Transcriber’s note
Variable spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Minor punctuationinconsistencies have been silently repaired. A list of the corrections made can be found at the end of the book.
SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT
OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
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SHAKESPEARE’S
TREATMENT OF
LOVE & MARRIAGE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
By C. H. HERFORD
HONORARY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATUREIN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
First published in 1921
(All rights reserved)
TO
MY STUDENTS,
PAST AND PRESENT,
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
1901-1921
PREFACE
THE following essays, mainly concerned withfamous and familiar names, are less heterogeneous,and it is hoped less hackneyed, thansome of the titles may suggest. They are alloccupied ultimately with some aspect of a singleproblem in what I would call the psychologyof poetic experience, did not the phrase implya scientific rigour of method hardly as yetachieved, in this region, by psychological scienceitself, and in any case beyond the reach ofthe present writer. How is the gift of imaginativecreation affected by the presence in thesame mind of one or other of the spiritualenergies which have a different, even an alien,perhaps incompatible, aim or goal; or simplyby a bias of ingrained ethical habitudes orideals? What terms does poetry make with philosophy,or religion, or patriotism, or politics, orlove, when one of these is urgent, also, in themind of a poet? I say ‘terms’ advisedly, fornothing is more certain than that the outcome isdetermined by a process of give and take. Everycomplex experience involves a certain compromiseamong its disparate or contending factors; acompromise in great part, indeed, involuntary,resulting from the fact that, even in the least[8]integrated personalities, the field of consciousnessis a continuous unity, into which no fresh elemententers without modifying, and being itself modifiedby, the rest. In the class of cases with which weare here concerned the modification may be lossor gain, or both together. We think of Dante orLucretius as great philosophical poets, and manypeople assume, because there are longueurs in theParadiso, and tough blocks of versified mechanicsin the De Rerum Natura, that these great poetswould have produced better poems had theypursued poetry ‘for its own sake.’ What iscertain is that, without the passion for trut