THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
something new and wonderful. Certain child-like ages, notably the Elizabethan, have rediscovered language, have toyed with it and manipulated it,—even distorted it; and Shakspere, the supreme child of a child-like age, when his interest was diverted from word-play to the spectacle of life, energized that life with unreflecting abandon into language curiously haphazard and uneven, but at its best a matchless symbol or incarnation of life itself.
III
The theory of Shakspere's mind which is here put forth seems to find two objections. The sonnets, which follow a contemporary fashion in a set literary form, can hardly be accounted for as the unconscious product of the naïve contemplation of life. And in the plays
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