R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Tennyson, Swinburne, Meredith 171do know better than to depreciate Tennyson lightly), andif it were, it could certainly be matched by passages fromShakespeare himself, who could, on occasion, write ascrudely, flatly, consciencelessly, as you please. ButShakespeare, at his worst, could not be more thanmomentarily undramatic. He writes as by instinct tobe spoken, not to be read. His verse is naturally rhetorical;and it is always more or less charged with emotion;for nobody, speaking to a crowd (and the actor is speakingto the audience as well as to his fellow-actors) will keepto cut and dried thought alone. It has something aboutit, then, that Sir Philip Hartog's rhyme and rhythmalone cannot give; it has an added carrying power.This was the point from which Shakespeare and hisfollowers started. They had to capture and hold an unrulyaudience, and their chief means to do it was rhetoricalemotional verse. Shakespeare's own progress as an artistcan well be studied (and should be, by any poet anxiousto turn dramatist) by tracing the development of hisverse-making, from its early lyric fervour—which issometimes monotonous and dramatically ineffective 1 —and from the commanding, but unyielding rhetoric of theHistories, to the masterly breadth and delicacy andvariety, to the subtle suggestiveness of character andmood to be found in the later plays. But we are too aptto admire these mature elaborations (one suspects thatthey chiefly influenced Tennyson) and forget the fundamentalstrength of simple emotional rhetoric still underlyingthem. Shakespeare never forgot that first need. Inthe greater plays the emotional tension is high throughout.But should he feel the strength of a scene and its carryingpower slackening he is ready enough with a piece of pure1This is one good reason for supposing that such plays as Love'sLabours Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream may have been writtenrather for special audiences than for the public theatre.