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Title: Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King
Lear, Macbeth

Author: A. C. Bradley

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY: LECTURES ON HAMLET, OTHELLO,
KING LEAR, MACBETH ***

SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

LECTURES ON

HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR

MACBETH
BY

A.C. BRADLEY
LL.D. LITT.D., FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

SECOND EDITION (THIRTEENTH IMPRESSION)
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1919

COPYRIGHT.
First Edition 1904.
Second Edition March 1905.
Reprinted August 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1916,
1918, 1919.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT
MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

To my Students

PREFACE
These lectures are based on a selection from materials used in teaching at
Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford; and I have for the most part preserved the
lecture form. The point of view taken in them is explained in the
Introduction. I should, of course, wish them to be read in their order, and a
knowledge of the first two is assumed in the remainder; but readers who
may prefer to enter at once on the discussion of the several plays can do so
by beginning at page 89.
Any one who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors.
Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged it;
but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many years
ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my own what
belongs to another.
Many of the Notes will be of interest only to scholars, who may find, I
hope, something new in them.
I have quoted, as a rule, from the Globe edition, and have referred always to
its numeration of acts, scenes, and lines.
November, 1904.

NOTE TO SECOND AND SUBSEQUENT
IMPRESSIONS
In these impressions I have confined myself to making some formal
improvements, correcting indubitable mistakes, and indicating here and
there my desire to modify or develop at some future time statements which
seem to me doubtful or open to misunderstanding. The changes, where it
seemed desirable, are shown by the inclusion of sentences in square
brackets.

CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction 1
LECTURE I.
The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy 5
LECTURE II.
Construction in Shakespeare's Tragedies 40
LECTURE III.
Shakespeare's Tragic Period—Hamlet 79
LECTURE IV.
Hamlet 129
LECTURE V.
Othello 175
LECTURE VI.
Othello 207
LECTURE VII.
King Lear 243
LECTURE VIII.
King Lear 280
LECTURE IX.
Macbeth 331
LECTURE X.

Macbeth 366

Note A. Events before the opening of the action in Hamlet 401
Note B. Where was Hamlet at the time of his father's death? 403
Note C. Hamlet's age 407
Note D. 'My tables—meet it is I set it down' 409
Note E. The Ghost in the cellarage 412
Note F. The Player's speech in Hamlet 413
Note G. Hamlet's apology to Laertes 420
Note H. The exchange of rapiers 422
Note I. The duration of the action in Othello 423
Note J. The 'additions' in the Folio text of Othello. The Pontic
sea 429
Note K. Othello's courtship 432
Note L. Othello in the Temptation scene 434
Note M. Questions as to Othello, iv. i. 435
Note N. Two passages in the last scene of Othello 437
Note O. Othello on Desdemona's last words 438
Note P. Did Emilia suspect Iago? 439
Note Q. Iago's suspicion regarding Cassio and Emilia 441
Note R. Reminiscences of Othello in King Lear 441
Note S. King Lear and Timon of Athens 443
Note T. Did Shakespeare shorten King Lear? 445
Note U. Movements of the dramatis personæ in King Lear, ii
448

Note V. Suspected interpolations in King Lear 450
Note W. The staging of the scene of Lear's reunion with
Cordelia 453
Note X. The Battle in King Lear 456
Note Y. Some difficult passages in King Lear 458
Note Z. Suspected interpolations in Macbeth 466
Note AA. Has Macbeth been abridged? 467
Note BB. The date of Macbeth. Metrical Tests 470
Note CC. When was the murder of Duncan first plotted? 480
Note DD. Did Lady Macbeth really faint? 484
Note EE. Duration of the action in Macbeth. Macbeth's age. 'He
has no children' 486
Note FF. The Ghost of Banquo 492
Index 494

INTRODUCTION
In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of
Shakespeare from a single point of view. Nothing will be said of
Shakespeare's place in the history either of English literature or of the
drama in general. No attempt will be made to compare him with other
writers. I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions regarding
his life and character, the development of his genius and art, the
genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works. Even what
may be called, in a restricted sense, the 'poetry' of the four tragedies—the
beauties of style, diction, versification—I shall pass by in silence. Our one
object will be what, again in a restricted sense, may be called dramatic
appreciation; to increase our understanding and enjoyment of these works
as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action and some of the personages of
each with a somewhat greater truth and intensity, so that they may assume
in our imaginations a shape a little less unlike the shape they wore in the
imagination of their creator. For this end all those studies that were
mentioned just now, of literary history and the like, are useful and even in
various degrees necessary. But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary
here, nor is any one of them so indispensable to our object as that close
familiarity with the plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and
that habit of reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly
lover of Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.
Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to study
all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts the
persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they want to
realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced these words
and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular moment. This,
carried through a drama, is the right way to read the dramatist Shakespeare;
and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid and intent imagination. But
this alone will hardly suffice. It is necessary also, especially to a true
conception of the whole, to compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such
readers often shrink from this task, which seems to them prosaic or even a
desecration. They misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they

remembered two things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and
analysis, it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination
aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want of
practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic perception
difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these dissecting processes,
though they are also imaginative, are still, and are meant to be, nothing but
means to an end. When they have finished their work (it can only be
finished for the time) they give place to the end, which is that same
imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama from which they set out, but
a reading now enriched by the products of analysis, and therefore far more
adequate and enjoyable.
This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with merely
personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation. And so, before
coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to discuss some
preliminary matters which concern them all. Though each is individual
through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same substance; for
in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect of life, the tragic
fact. They have, again, up to a certain point, a common form or structure.
This substance and this structure, which would be found to distinguish
them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to diminish repetition, be
considered once for all; and in considering them we shall also be able to
observe characteristic differences among the four plays. And to this may be
added the little that it seems necessary to premise on the position of these
dramas in Shakespeare's literary career.
Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold good,
within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. But it will often apply to these other
works only in part, and to some of them more fully than to others. Romeo
and Juliet, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it is an early work, and in
some respects an immature one. Richard III. and Richard II., Julius Caesar,
Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus are tragic histories or historical
tragedies, in which Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain
obligation to follow his authority, even when that authority offered him an
undramatic material. Probably he himself would have met some criticisms
to which these plays are open by appealing to their historical character, and
by denying that such works are to be judged by the standard of pure

tragedy. In any case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter
of fact, considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is
said of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which
I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain Titus
Andronicus and Timon of Athens. The former I shall leave out of account,
because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so before he had
either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic conception. Timon
stands on a different footing. Parts of it are unquestionably Shakespeare's,
and they will be referred to in one of the later lectures. But much of the
writing is evidently not his, and as it seems probable that the conception
and construction of the whole tragedy should also be attributed to some
other writer, I shall omit this work too from our preliminary discussions.

LECTURE I
THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a variety of
ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a Shakespearean
tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from the differences in
point of substance between one tragedy and another? Or thus: What is the
nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented by Shakespeare? What is
the general fact shown now in this tragedy and now in that? And we are
putting the same question when we ask: What is Shakespeare's tragic
conception, or conception of tragedy?
These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that Shakespeare
himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he set himself to
reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic conception, and
still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a theory of the kind of
poetry called tragedy. These things are all possible; how far any one of them
is probable we need not discuss; but none of them is presupposed by the
question we are going to consider. This question implies only that, as a
matter of fact, Shakespeare in writing tragedy did represent a certain aspect
of life in a certain way, and that through examination of his writings we
ought to be able, to some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms
addressed to the understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and
adequate, may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an account
of the substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare's
conception of tragedy or view of the tragic fact.
Two further warnings may be required. In the first place, we must
remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot arrive
at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his
tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at
Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their
important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at
their best always look at things in one light; but Hamlet and Henry IV. and

Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, and Shakespeare's
whole dramatic view is not to be identified with any one of these
reflections. And, in the second place, I may repeat that in these lectures, at
any rate for the most part, we are to be content with his dramatic view, and
are not to ask whether it corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed
outside his poetry—the opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes
oddly call 'Shakespeare the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his
poetry he was a very simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as
some have maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we
can, that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.

1

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the
path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the
facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
And first, to begin from the outside, such a tragedy brings before us a
considerable number of persons (many more than the persons in a Greek
play, unless the members of the Chorus are reckoned among them); but it is
pre-eminently the story of one person, the 'hero,'[1] or at most of two, the
'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and
Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of
the action as the hero. The rest, including Macbeth, are single stars. So that,
having noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for
the sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
concerned primarily with one person.
The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the death of the hero. On the one
hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the end of
which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy;
and we no longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as such, as did
the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story depicts also the
troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and leads up to his death; and
an instantaneous death occurring by 'accident' in the midst of prosperity

would not suffice for it. It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and
calamity conducting to death.
The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory.
A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease, poverty,
little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous or dreadful it
might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.
Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and—we
must now add—generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to
make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy
and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the
proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will
naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much larger part in King
Lear than in Macbeth, and is directed in the one case chiefly to the hero, in
the other chiefly to minor characters.
Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They
would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it presented
itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy meant a
narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of this narrative
may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer's
Monk's Tale is a series of what he calls 'tragedies'; and this means in fact a
series of tales de Casibus Illustrium Virorum,—stories of the Falls of
Illustrious Men, such as Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And
the Monk ends the tale of Croesus thus:

Anhanged was Cresus, the proudè kyng;
His roial tronè myghte hym nat availle.
Tragédie is noon oother maner thyng,
Ne kan in syngyng criè ne biwaille
But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile
With unwar strook the regnès that been proude;
For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,
And covere hire brighte facè with a clowde.

A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who 'stood in high
degree,' happy and apparently secure,—such was the tragic fact to the
mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and pity;
it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men and awed
them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an
inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name,—a
power which appears to smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden
strikes him down in his pride.
Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond
it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two
in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy with Shakespeare is
concerned always with persons of 'high degree'; often with kings or princes;
if not, with leaders in the state like Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least,
as in Romeo and Juliet, with members of great houses, whose quarrels are
of public moment. There is a decided difference here between Othello and
our three other tragedies, but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is
no mere private person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning
we see him in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his
high position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no
longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great world,
and his last speech begins,

Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know it.[2]

And this characteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, though not the most vital,
is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every death-bed is the
scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning, but it would not be true if
the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense. The pangs of despised love and
the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a prince; but,
not to insist that they cannot be so when the prince is really a prince, the
story of the prince, the triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity
of its own. His fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and
when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his
fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the
omnipotence—perhaps the caprice—of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of
private life can possibly rival.

Such feelings are constantly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies,—again in
varying degrees. Perhaps they are the very strongest of the emotions
awakened by the early tragedy of Richard II., where they receive a
concentrated expression in Richard's famous speech about the antic Death,
who sits in the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security have
wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little pin
through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their predominance is
subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful there. In the figure of
the maddened Lear we see

A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
Past speaking of in a king;

and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better than
compare with the effect of King Lear the effect of Tourgénief's parallel and
remarkable tale of peasant life, A King Lear of the Steppes.

2

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of
exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is
clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another
side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from
the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could
alone provide the substance of its story. Job was the greatest of all the
children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could
bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not
make his story tragic. Nor yet would it become so, in the Shakespearean
sense, if the fire, and the great wind from the wilderness, and the torments
of his flesh were conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or
malignant. The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they
sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions of men.

We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we
see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these circumstances,
certain actions. These actions beget others, and these others beget others
again, until this series of inter-connected deeds leads by an apparently
inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. The effect of such a series on
imagination is to make us regard the sufferings which accompany it, and the
catastrophe in which it ends, not only or chiefly as something which
happens to the persons concerned, but equally as something which is caused
by them. This at least may be said of the principal persons, and, among
them, of the hero, who always contributes in some measure to the disaster
in which he perishes.
This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first. Men,
from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents, 'themselves the
authors of their proper woe'; and our fear and pity, though they will not
cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. We are now to consider
this second aspect, remembering that it too is only one aspect, and
additional to the first, not a substitute for it.
The 'story' or 'action' of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of
course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the predominant
factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in the full sense of the
word; not things done ''tween asleep and wake,' but acts or omissions
thoroughly expressive of the doer,—characteristic deeds. The centre of the
tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from
character, or in character issuing in action.
Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that it lay in mere character, or
was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake, for he was dramatic
to the tips of his fingers. It is possible to find places where he has given a
certain indulgence to his love of poetry, and even to his turn for general
reflections; but it would be very difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps
impossible, to detect passages where he has allowed such freedom to the
interest in character apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the
abstraction of mere 'plot' (which is a very different thing from the tragic
'action'), for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like The
Woman in White, it is clear that he cared even less. I do not mean that this
interest is absent from his dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and is so

interwoven with them that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and rarely
feel in any great strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous excitement of
following an ingenious complication. What we do feel strongly, as a tragedy
advances to its close, is that the calamities and catastrophe follow inevitably
from the deeds of men, and that the main source of these deeds is character.
The dictum that, with Shakespeare, 'character is destiny' is no doubt an
exaggeration, and one that may mislead (for many of his tragic personages,
if they had not met with peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a
tragic end, and might even have lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the
exaggeration of a vital truth.
This truth, with some of its qualifications, will appear more clearly if we
now go on to ask what elements are to be found in the 'story' or 'action,'
occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds, and the
sufferings and circumstances, of the persons. I will refer to three of these
additional factors.
(a) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be discussed
here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for example,
somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are certainly
not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds expressive of character.
No; but these abnormal conditions are never introduced as the origin of
deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking has no
influence whatever on the events that follow it. Macbeth did not murder
Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air: he saw the dagger because he
was about to murder Duncan. Lear's insanity is not the cause of a tragic
conflict any more than Ophelia's; it is, like Ophelia's, the result of a
conflict; and in both cases the effect is mainly pathetic. If Lear were really
mad when he divided his kingdom, if Hamlet were really mad at any time in
the story, they would cease to be tragic characters.
(b) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies;
he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge. This
supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if in any, be explained
away as an illusion in the mind of one of the characters. And further, it does
contribute to the action, and is in more than one instance an indispensable
part of it: so that to describe human character, with circumstances, as
always the sole motive force in this action would be a serious error. But the

supernatural is always placed in the closest relation with character. It gives
a confirmation and a distinct form to inward movements already present
and exerting an influence; to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the stifled
workings of conscience in Richard, to the half-formed thought or the
horrified memory of guilt in Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet. Moreover, its
influence is never of a compulsive kind. It forms no more than an element,
however important, in the problem which the hero has to face; and we are
never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or responsibility for
dealing with this problem. So far indeed are we from feeling this, that many
readers run to the opposite extreme, and openly or privately regard the
supernatural as having nothing to do with the real interest of the play.
(c) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to 'chance' or
'accident' an appreciable influence at some point in the action. Chance or
accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence (not
supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither from
the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding circumstances.
[3]
It may be called an accident, in this sense, that Romeo never got the
Friar's message about the potion, and that Juliet did not awake from her
long sleep a minute sooner; an accident that Edgar arrived at the prison just
too late to save Cordelia's life; an accident that Desdemona dropped her
handkerchief at the most fatal of moments; an accident that the pirate ship
attacked Hamlet's ship, so that he was able to return forthwith to Denmark.
Now this operation of accident is a fact, and a prominent fact, of human
life. To exclude it wholly from tragedy, therefore, would be, we may say, to
fail in truth. And, besides, it is not merely a fact. That men may start a
course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a tragic fact. The
dramatist may use accident so as to make us feel this; and there are also
other dramatic uses to which it may be put. Shakespeare accordingly admits
it. On the other hand, any large admission of chance into the tragic
sequence[4] would certainly weaken, and might destroy, the sense of the
causal connection of character, deed, and catastrophe. And Shakespeare
really uses it very sparingly. We seldom find ourselves exclaiming, 'What
an unlucky accident!' I believe most readers would have to search painfully
for instances. It is, further, frequently easy to see the dramatic intention of
an accident; and some things which look like accidents have really a
connection with character, and are therefore not in the full sense accidents.

Finally, I believe it will be found that almost all the prominent accidents
occur when the action is well advanced and the impression of the causal
sequence is too firmly fixed to be impaired.
Thus it appears that these three elements in the 'action' are subordinate,
while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue from character. So
that, by way of summary, we may now alter our first statement, 'A tragedy
is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high
estate,' and we may say instead (what in its turn is one-sided, though less
so), that the story is one of human actions producing exceptional calamity
and ending in the death of such a man.[5]

Before we leave the 'action,' however, there is another question that may
usefully be asked. Can we define this 'action' further by describing it as a
conflict?
The frequent use of this idea in discussions on tragedy is ultimately due, I
suppose, to the influence of Hegel's theory on the subject, certainly the most
important theory since Aristotle's. But Hegel's view of the tragic conflict is
not only unfamiliar to English readers and difficult to expound shortly, but
it had its origin in reflections on Greek tragedy and, as Hegel was well
aware, applies only imperfectly to the works of Shakespeare.[6] I shall,
therefore, confine myself to the idea of conflict in its more general form. In
this form it is obviously suitable to Shakespearean tragedy; but it is vague,
and I will try to make it more precise by putting the question, Who are the
combatants in this conflict?
Not seldom the conflict may quite naturally be conceived as lying between
two persons, of whom the hero is one; or, more fully, as lying between two
parties or groups, in one of which the hero is the leading figure. Or if we
prefer to speak (as we may quite well do if we know what we are about) of
the passions, tendencies, ideas, principles, forces, which animate these
persons or groups, we may say that two of such passions or ideas, regarded
as animating two persons or groups, are the combatants. The love of Romeo
and Juliet is in conflict with the hatred of their houses, represented by

various other characters. The cause of Brutus and Cassius struggles with
that of Julius, Octavius and Antony. In Richard II. the King stands on one
side, Bolingbroke and his party on the other. In Macbeth the hero and
heroine are opposed to the representatives of Duncan. In all these cases the
great majority of the dramatis personae fall without difficulty into
antagonistic groups, and the conflict between these groups ends with the
defeat of the hero.
Yet one cannot help feeling that in at least one of these cases, Macbeth,
there is something a little external in this way of looking at the action. And
when we come to some other plays this feeling increases. No doubt most of
the characters in Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, or Antony and Cleopatra can
be arranged in opposed groups;[7] and no doubt there is a conflict; and yet it
seems misleading to describe this conflict as one between these groups. It
cannot be simply this. For though Hamlet and the King are mortal foes, yet
that which engrosses our interest and dwells in our memory at least as much
as the conflict between them, is the conflict within one of them. And so it is,
though not in the same degree, with Antony and Cleopatra and even with
Othello; and, in fact, in a certain measure, it is so with nearly all the
tragedies. There is an outward conflict of persons and groups, there is also a
conflict of forces in the hero's soul; and even in Julius Caesar and Macbeth
the interest of the former can hardly be said to exceed that of the latter.
The truth is, that the type of tragedy in which the hero opposes to a hostile
force an undivided soul, is not the Shakespearean type. The souls of those
who contend with the hero may be thus undivided; they generally are; but,
as a rule, the hero, though he pursues his fated way, is, at least at some point
in the action, and sometimes at many, torn by an inward struggle; and it is
frequently at such points that Shakespeare shows his most extraordinary
power. If further we compare the earlier tragedies with the later, we find
that it is in the latter, the maturest works, that this inward struggle is most
emphasised. In the last of them, Coriolanus, its interest completely eclipses
towards the close of the play that of the outward conflict. Romeo and Juliet,
Richard III., Richard II., where the hero contends with an outward force,
but comparatively little with himself, are all early plays.
If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception more
definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such phrase

as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever forces act in the human spirit,
whether good or evil, whether personal passion or impersonal principle;
doubts, desires, scruples, ideas—whatever can animate, shake, possess, and
drive a man's soul. In a Shakespearean tragedy some such forces are shown
in conflict. They are shown acting in men and generating strife between
them. They are also shown, less universally, but quite as characteristically,
generating disturbance and even conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous
ambition in Macbeth collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and
Malcolm: here is the outward conflict. But these powers or principles
equally collide in the soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And neither
by itself could make the tragedy.[8]
We shall see later the importance of this idea. Here we need only observe
that the notion of tragedy as a conflict emphasises the fact that action is the
centre of the story, while the concentration of interest, in the greater plays,
on the inward struggle emphasises the fact that this action is essentially the
expression of character.

3

Let us turn now from the 'action' to the central figure in it; and, ignoring the
characteristics which distinguish the heroes from one another, let us ask
whether they have any common qualities which appear to be essential to the
tragic effect.
One they certainly have. They are exceptional beings. We have seen already
that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a person of high degree or of public
importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an unusual kind. But
this is not all. His nature also is exceptional, and generally raises him in
some respect much above the average level of humanity. This does not
mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon. Shakespeare never drew
monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are far from being 'good'; and if
he drew eccentrics he gave them a subordinate position in the plot. His
tragic characters are made of the stuff we find within ourselves and within
the persons who surround them. But, by an intensification of the life which
they share with others, they are raised above them; and the greatest are
raised so far that, if we fully realise all that is implied in their words and

actions, we become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any
one resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius.
Others, like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand
scale; and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost
all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular
direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force
which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being
with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is,
for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. It is present in his early
heroes, Romeo and Richard II., infatuated men, who otherwise rise
comparatively little above the ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries
with it a touch of greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind,
or genius, or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul,
and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not
only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.
The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic character
is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like Cymbeline
and the Winter's Tale, which might seem destined to end tragically, but
actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely to the fact that the
principal characters fail to reach tragic dimensions. And, conversely, if
these persons were put in the place of the tragic heroes, the dramas in which
they appeared would cease to be tragedies. Posthumus would never have
acted as Othello did; Othello, on his side, would have met Iachimo's
challenge with something more than words. If, like Posthumus, he had
remained convinced of his wife's infidelity, he would not have repented her
execution; if, like Leontes, he had come to believe that by an unjust
accusation he had caused her death, he would never have lived on, like
Leontes. In the same way the villain Iachimo has no touch of tragic
greatness. But Iago comes nearer to it, and if Iago had slandered Imogen
and had supposed his slanders to have led to her death, he certainly would
not have turned melancholy and wished to die. One reason why the end of
the Merchant of Venice fails to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic
character, and that we cannot believe in his accepting his defeat and the
conditions imposed on him. This was a case where Shakespeare's
imagination ran away with him, so that he drew a figure with which the
destined pleasant ending would not harmonise.

In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait, which is
also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these circumstances something is
required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot
give. He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other
causes, brings on him ruin. This is always so with Shakespeare. As we have
seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by
external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as
contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the
fatal imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and
degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo,
which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error involves
no conscious breach of right; in some (e.g. that of Brutus or Othello) it is
accompanied by a full conviction of right. In Hamlet there is a painful
consciousness that duty is being neglected; in Antony a clear knowledge
that the worse of two courses is being pursued; but Richard and Macbeth
are the only heroes who do what they themselves recognise to be villainous.
It is important to observe that Shakespeare does admit such heroes,[9] and
also that he appears to feel, and exerts himself to meet, the difficulty that
arises from their admission. The difficulty is that the spectator must desire
their defeat and even their destruction; and yet this desire, and the
satisfaction of it, are not tragic feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard
therefore a power which excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts
admiration. He gives to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary,
greatness, and adds to it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so
maddening in its reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a
horrified sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the
hero's ruin.
The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not be 'good,' though
generally he is 'good' and therefore at once wins sympathy in his error. But
it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his error and
fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human nature.[10]
Hence, in the first place, a Shakespearean tragedy is never, like some
miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book with the
feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched and he may
be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending and mysterious,

but it is not contemptible. The most confirmed of cynics ceases to be a
cynic while he reads these plays. And with this greatness of the tragic hero
(which is not always confined to him) is connected, secondly, what I
venture to describe as the centre of the tragic impression. This central
feeling is the impression of waste. With Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity
and fear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to unite with, and even to
merge in, a profound sense of sadness and mystery, which is due to this
impression of waste. 'What a piece of work is man,' we cry; 'so much more
beautiful and so much more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if
this beauty and greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?' We
seem to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic
fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the
crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power,
intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our
worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another
and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came
into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery,
because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflicting and
destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It forces the mystery upon
us, and it makes us realise so vividly the worth of that which is wasted that
we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reflection that all is vanity.

4

In this tragic world, then, where individuals, however great they may be and
however decisive their actions may appear, are so evidently not the ultimate
power, what is this power? What account can we give of it which will
correspond with the imaginative impressions we receive? This will be our
final question.
The variety of the answers given to this question shows how difficult it is.
And the difficulty has many sources. Most people, even among those who
know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are
inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact. Some
are so much influenced by their own habitual beliefs that they import them
more or less into their interpretation of every author who is 'sympathetic' to
them. And even where neither of these causes of error appears to operate,

another is present from which it is probably impossible wholly to escape.
What I mean is this. Any answer we give to the question proposed ought to
correspond with, or to represent in terms of the understanding, our
imaginative and emotional experience in reading the tragedies. We have, of
course, to do our best by study and effort to make this experience true to
Shakespeare; but, that done to the best of our ability, the experience is the
matter to be interpreted, and the test by which the interpretation must be
tried. But it is extremely hard to make out exactly what this experience is,
because, in the very effort to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of
everyday ideas, is always tending to transform it by the application of these
ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing the fact,
conventionalises it. And the consequence is not only mistaken theories; it is
that many a man will declare that he feels in reading a tragedy what he
never really felt, while he fails to recognise what he actually did feel. It is
not likely that we shall escape all these dangers in our effort to find an
answer to the question regarding the tragic world and the ultimate power in
it.
It will be agreed, however, first, that this question must not be answered in
'religious' language. For although this or that dramatis persona may speak
of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of heaven and of hell, and
although the poet may show us ghosts from another world, these ideas do
not materially influence his representation of life, nor are they used to throw
light on the mystery of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama was almost
wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined
his view to the world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he
represents it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of
the story is pre-Christian or Christian.[11] He looked at this 'secular' world
most intently and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but conclude, with
entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own, and, in
essentials, without regard to anyone's hopes, fears, or beliefs. His greatness
is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary power; and if, as a
private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic view can hardly have been
in contradiction with this faith, but must have been included in it, and
supplemented, not abolished, by additional ideas.
Two statements, next, may at once be made regarding the tragic fact as he
represents it: one, that it is and remains to us something piteous, fearful and

mysterious; the other, that the representation of it does not leave us crushed,
rebellious or desperate. These statements will be accepted, I believe, by any
reader who is in touch with Shakespeare's mind and can observe his own.
Indeed such a reader is rather likely to complain that they are painfully
obvious. But if they are true as well as obvious, something follows from
them in regard to our present question.
From the first it follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is not
adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just and
benevolent,—as, in that sense, a 'moral order': for in that case the spectacle
of suffering and waste could not seem to us so fearful and mysterious as it
does. And from the second it follows that this ultimate power is not
adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and cruel, or blind and
indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in that case the spectacle
would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one or other of these two ideas
will be found to govern most accounts of Shakespeare's tragic view or
world. These accounts isolate and exaggerate single aspects, either the
aspect of action or that of suffering; either the close and unbroken
connection of character, will, deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone,
shows the individual simply as sinning against, or failing to conform to, the
moral order and drawing his just doom on his own head; or else that
pressure of outward forces, that sway of accident, and those blind and
agonised struggles, which, taken alone, show him as the mere victim of
some power which cares neither for his sins nor for his pain. Such views
contradict one another, and no third view can unite them; but the several
aspects from whose isolation and exaggeration they spring are both present
in the fact, and a view which would be true to the fact and to the whole of
our imaginative experience must in some way combine these aspects.
Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and glance at some of the
impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether this
idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt that they do
arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at times that the hero is,
in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others drift struggling to
destruction like helpless creatures borne on an irresistible flood towards a
cataract; that, faulty as they may be, their fault is far from being the sole or
sufficient cause of all they suffer; and that the power from which they

cannot escape is relentless and immovable, we have failed to receive an
essential part of the full tragic effect.
The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a few.
One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes the
player-king in Hamlet say:

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;

'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says the
speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and action is
the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women confidently
attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things in pursuance of
their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they intended; it is terribly
unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to ourselves, of the world on
which they operate. They fight blindly in the dark, and the power that works
through them makes them the instrument of a design which is not theirs.
They act freely, and yet their action binds them hand and foot. And it makes
no difference whether they meant well or ill. No one could mean better than
Brutus, but he contrives misery for his country and death for himself. No
one could mean worse than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins
for others. Hamlet, recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into
blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge he
could not will. His adversary's murders, and no less his adversary's remorse,
bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an old man's
whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses all the powers
of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty fiction, and,
meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and strangles love.
They understand themselves no better than the world about them.
Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like snow before a fire.
Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own child's brains, finds
herself hounded to death by the smell of a stranger's blood. Her husband
thinks that to gain a crown he would jump the life to come, and finds that
the crown has brought him all the horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this
tragic world, man's thought, translated into act, is transformed into the
opposite of itself. His act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a
moment of time, becomes a monstrous flood which spreads over a

kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams of doing, he achieves that which he
least dreamed of, his own destruction.
All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by itself it
would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as in some
degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other
impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us feel
that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is, even in
Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents already
considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late, Desdemona's
loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the loss would have
mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia's life. Again, men act,
no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but what is it that brings them
just the one problem which is fatal to them and would be easy to another,
and sometimes brings it to them just when they are least fitted to face it?
How is it that Othello comes to be the companion of the one man in the
world who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to
ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it happen that Lear has such
daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even character itself contributes to
these feelings of fatality. How could men escape, we cry, such vehement
propensities as drive Romeo, Antony, Coriolanus, to their doom? And why
is it that a man's virtues help to destroy him, and that his weakness or defect
is so intertwined with everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly
separate them even in imagination?
If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source of impressions like these, it
is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do not find there. We find
practically no trace of fatalism in its more primitive, crude and obvious
forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of the actions and sufferings of the
persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed beforehand without regard to their
feelings, thoughts and resolutions. Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so
presented that it seems to us as if the supreme power, whatever it may be,
had a special spite against a family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we
receive the impression (which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic)
that a family, owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is
doomed in later days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in

heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
'heredity' in the Index.)
What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead us to
describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to be a
mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which seems
to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and their
circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast and
complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its workings;
and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever changes take
place in it produce other changes inevitably and without regard to men's
desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is best called by the
name of fate or no,[12] it can hardly be denied that it does appear as the
ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it has such characteristics as
these. But the name 'fate' may be intended to imply something more—to
imply that this order is a blank necessity, totally regardless alike of human
weal and of the difference between good and evil or right and wrong. And
such an implication many readers would at once reject. They would
maintain, on the contrary, that this order shows characteristics of quite
another kind from those which made us give it the name of fate,
characteristics which certainly should not induce us to forget those others,
but which would lead us to describe it as a moral order and its necessity as a
moral necessity.

5

Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into the light those aspects of the
tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. And the argument
which leads to it in its simplest form may be stated briefly thus: 'Whatever
may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like, human action is, after
all, presented to us as the central fact in tragedy, and also as the main cause
of the catastrophe. That necessity which so much impresses us is, after all,
chiefly the necessary connection of actions and consequences. For these
actions we, without even raising a question on the subject, hold the agents
responsible; and the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The
critical action is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is,

in the main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an
example of justice; and that order which, present alike within the agents and
outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just. The rigour of its
justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a terrible story; but, in spite of
fear and pity, we acquiesce, because our sense of justice is satisfied.'
Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice' of which it speaks must be at
once distinguished from what is called 'poetic justice.' 'Poetic justice' means
that prosperity and adversity are distributed in proportion to the merits of
the agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in flagrant contradiction with the facts of
life, and it is absent from Shakespeare's tragic picture of life; indeed, this
very absence is a ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson.
Δράσαντι παθειν, 'the doer must suffer'— this we find in Shakespeare. We
also find that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at the last.
But an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an assignment even
of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not find. No one who thinks
of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that one end awaits
Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks himself which
suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse Shakespeare of
representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just.
And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at all
these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two reasons. In the
first place, essential as it is to recognise the connection between act and
consequence, and natural as it may seem in some cases (e.g. Macbeth's) to
say that the doer only gets what he deserves, yet in very many cases to say
this would be quite unnatural. We might not object to the statement that
Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert
that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to
language but to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the
tragic fact that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which
would appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when
we call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in
some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown
us of this order, and are appealing to faith.
But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems to me,
in all cases—even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

—untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed in a
tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such emotions as
attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror, perhaps hatred; but we
do not judge. This is a point of view which emerges only when, in reading a
play, we slip, by our own fault or the dramatist's, from the tragic position, or
when, in thinking about the play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday
legal and moral notions. But tragedy does not belong, any more than
religion belongs, to the sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative
attitude in presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing
that so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents, nor
asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is just.
And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the least, full
of danger.[13]
Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the tragic
world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice and merit, and
speak simply of good and evil. Let us understand by these words, primarily,
moral good and evil, but also everything else in human beings which we
take to be excellent or the reverse. Let us understand the statement that the
ultimate power or order is 'moral' to mean that it does not show itself
indifferent to good and evil, or equally favourable or unfavourable to both,
but shows itself akin to good and alien from evil. And, understanding the
statement thus, let us ask what grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented
by Shakespeare.
Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the idea of fate rests, I
choose only two or three out of many. And the most important is this. In
Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces
suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only
from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.
The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and, what is more
(though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in almost every case evil
in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but plain moral evil. The love of
Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death only because of the senseless
hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition, seconded by diabolic malice and
issuing in murder, opens the action in Macbeth. Iago is the main source of

the convulsion in Othello; Goneril, Regan and Edmund in King Lear. Even
when this plain moral evil is not the obviously prime source within the play,
it lies behind it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been
formed by adultery and murder. Julius Caesar is the only tragedy in which
one is even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the world,
this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil and good,
any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly to it or
indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.
Again, if we confine our attention to the hero, and to those cases where the
gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that the
comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or
defect,—irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive
simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like. These
defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the word, evil,
and they contribute decisively to the conflict and catastrophe. And the
inference is again obvious. The ultimate power which shows itself disturbed
by this evil and reacts against it, must have a nature alien to it. Indeed its
reaction is so vehement and 'relentless' that it would seem to be bent on
nothing short of good in perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.
To this must be added another fact, or another aspect of the same fact. Evil
exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren, weakening,
destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites, and tends to
annihilate not only its opposite but itself. That which keeps the evil man[14]
prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him to exist, is the good in
him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral' good). When the evil in him
masters the good and has its way, it destroys other people through him, but
it also destroys him. At the close of the struggle he has vanished, and has
left behind him nothing that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a
country, exhausted, pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good
which animates it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the
brilliance or greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and
confidence. And the inference would seem clear. If existence in an order
depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such existence, the
inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.

These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as those
which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate. And the idea which they in
their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order which does not
indeed award 'poetic justice,' but which reacts through the necessity of its
own 'moral' nature both against attacks made upon it and against failure to
conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the exhibition of that convulsive
reaction; and the fact that the spectacle does not leave us rebellious or
desperate is due to a more or less distinct perception that the tragic suffering
and death arise from collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a
moral power, a power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass judgment
on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the sense of waste,
which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke. And, finally, this view seems
quite able to do justice to those aspects of the tragic fact which give rise to
the idea of fate. They would appear as various expressions of the fact that
the moral order acts not capriciously or like a human being, but from the
necessity of its nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,—a
necessity or law which of course knows no exception and is as 'ruthless' as
fate.
It is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet
without some amendment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not include the
whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with the
impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order which
shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense explained,
moral. Still—at any rate for the eye of sight—the evil against which it
asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil inhabits, are not really
something outside the order, so that they can attack it or fail to conform to
it; they are within it and a part of it. It itself produces them,—produces Iago
as well as Desdemona, Iago's cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not
poisoned, it poisons itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the
poison is poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact
cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants the
assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdemona, but Iago
for the evil in Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on grounds other
than the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.

Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or want of
conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic character. We
do not think of Hamlet merely as failing to meet its demand, of Antony as
merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as simply attacking it. What
we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea that they are its parts,
expressions, products; that in their defect or evil it is untrue to its soul of
goodness, and falls into conflict and collision with itself; that, in making
them suffer and waste themselves, it suffers and wastes itself; and that
when, to save its life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts
them out, it has lost a part of its own substance,—a part more dangerous
and unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which
remains,—a Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in its
expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of good.
Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which we
can neither separate nor reconcile. The whole or order against which the
individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a passion
for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil. Yet
it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to overcome
and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven to mutilate its own
substance and to lose not only evil but priceless good. That this idea, though
very different from the idea of a blank fate, is no solution of the riddle of
life is obvious; but why should we expect it to be such a solution?
Shakespeare was not attempting to justify the ways of God to men, or to
show the universe as a Divine Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy
would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said
even to point distinctly, like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where
a solution might lie. We find a few references to gods or God, to the
influence of the stars, to another life: some of them certainly, all of them
perhaps, merely dramatic—appropriate to the person from whose lips they
fall. A ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the reach of its
hearer—who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of death
is dreamless. Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the words,
'There's a divinity that shapes our ends.' More important are other
impressions. Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a conviction
seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this agony counts as
nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it and thrill our

hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these mighty or heavenly
spirits who perish are too great for the little space in which they move, and
that they vanish not into nothingness but into freedom. Sometimes from
these sources and from others comes a presentiment, formless but haunting
and even profound, that all the fury of conflict, with its waste and woe, is
less than half the truth, even an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.'
But these faint and scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a
fragment of a whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and
no ultimate truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain
confronted with the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable
appearance, of a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth,
together with glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by
self-torture and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy.[15]

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Julius Caesar is not an exception to this rule. Caesar, whose murder comes in
the Third Act, is in a sense the dominating figure in the story, but Brutus is the
'hero.'
[2] Timon of Athens, we have seen, was probably not designed by Shakespeare,
but even Timon is no exception to the rule. The sub-plot is concerned with
Alcibiades and his army, and Timon himself is treated by the Senate as a man of
great importance. Arden of Feversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy would certainly
be exceptions to the rule; but I assume that neither of them is Shakespeare's; and
if either is, it belongs to a different species from his admitted tragedies. See, on
this species, Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors, ch. xi.
[3] Even a deed would, I think, be counted an 'accident,' if it were the deed of a
very minor person whose character had not been indicated; because such a deed
would not issue from the little world to which the dramatist had confined our
attention.
[4] Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by chance often
form a principal part of the comic action.
[5] It may be observed that the influence of the three elements just considered is
to strengthen the tendency, produced by the sufferings considered first, to regard
the tragic persons as passive rather than as agents.
[6] An account of Hegel's view may be found in Oxford Lectures on Poetry.
[7] The reader, however, will find considerable difficulty in placing some very
important characters in these and other plays. I will give only two or three
illustrations. Edgar is clearly not on the same side as Edmund, and yet it seems
awkward to range him on Gloster's side when Gloster wishes to put him to

death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet, but how can she be said to be of Hamlet's
party against the King and Polonius, or of their party against Hamlet?
Desdemona worships Othello, yet it sounds odd to say that Othello is on the
same side with a person whom he insults, strikes and murders.
[8] I have given names to the 'spiritual forces' in Macbeth merely to illustrate the
idea, and without any pretension to adequacy. Perhaps, in view of some
interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, it will be as well to add that I do not
dream of suggesting that in any of his dramas Shakespeare imagined two
abstract principles or passions conflicting, and incorporated them in persons; or
that there is any necessity for a reader to define for himself the particular forces
which conflict in a given case.
[9] Aristotle apparently would exclude them.
[10] Richard II. is perhaps an exception, and I must confess that to me he is
scarcely a tragic character, and that, if he is nevertheless a tragic figure, he is so
only because his fall from prosperity to adversity is so great.
[11] I say substantially; but the concluding remarks on Hamlet will modify a
little the statements above.
[12] I have raised no objection to the use of the idea of fate, because it occurs so
often both in conversation and in books about Shakespeare's tragedies that I
must suppose it to be natural to many readers. Yet I doubt whether it would be so
if Greek tragedy had never been written; and I must in candour confess that to
me it does not often occur while I am reading, or when I have just read, a
tragedy of Shakespeare. Wordsworth's lines, for example, about

poor humanity's afflicted will
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny

do not represent the impression I receive; much less do images which compare
man to a puny creature helpless in the claws of a bird of prey. The reader should
examine himself closely on this matter.
[13] It is dangerous, I think, in reference to all really good tragedies, but I am
dealing here only with Shakespeare's. In not a few Greek tragedies it is almost
inevitable that we should think of justice and retribution, not only because the
dramatis personae often speak of them, but also because there is something
casuistical about the tragic problem itself. The poet treats the story in such a way
that the question, Is the hero doing right or wrong? is almost forced upon us. But
this is not so with Shakespeare. Julius Caesar is probably the only one of his
tragedies in which the question suggests itself to us, and this is one of the
reasons why that play has something of a classic air. Even here, if we ask the
question, we have no doubt at all about the answer.
[14] It is most essential to remember that an evil man is much more than the evil
in him. I may add that in this paragraph I have, for the sake of clearness,
considered evil in its most pronounced form; but what is said would apply,
mutatis mutandis, to evil as imperfection, etc.

