Now the commonplace has no place at all in
the drama of Shakspere, which fact at once elevates it above the tone of
ordinary life. And so the mode of the speech must be elevated as well;
therefore from prose into blank verse. If we go beyond this, we cease to
be natural for the stage as well as life; and the result is that kind of
composition well enough known in Shakspere's time, which he ridicules in
the recitations of the player in "Hamlet," about _Priam_ and _Hecuba_.
We could show the very passages of the play-writer Nash which Shakspere
imitates in these. To use another figure, Shakspere, in the same play,
instructs the players "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." Now
every one must have felt that somehow there is a difference between the
appearance of any object or group of objects immediately presented to
the eye, and the appearance of the same object or objects in a mirror.
Nature herself is not the same in the mirror held up to her. Everything
changes sides in this representation; and the room which is an ordinary,
well-known, homely room, gains something of the strange and poetic when
regarded in the mirror over the fire.
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