Essays On Shakespeare

The Tempest: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Shakespeare’s The Tempest
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently, there must be rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing but means to an end previously ascertained—(inattention to which simple truth has been the occasion of all [...]

Henry V, Prologue

Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this Wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?