[15] Partly in order not to anticipate later passages, I abstained from treating
fully here the question why we feel, at the death of the tragic hero, not only pain
but also reconciliation and sometimes even exultation. As I cannot at present
make good this defect, I would ask the reader to refer to the word Reconciliation
in the Index. See also, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Hegel's Theory of Tragedy,
especially pp. 90, 91.

LECTURE II
CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES

Having discussed the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, we should
naturally go on to examine the form. And under this head many things
might be included; for example, Shakespeare's methods of characterisation,
his language, his versification, the construction of his plots. I intend,
however, to speak only of the last of these subjects, which has been
somewhat neglected;[16] and, as construction is a more or less technical
matter, I shall add some general remarks on Shakespeare as an artist.

1

As a Shakespearean tragedy represents a conflict which terminates in a
catastrophe, any such tragedy may roughly be divided into three parts. The
first of these sets forth or expounds the situation,[17] or state of affairs, out
of which the conflict arises; and it may, therefore, be called the Exposition.
The second deals with the definite beginning, the growth and the
vicissitudes of the conflict. It forms accordingly the bulk of the play,
comprising the Second, Third and Fourth Acts, and usually a part of the
First and a part of the Fifth. The final section of the tragedy shows the issue
of the conflict in a catastrophe.[18]
The application of this scheme of division is naturally more or less
arbitrary. The first part glides into the second, and the second into the third,
and there may often be difficulty in drawing the lines between them. But it
is still harder to divide spring from summer, and summer from autumn; and
yet spring is spring, and summer summer.
The main business of the Exposition, which we will consider first, is to
introduce us into a little world of persons; to show us their positions in life,
their circumstances, their relations to one another, and perhaps something of
their characters; and to leave us keenly interested in the question what will

come out of this condition of things. We are left thus expectant, not merely
because some of the persons interest us at once, but also because their
situation in regard to one another points to difficulties in the future. This
situation is not one of conflict,[19] but it threatens conflict. For example, we
see first the hatred of the Montagues and Capulets; and then we see Romeo
ready to fall violently in love; and then we hear talk of a marriage between
Juliet and Paris; but the exposition is not complete, and the conflict has not
definitely begun to arise, till, in the last scene of the First Act, Romeo the
Montague sees Juliet the Capulet and becomes her slave.
The dramatist's chief difficulty in the exposition is obvious, and it is
illustrated clearly enough in the plays of unpractised writers; for example,
in Remorse, and even in The Cenci. He has to impart to the audience a
quantity of information about matters of which they generally know nothing
and never know all that is necessary for his purpose.[20] But the process of
merely acquiring information is unpleasant, and the direct imparting of it is
undramatic. Unless he uses a prologue, therefore, he must conceal from his
auditors the fact that they are being informed, and must tell them what he
wants them to know by means which are interesting on their own account.
These means, with Shakespeare, are not only speeches but actions and
events. From the very beginning of the play, though the conflict has not
arisen, things are happening and being done which in some degree arrest,
startle, and excite; and in a few scenes we have mastered the situation of
affairs without perceiving the dramatist's designs upon us. Not that this is
always so with Shakespeare. In the opening scene of his early Comedy of
Errors, and in the opening speech of Richard III., we feel that the speakers
are addressing us; and in the second scene of the Tempest (for Shakespeare
grew at last rather negligent of technique) the purpose of Prospero's long
explanation to Miranda is palpable. But in general Shakespeare's
expositions are masterpieces.[21]
His usual plan in tragedy is to begin with a short scene, or part of a scene,
either full of life and stir, or in some other way arresting. Then, having
secured a hearing, he proceeds to conversations at a lower pitch,
accompanied by little action but conveying much information. For example,
Romeo and Juliet opens with a street-fight, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus
with a crowd in commotion; and when this excitement has had its effect on

the audience, there follow quiet speeches, in which the cause of the
excitement, and so a great part of the situation, are disclosed. In Hamlet and
Macbeth this scheme is employed with great boldness. In Hamlet the first
appearance of the Ghost occurs at the fortieth line, and with such effect that
Shakespeare can afford to introduce at once a conversation which explains
part of the state of affairs at Elsinore; and the second appearance, having
again increased the tension, is followed by a long scene, which contains no
action but introduces almost all the dramatis personae and adds the
information left wanting. The opening of Macbeth is even more remarkable,
for there is probably no parallel to its first scene, where the senses and
imagination are assaulted by a storm of thunder and supernatural alarm.
This scene is only eleven lines long, but its influence is so great that the
next can safely be occupied with a mere report of Macbeth's battles,—a
narrative which would have won much less attention if it had opened the
play.
When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes
people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of
sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with
anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet conversation, this
is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters and takes action of some
decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less like the beginning of
Macbeth than that of King Lear. The tone is pitched so low that the
conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund is written in prose. But at
the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by the entrance of Lear and his court,
and without delay the King proceeds to his fatal division of the kingdom.
This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. King Lear has a
secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons. To make the
beginning of this plot quite clear, and to mark it off from the main action,
Shakespeare gives it a separate exposition. The great scene of the division
of Britain and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent is followed by the second
scene, in which Gloster and his two sons appear alone, and the beginning of
Edmund's design is disclosed. In Hamlet, though the plot is single, there is a
little group of characters possessing a certain independent interest,—
Polonius, his son, and his daughter; and so the third scene is devoted wholly
to them. And again, in Othello, since Roderigo is to occupy a peculiar
position almost throughout the action, he is introduced at once, alone with

Iago, and his position is explained before the other characters are allowed to
appear.
But why should Iago open the play? Or, if this seems too presumptuous a
question, let us put it in the form, What is the effect of his opening the play?
It is that we receive at the very outset a strong impression of the force
which is to prove fatal to the hero's happiness, so that, when we see the hero
himself, the shadow of fate already rests upon him. And an effect of this
kind is to be noticed in other tragedies. We are made conscious at once of
some power which is to influence the whole action to the hero's undoing. In
Macbeth we see and hear the Witches, in Hamlet the Ghost. In the first
scene of Julius Caesar and of Coriolanus those qualities of the crowd are
vividly shown which render hopeless the enterprise of the one hero and
wreck the ambition of the other. It is the same with the hatred between the
rival houses in Romeo and Juliet, and with Antony's infatuated passion. We
realise them at the end of the first page, and are almost ready to regard the
hero as doomed. Often, again, at one or more points during the exposition
this feeling is reinforced by some expression that has an ominous effect.
The first words we hear from Macbeth, 'So foul and fair a day I have not
seen,' echo, though he knows it not, the last words we heard from the
Witches, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair.' Romeo, on his way with his friends to
the banquet, where he is to see Juliet for the first time, tells Mercutio that he
has had a dream. What the dream was we never learn, for Mercutio does not
care to know, and breaks into his speech about Queen Mab; but we can
guess its nature from Romeo's last speech in the scene:

My mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels.

When Brabantio, forced to acquiesce in his daughter's stolen marriage,
turns, as he leaves the council-chamber, to Othello, with the warning,

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;
She has deceived her father, and may thee,

this warning, and no less Othello's answer, 'My life upon her faith,' make
our hearts sink. The whole of the coming story seems to be prefigured in
Antony's muttered words (i. ii. 120):

These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage;

and, again, in Hamlet's weary sigh, following so soon on the passionate
resolution stirred by the message of the Ghost:

The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.

These words occur at a point (the end of the First Act) which may be held to
fall either within the exposition or beyond it. I should take the former view,
though such questions, as we saw at starting, can hardly be decided with
certainty. The dimensions of this first section of a tragedy depend on a
variety of causes, of which the chief seems to be the comparative simplicity
or complexity of the situation from which the conflict arises. Where this is
simple the exposition is short, as in Julius Caesar and Macbeth. Where it is
complicated the exposition requires more space, as in Romeo and Juliet,
Hamlet, and King Lear. Its completion is generally marked in the mind of
the reader by a feeling that the action it contains is for the moment complete
but has left a problem. The lovers have met, but their families are at deadly
enmity; the hero seems at the height of success, but has admitted the
thought of murdering his sovereign; the old king has divided his kingdom
between two hypocritical daughters, and has rejected his true child; the hero
has acknowledged a sacred duty of revenge, but is weary of life: and we
ask, What will come of this? Sometimes, I may add, a certain time is
supposed to elapse before the events which answer our question make their
appearance and the conflict begins; in King Lear, for instance, about a
fortnight; in Hamlet about two months.

2

We come now to the conflict itself. And here one or two preliminary
remarks are necessary. In the first place, it must be remembered that our

point of view in examining the construction of a play will not always
coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole dramatic effect.
For example, that struggle in the hero's soul which sometimes accompanies
the outward struggle is of the highest importance for the total effect of a
tragedy; but it is not always necessary or desirable to consider it when the
question is merely one of construction. And this is natural. The play is
meant primarily for the theatre; and theatrically the outward conflict, with
its influence on the fortunes of the hero, is the aspect which first catches, if
it does not engross, attention. For the average play-goer of every period the
main interest of Hamlet has probably lain in the vicissitudes of his long duel
with the King; and the question, one may almost say, has been which will
first kill the other. And so, from the point of view of construction, the fact
that Hamlet spares the King when he finds him praying, is, from its effect
on the hero's fortunes, of great moment; but the cause of the fact, which lies
within Hamlet's character, is not so.
In the second place we must be prepared to find that, as the plays vary so
much, no single way of regarding the conflict will answer precisely to the
construction of all; that it sometimes appears possible to look at the
construction of a tragedy in two quite different ways, and that it is material
to find the best of the two; and that thus, in any given instance, it is
necessary first to define the opposing sides in the conflict. I will give one or
two examples. In some tragedies, as we saw in our first lecture, the
opposing forces can, for practical purposes, be identified with opposing
persons or groups. So it is in Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. But it is not
always so. The love of Othello may be said to contend with another force,
as the love of Romeo does; but Othello cannot be said to contend with Iago
as Romeo contends with the representatives of the hatred of the houses, or
as Macbeth contends with Malcolm and Macduff. Again, in Macbeth the
hero, however much influenced by others, supplies the main driving power
of the action; but in King Lear he does not. Possibly, therefore, the conflict,
and with it the construction, may best be regarded from different points of
view in these two plays, in spite of the fact that the hero is the central figure
in each. But if we do not observe this we shall attempt to find the same
scheme in both, and shall either be driven to some unnatural view or to a
sceptical despair of perceiving any principle of construction at all.

With these warnings, I turn to the question whether we can trace any
distinct method or methods by which Shakespeare represents the rise and
development of the conflict.
(1) One at least is obvious, and indeed it is followed not merely during the
conflict but from beginning to end of the play. There are, of course, in the
action certain places where the tension in the minds of the audience
becomes extreme. We shall consider these presently. But, in addition, there
is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of rises and falls in this
tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a regular sequence of more
exciting and less exciting sections. Some kind of variation of pitch is to be
found, of course, in all drama, for it rests on the elementary facts that relief
must be given after emotional strain, and that contrast is required to bring
out the full force of an effect. But a good drama of our own time shows
nothing approaching to the regularity with which in the plays of
Shakespeare and of his contemporaries the principle is applied. And the
main cause of this difference lies simply in a change of theatrical
arrangements. In Shakespeare's theatre, as there was no scenery, scene
followed scene with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though not the
only, way to vary the emotional pitch was to interpose a whole scene where
the tension was low between scenes where it was high. In our theatres there
is a great deal of scenery, which takes a long time to set and change; and
therefore the number of scenes is small, and the variations of tension have
to be provided within the scenes, and still more by the pauses between
them. With Shakespeare there are, of course, in any long scene variations of
tension, but the scenes are numerous and, compared with ours, usually
short, and variety is given principally by their difference in pitch.
It may further be observed that, in a portion of the play which is relatively
unexciting, the scenes of lower tension may be as long as those of higher;
while in a portion of the play which is specially exciting the scenes of low
tension are shorter, often much shorter, than the others. The reader may
verify this statement by comparing the First or the Fourth Act in most of the
tragedies with the Third; for, speaking very roughly, we may say that the
First and Fourth are relatively quiet acts, the Third highly critical. A good
example is the Third Act of King Lear, where the scenes of high tension (ii.,
iv., vi.) are respectively 95, 186 and 122 lines in length, while those of low
tension (i., iii., v.) are respectively 55, 26 and 26 lines long. Scene vii., the

last of the Act, is, I may add, a very exciting scene, though it follows scene
vi., and therefore the tone of scene vi. is greatly lowered during its final
thirty lines.
(2) If we turn now from the differences of tension to the sequence of events
within the conflict, we shall find the principle of alternation at work again
in another and a quite independent way. Let us for the sake of brevity call
the two sides in the conflict A and B. Now, usually, as we shall see
presently, through a considerable part of the play, perhaps the first half, the
cause of A is, on the whole, advancing; and through the remaining part it is
retiring, while that of B advances in turn. But, underlying this broad
movement, all through the conflict we shall find a regular alternation of
smaller advances and retirals; first A seeming to win some ground, and then
the counter-action of B being shown. And since we always more or less
decidedly prefer A to B or B to A, the result of this oscillating movement is
a constant alternation of hope and fear, or rather of a mixed state
predominantly hopeful and a mixed state predominantly apprehensive. An
example will make the point clear. In Hamlet the conflict begins with the
hero's feigning to be insane from disappointment in love, and we are shown
his immediate success in convincing Polonius. Let us call this an advance of
A. The next scene shows the King's great uneasiness about Hamlet's
melancholy, and his scepticism as to Polonius's explanation of its cause:
advance of B. Hamlet completely baffles Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
who have been sent to discover his secret, and he arranges for the test of the
play-scene: advance of A. But immediately before the play-scene his
soliloquy on suicide fills us with misgiving; and his words to Ophelia,
overheard, so convince the King that love is not the cause of his nephew's
strange behaviour, that he determines to get rid of him by sending him to
England: advance of B. The play-scene proves a complete success: decided
advance of A. Directly after it Hamlet spares the King at prayer, and in an
interview with his mother unwittingly kills Polonius, and so gives his
enemy a perfect excuse for sending him away (to be executed): decided
advance of B. I need not pursue the illustration further. This oscillating
movement can be traced without difficulty in any of the tragedies, though
less distinctly in one or two of the earliest.
(3) Though this movement continues right up to the catastrophe, its effect
does not disguise that much broader effect to which I have already alluded,

and which we have now to study. In all the tragedies, though more clearly
in some than in others, one side is distinctly felt to be on the whole
advancing up to a certain point in the conflict, and then to be on the whole
declining before the reaction of the other. There is therefore felt to be a
critical point in the action, which proves also to be a turning point. It is
critical sometimes in the sense that, until it is reached, the conflict is not, so
to speak, clenched; one of the two sets of forces might subside, or a
reconciliation might somehow be effected; while, as soon as it is reached,
we feel this can no longer be. It is critical also because the advancing force
has apparently asserted itself victoriously, gaining, if not all it could wish,
still a very substantial advantage; whereas really it is on the point of turning
downward towards its fall. This Crisis, as a rule, comes somewhere near the
middle of the play; and where it is well marked it has the effect, as to
construction, of dividing the play into five parts instead of three; these parts
showing (1) a situation not yet one of conflict, (2) the rise and development
of the conflict, in which A or B advances on the whole till it reaches (3) the
Crisis, on which follows (4) the decline of A or B towards (5) the
Catastrophe. And it will be seen that the fourth and fifth parts repeat, though
with a reversal of direction as regards A or B, the movement of the second
and third, working towards the catastrophe as the second and third worked
towards the crisis.
In developing, illustrating and qualifying this statement, it will be best to
begin with the tragedies in which the movement is most clear and simple.
These are Julius Caesar and Macbeth. In the former the fortunes of the
conspiracy rise with vicissitudes up to the crisis of the assassination (iii. i.);
they then sink with vicissitudes to the catastrophe, where Brutus and
Cassius perish. In the latter, Macbeth, hurrying, in spite of much inward
resistance, to the murder of Duncan, attains the crown, the upward
movement being extraordinarily rapid, and the crisis arriving early: his
cause then turns slowly downward, and soon hastens to ruin. In both these
tragedies the simplicity of the constructional effect, it should be noticed,
depends in part on the fact that the contending forces may quite naturally be
identified with certain persons, and partly again on the fact that the defeat
of one side is the victory of the other. Octavius and Antony, Malcolm and
Macduff, are left standing over the bodies of their foes.

This is not so in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, because here, although the
hero perishes, the side opposed to him, being the more faulty or evil, cannot
be allowed to triumph when he falls. Otherwise the type of construction is
the same. The fortunes of Romeo and Juliet rise and culminate in their
marriage (ii. vi.), and then begin to decline before the opposition of their
houses, which, aided by accidents, produces a catastrophe, but is thereupon
converted into a remorseful reconciliation. Hamlet's cause reaches its zenith
in the success of the play-scene (iii. ii.). Thereafter the reaction makes way,
and he perishes through the plot of the King and Laertes. But they are not
allowed to survive their success.
The construction in the remaining Roman plays follows the same plan, but
in both plays (as in Richard II. and Richard III.) it suffers from the
intractable nature of the historical material, and is also influenced by other
causes. In Coriolanus the hero reaches the topmost point of success when
he is named consul (ii. iii.), and the rest of the play shows his decline and
fall; but in this decline he attains again for a time extraordinary power, and
triumphs, in a sense, over his original adversary, though he succumbs to
another. In Antony and Cleopatra the advance of the hero's cause depends
on his freeing himself from the heroine, and he appears to have succeeded
when he becomes reconciled to Octavius and marries Octavia (iii. ii.); but
he returns to Egypt and is gradually driven to his death, which involves that
of the heroine.
There remain two of the greatest of the tragedies, and in both of them a
certain difficulty will be felt. King Lear alone among these plays has a
distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point
of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure. If we
attempt to do so, we must either find the crisis in the First Act (for after it
Lear's course is downward), and this is absurd; or else we must say that the
usual movement is present but its direction is reversed, the hero's cause first
sinking to the lowest point (in the Storm-scenes) and then rising again. But
this also will not do; for though his fortunes may be said to rise again for a
time, they rise only to fall once more to a catastrophe. The truth is, that after
the First Act, which is really filled by the exposition, Lear suffers but hardly
initiates action at all; and the right way to look at the matter, from the point
of view of construction, is to regard Goneril, Regan and Edmund as the
leading characters. It is they who, in the conflict, initiate action. Their

fortune mounts to the crisis, where the old King is driven out into the storm
and loses his reason, and where Gloster is blinded and expelled from his
home (iii. vi. and vii.). Then the counter-action begins to gather force, and
their cause to decline; and, although they win the battle, they are involved
in the catastrophe which they bring on Cordelia and Lear. Thus we may still
find in King Lear the usual scheme of an ascending and a descending
movement of one side in the conflict.
The case of Othello is more peculiar. In its whole constructional effect
Othello differs from the other tragedies, and the cause of this difference is
not hard to find, and will be mentioned presently. But how, after it is found,
are we to define the principle of the construction? On the one hand the
usual method seems to show itself. Othello's fortune certainly advances in
the early part of the play, and it may be considered to reach its topmost
point in the exquisite joy of his reunion with Desdemona in Cyprus; while
soon afterwards it begins to turn, and then falls to the catastrophe. But the
topmost point thus comes very early (ii. i.), and, moreover, is but faintly
marked; indeed, it is scarcely felt as a crisis at all. And, what is still more
significant, though reached by conflict, it is not reached by conflict with the
force which afterwards destroys it. Iago, in the early scenes, is indeed
shown to cherish a design against Othello, but it is not Iago against whom
he has at first to assert himself, but Brabantio; and Iago does not even begin
to poison his mind until the third scene of the Third Act.
Can we then, on the other hand, following the precedent of King Lear, and
remembering the probable chronological juxtaposition of the two plays,
regard Iago as the leading figure from the point of view of construction?
This might at first seem the right view; for it is the case that Othello
resembles King Lear in having a hero more acted upon than acting, or
rather a hero driven to act by being acted upon. But then, if Iago is taken as
the leading figure, the usual mode of construction is plainly abandoned, for
there will nowhere be a crisis followed by a descending movement. Iago's
cause advances, at first slowly and quietly, then rapidly, but it does nothing
but advance until the catastrophe swallows his dupe and him together. And
this way of regarding the action does positive violence, I think, to our
natural impressions of the earlier part of the play.

I think, therefore, that the usual scheme is so far followed that the drama
represents first the rise of the hero, and then his fall. But, however this
question may be decided, one striking peculiarity remains, and is the cause
of the unique effect of Othello. In the first half of the play the main conflict
is merely incubating; then it bursts into life, and goes storming, without
intermission or change of direction, to its close. Now, in this peculiarity
Othello is quite unlike the other tragedies; and in the consequent effect,
which is that the second half of the drama is immeasurably more exciting
than the first, it is approached only by Antony and Cleopatra. I shall
therefore reserve it for separate consideration, though in proceeding to
speak further of Shakespeare's treatment of the tragic conflict I shall have to
mention some devices which are used in Othello as well as in the other
tragedies.

3

Shakespeare's general plan, we have seen, is to show one set of forces
advancing, in secret or open opposition to the other, to some decisive
success, and then driven downward to defeat by the reaction it provokes.
And the advantages of this plan, as seen in such a typical instance as Julius
Caesar, are manifest. It conveys the movement of the conflict to the mind
with great clearness and force. It helps to produce the impression that in his
decline and fall the doer's act is returning on his own head. And, finally, as
used by Shakespeare, it makes the first half of the play intensely interesting
and dramatic. Action which effects a striking change in an existing situation
is naturally watched with keen interest; and this we find in some of these
tragedies. And the spectacle, which others exhibit, of a purpose forming
itself and, in spite of outward obstacles and often of inward resistance,
forcing its way onward to a happy consummation or a terrible deed, not
only gives scope to that psychological subtlety in which Shakespeare is
scarcely rivalled, but is also dramatic in the highest degree.
But when the crisis has been reached there come difficulties and dangers,
which, if we put Shakespeare for the moment out of mind, are easily seen.
An immediate and crushing counter-action would, no doubt, sustain the
interest, but it would precipitate the catastrophe, and leave a feeling that
there has been too long a preparation for a final effect so brief. What seems

necessary is a momentary pause, followed by a counter-action which
mounts at first slowly, and afterwards, as it gathers force, with quickening
speed. And yet the result of this arrangement, it would seem, must be, for a
time, a decided slackening of tension. Nor is this the only difficulty. The
persons who represent the counter-action and now take the lead, are likely
to be comparatively unfamiliar, and therefore unwelcome, to the audience;
and, even if familiar, they are almost sure to be at first, if not permanently,
less interesting than those who figured in the ascending movement, and on
whom attention has been fixed. Possibly, too, their necessary prominence
may crowd the hero into the back-ground. Hence the point of danger in this
method of construction seems to lie in that section of the play which
follows the crisis and has not yet approached the catastrophe. And this
section will usually comprise the Fourth Act, together, in some cases, with a
part of the Third and a part of the Fifth.
Shakespeare was so masterly a playwright, and had so wonderful a power
of giving life to unpromising subjects, that to a large extent he was able to
surmount this difficulty. But illustrations of it are easily to be found in his
tragedies, and it is not always surmounted. In almost all of them we are
conscious of that momentary pause in the action, though, as we shall see, it
does not generally occur immediately after the crisis. Sometimes he allows
himself to be driven to keep the hero off the stage for a long time while the
counter-action is rising; Macbeth, Hamlet and Coriolanus during about 450
lines, Lear for nearly 500, Romeo for about 550 (it matters less here,
because Juliet is quite as important as Romeo). How can a drama in which
this happens compete, in its latter part, with Othello? And again, how can
deliberations between Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, between Malcolm
and Macduff, between the Capulets, between Laertes and the King, keep us
at the pitch, I do not say of the crisis, but even of the action which led up to
it? Good critics—writers who have criticised Shakespeare's dramas from
within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by
themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds than
his—have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the Fourth Act,
and that one or two never wholly recover themselves. And I believe most
readers would find, if they examined their impressions, that to their minds
Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth have all a tendency to 'drag'
in this section of the play, and that the first and perhaps also the last of these

four fail even in the catastrophe to reach the height of the greatest scenes
that have preceded the Fourth Act. I will not ask how far these impressions
are justified. The difficulties in question will become clearer and will gain
in interest if we look rather at the means which have been employed to meet
them, and which certainly have in part, at least, overcome them.
(a) The first of these is always strikingly effective, sometimes marvellously
so. The crisis in which the ascending force reaches its zenith is followed
quickly, or even without the slightest pause, by a reverse or counter-blow
not less emphatic and in some cases even more exciting. And the effect is to
make us feel a sudden and tragic change in the direction of the movement,
which, after ascending more or less gradually, now turns sharply downward.
To the assassination of Caesar (iii. i.) succeeds the scene in the Forum (iii.
ii.), where Antony carries the people away in a storm of sympathy with the
dead man and of fury against the conspirators. We have hardly realised their
victory before we are forced to anticipate their ultimate defeat and to take
the liveliest interest in their chief antagonist. In Hamlet the thrilling success
of the play-scene (iii. ii.) is met and undone at once by the counter-stroke of
Hamlet's failure to take vengeance (iii. iii.) and his misfortune in killing
Polonius (iii. iv.). Coriolanus has no sooner gained the consulship than he is
excited to frenzy by the tribunes and driven into exile. On the marriage of
Romeo follows immediately the brawl which leads to Mercutio's death and
the banishment of the hero (ii. vi. and iii. i.). In all of these instances
excepting that of Hamlet the scene of the counter-stroke is at least as
exciting as that of the crisis, perhaps more so. Most people, if asked to
mention the scene that occupies the centre of the action in Julius Caesar
and in Coriolanus, would mention the scenes of Antony's speech and
Coriolanus' banishment. Thus that apparently necessary pause in the action
does not, in any of these dramas, come directly after the crisis. It is
deferred; and in several cases it is by various devices deferred for some
little time; e.g. in Romeo and Juliet till the hero has left Verona, and Juliet is
told that her marriage with Paris is to take place 'next Thursday morn' (end
of Act iii.); in Macbeth till the murder of Duncan has been followed by that
of Banquo, and this by the banquet-scene. Hence the point where this pause
occurs is very rarely reached before the end of the Third Act.
(b) Either at this point, or in the scene of the counter-stroke which precedes
it, we sometimes find a peculiar effect. We are reminded of the state of

affairs in which the conflict began. The opening of Julius Caesar warned us
that, among a people so unstable and so easily led this way or that, the
enterprise of Brutus is hopeless; the days of the Republic are done. In the
scene of Antony's speech we see this same people again. At the beginning
of Antony and Cleopatra the hero is about to leave Cleopatra for Rome.
Where the play takes, as it were, a fresh start after the crisis, he leaves
Octavia for Egypt. In Hamlet, when the counter-stroke succeeds to the
crisis, the Ghost, who had appeared in the opening scenes, reappears.
Macbeth's action in the first part of the tragedy followed on the prediction
of the Witches who promised him the throne. When the action moves
forward again after the banquet-scene the Witches appear once more, and
make those fresh promises which again drive him forward. This repetition
of a first effect produces a fateful feeling. It generally also stimulates
expectation as to the new movement about to begin. In Macbeth the scene
is, in addition, of the greatest consequence from the purely theatrical point
of view.
(c) It has yet another function. It shows, in Macbeth's furious irritability and
purposeless savagery, the internal reaction which accompanies the outward
decline of his fortunes. And in other plays also the exhibition of such inner
changes forms a means by which interest is sustained in this difficult
section of a tragedy. There is no point in Hamlet where we feel more
hopeless than that where the hero, having missed his chance, moralises over
his irresolution and determines to cherish now only thoughts of blood, and
then departs without an effort for England. One purpose, again, of the
quarrel-scene between Brutus and Cassius (iv. iii), as also of the appearance
of Caesar's ghost just afterwards, is to indicate the inward changes.
Otherwise the introduction of this famous and wonderful scene can hardly
be defended on strictly dramatic grounds. No one would consent to part
with it, and it is invaluable in sustaining interest during the progress of the
reaction, but it is an episode, the removal of which would not affect the
actual sequence of events (unless we may hold that, but for the emotion
caused by the quarrel and reconciliation, Cassius would not have allowed
Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering battle at
Philippi).
(d) The quarrel-scene illustrates yet another favourite expedient. In this
section of a tragedy Shakespeare often appeals to an emotion different from

any of those excited in the first half of the play, and so provides novelty and
generally also relief. As a rule this new emotion is pathetic; and the pathos
is not terrible or lacerating, but, even if painful, is accompanied by the
sense of beauty and by an outflow of admiration or affection, which come
with an inexpressible sweetness after the tension of the crisis and the first
counter-stroke. So it is with the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius, and
the arrival of the news of Portia's death. The most famous instance of this
effect is the scene (iv. vii.) where Lear wakes from sleep and finds Cordelia
bending over him, perhaps the most tear-compelling passage in literature.
Another is the short scene (iv. ii.) in which the talk of Lady Macduff and
her little boy is interrupted by the entrance of the murderers, a passage of
touching beauty and heroism. Another is the introduction of Ophelia in her
madness (twice in different parts of iv. v.), where the effect, though
intensely pathetic, is beautiful and moving rather than harrowing; and this
effect is repeated in a softer tone in the description of Ophelia's death (end
of Act iv.). And in Othello the passage where pathos of this kind reaches its
height is certainly that where Desdemona and Emilia converse, and the
willow-song is sung, on the eve of the catastrophe (iv. iii.).
(e) Sometimes, again, in this section of a tragedy we find humorous or
semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most
frequently in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows
more sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the
Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also heightens by
contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch of comedy in the
conversation of Lady Macduff with her little boy. Purely and delightfully
humorous are the talk and behaviour of the servants in that admirable scene
where Coriolanus comes disguised in mean apparel to the house of Aufidius
(iv. v.); of a more mingled kind is the effect of the discussion between
Menenius and the sentinels in v. ii.; and in the very middle of the supreme
scene between the hero, Volumnia and Virgilia, little Marcius makes us
burst out laughing (v. iii.) A little before the catastrophe in Hamlet comes
the grave-digger passage, a passage ever welcome, but of a length which
could hardly be defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later,
occupying some hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have
the chatter of Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is
reached in Antony and Cleopatra, where, quite close to the end, the old

countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues and
vices of the worm, and where his last words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish you joy
o' the worm,' are followed, without the intervention of a line, by the
glorious speech,

Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me....

In some of the instances of pathos or humour just mentioned we have been
brought to that part of the play which immediately precedes, or even
contains, the catastrophe. And I will add at once three remarks which refer
specially to this final section of a tragedy.
(f) In several plays Shakespeare makes here an appeal which in his own
time was evidently powerful: he introduces scenes of battle. This is the case
in Richard III., Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and
Cleopatra. Richard, Brutus and Cassius, and Macbeth die on the battlefield.
Even if his use of this expedient were not enough to show that battle-scenes
were extremely popular in the Elizabethan theatre, we know it from other
sources. It is a curious comment on the futility of our spectacular effects
that in our theatre these scenes, in which we strive after an 'illusion' of
which the Elizabethans never dreamt, produce comparatively little
excitement, and to many spectators are even somewhat distasteful.[22] And
although some of them thrill the imagination of the reader, they rarely, I
think, quite satisfy the dramatic sense. Perhaps this is partly because a
battle is not the most favourable place for the exhibition of tragic character;
and it is worth notice that Brutus, Cassius and Antony do not die fighting,
but commit suicide after defeat. The actual battle, however, does make us
feel the greatness of Antony, and still more does it help us to regard Richard
and Macbeth in their day of doom as heroes, and to mingle sympathy and
enthusiastic admiration with desire for their defeat.
(g) In some of the tragedies, again, an expedient is used, which Freytag has
pointed out (though he sometimes finds it, I think, where it is not really
employed). Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by
his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in
which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen. Occasionally,
however, where we dread the catastrophe because we love the hero, a

moment occurs, just before it, in which a gleam of false hope lights up the
darkening scene; and, though we know it is false, it affects us. Far the most
remarkable example is to be found in the final Act of King Lear. Here the
victory of Edgar and the deaths of Edmund and the two sisters have almost
made us forget the design on the lives of Lear and Cordelia. Even when we
are reminded of it there is still room for hope that Edgar, who rushes away
to the prison, will be in time to save them; and, however familiar we are
with the play, the sudden entrance of Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms,
comes on us with a shock. Much slighter, but quite perceptible, is the effect
of Antony's victory on land, and of the last outburst of pride and joy as he
and Cleopatra meet (iv. viii.). The frank apology of Hamlet to Laertes, their
reconciliation, and a delusive appearance of quiet and even confident
firmness in the tone of the hero's conversation with Horatio, almost blind us
to our better knowledge, and give to the catastrophe an added pain. Those in
the audience who are ignorant of Macbeth, and who take more simply than
most readers now can do the mysterious prophecies concerning Birnam
Wood and the man not born of woman, feel, I imagine, just before the
catastrophe, a false fear that the hero may yet escape.
(h) I will mention only one point more. In some cases Shakespeare spreads
the catastrophe out, so to speak, over a considerable space, and thus
shortens that difficult section which has to show the development of the
counter-action. This is possible only where there is, besides the hero, some
character who engages our interest in the highest degree, and with whose
fate his own is bound up. Thus the murder of Desdemona is separated by
some distance from the death of Othello. The most impressive scene in
Macbeth, after that of Duncan's murder, is the sleep-walking scene; and it
may truly, if not literally, be said to show the catastrophe of Lady Macbeth.
Yet it is the opening scene of the Fifth Act, and a number of scenes in which
Macbeth's fate is still approaching intervene before the close. Finally, in
Antony and Cleopatra the heroine equals the hero in importance, and here
the death of Antony actually occurs in the Fourth Act, and the whole of the
Fifth is devoted to Cleopatra.

Let us now turn to Othello and consider briefly its exceptional scheme of
construction. The advantage of this scheme is obvious. In the second half of
the tragedy there is no danger of 'dragging,' of any awkward pause, any
undue lowering of pitch, any need of scenes which, however fine, are more
or less episodic. The tension is extreme, and it is relaxed only for brief
intervals to permit of some slight relief. From the moment when Iago
begins to poison Othello's mind we hold our breath. Othello from this point
onwards is certainly the most exciting of Shakespeare's plays, unless
possibly Macbeth in its first part may be held to rival it. And Othello is such
a masterpiece that we are scarcely conscious of any disadvantage attending
its method of construction, and may even wonder why Shakespeare
employed this method—at any rate in its purity—in this tragedy alone. Nor
is it any answer to say that it would not elsewhere have suited his material.
Even if this be granted, how was it that he only once chose a story to which
this method was appropriate? To his eyes, or for his instinct, there must
have been some disadvantage in it. And dangers in it are in fact not hard to
see.
In the first place, where the conflict develops very slowly, or, as in Othello,
remains in a state of incubation during the first part of a tragedy, that part
cannot produce the tension proper to the corresponding part of a tragedy
like Macbeth, and may even run the risk of being somewhat flat. This seems
obvious, and it is none the less true because in Othello the difficulty is
overcome. We may even see that in Othello a difficulty was felt. The First
Act is full of stir, but it is so because Shakespeare has filled it with a kind of
preliminary conflict between the hero and Brabantio,—a personage who
then vanishes from the stage. The long first scene of the Second Act is
largely occupied with mere conversations, artfully drawn out to dimensions
which can scarcely be considered essential to the plot. These expedients are
fully justified by their success, and nothing more consummate in their way
is to be found in Shakespeare than Othello's speech to the Senate and Iago's
two talks with Roderigo. But the fact that Shakespeare can make a plan
succeed does not show that the plan is, abstractedly considered, a good
plan; and if the scheme of construction in Othello were placed, in the shape
of a mere outline, before a play-wright ignorant of the actual drama, he
would certainly, I believe, feel grave misgivings about the first half of the
play.

There is a second difficulty in the scheme. When the middle of the tragedy
is reached, the audience is not what it was at the beginning. It has been
attending for some time, and has been through a certain amount of
agitation. The extreme tension which now arises may therefore easily tire
and displease it, all the more if the matter which produces the tension is
very painful, if the catastrophe is not less so, and if the limits of the
remainder of the play (not to speak of any other consideration) permit of
very little relief. It is one thing to watch the scene of Duncan's assassination
at the beginning of the Second Act, and another thing to watch the murder
of Desdemona at the beginning of the Fifth. If Shakespeare has wholly
avoided this difficulty in Othello, it is by treating the first part of the play in
such a manner that the sympathies excited are predominantly pleasant and
therefore not exhausting. The scene in the Council Chamber, and the scene
of the reunion at Cyprus, give almost unmixed happiness to the audience;
however repulsive Iago may be, the humour of his gulling of Roderigo is
agreeable; even the scene of Cassio's intoxication is not, on the whole,
painful. Hence we come to the great temptation-scene, where the conflict
emerges into life (iii. iii.), with nerves unshaken and feelings much fresher
than those with which we greet the banquet-scene in Macbeth (iii. iv.), or
the first of the storm-scenes in King Lear (iii. i.). The same skill may be
observed in Antony and Cleopatra, where, as we saw, the second half of the
tragedy is the more exciting. But, again, the success due to Shakespeare's
skill does not show that the scheme of construction is free from a
characteristic danger; and on the whole it would appear to be best fitted for
a plot which, though it may cause painful agitation as it nears the end,
actually ends with a solution instead of a catastrophe.
But for Shakespeare's scanty use of this method there may have been a
deeper, though probably an unconscious, reason. The method suits a plot
based on intrigue. It may produce intense suspense. It may stir most
powerfully the tragic feelings of pity and fear. And it throws into relief that
aspect of tragedy in which great or beautiful lives seem caught in the net of
fate. But it is apt to be less favourable to the exhibition of character, to show
less clearly how an act returns upon the agent, and to produce less strongly
the impression of an inexorable order working in the passions and actions
of men, and labouring through their agony and waste towards good. Now, it
seems clear from his tragedies that what appealed most to Shakespeare was

this latter class of effects. I do not ask here whether Othello fails to produce,
in the same degree as the other tragedies, these impressions; but
Shakespeare's preference for them may have been one reason why he
habitually chose a scheme of construction which produces in the final Acts
but little of strained suspense, and presents the catastrophe as a thing
foreseen and following with a psychological and moral necessity on the
action exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.

