Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/22

20 Othello, by the same means, we watch the gradual growth of jealousy through all the stages of its slow development. Shakespeare hurls his spells into the spongy air, and we are powerless to resist. This to and fro movement of time, which so thoroughly deceives us and is the effect of consummate art, Shakespeare uses even in the historic plays. Thanks to our great Greek scholar, of whom all Harvard is proud, this very device in the treatment of dramatic time has been detected in the opening scene of the Agamemnon. Thus we find the two greatest dramatic poets of the world using a kindred art in producing kindred dramatic effects. If we find these effects in their dramas, their hands put them there, and to imagine that we can see them, and that the mighty poets themselves did not, is to usurp a position which I, for one, utterly refuse to occupy; and I say this in clear remembrance that Plato in his Apologia of Socrates asserts that poets do not appreciate to the full what they write.

Will you permit me to say a few words on the study of Shakespeare?

First, keep clearly in mind the purpose of your study. It is for pleasure above all things; the pleasure to be derived from pity and fear in the Tragedies, and from amusement in the Comedies. The study of the human heart, its sympathies, its antipathies, its emotions, you can pursue as unerringly in Shakespeare’s pages as you can in real life. Herein, when forming your conclusions, beware of accepting what the characters may say of each other, but take only what the characters say and do themselves;—especially study their soliloquies. You will let neither Ophelia nor the Gravedigger settle for you the question of Hamlet’s madness, nor will you let your estimate of Caesar be affected by Cassius’s description of Caesar’s behavior when ill and said “‘Give me to drink, Titinius,’ like a sick girl”: nor will you accept Henry the Fourth’s opinion of Prince Hal; and, as little, will you suffer your judgement of Cleopatra’s devotion to Anthony to be influenced by what the other characters may report of her behavior in general, nor even what you may read in Plutarch. You must at first imagine yourself as seated in the Globe Theatre on the Bankside, with no knowledge whatsoever of the characters or of the plot but what shall be unfolded before you on the stage. Shakespeare will tell you everything needful. Sometimes a rhymed couplet will warn