Now if Hamlet's praise of the Aeneas and Dido play and speech is
ironical, his later advice to the player must surely be ironical too:
and who will maintain that? And if in the one passage Hamlet is serious
but Shakespeare ironical, then in the other passage all those famous
remarks about drama and acting, which have been cherished as
Shakespeare's by all the world, express the opposite of Shakespeare's
opinion: and who will maintain that? And if Hamlet and Shakespeare are
both serious--and nothing else is credible--then, to Hamlet and
Shakespeare, the speeches of Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia's grave are
rant, but the speech of Aeneas to Dido is not rant. Is it not evident
that he meant it for an exalted narrative speech of 'passion,' in a
style which, though he may not have adopted it, he still approved and
despised the million for not approving,--a speech to be delivered with
temperance or modesty, but not too tamely neither? Is he not aiming here
to do precisely what Marlowe aimed to do when he proposed to lead the
audience
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
to 'stately' themes which beget 'high astounding terms'? And is it
strange that, like Marlowe in _Tamburlaine_, he adopted a style marred
in places by that which _we_ think bombast, but which the author meant
to be more 'handsome than fine'?
2.
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