4

The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here, and
I will not pursue the subject further. But its discussion suggests a question
which will have occurred to some of my hearers. They may have asked
themselves whether I have not used the words 'art' and 'device' and
'expedient' and 'method' too boldly, as though Shakespeare were a conscious
artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience to an
extraordinary dramatic instinct, as he composed mainly by inspiration. And
a brief explanation on this head will enable me to allude to a few more
points, chiefly of construction, which are not too technical for a lecture.
In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to
imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he
produced. But no artist always does this, and I see no reason to doubt that
Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his method of constructing and
composing differed, except in degree, from that of the most 'conscious' of
artists. The antithesis of art and inspiration, though not meaningless, is often
most misleading. Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate
workmanship. The two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where
a genuinely poetic result is being produced they cannot be so. The glow of a
first conception must in some measure survive or rekindle itself in the work
of planning and executing; and what is called a technical expedient may
'come' to a man with as sudden a glory as a splendid image. Verse may be
easy and unpremeditated, as Milton says his was, and yet many a word in it
may be changed many a time, and the last change be more 'inspired' than
the original. The difference between poets in these matters is no doubt
considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a difference of
less and more. It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote fluently, for

Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says so; and for
anything we can tell he may also have constructed with unusual readiness.
But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for instance in Love's Labour's
Lost and Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet); it is almost impossible that he can
have worked out the plots of his best plays without much reflection and
many experiments; and it appears to me scarcely more possible to mistake
the signs of deliberate care in some of his famous speeches. If a 'conscious
artist' means one who holds his work away from him, scrutinises and judges
it, and, if need be, alters it and alters it till it comes as near satisfying him as
he can make it, I am sure that Shakespeare frequently employed such
conscious art. If it means, again, an artist who consciously aims at the
effects he produces, what ground have we for doubting that he frequently
employed such art, though probably less frequently than a good many other
poets?
But perhaps the notion of a 'conscious artist' in drama is that of one who
studies the theory of the art, and even writes with an eye to its 'rules.' And
we know it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was totally ignorant
of the 'rules.' Yet this is quite incredible. The rules referred to, such as they
were, were not buried in Aristotle's Greek nor even hidden away in Italian
treatises. He could find pretty well all of them in a book so current and
famous as Sidney's Defence of Poetry. Even if we suppose that he refused
to open this book (which is most unlikely), how could he possibly remain
ignorant of the rules in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who
must have been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some
of whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the
lawlessness of the popular drama? Who can doubt that at the Mermaid
Shakespeare heard from Jonson's lips much more censure of his offences
against 'art' than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper? And is it
not most probable that those battles between the two which Fuller imagines,
were waged often on the field of dramatic criticism? If Shakespeare, then,
broke some of the 'rules,' it was not from ignorance. Probably he refused, on
grounds of art itself, to trouble himself with rules derived from forms of
drama long extinct. And it is not unlikely that he was little interested in
theory as such, and more than likely that he was impatient of pedantic
distinctions between 'pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-
historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem

unlimited.' But that would not prove that he never reflected on his art, or
could not explain, if he cared to, what he thought would be good general
rules for the drama of his own time. He could give advice about play-acting.
Why should we suppose that he could not give advice about play-making?
Still Shakespeare, though in some considerable degree a 'conscious' artist,
frequently sins against art; and if his sins were not due to ignorance or
inspiration, they must be accounted for otherwise. Neither can there be
much doubt about their causes (for they have more than one cause), as we
shall see if we take some illustrations of the defects themselves.
Among these are not to be reckoned certain things which in dramas written
at the present time would rightly be counted defects. There are, for
example, in most Elizabethan plays peculiarities of construction which
would injure a play written for our stage but were perfectly well-fitted for
that very different stage,—a stage on which again some of the best-
constructed plays of our time would appear absurdly faulty. Or take the
charge of improbability. Shakespeare certainly has improbabilities which
are defects. They are most frequent in the winding up of his comedies (and
how many comedies are there in the world which end satisfactorily?). But
his improbabilities are rarely psychological, and in some of his plays there
occurs one kind of improbability which is no defect, but simply a
characteristic which has lost in our day much of its former attraction. I
mean that the story, in most of the comedies and many of the tragedies of
the Elizabethans, was intended to be strange and wonderful. These plays
were tales of romance dramatised, and they were meant in part to satisfy the
same love of wonder to which the romances appealed. It is no defect in the
Arthurian legends, or the old French romances, or many of the stories in the
Decameron, that they are improbable: it is a virtue. To criticise them as
though they were of the same species as a realistic novel, is, we should all
say, merely stupid. Is it anything else to criticise in the same way Twelfth
Night or As You Like It? And so, even when the difference between comedy
and tragedy is allowed for, the improbability of the opening of King Lear,
so often censured, is no defect. It is not out of character, it is only extremely
unusual and strange. But it was meant to be so; like the marriage of the
black Othello with Desdemona, the Venetian senator's daughter.

To come then to real defects, (a) one may be found in places where
Shakespeare strings together a number of scenes, some very short, in which
the dramatis personae are frequently changed; as though a novelist were to
tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in which he flitted from one
group of his characters to another. This method shows itself here and there
in the pure tragedies (e.g. in the last Act of Macbeth), but it appears most
decidedly where the historical material was undramatic, as in the middle
part of Antony and Cleopatra. It was made possible by the absence of
scenery, and doubtless Shakespeare used it because it was the easiest way
out of a difficulty. But, considered abstractedly, it is a defective method,
and, even as used by Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely
narrative arrangement common in plays before his time.
(b) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of matter
neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of character: e.g.
the references in Hamlet to theatre-quarrels of the day, and the length of the
player's speech and also of Hamlet's directions to him respecting the
delivery of the lines to be inserted in the 'Murder of Gonzago.' All this was
probably of great interest at the time when Hamlet was first presented; most
of it we should be very sorry to miss; some of it seems to bring us close to
Shakespeare himself; but who can defend it from the point of view of
constructive art?
(c) Again, we may look at Shakespeare's soliloquies. It will be agreed that
in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are being
addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the soliloquies are
master-pieces. But certainly in some the purpose of giving information lies
bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks to the audience. Such faults
are found chiefly in the early plays, though there is a glaring instance at the
end of Belarius's speech in Cymbeline (iii. iii. 99 ff.), and even in the mature
tragedies something of this kind may be traced. Let anyone compare, for
example, Edmund's soliloquy in King Lear, i. ii., 'This is the excellent
foppery of the world,' with Edgar's in ii. iii., and he will be conscious that in
the latter the purpose of giving information is imperfectly disguised.[23]
(d) It cannot be denied, further, that in many of Shakespeare's plays, if not
in all, there are inconsistencies and contradictions, and also that questions
are suggested to the reader which it is impossible for him to answer with

certainty. For instance, some of the indications of the lapse of time between
Othello's marriage and the events of the later Acts flatly contradict one
another; and it is impossible to make out whether Hamlet was at Court or at
the University when his father was murdered. But it should be noticed that
often what seems a defect of this latter kind is not really a defect. For
instance, the difficulty about Hamlet's age (even if it cannot be resolved by
the text alone) did not exist for Shakespeare's audience. The moment
Burbage entered it must have been clear whether the hero was twenty or
thirty. And in like manner many questions of dramatic interpretation which
trouble us could never have arisen when the plays were first produced, for
the actor would be instructed by the author how to render any critical and
possibly ambiguous passage. (I have heard it remarked, and the remark I
believe is just, that Shakespeare seems to have relied on such instructions
less than most of his contemporaries; one fact out of several which might be
adduced to prove that he did not regard his plays as mere stage-dramas of
the moment.)
(e) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often
provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passages
in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or 'pestered with metaphors';
but they were surely right in the general statement that his language often
shows these faults. And this is a subject which later criticism has never
fairly faced and examined.
(f) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious characters talk
alike,[24] and that he constantly speaks through the mouths of his dramatis
personae without regard to their individual natures, would be to exaggerate
absurdly; but it is true that in his earlier plays these faults are traceable in
some degree, and even in Hamlet there are striking passages where
dramatic appropriateness is sacrificed to some other object. When Laertes
speaks the lines beginning,

For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
In thews and bulk,

who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes? Or
when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the
instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists to
Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see that
Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in part simply to
write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience thoughts which will help
them to understand, not the player-king nor yet King Claudius, but Hamlet
himself, who, on his side,—and here quite in character—has already
enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of his soliloquies?
(g) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times much
earlier, Shakespeare was fond of 'gnomic' passages, and introduces them
probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely than, I
suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do. These passages, it may
be observed, are frequently rhymed (e.g. Othello, i. iii. 201 ff., ii. i. 149 ff.).
Sometimes they were printed in early editions with inverted commas round
them, as are in the First Quarto Polonius's 'few precepts' to Laertes.
If now we ask whence defects like these arose, we shall observe that some
of them are shared by the majority of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and
abound in the dramas immediately preceding his time. They are
characteristics of an art still undeveloped, and, no doubt, were not perceived
to be defects. But though it is quite probable that in regard to one or two
kinds of imperfection (such as the superabundance of 'gnomic' passages)
Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very unlikely that in most
cases he did so, unless in the first years of his career of authorship. And
certainly he never can have thought it artistic to leave inconsistencies,
obscurities, or passages of bombast in his work. Most of the defects in his
writings must be due to indifference or want of care.
I do not say that all were so. In regard, for example, to his occasional
bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his
perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English
language like no one else, he had not that sureness of taste in words which

has been shown by some much smaller writers. And it seems not unlikely
that here he suffered from his comparative want of 'learning,'—that is, of
familiarity with the great writers of antiquity. But nine-tenths of his defects
are not, I believe, the errors of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the
sins of a great but negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, over-worked and
pressed for time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were
incapable of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt
the degradation of having to live by pleasing them. Probably in hours of
depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood
the whole business of play-writing seemed to him a little thing. None of
these thoughts and feelings influenced him when his subject had caught
hold of him. To imagine that then he 'winged his roving flight' for 'gain' or
'glory,' or wrote from any cause on earth but the necessity of expression,
with all its pains and raptures, is mere folly. He was possessed: his mind
must have been in a white heat: he worked, no doubt, with the furia of
Michael Angelo. And if he did not succeed at once—and how can even he
have always done so?—he returned to the matter again and again. Such
things as the scenes of Duncan's murder or Othello's temptation, such
speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and of Claudio to his sister about
death, were not composed in an hour and tossed aside; and if they have
defects, they have not what Shakespeare thought defects. Nor is it possible
that his astonishingly individual conceptions of character can have been
struck out at a heat: prolonged and repeated thought must have gone to
them. But of small inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless.
He seems to have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even
contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got
married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married
somehow. And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were
necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a
craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill will
turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote probably
fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying what he
meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when passion
was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must heighten his
style but would not take the trouble to inflame his imagination. It may truly
be said that what injures such passages is not inspiration, but the want of it.
But, as they are mostly passages where no poet could expect to be inspired,

it is even more true to say that here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of
the artist who is determined to make everything as good as he can. Such
poets as Milton, Pope, Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left
probably scarcely anything that they felt they could improve. No one could
dream of saying that of Shakespeare.
Hence comes what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his works.
Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble that of
nature. It organises and vitalises its product from the centre outward to the
minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn upon it the most
searching light you can command, when you dissect it and apply to it the
test of a microscope, still you find in it nothing formless, general or vague,
but everywhere structure, character, individuality. In this his great things,
which seem to come whenever they are wanted, have no companions in
literature except the few greatest things in Dante; and it is a fatal error to
allow his carelessness elsewhere to make one doubt whether here one is not
seeking more than can be found. It is very possible to look for subtlety in
the wrong places in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible to
find too much. But then this characteristic, which is one source of his
endless attraction, is also a source of perplexity. For in those parts of his
plays which show him neither in his most intense nor in his most negligent
mood, we are often unable to decide whether something that seems
inconsistent, indistinct, feeble, exaggerated, is really so, or whether it was
definitely meant to be as it is, and has an intention which we ought to be
able to divine; whether, for example, we have before us some unusual trait
in character, some abnormal movement of mind, only surprising to us
because we understand so very much less of human nature than
Shakespeare did, or whether he wanted to get his work done and made a
slip, or in using an old play adopted hastily something that would not
square with his own conception, or even refused to trouble himself with
minutiae which we notice only because we study him, but which nobody
ever notices in a stage performance. We know well enough what
Shakespeare is doing when at the end of Measure for Measure he marries
Isabella to the Duke—and a scandalous proceeding it is; but who can ever
feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some not unimportant points
in Hamlet are due to his own want of eyesight or to Shakespeare's want of
care?

FOOTNOTES:
[16] The famous critics of the Romantic Revival seem to have paid very little
attention to this subject. Mr. R.G. Moulton has written an interesting book on
Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885). In parts of my analysis I am much
indebted to Gustav Freytag's Technik des Dramas, a book which deserves to be
much better known than it appears to be to Englishmen interested in the drama. I
may add, for the benefit of classical scholars, that Freytag has a chapter on
Sophocles. The reader of his book will easily distinguish, if he cares to, the
places where I follow Freytag, those where I differ from him, and those where I
write in independence of him. I may add that in speaking of construction I have
thought it best to assume in my hearers no previous knowledge of the subject;
that I have not attempted to discuss how much of what is said of Shakespeare
would apply also to other dramatists; and that I have illustrated from the
tragedies generally, not only from the chosen four.
[17] This word throughout the lecture bears the sense it has here, which, of
course, is not its usual dramatic sense.
[18] In the same way a comedy will consist of three parts, showing the
'situation,' the 'complication' or 'entanglement,' and the dénouement or 'solution.'
[19] It is possible, of course, to open the tragedy with the conflict already begun,
but Shakespeare never does so.
[20] When the subject comes from English history, and especially when the play
forms one of a series, some knowledge may be assumed. So in Richard III. Even
in Richard II. not a little knowledge seems to be assumed, and this fact points to
the existence of a popular play on the earlier part of Richard's reign. Such a play
exists, though it is not clear that it is a genuine Elizabethan work. See the
Jahrbuch d. deutschen Sh.-gesellschaft for 1899.
[21] This is one of several reasons why many people enjoy reading him, who, on
the whole, dislike reading plays. A main cause of this very general dislike is that
the reader has not a lively enough imagination to carry him with pleasure
through the exposition, though in the theatre, where his imagination is helped, he
would experience little difficulty.
[22] The end of Richard III. is perhaps an exception.
[23] I do not discuss the general question of the justification of soliloquy, for it
concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all dramatists down to quite
recent times. I will only remark that neither soliloquy nor the use of verse can be
condemned on the mere ground that they are 'unnatural.' No dramatic language
is 'natural'; all dramatic language is idealised. So that the question as to
soliloquy must be one as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of
advantages and disadvantages. (Since this lecture was written I have read some
remarks on Shakespeare's soliloquies to much the same effect by E. Kilian in the
Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft for 1903.)
[24] If by this we mean that these characters all speak what is recognisably
Shakespeare's style, of course it is true; but it is no accusation. Nor does it

follow that they all speak alike; and in fact they are far from doing so.

LECTURE III
SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD—HAMLET

1

Before we come to-day to Hamlet, the first of our four tragedies, a few
remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare's literary
career. But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our restricted
purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be stating widely
accepted results of investigation, without going into the evidence on which
they rest.[25]
Shakespeare's tragedies fall into two distinct groups, and these groups are
separated by a considerable interval. He wrote tragedy—pure, like Romeo
and Juliet; historical, like Richard III.—in the early years of his career of
authorship, when he was also writing such comedies as Love's Labour's
Lost and the Midsummer-Night's Dream. Then came a time, lasting some
half-dozen years, during which he composed the most mature and
humorous of his English History plays (the plays with Falstaff in them), and
the best of his romantic comedies (the plays with Beatrice and Jaques and
Viola in them). There are no tragedies belonging to these half-dozen years,
nor any dramas approaching tragedy. But now, from about 1601 to about
1608, comes tragedy after tragedy—Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King
Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus;
and their companions are plays which cannot indeed be called tragedies, but
certainly are not comedies in the same sense as As You Like It or the
Tempest. These seven years, accordingly, might, without much risk of
misunderstanding, be called Shakespeare's tragic period.[26] And after it he
wrote no more tragedies, but chiefly romances more serious and less sunny
than As You Like It, but not much less serene.
The existence of this distinct tragic period, of a time when the dramatist
seems to have been occupied almost exclusively with deep and painful

problems, has naturally helped to suggest the idea that the 'man' also, in
these years of middle age, from thirty-seven to forty-four, was heavily
burdened in spirit; that Shakespeare turned to tragedy not merely for
change, or because he felt it to be the greatest form of drama and felt
himself equal to it, but also because the world had come to look dark and
terrible to him; and even that the railings of Thersites and the maledictions
of Timon express his own contempt and hatred for mankind. Discussion of
this large and difficult subject, however, is not necessary to the dramatic
appreciation of any of his works, and I shall say nothing of it here, but shall
pass on at once to draw attention to certain stages and changes which may
be observed within the tragic period. For this purpose too it is needless to
raise any question as to the respective chronological positions of Othello,
King Lear and Macbeth. What is important is also generally admitted: that
Julius Caesar and Hamlet precede these plays, and that Antony and
Cleopatra and Coriolanus follow them.[27]
If we consider the tragedies first on the side of their substance, we find at
once an obvious difference between the first two and the remainder. Both
Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit.
Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic; Brutus may be
called so in a stricter sense. Each, being also a 'good' man, shows
accordingly, when placed in critical circumstances, a sensitive and almost
painful anxiety to do right. And though they fail—of course in quite
different ways—to deal successfully with these circumstances, the failure in
each case is connected rather with their intellectual nature and reflective
habit than with any yielding to passion. Hence the name 'tragedy of
thought,' which Schlegel gave to Hamlet, may be given also, as in effect it
has been by Professor Dowden, to Julius Caesar. The later heroes, on the
other hand, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus, have, one
and all, passionate natures, and, speaking roughly, we may attribute the
tragic failure in each of these cases to passion. Partly for this reason, the
later plays are wilder and stormier than the first two. We see a greater mass
of human nature in commotion, and we see Shakespeare's own powers
exhibited on a larger scale. Finally, examination would show that, in all
these respects, the first tragedy, Julius Caesar, is further removed from the
later type than is the second, Hamlet.

These two earlier works are both distinguished from most of the succeeding
tragedies in another though a kindred respect. Moral evil is not so intently
scrutinised or so fully displayed in them. In Julius Caesar, we may almost
say, everybody means well. In Hamlet, though we have a villain, he is a
small one. The murder which gives rise to the action lies outside the play,
and the centre of attention within the play lies in the hero's efforts to do his
duty. It seems clear that Shakespeare's interest, since the early days when
under Marlowe's influence he wrote Richard III., has not been directed to
the more extreme or terrible forms of evil. But in the tragedies that follow
Hamlet the presence of this interest is equally clear. In Iago, in the 'bad'
people of King Lear, even in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, human nature
assumes shapes which inspire not mere sadness or repulsion but horror and
dismay. If in Timon no monstrous cruelty is done, we still watch ingratitude
and selfishness so blank that they provoke a loathing we never felt for
Claudius; and in this play and King Lear we can fancy that we hear at times
the saeva indignatio, if not the despair, of Swift. This prevalence of
abnormal or appalling forms of evil, side by side with vehement passion, is
another reason why the convulsion depicted in these tragedies seems to
come from a deeper source, and to be vaster in extent, than the conflict in
the two earlier plays. And here again Julius Caesar is further removed than
Hamlet from Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.
But in regard to this second point of difference a reservation must be made,
on which I will speak a little more fully, because, unlike the matter hitherto
touched on, its necessity seems hardly to have been recognised. All of the
later tragedies may be called tragedies of passion, but not all of them
display these extreme forms of evil. Neither of the last two does so. Antony
and Coriolanus are, from one point of view, victims of passion; but the
passion that ruins Antony also exalts him, he touches the infinite in it; and
the pride and self-will of Coriolanus, though terrible in bulk, are scarcely so
in quality; there is nothing base in them, and the huge creature whom they
destroy is a noble, even a lovable, being. Nor does either of these dramas,
though the earlier depicts a corrupt civilisation, include even among the
minor characters anyone who can be called villainous or horrible. Consider,
finally, the impression left on us at the close of each. It is remarkable that
this impression, though very strong, can scarcely be called purely tragic; or,
if we call it so, at least the feeling of reconciliation which mingles with the

obviously tragic emotions is here exceptionally well-marked. The death of
Antony, it will be remembered, comes before the opening of the Fifth Act.
The death of Cleopatra, which closes the play, is greeted by the reader with
sympathy and admiration, even with exultation at the thought that she has
foiled Octavius; and these feelings are heightened by the deaths of
Charmian and Iras, heroically faithful to their mistress, as Emilia was to
hers. In Coriolanus the feeling of reconciliation is even stronger. The whole
interest towards the close has been concentrated on the question whether the
hero will persist in his revengeful design of storming and burning his native
city, or whether better feelings will at last overpower his resentment and
pride. He stands on the edge of a crime beside which, at least in outward
dreadfulness, the slaughter of an individual looks insignificant. And when,
at the sound of his mother's voice and the sight of his wife and child, nature
asserts itself and he gives way, although we know he will lose his life, we
care little for that: he has saved his soul. Our relief, and our exultation in the
power of goodness, are so great that the actual catastrophe which follows
and mingles sadness with these feelings leaves them but little diminished,
and as we close the book we feel, it seems to me, more as we do at the close
of Cymbeline than as we do at the close of Othello. In saying this I do not in
the least mean to criticise Coriolanus. It is a much nobler play as it stands
than it would have been if Shakespeare had made the hero persist, and we
had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome, awaking suddenly to the
enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on himself; but that would
surely have been an ending more strictly tragic than the close of
Shakespeare's play. Whether this close was simply due to his unwillingness
to contradict his historical authority on a point of such magnitude we need
not ask. In any case Coriolanus is, in more than an outward sense, the end
of his tragic period. It marks the transition to his latest works, in which the
powers of repentance and forgiveness charm to rest the tempest raised by
error and guilt.
If we turn now from the substance of the tragedies to their style and
versification, we find on the whole a corresponding difference between the
earlier and the later. The usual assignment of Julius Caesar, and even of
Hamlet, to the end of Shakespeare's Second Period—the period of Henry V.
—is based mainly, we saw, on considerations of form. The general style of
the serious parts of the last plays from English history is one of full, noble

and comparatively equable eloquence. The 'honey-tongued' sweetness and
beauty of Shakespeare's early writing, as seen in Romeo and Juliet or the
Midsummer-Night's Dream, remain; the ease and lucidity remain; but there
is an accession of force and weight. We find no great change from this style
when we come to Julius Caesar,[28] which may be taken to mark its
culmination. At this point in Shakespeare's literary development he reaches,
if the phrase may be pardoned, a limited perfection. Neither thought on the
one side, nor expression on the other, seems to have any tendency to outrun
or contend with its fellow. We receive an impression of easy mastery and
complete harmony, but not so strong an impression of inner power bursting
into outer life. Shakespeare's style is perhaps nowhere else so free from
defects, and yet almost every one of his subsequent plays contains writing
which is greater. To speak familiarly, we feel in Julius Caesar that, although
not even Shakespeare could better the style he has chosen, he has not let
himself go.
In reading Hamlet we have no such feeling, and in many parts (for there is
in the writing of Hamlet an unusual variety[29]) we are conscious of a
decided change. The style in these parts is more rapid and vehement, less
equable and less simple; and there is a change of the same kind in the
versification. But on the whole the type is the same as in Julius Caesar, and
the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly more marked than the
difference. If Hamlet's soliloquies, considered simply as compositions,
show a great change from Jaques's speech, 'All the world's a stage,' and
even from the soliloquies of Brutus, yet Hamlet (for instance in the hero's
interview with his mother) is like Julius Caesar, and unlike the later
tragedies, in the fulness of its eloquence, and passages like the following
belong quite definitely to the style of the Second Period:

Mar. It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

Hor. So have I heard and do in part believe it.
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
This bewitching music is heard again in Hamlet's farewell to Horatio:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

But after Hamlet this music is heard no more. It is followed by a music
vaster and deeper, but not the same.
The changes observable in Hamlet are afterwards, and gradually, so greatly
developed that Shakespeare's style and versification at last become almost
new things. It is extremely difficult to illustrate this briefly in a manner to
which no just exception can be taken, for it is almost impossible to find in
two plays passages bearing a sufficiently close resemblance to one another
in occasion and sentiment. But I will venture to put by the first of those
quotations from Hamlet this from Macbeth:

Dun. This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.

Ban. This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate;

and by the second quotation from Hamlet this from Antony and Cleopatra:

The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts

In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,
The noblest; and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman,—a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;
I can no more.
It would be almost an impertinence to point out in detail how greatly these
two passages, and especially the second, differ in effect from those in
Hamlet, written perhaps five or six years earlier. The versification, by the
time we reach Antony and Cleopatra, has assumed a new type; and
although this change would appear comparatively slight in a typical passage
from Othello or even from King Lear, its approach through these plays to
Timon and Macbeth can easily be traced. It is accompanied by a similar
change in diction and construction. After Hamlet the style, in the more
emotional passages, is heightened. It becomes grander, sometimes wilder,
sometimes more swelling, even tumid. It is also more concentrated, rapid,
varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical. It
is, therefore, not so easy and lucid, and in the more ordinary dialogue it is
sometimes involved and obscure, and from these and other causes deficient
in charm.[30] On the other hand, it is always full of life and movement, and
in great passages produces sudden, strange, electrifying effects which are
rarely found in earlier plays, and not so often even in Hamlet. The more
pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may almost be called
explosions of sublimity or pathos.
There is room for differences of taste and preference as regards the style
and versification of the end of Shakespeare's Second Period, and those of
the later tragedies and last romances. But readers who miss in the latter the
peculiar enchantment of the earlier will not deny that the changes in form
are in entire harmony with the inward changes. If they object to passages
where, to exaggerate a little, the sense has rather to be discerned beyond the
words than found in them, and if they do not wholly enjoy the movement of
so typical a speech as this,

Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will
Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show,

Against a sworder! I see men's judgements are
A parcel of their fortunes; and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them,
To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdued
His judgement too,
they will admit that, in traversing the impatient throng of thoughts not
always completely embodied, their minds move through an astonishing
variety of ideas and experiences, and that a style less generally poetic than
that of Hamlet is also a style more invariably dramatic. It may be that, for
the purposes of tragedy, the highest point was reached during the progress
of these changes, in the most critical passages of Othello, King Lear and
Macbeth.[31]

2

Suppose you were to describe the plot of Hamlet to a person quite ignorant
of the play, and suppose you were careful to tell your hearer nothing about
Hamlet's character, what impression would your sketch make on him?
Would he not exclaim: 'What a sensational story! Why, here are some eight
violent deaths, not to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad woman, and a fight
in a grave! If I did not know that the play was Shakespeare's, I should have
thought it must have been one of those early tragedies of blood and horror
from which he is said to have redeemed the stage'? And would he not then
go on to ask: 'But why in the world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at once,
and so save seven of those eight lives?'
This exclamation and this question both show the same thing, that the
whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero. For without this
character the story would appear sensational and horrible; and yet the actual
Hamlet is very far from being so, and even has a less terrible effect than
Othello, King Lear or Macbeth. And again, if we had no knowledge of this
character, the story would hardly be intelligible; it would at any rate at once
suggest that wondering question about the conduct of the hero; while the
story of any of the other three tragedies would sound plain enough and

would raise no such question. It is further very probable that the main
change made by Shakespeare in the story as already represented on the
stage, lay in a new conception of Hamlet's character and so of the cause of
his delay. And, lastly, when we examine the tragedy, we observe two things
which illustrate the same point. First, we find by the side of the hero no
other figure of tragic proportions, no one like Lady Macbeth or Iago, no one
even like Cordelia or Desdemona; so that, in Hamlet's absence, the
remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all. And,
secondly, we find among them two, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are
evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief. Even in the
situations there is a curious parallelism; for Fortinbras, like Hamlet, is the
son of a king, lately dead, and succeeded by his brother; and Laertes, like
Hamlet, has a father slain, and feels bound to avenge him. And with this
parallelism in situation there is a strong contrast in character; for both
Fortinbras and Laertes possess in abundance the very quality which the hero
seems to lack, so that, as we read, we are tempted to exclaim that either of
them would have accomplished Hamlet's task in a day. Naturally, then, the
tragedy of Hamlet with Hamlet left out has become the symbol of extreme
absurdity; while the character itself has probably exerted a greater
fascination, and certainly has been the subject of more discussion, than any
other in the whole literature of the world.
Before, however, we approach the task of examining it, it is as well to
remind ourselves that the virtue of the play by no means wholly depends on
this most subtle creation. We are all aware of this, and if we were not so the
history of Hamlet, as a stage-play, might bring the fact home to us. It is to-
day the most popular of Shakespeare's tragedies on our stage; and yet a
large number, perhaps even the majority of the spectators, though they may
feel some mysterious attraction in the hero, certainly do not question
themselves about his character or the cause of his delay, and would still find
the play exceptionally effective, even if he were an ordinary brave young
man and the obstacles in his path were purely external. And this has
probably always been the case. Hamlet seems from the first to have been a
favourite play; but until late in the eighteenth century, I believe, scarcely a
critic showed that he perceived anything specially interesting in the
character. Hanmer, in 1730, to be sure, remarks that 'there appears no reason
at all in nature why this young prince did not put the usurper to death as

soon as possible'; but it does not even cross his mind that this apparent
'absurdity' is odd and might possibly be due to some design on the part of
the poet. He simply explains the absurdity by observing that, if Shakespeare
had made the young man go 'naturally to work,' the play would have come
to an end at once! Johnson, in like manner, notices that 'Hamlet is, through
the whole piece, rather an instrument than an agent,' but it does not occur to
him that this peculiar circumstance can be anything but a defect in
Shakespeare's management of the plot. Seeing, they saw not. Henry
Mackenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling, was, it would seem, the first
of our critics to feel the 'indescribable charm' of Hamlet, and to divine
something of Shakespeare's intention. 'We see a man,' he writes, 'who in
other circumstances would have exercised all the moral and social virtues,
placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind serve
but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.'[32] How significant
is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the slowly rising sun of
Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder, beauty and pathos of this
most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations began to be visible! We do not
know that they were perceived even in his own day, and perhaps those are
not wholly wrong who declare that this creation, so far from being a
characteristic product of the time, was a vision of

the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

But the dramatic splendour of the whole tragedy is another matter, and must
have been manifest not only in Shakespeare's day but even in Hanmer's.
It is indeed so obvious that I pass it by, and proceed at once to the central
question of Hamlet's character. And I believe time will be saved, and a good
deal of positive interpretation may be introduced, if, without examining in
detail any one theory, we first distinguish classes or types of theory which
appear to be in various ways and degrees insufficient or mistaken. And we
will confine our attention to sane theories;—for on this subject, as on all
questions relating to Shakespeare, there are plenty of merely lunatic views:
the view, for example, that Hamlet, being a disguised woman in love with
Horatio, could hardly help seeming unkind to Ophelia; or the view that,
being a very clever and wicked young man who wanted to oust his innocent
uncle from the throne, he 'faked' the Ghost with this intent.

But, before we come to our types of theory, it is necessary to touch on an
idea, not unfrequently met with, which would make it vain labour to discuss
or propose any theory at all. It is sometimes said that Hamlet's character is
not only intricate but unintelligible. Now this statement might mean
something quite unobjectionable and even perhaps true and important. It
might mean that the character cannot be wholly understood. As we saw,
there may be questions which we cannot answer with certainty now,
because we have nothing but the text to guide us, but which never arose for
the spectators who saw Hamlet acted in Shakespeare's day; and we shall
have to refer to such questions in these lectures. Again, it may be held
without any improbability that, from carelessness or because he was
engaged on this play for several years, Shakespeare left inconsistencies in
his exhibition of the character which must prevent us from being certain of
his ultimate meaning. Or, possibly, we may be baffled because he has
illustrated in it certain strange facts of human nature, which he had noticed
but of which we are ignorant. But then all this would apply in some
measure to other characters in Shakespeare, and it is not this that is meant
by the statement that Hamlet is unintelligible. What is meant is that
Shakespeare intended him to be so, because he himself was feeling strongly,
and wished his audience to feel strongly, what a mystery life is, and how
impossible it is for us to understand it. Now here, surely, we have mere
confusion of mind. The mysteriousness of life is one thing, the
psychological unintelligibility of a dramatic character is quite another; and
the second does not show the first, it shows only the incapacity or folly of
the dramatist. If it did show the first, it would be very easy to surpass
Shakespeare in producing a sense of mystery: we should simply have to
portray an absolutely nonsensical character. Of course Hamlet appeals
powerfully to our sense of the mystery of life, but so does every good
tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is an enigma to us, but because,
having a fair understanding of him, we feel how strange it is that strength
and weakness should be so mingled in one soul, and that this soul should be
doomed to such misery and apparent failure.
(1) To come, then, to our typical views, we may lay it down, first, that no
theory will hold water which finds the cause of Hamlet's delay merely, or
mainly, or even to any considerable extent, in external difficulties. Nothing
is easier than to spin a plausible theory of this kind. What, it may be asked,

[33]
was Hamlet to do when the Ghost had left him with its commission of
vengeance? The King was surrounded not merely by courtiers but by a
Swiss body-guard: how was Hamlet to get at him? Was he then to accuse
him publicly of the murder? If he did, what would happen? How would he
prove the charge? All that he had to offer in proof was—a ghost-story!
Others, to be sure, had seen the Ghost, but no one else had heard its
revelations. Obviously, then, even if the court had been honest, instead of
subservient and corrupt, it would have voted Hamlet mad, or worse, and
would have shut him up out of harm's way. He could not see what to do,
therefore, and so he waited. Then came the actors, and at once with
admirable promptness he arranged for the play-scene, hoping that the King
would betray his guilt to the whole court. Unfortunately the King did not. It
is true that immediately afterwards Hamlet got his chance; for he found the
King defenceless on his knees. But what Hamlet wanted was not a private
revenge, to be followed by his own imprisonment or execution; it was
public justice. So he spared the King; and, as he unluckily killed Polonius
just afterwards, he had to consent to be despatched to England. But, on the
voyage there, he discovered the King's commission, ordering the King of
England to put him immediately to death; and, with this in his pocket, he
made his way back to Denmark. For now, he saw, the proof of the King's
attempt to murder him would procure belief also for the story of the murder
of his father. His enemy, however, was too quick for him, and his public
arraignment of that enemy was prevented by his own death.
A theory like this sounds very plausible—so long as you do not remember
the text. But no unsophisticated mind, fresh from the reading of Hamlet,
will accept it; and, as soon as we begin to probe it, fatal objections arise in
such numbers that I choose but a few, and indeed I think the first of them is
enough.
(a) From beginning to end of the play, Hamlet never makes the slightest
reference to any external difficulty. How is it possible to explain this fact in
conformity with the theory? For what conceivable reason should
Shakespeare conceal from us so carefully the key to the problem?
(b) Not only does Hamlet fail to allude to such difficulties, but he always
assumes that he can obey the Ghost,[34] and he once asserts this in so many

words ('Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do't,' iv. iv.
45).
(c) Again, why does Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising the
people against the King? Why but to show how much more easily Hamlet,
whom the people loved, could have done the same thing, if that was the
plan he preferred?
(d) Again, Hamlet did not plan the play-scene in the hope that the King
would betray his guilt to the court. He planned it, according to his own
account, in order to convince himself by the King's agitation that the Ghost
had spoken the truth. This is perfectly clear from ii. ii. 625 ff. and from iii.
ii. 80 ff. Some readers are misled by the words in the latter passage:

if his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen.

The meaning obviously is, as the context shows, 'if his hidden guilt do not
betray itself on occasion of one speech,' viz., the 'dozen or sixteen lines'
with which Hamlet has furnished the player, and of which only six are
delivered, because the King does not merely show his guilt in his face
(which was all Hamlet had hoped, iii. ii. 90) but rushes from the room.
It may be as well to add that, although Hamlet's own account of his reason
for arranging the play-scene may be questioned, it is impossible to suppose
that, if his real design had been to provoke an open confession of guilt, he
could have been unconscious of this design.
(e) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of the plan
of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of using his 'sword' or
his 'arm.' And this is so just as much after he has returned to Denmark with
the commission in his pocket as it was before this event. When he has told
Horatio the story of the voyage, he does not say, 'Now I can convict him':
he says, 'Now am I not justified in using this arm?'
This class of theory, then, we must simply reject. But it suggests two
remarks. It is of course quite probable that, when Hamlet was 'thinking too
precisely on the event,' he was considering, among other things, the

question how he could avenge his father without sacrificing his own life or
freedom. And assuredly, also, he was anxious that his act of vengeance
should not be misconstrued, and would never have been content to leave a
'wounded name' behind him. His dying words prove that.
(2) Assuming, now, that Hamlet's main difficulty—almost the whole of his
difficulty—was internal, I pass to views which, acknowledging this, are still
unsatisfactory because they isolate one element in his character and
situation and treat it as the whole.
According to the first of these typical views, Hamlet was restrained by
conscience or a moral scruple; he could not satisfy himself that it was right
to avenge his father.
This idea, like the first, can easily be made to look very plausible if we
vaguely imagine the circumstances without attending to the text. But
attention to the text is fatal to it. For, on the one hand, scarcely anything can
be produced in support of it, and, on the other hand, a great deal can be
produced in its disproof. To take the latter point first, Hamlet, it is
impossible to deny, habitually assumes, without any questioning, that he
ought to avenge his father. Even when he doubts, or thinks that he doubts,
the honesty of the Ghost, he expresses no doubt as to what his duty will be
if the Ghost turns out honest: 'If he but blench I know my course.' In the
two soliloquies where he reviews his position (ii. ii., 'O what a rogue and
peasant slave am I,' and iv. iv., 'How all occasions do inform against me') he
reproaches himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. When he reflects on
the possible causes of this neglect he never mentions among them a moral
scruple. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber he confesses,
conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and passion, he has let go by the
acting of its command; but he does not plead that his conscience stood in
his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to whet his 'almost blunted
purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but does not blunt it. What
natural explanation of all this can be given on the conscience theory?

And now what can be set against this evidence? One solitary passage.[35]
Quite late, after Hamlet has narrated to Horatio the events of his voyage, he
asks him (v. ii. 63):

Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon—
He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother,
Popp'd in between the election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage—is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? and is't not to be damn'd
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?

