thee, the death
Of the young prince, whose honourable thoughts,
Thoughts high for one so tender, cleft the heart
That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
Blemished his gracious dam.

Nowhere are the poet's metaphors more nakedly material; nowhere does he
verge more often upon a sort of brutality of phrase, a cruel coarseness.
Iachimo tells us how:

The cloyed will,
That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub
Both filled and running, ravening first the lamb,
Longs after for the garbage.

and talks of:

an eye
Base and unlustrous as the smoky light
That's fed with stinking tallow.

'The south fog rot him!' Cloten bursts out to Imogen, cursing her
husband in an access of hideous rage.

What traces do such passages as these show of 'serene self-possession,'
of 'the highest wisdom and peace,' or of 'meditative romance'? English
critics, overcome by the idea of Shakespeare's ultimate tranquillity,
have generally denied to him the authorship of the brothel scenes in
_Pericles_ but these scenes are entirely of a piece with the grossnesses
of _The Winter's Tale_ and _Cymbeline_.

Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers?

says Posthumus when he hears of Imogen's guilt.

We are all bastards;
And that most venerable man, which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seemed
The Dian of that time; so doth my wife
The nonpareil of this--O vengeance, vengeance!
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained
And prayed me, oft, forbearance; did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't
Might well have warmed old Saturn, that I thought her
As chaste as unsunned snow--O, all the devils!--
This yellow Iachimo, in an hour,--was't not?
Or less,--at first: perchance he spoke not; but,
Like a full-acorned boar, a German one,
Cried, oh! and mounted: found no opposition
But what he looked for should oppose, and she
Should from encounter guard.

And Leontes, in a similar situation, expresses himself in images no less
to the point.

There have been,
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the