The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [2812]
Love’s Labour’s Lost, iv. 3. Othello.
1. “By heaven, thy love is black 1. “An old black ram.” i. 1.
as ebony.”
2. “No face is fair that is not 2. “Your son-in-law is far more
full so black.” fair than black.” i. 3.
3. “O paradox! Black is the 3. “How if she be black and
badge of hell.” witty?” ii. 1.
4. “O, if in black my lady’s 4. “If she be black, and thereto
brows be decked.” have a wit.” id.
5. “And therefore is she born 5. “A measure to the health of
to make black fair.” black Othello.” ii. 3.
6. “Paints itself black to 6. “For I am black.” iii, 3.
imitate her brow.”
7. “To look like her are 7. “Begrimed and black.” id.
chimney-sweepers black.”
Now, with these parallel passages before them, what man, woman, or child could bring himself or herself to believe that the connection of these plays was casual or the date of the first Othello removable from the date of the early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play Love’s Labour’s Lost, or that anybody’s opinion that they were so was worth one straw? When therefore by the introduction of the Iago episode Shakespeare in his later days had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed the unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this Iago underplot supplied them with an evidence wholly distinct from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed in every point the conclusion independently arrived at and supported by the irresistible coincidence of all the tests. He defied anybody to accept his principle of study or adopt his method of work, and arrive at a different conclusion from himself.
The reading of Mr. G.’s paper on the authorship of the soliloquies in Hamlet was unavoidably postponed till the next meeting, the learned member having only time on this occasion to give a brief summary of the points he was prepared to establish and the grounds on which he was prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he first thought of starting the present Society, he had never read a line of the play in question, having always understood it to be admittedly spurious: but on being assured of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of the English-speaking world, who was good enough to read out to him in proof of this assertion all that part of the play which could reasonably be assigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrendered his own former opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be on the most solid of all possible foundations. At their next meeting he would show cause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but inconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare’s, but the entire original conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. The resemblance of this character to that of Volpone in The Fox and to that of Face in The Alchemist could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory reader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether the end in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the case of Hamlet) personal profit combined with revenge; and whether the disguise assumed was that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, the assumption of character was in all three cases identical. As to style, he was only too anxious to meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own ground any antagonist whose ear had begotten the crude and untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly within the range of the man who could produce those of Crites and of Macilente in Cynthia’s Revels and Every Man out of his Humour. The author of those soliloquies