Here, certainly, is a question of conscience in the usual present sense of the
word; and, it may be said, does not this show that all along Hamlet really
has been deterred by moral scruples? But I ask first how, in that case, the
facts just adduced are to be explained: for they must be explained, not
ignored. Next, let the reader observe that even if this passage did show that
one hindrance to Hamlet's action was his conscience, it by no means
follows that this was the sole or the chief hindrance. And, thirdly, let him
observe, and let him ask himself whether the coincidence is a mere
accident, that Hamlet is here almost repeating the words he used in vain
self-reproach some time before (iv. iv. 56):

How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep?

Is it not clear that he is speculating just as vainly now, and that this question
of conscience is but one of his many unconscious excuses for delay? And,
lastly, is it not so that Horatio takes it? He declines to discuss that unreal
question, and answers simply,

It must be shortly known to him from England
What is the issue of the business there.

In other words, 'Enough of this endless procrastination. What is wanted is
not reasons for the deed, but the deed itself.' What can be more significant?
Perhaps, however, it may be answered: 'Your explanation of this passage
may be correct, and the facts you have mentioned do seem to be fatal to the

theory of conscience in its usual form. But there is another and subtler
theory of conscience. According to it, Hamlet, so far as his explicit
consciousness went, was sure that he ought to obey the Ghost; but in the
depths of his nature, and unknown to himself, there was a moral repulsion
to the deed. The conventional moral ideas of his time, which he shared with
the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge his father; but a deeper
conscience in him, which was in advance of his time, contended with these
explicit conventional ideas. It is because this deeper conscience remains
below the surface that he fails to recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by
cowardice or sloth or passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that
speech to Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in
him that we admire and love him.'
Now I at once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and
more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has more
verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to Shakespeare's
meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections to it, three
which seem to be fatal. (a) If it answers to Shakespeare's meaning, why in
the world did he conceal that meaning until the last Act? The facts adduced
above seem to show beyond question that, on the hypothesis, he did so.
That he did so is surely next door to incredible. In any case, it certainly
requires an explanation, and certainly has not received one. (b) Let us test
the theory by reference to a single important passage, that where Hamlet
finds the King at prayer and spares him. The reason Hamlet gives himself
for sparing the King is that, if he kills him now, he will send him to heaven,
whereas he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be an
unconscious excuse, but is it believable that, if the real reason had been the
stirrings of his deeper conscience, that could have masked itself in the form
of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell? Is not the idea quite ludicrous?
(c) The theory requires us to suppose that, when the Ghost enjoins Hamlet
to avenge the murder of his father, it is laying on him a duty which we are
to understand to be no duty but the very reverse. And is not that supposition
wholly contrary to the natural impression which we all receive in reading
the play? Surely it is clear that, whatever we in the twentieth century may
think about Hamlet's duty, we are meant in the play to assume that he ought
to have obeyed the Ghost.

The conscience theory, then, in either of its forms we must reject. But it
may remind us of points worth noting. In the first place, it is certainly true
that Hamlet, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, was, as Goethe
said, of a most moral nature, and had a great anxiety to do right. In this
anxiety he resembles Brutus, and it is stronger in him than in any of the
later heroes. And, secondly, it is highly probable that in his interminable
broodings the kind of paralysis with which he was stricken masked itself in
the shape of conscientious scruples as well as in many other shapes. And,
finally, in his shrinking from the deed there was probably, together with
much else, something which may be called a moral, though not a
conscientious, repulsion: I mean a repugnance to the idea of falling
suddenly on a man who could not defend himself. This, so far as we can
see, was the only plan that Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive
evidence in the play that he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and
honourable man, one must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet
certainly was brave and honourable, we may presume that he did so.
(3) We come next to what may be called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a
view common both among his worshippers and among his defamers. Its
germ may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of
course is not responsible for the whole view): 'a lovely, pure and most
moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks
beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a graceful
youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning
aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and earthly; but
frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like Shelley's and a voice like
Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity, how could such a man perform
the terrible duty laid on him?
How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful traits of
Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet on one side, and it
is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience' theory at any rate leaves
Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and even revere. But for the
'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not unmingled with contempt.
Whatever else he is, he is no hero.

But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth—how could he
possibly have done what we see Hamlet do? What likeness to him is there
in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his terrified
friends with the cry:

Unhand me, gentlemen!
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;

the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles his
head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a pirate
ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands helpless,
who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives his foil right
through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and forces it violently
between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes of death has force and
fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand ('By heaven, I'll have it!')
lest he should drink and die? This man, the Hamlet of the play, is a heroic,
terrible figure. He would have been formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If
the sentimental Hamlet had crossed him, he would have hurled him from
his path with one sweep of his arm.
This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to Hamlet,
and turns tragedy into mere pathos. But, on the other side, it is too kind to
him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were indeed no part of his
nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are indubitably present and painfully
marked. His sternness, itself left out of sight by this theory, is no defect; but
he is much more than stern. Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than
the words addressed to his corpse:

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune:
Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger;

yet this was Ophelia's father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us, for
Hamlet's own sake, to hear the words:

This man shall set me packing:
I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

There is the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the
least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia was
partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly feigned; still
one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still less can one so
account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of his language to her in
the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely an example of the custom of
Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is such language as you will find
addressed to a woman by no other hero of Shakespeare's, not even in that
dreadful scene where Othello accuses Desdemona. It is a great mistake to
ignore these things, or to try to soften the impression which they naturally
make on one. That this embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality,
should be induced on a soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and
Shakespeare's business was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally
beautiful soul unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the
anguish of conscious failure.[37]
(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after
Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, Hamlet is the tragedy of
reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause of this
irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of mind. He has a
general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue of resolution is
sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' He is 'thought-sick.' 'The whole,'
says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a calculating consideration which
aims at exhausting, so far as human foresight can, all the relations and
possible consequences of a deed, cripples[38] the power of acting.... Hamlet
is a hypocrite towards himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere
pretexts to cover his want of determination.... He has no firm belief in
himself or in anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and a
proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the aversion, that

is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor Dowden objects to this
view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional side of Hamlet's character,
'which is quite as important as the intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he
appears on the whole to adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact
because with him each object and event transforms and expands itself into
an idea.... He cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the
importance of any positive, limited thing,—a deed, for example.' And
Professor Dowden explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life.
'When the play opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has
received culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for his
meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter
of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on
the things of life and death, who has never formed a resolution or executed
a deed' (Shakspere, his Mind and Art, 4th ed., pp. 132, 133).
On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
Dowden's modification and amplification) is the most widely received view
of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close contact with
the text of the play. It not only answers, in some fundamental respects, to
the general impression produced by the drama, but it can be supported by
Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies—such words, for example, as those
about the native hue of resolution, or those about the craven scruple of
thinking too precisely on the event. It is confirmed, also, by the contrast
between Hamlet on the one side and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other;
and, further, by the occurrence of those words of the King to Laertes (iv. vii.
119 f.), which, if they are not in character, are all the more important as
showing what was in Shakespeare's mind at the time:

that we would do
We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh
That hurts by easing.

And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the description given by
its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the last four Acts,

is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true description. The energy of
resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding on the deed required. When he
acts, his action does not proceed from this deliberation and analysis, but is
sudden and impulsive, evoked by an emergency in which he has no time to
think. And most of the reasons he assigns for his procrastination are
evidently not the true reasons, but unconscious excuses.
Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in this or that
detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not fully answer to our
imaginative impression. He is not nearly so inadequate to this impression as
the sentimental Hamlet, but still we feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man
and does him wrong. And when we come to examine the theory we find that
it is partial and leaves much unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for
we shall see, I believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that
in a most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.
Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to the
theory, the direct result of 'an almost enormous intellectual activity' in the
way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to exhaust all the
relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this again proceeds
from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by habit, and,
perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory describes, therefore, a
man in certain respects like Coleridge himself, on one side a man of genius,
on the other side, the side of will, deplorably weak, always procrastinating
and avoiding unpleasant duties, and often reproaching himself in vain; a
man, observe, who at any time and in any circumstances would be unequal
to the task assigned to Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades
Hamlet and travesties the play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications
in the text, was not naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to
affirm, a man who at any other time and in any other circumstances than
those presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on him at the
one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest gifts, instead of
helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of the tragedy the theory
quite misses; and it does so because it misconceives the cause of that
irresolution which, on the whole, it truly describes. For the cause was not
directly or mainly an habitual excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was
a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special circumstances,—a

state of profound melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless
played a certain part in the production of that melancholy, and was thus one
indirect contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy,
once established, displayed, as one of its symptoms, an excessive reflection
on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as the theory makes
it, the direct cause of the irresolution at all; nor was it the only indirect
cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four Acts it is to be considered rather a
symptom of his state than a cause of it.
These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they will
presently become so.

3

Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately or
by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father's death.
And I begin by observing that the text does not bear out the idea that he was
one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who knew him
seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a mere scholar
who has 'never formed a resolution or executed a deed.' In a court which
certainly would not much admire such a person he is the observed of all
observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne everyone shows
him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who are not given to
worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently practical man, considered
that he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally. He has
Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a soldier' to his grave; and Ophelia says
that Hamlet was a soldier. If he was fond of acting, an aesthetic pursuit, he
was equally fond of fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously
even in his worst days.[39] So far as we can conjecture from what we see of
him in those bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank,
courteous and kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or
respected, but by no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would
gather that he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided
and even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have
been fearless,—in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for it
is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost, killing

Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship, boarding the
pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final vengeance, could ever
have been shrinking or slow in an emergency. Imagine Coleridge doing any
of these things!
If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was a
weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at a
University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without becoming
the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did rests upon a
most insecure foundation.[40]
Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?
(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not judge
that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the word;
there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by temperament
he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes
of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed
in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or
depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called
melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a
temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of
temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time—as Burton, and earlier
prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show—that Shakespeare may
quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet consciously and
deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a habit, not a mere
temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs at the passing and
half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don John in Much Ado he
had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of discontent; in Jaques a
whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio in the Merchant of Venice a
quiet but deep melancholy, for which neither the victim nor his friends can
assign any cause.[41] He gives to Hamlet a temperament which would not
develop into melancholy unless under some exceptional strain, but which
still involved a danger. In the play we see the danger realised, and find a
melancholy quite unlike any that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because
the temperament of Hamlet is quite different.

(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier days
an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if that word
is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though it suffers cruelly
in later days, as we saw in criticising the sentimental view of Hamlet, never
deserts him; it makes all his cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us
morbidities, and has an inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had
the soul of the youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an
unbounded delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this
from himself. The world for him was herrlich wie am ersten Tag—'this
goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.' And
not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how
infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in
action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!' This is no
commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled with wonder
and swelling into ecstasy.
Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those around
him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's adoration of
his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of him. And, if
there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother, though many
signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never entertained a
suspicion of anything unworthy in her,—characteristic, and significant of
his tendency to see only what is good unless he is forced to see the reverse.
For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find it going so far that we must
call it a disposition to idealise, to see something better than what is there, or
at least to ignore deficiencies. He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he
describes Laertes as a 'very noble youth,' which he was far from being. In
his first greeting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self
revives, we trace the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at
their best. His love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely
the most natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure that

he was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the foils.' To
the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be, answers
instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving the one and
hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm belief in anything,
but he is never sceptical about them.
And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps even
more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of earlier
days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to be found
elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the disillusioned idealist
Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust at his uncle's
drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his astonishment and
horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything pretentious or false,
his indifference to everything merely external. This last characteristic
appears in his choice of the friend of his heart, and in a certain impatience
of distinctions of rank or wealth. When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly
king,' he answers, surely with an emphasis on 'man,'

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the others
speak of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to you.' He
speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier. He is not in
the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and a beggar are all one
to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and his pitilessness towards
Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is not wholly due to morbidity,
but belongs in part to his original character.
Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any
great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme intensity.
Such a shock might even produce tragic results. And, in fact, Hamlet
deserves the title 'tragedy of moral idealism' quite as much as the title
'tragedy of reflection.'
(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the Hamlet
of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius. It is chiefly this that makes
him so different from all those about him, good and bad alike, and hardly

less different from most of Shakespeare's other heroes. And this, though on
the whole the most important trait in his nature, is also so obvious and so
famous that I need not dwell on it at length. But against one prevalent
misconception I must say a word of warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is
not a specific gift, like a genius for music or mathematics or philosophy. It
shows itself, fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of
perception, great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity
and fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does not
make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them, and
no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer. It shows itself in
conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour; and, alike in
conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of imagination
quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense. Further, where it
takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is not philosophic in the
technical meaning of the word. There is really nothing in the play to show
that Hamlet ever was 'a student of philosophies,' unless it be the famous
lines which, comically enough, exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy
as its critic:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]

His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare's own, the
immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad but
thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce them. Or
does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,' i.e., out of relation,
prove that she had studied metaphysics?
Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as he
had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier days he
was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his results in
those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to make in wild
irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile and be a villain.
Again and again we remark that passion for generalisation which so
occupied him, for instance, in reflections suggested by the King's
drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he was waiting to meet upon
the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always considering things, as

Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a necessity in his soul driving
him to penetrate below the surface and to question what others took for
granted. That fixed habitual look which the world wears for most men did
not exist for him. He was for ever unmaking his world and rebuilding it in
thought, dissolving what to others were solid facts, and discovering what to
others were old truths. There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio
a thing of course that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet
it is a discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind,
where he felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in
apprehension like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content,
so that even in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell
and yet count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
dreams.
If now we ask whether any special danger lurked here, how shall we
answer? We must answer, it seems to me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but,
granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.' For, in the first place, that
idea which so many critics quietly take for granted—the idea that the gift
and the habit of meditative and speculative thought tend to produce
irresolution in the affairs of life—would be found by no means easy to
verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of the philosophers, or
again in the lives of men whom you have personally known to be addicted
to such speculation? I cannot. Of course, individual peculiarities being set
apart, absorption in any intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from
affairs, may make a man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless,
individual peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to be
more at a loss in a sudden and great practical emergency than a soldier or a
lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a historian,
and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and even helplessness
are something totally different from the peculiar kind of irresolution that
Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking specially tends to
produce this is really a mere illusion.
In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
Hamlet did not live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere dreamer,
and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly intellectual,
but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary chances of life, there
would seem to be no great danger in his intellectual tendency and his habit

of speculation; and I would go further and say that there was nothing in
them, taken alone, to unfit him even for the extraordinary call that was
made upon him. In fact, if the message of the Ghost had come to him within
a week of his father's death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have
acted on it as decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer
and more anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view
(apart from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an over-
speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.
On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius might
even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that violent shock to
his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that under this shock, any
possible action being denied to him, he began to sink into melancholy; then,
no doubt, his imaginative and generalising habit of mind might extend the
effects of this shock through his whole being and mental world. And if, the
state of melancholy being thus deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for
difficult and decisive action in a matter connected with the melancholy
arose, this state might well have for one of its symptoms an endless and
futile mental dissection of the required deed. And, finally, the futility of this
process, and the shame of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave
him to his melancholy still more. Thus the speculative habit would be one
indirect cause of the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also
reappear in a degenerate form as one of the symptoms of this morbid state.

Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where the
author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you hear?

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! 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.
Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense that
nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And what
has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer upon us
that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his father's death; that
doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for some one loved and lost
does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as a place full only of things
rank and gross. It was not the vague suspicion that we know Hamlet felt.
Still less was it the loss of the crown; for though the subserviency of the
electors might well disgust him, there is not a reference to the subject in the
soliloquy, nor any sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was
the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature,
falling on him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless
was weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether Hamlet's age
was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a matron of mature
years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be sure, as such a son
would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his father, but hanging on
him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him

As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.

He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then within a
month—'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'—she married again,
and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and loathsome in
his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous wedlock;[43]
married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of old family
affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see in her action not
only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an eruption of coarse
sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44] speeding post-haste to its horrible delight. Is
it possible to conceive an experience more desolating to a man such as we
have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result anything but perfectly natural? It

brings bewildered horror, then loathing, then despair of human nature. His
whole mind is poisoned. He can never see Ophelia in the same light again:
she is a woman, and his mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief'
to him, the answer drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The
last words of the soliloquy, which is wholly concerned with this subject, are,

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his uncle
that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if his heart
ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with the love that
never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood as he stood in his
mother's chamber beside his father's marriage-bed.[45]
If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
tremendous, let us observe that now the conditions have arisen under which
Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius, become
his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so dreadful a
revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and positive mind might
not have extended so widely through its world the disgust and disbelief that
have entered it. But Hamlet has the imagination which, for evil as well as
good, feels and sees all things in one. Thought is the element of his life, and
his thought is infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and
lacerating the wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and
he cries out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I
remember?' 'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his
passion, the vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.
And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there comes
on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to answer
this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the last rivet in
the melancholy which holds him bound.

The time is out of joint! O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right,—

so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his life
to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain efforts to
fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing self-reproaches,
and the tragic results of his delay.

4

'Melancholy,' I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was not far
from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of madness
may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an instinct of self-
preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would enable him to give some
utterance to the load that pressed on his heart and brain, and a fear that he
would be unable altogether to repress such utterance. And if the pathologist
calls his state melancholia, and even proceeds to determine its species, I see
nothing to object to in that; I am grateful to him for emphasising the fact
that Hamlet's melancholy was no mere common depression of spirits; and I
have no doubt that many readers of the play would understand it better if
they read an account of melancholia in a work on mental diseases. If we
like to use the word 'disease' loosely, Hamlet's condition may truly be called
diseased. No exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been
able at once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still
remained for some time under the cloud. It would be absurdly unjust to call
Hamlet a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study.
But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, in anything
like the usual meaning of that word. No doubt it might develop into
insanity. The longing for death might become an irresistible impulse to self-
destruction; the disorder of feeling and will might extend to sense and
intellect; delusions might arise; and the man might become, as we say,
incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's melancholy is some way from
this condition. It is a totally different thing from the madness which he
feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with Horatio alone,
exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic use of this
melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly be made to

the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a tragic end. The man
who suffers as Hamlet suffers—and thousands go about their business
suffering thus in greater or less degree—is considered irresponsible neither
by other people nor by himself: he is only too keenly conscious of his
responsibility. He is therefore, so far, quite capable of being a tragic agent,
which an insane person, at any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is
not.[47] And, finally, Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is
unable sufficiently to imagine. It is probably not further from average
experience, nor more difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of
Othello, Antony or Macbeth.
Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for.
It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the immediate cause of
that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at life and
everything in it, himself included,—a disgust which varies in intensity,
rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy, but
is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such a state of feeling is
inevitably adverse to any kind of decided action; the body is inert, the mind
indifferent or worse; its response is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth
while,' 'it is no good.' And the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional.
It is violent, dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side
repulsive to a man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved
in a certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various
causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would not
suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and against
them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and positive feelings,
love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of revenge, desire to do duty.
But the retarding motives acquire an unnatural strength because they have
an ally in something far stronger than themselves, the melancholic disgust
and apathy; while the healthy motives, emerging with difficulty from the
central mass of diseased feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name
of action.' We see them doing so; and sometimes the process is quite simple,
no analytical reflection on the deed intervening between the outburst of
passion and the relapse into melancholy.[48] But this melancholy is perfectly
consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task assigned, of which
the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. For those endless questions
(as we may imagine them), 'Was I deceived by the Ghost? How am I to do

the deed? When? Where? What will be the consequence of attempting it—
success, my death, utter misunderstanding, mere mischief to the State? Can
it be right to do it, or noble to kill a defenceless man? What is the good of
doing it in such a world as this?'—all this, and whatever else passed in a
sickening round through Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right
deliberation of a man with such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving
the name of thought, an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction,
aimless tossings on a sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only
increased it by deepening self-contempt.
Again, (a) this state accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his
lassitude, those quick decided actions of his being the outcome of a nature
normally far from passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing healthy
impulses which work themselves out before they have time to subside. (b) It
accounts for the evidently keen satisfaction which some of these actions
give to him. He arranges the play-scene with lively interest, and exults in its
success, not really because it brings him nearer to his goal, but partly
because it has hurt his enemy and partly because it has demonstrated his
own skill (iii. ii. 286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to
countermining the King's designs in sending him away (iii. iv. 209), and
looks back with obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and
vigour he displayed on the voyage (v. ii. 1-55). These were not the action
on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them his old force,
and escapes in them from his disgust. (c) It accounts for the pleasure with
which he meets old acquaintances, like his 'school-fellows' or the actors.
The former observed (and we can observe) in him a 'kind of joy' at first,
though it is followed by 'much forcing of his disposition' as he attempts to
keep this joy and his courtesy alive in spite of the misery which so soon
returns upon him and the suspicion he is forced to feel. (d) It accounts no
less for the painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost
savage irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises, and to
the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent symptoms of
such melancholy, and (e) they sometimes alternate, as they do in Hamlet,
with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite fruitless emotion. It is
to these last (of which a part of the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a good
example) that Hamlet alludes when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as

'lapsed in passion,' and it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in
regard to them that inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not
'passion's slave.'[49]
Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or 'lethargy.' We
are bound to consider the evidence which the text supplies of this, though it
is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions, as one possible cause of his
inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on the event,' he mentions another,
'bestial oblivion'; and the thing against which he inveighs in the greater part
of that soliloquy (iv. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
him here and always is god-like), but this bestial oblivion or 'dullness,' this
'letting all sleep,' this allowing of heaven-sent reason to 'fust unused':

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.[50]

So, in the soliloquy in ii. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a dull and muddy-
mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of his
cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when the Ghost appears to him
the second time, he accuses himself of being tardy and lapsed in time; and
the Ghost speaks of his purpose being almost blunted, and bids him not to
forget (cf. 'oblivion'). And so, what is emphasised in those undramatic but
significant speeches of the player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying
away of purpose or of love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a
condition of excessive but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality,
curiously little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
thinking of it at all, but for the time literally forgets it. It seems to me we are
driven to think of Hamlet chiefly thus during the long time which elapsed
between the appearance of the Ghost and the events presented in the Second
Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we suppose at first for
leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the command, 'Remember
me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the command, 'Do not
forget.'[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not accidents.

The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. 'Why,' he asks
himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be cowardice?
Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the event? And does that
again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me sit idle when I feel it is
shameful to do so, and when I have cause, and will, and strength, and
means, to act?' A man irresolute merely because he was considering a
proposed action too minutely would not feel this bewilderment. A man
might feel it whose conscience secretly condemned the act which his
explicit consciousness approved; but we have seen that there is no sufficient
evidence to justify us in conceiving Hamlet thus. These are the questions of
a man stimulated for the moment to shake off the weight of his melancholy,
and, because for the moment he is free from it, unable to understand the
paralysing pressure which it exerts at other times.
I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the
psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to omit it
from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make Shakespeare's
story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view is not equivalent to
the tragic; and, having once given its due weight to the fact of Hamlet's
melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may be anxious to insist, that
this pathological condition would excite but little, if any, tragic interest if it
were not the condition of a nature distinguished by that speculative genius
on which the Schlegel-Coleridge type of theory lays stress. Such theories
misinterpret the connection between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but
still it is this connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and
makes it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic
mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us,
wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike
'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at the
same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of action, and
powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his thought, we
remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great ideal movement
which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this tragedy
acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and shared only

by Goethe's Faust. It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy
or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us at
once the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of the doom which not
only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring.

FOOTNOTES:
[25] It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of this book to have
by them a list of Shakespeare's plays, arranged in periods. No such list, of
course, can command general assent, but the following (which does not
throughout represent my own views) would perhaps meet with as little objection
from scholars as any other. For some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are
better considered to be one. Within each period the so-called Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies are respectively grouped together; and for this reason,
as well as for others, the order within each period does not profess to be
chronological (e.g. it is not implied that the Comedy of Errors preceded 1 Henry
VI. or Titus Andronicus). Where Shakespeare's authorship of any considerable
part of a play is questioned, widely or by specially good authority, the name of
the play is printed in italics.
First Period (to 1595?).—Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night's Dream; 1 Henry VI., 2 Henry VI., 3
Henry VI., Richard III., Richard II.; Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet.
Second Period (to 1602?).—Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in Third
Period?), Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry Wives, Twelfth
Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.; Julius Caesar, Hamlet.
Third Period (to 1608?).—Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure; Othello,
King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus.
Fourth Period.—Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, Two Noble
Kinsmen, Henry VIII.
[26] The reader will observe that this 'tragic period' would not exactly coincide
with the 'Third Period' of the division given in the last note. For Julius Caesar
and Hamlet fall in the Second Period, not the Third; and I may add that, as
Pericles was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1608 and published in 1609, it ought
strictly to be put in the Third Period—not the Fourth. The truth is that Julius
Caesar and Hamlet are given to the Second Period mainly on the ground of
style; while a Fourth Period is admitted, not mainly on that ground (for there is
no great difference here between Antony and Coriolanus on the one side and
Cymbeline and the Tempest on the other), but because of a difference in
substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were admitted on grounds of form, it
ought to begin with Antony and Cleopatra.
[27] I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally admitted that Timon
of Athens also precedes the two Roman tragedies; but its precedence seems to
me so nearly certain that I assume it in what follows.

[28] That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a deliberate endeavour after
a dignified and unadorned simplicity,—a Roman simplicity perhaps.
[29] It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the fact, which seems
hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in places re-written, some little
time after its first composition.
[30] This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I think, especially the case
in King Lear and Timon.
[31] The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of course, much nearer to
Hamlet, especially in versification, than to Antony and Cleopatra, in which
Shakespeare's final style first shows itself practically complete. It has been
impossible, in the brief treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the
individual plays.
[32] The Mirror, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness, Variorum Hamlet, ii. 148.
In the above remarks I have relied mainly on Furness's collection of extracts
from early critics.
[33] I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still less, to do justice to
the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder (Vorlesungen über Hamlet,
1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's difficulties as merely external.
[34] I give one instance. When he spares the King, he speaks of killing him
when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is awake in bed, when
he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases the least obstacle (iii. iii. 89
ff.).
[35] It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the conscience view, the line
'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,' and to observe the total
misinterpretation of the soliloquy To be or not to be, from which the line comes.
In this soliloquy Hamlet is not thinking of the duty laid upon him at all. He is
debating the question of suicide. No one oppressed by the ills of life, he says,
would continue to bear them if it were not for speculation about his possible
fortune in another life. And then, generalising, he says (what applies to himself,
no doubt, though he shows no consciousness of the fact) that such speculation or
reflection makes men hesitate and shrink like cowards from great actions and
enterprises. 'Conscience' does not mean moral sense or scrupulosity, but this
reflection on the consequences of action. It is the same thing as the 'craven
scruple of thinking too precisely on the event' of the speech in iv. iv. As to this
use of 'conscience,' see Schmidt, s.v. and the parallels there given. The Oxford
Dictionary also gives many examples of similar uses of 'conscience,' though it
unfortunately lends its authority to the misinterpretation criticised.
[36] The King does not die of the poison on the foil, like Laertes and Hamlet.
They were wounded before he was, but they die after him.
[37] I may add here a word on one small matter. It is constantly asserted that
Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if he did, it would make no
difference to my point in the paragraph above; but there is no warrant in the text
for the assertion. It is based on some words of the Queen (iv. i. 24), in answer to
the King's question, 'Where is he gone?':

To draw apart the body he hath killed:
O'er whom his very madness, like some ore
Among a mineral of metals base,
Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.

But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her son. She
has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying, 'A rat! a rat!', ran
his rapier through the arras, it was because he heard something stir there,
whereas we know that what he heard was a man's voice crying, 'What ho! help,
help, help!' And in this scene she has come straight from the interview with her
son, terribly agitated, shaken with 'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line
30). Now we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that
interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that said those
things and others. The only sign of relenting is in the words (iii. iv. 171):

For this same lord,
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.

His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it may be to
her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at iii. iv. 130, and that the
Queen supposed he was weeping for Polonius.)
Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards? Well, in
the next scene (iv. ii.) we see him alone with the body, and are therefore likely to
witness his genuine feelings. And his first words are, 'Safely stowed'!
[38] Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.
[39] He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving (v. ii. 218).
His contrary statement (ii. ii. 308) is made to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
[40] See Note B.
[41] The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to me Shakespeare
simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a very touching picture he
draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in the opening lines of the play,
would never drive him to suicide, but it makes him indifferent to the issue of the
trial, as all his speeches in the trial-scene show.
[42] Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in particular. 'Your' is
used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that 'your water is a sore decayer of
your ... dead body.'
[43] This aspect of the matter leaves us comparatively unaffected, but
Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The Ghost speaks of it
twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious words to the King). If, as we
must suppose, the marriage was universally admitted to be incestuous, the
corrupt acquiescence of the court and the electors to the crown would naturally
have a strong effect on Hamlet's mind.

[44] It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy reappears in
Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (iii. iv. 150):

Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker.

[45] If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's that precedes the
soliloquy, and is more than one line in length—the speech beginning 'Seems,
madam! nay, it is'—he will understand what, surely, when first we come to it,
sounds very strange and almost boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet
himself at all; it is about his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and
consciously so; and still less that she understood it so).
[46] See Note D.
[47] See p. 13.
[48] E.g. in the transition, referred to above, from desire for vengeance into the
wish never to have been born; in the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue'; in the scene at
Ophelia's grave. The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the
psychological movement in these passages.
[49] Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably intentionally
exaggerated, is another example of this want of self-control. The Queen's
description of him (v. i. 307),

This is mere madness;
And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
Anon, as patient as the female dove,
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.

may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to excuse his
violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see further Note G.
[50] Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.
[51] Cf. Measure for Measure, iv. iv. 23, 'This deed ... makes me unpregnant and
dull to all proceedings.'
[52] iii. ii. 196 ff., iv. vii. 111 ff.: e.g.,

Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth but poor validity.

[53] So, before, he had said to him:

And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Would'st thou not stir in this.

On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance see Note D.

LECTURE IV
HAMLET

The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's
character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone,
explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To attempt
such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if I felt
certain of the interpretation of all the facts. But I propose now to follow
rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially illustrates the
character, reserving for separate consideration one important but
particularly doubtful point.

1

We left Hamlet, at the close of the First Act, when he had just received his
charge from the spirit of his father; and his condition was vividly depicted
in the fact that, within an hour of receiving this charge, he had relapsed into
that weariness of life or longing for death which is the immediate cause of
his later inaction. When next we meet him, at the opening of the Second
Act, a considerable time has elapsed, apparently as much as two months.[54]
The ambassadors sent to the King of Norway (i. ii. 27) are just returning.
Laertes, whom we saw leaving Elsinore (i. iii.), has been in Paris long
enough to be in want of fresh supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's
command (given in i. iii.), and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or
letters. What has Hamlet done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and
established a reputation for lunacy, with the result that his mother has
become deeply anxious about him, and with the further result that the King,
who was formerly so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished him to
stay on at Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous to discover the
cause of his 'transformation.' Hence Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have
been sent for, to cheer him by their company and to worm his secret out of
him; and they are just about to arrive. Beyond exciting thus the
apprehensions of his enemy Hamlet has done absolutely nothing; and, as we

have seen, we must imagine him during this long period sunk for the most
part in 'bestial oblivion' or fruitless broodings, and falling deeper and deeper
into the slough of despond.
Now he takes a further step. He suddenly appears unannounced in Ophelia's
chamber; and his appearance and behaviour are such as to suggest both to
Ophelia and to her father that his brain is turned by disappointment in love.
How far this step was due to the design of creating a false impression as to
the origin of his lunacy, how far to other causes, is a difficult question; but
such a design seems certainly present. It succeeds, however, only in part;
for, although Polonius is fully convinced, the King is not so, and it is
therefore arranged that the two shall secretly witness a meeting between
Ophelia and Hamlet. Meanwhile Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and
at the King's request begin their attempts, easily foiled by Hamlet, to pluck
out the heart of his mystery. Then the players come to Court, and for a little
while one of Hamlet's old interests revives, and he is almost happy. But
only for a little while. The emotion shown by the player in reciting the
speech which tells of Hecuba's grief for her slaughtered husband awakes
into burning life the slumbering sense of duty and shame. He must act. With
the extreme rapidity which always distinguishes him in his healthier
moments, he conceives and arranges the plan of having the 'Murder of
Gonzago' played before the King and Queen, with the addition of a speech
written by himself for the occasion. Then, longing to be alone, he abruptly
dismisses his guests, and pours out a passion of self-reproach for his delay,
asks himself in bewilderment what can be its cause, lashes himself into a
fury of hatred against his foe, checks himself in disgust at his futile
emotion, and quiets his conscience for the moment by trying to convince
himself that he has doubts about the Ghost, and by assuring himself that, if
the King's behaviour at the play-scene shows but a sign of guilt, he 'knows
his course.'
Nothing, surely, can be clearer than the meaning of this famous soliloquy.
The doubt which appears at its close, instead of being the natural conclusion
of the preceding thoughts, is totally inconsistent with them. For Hamlet's
self-reproaches, his curses on his enemy, and his perplexity about his own
inaction, one and all imply his faith in the identity and truthfulness of the
Ghost. Evidently this sudden doubt, of which there has not been the

slightest trace before, is no genuine doubt; it is an unconscious fiction, an
excuse for his delay—and for its continuance.
A night passes, and the day that follows it brings the crisis. First takes place
that interview from which the King is to learn whether disappointed love is
really the cause of his nephew's lunacy. Hamlet is sent for; poor Ophelia is
told to walk up and down, reading her prayer-book; Polonius and the King
conceal themselves behind the arras. And Hamlet enters, so deeply
absorbed in thought that for some time he supposes himself to be alone.
What is he thinking of? 'The Murder of Gonzago,' which is to be played in a
few hours, and on which everything depends? Not at all. He is meditating
on suicide; and he finds that what stands in the way of it, and
counterbalances its infinite attraction, is not any thought of a sacred
unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether it
is not ignoble in the mind to end its misery, and, still more, whether death
would end it. Hamlet, that is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he
was at the time of his first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would
melt') two months ago, before ever he heard of his father's murder.[55] His
reflections have no reference to this particular moment; they represent that
habitual weariness of life with which his passing outbursts of emotion or
energy are contrasted. What can be more significant than the fact that he is
sunk in these reflections on the very day which is to determine for him the
truthfulness of the Ghost? And how is it possible for us to hope that, if that
truthfulness should be established, Hamlet will be any nearer to his
revenge?[56]
His interview with Ophelia follows; and its result shows that his delay is
becoming most dangerous to himself. The King is satisfied that, whatever
else may be the hidden cause of Hamlet's madness, it is not love. He is by
no means certain even that Hamlet is mad at all. He has heard that
infuriated threat, 'I say, we will have no more marriages; those that are
married, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are.' He is
thoroughly alarmed. He at any rate will not delay. On the spot he
determines to send Hamlet to England. But, as Polonius is present, we do
not learn at once the meaning of this purpose.
Evening comes. The approach of the play-scene raises Hamlet's spirits. He
is in his element. He feels that he is doing something towards his end,

striking a stroke, but a stroke of intellect. In his instructions to the actor on
the delivery of the inserted speech, and again in his conversation with
Horatio just before the entry of the Court, we see the true Hamlet, the
Hamlet of the days before his father's death. But how characteristic it is that
he appears quite as anxious that his speech should not be ranted as that
Horatio should observe its effect upon the King! This trait appears again
even at that thrilling moment when the actor is just going to deliver the
speech. Hamlet sees him beginning to frown and glare like the conventional
stage-murderer, and calls to him impatiently, 'Leave thy damnable faces and
begin!'[57]
Hamlet's device proves a triumph far more complete than he had dared to
expect. He had thought the King might 'blench,' but he does much more.
When only six of the 'dozen or sixteen lines' have been spoken he starts to
his feet and rushes from the hall, followed by the whole dismayed Court. In
the elation of success—an elation at first almost hysterical—Hamlet treats
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are sent to him, with undisguised
contempt. Left to himself, he declares that now he could

drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.

He has been sent for by his mother, and is going to her chamber; and so
vehement and revengeful is his mood that he actually fancies himself in
danger of using daggers to her as well as speaking them.[58]
In this mood, on his way to his mother's chamber, he comes upon the King,
alone, kneeling, conscience-stricken and attempting to pray. His enemy is
delivered into his hands.

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying:
And now I'll do it: and so he goes to heaven:
And so am I revenged.[59] That would be scanned.

He scans it; and the sword that he drew at the words, 'And now I'll do it,' is
thrust back into its sheath. If he killed the villain now he would send his
soul to heaven; and he would fain kill soul as well as body.

That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty generally
agreed, and it is needless to describe again the state of mind which, on the
view explained in our last lecture, is the real cause of Hamlet's failure here.
The first five words he utters, 'Now might I do it,' show that he has no
effective desire to 'do it'; and in the little sentences that follow, and the long
pauses between them, the endeavour at a resolution, and the sickening
return of melancholic paralysis, however difficult a task they set to the
actor, are plain enough to a reader. And any reader who may retain a doubt
should observe the fact that, when the Ghost reappears, Hamlet does not
think of justifying his delay by the plea that he was waiting for a more
perfect vengeance. But in one point the great majority of critics, I think, go
astray. The feeling of intense hatred which Hamlet expresses is not the
cause of his sparing the King, and in his heart he knows this; but it does not
at all follow that this feeling is unreal. All the evidence afforded by the play
goes to show that it is perfectly genuine, and I see no reason whatever to
doubt that Hamlet would have been very sorry to send his father's murderer
to heaven, nor much to doubt that he would have been glad to send him to
perdition. The reason for refusing to accept his own version of his motive in
sparing Claudius is not that his sentiments are horrible, but that elsewhere,
and also in the opening of his speech here, we can see that his reluctance to
act is due to other causes.
The incident of the sparing of the King is contrived with extraordinary
dramatic insight. On the one side we feel that the opportunity was perfect.
Hamlet could not possibly any longer tell himself that he had no certainty as
to his uncle's guilt. And the external conditions were most favourable; for
the King's remarkable behaviour at the play-scene would have supplied a
damning confirmation of the story Hamlet had to tell about the Ghost. Even
now, probably, in a Court so corrupt as that of Elsinore, he could not with
perfect security have begun by charging the King with the murder; but he
could quite safely have killed him first and given his justification
afterwards, especially as he would certainly have had on his side the people,
who loved him and despised Claudius. On the other hand, Shakespeare has
taken care to give this perfect opportunity so repulsive a character that we
can hardly bring ourselves to wish that the hero should accept it. One of his
minor difficulties, we have seen, probably was that he seemed to be

required to attack a defenceless man; and here this difficulty is at its
maximum.
This incident is, again, the turning-point of the tragedy. So far, Hamlet's
delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has done no
irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the disasters that
follow. In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself. This central significance
of the passage is dramatically indicated in the following scene by the
reappearance of the Ghost and the repetition of its charge.
Polonius is the first to fall. The old courtier, whose vanity would not allow
him to confess that his diagnosis of Hamlet's lunacy was mistaken, had
suggested that, after the theatricals, the Queen should endeavour in a private
interview with her son to penetrate the mystery, while he himself would
repeat his favourite part of eaves-dropper (iii. i. 184 ff.). It has now become
quite imperative that the Prince should be brought to disclose his secret; for
his choice of the 'Murder of Gonzago,' and perhaps his conduct during the
performance, have shown a spirit of exaggerated hostility against the King
which has excited general alarm. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discourse to
Claudius on the extreme importance of his preserving his invaluable life, as
though Hamlet's insanity had now clearly shown itself to be homicidal.[60]
When, then, at the opening of the interview between Hamlet and his mother,
the son, instead of listening to her remonstrances, roughly assumes the
offensive, she becomes alarmed; and when, on her attempting to leave the
room, he takes her by the arm and forces her to sit down, she is terrified,
cries out, 'Thou wilt not murder me?' and screams for help. Polonius,
behind the arras, echoes her call; and in a moment Hamlet, hoping the
concealed person is the King, runs the old man through the body.
Evidently this act is intended to stand in sharp contrast with Hamlet's
sparing of his enemy. The King would have been just as defenceless behind
the arras as he had been on his knees; but here Hamlet is already excited
and in action, and the chance comes to him so suddenly that he has no time
to 'scan' it. It is a minor consideration, but still for the dramatist not
unimportant, that the audience would wholly sympathise with Hamlet's
attempt here, as directed against an enemy who is lurking to entrap him,

instead of being engaged in a business which perhaps to the bulk of the
audience then, as now, seemed to have a 'relish of salvation in't.'
We notice in Hamlet, at the opening of this interview, something of the
excited levity which followed the dénouement of the play-scene. The death
of Polonius sobers him; and in the remainder of the interview he shows,
together with some traces of his morbid state, the peculiar beauty and
nobility of his nature. His chief desire is not by any means to ensure his
mother's silent acquiescence in his design of revenge; it is to save her soul.
And while the rough work of vengeance is repugnant to him, he is at home
in this higher work. Here that fatal feeling, 'it is no matter,' never shows
itself. No father-confessor could be more selflessly set upon his end of
redeeming a fellow-creature from degradation, more stern or pitiless in
denouncing the sin, or more eager to welcome the first token of repentance.
There is something infinitely beautiful in that sudden sunshine of faith and
love which breaks out when, at the Queen's surrender,

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain,

he answers,

O throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half.

