Ashley Horace Thorndike

“ Love is the theme, and an excess of sentiment and passion in conflict with friendship, right, or natural law, is the particular province that Ford makes his own. A favorite in love with the wife of his lord, a brother in love with a sister, are the situations over which his genius casts an oppressive melancholy that lasts until the final heart-breaks. The monarch, his favorite, a buffoon or two, and lords and ladies, love-sick or passion-inflamed, play with the casuistry of love and mingle dances and revels with bloodshed and horror. Villany and revenge appear but are not very essential. ”

“ Men achieved much and they dreamt of more. The apprentice went to the theatre to don Fortunatus's cap or to triumph with Tamburlaine; every one had his El Dorado distant only a short voyage; and, with the new world before them, poets and playwrights set sail in blithe confidence of splendid discovery. Never before, or perhaps since, have so many new things seemed within grasp, whether in literature or in life; never has all living so throbbed with a sense of the nearness of the unattainable, the kinship of the real and the ideal. ”

“ And this feverishness to make trial of thronging opportunities was symptomatic not only of vigor of intellect, celerity of emotion, and independence of will, but also of an imaginative idealism that enlightened the daily living of many a sorry citizen, and was destined to live resplendent in the verses of Spenser and Shakespeare. In the stir of free ideas, the surprise of discovery, and the glow of accomplishment, life grew heroic, attainment seemed easy, and no ideals too lofty for the scaling ladders of human aspiration. ”

“ The effect of Shakespeare's tragedies on spectator or reader is so complex as to defy analysis. Incidental wisdom, effective scene, immortal story all contribute; but the main sources of their abiding impressiveness have surely been the characterization and the poetic style. If we must continue to seek for a katharsis, do not they supply it? The great tragedies are full of disaster, wrong, and suffering. The world they reveal is not the abode of happiness, but of darkness and remorse. Though the bad are punished, the good are not rewarded. ”

“ Even Shakespeare's isles of the blest that so delighted Elizabeth and James were strangely inaccessible to Restoration fancy, which took pleasure in only the "Merry Wives of Windsor" among his comedies. The narrowing of romance had been manifest in the drama since 1600, and it was a theatrical and artificial domain of thrills, sentiments, and honor that the Restoration received for its heritage. Poor enough as is this kingdom, absurd its inhabitants, it is still the land of the wonderful and impossible, and its monarchs now and then remind us of Tamburlaine and Hotspur. ”

“ The harmony of the argument, the splendor of the verse, the grandeur of conception and expression may counterbalance the painfulness of the story. Yet more, tragedy may bring the inspiration of greatness and endurance, of purity and unselfishness of spirit. Its idealization of character, its revelation of beauty and power even in distress and downfall, may bring a reassurance that turns pity to exhilaration. In drama as in life there may come in moments of trial and ruin the visions of the eternities to console and exalt us. ”

“ Verona of brawls, dinners, nurses, and deaths, and, forever ascendant over our fancies, like Romeo's blessed moon, "tips everything with silver."
It is in part this poetic style which distinguishes the play from the later tragedies, but the difference is everywhere manifest to our impressions. The evil and gloom and pessimism that help to make up the tragic fact in "Lear" and "Macbeth" are here scarcely felt. To joy comes sorrow, because of evil and through accident,—this is the tragic theme. ”

“ In literature we are attempting to trace the development of species, of which individuals live forever; to discriminate the agents in a complex creative process which we do not at all understand; to call one play the child of another when it is more truly the kaleidoscopic aggregate of much reading, much observation, much experience shaken into a new form by the author's creative imagination.
Literary criticism may borrow from the natural sciences the evolutionary conception and some of its accompaniments ”

“ His careful art and sincere morality lack the leaven of dramatic genius. The orator and the rhetorician are always elbowing the dramatist off the scene. His style, never splendid, never excessively figurative, is always contained and clear. At its best in sustained declamation, it often descends to a tone approaching prose and rarely rises to the more stirring or impelling emotions. His abundant inventiveness also fails him in the great crises of passion. Again and again when the heroine is at bay, or the hero within the jaws of ruin, Massinger resorts to oratory. ”

“ Deeply impressed by the current tradition about Beatrice Cenci, he made this story of incest and parricide the expression of his view of life and history as a conflict between tyranny and downtrodden innocence. Nowhere else in Shelley, not even in "Prometheus Unbound," does this world drama come out of the clouds and reveal itself with such clarity and power. There is passion in the persons, climax in the situations, and directness in the language such as the romantic drama had rarely shown. The philosophical conception and the tangle of human motives do not indeed quite harmonize. ”

“ The extraordinary achievements that had been contributing to the might of England as a political power were, indeed, but one expression of the freedom and eagerness of individual initiative that characterized this English Renaissance and found other expression in the activities and accomplishments of literature. In comparison with the men of preceding generations, the Elizabethan Englishman faced a world of new horizons, new ideas, boundless opportunities, and alluring rewards. Every career was open and promised an untrod pathway and unworn laurels. ”

“ We cannot separate ourselves from the misery. We feel the intolerable burden of the world's woe. Our sympathies struggle beneath it, vainly, despairingly. How far such emotions have any potency for actual accomplishment in deed may be doubtful to the psychologists; but surely our recognition of tragedy as one of the greatest imaginative achievements needs no other warrant than our faith that virtue lies in human sympathy, in the only atonement that we can offer, the vicarious response of our emotions to share in suffering and defeat. ”

“ Whether he has been writing mainly to meet the desires of actors and audience, or has been voyaging alone toward some discovery of beauty and grandeur of human passion, whether he has been building his house of intrigue according to well-conned rules of dramatic structure, or has been copying some tangle of fact, he has been studying the ways and means of human actions. Trivially or greatly, as the case may be, he has been seeking to interpret life. Classicist, romanticist, and realist have been by different processes seeking the same end, the discovery of meaning in the facts of existence. ”

“ Death ends all,—that is the great catastrophe toward which human endeavor precipitates itself. This is not Shakespeare's view of life, but it is his view of the tragedy of life, and its effect upon us is gloomy, overpowering, heartrending. But everywhere this tragedy of life is revealed in verse infinitely appealing to intellectual analysis and to imaginative exhilaration. Everywhere there are men and women, not dead but living, representative of much that is most intensely and universally interesting in life, and the permanent guests of our reflection. ”