Chapter 76

“Adultery! it is the lightest ill I will commit. A race of wicked acts Shall flow out of my anger, and o’erspread The world’s wide face, which no posterity Shall e’er approve, nor yet keep silent,” &c.

The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakespeare over his contemporaries;—and yet what contemporaries!—giant minds indeed! Think of Jonson’s erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and yet, in no genuine part of Shakespeare’s works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca’s tragedies, and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear to come.