Page:Romeo and Juliet (Dowden).djvu/26

xxii furnished by the poem, of which no traces are found either in Painter's novel, or in Boisteau, or the original."

Brooke's poem has been unjustly depreciated; yet it contains no poetry of a high order. If Romeo and Juliet owed to Shakespeare, as Mr. Grant White has said, only its dramatic form and poetic decoration, we might still add with the critic—This is to say that "the earth owes to the sun only its verdure and flowers, the air only its perfume and its balm, the heavens only their azure and their glow." But in fact Shakespeare departs from Brooke, as Mr. White proceeds to point out, in several important particulars. He accelerates the action, reducing the time from months to days, and thus adds impetuosity to the torrent of passion. He creates from a mere passing hint of Brooke the brilliant and gallant Mercutio. In Brooke's poem Mercutio appears but once for a moment, as a courtier in the ballroom of Capulet; he is "courteous of his speech" and "pleasant of device"; bold among the bashful maids as a lion among lambs; and nature has given him the gift of hands that are colder than frozen mountain ice. But he does not serve, as with Shakespeare, by his vivid intellectuality to set off the imaginative passion of Romeo; he is not at once the irrepressible mocker and the chivalrous protector; nor does he die, still jesting and still gallant, before the tragedy darkens to its close. Shakespeare, again, it is who introduces Tybalt at the old accustomed feast of Capulet, and thus, incarnating in an individual the rage of faction, brings hatred face to face with love. The character of the Nurse is found in Brooke, but Shakespeare admirably develops its humorous side. He reduces the