Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/55

Rh traits of Shakespeare’s style are the newness and boldness of his similes, the acuteness of the observation they betray, the persuasive power of his almost paradoxical combination of things, the surprising riches of his associations. For his imagination, as Spalding says, throws constantly flowers into the currency of his thought. Lines like those from Coriolanus,, i, 168: are therefore unmistakably Shakespearian; they would betray his hand wherever they were to be found. Are there any lines of this sort in the “insurrection-scene”? Certainly not. Its language is throughout clever but nowhere brilliant. This is what Furnivall must have had in his mind’s eye when he wrote that there is “nothing necessarily Shakespearian in it, though part of it (is) worthy of him.” Perhaps, however, even this is too much to allow. There are, at any rate, lines in the scene that have scarcely the Shakespearian ring, compare for instance a poor verse like: In one case, the reviser himself seems to have been so little satisfied with the text that he crossed a passage out, and indeed: “to kneele to be forgyven it safer warrs, then ever you can make, whose discipline is ryot” deserved no better fate, the paradox “to kneele… is warrs” being most unhappily chosen.

There are certainly, and this has more weight, a great number of expressions in it which seem not at all to belong to his vocabulary. It is true that this test must be used with great caution. For it is self-evident that each part of his work must contain words which are not in the rest. On the other hand, there are certainly words and expressions which belong to the common property of the time, and are lacking in Shakespeare’s vocabulary for the simple psychological reason that every human being, even he with the very greatest imagination, has only a distinctly circumscribed stock of words in his use, favouring some and neglecting