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Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, histories, tragedies and poems
Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies histories tragedies and poems Author:William Shakespeare 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: EDITOR'S PREFACE. This edition of the works of Shakespeare has been prepared with a single eye to the wants of his readers. Its purpose is not to furnish mate... more »rial for critical study either of the Elizabethan dramatists or of the English language. It seeks rather to enable the reader of general intelligence to understand, and therefore to enjoy, what Shakespeare wrote as nearly as possible in the very way in which he would have understood and enjoyed it if he had lived in London in the reign of James I. That done, as well as the editor was able to do it under the limiting conditions of his work, he has regarded his task as ended. Editors of poets and dramatists at the best are always necessary evils ; commentators at the best are rarely better than unnecessary nuisances. They are so in this present case when they presume to do all the reader's thinking and appreciation for him, and thus deprive him of the highest pleasures and richest benefits that come of reading Shakespeare; and chiefly when in doing this they grope and fumble for a profound moral purpose in these plays ; which is really to insist upon such a purpose in the Italian novdli and English chronicles, which, always with the least possible trouble to himself, Shakespeare put into an actable shape. Nor has it been deemed desirable to label Shakespeare's style, and pigeon-hole it for reference by pointing out that this is metaphor, that simile, and the others synechdoche, hendiadys, litotes, zeugma, and the like. In an edition prepared as a textbook of literature for schools all this is in place and in keeping; but in one intended merely to be read and enjoyed, it seems more than out of place and out of keeping. I have never been able to divine how such rhetorical labelling helped any one to agreater enjoyment or a ...« less