He had as much confidence in his home-bred
speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims:--
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great
trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as the embodier and
perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he would
do so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of immediate effect
on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear thinking makes clear
writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently capable of it in one
case is not to be supposed to abdicate intentionally in others. The
difficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded either as
corruptions, or else as phenomena in the natural history of Imagination,
whose study will enable us to arrive at a clearer theory and better
understanding of it.
While I believe that our language had two periods of culmination in
poetic beauty,--one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads,
which deal only with narrative and feeling,--another of Art, (or Nature
as it is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of stately
amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and the
greater dramatists,--and that Shakespeare made use of the latter as he
found it, I by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or that
any inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great poet's
inkstand.
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