Shakespeare's Coriolanus 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: thoughts he had before missed, of relations between the characters that had hitherto escaped him. For reading Shakespeare is just like examining Nature; there ar... more »e no hollownesses, there is no scamped work, for Shakespeare is as patiently exact and as first-hand as Nature herself. " Besides this thorough working-out of Shakespeare's meaning, advantage has been taken of the opportunity to teach his English—to make each play an introduction to the English Of Shakespeare. For this purpose copious collections of similar phrases have been gathered from other plays; his idioms have been dwelt upon ; his peculiar use of words; his style and his rhythm. Some teachers may consider that too many instances are given; but, in teaching, as in everything else, the old French saying is true: Assez n'y a, s'il trap n'y a. The teacher need not require each pupil to give him all the instances collected. If each gives one or two, it will probably be enough ; and, among them all, it is certain that one or two will stick in the memory. It is probable that, for those pupils who do not study either Greek or Latin, this close examination of every word and phrase in the text of Shakespeare will be the best substitute that can be found for the study of the ancient classics. "It were much to be hoped that Shakespeare should become more and more of a study, and that every boy and girl should have a thorough knowledge of at least one play of Shakespeare before leaving school. It.would be one of the best lessons in human life, without the chance of a polluting or degrading experience. It would also have the effect of bringing back into the too pale and for chapter{Section 4Til mal English of modern times a large number of pithy and vigorous phrases which would help to develop as well as to reflect v...« less