文档介绍：Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers
Virginibus Puerisque and
Other Papers
Robert Louis Stevenson.
1
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers
CHAPTER I - "VIRGINIBUS
PUERISQUE"
I
WITH the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's characters are
what we call marrying men. Mercutio, as he was own cousin to Benedick
and Biron, would e to the same end in the long run. Even Iago
had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like Jacques
and the Fool in LEAR, although we can hardly imagine they would ever
marry, kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and not,
as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference for the
single state. For that matter, if you turn to e Sand's French version of
AS YOU LIKE IT (and I think I can promise you will like it but little),
you will find Jacques marries Celia just as Orlando marries Rosalind.
At least there seems to have been much less hesitation over marriage
in Shakespeare's days; and what hesitation there was was of a laughing
sort, and not much more serious, one way or the other, than that of
Panurge. In edies the heroes are mostly of Benedick's way of
thinking, but twice as much in earnest, and not one quarter so confident.
And I take this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror is. They
know they are only human after all; they know what gins and pitfalls lie
about their feet; and how the shadow of matrimony waits, resolute and
awful, at the cross-roads. They would wish to keep their liberty; but if that
may not be, why, God's will be done! "What, are you afraid of marriage?"
asks Cecile, in MAITRE GUERIN. "Oh, mon Dieu, non!" replies Arthur;
"I should take chloroform." They look forward to marriage much in the
same way as they prepare themselves for death: each seems inevitable;
each is a great Perhaps, and a leap into the dark, for which, when a man is
in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart. That splendid
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