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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Cymbeline with Annotations and a General Introduction by Sidney Lee
By William Shakespeare
Introduction
If it could be assumed, with any strong probability, that
"Cymbeline," which ends the First Folio, was really the last play
which Shakespeare wrote, several difficulties which present
themselves in connection with it might be resolved at once. It
contains one of the most perfect of Shakespeare's women, two
gallant boys, a notable villain; with rapid, summarising studies in
jealousy, a murderous queen, a royal clown, done as if from memory
or on second thoughts. There are pastoral scenes in it which can
only be compared with the pastoral scenes in "The Winter's Tale";
and they are written in verse of the same free and happy cadence.
Yet the play is thrown together loosely, rather as if it were a
novel, to be read, than a play, to be acted. The action is
complicated here, neglected there. A scene of sixteen lines is
introduced to say that the tribunes are required to raise more
forces for the war, and that Lucius is to be general. The last
scene is five hundred lines long, and has to do as much business as
all the rest of the play. The playwright seems no longer to have
patience with his medium; it is as if his interest had gone out of
it, and he were using it as the only makeshift at hand.
Most artists, at the end of their careers, become discontented with
the form in which they have worked. They have succeeded through
obedience to this form, but it seems to them that a rarer success
lies, uncaptured, outside those limits. They are tempted by what
seems lawless in life itself; by what is certainly various and
elastic in life. They are impatient with the slowness of results,
with their rigidity, inside those inexorable limits. The technique
which they have perfected seems to them too perfect; something
cries out of chains, and they would set the voice, or Ariel, free.
That spirit, I think, we see in the later plays of Shakespeare, in
which not only does metre dissolve and reform, in some new,
fluctuant way of its own, but the whole structure becomes vaporous,
and floats out through the solid walls of the theatre. Even "The
Tempest," when I have seen it acted, lost the greater part of its
magic, and was no longer that "cloudcapt" promontory in "faery seas
forlorn," the last foothold of human life on the edge of the world.
What sense of loss do we feel when we see "Othello" acted?
"Othello" has nothing to lose; the playwright has never forgotten
the walls of his theatre. In "Cymbeline" he is frankly tired of
them.
"Cymbeline" is a romance, made out of Holinshed, and Boccaccio, and
perhaps nursery stories, and it is that happiest kind of romance...
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Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage
of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality
reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable
prices.
This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images
of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also
preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics,
unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and
every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and
interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human
than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a
unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader
organically to the art of bindery and book-making.
We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection
resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and
their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes
beyond the mere words of the text.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Pericles, Prince of Tyre with Annotations and a General
Introduction by Sidney Lee
By William Shakespeare
Introduction
The apocryphal works of Shakespeare are even more various in values
than the apocryphal books of the Bible. There is hardly as much
difference between the sub- lime "Wisdom of Solomon " and the
nursery tale of " Bel and the Dragon " as between the glorious
torso of " The Two Noble Kinsmen " and the abject futility of
"Mucedonis " or "Locrine." There are two plays, and only two,
certain that Shakespeare wrote the nobler part as that Shakespeare
did not write the whole. The one is taken from the "Knight's Tale,"
of Chaucer, the other from an episode in Gower's " Confessio
Amantis." In the one case the unfinished work of Shakespeare was
completed by the feebler and yet the accomplished and the dexterous
hand of a lesser and yet a great dramatic poet; in the other case
the hand of Shakespeare touched and transfigured, recreated and
recast, the work of an obscure precursor whose sketch he did not
always give himself the trouble to correct and repaint, but chose
rather now and then to leave as it stood in the rough, with an
incongruous touch of unseasonable splendor flung in or thrown on
here and there. It is not easy to say exactly where the work of
revision or interpolation begins or ends. We may be misled and
dazzled into misjudgment and injustice by the beauty of single
lines or short passages, which on reconsideration may not seem so
far superior as at first they seemed to the not always un- worthy
context. There is true poetic dignity through- out in the part of
Pericles: and the fitfully frequent relapses into rhyme which help
to make the style of the earlier scenes seem cruder and more
juvenile than that of the last three acts are merely, it may be,
signs of haste and indifference rather than of inferiority and
illegitimacy. The scene with the fishermen is at once like
Shakespeare and like Heywood: either of the two might have written
it. No one who knows the lesser poet will deny this; and no one can
fail to see how this explains the curious and at first sight
startling collocation of his name and of Dekker's with the name
that is above every name in the famous passage which places on
record the wish of Shakespeare's greatest disciple that what he
wrote should be read by their light.
All the second act; be the text canonical or apocryphal must
evidently have been written at the gallop of the pen.
The moral or spiritual charm of Shakespeare's work is as nearly
indefinable as it is incomparable. There are touches or strokes of
something like it now and then in Homer and the Hebrews; but they
flash across the text and pass away. Divine atrocity and...
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Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage
of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality
reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable
prices.
This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images
of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also
preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics,
unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and
every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and
interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human
than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a
unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader
organically to the art of bindery and book-making.
We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection
resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and
their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes
beyond the mere words of the text.
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for
quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in
an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the
digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books
may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading
experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have
elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing
commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.
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