But the truth will out: Shakespeare was the greatest of
poets, a miraculous artist, too, when he liked; but he was not a hero,
and manliness was not his
forte: he was by nature a neuropath and
a lover.
He was a master of passion and pity, and it astonishes one to notice how
willingly he passed always to that extreme of sympathy where nothing but
his exquisite choice of words and images saved him from falling into the
silly. For example, in "Titus Andronicus," with its crude, unmotived
horrors, Titus calls Marcus a murderer, and when Marcus replies: "Alas,
my lord, I have but killed a fly," Titus answers:
"But how, if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buzz lamenting doings in the air?
Poor harmless fly!
That with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry! and thou hast killed him."
Even in his earliest plays in the noontide of lusty youth, when the heat
of the blood makes most men cruel, or at least heedless of others'
sorrows, Shakespeare was full of sympathy; his gentle soul wept with the
stricken deer and suffered through the killing of a fly.
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