These plays, whatever names they bear, take place in the true land of romance and in the very century of wonderful love stories.  He knew well that in the forest of Ardennes there were neither the lions and serpents of the torrid zone, nor the shepherdesses of Arcadia; but he transferred both to it,[22] because the design and import of his picture required them.  Here he considered himself entitled to take the greatest liberties.  He had not to do with a hair-splitting, hypercritical age like ours, which is always seeking in poetry for something else than poetry; his audience entered the theatre, not to learn true chronology, geography, and natural history, but to witness a vivid exhibition.  I will undertake to prove that Shakespeare’s anachronisms are, for the most part, committed of set purpose and deliberately.  It was frequently of importance to him to move the exhibited subjects out of the background of time and bring it quite near us.  Hence in Hamlet, though avowedly an old Northern story, there runs a tone of modish society, and in every respect the customs of the most recent period.  Without those circumstantialities it would not have been allowable to make a philosophical inquirer of Hamlet, on which trait, however, the meaning of the whole is made to rest.  On that account he mentions his education at a university, though, in the age of the true Hamlet of history, universities were not in existence.  He makes him study at Wittenberg, and no selection of a place could have been more suitable.  The name was very popular:  the story of Dr. Faustus of Wittenberg had made it well known; it was of particular celebrity in Protestant England, as Luther had taught and written there shortly before, and the very name must have immediately suggested the idea of freedom in thinking.  I cannot even consider it an anachronism that Richard the Third should speak of Machiavelli.  The word is here used altogether proverbially the contents, at least, of the book entitled Of the Prince (Del Principe) have been in existence ever since the existence of tyrants; Machiavelli was merely the first to commit them to writing.

That Shakespeare has accurately hit the essential custom, namely, the spirit of ages and nations, is at least acknowledged generally by the English critics; but many sins against external costume may be easily remarked.  Yet here it is necessary to bear in mind that the Roman pieces were acted upon the stage of that day in the European dress.  This was, it is true, still grand and splendid, not so silly and tasteless as it became toward the end of the seventeenth century.  (Brutus and Cassius appeared in the Spanish cloak; they wore, quite contrary to the Roman custom, the sword by their side in time of peace, and, according to the testimony of an eye witness,[23] it was, in the dialogue where Brutus stimulates Cassius to the conspiracy, drawn, as if involuntarily, half out of the sheath).  This does in no way agree with our way of thinking:  we are not content without the toga.