Search -
Rosamund Gray, Essays, Letters, and Poems
Rosamund Gray Essays Letters and Poems Author:Charles Lamb Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, CONTEHPORABT WITH RRAKSPEARE. When I selected for publication, in 1808, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about... more » the time of Shakspcare, the kind of extracts which I was anxious to give were not so much passages of wit and humor, though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting situations, serious descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I made choice of were, with few exceptions, such as treat of human life and manners, rather than masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals— Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amaryllis. My leading design was to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors. To show in what manner they felt, when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying circumstances, in the conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife of contending duties; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how their griefs were tempered, and their full-swollen joys abated; how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind. I was also desirous to brin"' together some of the most admired scenes of Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only dramatic poets of that age entitled to be considered after Shakspeare, and, by exhibiting them in the same volume with the more impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Hey- wood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and others, to shorw what we had slighted, while beyond all proportion we had been crying up one or two favorite names. From the desultory critic...« less