Shakespeare on the Stage
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217253628
Paperback|9780217253628
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Overview
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: III. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Thou art come to answer A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch Uncapable of pity, void and empty From any dram of mercy. ?Shakespeare. The most popular of Shakespeare's comedies, the one most widely known, the one by means of which most abundant success has been obtained on the stage, is The Merchant of Venice. One reason for its exceptional vitality is the fascinating charm of its style, the simple, direct, fluent, sweet, natural language of human feeling, sometimes irradiated with the fire of poetic thought, and sometimes expanded and elevated with the fervor of noble eloquence. Its more decisive power consists in the felicity of its fable, and in the force, interest, and variety of its happily harmonized and as happily contrasted characters. The love story of Bassanio and Portia is ingeniously fanciful, and it may be doubted whether, in the whole wide range of the poetic drama, there is any woman who can vie with Portia, as a type of blended intellect, brilliancy, and feminine fascination. No characters in Shakespearean comedy are more sharply discriminated or more vigorously drawn than those of Portia, Shy- lock, Antonio, Gratiano, and Launcelot Gobbo. Nowhere else is the poet more eloquent than he is in this play, in expressing elemental passions of human nature. Portia is a perfect incarnation of love, Shylock a perfect incarnation of hate; Antonio typifies the temperament of constitutional melancholy; Gratiano is embodied glee, and Launcelot is an image of drollery and animal happiness. Studies of character that the poet began in his juvenile comedy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona are massed and completed in his mature comedy of The Merchant. Launce, in the former, foreshadows Launcelot in the latter, Lucetta is the germ of ...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217253628 |
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| ISBN-10 | 0217253628 |
| Weight | 0.73 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.51 In |
| List Price | $21.14 |
| Format | Paperback |
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| Pages | 222 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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