tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us

“It is those deep, far-away things in him, those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;—those are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.”

—Herman Melville on Shakespeare, from Hawthorne and His Mosses