Meanwhile the name of
Tragedy was assumed by plays in which everyone was killed in the last
act, just as, in spite of Moliere, plays in which everyone was married
in the last act called themselves comedies. Now neither tragedies nor
comedies can be produced according to a prescription which gives only
the last moments of the last act. Shakespear did not make Hamlet out of
its final butchery, nor Twelfth Night out of its final matrimony. And he
could not become the conscious iconographer of a religion because he had
no conscious religion. He had therefore to exercise his extraordinary
natural gifts in the very entertaining art of mimicry, giving us the
famous 'delineation of character' which makes his plays, like the novels
of Scott, Dumas, and Dickens, so delightful. Also, he developed that
curious and questionable art of building us a refuge from despair by
disguising the cruelties of Nature as jokes. But with all his gifts, the
fact remains that he never found the inspiration to write an original
play. He furbished up old plays, and adapted popular stories, and
chapters of history from Holinshed's Chronicle and Plutarch's
biographies, to the stage.
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