The New British Theatre (Volume 2); A Selection of Original Dramas, Not Yet Acted (Paperback)

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: NOTE ON SULIEMAN. The merits of a dramatic composition may be estimated either by considering the management of the subject or the style. For an author may evince the very highest powers as a dramatist, and yet his performance not afford a single striking quotation; on the contrary, he may possess very little of that metaphysical acumen, which constitutes the tact of the dramatist, and yet his works may furnish splendid specimens of poetry.?Glover, in his Medea, is an example of the latter. In the Coriolanus of Shakespear it would be difficult to find five successive lines with any ordinary degree of poetical merit, and yet, perhaps, the play, taken altogether, is one of the best of the greatest dramatist that ever appeared. Dr. Johnson has indeed observed, that those who would judge of Shakespear's genius by quotations, might as well attempt to form an idea of the architectural magnificence of a great edifice by inspecting the bricks. But the indisputable soundness of this remark, as applied to Shakespear, the invidious spirit of modern criticism carefully keeps out of mind in pretending to estimate the works of living authors. The reviewers in general either want the di1cernment to perceive, or the judgment to appreciate, what is characteristic, and they often fix on those passages as blemishes, which are intended by the dramatist for features of character, and which perhaps require more knowledge of the human mind to conceive with a proper degree, not of mediocrity only, but of meanness and vulgarity, than it requires talents to produce the finest incidental effusions of sentimental or descriptive poetry. In the task that we have imposed upon ourselves, with the hope of inducing some degree of reformation in the spectacles of the stage, we are convinced that the eff...