiness as the almost pure Saxon of the foregoing: 

                       “How could communities,
    Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
    Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
    The primogenity and due of birth,
    Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
    But by degree, stand in authentic place? 
    Take but degree away, untune that string,
    And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
    In mere oppugnancy:  the bounded waters
    Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
    And make a sop of all this solid globe: 
    Strength should be lord of imbecility,
    And the rude son should strike his father dead: 
    Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong—­
    Between whose endless jar justice resides—­
    Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 
    Then every thing includes itself in power
    Power into will, will into appetite;
    And appetite, an universal wolf,
    So doubly seconded with will and power,
    Must make perforce an universal prey,
    And last eat up himself.”

                            “Tremble, thou wretch,
    That hast within thee undivulged crimes,
    Unwhipp’d of justice:  hide thee, thou bloody hand;
    Thou perjur’d, and thou simular of virtue,

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Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.