Part 22 (2/2)

If, again, the question were put to us, which of Shakespeare's characters reveals most of his personality, the ive an ansould answer 'Hamlet' This impression may be fanciful, but it is difficult to think it wholly so, and, speaking for those who share it, I will try to trace soood deal of Shakespeare that is not in Hamlet But Hamlet, we think, is the only character in Shakespeare who could possibly have coh it appears unlikely, from his verses to Ophelia, that he could have written the best songs) Into Hamlet's mouth are put what are evidently Shakespeare's own views on drareat serious characters, can be called a humorist When in some trait of another character we seem to touch Shakespeare's personality, we are frequently reminded of Hamlet[41]

When in a profound reflective speech we hear Shakespeare's voice, we usually hear Hamlet's too, and his peculiar humour and turns of phrase appear unexpectedly in persons otherwise unlike hiroup of Sonnets (71-74) recalls Hamlet at once, here and there recalls even his words; and he and the writer of Sonnet 66 both recount in a list the ills thatfor death

And then Hamlet 'was indeed honest and of an open and free nature'; sweet-tempered and modest, yet not slow to resent calumny or injury; of a serious but not a melancholy disposition; and the lover of his friend

And, with these traits, we relory of earth and sky and the er affectionate response to everything noble or sweet in human nature; his tendency to dream and to live in the world of his own mind; his liability to sudden vehe effect of disillusionment upon him; his sadness, fierceness, bitterness and cynicism All this, andto answer to it, and his anguish over his strange delay; the conviction gathering in his tortured soul that man's purposes and failures are divinely shaped to ends beyond his vision; his incessant meditation, and his sense that there are mysteries which no meditation can fathom; nay, even little traits like his recourse toon the one hand that the peasant should not tread on the courtier's heels, and on the other that the mere courtier is spacious in the possession of dirt--all this, I say, corresponds with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of characteristic traits in Shakespeare, probably here and there a good deal heightened, and led with others not characteristic of Shakespeare at all And if this is more than fancy, itcharacter, and the inative literature What else should he be, if the world's greatest poet, as able to give almost the reality of nature to creations totally unlike hiht into this creation, and when he wrote Hamlet's speeches wrote down his own heart?[42]

1904

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who in _At the Merined that neither his oork nor Shakespeare's betrayed anything of the inner uments, we must say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have to choose between a self-revelation like Byron's and no self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house

[2] Almost all Shakespearean criticis on our subject; but I have a practical reason forin particular Mr Frank Harris's articles in the _Saturday Review_ for 1898 A good many of Mr Harris's views I cannot share, and I had arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except so his papers But I found in them also valuable ideas which were quite new to reat pity that the articles are not collected and published in a book [Mr Harris has published, in _The Man Shakespeare_, the substance of the articles, and alsofor an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer

[4] It was said of hily parts in sport (_ie_ on the stage), he would have been a co

[5] Nor, _vice versa_, does the possession of these latter qualities at all imply, as soentleness

[6] Fullerdown a tradition, but it is not safe to assume this His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and Jonson, in their wit coalleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses

[7] See, for example, Act IV Sc v, to which I know no parallel in the later tragedies

[8] I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr Beeching's note on which seeht: 'There is no reference to the poet's profession of player The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of society' This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend, though there are _also_ references to his profession and its effect on his nature and his reputation (By a slip Mr Beeching lect last for three years)

[9] It is perhapsof the shock and the effects of _disillusionment_ in open natures that we seem to feel Shakespeare's personality The nature of this shock is expressed in Henry's words to Lord Scroop:

I eep for thee; For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like Another fall ofof this semi-reality, of course, in the _passion_ of love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as Orlando, Othello, Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles that of Romeo for Juliet What I have said of Roe's view; and, without subscribing to all of Coleridge's re an intentional contrast between this feeling and the passion that displaces it (though it does not follow that the feeling would not have becoenuine passion if Rosaline had been kind) Nor do I understand the notion that Coleridge's view is refuted and even rendered ridiculous by the mere fact that Shakespeare found the Rosaline story in Brooke (Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines_, 7th ed, illustrative note 2) Was he compelled then to use whatever he found?

Was it his practice to do so? The question is always _why_ he used what he found, and _how_ Coleridge's view of this matter, it need hardly be said, is far froe of Shakespeare's mind and not of his material alone I may add, as I have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare es in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assue, who read Steevens, was unaware of Shakespeare's use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a 'wretched poetaster'

[11] _Hamlet_, _Measure for Measure_, _Othello_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Tiedy_, pp 79-85, 275-6 I should like to insist on the view there taken that the tragedies subsequent to _Lear_ and _Tis

[12] It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare's; but I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them

[13] That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in the _Passionate Pilgrim_ But I see no difficulty in that What bears little fruit in a normal condition of spirits eely by other causes

[14] _The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes_ Ginn & Co, 1904

[15] I find that Mr Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations

[16] I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been written by 1598

[17] A fact to be reard to references to the social position of the friend