I think Shakespeare liked Posthumus and Imogen; but he could not have
thought "Cymbeline" a great work, and so he pulled himself together for
a masterpiece. He seems to have said to himself, "All that fighting of
Posthumus is wrong; men do not fight at forty-eight; I will paint myself
simply in the qualities I possess now; I will tell the truth about
myself so far as I can." The result is the portrait of Prospero in "The
Tempest."
Let me just say before I begin to study Prospero that I find the
introduction of the Masque in the fourth act extraordinarily
interesting. Ben Jonson had written classic masques for this and that
occasion; masques which were very successful, we are told; they had
"caught on," in fact, to use our modern slang. Shakespeare will now show
us that he, too, can write a masque with classic deities in it, and
better Jonson's example. It is pitiful, and goes to prove, I think, that
Shakespeare was but little esteemed by his generation.
Jonson answered him conceitedly, as Jonson would, in the Introduction to
his "Bartholomew Fair" (1612-14), "If there be never a
Servant
monster i' the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes; nor a nest of
Antiques.
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