The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [2805]
Death’s name is much more mighty than his deeds:
Thy parcelling this power hath made it more.
As many sands as these my hands can hold
Are but my handful of so many sands;
Then all the world—and call it but a power—
Easily ta’en up, and quickly thrown away;
But if I stand to count them sand by sand
The number would confound my memory
And make a thousand millions of a task
Which briefly is no more indeed than one.
These quartered squadrons and these regiments
Before, behind us, and on either hand,
Are but a power: When we name a man,
His hand, his foot, his head, have several strengths;
And being all but one self instant strength,
Why, all this many, Audley, is but one,
And we can call it all but one man’s strength.
He that hath far to go tells it by miles;
If he should tell the steps, it kills his heart:
The drops are infinite that make a flood,
And yet, thou know’st, we call it but a rain.
There is but one France, one king of France,
That France hath no more kings; and that same king
Hath but the puissant legion of one king;
And we have one: Then apprehend no odds;
For one to one is fair equality.
Bien coupé, mal cousu; such is the most favourable verdict I can pass on this voluminous effusion of a spirit smacking rather of the schools than of the field. The first six lines or so might pass muster as the early handiwork of Shakespeare; the rest has as little of his manner as his matter, his metre as his style.
The poet can hardly be said to rise again after this calamitous collapse. We find in the rest of this scene nothing better worth remark than such poor catches at a word as this;
And let those milkwhite messengers of time
Show thy time’s learning in this dangerous time;
a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and then to affect the adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself as admirably as unconsciously burlesqued in two lines of this very scene:
I will not give a penny for a life,
Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death.
The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and passably well worded; indeed the force of elegant commonplace cannot well go further than in such lines as these.
Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils,
And stratagems forepast with iron pens
Are texèd in thine honourable face;
Thou art a married man in this distress,
But danger woos me as a blushing maid;
Teach me an answer to this perilous time.
Audley. To die is all as common as to live;
The one in choice, the other holds in chase;
For from the instant we begin to live
We do pursue and hunt the time to die:
First bud we, then we blow, and after seed;
Then presently we fall; and as a shade
Follows the body, so we follow death.
If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it?
If we fear it, why do we follow it?
(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever have put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of response from an Irish echo—“Because we can’t help.”)
If we do fear, with fear we do but aid
The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner;
If we fear not, then no resolvèd proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate:
and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of a passage in the transcendant central scenes of Measure for Measure:
Merely, thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn’st toward him still;
and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-whistle was blown by the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelic trumpet. Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego.
The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no special analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog
Which now hath hid the