Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely narrative arrangement common in plays before his time.
(b) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of matter neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of character: e.g. the references in Hamlet to theatre-quarrels of the day, and the length of the player’s speech and also of Hamlet’s directions to him respecting the delivery of the lines to be inserted in the ‘Murder of Gonzago.’ All this was probably of great interest at the time when Hamlet was first presented; most of it we should be very sorry to miss; some of it seems to bring us close to Shakespeare himself; but who can defend it from the point of view of constructive art?
(c) Again, we may look at Shakespeare’s soliloquies. It will be agreed that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are being addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the soliloquies are master-pieces. But certainly in some the purpose of giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks to the audience. Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays, though there is a glaring instance at the end of Belarius’s speech in Cymbeline (III. iii. 99 ff), and even in the mature tragedies something of this kind may be traced. Let anyone compare, for example, Edmund’s soliloquy in King Lear, I. ii., ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world,’ with Edgar’s in II. iii., and he will be conscious that in the latter the purpose of giving information is imperfectly disguised.[1]
- ↑ I do not discuss the general question of the justification of soliloquy, for it concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all dramatists down to quite recent times. I will only remark that neither soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that they are ‘unnatural.’ No dramatic language is ‘natural’; all dramatic language is idealised. So that the question as to soliloquy must be one as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of advantages and
