Spoils Studies in Shakespeare (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

Caldecott, Harry Stratford

9780267651849: Spoils Studies in Shakespeare (Classic Reprint)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0267651848 ISBN 13: 9780267651849

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

Excerpt from Spoils Studies in Shakespeare

There have been, admittedly, mountains of rubbish written about Shakespeare. He has (according to Mr. Saintsbury, his latest critic and expositor) been the subject of commentatorial folly to an extent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject. One especial form of folly has been to treat Shakespeare as, if not exactly an inspired idiot, at any rate a mainly tentative if not purely unconscious artist, much of whose work is only not bad as art, while most, if not all, of it was originally produced with a minimum of artistic conscious ness and designl - and, I may add, with a minimum of literary preparation, and a tag-rag equipment of knowledge, comparable only to the motley of a juggler or a court fool. The business of the critic, therefore, is much more to shovel away the rubbish of his predecessors than to attempt any accummula tion of his own. In the meantime certain writers have boldly put forward the theory that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare at all. The newest form of folly, in fact, is to deny that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems so long attributed to him - and not only to deny that Shakespeare wrote them, but to, assert that his great co-temporary, Francis Bacon, did. This hypothesis - strange and startling as it may seem - is, if not proved, at least supported by many curious and ingenious arguments. Many people have been convinced of its validity, and declare that for them it has thrown fresh beauty, grandeur, and meaning on the plays, and cleared up many doubts and difficulties of criticism, which have so far defied s'olution.

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