Let us take "The Tempest."
Of "The Tempest" we may say confidently:
(1) that it is a literary masterpiece: the last most perfect
'fruit of the noblest tree in our English Forest';
(2) that its story is quite simple; intelligible to a child: (its
basis in fact is fairy-tale, pure and simple--as I tried to show
in a previous lecture);
(3) that in reading it--or in reading "Hamlet," for that matter--
the child has no sense at all of being patronised, of being
'written down to.' And this has the strongest bearing on my
argument. The great authors, as Emerson says, never condescend.
Shakespeare himself speaks to a slip of a boy, and that boy feels
that he _is_ Ferdinand;
(4) that, though Shakespeare uses his loftiest, most accomplished
and, in a sense, his most difficult language: a way of talking it
has cost him a life-time to acquire, in line upon line inviting
the scholar's, prosodist's, poet's most careful study; that
language is no bar to the child's enjoyment: but rather casts
about the whole play an aura of magnificence which, with the
assistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell.
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