In the last charming line I find not only the music of
Shakespeare's voice, but also one of the reasons--perhaps, indeed, the
chief because the highest reason--which drew him from Stratford to
London. And what the "future hope" was, he told us in the very first
line of "Love's Labour's Lost." The King begins the play with"
"Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives."
Now all men don't hunt after fame; it was Shakespeare who felt that Fame
pieced out Life's span and made us "heirs of all eternity"; it was young
Shakespeare who desired fame so passionately that he believed all other
men must share his immortal longing, the desire in him being a forecast
of capacity, as, indeed, it usually is. If any one is inclined to think
that I am here abusing conjecture let him remember that Proteus, too,
tells us that Valentine is hunting after honour.
When Proteus defends love we hear Shakespeare just as clearly as when
Valentine inveighs against it:
"Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canker dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
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