Letters; Written Between the Years 1784 And 1807: In Six Volumes Volume 5

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1811 edition. Excerpt: ... portion of existence can supply events, which place the persons of the drama in those varied and contrasting situations, which shew the characters in different points of view, as acting under the influence of dissimilar circumstances and passions. Mr Hodson had studied Shakespeare so little as to observe that, finely as he has written, " his plays would have possessed still greater superiority had he observed the rules of Aristotle." All who feel Shakespeare's excellence, and examine the causes of his infinitely surpassing powers, respecting all other dramatic writers, Greek, Roman, French, German, and English, in the representation of life, of the passions, and manners, will feel that his disdain of those rules is not an error to be pardoned on the score of his poetic and characteristic recompenses, but one powerfully operative means by which he acquired his confessed transcendence. Could he have been engaged to have new-modelled his Macbeth in an approach to the restraints of the unities, as to time and place, observe what it must have lost;--the heath-scene; the banquet-scene; the cavescene; the castle-scene, and its siege, --with all their animating changes, all the characteristic varieties, all the poetic sublimities resulting from situations of such inspiriting difference!--all lopt and lost; while, for the business of one evening, and even for an elapse of twenty-four hours, what superfluous speeches, what spun-out declamation, must have been made to have dragged the murder of Duncan through five acts? Then the admirable moral sacrificed, which results from the gradual progression of vice in the character of Macbeth;--a mind, once great and noble, proceeding to the last excesses of superfluous cruelty. That could not...