“He has loved and been loved.  It was he whom Sylvia, Hermia, Titania, Portia, Juliet, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, and Olivia loved,—­and Ophelia, Desdemona, Hermione and Miranda.”

    [21.  Chr.  Collin, Christiania. 1914.  H. Aschehoug & Co.]

In the second chapter Collin argues, as he had done in his essay on Hamlet[22] that Shakespeare’s great tragedies voice no pessimism, but the stern purpose to strengthen himself and his contemporaries against the evils and vices of Jacobean England—­that period of moral and intellectual disintegration which followed the intense life of the Elizabethan age.  Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against the forces of ruin and decay.  “To hold the mirror up to nature,” that men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the social body.  And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun moralizing.  He warns against sensual excess in Adam’s speech in As You Like It, II, 3: 

      Let me be your servant;
  Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty;
  For in my youth I never did apply
  Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood;
  Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
  The means of weakness and debility;

    [22.  See pp. 71 ff. below.]

Or, compare the violent outburst against drunkenness in Hamlet Act 1, Sc. 4, and the stern warning against the same vice in Othello, where, indeed, Cassius’ weakness for strong drink is the immediate occasion of the tragic complication.  In like manner, Shakespeare moralizes against lawless love in the Merry Wives, in Troilus and Cressida, in Hamlet, in Lear.

On the other hand, Shakespeare never allows artistic scruples to stand in the way of exalting simple, domestic virtues.  Simple conjugal fidelity is one of the glories of Hamlet’s illustrious father and of the stern, old Roman, Coriolanus; the young prince, Malcolm, is as chaste and innocent as the young barbarians of whom Tacitus tells.

In a final section, Collin connects this view of Hamlet which he has developed in his essay on Hamlet and the Sonnets, with the theory of human civilization which his book so suggestively advances.

The great tragedies from Hamlet to Timon of Athens are not autobiographical in the sense that they are reflections of Shakespeare’s own concrete experience.  They are not the record of a bitter personal pessimism.  In the years when they were written Shakespeare was contented and prosperous.  He restored the fortunes of his family and he was hailed as a master of English without a peer.  It is therefore a priori quite unlikely that the tragic atmosphere of this period should go back to purely personal disappointments.  The case is more likely this:  Shakespeare had grown in power of sympathy with his fellows and his time.  He had become sensitive to the needs and sorrows of the society about him.  He could put himself in the place of those who are sick in mind and heart.  And in consequence of this he could preach to this generation the simple gospel of right living and show to them the psychic weakness whence comes all human sorrow.