Measure and Hamlet-with much less care than in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing. On the other hand, the management of the plot in Macbeth and Othello is admirable throughout, and in the introduction of the grave-diggers in Hamlet and of the Fool in King Lear, Shakespeare gave proof not only of consummate stage-craft but of the finest judgment. While he gratified the English love of realistic imitation and kept up the old traditions of the stage, he contrived by episodes like these to reduce to its proper tone the intense expression of personal sympathy which he threw into the speeches of his leading characters.

Nor is there any want of dramatic balance in his tragic representation of human nature. With all Shakespeare's intense feeling for individuals, he always shows them in their true relation to life and action. As Aristotle recommends, he excites interest in men of mixed character, whose deeds or misfortunes are not wholly due to themselves. We see in Hamlet and Macbeth the will suspended between conscience and desire in a manner intelligible to all human beings: Othello and Lear are in some measure the victims of the crimes of others. Yet, lest we should sympathise too strongly with Hamlet in his soliloquies, the consequences of his irresolution are clearly shown, and our judgment of his character is determined by the admiration he himself expresses for men like Fortinbras and Horatio: our compassion for Othello recoils before the fate of the pure and innocent Desdemona, the result of the Moor's consuming jealousy; while the original cause of Lear's calamities is clearly indicated in the moralising of his Fool. It is notable with what persistency and knowledge the poet treats the passion of jealousy, always representing it as a baneful force destroying the balance of the soul:

Trifles light as air

Are to the jealous confirmation strong

As proofs of holy writ.

Yet he does not make us hate the characters who yield

to it. On the other hand, there is no attempt, in these late tragedies, to exhibit the principle of virtù melodramatically, as in the persons of Aaron and Richard III. Whatever admiration may be felt for the intellect of Iago and Edmund is lost in our detestation of their selfish cruelty, and we rejoice at the poetical justice of their punishment.

The characters of women in this group of plays are of three kinds: they are represented sometimes as the innocent victims of evil in the world; sometimes as the types of evil will or sensual passion; sometimes as the models of noble purity. To the first and largest class belong Ophelia, Desdemona, Mariana, Helen, Imogen, Hermione; to the second Lady Macbeth and Hamlet's mother; to the third Isabella and Marina. This mode of representing female character is the natural result of the change from romantic comedy or tragicomedy to tragedy; for the witty and versatile women of the preceding group there seems to be no place in the more melancholy view of life and action which now fills the imagination of the poet.

This change of thought and feeling is expressed by a change of style. From the smooth-flowing verse characteristic of the romantic period, we pass abruptly in Shakespeare's tragedies to vehement imagery and broken interjectional sentences, suggestive of the internal anguish of the speakers. The new manner is first observable in Hamlet, which is one of the earliest of the tragic dramas. For example:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,

VOL. IV

That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on: and yet, within a month

Let me not think on't-Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears-why she, even she-

O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourned longer-married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father

Than I to Hercules: within a month,

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing of her galled eyes,
She married.1

It will be noted how frequently in this passage a redundant syllable occurs after the cæsura in the middle of the line. This effect is, I think, comparatively rare in the plays of the middle period, and in the early comedies and tragedies it is hardly found at all. Equally remarkable is the savage emphasis of the rhythm in those speeches in the later plays of this group which are inspired by the passion of jealousy, as in the following of Posthumus in Cymbeline :

Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers? We are all bastards;

And that most venerable man which I

Did call my father, was I know not where

When I was stamped; some coiner with his tools

Made me a counterfeit

The Dian of that time:

yet my mother seemed

so doth my wife

The nonpareil of this. O vengeance, vengeance !

Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained,

And prayed me oft forbearance; did it with

A pudency so rosy the sweet view on't

Might well have warmed old Saturn: that I thought her
As chaste as unsunned snow.

Could I find out

The woman's part in me! For there's no motion

That tends to vice in man, but I affirm

It is the woman's part! be it lying, note it,

1 Hamlet, Act i. Sc. 2.

to it. On the other hand, there is no attempt, in these late tragedies, to exhibit the principle of virtù melodramatically, as in the persons of Aaron and Richard III. Whatever admiration may be felt for the intellect of Iago and Edmund is lost in our detestation of their selfish cruelty, and we rejoice at the poetical justice of their punishment.

The characters of women in this group of plays are of three kinds: they are represented sometimes as the innocent victims of evil in the world; sometimes as the types of evil will or sensual passion; sometimes as the models of noble purity. To the first and largest class belong Ophelia, Desdemona, Mariana, Helen, Imogen, Hermione; to the second Lady Macbeth and Hamlet's mother; to the third Isabella and Marina. This mode of representing female character is the natural result of the change from romantic comedy or tragi - comedy to tragedy; for the witty and versatile women of the preceding group there seems to be no place in the more melancholy view of life and action which now fills the imagination of the poet.

This change of thought and feeling is expressed by a change of style. From the smooth-flowing verse characteristic of the romantic period, we pass abruptly in Shakespeare's tragedies to vehement imagery and broken interjectional sentences, suggestive of the internal anguish of the speakers. The new manner is first observable in Hamlet, which is one of the earliest of the tragic dramas. For example :

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,

VOL. IV