Читать книгу William Shakespeare: A Critical Study - Георг Брандес - Страница 20

[1] Here is a specimen. Romeo says to Juliet—

"Since, lady, that you like to honor me so much

As to accept me for your spouse, I yeld my selfe for such.

In true witness whereof, because I must depart,

Till that my deed do prove my woord, I leave in pawne my hart.

Tomorrow eke bestimes, before the sunne arise,

To Fryer Lawrence will I wende, to learne his sage advise."

[2] "A coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselves to vnhonest desire, neglecting the anthoritie and aduise of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of unchastitie), attemptyng all aduentures of peryll for thattaynyng of their wished lust, vsyng auriculer confession (the key of whoredom and treason)...."

[3] See Dowden: Shakspere: His Mind and Art, p. 60.

[4] Edward von Hartmann, from the lofty standpoint of German morality, has launched a diatribe against Juliet. He asserts her immeasurable moral inferiority to the typical German maiden, both of poetry and of real life. Schiller's Thekla has undeniably less warm blood in her veins.

A Swedish professor, Henrik Schück, in an able work on Shakespeare, says of Juliet: "On examining into the nature of the love to which she owes all this strength, the unprejudiced reader cannot but recognise in it a purely sensual passion.... A few words from the lips of this well-favoured youth are sufficient to awaken in its fullest strength the slumbering desire in her breast. But this love possesses no psychical basis; it is not founded on any harmony of souls. They scarcely know each other.... Can their love, then, be anything more than the merely sensual passion aroused by the contemplation of a beautiful body? ... So much I say with confidence, that the woman who, inaccessible to the spiritual element in love, lets herself be carried away on this first meeting by the joy of the senses ... that woman is ignorant of the love which our age demands."