ly to be separated, for the persons are
revealed through the beauty of the verse, and the poetry is ever adapted
to the speakers. In the early plays the poet's fancy often refuses to be
bound by the requirements of his characters and escapes in lyric or
descriptive excursions; but as his art becomes more masterly, the
poetry adapts itself with increasing devotion to the dramatic task,
discarding the limitations of the verse form and even at times
sacrificing clarity and harmony of expression in its effort to make a
few lines significant of the thought and emotion of some individual. An
enormous vocabulary is treated with daring freedom; words are coined,
changed, or restamped in order to let nothing of significance escape.
The effect is not primarily that of finished workmanship or elaborate
harmony, though these may be found in many passages and notably in the
greatest of the sonnets. Broken rather than completed images, richness
of suggestion rather than unity of impressiveness, surprise and novelty
in words rather than their delicate adjustment, make up an effect of
bewildering enchantment rather than of perfected form. This is true even
in an early play like _Romeo and Juliet_, where the verse becomes
undramatic in order to make the most of every opportunity for fancy or
melody, and it is true also in _Othello_, where poetry and
characterization are wedded with consummate art. The reader's pleasure
is not in finding each idea finally developed or each motive given full
elaboration. It is rather in the flow of words which endow each person
and moment with their wealth of color and suggestion, and somehow carry
on to the reader both their impression of life and the transforming
power of their dignity and splendor.

[Page Heading: Poetry of the Plays]

In a last analysis the quality of the poetry is less dependent on the
music of line or passage than on the imagery of the words themselves. It
seems as if the imagination had hurried on Ariel's wing around the
universe in order to freight each phrase with a fresh trope and an
unexpected meaning. Sometimes, to be sure, there results an excess or
mixture of figures; but restrained to character and situation, bound by
the measure of the pentameter, the carnival of words becomes a gorgeous
yet ordered pageant, the very spectacle of beauty.

Let us take but one passage, not from the great crises of passion, nor
from those unsurpassable revelations of the tortured spirit, bu