In Hamlet this is mingled with the impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances:  it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amid feigned gayety and extravagance.  In Lear, it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon, it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy.”

These words certainly carry much weight, and may go far to warrant the belief of the writers, that the Poet was smitten with some rude shock of fortune which untuned the melody of his soul, and wrenched his mind from its once smooth and happy course, causing it to recoil upon itself and brood over its own thoughts.  Yet there are considerable difficulties besetting a theory of this kind.  For, in some other plays referred by these critics to the same period, there is so much of the Poet’s gayest and happiest workmanship as must greatly embarrass if not quite upset such a theory.  But, whatever may have caused the peculiar tone and the cast of thought in the forenamed plays, it is pretty certain that the darkness was not permanent; the clear azure, soft sunshine, and serene sweetness of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale being unquestionably of a later date.  And, surely, in the life of so earnest and thoughtful a man as Shakespeare, there might well be, nay, there must have been, times when, without any special woundings or bruisings of fortune, his mind got fascinated by the appalling mystery of evil that haunts our fallen nature.

That such darker hours, however occasioned, were more frequent at one period of the Poet’s life than at others, is indeed probable.  And it was equally natural that their coming should sometimes engage him in heart-tugging and brain-sweating efforts to scrutinize the inscrutable workings of human guilt, and thus stamp itself strongly upon the offspring of his mind.  Thus, without any other than the ordinary progress of thoughtful spirits, we should naturally have a middle period, when the early enthusiasm of hope had passed away, and before the deeper, calmer, but not less cheerful tranquillity of resignation had set in.  For so it is apt to be in this life of ours:  the angry barkings of fortune, or what seem such, have their turn with us; “the fretful fever and the stir unprofitable” work our souls full of discord and perturbation; but after a while these things pass away, and are followed by a more placid and genial time; the experienced insufficiency of man for himself having charmed our wrestlings of thought into repose, and our spirits having undergone the chastening and subduing power of life’s sterner discipline.