New Catholic World

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY. BY KATHERINE BREGY. T is not often in the history of our self-centred world, busy with its beeves and its fatlings, its marrying and giving in marriage, that the clock of civilization stops suddenly?premeditatedly?to do honor to a poet. Yet this year it will so stop; because,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY. BY KATHERINE BREGY. T is not often in the history of our self-centred world, busy with its beeves and its fatlings, its marrying and giving in marriage, that the clock of civilization stops suddenly?premeditatedly?to do honor to a poet. Yet this year it will so stop; because, forsooth, the twenty-third day of the fair month of April is just the three hundredth anniversary of Master William Shakespeare's birthday into eternity. There had been brave doings in old Stratford this spring, but for this and that?a Shakespeare festival to make glad the children of men from every clime There had been something brave in Germany, too; where a few years back at Frank- fort-on-the-Main the present writer gazed (with eyes not too sanely dry ) upon a huge wreath sent in friendship from the Shakespeare house to the Goethe house. We have changed all that, to our very bitter loss. This year the Old World, staggering under its weight of war, can do little for the praise of art. For lo, the thunder hushing all the grove, And did love live, not even Love could sing And so with beautiful fitness the New World takes up this duty of honoring Shakespeare, and from New York to California the tercentenary plans stretch out like a carpet of gold or a canopy of sunshine. It is not as though we turned, in duty bound, to honor a stranger. It is not even as though we honored Cervantes, that high-spirited Spaniard who upon the same day and same year went out to God. Shakespeare is our own, the high-water mark of English drama and English poetry?but more still than this. It is merely a truism?that is, a truth which has grown tiresome because no one any longer cares to challenge it ?to say that he is for all people as for all time: one of that small Urania...