The truth is that, though Hamlet hates his uncle and acknowledges the duty
of vengeance, his whole heart is never in this feeling or this task; but his
whole heart is in his horror at his mother's fall and in his longing to raise
her. The former of these feelings was the inspiration of his first soliloquy; it
combines with the second to form the inspiration of his eloquence here. And
Shakespeare never wrote more eloquently than here.
I have already alluded to the significance of the reappearance of the Ghost
in this scene; but why does Shakespeare choose for the particular moment
of its reappearance the middle of a speech in which Hamlet is raving against
his uncle? There seems to be more than one reason. In the first place,
Hamlet has already attained his object of stirring shame and contrition in
his mother's breast, and is now yielding to the old temptation of unpacking
his heart with words, and exhausting in useless emotion the force which

should be stored up in his will. And, next, in doing this he is agonising his
mother to no purpose, and in despite of her piteous and repeated appeals for
mercy. But the Ghost, when it gave him his charge, had expressly warned
him to spare her; and here again the dead husband shows the same tender
regard for his weak unfaithful wife. The object of his return is to repeat his
charge:

Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose;

but, having uttered this reminder, he immediately bids the son to help the
mother and 'step between her and her fighting soul.'
And, whether intentionally or not, another purpose is served by
Shakespeare's choice of this particular moment. It is a moment when the
state of Hamlet's mind is such that we cannot suppose the Ghost to be
meant for an hallucination; and it is of great importance here that the
spectator or reader should not suppose any such thing. He is further guarded
by the fact that the Ghost proves, so to speak, his identity by showing the
same traits as were visible on his first appearance—the same insistence on
the duty of remembering, and the same concern for the Queen. And the
result is that we construe the Ghost's interpretation of Hamlet's delay
('almost blunted purpose') as the truth, the dramatist's own interpretation.
Let me add that probably no one in Shakespeare's audience had any doubt
of his meaning here. The idea of later critics and readers that the Ghost is an
hallucination is due partly to failure to follow the indications just noticed,
but partly also to two mistakes, the substitution of our present intellectual
atmosphere for the Elizabethan, and the notion that, because the Queen does
not see and hear the Ghost, it is meant to be unreal. But a ghost, in
Shakespeare's day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its
manifestation to a single person in a company; and here the sufficient
reason, that of sparing the Queen, is obvious.[61]
At the close of this scene it appears that Hamlet has somehow learned of the
King's design of sending him to England in charge of his two 'school-
fellows.' He has no doubt that this design covers some villainous plot
against himself, but neither does he doubt that he will succeed in defeating
it; and, as we saw, he looks forward with pleasure to this conflict of wits.
The idea of refusing to go appears not to occur to him. Perhaps (for here we
are left to conjecture) he feels that he could not refuse unless at the same
time he openly accused the King of his father's murder (a course which he
seems at no time to contemplate); for by the slaughter of Polonius he has
supplied his enemy with the best possible excuse for getting him out of the
country. Besides, he has so effectually warned this enemy that, after the

death of Polonius is discovered, he is kept under guard (iv. iii. 14). He
consents, then, to go. But on his way to the shore he meets the army of
Fortinbras on its march to Poland; and the sight of these men going
cheerfully to risk death 'for an egg-shell,' and 'making mouths at the
invisible event,' strikes him with shame as he remembers how he, with so
much greater cause for action, 'lets all sleep;' and he breaks out into the
soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me!'
This great speech, in itself not inferior to the famous 'To be or not to be,' is
absent not only from the First Quarto but from the Folio. It is therefore
probable that, at any rate by the time when the Folio appeared (1623), it had
become customary to omit it in theatrical representation; and this is still the
custom. But, while no doubt it is dramatically the least indispensable of the
soliloquies, it has a direct dramatic value, and a great value for the
interpretation of Hamlet's character. It shows that Hamlet, though he is
leaving Denmark, has not relinquished the idea of obeying the Ghost. It
exhibits very strikingly his inability to understand why he has delayed so
long. It contains that assertion which so many critics forget, that he has
'cause and will and strength and means to do it.' On the other hand—and
this was perhaps the principal purpose of the speech—it convinces us that
he has learnt little or nothing from his delay, or from his failure to seize the
opportunity presented to him after the play-scene. For, we find, both the
motive and the gist of the speech are precisely the same as those of the
soliloquy at the end of the Second Act ('O what a rogue'). There too he was
stirred to shame when he saw a passionate emotion awakened by a cause
which, compared with his, was a mere egg-shell. There too he stood
bewildered at the sight of his own dulness, and was almost ready to believe
—what was justly incredible to him—that it was the mask of mere
cowardice. There too he determined to delay no longer: if the King should
but blench, he knew his course. Yet this determination led to nothing then;
and why, we ask ourselves in despair, should the bloody thoughts he now
resolves to cherish ever pass beyond the realm of thought?
Between this scene (iv. iv.) and the remainder of the play we must again
suppose an interval, though not a very long one. When the action
recommences, the death of Polonius has led to the insanity of Ophelia and
the secret return of Laertes from France. The young man comes back
breathing slaughter. For the King, afraid to put Hamlet on his trial (a course

likely to raise the question of his own behaviour at the play, and perhaps to
provoke an open accusation),[62] has attempted to hush up the
circumstances of Polonius's death, and has given him a hurried and
inglorious burial. The fury of Laertes, therefore, is directed in the first
instance against the King: and the ease with which he raises the people, like
the King's fear of a judicial enquiry, shows us how purely internal were the
obstacles which the hero had to overcome. This impression is intensified by
the broad contrast between Hamlet and Laertes, who rushes headlong to his
revenge, and is determined to have it though allegiance, conscience, grace
and damnation stand in his way (iv. v. 130). But the King, though he has
been hard put to it, is now in his element and feels safe. Knowing that he
will very soon hear of Hamlet's execution in England, he tells Laertes that
his father died by Hamlet's hand, and expresses his willingness to let the
friends of Laertes judge whether he himself has any responsibility for the
deed. And when, to his astonishment and dismay, news comes that Hamlet
has returned to Denmark, he acts with admirable promptitude and address,
turns Laertes round his finger, and arranges with him for the murder of their
common enemy. If there were any risk of the young man's resolution
faltering, it is removed by the death of Ophelia. And now the King has but
one anxiety,—to prevent the young men from meeting before the fencing-
match. For who can tell what Hamlet might say in his defence, or how
enchanting his tongue might prove?[63]
Hamlet's return to Denmark is due partly to his own action, partly to
accident. On the voyage he secretly possesses himself of the royal
commission, and substitutes for it another, which he himself writes and
seals, and in which the King of England is ordered to put to death, not
Hamlet, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then the ship is attacked by a
pirate, which, apparently, finds its intended prize too strong for it, and
makes off. But as Hamlet 'in the grapple,' eager for fighting, has boarded
the assailant, he is carried off in it, and by promises induces the pirates to
put him ashore in Denmark.
In what spirit does he return? Unquestionably, I think, we can observe a
certain change, though it is not great. First, we notice here and there what
seems to be a consciousness of power, due probably to his success in
counter-mining Claudius and blowing the courtiers to the moon, and to his
vigorous action in the sea-fight. But I doubt if this sense of power is more

marked than it was in the scenes following the success of the 'Murder of
Gonzago.' Secondly, we nowhere find any direct expression of that
weariness of life and that longing for death which were so marked in the
first soliloquy and in the speech 'To be or not to be.' This may be a mere
accident, and it must be remembered that in the Fifth Act we have no
soliloquy. But in the earlier Acts the feelings referred to do not appear
merely in soliloquy, and I incline to think that Shakespeare means to show
in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight thinning of the dark cloud of
melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic that this change comes too late.
And, in the third place, there is a trait about which doubt is impossible,—a
sense in Hamlet that he is in the hands of Providence. This had, indeed,
already shown itself at the death of Polonius,[64] and perhaps at Hamlet's
farewell to the King,[65] but the idea seems now to be constantly present in
his mind. 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends,' he declares to Horatio in
speaking of the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his
rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission. How
was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?

Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,

Hamlet answers; he had his father's signet in his purse. And though he has a
presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield to it: 'we
defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow ... the
readiness is all.'
Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when
they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked
effect on our feeling about Hamlet's character and still more about the
events of the action. But I find it impossible to believe, with some critics,
that they indicate any material change in his general condition, or the
formation of any effective resolution to fulfil the appointed duty. On the
contrary, they seem to express that kind of religious resignation which,
however beautiful in one aspect, really deserves the name of fatalism rather
than that of faith in Providence, because it is not united to any
determination to do what is believed to be the will of Providence. In place
of this determination, the Hamlet of the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or
indifferent self-abandonment, as if he secretly despaired of forcing himself

to action, and were ready to leave his duty to some other power than his
own. This is really the main change which appears in him after his return to
Denmark, and which had begun to show itself before he went,—this, and
not a determination to act, nor even an anxiety to do so.
For when he returns he stands in a most perilous position. On one side of
him is the King, whose safety depends on his death, and who has done his
best to murder him; on the other, Laertes, whose father and sister he has
sent to their graves, and of whose behaviour and probable attitude he must
surely be informed by Horatio. What is required of him, therefore, if he is
not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost wariness and the swiftest
resolution. Yet it is not too much to say that, except when Horatio forces the
matter on his attention, he shows no consciousness of this position. He
muses in the graveyard on the nothingness of life and fame, and the base
uses to which our dust returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-
conqueror's. He learns that the open grave over which he muses has been
dug for the woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which
he gains relief in frenzied words and frenzied action,—action which must
needs intensify, if that were possible, the fury of the man whom he has,
however unwittingly, so cruelly injured. Yet he appears absolutely
unconscious that he has injured Laertes at all, and asks him:

What is the reason that you use me thus?

And as the sharpness of the first pang passes, the old weary misery returns,
and he might almost say to Ophelia, as he does to her brother:

I loved you ever: but it is no matter.

'It is no matter': nothing matters.
The last scene opens. He narrates to Horatio the events of the voyage and
his uncle's attempt to murder him. But the conclusion of the story is no plan
of action, but the old fatal question, 'Ought I not to act?'[66] And, while he
asks it, his enemies have acted. Osric enters with an invitation to him to
take part in a fencing-match with Laertes. This match—he is expressly told
so—has been arranged by his deadly enemy the King; and his antagonist is
a man whose hands but a few hours ago were at his throat, and whose voice

he had heard shouting 'The devil take thy soul!' But he does not think of
that. To fence is to show a courtesy, and to himself it is a relief,—action,
and not the one hateful action. There is something noble in his carelessness,
and also in his refusal to attend to the presentiment which he suddenly feels
(and of which he says, not only 'the readiness is all,' but also 'it is no
matter'). Something noble; and yet, when a sacred duty is still undone,
ought one to be so ready to die? With the same carelessness, and with that
trustfulness which makes us love him, but which is here so fatally
misplaced, he picks up the first foil that comes to his hand, asks
indifferently, 'These foils have all a length?' and begins. And Fate descends
upon his enemies, and his mother, and himself.
But he is not left in utter defeat. Not only is his task at last accomplished,
but Shakespeare seems to have determined that his hero should exhibit in
his latest hour all the glorious power and all the nobility and sweetness of
his nature. Of the first, the power, I spoke before,[67] but there is a
wonderful beauty in the revelation of the second. His body already
labouring in the pangs of death, his mind soars above them. He forgives
Laertes; he remembers his wretched mother and bids her adieu, ignorant
that she has preceded him. We hear now no word of lamentation or self-
reproach. He has will, and just time, to think, not of the past or of what
might have been, but of the future; to forbid his friend's death in words
more pathetic in their sadness than even his agony of spirit had been; and to
take care, so far as in him lies, for the welfare of the State which he himself
should have guided. Then in spite of shipwreck he reaches the haven of
silence where he would be. What else could his world-wearied flesh desire?
But we desire more; and we receive it. As those mysterious words, 'The rest
is silence,' die upon Hamlet's lips, Horatio answers:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Why did Shakespeare here, so much against his custom, introduce this
reference to another life? Did he remember that Hamlet is the only one of
his tragic heroes whom he has not allowed us to see in the days when this
life smiled on him? Did he feel that, while for the others we might be
content to imagine after life's fitful fever nothing more than release and

silence, we must ask more for one whose 'godlike reason' and passionate
love of goodness have only gleamed upon us through the heavy clouds of
melancholy, and yet have left us murmuring, as we bow our heads, 'This
was the noblest spirit of them all'?

2

How many things still remain to say of Hamlet! Before I touch on his
relation to Ophelia, I will choose but two. Neither of them, compared with
the matters so far considered, is of great consequence, but both are
interesting, and the first seems to have quite escaped observation.
(1) Most people have, beside their more essential traits of character, little
peculiarities which, for their intimates, form an indissoluble part of their
personality. In comedy, and in other humorous works of fiction, such
peculiarities often figure prominently, but they rarely do so, I think, in
tragedy. Shakespeare, however, seems to have given one such idiosyncrasy
to Hamlet.
It is a trick of speech, a habit of repetition. And these are simple examples
of it from the first soliloquy:

O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie!

Now I ask your patience. You will say: 'There is nothing individual here.
Everybody repeats words thus. And the tendency, in particular, to use such
repetitions in moments of great emotion is well-known, and frequently
illustrated in literature—for example, in David's cry of lament for Absalom.'
This is perfectly true, and plenty of examples could be drawn from
Shakespeare himself. But what we find in Hamlet's case is, I believe, not
common. In the first place, this repetition is a habit with him. Here are
some more instances: 'Thrift, thrift, Horatio'; 'Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this
troubles me'; 'Come, deal justly with me: come, come'; 'Wormwood,
wormwood!' I do not profess to have made an exhaustive search, but I am

much mistaken if this habit is to be found in any other serious character of
Shakespeare.[68]
And, in the second place—and here I appeal with confidence to lovers of
Hamlet—some of these repetitions strike us as intensely characteristic.
Some even of those already quoted strike one thus, and still more do the
following:

(a) Horatio. It would have much amazed you.
Hamlet. Very like, very like. Stay'd it long?

(b) Polonius. What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet. Words, words, words.

(c) Polonius. My honourable lord, I will most humbly take
my leave of you.
Hamlet. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I
will more willingly part withal: except my
life, except my life, except my life.

(d) Ophelia. Good my lord,
How does your honour for this many a day?
Hamlet. I humbly thank you, well, well, well.

Is there anything that Hamlet says or does in the whole play more
unmistakably individual than these replies?[69]
(2) Hamlet, everyone has noticed, is fond of quibbles and word-play, and of
'conceits' and turns of thought such as are common in the poets whom
Johnson called Metaphysical. Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words
and ideas chiefly in order to mystify, thwart and annoy. To some extent,
again, as we may see from the conversation where Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern first present themselves (ii. ii. 227), he is merely following the
fashion of the young courtiers about him, just as in his love-letter to
Ophelia[70] he uses for the most part the fantastic language of Court
Euphuism. Nevertheless in this trait there is something very characteristic.

We should be greatly surprised to find it marked in Othello or Lear or
Timon, in Macbeth or Antony or Coriolanus; and, in fact, we find it in them
hardly at all. One reason of this may perhaps be that these characters are all
later creations than Hamlet, and that Shakespeare's own fondness for this
kind of play, like the fondness of the theatrical audience for it, diminished
with time. But the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in
Hamlet, betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is
characteristic of him and not of the later less many-sided heroes. Macbeth,
for instance, has an imagination quite as sensitive as Hamlet's to certain
impressions, but he has none of Hamlet's delight in freaks and twists of
thought, or of his tendency to perceive and play with resemblances in the
most diverse objects and ideas. Though Romeo shows this tendency, the
only tragic hero who approaches Hamlet here is Richard II., who indeed in
several ways recalls the emasculated Hamlet of some critics, and may, like
the real Hamlet, have owed his existence in part to Shakespeare's personal
familiarity with the weaknesses and dangers of an imaginative
temperament.
That Shakespeare meant this trait to be characteristic of Hamlet is beyond
question. The very first line the hero speaks contains a play on words:

A little more than kin and less than kind.

The fact is significant, though the pun itself is not specially characteristic.
Much more so, and indeed absolutely individual, are the uses of word-play
in moments of extreme excitement. Remember the awe and terror of the
scene where the Ghost beckons Hamlet to leave his friends and follow him
into the darkness, and then consider this dialogue:

Hamlet. It waves me still.
Go on; I'll follow thee.
Marcellus. You shall not go, my lord.
Hamlet. Hold off your hands.
Horatio. Be ruled; you shall not go.
Hamlet. My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.

Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen.
By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.

Would any other character in Shakespeare have used those words? And,
again, where is Hamlet more Hamlet than when he accompanies with a pun
the furious action by which he compels his enemy to drink the 'poison
tempered by himself'?

Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damn'd Dane,
Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?
Follow my mother.

The 'union' was the pearl which Claudius professed to throw into the cup,
and in place of which (as Hamlet supposes) he dropped poison in. But the
'union' is also that incestuous marriage which must not be broken by his
remaining alive now that his partner is dead. What rage there is in the
words, and what a strange lightning of the mind!
Much of Hamlet's play with words and ideas is imaginatively humorous.
That of Richard II. is fanciful, but rarely, if ever, humorous. Antony has
touches of humour, and Richard III. has more; but Hamlet, we may safely
assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a humorist, his
humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency which keeps his
mental world in perpetual movement. Some of his quips are, of course, poor
enough, and many are not distinctive. Those of his retorts which strike one
as perfectly individual do so, I think, chiefly because they suddenly reveal
the misery and bitterness below the surface; as when, to Rosencrantz's
message from his mother, 'She desires to speak with you in her closet, ere
you go to bed,' he answers, 'We shall obey, were she ten times our mother';
or as when he replies to Polonius's invitation, 'Will you walk out of the air,
my lord?' with words that suddenly turn one cold, 'Into my grave.'
Otherwise, what we justly call Hamlet's characteristic humour is not his
exclusive property, but appears in passages spoken by persons as different
as Mercutio, Falstaff and Rosalind. The truth probably is that it was the
kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in
some other traits of the poet's greatest creation, we come into close contact
with Shakespeare the man.

3

The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the
interpretation of every word and deed of the character. Even if at some
point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right, he
must still choose one or the other. The mere critic is not obliged to do this.
Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is of
importance, he ought to say so.
This is the position in which I find myself in regard to Hamlet's love for
Ophelia. I am unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of some of
his words and deeds, and I question whether from the mere text of the play
a sure interpretation of them can be drawn. For this reason I have reserved
the subject for separate treatment, and have, so far as possible, kept it out of
the general discussion of Hamlet's character.
On two points no reasonable doubt can, I think, be felt. (1) Hamlet was at
one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself says
that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had given
countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven (i. iii.
110 f.). (2) When, at Ophelia's grave, he declared,

I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum,

he must have spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted that
he used the past tense, 'loved,' merely because Ophelia was dead, and not to
imply that he had once loved her but no longer did so.
So much being assumed, we come to what is doubtful, and I will begin by
stating what is probably the most popular view. According to this view,
Hamlet's love for Ophelia never changed. On the revelation made by the
Ghost, however, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and it also
seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others, that he was
insane, and so to destroy her hopes of any happy issue to their love. This
was the purpose of his appearance in her chamber, though he was probably
influenced also by a longing to see her and bid her a silent farewell, and

possibly by a faint hope that he might safely entrust his secret to her. If he
entertained any such hope his study of her face dispelled it; and thereafter,
as in the Nunnery-scene (iii. i.) and again at the play-scene, he not only
feigned madness, but, to convince her that he had quite lost his love for her,
he also addressed her in bitter and insulting language. In all this he was
acting a part intensely painful to himself; the very violence of his language
in the Nunnery-scene arose from this pain; and so the actor should make
him show, in that scene, occasional signs of a tenderness which with all his
efforts he cannot wholly conceal. Finally, over her grave the truth bursts
from him in the declaration quoted just now, though it is still impossible for
him to explain to others why he who loved her so profoundly was forced to
wring her heart.
Now this theory, if the view of Hamlet's character which I have taken is
anywhere near the truth, is certainly wrong at one point, viz., in so far as it
supposes that Hamlet's bitterness to Ophelia was a mere pretence forced on
him by his design of feigning to be insane; and I proceed to call attention to
certain facts and considerations, of which the theory seems to take no
account.
1. How is it that in his first soliloquy Hamlet makes no reference whatever
to Ophelia?
2. How is it that in his second soliloquy, on the departure of the Ghost, he
again says nothing about her? When the lover is feeling that he must make a
complete break with his past, why does it not occur to him at once that he
must give up his hopes of happiness in love?
3. Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia
directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to see her
and sends letters to her (ii. i. 109). What really happens is that Ophelia
suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, we know that she is simply
obeying her father's order; but how would her action appear to Hamlet,
already sick at heart because of his mother's frailty,[71] and now finding that,
the moment fortune has turned against him, the woman who had welcomed
his love turns against him too? Even if he divined (as his insults to Polonius
suggest) that her father was concerned in this change, would he not still, in
that morbid condition of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple

than she had appeared to him?[72] Even if he remained free from this
suspicion, and merely thought her deplorably weak, would he not probably
feel anger against her, an anger like that of the hero of Locksley Hall
against his Amy?
4. When Hamlet made his way into Ophelia's room, why did he go in the
garb, the conventionally recognised garb, of the distracted lover? If it was
necessary to convince Ophelia of his insanity, how was it necessary to
convince her that disappointment in love was the cause of his insanity? His
main object in the visit appears to have been to convince others, through
her, that his insanity was not due to any mysterious unknown cause, but to
this disappointment, and so to allay the suspicions of the King. But if his
feeling for her had been simply that of love, however unhappy, and had not
been in any degree that of suspicion or resentment, would he have adopted
a plan which must involve her in so much suffering?[73]
5. In what way are Hamlet's insults to Ophelia at the play-scene necessary
either to his purpose of convincing her of his insanity or to his purpose of
revenge? And, even if he did regard them as somehow means to these ends,
is it conceivable that he would have uttered them, if his feeling for her were
one of hopeless but unmingled love?
6. How is it that neither when he kills Polonius, nor afterwards, does he
appear to reflect that he has killed Ophelia's father, or what the effect on
Ophelia is likely to be?
7. We have seen that there is no reference to Ophelia in the soliloquies of
the First Act. Neither is there the faintest allusion to her in any one of the
soliloquies of the subsequent Acts, unless possibly in the words (iii. i. 72)
'the pangs of despised love.'[74] If the popular theory is true, is not this an
astounding fact?
8. Considering this fact, is there no significance in the further fact (which,
by itself, would present no difficulty) that in speaking to Horatio Hamlet
never alludes to Ophelia, and that at his death he says nothing of her?
9. If the popular theory is true, how is it that neither in the Nunnery-scene
nor at the play-scene does Shakespeare insert anything to make the truth

plain? Four words like Othello's 'O hardness to dissemble' would have
sufficed.
These considerations, coupled with others as to Hamlet's state of mind,
seem to point to two conclusions. They suggest, first, that Hamlet's love,
though never lost, was, after Ophelia's apparent rejection of him, mingled
with suspicion and resentment, and that his treatment of her was due in part
to this cause. And I find it impossible to resist this conclusion. But the
question how much of his harshness is meant to be real, and how much
assumed, seems to me impossible in some places to answer. For example,
his behaviour at the play-scene seems to me to show an intention to hurt
and insult; but in the Nunnery-scene (which cannot be discussed briefly) he
is evidently acting a part and suffering acutely, while at the same time his
invective, however exaggerated, seems to spring from real feelings; and
what is pretence, and what sincerity, appears to me an insoluble problem.
Something depends here on the further question whether or no Hamlet
suspects or detects the presence of listeners; but, in the absence of an
authentic stage tradition, this question too seems to be unanswerable.
But something further seems to follow from the considerations adduced.
Hamlet's love, they seem to show, was not only mingled with bitterness, it
was also, like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deadened by his
melancholy.[75] It was far from being extinguished; probably it was one of
the causes which drove him to force his way to Ophelia; whenever he saw
Ophelia, it awoke and, the circumstances being what they were, tormented
him. But it was not an absorbing passion; it did not habitually occupy his
thoughts; and when he declared that it was such a love as forty thousand
brothers could not equal, he spoke sincerely indeed but not truly. What he
said was true, if I may put it thus, of the inner healthy self which doubtless
in time would have fully reasserted itself; but it was only partly true of the
Hamlet whom we see in the play. And the morbid influence of his
melancholy on his love is the cause of those strange facts, that he never
alludes to her in his soliloquies, and that he appears not to realise how the
death of her father must affect her.
The facts seem almost to force this idea on us. That it is less 'romantic' than
the popular view is no argument against it. And psychologically it is quite
sound, for a frequent symptom of such melancholy as Hamlet's is a more or

less complete paralysis, or even perversion, of the emotion of love. And yet,
while feeling no doubt that up to a certain point it is true, I confess I am not
satisfied that the explanation of Hamlet's silence regarding Ophelia lies in
it. And the reason of this uncertainty is that scarcely any spectators or
readers of Hamlet notice this silence at all; that I never noticed it myself till
I began to try to solve the problem of Hamlet's relation to Ophelia; and that
even now, when I read the play through without pausing to consider
particular questions, it scarcely strikes me. Now Shakespeare wrote
primarily for the theatre and not for students, and therefore great weight
should be attached to the immediate impressions made by his works. And so
it seems at least possible that the explanation of Hamlet's silence may be
that Shakespeare, having already a very difficult task to perform in the
soliloquies—that of showing the state of mind which caused Hamlet to
delay his vengeance—did not choose to make his task more difficult by
introducing matter which would not only add to the complexity of the
subject but might, from its 'sentimental' interest, distract attention from the
main point; while, from his theatrical experience, he knew that the audience
would not observe how unnatural it was that a man deeply in love, and
forced not only to renounce but to wound the woman he loved, should not
think of her when he was alone. But, as this explanation is no more
completely convincing to me than the other, I am driven to suspend
judgment, and also to suspect that the text admits of no sure interpretation.
[This paragraph states my view imperfectly.]
This result may seem to imply a serious accusation against Shakespeare.
But it must be remembered that if we could see a contemporary
representation of Hamlet, our doubts would probably disappear. The actor,
instructed by the author, would make it clear to us by looks, tones, gestures,
and by-play how far Hamlet's feigned harshness to Ophelia was mingled
with real bitterness, and again how far his melancholy had deadened his
love.

4

As we have seen, all the persons in Hamlet except the hero are minor
characters, who fail to rise to the tragic level. They are not less interesting
on that account, but the hero has occupied us so long that I shall refer only

to those in regard to whom Shakespeare's intention appears to be not
seldom misunderstood or overlooked.
It may seem strange that Ophelia should be one of these; and yet
Shakespearean literature and the experience of teachers show that there is
much difference of opinion regarding her, and in particular that a large
number of readers feel a kind of personal irritation against her. They seem
unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they fancy her
much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been able to help
Hamlet to fulfil his task. And they betray, it appears to me, the strangest
misconceptions as to what she actually did.
Now it was essential to Shakespeare's purpose that too great an interest
should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that Ophelia
should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and necessary,
accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit, power or
intelligence, of his famous heroines. If she had been an Imogen, a Cordelia,
even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken another shape. Hamlet
would either have been stimulated to do his duty, or (which is more likely)
he would have gone mad, or (which is likeliest) he would have killed
himself in despair. Ophelia, therefore, was made a character who could not
help Hamlet, and for whom on the other hand he would not naturally feel a
passion so vehement or profound as to interfere with the main motive of the
play.[76] And in the love and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced
an element, not of deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the
analysis of her character seem almost a desecration.
Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her mother,
and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly, to take care of
her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to her. To the
persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the thought of flowers.
'Rose of May' Laertes names her.

Lay her in the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!

—so he prays at her burial. 'Sweets to the sweet' the Queen murmurs, as she
scatters flowers on the grave; and the flowers which Ophelia herself
gathered—those which she gave to others, and those which floated about
her in the brook—glimmer in the picture of the mind. Her affection for her
brother is shown in two or three delicate strokes. Her love for her father is
deep, though mingled with fear. For Hamlet she has, some say, no deep love
—and perhaps she is so near childhood that old affections have still the
strongest hold; but certainly she has given to Hamlet all the love of which
her nature is as yet capable. Beyond these three beloved ones she seems to
have eyes and ears for no one. The Queen is fond of her, but there is no sign
of her returning the Queen's affection. Her existence is wrapped up in these
three.
On this childlike nature and on Ophelia's inexperience everything depends.
The knowledge that 'there's tricks in the world' has reached her only as a
vague report. Her father and brother are jealously anxious for her because
of her ignorance and innocence; and we resent their anxiety chiefly because
we know Hamlet better than they. Her whole character is that of simple
unselfish affection. Naturally she is incapable of understanding Hamlet's
mind, though she can feel its beauty. Naturally, too, she obeys her father
when she is forbidden to receive Hamlet's visits and letters. If we remember
not what we know but what she knows of her lover and her father; if we
remember that she had not, like Juliet, confessed her love; and if we
remember that she was much below her suitor in station, her compliance
surely must seem perfectly natural, apart from the fact that the standard of
obedience to a father was in Shakespeare's day higher than in ours.
'But she does more than obey,' we are told; 'she runs off frightened to report
to her father Hamlet's strange visit and behaviour; she shows to her father
one of Hamlet's letters, and tells him[77] the whole story of the courtship;
and she joins in a plot to win Hamlet's secret from him.' One must
remember, however, that she had never read the tragedy. Consider for a
moment how matters looked to her. She knows nothing about the Ghost and
its disclosures. She has undergone for some time the pain of repelling her
lover and appearing to have turned against him. She sees him, or hears of
him, sinking daily into deeper gloom, and so transformed from what he was
that he is considered to be out of his mind. She hears the question
constantly discussed what the cause of this sad change can be; and her heart

tells her—how can it fail to tell her?—that her unkindness is the chief
cause. Suddenly Hamlet forces his way into her chamber; and his
appearance and his behaviour are those of a man crazed with love. She is
frightened—why not? She is not Lady Macbeth. Rosalind would have been
frightened. Which of her censors would be wholly unmoved if his room
were invaded by a lunatic? She is frightened, then; frightened, if you will,
like a child. Yes, but, observe, her one idea is to help Hamlet. She goes,
therefore, at once to her father. To whom else should she go? Her brother is
away. Her father, whom she saw with her own eyes and not with
Shakespeare's, is kind, and the wisest of men, and concerned about Hamlet's
state. Her father finds, in her report, the solution of the mystery: Hamlet is
mad because she has repulsed him. Why should she not tell her father the
whole story and give him an old letter which may help to convince the King
and the Queen? Nay, why should she not allow herself to be used as a
'decoy' to settle the question why Hamlet is mad? It is all-important that it
should be settled, in order that he may be cured; all her seniors are simply
and solely anxious for his welfare; and, if her unkindness is the cause of his
sad state, they will permit her to restore him by kindness (iii. i. 40). Was she
to refuse to play a part just because it would be painful to her to do so? I
find in her joining the 'plot' (as it is absurdly called) a sign not of weakness,
but of unselfishness and strength.
'But she practised deception; she even told a lie. Hamlet asked her where
her father was, and she said he was at home, when he was really listening
behind a curtain.' Poor Ophelia! It is considered angelic in Desdemona to
say untruly that she killed herself, but most immoral or pusillanimous in
Ophelia to tell her lie. I will not discuss these casuistical problems; but, if
ever an angry lunatic asks me a question which I cannot answer truly
without great danger to him and to one of my relations, I hope that grace
may be given me to imitate Ophelia. Seriously, at such a terrible moment
was it weak, was it not rather heroic, in a simple girl not to lose her
presence of mind and not to flinch, but to go through her task for Hamlet's
sake and her father's? And, finally, is it really a thing to be taken as matter
of course, and no matter for admiration, in this girl that, from beginning to
end, and after a storm of utterly unjust reproach, not a thought of
resentment should even cross her mind?

Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason. And
here again her critics seem hardly to realise the situation, hardly to put
themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from her, goes mad
and kills her father. They seem to forget also that Ophelia must have
believed that these frightful calamities were not mere calamities, but
followed from her action in repelling her lover. Nor do they realise the utter
loneliness that must have fallen on her. Of the three persons who were all
the world to her, her father has been killed, Hamlet has been sent out of the
country insane, and her brother is abroad. Horatio, when her mind gives
way, tries to befriend her, but there is no sign of any previous relation
between them, or of Hamlet's having commended her to his friend's care.
What support she can gain from the Queen we can guess from the Queen's
character, and from the fact that, when Ophelia is most helpless, the Queen
shrinks from the very sight of her (iv. v. 1). She was left, thus, absolutely
alone, and if she looked for her brother's return (as she did, iv. v. 70), she
might reflect that it would mean danger to Hamlet.
Whether this idea occurred to her we cannot tell. In any case it was well for
her that her mind gave way before Laertes reached Elsinore; and pathetic as
Ophelia's madness is, it is also, we feel, the kindest stroke that now could
fall on her. It is evident, I think, that this was the effect Shakespeare
intended to produce. In her madness Ophelia continues sweet and lovable.

Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favour and to prettiness.

In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest
sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness
dreadful or shocking.[78] And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow dim
in watching it, is still purely beautiful. Coleridge was true to Shakespeare
when he wrote of 'the affecting death of Ophelia,—who in the beginning lay
like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-
flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or
loosened, and becomes a fairy isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost
without an eddy.'[79]

5

I reluctantly pass by Polonius, Laertes and the beautiful character of
Horatio, to say something in conclusion of the Queen and the King.
The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me,
practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with
indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is surely
the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (i. v. 41 f.),
coming, as they do, before his account of the murder. And against this
testimony what force has the objection that the queen in the 'Murder of
Gonzago' is not represented as an adulteress? Hamlet's mark in arranging
the play-scene was not his mother, whom besides he had been expressly
ordered to spare (i. v. 84 f.).
(2) On the other hand, she was not privy to the murder of her husband,
either before the deed or after it. There is no sign of her being so, and there
are clear signs that she was not. The representation of the murder in the
play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts from his throne,
she innocently asks him, 'How fares my lord?' In the interview with Hamlet,
when her son says of his slaughter of Polonius,

'A bloody deed!' Almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king and marry with his brother,

the astonishment of her repetition 'As kill a king!' is evidently genuine; and,
if it had not been so, she would never have had the hardihood to exclaim:

What have I done, that thou darest wag thy tongue
In noise so rude against me?

Further, it is most significant that when she and the King speak together
alone, nothing that is said by her or to her implies her knowledge of the
secret.
The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think
little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull and
very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and, to do her
justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun. She
never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so; and,
though she knew that he considered her marriage 'o'er-hasty' (ii. ii. 57), she

was untroubled by any shame at the feelings which had led to it. It was
pleasant to sit upon her throne and see smiling faces round her, and foolish
and unkind in Hamlet to persist in grieving for his father instead of
marrying Ophelia and making everything comfortable. She was fond of
Ophelia and genuinely attached to her son (though willing to see her lover
exclude him from the throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of
rank a mere trifle compared with the claims of love. The belief at the
bottom of her heart was that the world is a place constructed simply that
people may be happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.
Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her, the
good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass of sloth.
Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she dies a better
woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she has done she
feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not last, and so at the
end of the interview (iii. iv. 180 ff.) he adds a warning that, if she betrays
him, she will ruin herself as well.[80] It is true too that there is no sign of her
obeying Hamlet in breaking off her most intimate connection with the King.
Still she does feel remorse; and she loves her son, and does not betray him.
She gives her husband a false account of Polonius's death, and is silent
about the appearance of the Ghost. She becomes miserable;

To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.

She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for
standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If she
had sense to realise Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the King's taking
some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered torture in those days.
But perhaps she was too dull.
The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic. She is
perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and she has no
apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of sympathy for her son,
who is out of condition and pants and perspires. These are afflictions she
can thoroughly feel for, though they are even more common than the death
of a father. But then she meets her death because she cannot resist the wish
to please her son by drinking to his success. And more: when she falls

dying, and the King tries to make out that she is merely swooning at the
sight of blood, she collects her energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:

No, no, the drink, the drink,—O my dear Hamlet,—
The drink, the drink! I am poison'd. [Dies.

Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as Shakespeare?
Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic with a realism so
daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?

King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But he
is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the one hand,
he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is courteous and never
undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties efficiently; and he takes
good care of the national interests. He nowhere shows cowardice, and when
Laertes and the mob force their way into the palace, he confronts a
dangerous situation with coolness and address. His love for his ill-gotten
wife seems to be quite genuine, and there is no ground for suspecting him
of having used her as a mere means to the crown.[81] His conscience,
though ineffective, is far from being dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots
new crimes to ensure the prize of the old one; but still it makes him
unhappy (iii. i. 49 f., iii. iii. 35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.
On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If
Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance—a mildewed
ear, a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People
made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when
he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he
evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of force, who
thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open stroke, but a cut-
purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in his pocket. He had the
inclination of natures physically weak and morally small towards intrigue
and crooked dealing. His instinctive predilection was for poison: this was
the means he used in his first murder, and he at once recurred to it when he

had failed to get Hamlet executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed
no cowardice, his first thought was always for himself.

I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range,

—these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His first
comment on the death of Polonius is,

It had been so with us had we been there;

and his second is,

Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?
It will be laid to us.

