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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: as free of economic difficulties as Amadis de Gaul. Hamlet's
experiences simply could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man
is useful on the stage only as a blind man is: to excite sympathy.
The poverty of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet produces a great
effect, and even points the sound moral that a poor man cannot afford
to have a conscience; but if all the characters of the play had been
as poor as he, it would have been nothing but a melodrama of the sort
that the Sicilian players gave us here; and that was not the best that
lay in Shakespear's power. When poverty is abolished, and leisure and
grace of life become general, the only plays surviving from our epoch
which will have any relation to life as it will be lived then will be
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