Transcriber’s Notes:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
A complete list of corrections as well as other notes follows the text.
THE PRAISE OF SHAKESPEARE
THE PRAISE OF
SHAKESPEARE
AN ENGLISH ANTHOLOGY
COMPILED BY
C. E. HUGHES
WITH A PREFACE BY
SIDNEY LEE
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1904
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror;
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.
Richard III., III. i. 87.
Who is it that says most? which can say more
Than this rich praise,—that you alone are you?
In whose confine immured is the store
Which should example where your equal grew.
Lean penury within that pen doth dwell,
That to his subject lends not some small glory;
But he that writes of you, if he can tell
That you are you, so dignifies his story;
Let him but copy what in you is writ,
Not making worse what nature made so clear,
And such a counterpart shall fame his wit,
Making his style admired everywhere.
Sonnet LXXXIV.
[v]
PREFACE
I believe this volume serves a useful purpose. It is the fruit of asuggestion which I made to its compiler, Mr. Hughes, in the followingcircumstances.
At the beginning of last year I engaged in controversy in the Timesnewspaper with certain persons who laboured under the delusion that theevidence of Shakespeare’s authorship of those plays and poems, whichfor three centuries have been published as his, was inconclusive. Indefiance of the fact that the acknowledged work of Bacon, the prosewriter and philosopher, proves him to be incapable of writing verseof genuine merit, some of my opponents held Bacon and no other to beresponsible for those manifestations of supreme poetic genius whichare associated with Shakespeare’s name. Other sceptics, of less rawjudgment, hesitated to commit themselves to this extravagance,—theyconfined themselves to the slightly more plausible contention that thefacts recorded of Shakespeare by contemporaries were scanty, and thathis career was clothed in a mystery, which justified wild attempts at asolution.
The whole of the sceptical argument ignored alike the results ofrecent Shakespearean research and the elementary truths of Elizabethanliterary history. But confirmed sceptics are not easily convinced[vi]of defects of knowledg                        
...
                        
BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!

                        
Sitemize Üyelik ÜCRETSİZDİR!