" Admirable critics!
THE WINTER'S TALE
We wonder that Mr. Pope should have entertained doubts of the
genuineness of this play. He was, we suppose, shocked (as a certain
critic suggests) at the Chorus, Time, leaping over sixteen years
with his crutch between the third and fourth act, and at Antigonus's
landing with the infant Perdita on the seacoast of Bohemia. These
slips or blemishes, however, do not prove it not to be
Shakespeare's; for he was as likely to fall into them as anybody;
but we do not know anybody but himself who could produce the
beauties. The STUFF of which the tragic passion is composed, the
romantic sweetness, the comic humour, are evidently his. Even the
crabbed and tortuous style of the speeches of Leontes, reasoning on
his own jealousy, beset with doubts and fears, and entangled more
and more in the thorny labyrinth, bears every mark of Shakespeare's
peculiar manner of conveying the painful struggle of different
thoughts and feelings, labouring for utterance, and almost strangled
in me birth. For instance:
Ha' not you seen, Camillo?
(But that's past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass
Is thicker than a cuckold's horn) or heard,
(For to a vision so apparent, rumour
Cannot be mute) or thought (for cogitation
Resides not within man that does not think)
My wife is slippery? If thou wilt, confess,
Or else be impudently negative,
To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought.
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