If I
were asked to complete the portrait given to us by Shakespeare of
himself in Hamlet-Macbeth with one single passage, I should certainly
choose the first words of the Duke in "Twelfth Night." I must transcribe
the poem, though it will be in every reader's remembrance; for it
contains the completest, the most characteristic, confession of
Shakespeare's feelings ever given in a few lines:
"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again;--it had a dying fall:
Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.--Enough! no more
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before."
Every one will notice that Shakespeare as we know him in Romeo is here
depicted again with insistence on a few salient traits; here, too, we
have the poet of the Sonnets masquerading as a Duke and the protagonist
of yet another play. There is still less art used in characterizing this
Duke than there is in characterizing Macbeth; Shakespeare merely lets
himself go and sings his feelings in the most beautiful words.
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