He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is
Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:
"O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--
* * * * *
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss."
Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies
of life--a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is
inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death;
inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is
superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the
swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own
excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate
sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.
CHAPTER XI
THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: "LEAR"
Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashion to praise
Shakespeare as a demi-god; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of
perfection. This senseless hero-worship, which reached idolatry in the
superlatives of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and elsewhere in England,
was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has come to vigorous
expression in Tolstoi, who finds nothing to praise in any of
Shakespeare's works, and everything to blame in most of them, especially
in "Lear.
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