Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 159, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1917 — On Imitating Shakespeare. [ARTICLE]

On Imitating Shakespeare.

There’s such a divinity doth hedge our Shakespeare round that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the Remorse and when I had done it I found that I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger instead. It is really very curious, at first sight, how Shakespeare, and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in style much alike ;• nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and others; while no one has,ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakespeare idiom. I suppose it is because Shakespeare Is so universal and, in fact, has no manner; ju£t as you can so much more readily copy a picture than nature herself.—Goethe.