It is true that the choruses in Shakespeare
are generally so overloaded with curious ornament as to be
incomprehensible except as explanations of things already understood.
The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle to which the play is the
answer. One might at first suppose that the need of such finger-posts
betrayed a dull audience, but no dull person was ever enlightened by
Shakespeare's choruses. They play variations on the theme. They instruct
only the instructed.
If interest in the course of the story be the first excitement to the
theatre-goer, interest in seeing a picture of contemporary manners is
probably the second. Our chief loss in reading Shakespeare is the loss
of the society he depicts, and which we know only through him. In every
line and scene there must be meanings which have vanished forever with
the conditions on which they comment. A character on the stage has need,
at the feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will remind us of
something we know in real life. The types of Shakespeare which have been
found substantial enough to survive the loss of their originals must
have had an interest for the first audiences, both in nature and in
intensity, very different from their interest to us.
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