Reading the just-specified play in the light of Mr. O'Connor's
suggestion, I defy any one to escape such new and deep utterance-
meanings, like magic ink, warm' d by the fire, and previously invisible.
Will it not indeed be strange if the author of "Othello" and "Hamlet"
is destin'd to live in America, in a generation or two, less as the
cunning draughtsman of the passions, and more as putting on record the
first full expose--and by far the most vivid one, immeasurably ahead of
doctrinaires and economists--of the political theory and results, or the
reason-why and necessity for them which America has come on earth to
abnegate and replace?
The summary of my suggestion would be, therefore, that while the more
the rich and tangled jungle of the Shaksperean area is travers'd and
studied, and the more baffled and mix'd, as so far appears, becomes
the exploring student (who at last surmises everything, and remains
certain of nothing,) it is possible a future age of criticism, diving
deeper, mapping the land and lines freer, completer than hitherto, may
discover in the plays named the scientific (Baconian?) inauguration
of modern democracy--furnishing realistic and first-class artistic
portraitures of the mediaeval world, the feudal personalities,
institutes, in their morbid accumulations, deposits, upon politics and
sociology,--may penetrate to that hard-pan, far down and back of the
ostent of to-day, on which (and on which only) the progressism of the
last two centuries has built this Democracy which now hold's secure
lodgment over the whole civilized world.
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