Here one might think the Poet must have lapsed a little from the character in making the Boy talk such a high and solid strain of intelligence:  but it is not so; the Boy talks strictly in character.  The intellect he shows is all truly his own too, but not his own in that space of time.  He has indeed a shrewd, quick eye, and knows a thing or two; still he could not, unaided and alone, deliver so much intellect in a whole month as he here lets off in this brief speech.  Shakespeare just inspires the youngster, and the effect of that inspiration is to make him so much the more himself.

But the process of the thing involves, moreover, a sort of double consciousness, which probably cannot be altogether explained.  The Poet had a strange faculty, or at least had it in a strange degree, of being truly himself and truly another at one and the same time.  For he does not mould a character from the outside, but is truly inside of it, nay, is the character for the time being, and yet all the while he continues just as much Shakespeare as if he were nothing else.  His own proper consciousness, and the consciousness of the person he is representing, both of these are everywhere apparent in his characterization; both of them working together too, though in a manner which no psychology has been able to solve.  In other words, Shakespeare is perfectly in his persons and perfectly out of them at the same time; has his consciousness and theirs thoroughly identified, yet altogether distinct; so that they get all the benefit of his intellect without catching the least tinge of his personality.  There is the mystery of it.  And the wonder on this point is greatly enhanced in his delineations of mental disease.  For his consciousness takes on, so to speak, or passes into, the most abnormal states without any displacement or suspension of its normal propriety.  Accordingly he explores and delivers the morbid and insane consciousness with no less truth to the life than the healthy and sound; as if in both cases alike he were inside and outside the persons at the same time.  With what unexceptional mastery in Nature’s hidden processes he does this, must be left till I come to the analysis of particular instances.

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It is to be noted further that Shakespeare’s characters, generally, are not exhibited in any one fixed state or cast of formation.  There is a certain vital limberness and ductility in them, so that upon their essential identity more or less of mutation is ever supervening.  They grow on and unfold themselves under our eye:  we see them in course of development, in the act and process of becoming; undergoing marked changes, passing through divers stages, animated by mixed and various motives and impulses, passion alternating with passion, purpose with purpose, train of thought with train of thought; so that they often end greatly modified from what they were at the beginning; the same, and yet another.  Thus they have to our minds a past and a future as well as a present; and even in what we see of them at any given moment there is involved something both of history and of prophecy.