[Gutenberg 49008] • The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [Vol. 8 of 9]

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1907. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... To begin with "Richard ii" as a " stage" of Shakespeare. That it is an early one, external and so to speak non-literary testimony establishes, with a certainty not always at our service, in the fact of the date of the earliest quarto (1597), and the mention by Meres (1598); but without-these, internal evidence--not of the fantastically minute, but of the general and convincing kind--would assure us that these dates are not only not too early, but in all probability not quite early enough. The whole ordonnance and handling of the play, whether we look at plot, character, diction, or versification, speak a period at which the poet has already learned a great deal, but has not learned everything. He has already--we shall dwell more on this later--acquired the full disposition of the chronicle-play after a fashion which nobody but himself had yet shown; but he has not discovered the full secret of diversifying and adorning it. The historic page is translated into a dramatic one with the indefinable mastery--in adjusting to the theatre the "many actions of many men" at many places and times--which perhaps no other dramatist has ever fully shown. But, to mention nothing else, there is a want of tragi-comic relief; the history, interesting as it is, is still too much of a mere history. So, in the second respect, the poet has left his predecessors, and even to some extent himself, far behind in the art of breathing a soul into the figures of the historic tapestry; but he has not yet made it, as he was to make it later, a wholly complete and individual soul Of the central figure we shall speak anon; but it is almost more important that the accessories, though never mere "supers," still lack that full Shakespearean individuality "in the round" of which the poet is so prod...