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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: language of compliment and fashion, transfigured no doubt by
Shakespear's verbal magic, and hyperbolical, as Shakespear always
seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still
unmistakable for anything else than the expression of a friendship
delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be
outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the
language of passion: their cruelty shews it. There is no evidence
that Shakespear was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his
revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing
neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that
she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.
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