ABSTRACT
As imagery and figurative expression are discordant in the highest degree with the agony of a mother who is deprived of two hopeful sons by a brutal murder; therefore the following passage is a specimen of diction too light and airy for so intense a passion. [Quotes Richard III, 4.4.9-14.] A thought that turns upon the expression instead of the subject, commonly called a play of words, is unworthy of that composition which pretends to any degree of elevation; yet Shakespeare has made this sacrifice to the age he lived in in many instances, particularly in the following:
[Quotes ‘Too much of water hast thou poor Ophelia’, Hamlet, 4.7.185; and Antony’s pun on ‘hart’/‘heart’, Julius Caesar, 3.1.208ff.] But though Shakespeare has thus descended to a play of words, he has sometimes introduced it for the marking a peculiar character, as in the following passage.1 [Quotes Faulconbridge in King John, 2.5.496ff.] (76-7)
Immoral sentiments exposed in their native colours, instead of being concealed or disguised: thus lady Macbeth, projecting the death of the king, has the following soliloquy. [Quotes ‘Come all you spirits’, Macbeth, 1.5.40ff.] This speech we cannot think natural; the most treacherous murder, we hope, was never perpetrated by the most hardened miscreant without compunction;2 in that state of mind it is a never-failing artifice of self-deceit to draw the thickest veil over the most wicked action, and to extenuate it by all the circumstances which imagination can suggest; and if the mind even cannot bear disguise the next attempt is to thrust it out from its counsel altogether, and rush in upon action without thought; this last was her husband’s method:
[On tragi-comedy] One of the great requisites both of tragedy and comedy is unity
of action; now in a tragi-comedy there are two distinct actions carrying on together, to the perplexity of the audience, who, before they are well engaged in the concernments of one part are diverted to another, and by those means espouse the interest of neither. From hence likewise arises another inconvenience equally as absurd, which is that one half of the characters of the play are not known to each other; they keep their distances like the Montagues and Capulets, and seldom begin an acquaintance till the last scene of the fifth act, when they all meet upon the stage to wind up their own stories.
