Literature of the world : an introductory study . have the match-less love story of Romeoand Juliet. The second stage ofShakespeares v/ork is in-troduced by The ISIer-chant of Venice, with itsfine character conceptionsof Portia and of period includes alsothe rich and mellow andbroadly human playsMuch Ado about Noth-ing, As You Like it,and Twelfth Night,constituting the supremeflower of English is nothing in ourliterature to set beside the masterly characterizations of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola—por-traits in the great gallery of Shakespeares feminine characters. Th
Literature of the world : an introductory study . have the match-less love story of Romeoand Juliet. The second stage ofShakespeares v/ork is in-troduced by The ISIer-chant of Venice, with itsfine character conceptionsof Portia and of period includes alsothe rich and mellow andbroadly human playsMuch Ado about Noth-ing, As You Like it,and Twelfth Night,constituting the supremeflower of English is nothing in ourliterature to set beside the masterly characterizations of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola—por-traits in the great gallery of Shakespeares feminine characters. Thehistorical plays of this period are King John; Richard II, oneof the most deeply pathetic of all historical studies; Henry IV,containing one of the worlds master creations in comedy, the in-comparable old rogue Falstaff; and Henry V, perhaps the great-est treatment in our literature of a popular national hero. Amongthe tragedies are Julius Caesar and Hamlet. The first is al-niost faultless in dramatic structure, in interdependence of episode,. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 374 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD and in the working out of an essentially tragic conflict in the char-acter of Brutus. As for Hamlet, no man has yet plucked outthe heart of his mystery. The tragic greatness of the centralcharacter, struggling under the burden and the weight of allthis unintelligible world, the luminous insight into human motivesand passions, and the terrible sweep of forces ruthlessly crushingthe innocent with the guilty—the fragile flower Ophelia withthe base and wicked king—give it a place among the worldsgreatest dramas. Hamlet forms a fitting introduction to the third stage ofShakespeares work, often referred to as the great tragic reveals to us the wreck of a deeply tender and greatlysimple human soul,—one who loved not wisely but too well,—and in lago portrays a type of subtle, insidious, and unalloyedvillainy not equaled in literature. In Macbeth an essentiallynoble nature f
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, bookpublisherbosto, bookyear1922
