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The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1 Quotes
The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1
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Harold Clarke Goddard158 ratings, 4.44 average rating, 20 reviews
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The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1 Quotes
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“What, then, is the end of study?
For one thing, as the fate of Navarre’s Academe makes plain, it is not “philosophy” in the sense of a cloistered cultivation of the intellect and pursuit of truth for its own sake in a spot secluded from the world and from women. Nor is it “love” in its romantic sense sheltered from life’s suffering and reality--“love” with all its ritual and manners, its form and style, its fads and foibles, its “wit” and raprtee, its masks and costumes, its rhyming and sonneteering, its language of
‘Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical.’
These things are but summer flies that blow their worshipers full of ostentation, as they did Boyet--Boyet who picked up wit as pigeons do peas, Boyet the ladies’ man, forerunner of Osric, who kissed his hand away in courtesy. Neither is the end of education erudition, the barren learning that transformed the pendant Holofernes into a walking dictionary of synonyms, nor slavery to authority and the past, the bondage that never let the sycophatic curate Nathaniel utter an idea or opinion without backing it up with an “as the Father saith.” Nor, at the other extreme, is it subservience to fashion and the present, such as made the swashbuckling Don Adriano de Armado a mint of fire-new phrases emitting a “smoke of rhetoric.”
― The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1
For one thing, as the fate of Navarre’s Academe makes plain, it is not “philosophy” in the sense of a cloistered cultivation of the intellect and pursuit of truth for its own sake in a spot secluded from the world and from women. Nor is it “love” in its romantic sense sheltered from life’s suffering and reality--“love” with all its ritual and manners, its form and style, its fads and foibles, its “wit” and raprtee, its masks and costumes, its rhyming and sonneteering, its language of
‘Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical.’
These things are but summer flies that blow their worshipers full of ostentation, as they did Boyet--Boyet who picked up wit as pigeons do peas, Boyet the ladies’ man, forerunner of Osric, who kissed his hand away in courtesy. Neither is the end of education erudition, the barren learning that transformed the pendant Holofernes into a walking dictionary of synonyms, nor slavery to authority and the past, the bondage that never let the sycophatic curate Nathaniel utter an idea or opinion without backing it up with an “as the Father saith.” Nor, at the other extreme, is it subservience to fashion and the present, such as made the swashbuckling Don Adriano de Armado a mint of fire-new phrases emitting a “smoke of rhetoric.”
― The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1
“If I find a key that fits a treasure chest and am about to open it, but am suddenly confronted with indisputable evidence that it is a key to an entirely different chest several hundred years old, I may defer to the authenticity of the historical documents that have proved the fact, but what a fool I would be not to go ahead in spite of them and open the chest. A work of art exists for what it says to us, not for what it said to the people of its “own” day, nor even necessarily for what it said, consciously, to its author. A work of art is an autonomous entity. So long as we do no violence to it, we may fit to our own experience in any way we wish.”
― The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1
― The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1
