conclusions from within, through character, rather than through external chances.  This is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero.  This is so, in a special sense, in Hamlet, the subtlest of all Shakspere’s plays, and, if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds.  It is observable that in Shakspere’s comedies there is no one central figure, but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the attention upon a single character.  This difference is seen even in the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their titles from their heroes, the comedies never.

Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned were the three Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Anthony and Cleopatra.  It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the plot of none of his plays, but took material that he found at hand.  In these Roman tragedies he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist.  It is most instructive to compare Julius Caesar with Ben Jonson’s Catiline and Sejanus.  Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text.  In Catiline he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero’s first oration against Catiline. Sejanus is a mosaic of passages from Tacitus and Suetonius.  There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere’s play.  Having grasped the conceptions of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere’s own. Timon of Athens is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere’s undoubted tragedies, and Troilus and Cressida, said Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize.  The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them.  Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction.  In losing their ideal remoteness the heroes of the Iliad lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment.