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Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher
Shakespeare Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge 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: NOTES ON BEN JONSON. IT would be amusing to collect out of our dramatists from Elizabeth to Charles I. proofs of the manners of the times. One striking sympto... more »m of general coarseness of manners, which may coexist with great refinement of morals, as, alas! rice versa, is to be seen in the very frequent allusions to the olfactories with their most disgusting stimulants, and these, too, in the conversation of virtuous ladies. This would not appear so strange to one who had been on terms of familiarity with Sicilian and Italian women of rank: and bad as they may, too many of them, actually be, yet I doubt not that the extreme grossness of their language has impressed many an Englishman of the present era with far darker notions than the same language would have produced in the mind of one of Elizabeth's or James's courtiers. Those who have read Shakespeare only, complain of occasional grossness in his plays; but compare him with his contemporaries, and the inevitable conviction, is that of the exquisite purity of his imagination. The observation I have prefixed to the Volpone is the key to the faint interest which these noble efforts of intellectual power excite, with the exception of the fragment of the Sad Shepherd; because in that piece only is there any character with whom you can morally sympathise. On theother hand, Measure for Measure is the only play of Shakespeare's in which there are not some one or more characters, generally many, whom you follow with affectionate feeling. For I confess that Isabella, of all Shakespeare's female characters, pleases me the least; and Measure for Measure is, indeed, the only one of his genuine works, which is painful to ma Let me not conclude this remark, however, without a thankful acknowledgment to the manes of Ben Jonson, that the ...« less