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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1882 Original Publisher: Lee and Shepard Subjects: Drama / Shakespeare Literary Criticism / Shakespeare Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: MAN IN SHAKESPEARE. I PROPOSE to speak on Man in Shakespeare; I mean the male side of human nature as it appears to us in his dramatic representations. i. Nature has but one humanity, one human life; but this humanity, this human life, has two distinct manifestations; these manifestations are in sex. The distinction runs into all the currents of life: it commences with life in its primal fountain; it is, therefore, inherent, radical, thorough. It is subtile, pervading; we cannot analyze it, we cannot define it; but we fed it. We find in each sex certain tendencies and aptitudes, ways of thinking, ideals, emotions, forces, language, in which one distinctively differs from the other. This difference may evade logic and defy statement; but it is not the less absolute. The distinction is in nature, and therefore it is in Shakespeare. Even in the spiritual constitution of Shakespeare's personages there is the evidenceof sex; in the very innermost nature it is implanted: they think out of it, they speak out of it. The men are distinguished from the women of Shakespeare even in the movements of the mind. Sometimes this is in faculty; sometimes in degree; sometimes only in manner. Take as an example of faculty that of humor. Humor, in all its forms, Shakespeare puts into the mouths of men. Herein he assuredly accords with nature. Genius is but the highest expression of nature; and the genius of humor, in any of its methods of expression, has been mostly, if not entirely, found in men. But if Shakespeare giv...

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