Tuberculosis and the creative mind / by Arthur C. Jacobson.

  • Jacobson, Arthur C.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Tuberculosis and the creative mind / by Arthur C. Jacobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    As to time of writing, the Sonnets date from 1597- 1603. In the former year Shakespeare was about thirty-three years old. Some of the sonnets have been said by competent critics to relate to critical circumstances in Shakespeare's life, of which we know no more than that they must have occurred before 1599. They are unquestionably self-revelatory, these sonnets, though the allusions are veiled. They were written in his youth, thought Coleridge, who, with Wordsworth, believed in their autobiographical character. The latter emphatically declares them to express Shakespeare's own feelings in his own person. * * * in some respects the most interesting of Shakes- peare's writings [the 'Sonnets'], as they tell us most about himself. (Garnett and Gosse.) Says Gerald Massey, in his interpretative book on the Sonnets: These sonnets have the authority of parting words; for they were written when Shakespeare was ill, as I understand him. * * * This is a group (Sonnets 63, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 81) of very touching sonnets. Nowhere else shall we draw more near to the poet in his own person. They look as if written in contemplation of death. They have a touch of physical languor; the tinge of solemn thought. Shakespeare died of a fevour * * *. (From Memo- randa of Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon in 1662.) He was comparatively idle during the four years and a half that intervened between the writing of the Tempest in 1611 and his death.13 Halliwell-Phillips thinks that he may have written two or three plays, among them Henry the Eighth, after the performance above alluded to. An active literary career abandoned at the age of forty-seven! He had ceased to act about 1604, or twelve years before his death, being then only forty! His will was prepared in January, 1616, and signed in March, which commentators believe to indicate that he had been in poor health for some time before his death on April 23 of that year. Moreover, we may infer that the visit of Ben Jonson and Drayton to New Place, shortly before his taking to bed, was in the nature of a leave-taking. Why the delay in signing the will? Did he still have hopes of recovery? 13 Now my charms are all overthrown, And what strength I have's mine own; Which is most faint:—Epilogue, Tempest.