|
No, his heart was in these passages of verse, and so the heart of the play is in them. And the secret of the play--the refutation of all doctrinaire criticism of it--lies in the fact that though they may offend against every letter of dramatic law they fulfil the inmost spirit of it, inasmuch as they are dramatic in themselves. They are instinct with that excitement, that spontaneity, that sense of emotional overflow which is drama. They are as carefully constructed for effective speaking as a messenger\'s speech in a Greek drama. One passage in particular, Puck\'s \"My mistress with a monster is in love,\" is both in idea and form, in its tension, climax, and rounding off, a true messenger\'s speech. Shakespeare, I say, was from the first a playwright in spite of himself. Even when he seems to sacrifice drama to poem he--instinctively or not--manages to make the poem itself more dramatic than the drama he sacrifices.
-Harley Granville-Barker, More Prefaces to Shakespeare, 1974
|
