I offer the following flim-flam to the examination of your readers,
all of whom are, I presume, more or less, readers of Shakspeare, and
far better qualified than I am to "anatomize" his writings, and "see
what bred about his heart."
I start with the proposition that the language of passion is almost
invariably broken and abrupt, and the deduction that I wish to draw
from this proposition, and the passages that I am about to quote is,
that--_Shakspeare on more than one occasion advisedly used
monosyllables, and monosyllables only, when he wished to express
violent and overwhelming mental emotion_, ex. gratiâ:--
_Lear._ "Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air,
We wawl, and cry:--I will preach to thee; mark me.
[_Gloster._ "Alack! alack the day!]
_Lear._ "When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools,--This a good block?"
--_King Lear_, Act IV. Sc. 6.
In this passage [I bracket Gloster] we find no fewer than
_forty-two monosyllables_ following each other consecutively.
Again,
"------but through his lips do throng
Weak words, so thick come, in his poor heart's aid,
That no man could _distinguish_ what he said."
_Rape of Lucreece_, Stanza 255.
After I had kept this among other flim-flams for more than a year in
my note-book, I submitted it in a letter to the examination of a
friend; his answer was as follows:--"Your canon is ingenious,
especially in the line taken from the sonnet. I doubt it however,
much, and rather believe that sound is often sympathetically, and as
it were unconsciously, adapted to sense. Moreover, monosyllables are
redundant in our tongue, as you will see in the scene you quote. In
_King John_, Act III. Sc. 3., where the King is _pausing_
in his wish to incense Hubert to Arthur's murder, he says:--
'Good friend, though hast no cause to say so yet:
But thou shall have; and creep time ne'er so slow,
Yet it shall come, for me to do thee good.
I had a thing to say,--But let it go:'--
forty monosyllables."
"Credimus? an qui amant ipsi sibi somnia fingunt."
The very passage he quoted seemed, to my eyes, rather a
_corroboration_ of the theory, than an _argument against
it_! I might, I think, have quoted the remainder of Lear's speech
ending with the words "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill," and,
with the exception of three words, consisting _entirely_ of
monosyllables, and one or two other passages. But I have written
enough to express my meaning.