Claudio : character in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
... the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought... Page 92 A vivid speech on death and after-life occurs also in another play: a character named Claudio is speaking: Ay, but to die and go we know not where! To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit ... worse. Our lengthy quotation, with several parts bearing a resemblance - in particular verbal turns as well as in general expressive eloquence - to portions in the speeches of Hamlet and Claudio, is sufficient to demonstrate our point about Milton's underlying restraint and Shakespeare's basic leapingness. But it will help also to bring out another difference between Milton and Shakespeare... find their own voice in that speech and with it the emotional and sensational being is stirred. Or take the words of Adam after his condemnation, words which join up from afar with both Hamlet and Claudio in their general drift: Why do I overlive? Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet Mortality, my sentence, and be earth ...
... devising a dignified speech suitable for the Page 308 legendary hero, Rustum, while Shakespeare has to write a speech appropriate to the mentality of an errant youth like Claudio; yet, while Arnold is almost flat, Shakespeare has given a glow even to Claudio's frenzied fear of death. It is easy to beg the question and say: Well, Shakespeare is, after all, the greater poet... something behind...which comes not primarily from the mind or the vital emotions or the physical seeing but from the cosmic self and its consciousness standing behind them all." 53 It is not only Claudio speaking but all frightened humanity recoiling helplessly at the very thought of the approach of the grim Spectre; it is limited life retreating tremblingly before Death. Arnold might have cited ...
... cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought... A vivid speech on death and after-life occurs also in another play: a character named Claudio is speaking: Ay, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe ...
... others that we know not of! Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought... or the soliloquy of Claudio: Ay, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delightful spirit To bathe in ...
... a clearer ideative effect there than in the Tennyson and pick it out for a 'clincher' against the supposed presence of 'thought' in that intense phrase in the Shakespearean passage. The line from Claudio pitted against the Tennyson has a strong subjective tone: the nerves of mental sensation — to quote a phrase of Sri Aurobindo's — receive an impact through it; one feels in the mind's 'entrails', as ...
... different texture of language. The characteristic distinction of its note from that of the more intellectualised intuition can best be illustrated from Shakespeare and by such a passage as the speech of Claudio, Ay, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod: and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to ...
... wit, is a semi-Elizabethan. Only with Milton comes the pure Mind-Force. We can easily mark the difference between the Life-Force and the Mind-Force by juxtaposing Shakespeare and Milton. Here is Claudio in Measure for Measure: Aye, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted ...
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