That Shakespeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, we
suspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it is
inconceivable. Is there not something of self-consciousness in the
breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,--a sort of sad
prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after
such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years,
only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on
mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with
neighbors? His mind had entered into every phase of human life and
thought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found all
empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works were as
phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the rumor of the
pit? However this may be, his works have come down to us in a condition
of manifest and admitted corruption in some portions, while in others
there is an obscurity which may be attributed either to an idiosyncratic
use of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of intuition for a
proper coalescence with which ordinary language is inadequate, to a
concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the lighter links which
bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a process of reasoning in
common parlance, or to a sense of music which mingles music and meaning
without essentially confounding them.
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