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Wordsworth and Shakespeare (1985).(William Wordsworth and William Shakespeare)(Critical essay)

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From: Wordsworth Circle
Date: 20060622
Author:Bate, Jonathan

In his own time, Wordsworth had a reputation for being antipathetic to Shakespeare. There could be no more symbolic starting point than the occasion recorded by both Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke when Wordsworth criticised the repetition of the present participle in a line from Henry V, "The singing masons building roofs of gold" (I.ii.198): "This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Mr. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence (if negligence it was) ...

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