An Essay Upon the Ghost-belief of Shakespeare

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Page 28 - The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation, and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy ; Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear ! Hip.
Page 28 - T is strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. The. More strange than true : I never may believe These antique fables nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.
Page 9 - Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand ? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight ? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain ? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.
Page 15 - Be not too tame, neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature...
Page 15 - ... twere, the mirror up to nature ; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others.
Page 13 - They say, miracles are past; and we -have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar things, supernatural and causeless. Hence is it, that we make trifles of terrors; ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.
Page 28 - The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold ; That is, the madman : the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation, and a name.
Page 7 - Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks ; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body.
Page 13 - Shakspeare, inspired, as it might seem, with all knowledge, here uses the word 'causeless' in its strict philosophical sense ;— cause being truly predicable only of phenomena, that is, things natural, and not of noumena, or things supernatural.
Page 21 - O! reason not the need; our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm.

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