Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

32
Grcvo v;ith awe not known v/hile he
./as not, mad with glorious glee
As the sun saluted sea,
Vhen bis hour bade Shakespeare be?
(VIII (1890) 3-7; p.5).
Such is the Shakerpeare who appears in Swinburne's book, notable
there for his "godlike equity" and an "implacable and impeccable
righteousness of insight" (p»7o) - Shakespeare possesses not
only artistic but ethical powers of discrimination.
Swinburne f s abject adoration of the god-dramatist calls
forth not only an abundance of turgid and tasteless rose, but
oblique suggestions that the study of the dramatists works
had a place in the writer's own psycho-sexual development. In
the early pa^-js appears the figure of the boy "whose heart
firat begins to burn within him, who feels his blood kindle and
his spirit dilate, his pulse leap and his eyes lighten, over a
first study oaf Shakespeare" (p.20). The heroines of the ^lays
seem to have had a strong effect on the dilating heart and
leaping pulses, not by any conspicuous sexuality, but by their
purity. It is suggested that Shake peare d; liberately blackened
Goneril, Regan and lachimo in order to make credible the figures
of Cordelia and Imogeni
But for the contrast and even the contact of
antagonists as abominable as these, the gold
of their spirit \voulrt be too refined, the lily
of their holiness too radiant, the violet of
their virtue too sweet. (p.174).
The expression is unusually extreme (Swinburne never says once
v;h:it he knows three v/ays of saying) but the interpretation is
b^! no means orthodox, following as it does the path of Mrs
Jameson, riaokin's ooo a; and Liles (1865) and looser nid-
Victorian sentimentalists. Tlie final paean to Imoc\ n - "the
very crown and flower" of ohakcDtjeare's "daughters" - is unusual
only in the extravagance of its language. Sensitive persons
may remember that to their own innocent infantile
perceptions the i'iivt obscure electric revelations
of vvhrt Blake calls "the j'ternnl Fcnale" v;as riven
through a blind wondering thrill of chilt'ish rapture
by a lightening on the baby dp.wn of their
&oul from the ounrioe of Shckcspcare's Cleopatra.