little of imaginative mystery. The chief subject of difference among its critics concerns what we may call the ethics of the play.[1] "By Friar Laurence," writes Gervinus, "who, as it were, represents the part of the chorus in this tragedy, the leading idea of the piece is expressed in all fulness, an idea that runs throughout the whole, that excess in any enjoyment, however pure in itself, transforms its sweet into bitterness, that devotion to any single feeling, however noble, bespeaks its ascendency; that this ascendency moves the man and woman out of their natural spheres; that love can only be a companion in life, and cannot fill out the life and business of the man especially; that in the full power of its first rising, it is a paroxysm of happiness, which, according to its nature, cannot continue in equal strength; that, as the poet says in an image, it is a flower that,
'Being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.'"
And the critic pursues his well-meant moralisings in the same spirit.
Much nearer the mark was Goethe in his arrangement of Romeo and Juliet for the Weimar theatre, 1811: "Before Juliet revives," in Goethe's recast, "the Friar confesses that all his cunning wisdom was in vain; that if he had opposed, instead of aiding the lovers, things could not have come to a worse end. After
- ↑ The commonplace moralisings and the vigorous Protestant feeling expressed by Brooke in his address "To the Reader," prefixed to Romeus and Juliet, did not influence Shakespeare; and they do not enter into Brooke's poem, where the hero and heroine are not represented as "thralling themselves to unhonest desire," and the "superstitious frier" appears as an amiable old student of natural science.
