"By Shakespeare Voltaire was both attracted and repelled. As a Frenchman, trained in the strictest rules of the s, and disposed to render those rules even more rigid, he was shocked beyond measure by the irregularities, the gross improprieties, or rather indecencies, as he looked upon them, in which the greatest English dramatist had indulged with no apparent consciousness that his course was anything but perfectly proper. A man who could in all sincerity assert, as did Voltaire, that in the , all other laws, that is to say, all other beauties of the drama, are comprised, was not likely to be impressed favorably by the persistent disregard of them which Shakespeare had manifested. He shuddered furthermore at the mixture of the comic and the tragic in the same production; at the low characters which were brought upon the stage, and the low language in which they indulged; at the scenes of violence, of horror, and of carnage which were enacted in full view of the audience. Such practices ran counter to all his personal tastes and prejudices, as well as to the traditions of which he believed, or tried to believe, surpassed not only that of all modern nations, but themselves."
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Thomas Lounsbury
(January 1, 1838 – April 9, 1915) was an American literary historian, literary critic, author of several books, and professor of English language and literature at Yale University. He is noteworthy for his 1882 biography of James Fenimore Cooper and his 3-volume ‘’Studies in Chaucer’’ (Harper & Brothers, 1892).
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