, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious,
and unnatural language, in which not only they could not speak, but in
which no living man ever has spoken or does speak.

No living men could or can say, as Lear says, that he would divorce his
wife in the grave should Regan not receive him, or that the heavens
would crack with shouting, or that the winds would burst, or that the
wind wishes to blow the land into the sea, or that the curled waters
wish to flood the shore, as the gentleman describes the storm, or that
it is easier to bear one's grief and the soul leaps over many sufferings
when grief finds fellowship, or that Lear has become childless while I
am fatherless, as Edgar says, or use similar unnatural expressions with
which the speeches of all the characters in all Shakespeare's dramas
overflow.

Again, it is not enough that all the characters speak in a way in which
no living men ever did or could speak--they all suffer from a common
intemperance of language. Those who are in love, who are preparing for
death, who are fighting, who are dying, all alike speak much and
unexpectedly about subjects utterly inappropriate to the occasion, being
evidently guided rather by consonances and play of words than by
thoughts. They speak all alike. Lear raves exactly as does Edgar when
feigning madness. Both Kent and the fool speak alike. The words of one
of the personages might be placed in the mouth of another, and by the
character of the speech it would be impossible to distinguish who
speaks. If there is a difference in the speech of Shakespeare's various
characters, it lies merely in the different dialogs which are pronounced
for these characters--again by Shakespeare and not by themselves. Thus
Shakespeare always speaks for kings in one and the same inflated, empty
language. Also in one and the same Shakespearian, artificially
sentimental language speak all the women who are intended to be poetic:
Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, Marina. In the same way, also, it
is Shakespeare alone who speaks for his villains: Richard, Edmund, Iago,
Macbeth, expressing for them those vicious feelings which villains never
express. Yet more similar are the speeches of the madmen with their
horrible words, and those of fools with their mirthless puns. So that in
Shakespeare there is no language of living individuals--that language
which in the drama is the chief means of setting forth character. If
gesticulation be also a