Still we have
some objections to the style, which we think savours more of the
pedantic spirit of Shakespeare's time than of his own genius; more
of controversial divinity, and the logic of Peter Lombard, than of
the inspiration of the Muse. It transports us quite as much to the
manners of the court, and the quirks of courts of law, as to the
scenes of nature or the fairyland of his own imagination.
Shakespeare has set himself to imitate the tone of polite
conversation then prevailing among the fair, the witty, and the
learned, and he has imitated it but too faithfully. It is as if the
hand of Titian had been employed to give grace to the curls of a
full-bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted to give expression
to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords. Shakespeare has put
an excellent description of this fashionable jargon into the mouth
of the critical Holofernes 'as too picked, too spruce, too affected,
too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it'; and nothing
can be more marked than the difference when he breaks loose from the
trammels he had imposed on himself, 'as light as bird from brake',
and speaks in his own person. We think, for instance, that in the
following soliloquy the poet has fairly got the start of Queen
Elizabeth and her maids of honour;
Biron. O! and I forsooth in love, I that have been love's whip; A
very beadle to an amorous sigh: A critic; nay, a night-watch
constable, A domineering pedant o'er the boy, Than whom no mortal
more magnificent.
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