Pope and Johnson appear strangely to contradict each other, when the first says, “all the characters of Shakespeare are individuals,” and the second, “they are species.”  And yet perhaps these opinions may admit of reconciliation.  Pope’s expression is unquestionably the more correct.  A character which should be merely a personification of a naked general idea could neither exhibit any great depth nor any great variety.  The names of genera and species are well known to be merely auxiliaries for the understanding, that we may embrace the infinite variety of nature in a certain order.  The characters which Shakespeare has so thoroughly delineated have undoubtedly a number of individual peculiarities, but at the same time they possess a significance which is not applicable to them alone:  they generally supply materials for a profound theory of their most prominent and distinguishing property.  But even with the above correction, this opinion must still have its limitations.  Characterization is merely one ingredient of the dramatic art, and not dramatic poetry itself.  It would be improper in the extreme, if the poet were to draw our attention to superfluous traits of character at a time when it ought to be his endeavor to produce other impressions.  Whenever the musical or the fanciful preponderates, the characteristical necessarily falls into the background.  Hence many of the figures of Shakespeare exhibit merely external designations, determined by the place which they occupy in the whole:  they are like secondary persons in a public procession, to whose physiognomy we seldom pay much attention; their only importance is derived from the solemnity of their dress and the duty in which they are engaged.  Shakespeare’s messengers, for instance, are for the most part mere messengers, and yet not common, but poetical messengers:  the message which they have to bring is the soul which suggests to them their language.  Other voices, too, are merely raised to pour forth these as melodious lamentations or rejoicings, or to dwell in reflection on what has taken place; and in a serious drama without chorus this must always be more or less the case, if we would not have it prosaic.

If Shakespeare deserves our admiration for his characters, he is equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this word in its widest signification, as including every mental condition, every tone, from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage and despair.  He gives us the history of minds; he lays open to us, in a single word, a whole series of their anterior states.  His passions do not stand at the same height, from first to last, as is the case with so many tragic poets, who, in the language of Lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of love.  He paints, with inimitable veracity, the gradual advance from the first origin; “he gives,” as Lessing says, “a living picture of all the slight and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible