He is their mouth-piece, not they his:  what they say is never Shakespeare ventriloquizing, but is to all intents and purposes their own.  With the right or wrong, the honour or shame, of their actions, he has nothing to do:  that they are so, and act so, is their concern, not his; and his business is, not to reform nor deprave, not to censure nor approve them, but simply to tell the truth about them.  And so, because he would not serve as the advocate of any, therefore he was able to stand as the representative of all; which is indeed his characteristic office.

Most of the many faultings of Shakespeare’s workmanship on the score of taste are easily disposed of from this point.  As a general thing, the blame laid upon him in this behalf belongs only to his persons, and as regards him the matter of it should rather be a theme of praise.  Take, for example, the gross images and foul language used by Leontes when the rage of jealousy is on him:  the matter is offensive enough certainly in itself, but it is the proper outcome of the man’s character in that state of mind; that is, it is a part, and an essential part, of the truth concerning him:  as the passion turns him into a brute, so he is rightly made, or rather allowed to speak a brutal dialect; and the bad taste is his, not the Poet’s.  That jealousy, such as that of Leontes, naturally subverts a man’s understanding and manners, turns his sense, his taste, his decency all out of doors, and causes him to gloat over loathsome thoughts and fancies,—­this is among the things of human nature which it would be a sin to omit in a delineation of that passion.

And so of the many absurdities and follies and obscenities which Shakespeare puts into the mouths of certain persons:  for the most part, they have an ample justification in that they are characteristic of the speakers; if not beauties of art, they often have a higher beauty than art, as truths of nature; and the Poet is no more to be blamed for them than an honest reporter is for the bad taste of a speaker reported.  In like sort, we have Milton’s Satan satanizing thus: 

    “The mind is its own place, and of itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

I have often heard people quote this approvingly, as if they thought the better of Satan for thus declaring himself independent of God.  But those words coming from Satan are a high stroke of dramatic fitness; and when people quote them with approval, this may be an argument of intellectual impiety in them, but not of Milton’s agreement with them in opinion.

But do you say that Shakespeare should not have undertaken to represent any but persons of refined taste and decorous speech?  That were to cut the Drama off from its proper freehold in the truth of human character, and also from some of its fruitfullest sources of instruction and wisdom:  so, its office were quite another thing than “holding the mirror up to Nature.”  Not indeed but that Shakespeare