Introducing Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide - Nick Groom, Piero 2013
The Splendours of Shakespeare
Lewis Theobald (1688-1744), in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works, was dazzled …
THE attempt to write upon SHAKESPEARE is like going into a large, a spacious, and a splendid dome through the conveyance of a narrow and obscure entry.
A glare of light suddenly breaks upon you beyond what the avenue at first promised …
… and a thousand beauties of genius and character, like so many gaudy apartments pouring at once upon the eye, diffuse and throw themselves out to the mind.
The prospect is too wide to come within the compass of a single view …
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), in his eerie essay, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’’, concludes in rapture …
O MIGHTY POET! THY WORKS ARE NOT AS THOSE OF OTHER MEN, SIMPLY AND MERELY GREAT WORKS OF ART, BUT ARE ALSO LIKE THE PHENOMENA OF NATURE …
… like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew, hailstorm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties … the farther we press in our discovèries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!