He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won the
Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of her!), but
also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to have been soft-
spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on the person he
addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain'). We see this in
his speech to Laertes about the young man's desire to return to Paris (i. ii.
42 f.). Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to him without an insult, but he never
shows resentment, hardly even annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with
great dexterity. He had evidently found that a clear head, a general
complaisance, a willingness to bend and oblige where he could not
overawe, would lead him to his objects,—that he could trick men and
manage them. Unfortunately he imagined he could trick something more
than men.
This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to his
ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has fallen
out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy life. He
believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite ready to be kind to
Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of grief. He has no desire
to see him leave the court; he promises him his voice for the succession (i.
ii. 108, iii. ii. 355); he will be a father to him. Before long, indeed, he
becomes very uneasy, and then more and more alarmed; but when, much

later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in England, he has still no suspicion
that he need not hope for happiness:

till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my joys were ne'er begun.

Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:

Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],

he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has failed, and
that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him. He thinks he
can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is all the while
perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it. More—it is one of
the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such things so quietly that
we are apt to miss them—when the King is praying for pardon for his first
murder he has just made his final arrangements for a second, the murder of
Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact in his prayer. If Hamlet had
really wished to kill him at a moment that had no relish of salvation in it, he
had no need to wait.[82] So we are inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For
this was the crisis for Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died
at once, before he had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all
the woe and death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say,
here also Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his
end shaped the King's no less.
For—to return in conclusion to the action of the play—in all that happens or
is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not define it, or
even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is there; but our
imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works its way through the
deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end. And most of all do we feel
this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For these two, the one by his
shrinking from his appointed task, and the other by efforts growing ever
more feverish to rid himself of his enemy, seem to be bent on avoiding each
other. But they cannot. Through devious paths, the very paths they take in
order to escape, something is pushing them silently step by step towards
one another, until they meet and it puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He
himself must die, for he needed this compulsion before he could fulfil the

demand of destiny; but he must fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as
he may, must reach the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the
windings which seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of
the hero is apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but
in no other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in Macbeth, is this aspect so
impressive.[83]
I mention Macbeth for a further reason. In Macbeth and Hamlet not only is
the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but it has also
at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense, religious. I cannot
make my meaning clear without using language too definite to describe
truly the imaginative impression produced; but it is roughly true that, while
we do not imagine the supreme power as a divine being who avenges crime,
or as a providence which supernaturally interferes, our sense of it is
influenced by the fact that Shakespeare uses current religious ideas here
much more decidedly than in Othello or King Lear. The horror in Macbeth's
soul is more than once represented as desperation at the thought that he is
eternally 'lost'; the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at
repentance; and as Hamlet nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy
is deepened in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the
plot in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to
Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident
has been therefore severely criticised as a lame expedient,[84] but it appears
probable that the 'accident' is meant to impress the imagination as the very
reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly does so. And that
this was the intention is made the more likely by a second fact, the fact that
in connection with the events of the voyage Shakespeare introduces that
feeling, on Hamlet's part, of his being in the hands of Providence. The
repeated expressions of this feeling are not, I have maintained, a sign that
Hamlet has now formed a fixed resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their
effect is to strengthen in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may
become of Hamlet, and whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be
accomplished, because it is the purpose of a power against which both he
and his enemy are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its
own will.
Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance
between Hamlet and Macbeth, the appearance in each play of a Ghost,—a

figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would seem utterly
out of place in Othello or King Lear. Much might be said of the Ghost in
Hamlet, but I confine myself to the matter which we are now considering.
What is the effect of the appearance of the Ghost? And, in particular, why
does Shakespeare make this Ghost so majestical a phantom, giving it that
measured and solemn utterance, and that air of impersonal abstraction
which forbids, for example, all expression of affection for Hamlet and
checks in Hamlet the outburst of pity for his father? Whatever the intention
may have been, the result is that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as
the apparition of a dead king who desires the accomplishment of his
purposes, but also as the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the
messenger of divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it
appeared impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a
symbol of the connexion of the limited world of ordinary experience with
the vaster life of which it is but a partial appearance. And as, at the
beginning of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the
medium of the received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at
the end, conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its
rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that the
apparent failure of Hamlet's life is not the ultimate truth concerning him.
If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be agreed
that, while Hamlet certainly cannot be called in the specific sense a
'religious drama,' there is in it nevertheless both a freer use of popular
religious ideas, and a more decided, though always imaginative, intimation
of a supreme power concerned in human evil and good, than can be found
in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. And this is probably one of the
causes of the special popularity of this play, just as Macbeth, the tragedy
which in these respects most nearly approaches it, has also the place next to
it in general esteem.

FOOTNOTES:
[54] In the First Act (i. ii. 138) Hamlet says that his father has been dead not
quite two months. In the Third Act (iii. ii. 135) Ophelia says King Hamlet has
been dead 'twice two months.' The events of the Third Act are separated from
those of the Second by one night (ii. ii. 565).

[55] The only difference is that in the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy there is no
reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by 'the Everlasting.' Even this,
however, seems to have been present in the original form of the speech, for the
version in the First Quarto has a line about our being 'borne before an everlasting
Judge.'
[56] The present position of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, and of the
interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due to an after-thought of
Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they precede, instead of following, the
arrival of the players, and consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This
is a notable instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a
poet's first conceptions.
[57] Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong strain of aesthetic
disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion' with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt
mouth, I'll rant as well as thou' (v. i. 306).
[58]

O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:

Nero, who put to death his mother who had poisoned her husband. This passage
is surely remarkable. And so are the later words (iii. iv. 28):

A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

Are we to understand that at this time he really suspected her of complicity in
the murder? We must remember that the Ghost had not told him she was
innocent of that.
[59] I am inclined to think that the note of interrogation put after 'revenged' in a
late Quarto is right.
[60] iii. iii. 1-26. The state of affairs at Court at this time, though I have not seen
it noticed by critics, seems to me puzzling. It is quite clear from iii. ii. 310 ff.,
from the passage just cited, and from iv. vii. 1-5 and 30 ff., that everyone sees in
the play-scene a gross and menacing insult to the King. Yet no one shows any
sign of perceiving in it also an accusation of murder. Surely that is strange. Are
we perhaps meant to understand that they do perceive this, but out of
subservience choose to ignore the fact? If that were Shakespeare's meaning, the
actors could easily indicate it by their looks. And if it were so, any sympathy we
may feel for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their fate would be much
diminished. But the mere text does not suffice to decide either this question or
the question whether the two courtiers were aware of the contents of the
commission they bore to England.
[61] This passage in Hamlet seems to have been in Heywood's mind when, in
The Second Part of the Iron Age (Pearson's reprint, vol. iii., p. 423), he makes
the Ghost of Agamemnon appear in order to satisfy the doubts of Orestes as to
his mother's guilt. No reader could possibly think that this Ghost was meant to
be an hallucination; yet Clytemnestra cannot see it. The Ghost of King Hamlet, I

may add, goes further than that of Agamemnon, for he is audible, as well as
visible, to the privileged person.
[62] I think it is clear that it is this fear which stands in the way of the obvious
plan of bringing Hamlet to trial and getting him shut up or executed. It is much
safer to hurry him off to his doom in England before he can say anything about
the murder which he has somehow discovered. Perhaps the Queen's resistance,
and probably Hamlet's great popularity with the people, are additional reasons.
(It should be observed that as early as iii. i. 194 we hear of the idea of 'confining'
Hamlet as an alternative to sending him to England.)
[63] I am inferring from iv. vii., 129, 130, and the last words of the scene.
[64] iii. iv. 172:

For this same lord,
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister:

i.e. the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense elsewhere also
in Shakespeare.
[65] iv. iii. 48:

Ham. For England!
King. Ay, Hamlet.
Ham. Good.
King. So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.
Ham. I see a cherub that sees them.

[66] On this passage see p. 98. Hamlet's reply to Horatio's warning sounds, no
doubt, determined; but so did 'I know my course.' And is it not significant that,
having given it, he abruptly changes the subject?
[67] P. 102.
[68] It should be observed also that many of Hamlet's repetitions can hardly be
said to occur at moments of great emotion, like Cordelia's 'And so I am, I am,'
and 'No cause, no cause.'
Of course, a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be found in
comic persons, e.g. Justice Shallow in 2 Henry IV.
[69] Perhaps it is from noticing this trait that I find something characteristic too
in this coincidence of phrase: 'Alas, poor ghost!' (i. v. 4), 'Alas, poor Yorick!' (v.
i. 202).
[70] This letter, of course, was written before the time when the action of the
drama begins, for we know that Ophelia, after her father's commands in i. iii.,
received no more letters (ii. i. 109).

[71] 'Frailty, thy name is woman!' he had exclaimed in the first soliloquy. Cf.
what he says of his mother's act (iii. iv. 40):

Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love
And sets a blister there.

[72] There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible idea that he had
been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother; that she was shallow and
artificial, and even that what had seemed simple and affectionate love might
really have been something very different. The grossness of his language at the
play-scene, and some lines in the Nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering
the state of his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a
suspicion. I do not suggest that he believed in it, and in the Nunnery-scene it is
clear that his healthy perception of her innocence is in conflict with it.
He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable
intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that Polonius
had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long as Hamlet was
prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress on inferences drawn from
his conversations with Polonius.
[73] Many readers and critics imagine that Hamlet went straight to Ophelia's
room after his interview with the Ghost. But we have just seen that on the
contrary he tried to visit her and was repelled, and it is absolutely certain that a
long interval separates the events of i. v. and ii. i. They think also, of course, that
Hamlet's visit to Ophelia was the first announcement of his madness. But the
text flatly contradicts that idea also. Hamlet has for some time appeared totally
changed (ii. ii. 1-10); the King is very uneasy at his 'transformation,' and has sent
for his school-fellows in order to discover its cause. Polonius now, after Ophelia
has told him of the interview, comes to announce his discovery, not of Hamlet's
madness, but of its cause (ii. ii. 49). That, it would seem, was the effect Hamlet
aimed at in his interview. I may add that Ophelia's description of his intent
examination of her face suggests doubt rather as to her 'honesty' or sincerity than
as to her strength of mind. I cannot believe that he ever dreamed of confiding his
secret to her.
[74] If this is an allusion to his own love, the adjective 'despised' is significant.
But I doubt the allusion. The other calamities mentioned by Hamlet, 'the
oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of
office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes,' are not at all
specially his own.
[75] It should be noticed that it was not apparently of long standing. See the
words 'of late' in i. iii. 91, 99.
[76] This, I think, may be said on almost any sane view of Hamlet's love.
[77] Polonius says so, and it may be true.

[78] I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as is described above, but
there is absolutely nothing in the text to justify her rendering. Even the
exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the Quartos at iv. v. 33, but omitted in the Folios
and by almost all modern editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead
and gone, lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.
[79] In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a complete view of
the character, which has often been well described; but I cannot forbear a
reference to one point which I do not remember to have seen noticed. In the
Nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words pathetically betray her own feeling:

Good my lord,
How does your honour for this many a day?

She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested to her
by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in which she refers to the
sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and to the unkindness which has
succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach. So again do those most touching
little speeches:

Hamlet. ... I did love you once.
Ophelia. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Hamlet. You should not have believed me ... I loved you not.
Ophelia. I was the more deceived.

Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but that she
had repulsed him; and here, with his usual unobtrusive subtlety, Shakespeare
shows how Ophelia, even though she may have accepted from her elders the
theory that her unkindness has driven Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she
is forsaken, and cannot repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by
showing that her own heart is unchanged.
I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given them in
different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still shake their
heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day.' Probably they
are incurable, but they may be asked to consider that Shakespeare makes
Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,' sing an old song containing the
line,

If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.

[80] I.e. the King will kill her to make all sure.
[81] I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (iv. vii. 12 f.) as on
the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in speaking to her, and on such
signs as his mention of her in soliloquy (iii. iii. 55).
[82] This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he says, because if
the King is killed praying he will go to heaven. On Hamlet's departure, the King
rises from his knees, and mutters:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
[83] I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.
[84] The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by Hamlet is scarcely
worth mention.

LECTURE V
OTHELLO

There is practically no doubt that Othello was the tragedy written next after
Hamlet. Such external evidence as we possess points to this conclusion, and
it is confirmed by similarities of style, diction and versification, and also by
the fact that ideas and phrases of the earlier play are echoed in the later.[85]
There is, further (not to speak of one curious point, to be considered when
we come to Iago), a certain resemblance in the subjects. The heroes of the
two plays are doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have
dealt without much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the
other; but still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each
endures the shock of a terrible disillusionment. This theme is treated by
Shakespeare for the first time in Hamlet, for the second in Othello. It recurs
with modifications in King Lear, and it probably formed the attraction
which drew Shakespeare to refashion in part another writer's tragedy of
Timon. These four dramas may so far be grouped together in distinction
from the remaining tragedies.
But in point of substance, and, in certain respects, in point of style, the
unlikeness of Othello to Hamlet is much greater than the likeness, and the
later play belongs decidedly to one group with its successors. We have seen
that, like them, it is a tragedy of passion, a description inapplicable to Julius
Caesar or Hamlet. And with this change goes another, an enlargement in
the stature of the hero. There is in most of the later heroes something
colossal, something which reminds us of Michael Angelo's figures. They
are not merely exceptional men, they are huge men; as it were, survivors of
the heroic age living in a later and smaller world. We do not receive this
impression from Romeo or Brutus or Hamlet, nor did it lie in Shakespeare's
design to allow more than touches of this trait to Julius Caesar himself; but
it is strongly marked in Lear and Coriolanus, and quite distinct in Macbeth
and even in Antony. Othello is the first of these men, a being essentially
large and grand, towering above his fellows, holding a volume of force

which in repose ensures preeminence without an effort, and in commotion
reminds us rather of the fury of the elements than of the tumult of common
human passion.

1

What is the peculiarity of Othello? What is the distinctive impression that it
leaves? Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, I would answer, not even excepting
King Lear, Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible.
From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader's heart
and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear,
sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation. Evil is
displayed before him, not indeed with the profusion found in King Lear, but
forming, as it were, the soul of a single character, and united with an
intellectual superiority so great that he watches its advance fascinated and
appalled. He sees it, in itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by
fortunate accidents and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to
breathe an atmosphere as fateful as that of King Lear, but more confined
and oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous
room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the activity of
concentration rather than dilation.
I will not dwell now on aspects of the play which modify this impression,
and I reserve for later discussion one of its principal sources, the character
of Iago. But if we glance at some of its other sources, we shall find at the
same time certain distinguishing characteristics of Othello.
(1) One of these has been already mentioned in our discussion of
Shakespeare's technique. Othello is not only the most masterly of the
tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is unusual.
And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and advances without
appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the catastrophe, is a main
cause of the painful tension just described. To this may be added that, after
the conflict has begun, there is very little relief by way of the ridiculous.
Henceforward at any rate Iago's humour never raises a smile. The clown is
a poor one; we hardly attend to him and quickly forget him; I believe most

readers of Shakespeare, if asked whether there is a clown in Othello, would
answer No.
(2) In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual
jealousy rising to the pitch of passion; and there can hardly be any spectacle
at once so engrossing and so painful as that of a great nature suffering the
torment of this passion, and driven by it to a crime which is also a hideous
blunder. Such a passion as ambition, however terrible its results, is not itself
ignoble; if we separate it in thought from the conditions which make it
guilty, it does not appear despicable; it is not a kind of suffering, its nature
is active; and therefore we can watch its course without shrinking. But
jealousy, and especially sexual jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and
humiliation. For this reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we
ourselves are ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it
commonly stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such jealousy as
Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in man;
and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also the most ideal
of human feelings. What spectacle can be more painful than that of this
feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and loathing, the 'golden
purity' of passion split by poison into fragments, the animal in man forcing
itself into his consciousness in naked grossness, and he writhing before it
but powerless to deny it entrance, gasping inarticulate images of pollution,
and finding relief only in a bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to
witness in one who was indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender
than he was great. And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona,
and the scene where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far
more painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of
this tragedy.[86]
(3) The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third
cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all. I mean the suffering of
Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable spectacle
that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is mere suffering; and, ceteris
paribus, that is much worse to witness than suffering that issues in action.
Desdemona is helplessly passive. She can do nothing whatever. She cannot
retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling. And the chief reason
of her helplessness only makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely
painful. She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love

absolute. I would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we pity
Othello even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more
unmitigated distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that
Othello is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering
is like that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by
the being he adores.
(4) Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character, we
observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and catastrophe of
Othello depend largely on intrigue. We must not say more than this. We
must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as distinguished from a tragedy
of character. Iago's plot is Iago's character in action; and it is built on his
knowledge of Othello's character, and could not otherwise have succeeded.
Still it remains true that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the
catastrophe; for Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to
engender such jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a
position in the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other
tragedies; the only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of
Edmund in the secondary plot of King Lear. Now in any novel or play, even
if the persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a
skilfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And
where, as in Othello, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and
antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the source
of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere else in
Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so long a time as
in the later Acts of Othello.
(5) One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that Othello is
less unlike a story of private life than any other of the great tragedies. And
this impression is strengthened in further ways. In the other great tragedies
the action is placed in a distant period, so that its general significance is
perceived through a thin veil which separates the persons from ourselves
and our own world. But Othello is a drama of modern life; when it first
appeared it was a drama almost of contemporary life, for the date of the
Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570. The characters come close to us, and the
application of the drama to ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is
more immediate than it can be in Hamlet or Lear. Besides this, their
fortunes affect us as those of private individuals more than is possible in

any of the later tragedies with the exception of Timon. I have not forgotten
the Senate, nor Othello's position, nor his service to the State;[87] but his
deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a nation or an
empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our own sphere, the
stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony. Indeed he is
already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated, and as we
leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of peace descending
on a distracted land.
(6) The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce those
feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow world,
and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading Othello. In Macbeth the fate
which works itself out alike in the external conflict and in the hero's soul, is
obviously hostile to evil; and the imagination is dilated both by the
consciousness of its presence and by the appearance of supernatural
agencies. These, as we have seen, produce in Hamlet a somewhat similar
effect, which is increased by the hero's acceptance of the accidents as a
providential shaping of his end. King Lear is undoubtedly the tragedy
which comes nearest to Othello in the impression of darkness and
fatefulness, and in the absence of direct indications of any guiding power.
[88]
But in King Lear, apart from other differences to be considered later, the
conflict assumes proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in
Paradise Lost, to traverse spaces wider than the earth. In reading Othello
the mind is not thus distended. It is more bound down to the spectacle of
noble beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the
prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the
catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident[89] in this
catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate. This influence of accident is
keenly felt in King Lear only once, and at the very end of the play. In
Othello, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and terrible. The skill
of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good fortune. Again and again a
chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting of Othello and Cassio, a
question which starts to our lips and which anyone but Othello would have
asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot and ended his life. In their stead,
Desdemona drops her handkerchief at the moment most favourable to him,
[90]
Cassio blunders into the presence of Othello only to find him in a
swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when she is wanted to complete Othello's

deception and incense his anger into fury. All this and much more seems to
us quite natural, so potent is the art of the dramatist; but it confounds us
with a feeling, such as we experience in the Oedipus Tyrannus, that for
these star-crossed mortals—both δυσδαίμονες—there is no escape from
fate, and even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides
with villainy.[91] It is not surprising, therefore, that Othello should affect us
as Hamlet and Macbeth never do, and as King Lear does only in slighter
measure. On the contrary, it is marvellous that, before the tragedy is over,
Shakespeare should have succeeded in toning down this impression into
harmony with others more solemn and serene.
But has he wholly succeeded? Or is there a justification for the fact—a fact
it certainly is—that some readers, while acknowledging, of course, the
immense power of Othello, and even admitting that it is dramatically
perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph, still regard it with a certain distaste,
or, at any rate, hardly allow it a place in their minds beside Hamlet, King
Lear and Macbeth?
The distaste to which I refer is due chiefly to two causes. First, to many
readers in our time, men as well as women, the subject of sexual jealousy,
treated with Elizabethan fulness and frankness, is not merely painful but so
repulsive that not even the intense tragic emotions which the story generates
can overcome this repulsion. But, while it is easy to understand a dislike of
Othello thus caused, it does not seem necessary to discuss it, for it may
fairly be called personal or subjective. It would become more than this, and
would amount to a criticism of the play, only if those who feel it maintained
that the fulness and frankness which are disagreeable to them are also
needless from a dramatic point of view, or betray a design of appealing to
unpoetic feelings in the audience. But I do not think that this is maintained,
or that such a view would be plausible.
To some readers, again, parts of Othello appear shocking or even horrible.
They think—if I may formulate their objection—that in these parts
Shakespeare has sinned against the canons of art, by representing on the
stage a violence or brutality the effect of which is unnecessarily painful and
rather sensational than tragic. The passages which thus give offence are
probably those already referred to,—that where Othello strikes Desdemona

(iv. i. 251), that where he affects to treat her as an inmate of a house of ill-
fame (iv. ii.), and finally the scene of her death.
The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed, but
they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument. All we can profitably
do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask ourselves this
question: If we feel these objections, do we feel them when we are reading
the play with all our force, or only when we are reading it in a half-hearted
manner? For, however matters may stand in the former case, in the latter
case evidently the fault is ours and not Shakespeare's. And if we try the
question thus, I believe we shall find that on the whole the fault is ours. The
first, and least important, of the three passages—that of the blow—seems to
me the most doubtful. I confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile
myself with it. It seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the
shoulder with a roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of
the passage, have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is
not, I think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to
make it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There, it
seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of the
persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations of
pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to
intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this would
be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as dragged
about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be doubtful;
but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining this, and it is
also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was within the curtains,[92]
and so, presumably, in part concealed.

Here, then, Othello does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one point,[93]
open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other three tragedies
where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is shocked or else sensationally
excited. If nevertheless we feel it to occupy a place in our minds a little
lower than the other three (and I believe this feeling, though not general, is
not rare), the reason lies not here but in another characteristic, to which I
have already referred,—the comparative confinement of the imaginative
atmosphere. Othello has not equally with the other three the power of
dilating the imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers
working in the world of individual fate and passion. It is, in a sense, less

'symbolic.' We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial
suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with
the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one or
two of his plays, notably in Troilus and Cressida, we are almost painfully
conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual activity, but at
the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as though some power in his
soul, at once the highest and the sweetest, were for a time in abeyance. In
other plays, notably in the Tempest, we are constantly aware of the presence
of this power; and in such cases we seem to be peculiarly near to
Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in Hamlet and King Lear, and, in a
slighter degree, in Macbeth; but it is much less so in Othello. I do not mean
that in Othello the suppression is marked, or that, as in Troilus and
Cressida, it strikes us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to
follow simply from the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly
mundane subject. Still it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to
indicate, and it leaves an impression that in Othello we are not in contact
with the whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this respect
that the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet's
personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic
creations and as men.

2

The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt on
the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable to show
how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with this character.
Othello's description of himself as

one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme,

is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this—that his whole nature was
indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to
deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little
reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.

Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous notion
that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has some little
plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble barbarian, who has
become a Christian and has imbibed some of the civilisation of his
employers, but who retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his
Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness regarding female chastity
common among Oriental peoples, and that the last three Acts depict the
outburst of these original feelings through the thin crust of Venetian culture.
It would take too long to discuss this idea,[94] and it would perhaps be
useless to do so, for all arguments against it must end in an appeal to the
reader's understanding of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to
look at things in this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied
himself with problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his
Romans perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days
of Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral
consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will
also think this interpretation of Othello probable. To me it appears
hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer meant
the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of Somersetshire. I do not
mean that Othello's race is a matter of no account. It has, as we shall
presently see, its importance in the play. It makes a difference to our idea of
him; it makes a difference to the action and catastrophe. But in regard to the
essentials of his character it is not important; and if anyone had told
Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had
congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he
would have laughed.
Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among
Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and
adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our
world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence—almost as if from
wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of
royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous
peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the
sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he
has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references
to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo.

And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has
not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the
strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet. Indeed, if one
recalls Othello's most famous speeches—those that begin, 'Her father loved
me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased Heaven,' 'It is the cause,'
'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word or two before you go'—and if
one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other
hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There
is the same poetry in his casual phrases—like 'These nine moons wasted,'
'Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,'
'It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the
moon'—and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever since
have been taken as the absolute expression, like

If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate,

or

If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.
I'll not believe it;

or

No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,

or

But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

or

O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.

And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has
watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med'cinable gum,
and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed in a
fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the Propontic
and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of
it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of
glorious war.
So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun
where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled,
steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at
once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally
modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state,
unawed by dignitaries and unelated by honours, secure, it would seem,
against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he
comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as
strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history,
filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy. For there
is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than
Othello's.
The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the
story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He
is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from
introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his
imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the
very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness
and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt
products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women.
In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater
dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature full of the
most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his self-control, not only
by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but by references to the past.
Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:

Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature

Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?
Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:

Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon
When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puffed his own brother—and can he be angry?[95]

This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single line—
one of Shakespeare's miracles—the words by which Othello silences in a
moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of Brabantio:

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours to
elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano. Here,
however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how necessary
was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:

Now, by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way.

We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied,'
blackened and blotted out in total eclipse.
Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he trusts, is
absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-
reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred to indignation, as 'in
Aleppo once,' he answers with one lightning stroke. Love, if he loves, must
be to him the heaven where either he must live or bear no life. If such a
passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable
flood. He will press for immediate conviction or immediate relief.

Convinced, he will act with the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a
man in mortal pain. Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.
This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so
inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his
sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most readers a
passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in
Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr. Swinburne can do more than
justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who cherish a
grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later stages of his
temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to speak pedantically,
he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and violence; no one, I suppose,
denies that. But, even when they admit that he was not of a jealous temper,
they consider that he was 'easily jealous'; they seem to think that it was
inexcusable in him to feel any suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame
him for never suspecting Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this
attitude of mind chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the
story. It comes partly from mere inattention (for Othello did suspect Iago
and did ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text
which makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so;[96] and
partly from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin with these.
(1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He put
entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his
companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness in
the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we happen
to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago
was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him: and that opinion
was that Iago was before all things 'honest,' his very faults being those of
excess in honesty. This being so, even if Othello had not been trustful and
simple, it would have been quite unnatural in him to be unmoved by the
warnings of so honest a friend, warnings offered with extreme reluctance
and manifestly from a sense of a friend's duty.[97] Any husband would have
been troubled by them.
(2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a
wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his bosom-friend.
Nor is there any ground in Othello's character for supposing that, if he had

been such a man, he would have felt and acted as he does in the play. But he
was newly married; in the circumstances he cannot have known much of
Desdemona before his marriage; and further he was conscious of being
under the spell of a feeling which can give glory to the truth but can also
give it to a dream.
(3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such
circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In
Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now comes, to
reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an Italian, not even a
European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and the customary
morality of Venetian women;[98] that he had himself seen in Desdemona's
deception of her father how perfect an actress she could be. As he listens in
horror, for a moment at least the past is revealed to him in a new and
dreadful light, and the ground seems to sink under his feet. These
suggestions are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating
insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be
the true explanation of Desdemona's rejection of acceptable suitors, and of
her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago
goes too far. He sees something in Othello's face that frightens him, and he
breaks off. Nor does this idea take any hold of Othello's mind. But it is not
surprising that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of
knowledge of his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character
which is possible between persons of the same race,[99] should complete his
misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his
friend (iii. iii. 238).
Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been
disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have
been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed,
Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken,
he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet
jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy (iii. iii. 258 ff.) the
beginning of this passion may be traced; but it is only after an interval of
solitude, when he has had time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and
especially after statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion,
are offered, that the passion lays hold of him. Even then, however, and
indeed to the very end, he is quite unlike the essentially jealous man, quite

unlike Leontes. No doubt the thought of another man's possessing the
woman he loves is intolerable to him; no doubt the sense of insult and the
impulse of revenge are at times most violent; and these are the feelings of
jealousy proper. But these are not the chief or the deepest source of
Othello's suffering. It is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling,

If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;

the feeling,

O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

the feeling,

But there where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence....

You will find nothing like this in Leontes.
Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said against
Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may abandon the
ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame. When
Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (iii. iii. 330), we see at once that the
poison has been at work and 'burns like the mines of sulphur.'

Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

He is 'on the rack,' in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the
sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the
whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his 'occupation
gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope. The bare
possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving him—though such a
deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that he can hardly

conceive it credible—is a kind of hope. He furiously demands proof, ocular
proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is demanding an
impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from the unwilling
witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream. It is enough. And
if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a handkerchief spotted
with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was his first gift to her.

I know not that; but such a handkerchief—
I am sure it was your wife's—did I to-day
See Cassio wipe his beard with.

'If it be that,' he answers—but what need to test the fact? The 'madness of
revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never knew. He passes
judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence a solemn vow.
The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never
complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the Temptation-
scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur remains almost
undiminished. Even in the following scene (iii. iv.), where he goes to test
Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and receives a fatal
confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is hardly touched by any
feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act 'Chaos has come.' A slight
interval of time may be admitted here. It is but slight; for it was necessary
for Iago to hurry on, and terribly dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting
of Cassio with Othello; and his insight into Othello's nature taught him that
his plan was to deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to
recover from the confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval;
and when Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He
is physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything
blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the
incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago,
perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio has
confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only second to
Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters disjointed
words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and the world; he
takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the horror he has just
heard,[101] and he falls senseless to the ground. When he recovers it is to

watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over his shame. It is an imposition
so gross, and should have been one so perilous, that Iago would never have
ventured it before. But he is safe now. The sight only adds to the confusion
of intellect the madness of rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge,
contending with motions of infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The
delay till night-fall is torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted
him, and he strikes his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so
lost to all sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the
deaths of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than
any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could
convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation; and
then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears, the
interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with Emilia,
and her last song.
But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio (v.
i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the bed-
chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder,
but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in
honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless
sorrow has taken its place; and

this sorrow's heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of
words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt,
these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give
way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost
nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity.[102]
And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the
majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close. Chaos has come
and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus
has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As he speaks those final

words in which all the glory and agony of his life—long ago in India and
Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus—seem to
pass before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning
man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all
the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies
upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free
from pain, and exulting in the power of 'love and man's unconquerable
mind.'

3

The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint
l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which, though
of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether Shakespeare
imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say that
Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that might
imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do; but
what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a black
man, and not as a light-brown one.
In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which we
are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent innovation.
Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Othello was always quite
black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration, and it almost settles
our question. For it is impossible that the colour of the original Othello
should have been forgotten so soon after Shakespeare's time, and most
improbable that it should have been changed from brown to black.
If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello's colour and
appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word 'black' was of course
used then where we should speak of a 'dark' complexion now; and even the
nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof that Othello was a Negro, might
have been applied by an enemy to what we call a Moor. On the other hand,
it is hard to believe that, if Othello had been light-brown, Brabantio would
have taunted him with having a 'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness
observes) he himself would have used the words,

her name, that was as fresh

As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face.
These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal
blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is said to be
going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we had reason to
believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and terms. Otherwise
it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century writers called any
dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a blackamoor. Sir Thomas
Elyot, according to Hunter,[103] calls Ethiopians Moors; and the following
are the first two illustrations of 'Blackamoor' in the Oxford English
Dictionary: 1547, 'I am a blake More borne in Barbary'; 1548, 'Ethiopo, a
blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus geographical names can tell us
nothing about the question how Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may
have known that a Mauritanian is not a Negro nor black, but we cannot
assume that he did. He may have known, again, that the Prince of Morocco,
who is described in the Merchant of Venice as having, like Othello, the
complexion of a devil, was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any
reason why he should not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and
Othello as a Blackamoor.
Titus Andronicus appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It is
believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he had a
hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it are scattered
through his plays. Now no one who reads Titus Andronicus with an open
mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he appears to have
been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice called 'coal-black'; his
colour is compared with that of a raven and a swan's legs; his child is coal-
black and thick-lipped; he himself has a 'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is
'Aaron the Moor,' just as Othello is 'Othello the Moor.' In the Battle of
Alcazar (Dyce's Peele, p. 421) Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and
Shakespeare himself in a single line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same
person (Merchant of Venice, iii. v. 42).
The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception) at
the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are highly
instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by Coleridge, and we
will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind; yet,

as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed
in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something
monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a
veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in
Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least
contemplated.'[104] Could any argument be more self-destructive? It actually
did appear to Brabantio 'something monstrous to conceive' his daughter
falling in love with Othello,—so monstrous that he could account for her
love only by drugs and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love
would argue 'disproportionateness' is precisely the suggestion that Iago did
make in Desdemona's case:

Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural.

In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now might
speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like Toussaint. Thus the
argument of Coleridge and others points straight to the conclusion against
which they argue.
But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was black
or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical curiosity; it
concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still more the
American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio regarded it, and
not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply blurring this glorious
conception when they try to lessen the distance between her and Othello,
and to smooth away the obstacle which his 'visage' offered to her romantic
passion for a hero. Desdemona, the 'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and
adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and
idealism of a saint, radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men
worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no
theories about universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all
the nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when
her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of the
shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took part with
it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was not prudent. It
even turned out tragically. She met in life with the reward of those who rise
too far above our common level; and we continue to allot her the same

reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a brown man, but find it
monstrous that she should love a black one.[105]
There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to Shakespeare's
meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a thing it was in a
gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail fortune with such a
'downright violence and storm' as is expected only in a hero. It is that when
first we hear of her marriage we have not yet seen the Desdemona of the
later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive how astonishing this love and
boldness must have been in a maiden so quiet and submissive. And when
we watch her in her suffering and death we are so penetrated by the sense of
her heavenly sweetness and self-surrender that we almost forget that she
had shown herself quite as exceptional in the active assertion of her own
soul and will. She tends to become to us predominantly pathetic, the
sweetest and most pathetic of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda
and as loving as Viola, yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen.
And she seems to lack that independence and strength of spirit which
Cordelia and Imogen possess, and which in a manner raises them above
suffering. She appears passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong
nothing but the infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not
how to resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful
example of this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world.
If her part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for
Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be
pronounced intolerable.
Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it must
be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what
Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence,
gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the
principal traits in Desdemona's character. She was, as her father supposed
her to be,

a maiden never bold,
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blushed at herself.

But suddenly there appeared something quite different—something which
could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia—a love not only full of
romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and leading to
a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was carried through with
a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or Cordelia. Desdemona does
not shrink before the Senate; and her language to her father, though deeply
respectful, is firm enough to stir in us some sympathy with the old man who
could not survive his daughter's loss. This then, we must understand, was
the emergence in Desdemona, as she passed from girlhood to womanhood,
of an individuality and strength which, if she had lived, would have been
gradually fused with her more obvious qualities and have issued in a
thousand actions, sweet and good, but surprising to her conventional or
timid neighbours. And, indeed, we have already a slight example in her
overflowing kindness, her boldness and her ill-fated persistence in pleading
Cassio's cause. But the full ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not
to be. In her brief wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and
submissive being of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked
by love, found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly
repulsed, blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more
exquisite fragrance; and, when rewarded with death, summoned its last
labouring breath to save its murderer.
Many traits in Desdemona's character have been described with sympathetic
insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but a few words
on the connection between this character and the catastrophe of Othello.
Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness of intellect and
less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare's heroines; but I
question whether the critic is right in adding that she shows much of the
'unconscious address common in women.' She seems to me deficient in this
address, having in its place a frank childlike boldness and persistency,
which are full of charm but are unhappily united with a certain want of
perception. And these graces and this deficiency appear to be inextricably
intertwined, and in the circumstances conspire tragically against her. They,

with her innocence, hinder her from understanding Othello's state of mind,
and lead her to the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger
subdues her so completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift
helplessly towards the cataract in front.
In Desdemona's incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her perfect
love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a sense, a child of
nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear and conscious
oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination, justice and injustice, is
alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good, kind and true in spite of a
temptation to be otherwise, any more than she is charming in spite of a
temptation to be otherwise. She seems to know evil only by name, and, her
inclinations being good, she acts on inclination. This trait, with its results,
may be seen if we compare her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In
Desdemona's place, Cordelia, however frightened at Othello's anger about
the lost handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience
had produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of
falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in spirit,
impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right would have led
her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello's agitation which would
have broken Iago's plot to pieces. In the same way, at the final crisis, no
instinctive terror of death would have compelled Cordelia suddenly to
relinquish her demand for justice and to plead for life. But these moments
are fatal to Desdemona, who acts precisely as if she were guilty; and they
are fatal because they ask for something which, it seems to us, could hardly
be united with the peculiar beauty of her nature.
This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in
Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear's
foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I
think, what Cordelia could not do—could have refused to compete with her
sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well. And I
doubt if Cordelia, 'falsely murdered,' would have been capable of those last
words of Desdemona—her answer to Emilia's 'O, who hath done this deed?'

Nobody: I myself. Farewell.
Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!

Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last 'falsehood,' that other
falsehood, 'It is not lost,' and to feel that, alike in the momentary child's fear
and the deathless woman's love, Desdemona is herself and herself alone?
[106]

FOOTNOTES:
[85] One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in Othello has,
oddly enough, given trouble. Desdemona says of the maid Barbara: 'She was in
love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her.' Theobald changed 'mad'
to 'bad.' Warburton read 'and he she loved forsook her, And she proved mad'!
Johnson said 'mad' meant only 'wild, frantic, uncertain.' But what Desdemona
says of Barbara is just what Ophelia might have said of herself.
[86] The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt only by a reader. The
Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare's Othello, any more than the
Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.
[87] See p. 9.
[88] Even here, however, there is a great difference; for although the idea of
such a power is not suggested by King Lear as it is by Hamlet and Macbeth, it is
repeatedly expressed by persons in the drama. Of such references there are very
few in Othello. But for somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the
view of the characters is almost strictly secular. Desdemona's sweetness and
forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting for her
undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune: 'It is my wretched fortune' (iv.
ii. 128). In like manner Othello can only appeal to Fate (v. ii. 264):

but, oh vain boast!
Who can control his fate?

