Parts of King Henry the Sixth, though we have, especially in the latter, considerable skill in individual character,—­far more than in any English plays preceding them,—­there is certainly very little, perhaps nothing, that can be rightly termed dramatic composition.  In several, again, as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and King John, we have but the beginnings and first stages of it.  But in various others, as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Henry the Fourth, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, it is found, if not in entire perfection, at least so nearly perfect, that there has yet been no criticism competent to point out the defect.

All which makes a full and conclusive answer to the charge of irregularity which has been so often brought against the Poet.  To be regular, in the right sense of the term, he did not need to follow the rules which others had followed before him:  he was just as right in differing from them as they were in differing from him:  in other words, he stands as an original, independent, authoritative legislator in the province of Art; or, as Gervinus puts it, “he holds the place of the revealing genius of the laws of Art in the Modern Drama”; so that it is sheer ignorance, or something worse, to insist on trying him by the laws of the ancient Tragedy.  It is on this ground that Coleridge makes the pregnant remark,—­“No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this.  As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius,—­the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.”  So that I may fitly close this branch of the subject by applying to Shakespeare a very noteworthy saying of Burke’s, the argument of which holds no less true of the law-making prerogative in Art than in the State:  “Legislators have no other rules to bind them but the great principles of reason and equity, and the general sense of mankind.  These they are bound to obey and follow; and rather to enlarge and enlighten law by the liberality of legislative reason, than to fetter and bind their higher capacity by the narrow constructions of subordinate, artificial justice."[15]

[15] Aristotle himself was very far from setting up the form and extent of the drama of his day as a rule for all time.  He declared that, “as regards the natural limit of the action, the more extended will always be the more beautiful, so long as it is easily surveyed.”  Shakespeare’s practice is strictly correspondent to this rule.  But with this rule in mind, he went to the very verge of these limits.  He chose his matter as rich and full as possible; he extended its form according to its requirements, but no further:  it will not be found, in any of his dramas, that the thought is exhausted before the end; that there is any superfluous extension of the form, or any needless abundance of the matter.