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Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.
PAGE 418
NOTES ON HAMLET

and in King John,

And pick strong matter of revolt and wrath
Out of the bloody finger-ends of John;

and in Lucrece,

And, bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
Circles her body in on every side,
Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood
Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.
  Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,
  And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd.
Is it so very unlikely that the poet who wrote thus might, aiming at a peculiarly heightened and passionate style, write the speech of Aeneas?

     4. But, pursuing this line of argument, we must go further. There is really scarcely one idea, and there is but little phraseology, in the speech that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare's own works. He merely exaggerates a little here what he has done elsewhere. I will conclude this Note by showing that this is so as regards almost all the passages most objected to, as well as some others. (1) 'The Hyrcanian beast' is Macbeth's 'Hyrcan tiger' (III. iv. 101), who also occurs in 3 Hen. VI., I. iv. 155. (2) With 'total gules' Steevens compared Timon, IV. iii. 59 (an undoubtedly Shakespearean passage),

With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules.

(3) With 'baked and impasted' cf. John, III. iii. 42, 'If that surly spirit melancholy Had baked thy blood.' In the questionable Tit. And., V. ii. 201 we have, 'in that paste let their vile heads be baked' (a paste made of blood and bones, ib. I88), and in the undoubted Richard II., III. ii. 154 (quoted by Caldecott) Richard refers to the ground

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

(4) 'O'er-sized with coagulate gore' finds an exact parallel in the 'blood-siz'd field' of the Two Noble Kinsmen, I. i. 99, a scene which, whether written by Shakespeare (as I fully believe) or by another poet, was certainly written in all seriousness. (5) 'With eyes like carbuncles' has been much ridiculed, but Milton (P.L., ix. 500) gives 'carbuncle eyes' to Satan turned into a serpent (Steevens), and why are they more out-

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