[89] Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this point and the
element of intrigue.
[90] And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it is. Else she
would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would have told Othello;
and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago's lie (iii. iii. 438) that he had
seen Cassio wipe his beard with the handkerchief 'to-day.' For in fact the
handkerchief had been lost not an hour before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the
same scene), and it was at that moment in his pocket. He lied therefore most
rashly, but with his usual luck.
[91] For those who know the end of the story there is a terrible irony in the
enthusiasm with which Cassio greets the arrival of Desdemona in Cyprus. Her
ship (which is also Iago's) sets out from Venice a week later than the others, but
reaches Cyprus on the same day with them:

Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands—

Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel—
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.
So swiftly does Fate conduct her to her doom.
[92] The dead bodies are not carried out at the end, as they must have been if the
bed had been on the main stage (for this had no front curtain). The curtains
within which the bed stood were drawn together at the words, 'Let it be hid' (v.
ii. 365).
[93] Against which may be set the scene of the blinding of Gloster in King Lear.
[94] The reader who is tempted by it should, however, first ask himself whether
Othello does act like a barbarian, or like a man who, though wrought almost to
madness, does 'all in honour.'
[95] For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry when he cashiers
Cassio is an utter mistake.
[96] I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See Note L.
[97] It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive at the facts about
Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had an example of Iago's
unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must injure a friend. No wonder he
feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this honest creature doubtless Sees and knows
more, much more, than he unfolds.'
[98] To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so seriously as
Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to accept the situation like an
Italian husband, is one of Iago's most artful and most maddening devices.
[99] If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently excited, he may
have been startled to observe how completely at a loss he was to interpret those
bodily expressions of passion which in a fellow-countryman he understands at
once, and in a European foreigner with somewhat less certainty. The effect of
difference in blood in increasing Othello's bewilderment regarding his wife is
not sufficiently realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to
Desdemona's mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.
[100] See Note M.
[101] Cf. Winter's Tale, i. ii. 137 ff.:

Can thy dam?—may't be?—
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicatest with dreams;—how can this be?
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost,
And that beyond commission, and I find it,
And that to the infection of my brains

And hardening of my brows.
[102] See Note O.
[103] New Illustrations, ii. 281.
[104] Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Ashe, p. 386.
[105] I will not discuss the further question whether, granted that to Shakespeare
Othello was a black, he should be represented as a black in our theatres now. I
dare say not. We do not like the real Shakespeare. We like to have his language
pruned and his conceptions flattened into something that suits our mouths and
minds. And even if we were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes,
to imagine is one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-
black with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes as
near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower our
imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge as to
Othello's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to stand in need of
excuse. 'This noble lady, with a singularity rather to be wondered at than
imitated, had chosen for the object of her affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is
Desdemona to be altogether condemned for the unsuitableness of the person
whom she selected for her lover' (Tales from Shakespeare). Others, of course,
have gone much further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a
sort of judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There
is no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb is true
to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to be condemned.
What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare regarded her marriage
differently from Imogen's?
[106] When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of the ballad
which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her brain,

Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.

Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among poets
seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same way, as
Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!' (iv. i. 274) is
an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at iii. iii. 403.

LECTURE VI
OTHELLO

1

Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character
of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly conceived, is a
far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical deformity, separating
him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for his egoism. In spite of
his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a mere individual: he is the
representative of his family, the Fury of the House of York. Nor is he so
negative as Iago: he has strong passions, he has admirations, and his
conscience disturbs him. There is the glory of power about him. Though an
excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud, and in his world there is no
general illusion as to his true nature. Again, to compare Iago with the Satan
of Paradise Lost seems almost absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's
man exceed Milton's Fiend in evil. That mighty Spirit, whose

form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined and the excess
Of glory obscured;

who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who

felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
His loss;

who could still weep—how much further distant is he than Iago from
spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes his
own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion for Iago
can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly coldness, the

same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like so many scores of
literary villains, has Iago for his father. And Mephistopheles, besides, is not,
in the strict sense, a character. He is half person, half symbol. A
metaphysical idea speaks through him. He is earthy, but could never live
upon the earth.
Of Shakespeare's characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I name
them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful. Of these,
again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together, are perhaps the
most subtle. And if Iago had been a person as attractive as Hamlet, as many
thousands of pages might have been written about him, containing as much
criticism good and bad. As it is, the majority of interpretations of his
character are inadequate not only to Shakespeare's conception, but, I
believe, to the impressions of most readers of taste who are unbewildered
by analysis. These false interpretations, if we set aside the usual lunacies,
[107]
fall into two groups. The first contains views which reduce
Shakespeare to common-place. In different ways and degrees they convert
his Iago into an ordinary villain. Their Iago is simply a man who has been
slighted and revenges himself; or a husband who believes he has been
wronged, and will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own; or
an ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival—one of these, or a
combination of these, endowed with unusual ability and cruelty. These are
the more popular views. The second group of false interpretations is much
smaller, but it contains much weightier matter than the first. Here Iago is a
being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil purely for
itself. His action is not prompted by any plain motive like revenge, jealousy
or ambition. It springs from a 'motiveless malignity,' or a disinterested
delight in the pain of others; and Othello, Cassio and Desdemona are
scarcely more than the material requisite for the full attainment of this
delight. This second Iago, evidently, is no conventional villain, and he is
much nearer to Shakespeare's Iago than the first. Only he is, if not a
psychological impossibility, at any rate not a human being. He might be in
place, therefore, in a symbolical poem like Faust, but in a purely human
drama like Othello he would be a ruinous blunder. Moreover, he is not in
Othello: he is a product of imperfect observation and analysis.
Coleridge, the author of that misleading phrase 'motiveless malignity,' has
some fine remarks on Iago; and the essence of the character has been

described, first in some of the best lines Hazlitt ever wrote, and then rather
more fully by Mr. Swinburne,—so admirably described that I am tempted
merely to read and illustrate these two criticisms. This plan, however,
would make it difficult to introduce all that I wish to say. I propose,
therefore, to approach the subject directly, and, first, to consider how Iago
appeared to those who knew him, and what inferences may be drawn from
their illusions; and then to ask what, if we judge from the play, his character
really was. And I will indicate the points where I am directly indebted to the
criticisms just mentioned.
But two warnings are first required. One of these concerns Iago's
nationality. It has been held that he is a study of that peculiarly Italian form
of villainy which is considered both too clever and too diabolical for an
Englishman. I doubt if there is much more to be said for this idea than for
the notion that Othello is a study of Moorish character. No doubt the belief
in that Italian villainy was prevalent in Shakespeare's time, and it may
perhaps have influenced him in some slight degree both here and in
drawing the character of Iachimo in Cymbeline. But even this slight
influence seems to me doubtful. If Don John in Much Ado had been an
Englishman, critics would have admired Shakespeare's discernment in
making his English villain sulky and stupid. If Edmund's father had been
Duke of Ferrara instead of Earl of Gloster, they would have said that
Edmund could have been nothing but an Italian. Change the name and
country of Richard III., and he would be called a typical despot of the
Italian Renaissance. Change those of Juliet, and we should find her
wholesome English nature contrasted with the southern dreaminess of
Romeo. But this way of interpreting Shakespeare is not Shakespearean.
With him the differences of period, race, nationality and locality have little
bearing on the inward character, though they sometimes have a good deal
on the total imaginative effect, of his figures. When he does lay stress on
such differences his intention is at once obvious, as in characters like
Fluellen or Sir Hugh Evans, or in the talk of the French princes before the
battle of Agincourt. I may add that Iago certainly cannot be taken to
exemplify the popular Elizabethan idea of a disciple of Macchiavelli. There
is no sign that he is in theory an atheist or even an unbeliever in the
received religion. On the contrary, he uses its language, and says nothing
resembling the words of the prologue to the Jew of Malta:

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Aaron in Titus Andronicus might have said this (and is not more likely to be
Shakespeare's creation on that account), but not Iago.
I come to a second warning. One must constantly remember not to believe a
syllable that Iago utters on any subject, including himself, until one has
tested his statement by comparing it with known facts and with other
statements of his own or of other people, and by considering whether he
had in the particular circumstances any reason for telling a lie or for telling
the truth. The implicit confidence which his acquaintances placed in his
integrity has descended to most of his critics; and this, reinforcing the
comical habit of quoting as Shakespeare's own statement everything said by
his characters, has been a fruitful source of misinterpretation. I will take as
an instance the very first assertions made by Iago. In the opening scene he
tells his dupe Roderigo that three great men of Venice went to Othello and
begged him to make Iago his lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and
obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole,
and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already
filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no
practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle,
arithmetic, whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, and by
'old gradation' too ought to have been preferred. Most or all of this is
repeated by some critics as though it were information given by
Shakespeare, and the conclusion is quite naturally drawn that Iago had
some reason to feel aggrieved. But if we ask ourselves how much of all this
is true we shall answer, I believe, as follows. It is absolutely certain that
Othello appointed Cassio his lieutenant, and nothing else is absolutely
certain. But there is no reason to doubt the statement that Iago had seen
service with him, nor is there anything inherently improbable in the
statement that he was solicited by three great personages on Iago's behalf.
On the other hand, the suggestions that he refused out of pride and
obstinacy, and that he lied in saying he had already chosen his officer, have
no verisimilitude; and if there is any fact at all (as there probably is) behind
Iago's account of the conversation, it doubtless is the fact that Iago himself
was ignorant of military science, while Cassio was an expert, and that
Othello explained this to the great personages. That Cassio, again, was an

interloper and a mere closet-student without experience of war is incredible,
considering first that Othello chose him for lieutenant, and secondly that the
senate appointed him to succeed Othello in command at Cyprus; and we
have direct evidence that part of Iago's statement is a lie, for Desdemona
happens to mention that Cassio was a man who 'all his time had founded his
good fortunes' on Othello's love and had 'shared dangers' with him (iii. iv.
93). There remains only the implied assertion that, if promotion had gone
by old gradation, Iago, as the senior, would have been preferred. It may be
true: Othello was not the man to hesitate to promote a junior for good
reasons. But it is just as likely to be a pure invention; and, though Cassio
was young, there is nothing to show that he was younger, in years or in
service, than Iago. Iago, for instance, never calls him 'young,' as he does
Roderigo; and a mere youth would not have been made Governor of
Cyprus. What is certain, finally, in the whole business is that Othello's mind
was perfectly at ease about the appointment, and that he never dreamed of
Iago's being discontented at it, not even when the intrigue was disclosed and
he asked himself how he had offended Iago.

2

It is necessary to examine in this manner every statement made by Iago. But
it is not necessary to do so in public, and I proceed to the question what
impression he made on his friends and acquaintances. In the main there is
here no room for doubt. Nothing could be less like Iago than the
melodramatic villain so often substituted for him on the stage, a person
whom everyone in the theatre knows for a scoundrel at the first glance.
Iago, we gather, was a Venetian[108] soldier, eight-and-twenty years of age,
who had seen a good deal of service and had a high reputation for courage.
Of his origin we are ignorant, but, unless I am mistaken, he was not of
gentle birth or breeding.[109] He does not strike one as a degraded man of
culture: for all his great powers, he is vulgar, and his probable want of
military science may well be significant. He was married to a wife who
evidently lacked refinement, and who appears in the drama almost in the
relation of a servant to Desdemona. His manner was that of a blunt, bluff
soldier, who spoke his mind freely and plainly. He was often hearty, and
could be thoroughly jovial; but he was not seldom rather rough and caustic
of speech, and he was given to making remarks somewhat disparaging to

human nature. He was aware of this trait in himself, and frankly admitted
that he was nothing if not critical, and that it was his nature to spy into
abuses. In these admissions he characteristically exaggerated his fault, as
plain-dealers are apt to do; and he was liked none the less for it, seeing that
his satire was humorous, that on serious matters he did not speak lightly (iii.
iii. 119), and that the one thing perfectly obvious about him was his
honesty. 'Honest' is the word that springs to the lips of everyone who speaks
of him. It is applied to him some fifteen times in the play, not to mention
some half-dozen where he employs it, in derision, of himself. In fact he was
one of those sterling men who, in disgust at gush, say cynical things which
they do not believe, and then, the moment you are in trouble, put in practice
the very sentiment they had laughed at. On such occasions he showed the
kindliest sympathy and the most eager desire to help. When Cassio
misbehaved so dreadfully and was found fighting with Montano, did not
Othello see that 'honest Iago looked dead with grieving'? With what
difficulty was he induced, nay, compelled, to speak the truth against the
lieutenant! Another man might have felt a touch of satisfaction at the
thought that the post he had coveted was now vacant; but Iago not only
comforted Cassio, talking to him cynically about reputation, just to help
him over his shame, but he set his wits to work and at once perceived that
the right plan for Cassio to get his post again was to ask Desdemona to
intercede. So troubled was he at his friend's disgrace that his own wife was
sure 'it grieved her husband as if the case was his.' What wonder that
anyone in sore trouble, like Desdemona, should send at once for Iago (iv. ii.
106)? If this rough diamond had any flaw, it was that Iago's warm loyal
heart incited him to too impulsive action. If he merely heard a friend like
Othello calumniated, his hand flew to his sword; and though he restrained
himself he almost regretted his own virtue (i. ii. 1-10).
Such seemed Iago to the people about him, even to those who, like Othello,
had known him for some time. And it is a fact too little noticed but most
remarkable, that he presented an appearance not very different to his wife.
There is no sign either that Emilia's marriage was downright unhappy, or
that she suspected the true nature of her husband.[110] No doubt she knew
rather more of him than others. Thus we gather that he was given to chiding
and sometimes spoke shortly and sharply to her (iii. iii. 300 f.); and it is
quite likely that she gave him a good deal of her tongue in exchange (ii. i.

101 f.). He was also unreasonably jealous; for his own statement that he
was jealous of Othello is confirmed by Emilia herself, and must therefore
be believed (iv. ii. 145).[111] But it seems clear that these defects of his had
not seriously impaired Emilia's confidence in her husband or her affection
for him. She knew in addition that he was not quite so honest as he seemed,
for he had often begged her to steal Desdemona's handkerchief. But
Emilia's nature was not very delicate or scrupulous about trifles. She
thought her husband odd and 'wayward,' and looked on his fancy for the
handkerchief as an instance of this (iii. iii. 292); but she never dreamed he
was a villain, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of her belief that
he was heartily sorry for Cassio's disgrace. Her failure, on seeing Othello's
agitation about the handkerchief, to form any suspicion of an intrigue,
shows how little she doubted her husband. Even when, later, the idea strikes
her that some scoundrel has poisoned Othello's mind, the tone of all her
speeches, and her mention of the rogue who (she believes) had stirred up
Iago's jealousy of her, prove beyond doubt that the thought of Iago's being
the scoundrel has not crossed her mind (iv. ii. 115-147). And if any
hesitation on the subject could remain, surely it must be dispelled by the
thrice-repeated cry of astonishment and horror, 'My husband!', which
follows Othello's words, 'Thy husband knew it all'; and by the choking
indignation and desperate hope which we hear in her appeal when Iago
comes in:

Disprove this villain if thou be'st a man:
He says thou told'st him that his wife was false:
I know thou did'st not, thou'rt not such a villain:
Speak, for my heart is full.

Even if Iago had betrayed much more of his true self to his wife than to
others, it would make no difference to the contrast between his true self and
the self he presented to the world in general. But he never did so. Only the
feeble eyes of the poor gull Roderigo were allowed a glimpse into that pit.
The bearing of this contrast upon the apparently excessive credulity of
Othello has been already pointed out. What further conclusions can be
drawn from it? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is
accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that Iago's powers of dissimulation
and of self-control must have been prodigious: for he was not a youth, like

Edmund, but had worn this mask for years, and he had apparently never
enjoyed, like Richard, occasional explosions of the reality within him. In
fact so prodigious does his self-control appear that a reader might be
excused for feeling a doubt of its possibility. But there are certain
observations and further inferences which, apart from confidence in
Shakespeare, would remove this doubt. It is to be observed, first, that Iago
was able to find a certain relief from the discomfort of hypocrisy in those
caustic or cynical speeches which, being misinterpreted, only heightened
confidence in his honesty. They acted as a safety-valve, very much as
Hamlet's pretended insanity did. Next, I would infer from the entire success
of his hypocrisy—what may also be inferred on other grounds, and is of
great importance—that he was by no means a man of strong feelings and
passions, like Richard, but decidedly cold by temperament. Even so, his
self-control was wonderful, but there never was in him any violent storm to
be controlled. Thirdly, I would suggest that Iago, though thoroughly selfish
and unfeeling, was not by nature malignant, nor even morose, but that, on
the contrary, he had a superficial good-nature, the kind of good-nature that
wins popularity and is often taken as the sign, not of a good digestion, but
of a good heart. And lastly, it may be inferred that, before the giant crime
which we witness, Iago had never been detected in any serious offence and
may even never have been guilty of one, but had pursued a selfish but
outwardly decent life, enjoying the excitement of war and of casual
pleasures, but never yet meeting with any sufficient temptation to risk his
position and advancement by a dangerous crime. So that, in fact, the
tragedy of Othello is in a sense his tragedy too. It shows us not a violent
man, like Richard, who spends his life in murder, but a thoroughly bad, cold
man, who is at last tempted to let loose the forces within him, and is at once
destroyed.

3

In order to see how this tragedy arises let us now look more closely into
Iago's inner man. We find here, in the first place, as has been implied in
part, very remarkable powers both of intellect and of will. Iago's insight,
within certain limits, into human nature; his ingenuity and address in
working upon it; his quickness and versatility in dealing with sudden
difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no parallel among

dramatic characters. Equally remarkable is his strength of will. Not Socrates
himself, not the ideal sage of the Stoics, was more lord of himself than Iago
appears to be. It is not merely that he never betrays his true nature; he
seems to be master of all the motions that might affect his will. In the most
dangerous moments of his plot, when the least slip or accident would be
fatal, he never shows a trace of nervousness. When Othello takes him by the
throat he merely shifts his part with his usual instantaneous adroitness.
When he is attacked and wounded at the end he is perfectly unmoved. As
Mr. Swinburne says, you cannot believe for a moment that the pain of
torture will ever open Iago's lips. He is equally unassailable by the
temptations of indolence or of sensuality. It is difficult to imagine him
inactive; and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his
pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and not
from weakness, and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the holiest of
ascetics would not put it more resolutely by. 'What should I do?' Roderigo
whimpers to him; 'I confess it is my shame to be so fond; but it is not in my
virtue to amend it.' He answers: 'Virtue! a fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are
thus and thus. It all depends on our will. Love is merely a lust of the blood
and a permission of the will. Come, be a man.... Ere I would say I would
drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen, I would change my humanity
with a baboon.' Forget for a moment that love is for Iago the appetite of a
baboon; forget that he is as little assailable by pity as by fear or pleasure;
and you will acknowledge that this lordship of the will, which is his
practice as well as his doctrine, is great, almost sublime. Indeed, in intellect
(always within certain limits) and in will (considered as a mere power, and
without regard to its objects) Iago is great.
To what end does he use these great powers? His creed—for he is no
sceptic, he has a definite creed—is that absolute egoism is the only rational
and proper attitude, and that conscience or honour or any kind of regard for
others is an absurdity. He does not deny that this absurdity exists. He does
not suppose that most people secretly share his creed, while pretending to
hold and practise another. On the contrary, he regards most people as honest
fools. He declares that he has never yet met a man who knew how to love
himself; and his one expression of admiration in the play is for servants

Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves.

'These fellows,' he says, 'have some soul.' He professes to stand, and he,
attempts to stand, wholly outside the world of morality.
The existence of Iago's creed and of his corresponding practice is evidently
connected with a characteristic in which he surpasses nearly all the other
inhabitants of Shakespeare's world. Whatever he may once have been, he
appears, when we meet him, to be almost destitute of humanity, of
sympathetic or social feeling. He shows no trace of affection, and in
presence of the most terrible suffering he shows either pleasure or an
indifference which, if not complete, is nearly so. Here, however, we must be
careful. It is important to realise, and few readers are in danger of ignoring,
this extraordinary deadness of feeling, but it is also important not to confuse
it with a general positive ill-will. When Iago has no dislike or hostility to a
person he does not show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows
at most the absence of pain. There is, for instance, not the least sign of his
enjoying the distress of Desdemona. But his sympathetic feelings are so
abnormally feeble and cold that, when his dislike is roused, or when an
indifferent person comes in the way of his purpose, there is scarcely
anything within him to prevent his applying the torture.
What is it that provokes his dislike or hostility? Here again we must look
closely. Iago has been represented as an incarnation of envy, as a man who,
being determined to get on in the world, regards everyone else with enmity
as his rival. But this idea, though containing truth, seems much exaggerated.
Certainly he is devoted to himself; but if he were an eagerly ambitious man,
surely we should see much more positive signs of this ambition; and surely
too, with his great powers, he would already have risen high, instead of
being a mere ensign, short of money, and playing Captain Rook to
Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one must conclude that his
desires were comparatively moderate and his ambition weak; that he
probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money enough, did not exert
himself greatly to acquire reputation or position; and, therefore, that he was
not habitually burning with envy and actively hostile to other men as
possible competitors.
But what is clear is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that touches his
pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him vain, but he has a
high opinion of himself and a great contempt for others. He is quite aware

of his superiority to them in certain respects; and he either disbelieves in or
despises the qualities in which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbs
or wounds his sense of superiority irritates him at once; and in that sense he
is highly competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him.
This is why Cassio's scientific attainments provoke him. This is the reason
of his jealousy of Emilia. He does not care for his wife; but the fear of
another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or derision
as an unfortunate husband, is wormwood to him; and as he is sure that no
woman is virtuous at heart, this fear is ever with him. For much the same
reason he has a spite against goodness in men (for it is characteristic that he
is less blind to its existence in men, the stronger, than in women, the
weaker). He has a spite against it, not from any love of evil for evil's sake,
but partly because it annoys his intellect as a stupidity; partly (though he
hardly knows this) because it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and
disturbs his faith that egoism is the right and proper thing; partly because,
the world being such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. But he, a
man ten times as able as Cassio or even Othello, does not greatly prosper.
Somehow, for all the stupidity of these open and generous people, they get
on better than the 'fellow of some soul' And this, though he is not
particularly eager to get on, wounds his pride. Goodness therefore annoys
him. He is always ready to scoff at it, and would like to strike at it. In
ordinary circumstances these feelings of irritation are not vivid in Iago—no
feeling is so—but they are constantly present.

4

Our task of analysis is not finished; but we are now in a position to consider
the rise of Iago's tragedy. Why did he act as we see him acting in the play?
What is the answer to that appeal of Othello's:

Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?

This question Why? is the question about Iago, just as the question Why did
Hamlet delay? is the question about Hamlet. Iago refused to answer it; but I
will venture to say that he could not have answered it, any more than
Hamlet could tell why he delayed. But Shakespeare knew the answer, and if

these characters are great creations and not blunders we ought to be able to
find it too.
Is it possible to elicit it from Iago himself against his will? He makes
various statements to Roderigo, and he has several soliloquies. From these
sources, and especially from the latter, we should learn something. For with
Shakespeare soliloquy generally gives information regarding the secret
springs as well as the outward course of the plot; and, moreover, it is a
curious point of technique with him that the soliloquies of his villains
sometimes read almost like explanations offered to the audience.[112] Now,
Iago repeatedly offers explanations either to Roderigo or to himself. In the
first place, he says more than once that he 'hates' Othello. He gives two
reasons for his hatred. Othello has made Cassio lieutenant; and he suspects,
and has heard it reported, that Othello has an intrigue with Emilia. Next
there is Cassio. He never says he hates Cassio, but he finds in him three
causes of offence: Cassio has been preferred to him; he suspects him too of
an intrigue with Emilia; and, lastly, Cassio has a daily beauty in his life
which makes Iago ugly. In addition to these annoyances he wants Cassio's
place. As for Roderigo, he calls him a snipe, and who can hate a snipe? But
Roderigo knows too much; and he is becoming a nuisance, getting angry,
and asking for the gold and jewels he handed to Iago to give to Desdemona.
So Iago kills Roderigo. Then for Desdemona: a fig's-end for her virtue! but
he has no ill-will to her. In fact he 'loves' her, though he is good enough to
explain, varying the word, that his 'lust' is mixed with a desire to pay
Othello in his own coin. To be sure she must die, and so must Emilia, and
so would Bianca if only the authorities saw things in their true light; but he
did not set out with any hostile design against these persons.
Is the account which Iago gives of the causes of his action the true account?
The answer of the most popular view will be, 'Yes. Iago was, as he says,
chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a hatred of
Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy. These are perfectly
intelligible causes; we have only to add to them unusual ability and cruelty,
and all is explained. Why should Coleridge and Hazlitt and Swinburne go
further afield?' To which last question I will at once oppose these: If your
view is correct, why should Iago be considered an extraordinary creation;
and is it not odd that the people who reject it are the people who elsewhere
show an exceptional understanding of Shakespeare?

The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it attributes
to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its Iago is impelled by
passions, a passion of ambition and a passion of hatred; for no ambition or
hatred short of passion could drive a man who is evidently so clear-sighted,
and who must hitherto have been so prudent, into a plot so extremely
hazardous. Why, then, in the Iago of the play do we find no sign of these
passions or of anything approaching to them? Why, if Shakespeare meant
that Iago was impelled by them, does he suppress the signs of them? Surely
not from want of ability to display them. The poet who painted Macbeth
and Shylock understood his business. Who ever doubted Macbeth's
ambition or Shylock's hate? And what resemblance is there between these
passions and any feeling that we can trace in Iago? The resemblance
between a volcano in eruption and a flameless fire of coke; the resemblance
between a consuming desire to hack and hew your enemy's flesh, and the
resentful wish, only too familiar in common life, to inflict pain in return for
a slight. Passion, in Shakespeare's plays, is perfectly easy to recognise.
What vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of passion gratified, is visible in
Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has less passion than an
ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things. The only ground for
attributing to him, I do not say a passionate hatred, but anything deserving
the name of hatred at all, is his own statement, 'I hate Othello'; and we
know what his statements are worth.
But the popular view, beside attributing to Iago what he does not show,
ignores what he does show. It selects from his own account of his motives
one or two, and drops the rest; and so it makes everything natural. But it
fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and suspicious, his own
account is. Certainly he assigns motives enough; the difficulty is that he
assigns so many. A man moved by simple passions due to simple causes
does not stand fingering his feelings, industriously enumerating their
sources, and groping about for new ones. But this is what Iago does. And
this is not all. These motives appear and disappear in the most extraordinary
manner. Resentment at Cassio's appointment is expressed in the first
conversation with Roderigo, and from that moment is never once mentioned
again in the whole play. Hatred of Othello is expressed in the First Act
alone. Desire to get Cassio's place scarcely appears after the first soliloquy,
and when it is gratified Iago does not refer to it by a single word. The

suspicion of Cassio's intrigue with Emilia emerges suddenly, as an after-
thought, not in the first soliloquy but the second, and then disappears for
ever.[113] Iago's 'love' of Desdemona is alluded to in the second soliloquy;
there is not the faintest trace of it in word or deed either before or after. The
mention of jealousy of Othello is followed by declarations that Othello is
infatuated about Desdemona and is of a constant nature, and during
Othello's sufferings Iago never shows a sign of the idea that he is now
paying his rival in his own coin. In the second soliloquy he declares that he
quite believes Cassio to be in love with Desdemona; it is obvious that he
believes no such thing, for he never alludes to the idea again, and within a
few hours describes Cassio in soliloquy as an honest fool. His final reason
for ill-will to Cassio never appears till the Fifth Act.
What is the meaning of all this? Unless Shakespeare was out of his mind, it
must have a meaning. And certainly this meaning is not contained in any of
the popular accounts of Iago.
Is it contained then in Coleridge's word 'motive-hunting'? Yes, 'motive-
hunting' exactly answers to the impression that Iago's soliloquies produce.
He is pondering his design, and unconsciously trying to justify it to himself.
He speaks of one or two real feelings, such as resentment against Othello,
and he mentions one or two real causes of these feelings. But these are not
enough for him. Along with them, or alone, there come into his head, only
to leave it again, ideas and suspicions, the creations of his own baseness or
uneasiness, some old, some new, caressed for a moment to feed his purpose
and give it a reasonable look, but never really believed in, and never the
main forces which are determining his action. In fact, I would venture to
describe Iago in these soliloquies as a man setting out on a project which
strongly attracts his desire, but at the same time conscious of a resistance to
the desire, and unconsciously trying to argue the resistance away by
assigning reasons for the project. He is the counterpart of Hamlet, who tries
to find reasons for his delay in pursuing a design which excites his aversion.
And most of Iago's reasons for action are no more the real ones than
Hamlet's reasons for delay were the real ones. Each is moved by forces
which he does not understand; and it is probably no accident that these two
studies of states psychologically so similar were produced at about the same
period.

What then were the real moving forces of Iago's action? Are we to fall back
on the idea of a 'motiveless malignity;'[114] that is to say, a disinterested love
of evil, or a delight in the pain of others as simple and direct as the delight
in one's own pleasure? Surely not. I will not insist that this thing or these
things are inconceivable, mere phrases, not ideas; for, even so, it would
remain possible that Shakespeare had tried to represent an inconceivability.
But there is not the slightest reason to suppose that he did so. Iago's action
is intelligible; and indeed the popular view contains enough truth to refute
this desperate theory. It greatly exaggerates his desire for advancement, and
the ill-will caused by his disappointment, and it ignores other forces more
important than these; but it is right in insisting on the presence of this desire
and this ill-will, and their presence is enough to destroy Iago's claims to be
more than a demi-devil. For love of the evil that advances my interest and
hurts a person I dislike, is a very different thing from love of evil simply as
evil; and pleasure in the pain of a person disliked or regarded as a
competitor is quite distinct from pleasure in the pain of others simply as
others. The first is intelligible, and we find it in Iago. The second, even if it
were intelligible, we do not find in Iago.
Still, desire of advancement and resentment about the lieutenancy, though
factors and indispensable factors in the cause of Iago's action, are neither
the principal nor the most characteristic factors. To find these, let us return
to our half-completed analysis of the character. Let us remember especially
the keen sense of superiority, the contempt of others, the sensitiveness to
everything which wounds these feelings, the spite against goodness in men
as a thing not only stupid but, both in its nature and by its success, contrary
to Iago's nature and irritating to his pride. Let us remember in addition the
annoyance of having always to play a part, the consciousness of exceptional
but unused ingenuity and address, the enjoyment of action, and the absence
of fear. And let us ask what would be the greatest pleasure of such a man,
and what the situation which might tempt him to abandon his habitual
prudence and pursue this pleasure. Hazlitt and Mr. Swinburne do not put
this question, but the answer I proceed to give to it is in principle theirs.[115]
The most delightful thing to such a man would be something that gave an
extreme satisfaction to his sense of power and superiority; and if it
involved, secondly, the triumphant exertion of his abilities, and, thirdly, the
excitement of danger, his delight would be consummated. And the moment

most dangerous to such a man would be one when his sense of superiority
had met with an affront, so that its habitual craving was reinforced by
resentment, while at the same time he saw an opportunity of satisfying it by
subjecting to his will the very persons who had affronted it. Now, this is the
temptation that comes to Iago. Othello's eminence, Othello's goodness, and
his own dependence on Othello, must have been a perpetual annoyance to
him. At any time he would have enjoyed befooling and tormenting Othello.
Under ordinary circumstances he was restrained, chiefly by self-interest, in
some slight degree perhaps by the faint pulsations of conscience or
humanity. But disappointment at the loss of the lieutenancy supplied the
touch of lively resentment that was required to overcome these obstacles;
and the prospect of satisfying the sense of power by mastering Othello
through an intricate and hazardous intrigue now became irresistible. Iago
did not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to
give himself reasons for his action, even those that had some reality made
but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were no more
than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power into the
machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the truth. It is when
he uses the phrase 'to plume up my will in double knavery.'
To 'plume up the will,' to heighten the sense of power or superiority—this
seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of cruelty which evidently
do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which therefore puzzle and
sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that makes a man bully the wife
or children of whom he is fond. The boy who torments another boy, as we
say, 'for no reason,' or who without any hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is
pleased with his victim's pain, not from any disinterested love of evil or
pleasure in pain, but mainly because this pain is the unmistakable proof of
his own power over his victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of
superiority wants satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the
consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued him
and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy people,
who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets in his
hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must contort
themselves in agony, while all the time they believe that he is their one true
friend and comforter? It must have been an ecstasy of bliss to him. And this,
granted a most abnormal deadness of human feeling, is, however horrible,

perfectly intelligible. There is no mystery in the psychology of Iago; the
mystery lies in a further question, which the drama has not to answer, the
question why such a being should exist.
Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest of the
forces that drive him on. But there are two others to be noticed. One is the
pleasure in an action very difficult and perilous and, therefore, intensely
exciting. This action sets all his powers on the strain. He feels the delight of
one who executes successfully a feat thoroughly congenial to his special
aptitude, and only just within his compass; and, as he is fearless by nature,
the fact that a single slip will cost him his life only increases his pleasure.
His exhilaration breaks out in the ghastly words with which he greets the
sunrise after the night of the drunken tumult which has led to Cassio's
disgrace: 'By the mass, 'tis morning. Pleasure and action make the hours
seem short.' Here, however, the joy in exciting action is quickened by other
feelings. It appears more simply elsewhere in such a way as to suggest that
nothing but such actions gave him happiness, and that his happiness was
greater if the action was destructive as well as exciting. We find it, for
instance, in his gleeful cry to Roderigo, who proposes to shout to Brabantio
in order to wake him and tell him of his daughter's flight:

Do, with like timorous[116] accent and dire yell
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.

All through that scene; again, in the scene where Cassio is attacked and
Roderigo murdered; everywhere where Iago is in physical action, we catch
this sound of almost feverish enjoyment. His blood, usually so cold and
slow, is racing through his veins.
But Iago, finally, is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His action is
a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception and execution of
it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic creation. 'He is,' says
Hazlitt, 'an amateur of tragedy in real life; and, instead of employing his
invention on imaginary characters or long-forgotten incidents, he takes the
bolder and more dangerous course of getting up his plot at home, casts the
principal parts among his newest friends and connections, and rehearses it
in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolution.' Mr.

Swinburne lays even greater stress on this aspect of Iago's character, and
even declares that 'the very subtlest and strongest component of his
complex nature' is 'the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an
inarticulate poet.' And those to whom this idea is unfamiliar, and who may
suspect it at first sight of being fanciful, will find, if they examine the play
in the light of Mr. Swinburne's exposition, that it rests on a true and deep
perception, will stand scrutiny, and might easily be illustrated. They may
observe, to take only one point, the curious analogy between the early
stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which Iago broods
over his plot, drawing at first only an outline, puzzled how to fix more than
the main idea, and gradually seeing it develop and clarify as he works upon
it or lets it work. Here at any rate Shakespeare put a good deal of himself
into Iago. But the tragedian in real life was not the equal of the tragic poet.
His psychology, as we shall see, was at fault at a critical point, as
Shakespeare's never was. And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his
piece was ruined.
Such, then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which, liberated by
his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from inactivity into
action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a new point, this force
completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is like the passion with which a
tragic hero wholly identifies himself, and which bears him on to his doom.
It is true that, once embarked on his course, Iago could not turn back, even
if this passion did abate; and it is also true that he is compelled, by his
success in convincing Othello, to advance to conclusions of which at the
outset he did not dream. He is thus caught in his own web, and could not
liberate himself if he would. But, in fact, he never shows a trace of wishing
to do so, not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than
of remorse; there is no ebb in the tide. As the crisis approaches there passes
through his mind a fleeting doubt whether the deaths of Cassio and
Roderigo are indispensable; but that uncertainty, which does not concern
the main issue, is dismissed, and he goes forward with undiminished zest.
Not even in his sleep—as in Richard's before his final battle—does any
rebellion of outraged conscience or pity, or any foreboding of despair, force
itself into clear consciousness. His fate—which is himself—has completely
mastered him: so that, in the later scenes, where the improbability of the
entire success of a design built on so many different falsehoods forces itself

on the reader, Iago appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but
as a man absolutely infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.

5

Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making, and
because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom fellow-feeling
of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism becomes possible to
them, and with it those hard vices—such as ingratitude and cruelty—which
to Shakespeare were far the worst. The second is that such evil is
compatible, and even appears to ally itself easily, with exceptional powers
of will and intellect. In the latter respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of
Richard, in egoism he is the superior, and his inferiority in passion and
massive force only makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can
bear to contemplate him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel
admiration and some kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:

There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out;

but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil, and—what is
more dreadful still—this absolute evil is united with supreme intellectual
power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why do we not accuse its
author either of untruth or of a desperate pessimism?
To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand alone; he
is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in isolation, acted
upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as destroying.[117] But, although
this is true and important, I pass it by and, continuing to regard him by
himself, I would make three remarks in answer to the questions.
In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil—far from it. Those
very forces that moved him and made his fate—sense of power, delight in
performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the exercise of
artistic skill—are not at all evil things. We sympathise with one or other of

them almost every day of our lives. And, accordingly, though in Iago they
are combined with something detestable and so contribute to evil, our
perception of them is accompanied with sympathy. In the same way, Iago's
insight, dexterity, quickness, address, and the like, are in themselves
admirable things; the perfect man would possess them. And certainly he
would possess also Iago's courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would
stand above the impulses of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this
goes to evil ends in Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in
reading, of course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.
All this, however, might apparently co-exist with absolute egoism and total
want of humanity. But, in the second place, it is not true that in Iago this
egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he is a thing of
mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute Iago would be a
monster, not a man. The fact is, he tries to make them absolute and cannot
succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and humanity, though faint,
are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he would be perfectly
indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly is not so. His very
irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his faith in his creed is not
entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm because he himself has a perception,
however dim, of the goodness of goodness. What is the meaning of the last
reason he gives himself for killing Cassio:

He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly?

Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute egoist.
Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open confession
of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no moral sense, we
should never have heard those soliloquies which so clearly betray his
uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade himself that he has some
excuse for the villainy he contemplates. These seem to be indubitable
proofs that, against his will, Iago is a little better than his creed, and has
failed to withdraw himself wholly from the human atmosphere about him.
And to these proofs I would add, though with less confidence, two others.
Iago's momentary doubt towards the end whether Roderigo and Cassio must
be killed has always surprised me. As a mere matter of calculation it is

perfectly obvious that they must; and I believe his hesitation is not merely
intellectual, it is another symptom of the obscure working of conscience or
humanity. Lastly, is it not significant that, when once his plot has begun to
develop, Iago never seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to
leave her as quickly as he can (iii. iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by
Emilia to see her in her distress (iv. ii. 110 ff.), we fail to catch in his words
any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's misery, and seem rather to
perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one dare say it, a faint touch of shame
or remorse? This interpretation of the passage, I admit, is not inevitable, but
to my mind (quite apart from any theorising about Iago) it seems the natural
one.[118] And if it is right, Iago's discomfort is easily understood; for
Desdemona is the one person concerned against whom it is impossible for
him even to imagine a ground of resentment, and so an excuse for cruelty.
[119]

There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme intellect who
is at the same time supremely wicked. That he is supremely wicked nobody
will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will interfere with his
right to that title. But to say that his intellectual power is supreme is to
make a great mistake. Within certain limits he has indeed extraordinary
penetration, quickness, inventiveness, adaptiveness; but the limits are
defined with the hardest of lines, and they are narrow limits. It would
scarcely be unjust to call him simply astonishingly clever, or simply a
consummate master of intrigue. But compare him with one who may
perhaps be roughly called a bad man of supreme intellectual power,
Napoleon, and you see how small and negative Iago's mind is, incapable of
Napoleon's military achievements, and much more incapable of his political
constructions. Or, to keep within the Shakespearean world, compare him
with Hamlet, and you perceive how miserably close is his intellectual
horizon; that such a thing as a thought beyond the reaches of his soul has
never come near him; that he is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind
to all but a tiny fragment of the meaning of things. Is it not quite absurd,
then, to call him a man of supreme intellect?
And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected with
his badness. He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the power of
love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not understand it; and he
could not understand it because it was not in him. Iago never meant his plot

to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that jealousy is painful, but the
jealousy of a love like Othello's he could not imagine, and he found himself
involved in murders which were no part of his original design. That
difficulty he surmounted, and his changed plot still seemed to prosper.
Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once dead, all will be well. Nay, when
he fails to kill Cassio, all may still be well. He will avow that he told
Othello of the adultery, and persist that he told the truth, and Cassio will
deny it in vain. And then, in a moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from
a quarter where he never dreamt of danger. He knows his wife, he thinks.
She is not over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has
learnt obedience. But one thing in her he does not know—that she loves her
mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame
darkened. There is genuine astonishment in his outburst 'What! Are you
mad?' as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the
handkerchief. But he might well have applied to himself the words she
flings at Othello,

O gull! O dolt!
As ignorant as dirt!

