[Footnote 17:  This word throughout the lecture bears the sense it has here, which, of course, is not its usual dramatic sense.]

[Footnote 18:  In the same way a comedy will consist of three parts, showing the ‘situation,’ the ‘complication’ or ‘entanglement,’ and the denouement or ‘solution.’]

[Footnote 19:  It is possible, of course, to open the tragedy with the conflict already begun, but Shakespeare never does so.]

[Footnote 20:  When the subject comes from English history, and especially when the play forms one of a series, some knowledge may be assumed.  So in Richard III. Even in Richard II. not a little knowledge seems to be assumed, and this fact points to the existence of a popular play on the earlier part of Richard’s reign.  Such a play exists, though it is not clear that it is a genuine Elizabethan work.  See the Jahrbuch d. deutschen Sh.-gesellschaft for 1899.]

[Footnote 21:  This is one of several reasons why many people enjoy reading him, who, on the whole, dislike reading plays.  A main cause of this very general dislike is that the reader has not a lively enough imagination to carry him with pleasure through the exposition, though in the theatre, where his imagination is helped, he would experience little difficulty.]

[Footnote 22:  The end of Richard III. is perhaps an exception.]

[Footnote 23:  I do not discuss the general question of the justification of soliloquy, for it concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all dramatists down to quite recent times.  I will only remark that neither soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that they are ‘unnatural.’  No dramatic language is ‘natural’; all dramatic language is idealised.  So that the question as to soliloquy must be one as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of advantages and disadvantages. (Since this lecture was written I have read some remarks on Shakespeare’s soliloquies to much the same effect by E. Kilian in the Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft for 1903.)]

[Footnote 24:  If by this we mean that these characters all speak what is recognisably Shakespeare’s style, of course it is true; but it is no accusation.  Nor does it follow that they all speak alike; and in fact they are far from doing so.]

LECTURE III

SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGIC PERIOD—­HAMLET

1

Before we come to-day to Hamlet, the first of our four tragedies, a few remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare’s literary career.  But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our restricted purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be stating widely accepted results of investigation, without going into the evidence on which they rest.[25]