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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: Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried
once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is
thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with
theoretical morality, actual law and administration with abstract
justice, and so forth. But Shakespear's perception of the fact that
all men, judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and
by which they justify their punishment of others, are fools and
scoundrels, does not date from the Dark Lady complication: he seems
to have been born with it. If in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer
Night's Dream the persons of the drama are not quite so ready for
treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to
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