The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.
To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is frightful. It is
rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in Iago. But the alliance of
evil like Iago's with supreme intellect is an impossible fiction; and
Shakespeare's fictions were truth.

6

The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will
touch on them only from a single point of view. In their combination of
excellences and defects they are good examples of that truth to nature
which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.

Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who takes
life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular. Othello, who calls
him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him much;
Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf. He has warm generous
feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a chivalrous
adoration for his peerless wife. But he is too easy-going. He finds it hard to
say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he has a very weak head,
and that the occasion is one on which he is bound to run no risk, he gets
drunk—not disgustingly so, but ludicrously so.[120] And, besides, he amuses
himself without any scruple by frequenting the company of a woman of
more than doubtful reputation, who has fallen in love with his good looks.
Moralising critics point out that he pays for the first offence by losing his
post, and for the second by nearly losing his life. They are quite entitled to
do so, though the careful reader will not forget Iago's part in these
transactions. But they ought also to point out that Cassio's looseness does
not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations with
Desdemona and Othello. He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we never
doubt that there was 'a daily beauty in his life,' or that his rapturous
admiration of Desdemona was as wholly beautiful a thing as it appears, or
that Othello was perfectly safe when in his courtship he employed Cassio to
'go between' Desdemona and himself. It is fortunately a fact in human
nature that these aspects of Cassio's character are quite compatible.
Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just because he is truthful in these
smaller things that in greater things we trust him absolutely never to pervert
the truth for the sake of some doctrine or purpose of his own.
There is something very lovable about Cassio, with his fresh eager feelings;
his distress at his disgrace and still more at having lost Othello's trust; his
hero-worship; and at the end his sorrow and pity, which are at first too acute
for words. He is carried in, wounded, on a chair. He looks at Othello and
cannot speak. His first words come later when, to Lodovico's question, 'Did
you and he consent in Cassio's death?' Othello answers 'Ay.' Then he falters
out, 'Dear General, I never gave you cause.' One is sure he had never used
that adjective before. The love in it makes it beautiful, but there is
something else in it, unknown to Cassio, which goes to one's heart. It tells
us that his hero is no longer unapproachably above him.

Few of Shakespeare's minor characters are more distinct than Emilia, and
towards few do our feelings change so much within the course of a play.
Till close to the end she frequently sets one's teeth on edge; and at the end
one is ready to worship her. She nowhere shows any sign of having a bad
heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor matters far from
scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite destitute of
imagination. She let Iago take the handkerchief though she knew how much
its loss would distress Desdemona; and she said nothing about it though she
saw that Othello was jealous. We rightly resent her unkindness in permitting
the theft, but—it is an important point—we are apt to misconstrue her
subsequent silence, because we know that Othello's jealousy was intimately
connected with the loss of the handkerchief. Emilia, however, certainly
failed to perceive this; for otherwise, when Othello's anger showed itself
violently and she was really distressed for her mistress, she could not have
failed to think of the handkerchief, and would, I believe, undoubtedly have
told the truth about it. But, in fact, she never thought of it, although she
guessed that Othello was being deceived by some scoundrel. Even after
Desdemona's death, nay, even when she knew that Iago had brought it
about, she still did not remember the handkerchief; and when Othello at last
mentions, as a proof of his wife's guilt, that he had seen the handkerchief in
Cassio's hand, the truth falls on Emilia like a thunder-bolt. 'O God!' she
bursts out, 'O heavenly God!'[121] Her stupidity in this matter is gross, but it
is stupidity and nothing worse.
But along with it goes a certain coarseness of nature. The contrast between
Emilia and Desdemona in their conversation about the infidelity of wives
(iv. iii.) is too famous to need a word,—unless it be a word of warning
against critics who take her light talk too seriously. But the contrast in the
preceding scene is hardly less remarkable. Othello, affecting to treat Emilia
as the keeper of a brothel, sends her away, bidding her shut the door behind
her; and then he proceeds to torture himself as well as Desdemona by
accusations of adultery. But, as a critic has pointed out, Emilia listens at the
door, for we find, as soon as Othello is gone and Iago has been summoned,
that she knows what Othello has said to Desdemona. And what could better
illustrate those defects of hers which make one wince, than her repeating
again and again in Desdemona's presence the word Desdemona could not
repeat; than her talking before Desdemona of Iago's suspicions regarding

Othello and herself; than her speaking to Desdemona of husbands who
strike their wives; than the expression of her honest indignation in the
words,

Has she forsook so many noble matches,
Her father and her country and her friends,
To be called whore?

If one were capable of laughing or even of smiling when this point in the
play is reached, the difference between Desdemona's anguish at the loss of
Othello's love, and Emilia's recollection of the noble matches she might
have secured, would be irresistibly ludicrous.
And yet how all this, and all her defects, vanish into nothingness when we
see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel! From the
moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her death she
is transfigured; and yet she remains perfectly true to herself, and we would
not have her one atom less herself. She is the only person who utters for us
the violent common emotions which we feel, together with those more
tragic emotions which she does not comprehend. She has done this once
already, to our great comfort. When she suggests that some villain has
poisoned Othello's mind, and Iago answers,

Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible;

and Desdemona answers,

If any such there be, Heaven pardon him;

Emilia's retort,

A halter pardon him, and Hell gnaw his bones,

says what we long to say, and helps us. And who has not felt in the last
scene how her glorious carelessness of her own life, and her outbursts
against Othello—even that most characteristic one,

She was too fond of her most filthy bargain—

lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us an
extraordinary lightening of the heart? Terror and pity are here too much to
bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not rage; and Emilia
lets us feel them and gives them words. She brings us too the relief of joy
and admiration,—a joy that is not lessened by her death. Why should she
live? If she lived for ever she never could soar a higher pitch, and nothing
in her life became her like the losing it.[122]

FOOTNOTES:
[107] It has been held, for example, that Othello treated Iago abominably in
preferring Cassio to him; that he did seduce Emilia; that he and Desdemona were
too familiar before marriage; and that in any case his fate was a moral judgment
on his sins, and Iago a righteous, if sharp, instrument of Providence.
[108] See iii. iii. 201, v. i. 89 f. The statements are his own, but he has no
particular reason for lying. One reason of his disgust at Cassio's appointment
was that Cassio was a Florentine (i. i. 20). When Cassio says (iii. i. 42) 'I never
knew a Florentine more kind and honest,' of course he means, not that Iago is a
Florentine, but that he could not be kinder and honester if he were one.
[109] I am here merely recording a general impression. There is no specific
evidence, unless we take Cassio's language in his drink (ii. ii. 105 f.) to imply
that Iago was not a 'man of quality' like himself. I do not know if it has been
observed that Iago uses more nautical phrases and metaphors than is at all usual
with Shakespeare's characters. This might naturally be explained by his roving
military life, but it is curious that almost all the examples occur in the earlier
scenes (see e.g. i. i. 30, 153, 157; i. ii. 17, 50; i. iii. 343; ii. iii. 65), so that the use
of these phrases and metaphors may not be characteristic of Iago but
symptomatic of a particular state of Shakespeare's mind.
[110] See further Note P.
[111] But it by no means follows that we are to believe his statement that there
was a report abroad about an intrigue between his wife and Othello (i. iii. 393),
or his statement (which may be divined from iv. ii. 145) that someone had
spoken to him on the subject.
[112] See, for instance, Aaron in Titus Andronicus, ii. iii.; Richard in 3 Henry
VI., iii. ii. and v. vi., and in Richard III., i. i. (twice), i. ii.; Edmund in King Lear,
i. ii. (twice), iii. iii. and v., v. i.

[113] See, further, Note Q.
[114] On the meaning which this phrase had for its author, Coleridge, see note
on p. 228.
[115] Coleridge's view is not materially different, though less complete. When
he speaks of 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity,' he does not mean by

the last two words that 'disinterested love of evil' or 'love of evil for evil's sake'
of which I spoke just now, and which other critics attribute to Iago. He means
really that Iago's malignity does not spring from the causes to which Iago
himself refers it, nor from any 'motive' in the sense of an idea present to
consciousness. But unfortunately his phrase suggests the theory which has been
criticised above. On the question whether there is such a thing as this supposed
pure malignity, the reader may refer to a discussion between Professor Bain and
F.H. Bradley in Mind, vol. viii.
[116] I.e. terrifying.
[117] Cf. note at end of lecture.
[118] It was suggested to me by a Glasgow student.
[119] A curious proof of Iago's inability to hold by his creed that absolute
egoism is the only proper attitude, and that loyalty and affection are mere
stupidity or want of spirit, may be found in his one moment of real passion,
where he rushes at Emilia with the cry, 'Villainous whore!' (v. ii. 229). There is
more than fury in his cry, there is indignation. She has been false to him, she has
betrayed him. Well, but why should she not, if his creed is true? And what a
melancholy exhibition of human inconsistency it is that he should use as terms
of reproach words which, according to him, should be quite neutral, if not
complimentary!
[120] Cassio's invective against drink may be compared with Hamlet's
expressions of disgust at his uncle's drunkenness. Possibly the subject may for
some reason have been prominent in Shakespeare's mind about this time.
[121] So the Quarto, and certainly rightly, though modern editors reprint the
feeble alteration of the Folio, due to fear of the Censor, 'O heaven! O heavenly
Powers!'
[122] The feelings evoked by Emilia are one of the causes which mitigate the
excess of tragic pain at the conclusion. Others are the downfall of Iago, and the
fact, already alluded to, that both Desdemona and Othello show themselves at
their noblest just before death.

LECTURE VII
KING LEAR

King Lear has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest
work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully his
multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas except
one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him best
would pronounce for keeping King Lear.
Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The
'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he
acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain
distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the least
successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a curious
fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate altered King
Lear for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting Edgar in the place
of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that time Shakespeare's
tragedy in its original form was never seen on the stage for a century and a
half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick acted it and Dr. Johnson
approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In 1823 Kean, 'stimulated by
Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's essays,' restored the original
tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready returned to Shakespeare's text
throughout.
What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of
Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and play-goer,
were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I venture to doubt
it. When I read King Lear two impressions are left on my mind, which seem
to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. King Lear seems to me
Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play.
And I find that I tend to consider it from two rather different points of view.
When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to me, though in certain parts
overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and
Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the

fullest revelation of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply
as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus
Vinctus and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of
Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.
This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the
affinities and the probable chronological position of King Lear. It is allied
with two tragedies, Othello and Timon of Athens; and these two tragedies
are utterly unlike.[123] Othello was probably composed about 1604, and
King Lear about 1605; and though there is a somewhat marked change in
style and versification, there are obvious resemblances between the two.
The most important have been touched on already: these are the most
painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those in which evil
appears in its coldest and most inhuman forms, and those which exclude the
supernatural from the action. But there is also in King Lear a good deal
which sounds like an echo of Othello,—a fact which should not surprise us,
since there are other instances where the matter of a play seems to go on
working in Shakespeare's mind and re-appears, generally in a weaker form,
in his next play. So, in King Lear, the conception of Edmund is not so fresh
as that of Goneril. Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund, though of
course essentially distinguished from Iago, often reminds us of him, and the
soliloquy, 'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in the very tone of
Iago's discourse on the sovereignty of the will. The gulling of Gloster,
again, recalls the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not carried out)
of making his father witness, without over-hearing, his conversation with
Edgar, reproduces the idea of the passage where Othello watches Iago and
Cassio talking about Bianca; and the conclusion of the temptation, where
Gloster says to Edmund:

and of my land,
Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means
To make thee capable,

reminds us of Othello's last words in the scene of temptation, 'Now art thou
my lieutenant.' This list might be extended; and the appearance of certain
unusual words and phrases in both the plays increases the likelihood that

the composition of the one followed at no great distance on that of the other.
[124]

When we turn from Othello to Timon of Athens we find a play of quite
another kind. Othello is dramatically the most perfect of the tragedies.
Timon, on the contrary, is weak, ill-constructed and confused; and, though
care might have made it clear, no mere care could make it really dramatic.
Yet it is undoubtedly Shakespearean in part, probably in great part; and it
immediately reminds us of King Lear. Both plays deal with the tragic
effects of ingratitude. In both the victim is exceptionally unsuspicious, soft-
hearted and vehement. In both he is completely overwhelmed, passing
through fury to madness in the one case, to suicide in the other. Famous
passages in both plays are curses. The misanthropy of Timon pours itself
out in a torrent of maledictions on the whole race of man; and these at once
recall, alike by their form and their substance, the most powerful speeches
uttered by Lear in his madness. In both plays occur repeated comparisons
between man and the beasts; the idea that 'the strain of man's bred out into
baboon,' wolf, tiger, fox; the idea that this bestial degradation will end in a
furious struggle of all with all, in which the race will perish. The
'pessimistic' strain in Timon suggests to many readers, even more
imperatively than King Lear, the notion that Shakespeare was giving vent to
some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of his hand
appear most unmistakably when the hero begins to pour the vials of his
wrath upon mankind. Timon, lastly, in some of the unquestionably
Shakespearean parts, bears (as it appears to me) so strong a resemblance to
King Lear in style and in versification that it is hard to understand how
competent judges can suppose that it belongs to a time at all near that of the
final romances, or even that it was written so late as the last Roman plays. It
is more likely to have been composed immediately after King Lear and
before Macbeth.[125]
Drawing these comparisons together, we may say that, while as a work of
art and in tragic power King Lear is infinitely nearer to Othello than to
Timon, in its spirit and substance its affinity with Timon is a good deal the
stronger. And, returning to the point from which these comparisons began, I
would now add that there is in King Lear a reflection or anticipation,
however faint, of the structural weakness of Timon. This weakness in King
Lear is not due, however, to anything intrinsically undramatic in the story,

but to characteristics which were necessary to an effect not wholly
dramatic. The stage is the test of strictly dramatic quality, and King Lear is
too huge for the stage. Of course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-
play. It has scenes immensely effective in the theatre; three of them—the
two between Lear and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and
the ineffably beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia—
lose in the theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the
gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in Much Ado.
But (not to speak of defects due to mere carelessness) that which makes the
peculiar greatness of King Lear,—the immense scope of the work; the mass
and variety of intense experience which it contains; the interpenetration of
sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour almost as moving as the
pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of nature and of human passion;
the vagueness of the scene where the action takes place, and of the
movements of the figures which cross this scene; the strange atmosphere,
cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter this scene, enfolding these
figures and magnifying their dim outlines like a winter mist; the half-
realised suggestions of vast universal powers working in the world of
individual fates and passions,—all this interferes with dramatic clearness
even when the play is read, and in the theatre not only refuses to reveal
itself fully through the senses but seems to be almost in contradiction with
their reports. This is not so with the other great tragedies. No doubt, as
Lamb declared, theatrical representation gives only a part of what we
imagine when we read them; but there is no conflict between the
representation and the imagination, because these tragedies are, in
essentials, perfectly dramatic. But King Lear, as a whole, is imperfectly
dramatic, and there is something in its very essence which is at war with the
senses, and demands a purely imaginative realisation. It is therefore
Shakespeare's greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the best of
his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely to the
extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its dramatic defects,
and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the peculiar effects to which
I have referred,—a failure which is natural because the appeal is made not
so much to dramatic perception as to a rarer and more strictly poetic kind of
imagination. For this reason, too, even the best attempts at exposition of
King Lear are disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose
the impalpable spirit of the Tempest.

I propose to develop some of these ideas by considering, first, the dramatic
defects of the play, and then some of the causes of its extraordinary
imaginative effect.

1

We may begin, however, by referring to two passages which have often
been criticised with injustice. The first is that where the blinded Gloster,
believing that he is going to leap down Dover cliff, does in fact fall flat on
the ground at his feet, and then is persuaded that he has leaped down Dover
cliff but has been miraculously preserved. Imagine this incident transferred
to Othello, and you realise how completely the two tragedies differ in
dramatic atmosphere. In Othello it would be a shocking or a ludicrous
dissonance, but it is in harmony with the spirit of King Lear. And not only
is this so, but, contrary to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least
absurd on the stage. The imagination and the feelings have been worked
upon with such effect by the description of the cliff, and by the portrayal of
the old man's despair and his son's courageous and loving wisdom, that we
are unconscious of the grotesqueness of the incident for common sense.
The second passage is more important, for it deals with the origin of the
whole conflict. The oft-repeated judgment that the first scene of King Lear
is absurdly improbable, and that no sane man would think of dividing his
kingdom among his daughters in proportion to the strength of their several
protestations of love, is much too harsh and is based upon a strange
misunderstanding. This scene acts effectively, and to imagination the story
is not at all incredible. It is merely strange, like so many of the stories on
which our romantic dramas are based. Shakespeare, besides, has done a
good deal to soften the improbability of the legend, and he has done much
more than the casual reader perceives. The very first words of the drama, as
Coleridge pointed out, tell us that the division of the kingdom is already
settled in all its details, so that only the public announcement of it remains.
[126]
Later we find that the lines of division have already been drawn on the
map of Britain (l. 38), and again that Cordelia's share, which is her dowry,
is perfectly well known to Burgundy, if not to France (ll. 197, 245). That
then which is censured as absurd, the dependence of the division on the
speeches of the daughters, was in Lear's intention a mere form, devised as a

childish scheme to gratify his love of absolute power and his hunger for
assurances of devotion. And this scheme is perfectly in character. We may
even say that the main cause of its failure was not that Goneril and Regan
were exceptionally hypocritical, but that Cordelia was exceptionally sincere
and unbending. And it is essential to observe that its failure, and the
consequent necessity of publicly reversing his whole well-known intention,
is one source of Lear's extreme anger. He loved Cordelia most and knew
that she loved him best, and the supreme moment to which he looked
forward was that in which she should outdo her sisters in expressions of
affection, and should be rewarded by that 'third' of the kingdom which was
the most 'opulent.' And then—so it naturally seemed to him—she put him to
open shame.
There is a further point, which seems to have escaped the attention of
Coleridge and others. Part of the absurdity of Lear's plan is taken to be his
idea of living with his three daughters in turn. But he never meant to do
this. He meant to live with Cordelia, and with her alone.[127] The scheme of
his alternate monthly stay with Goneril and Regan is forced on him at the
moment by what he thinks the undutifulness of his favourite child. In fact
his whole original plan, though foolish and rash, was not a 'hideous
rashness'[128] or incredible folly. If carried out it would have had no such
consequences as followed its alteration. It would probably have led quickly
to war,[129] but not to the agony which culminated in the storm upon the
heath. The first scene, therefore, is not absurd, though it must be
pronounced dramatically faulty in so far as it discloses the true position of
affairs only to an attention more alert than can be expected in a theatrical
audience or has been found in many critics of the play.
Let us turn next to two passages of another kind, the two which are mainly
responsible for the accusation of excessive painfulness, and so for the
distaste of many readers and the long theatrical eclipse of King Lear. The
first of these is much the less important; it is the scene of the blinding of
Gloster. The blinding of Gloster on the stage has been condemned almost
universally; and surely with justice, because the mere physical horror of
such a spectacle would in the theatre be a sensation so violent as to
overpower the purely tragic emotions, and therefore the spectacle would
seem revolting or shocking. But it is otherwise in reading. For mere

imagination the physical horror, though not lost, is so far deadened that it
can do its duty as a stimulus to pity, and to that appalled dismay at the
extremity of human cruelty which it is of the essence of the tragedy to
excite. Thus the blinding of Gloster belongs rightly to King Lear in its
proper world of imagination; it is a blot upon King Lear as a stage-play.
But what are we to say of the second and far more important passage, the
conclusion of the tragedy, the 'unhappy ending,' as it is called, though the
word 'unhappy' sounds almost ironical in its weakness? Is this too a blot
upon King Lear as a stage-play? The question is not so easily answered as
might appear. Doubtless we are right when we turn with disgust from Tate's
sentimental alterations, from his marriage of Edgar and Cordelia, and from
that cheap moral which every one of Shakespeare's tragedies contradicts,
'that Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.' But are we so sure that we are
right when we unreservedly condemn the feeling which prompted these
alterations, or at all events the feeling which beyond question comes
naturally to many readers of King Lear who would like Tate as little as we?
What they wish, though they have not always the courage to confess it even
to themselves, is that the deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster
should be followed by the escape of Lear and Cordelia from death, and that
we should be allowed to imagine the poor old King passing quietly in the
home of his beloved child to the end which cannot be far off. Now, I do not
dream of saying that we ought to wish this, so long as we regard King Lear
simply as a work of poetic imagination. But if King Lear is to be considered
strictly as a drama, or simply as we consider Othello, it is not so clear that
the wish is unjustified. In fact I will take my courage in both hands and say
boldly that I share it, and also that I believe Shakespeare would have ended
his play thus had he taken the subject in hand a few years later, in the days
of Cymbeline and the Winter's Tale. If I read King Lear simply as a drama, I
find that my feelings call for this 'happy ending.' I do not mean the human,
the philanthropic, feelings, but the dramatic sense. The former wish Hamlet
and Othello to escape their doom; the latter does not; but it does wish Lear
and Cordelia to be saved. Surely, it says, the tragic emotions have been
sufficiently stirred already. Surely the tragic outcome of Lear's error and his
daughters' ingratitude has been made clear enough and moving enough.
And, still more surely, such a tragic catastrophe as this should seem
inevitable. But this catastrophe, unlike those of all the other mature

tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even satisfactorily
motived.[130] In fact it seems expressly designed to fall suddenly like a bolt
from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. And although from a wider point
of view one may fully recognise the value of this effect, and may even
reject with horror the wish for a 'happy ending,' this wider point of view, I
must maintain, is not strictly dramatic or tragic.
Of course this is a heresy and all the best authority is against it. But then the
best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced unconsciously by disgust
at Tate's sentimentalism or unconsciously takes that wider point of view.
When Lamb—there is no higher authority—writes, 'A happy ending!—as if
the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings
alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous
thing for him,' I answer, first, that it is precisely this fair dismissal which we
desire for him instead of renewed anguish; and, secondly, that what we
desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not 'the childish
pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again,' not what Tate gives
him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him—peace and
happiness by Cordelia's fireside. And if I am told that he has suffered too
much for this, how can I possibly believe it with these words ringing in my
ears:

Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies?

And again when Schlegel declares that, if Lear were saved, 'the whole'
would 'lose its significance,' because it would no longer show us that the
belief in Providence 'requires a wider range than the dark pilgrimage on
earth to be established in its whole extent,' I answer that, if the drama does
show us that, it takes us beyond the strictly tragic point of view.[131]
A dramatic mistake in regard to the catastrophe, however, even supposing it
to exist, would not seriously affect the whole play. The principal structural
weakness of King Lear lies elsewhere. It is felt to some extent in the earlier

Acts, but still more (as from our study of Shakespeare's technique we have
learnt to expect) in the Fourth and the first part of the Fifth. And it arises
chiefly from the double action, which is a peculiarity of King Lear among
the tragedies. By the side of Lear, his daughters, Kent, and the Fool, who
are the principal figures in the main plot, stand Gloster and his two sons, the
chief persons of the secondary plot. Now by means of this double action
Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the
strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive. But the disadvantages
were dramatically greater. The number of essential characters is so large,
their actions and movements are so complicated, and events towards the
close crowd on one another so thickly, that the reader's attention,[132]
rapidly transferred from one centre of interest to another, is overstrained. He
becomes, if not intellectually confused, at least emotionally fatigued. The
battle, on which everything turns, scarcely affects him. The deaths of
Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster seem 'but trifles here'; and anything
short of the incomparable pathos of the close would leave him cold. There
is something almost ludicrous in the insignificance of this battle, when it is
compared with the corresponding battles in Julius Caesar and Macbeth; and
though there may have been further reasons for its insignificance, the main
one is simply that there was no room to give it its due effect among such a
host of competing interests.[133]
A comparison of the last two Acts of Othello with the last two Acts of King
Lear would show how unfavourable to dramatic clearness is a multiplicity
of figures. But that this multiplicity is not in itself a fatal obstacle is evident
from the last two Acts of Hamlet, and especially from the final scene. This
is in all respects one of Shakespeare's triumphs, yet the stage is crowded
with characters. Only they are not leading characters. The plot is single;
Hamlet and the King are the 'mighty opposites'; and Ophelia, the only other
person in whom we are obliged to take a vivid interest, has already
disappeared. It is therefore natural and right that the deaths of Laertes and
the Queen should affect us comparatively little. But in King Lear, because
the plot is double, we have present in the last scene no less than five
persons who are technically of the first importance—Lear, his three
daughters and Edmund; not to speak of Kent and Edgar, of whom the latter
at any rate is technically quite as important as Laertes. And again, owing to
the pressure of persons and events, and owing to the concentration of our

anxiety on Lear and Cordelia, the combat of Edgar and Edmund, which
occupies so considerable a space, fails to excite a tithe of the interest of the
fencing-match in Hamlet. The truth is that all through these Acts
Shakespeare has too vast a material to use with complete dramatic
effectiveness, however essential this very vastness was for effects of
another kind.
Added to these defects there are others, which suggest that in King Lear
Shakespeare was less concerned than usual with dramatic fitness:
improbabilities, inconsistencies, sayings and doings which suggest
questions only to be answered by conjecture. The improbabilities in King
Lear surely far surpass those of the other great tragedies in number and in
grossness. And they are particularly noticeable in the secondary plot. For
example, no sort of reason is given why Edgar, who lives in the same house
with Edmund, should write a letter to him instead of speaking; and this is a
letter absolutely damning to his character. Gloster was very foolish, but
surely not so foolish as to pass unnoticed this improbability; or, if so
foolish, what need for Edmund to forge a letter rather than a conversation,
especially as Gloster appears to be unacquainted with his son's
handwriting?[134] Is it in character that Edgar should be persuaded without
the slightest demur to avoid his father instead of confronting him and
asking him the cause of his anger? Why in the world should Gloster, when
expelled from his castle, wander painfully all the way to Dover simply in
order to destroy himself (iv. i. 80)? And is it not extraordinary that, after
Gloster's attempted suicide, Edgar should first talk to him in the language of
a gentleman, then to Oswald in his presence in broad peasant dialect, then
again to Gloster in gentle language, and yet that Gloster should not manifest
the least surprise?
Again, to take three instances of another kind; (a) only a fortnight seems to
have elapsed between the first scene and the breach with Goneril; yet
already there are rumours not only of war between Goneril and Regan but
of the coming of a French army; and this, Kent says, is perhaps connected
with the harshness of both the sisters to their father, although Regan has
apparently had no opportunity of showing any harshness till the day before.
(b) In the quarrel with Goneril Lear speaks of his having to dismiss fifty of
his followers at a clap, yet she has neither mentioned any number nor had
any opportunity of mentioning it off the stage. (c) Lear and Goneril,

intending to hurry to Regan, both send off messengers to her, and both tell
the messengers to bring back an answer. But it does not appear either how
the messengers could return or what answer could be required, as their
superiors are following them with the greatest speed.
Once more, (a) why does Edgar not reveal himself to his blind father, as he
truly says he ought to have done? The answer is left to mere conjecture. (b)
Why does Kent so carefully preserve his incognito till the last scene? He
says he does it for an important purpose, but what the purpose is we have to
guess. (c) Why Burgundy rather than France should have first choice of
Cordelia's hand is a question we cannot help asking, but there is no hint of
any answer.[135] (d) I have referred already to the strange obscurity
regarding Edmund's delay in trying to save his victims, and I will not
extend this list of examples. No one of such defects is surprising when
considered by itself, but their number is surely significant. Taken in
conjunction with other symptoms it means that Shakespeare, set upon the
dramatic effect of the great scenes and upon certain effects not wholly
dramatic, was exceptionally careless of probability, clearness and
consistency in smaller matters, introducing what was convenient or striking
for a momentary purpose without troubling himself about anything more
than the moment. In presence of these signs it seems doubtful whether his
failure to give information about the fate of the Fool was due to anything
more than carelessness or an impatient desire to reduce his overloaded
material.[136]
Before I turn to the other side of the subject I will refer to one more
characteristic of this play which is dramatically disadvantageous. In
Shakespeare's dramas, owing to the absence of scenery from the
Elizabethan stage, the question, so vexatious to editors, of the exact locality
of a particular scene is usually unimportant and often unanswerable; but, as
a rule, we know, broadly speaking, where the persons live and what their
journeys are. The text makes this plain, for example, almost throughout
Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth; and the imagination is therefore untroubled.
But in King Lear the indications are so scanty that the reader's mind is left
not seldom both vague and bewildered. Nothing enables us to imagine
whereabouts in Britain Lear's palace lies, or where the Duke of Albany
lives. In referring to the dividing-lines on the map, Lear tells us of shadowy
forests and plenteous rivers, but, unlike Hotspur and his companions, he

studiously avoids proper names. The Duke of Cornwall, we presume in the
absence of information, is likely to live in Cornwall; but we suddenly find,
from the introduction of a place-name which all readers take at first for a
surname, that he lives at Gloster (i. v. 1).[137] This seems likely to be also
the home of the Earl of Gloster, to whom Cornwall is patron. But no: it is a
night's journey from Cornwall's 'house' to Gloster's, and Gloster's is in the
middle of an uninhabited heath.[138] Here, for the purpose of the crisis,
nearly all the persons assemble, but they do so in a manner which no casual
spectator or reader could follow. Afterwards they all drift towards Dover for
the purpose of the catastrophe; but again the localities and movements are
unusually indefinite. And this indefiniteness is found in smaller matters.
One cannot help asking, for example, and yet one feels one had better not
ask, where that 'lodging' of Edmund's can be, in which he hides Edgar from
his father, and whether Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow
tree (in a district where 'for many miles about there's scarce a bush') to his
father's castle in order to soliloquise (ii. iii.):—for the favourite stage-
direction, 'a wood' (which is more than 'a bush'), however convenient to
imagination, is scarcely compatible with the presence of Kent asleep in the
stocks.[139] Something of the confusion which bewilders the reader's mind
in King Lear recurs in Antony and Cleopatra, the most faultily constructed
of all the tragedies; but there it is due not so much to the absence or
vagueness of the indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and
fatiguing journeys over thousands of miles. Shakespeare could not help
himself in the Roman play: in King Lear he did not choose to help himself,
perhaps deliberately chose to be vague.
From these defects, or from some of them, follows one result which must be
familiar to many readers of King Lear. It is far more difficult to retrace in
memory the steps of the action in this tragedy than in Hamlet, Othello, or
Macbeth. The outline is of course quite clear; anyone could write an
'argument' of the play. But when an attempt is made to fill in the detail, it
issues sooner or later in confusion even with readers whose dramatic
memory is unusually strong.[140]

2

How is it, now, that this defective drama so overpowers us that we are
either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant? As
soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that King Lear
possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its defects, but that
its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects of a wider kind. And,
looking for the sources of these effects, we find among them some of those
very things which appeared to us dramatically faulty or injurious. Thus, to
take at once two of the simplest examples of this, that very vagueness in the
sense of locality which we have just considered, and again that excess in the
bulk of the material and the number of figures, events and movements,
while they interfere with the clearness of vision, have at the same time a
positive value for imagination. They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling
not of a scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more
accurately, of a particular place which is also a world. This world is dim to
us, partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom; and
in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and
motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful pity,—sympathies
and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the
whole race. This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no
more look for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where
Prometheus was chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the
daughters of Ocean, or the place where Farinata stands erect in his glowing
tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in gran dispitto.'
Consider next the double action. It has certain strictly dramatic advantages,
and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic considerations. To go
no further, the secondary plot fills out a story which would by itself have
been somewhat thin, and it provides a most effective contrast between its
personages and those of the main plot, the tragic strength and stature of the
latter being heightened by comparison with the slighter build of the former.
But its chief value lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the
fact—in Shakespeare without a parallel—that the sub-plot simply repeats
the theme of the main story. Here, as there, we see an old man 'with a white
beard.' He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and self-willed.
He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for the wrong. He,
too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom he favours, and
is tortured and driven to death. This repetition does not simply double the

pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it startles and terrifies by
suggesting that the folly of Lear and the ingratitude of his daughters are no
accidents or merely individual aberrations, but that in that dark cold world
some fateful malignant influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers
against their children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the
earth with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the
father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the springs
of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the dull lust of
life.[141]
Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which haunts
us in King Lear, as though we were witnessing something universal,—a
conflict not so much of particular persons as of the powers of good and evil
in the world. And the treatment of many of the characters confirms this
feeling. Considered simply as psychological studies few of them, surely, are
of the highest interest. Fine and subtle touches could not be absent from a
work of Shakespeare's maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear
himself, no one of the characters strikes us as psychologically a wonderful
creation, like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be
somewhat faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite
natural to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we
observe a most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set
apart, the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even
violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side, Goneril,
Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters are in
various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but still in each
group there is a quality common to all the members, or one spirit breathing
through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted love, there hard self-
seeking. On both sides, further, the common quality takes an extreme form;
the love is incapable of being chilled by injury, the selfishness of being
softened by pity; and, it may be added, this tendency to extremes is found
again in the characters of Lear and Gloster, and is the main source of the
accusations of improbability directed against their conduct at certain points.
Hence the members of each group tend to appear, at least in part, as
varieties of one species; the radical differences of the two species are
emphasized in broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as

if Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two
ultimate forces of the universe.
The presence in King Lear of so large a number of characters in whom love
or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not merely inspire
in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir the intellect to wonder
and speculation. How can there be such men and women? we ask ourselves.
How comes it that humanity can take such absolutely opposite forms? And,
in particular, to what omission of elements which should be present in
human nature, or, if there is no omission, to what distortion of these
elements is it due that such beings as some of these come to exist? This is a
question which Iago (and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare's)
forces us to ask, but in King Lear it is provoked again and again. And more,
it seems to us that the author himself is asking this question. 'Then let them
anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
nature that makes these hard hearts?'—the strain of thought which appears
here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We seem to
trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and Caliban, the
tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to decompose human
nature into its constituent factors, and then to construct beings in whom one
or more of these factors is absent or atrophied or only incipient. This, of
course, is a tendency which produces symbols, allegories, personifications
of qualities and abstract ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite
foreign to Shakespeare's genius, which was in the highest degree concrete.
No doubt in the main we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to
that genius. The Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to
Shakespeare's mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;[142] and, while it
would be going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious
symbolism or allegory in King Lear, it does appear to disclose a mode of
imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must
remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in the
Fairy Queen.
This same tendency shows itself in King Lear in other forms. To it is due
the idea of monstrosity—of beings, actions, states of mind, which appear
not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea, which, of
course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with unusual
frequency in King Lear, for instance in the lines:

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!

or in the exclamation,

Filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to't?

It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as he
looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with dreadful
passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in horror:

Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame.
Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
A woman's shape doth shield thee.[143]

It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent's, as he listens to the
description of Cordelia's grief:

It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and mate could not beget
Such different issues.

(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over heredity,
and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two strains of
blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly different
products.)
This mode of thought is responsible, lastly, for a very striking characteristic
of King Lear—one in which it has no parallel except Timon—the incessant
references to the lower animals[144] and man's likeness to them. These
references are scattered broadcast through the whole play, as though

Shakespeare's mind were so busy with the subject that he could hardly write
a page without some allusion to it. The dog, the horse, the cow, the sheep,
the hog, the lion, the bear, the wolf, the fox, the monkey, the pole-cat, the
civet-cat, the pelican, the owl, the crow, the chough, the wren, the fly, the
butterfly, the rat, the mouse, the frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt, the water-
newt, the worm—I am sure I cannot have completed the list, and some of
them are mentioned again and again. Often, of course, and especially in the
talk of Edgar as the Bedlam, they have no symbolical meaning; but not
seldom, even in his talk, they are expressly referred to for their typical
qualities—'hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness,
lion in prey,' 'The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With a more riotous
appetite.' Sometimes a person in the drama is compared, openly or
implicitly, with one of them. Goneril is a kite: her ingratitude has a serpent's
tooth: she has struck her father most serpent-like upon the very heart: her
visage is wolvish: she has tied sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on
her father's breast: for her husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her
cruelty seems to have the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted:
they are tigers, not daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each
is covered with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and
heir of a mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white
with fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany, for
his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver'd: when Edgar as the Bedlam
first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we read, the
souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the bodies of these
mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust, deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty,
filthiness; miserable in their feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness,
blindness; and man, 'consider him well,' is even what they are. Shakespeare,
to whom the idea of the transmigration of souls was familiar and had once
been material for jest,[145] seems to have been brooding on humanity in the
light of it. It is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of
man's better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have
found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the dog
whom he so habitually maligns);[146] but he seems to have been asking
himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to some
strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower animal
souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found—to the
horror and confusion of the thinking mind—brains to forge, tongues to

speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive or
execute. He shows us in King Lear these terrible forces bursting into
monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who are
weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they are
human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the only
comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at least this
bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure: though stars and
gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet there must be an end
of this horrible world:

It will come;
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep.[147]

The influence of all this on imagination as we read King Lear is very great;
and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the form of
distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or universal
significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye. But the effect of
theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse. There the poetic atmosphere is
dissipated; the meaning of the very words which create it passes half-
realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye we conceive the characters
as mere particular men and women; and all that mass of vague suggestion,
if it enters the mind at all, appears in the shape of an allegory which we
immediately reject. A similar conflict between imagination and sense will
be found if we consider the dramatic centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-
scenes. The temptation of Othello and the scene of Duncan's murder may
lose upon the stage, but they do not lose their essence, and they gain as well
as lose. The Storm-scenes in King Lear gain nothing and their very essence
is destroyed. It is comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not
to drown the dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to
speak, and is wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is
it simply that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, 'an old man
tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,' disturbs and depresses that
sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination. There is a
further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in these words of
Lamb's: 'the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are
storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all

its vast riches.' Yes, 'they are storms.' For imagination, that is to say, the
explosions of Lear's passion, and the bursts of rain and thunder, are not,
what for the senses they must be, two things, but manifestations of one
thing. It is the powers of the tormented soul that we hear and see in the
'groans of roaring wind and rain' and the 'sheets of fire'; and they that, at
intervals almost more overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence.
Nor yet is even this all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger
made us see humanity 'reeling back into the beast' and ravening against
itself, so in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same
horrible passions; the 'common mother,'

Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast
Teems and feeds all,

turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon
themselves. Surely something not less, but much more, than these helpless
words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes; and if,
translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused and
inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and such poetry as
cannot be transferred to the space behind the foot-lights, but has its being
only in imagination. Here then is Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not
the mere dramatist Shakespeare.[148]
And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found
questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view. Its purpose is not
merely dramatic. This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems so far
from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for the victims
of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have expected in a
world so wild and monstrous. It is as if Shakespeare said to us: 'Did you
think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were you beginning
to dream that? I will show you it is not so.'
I come to a last point. As we contemplate this world, the question presses
on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that excites this
gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and overrules them?
And in King Lear this question is not left to us to ask, it is raised by the
characters themselves. References to religious or irreligious beliefs and
feelings are more frequent than is usual in Shakespeare's tragedies, as
frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He introduces characteristic
differences in the language of the different persons about fortune or the
stars or the gods, and shows how the question What rules the world? is
forced upon their minds. They answer it in their turn: Kent, for instance:

It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our condition:

Edmund: