SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1980, 12 May 1875, Page 4

SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS.

Shakespeare wrote on an average a play every six months for nearly twenty years. The variety is infinite; the multiplication of human portraiture is unparelleled. Ihe gayest fancy, the broadest humour, the most .piercing wit, alternate with the deepest pathos, the strongest passion, the truest philosophy. ,It was human life, not V stilted conventionality, not an academical rule, that Shakepeare cared for. He refused to be bound by the dogmas of a-schpol; he felt that no other unity-was essential if there were unity .of impression—harmony of general cbnception.- The Attic severity of the Grreek drama repelled him; he may have acknowledged the art; that pervaded it, but he missed the free movement of actual existence. He. saw that comedy and tragedy are blended indissolubly in man's life ; that tears and .-laughter have one common source, and flow in the same channel. He recognis_ed the truth that in our mundane condition the greatest moral lessons are taught in the midst of those conflicting emotions which shed upon surrounding objects alternate gloom and sunshine. The heart and the head alike confess that he was right. He has made it apparent to the whole world that JEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, great as they were, took a narrower and feebler, view of the true scope and aim of the drama, " whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and: the very;age and body of the time her form and purpose." Hence jt was that he fearlessly mingled the tragic with the comic element, that he gave, it* silver lining to the cloud, that he brought " sceptre and crown" face to face with the "poor cropked scythe and spade"—that he made nature predominant over accident-.—Oollin's Shakespeare.