Excerpt from Shakespeare and His Critics The critics of the eighteenth century were largely occupied with endeavors to establish a standard text by emendation and conjecture. Quite generally they looked at the plays from the standpoint of the theatre, ignor ing the idea that the tragedies were commentaries on human nature and possessed an absolute quality like truth or beauty. Dr. Johnson is typical of this class, if he is not too extreme an instance of common sense to be typical of that excellent quality. Though these ...
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Excerpt from Shakespeare and His Critics The critics of the eighteenth century were largely occupied with endeavors to establish a standard text by emendation and conjecture. Quite generally they looked at the plays from the standpoint of the theatre, ignor ing the idea that the tragedies were commentaries on human nature and possessed an absolute quality like truth or beauty. Dr. Johnson is typical of this class, if he is not too extreme an instance of common sense to be typical of that excellent quality. Though these critics rebelled rather timidly against slavish obedience to the authority of 'the ancients, ' the idea that the author was an untutored, natural genius, who would have been much improved by a university training, was not fully eradicated. The true nature of art was not philosophically grasped, and the profound relation of the plays to life was but dimly hinted at. The idea that the characters could be discussed exactly as if they were real, that they differed from historic characters in pos sessing more interesting personalities, in being placed in more complicated and trying situations, and, there fore, exemplifying more fully the passions of men, did not occur to the critics till very late in the eighteenth century. Nor was it discovered till towards the close of the eighteenth century that Shakespeare's female characters bear almost as close a relation to feminine nature as his heroes do to manly nature. In fact, both of these views may be said to belong to the romantic school of the nineteenth century. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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