Shakespeare’s tragedies fall into two distinct groups, and these groups are separated by a considerable interval.  He wrote tragedy—­pure, like Romeo and Juliet; historical, like Richard III.—­in the early years of his career of authorship, when he was also writing such comedies as Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Midsummer-Night’s Dream.  Then came a time, lasting some half-dozen years, during which he composed the most mature and humorous of his English History plays (the plays with Falstaff in them), and the best of his romantic comedies (the plays with Beatrice and Jaques and Viola in them).  There are no tragedies belonging to these half-dozen years, nor any dramas approaching tragedy.  But now, from about 1601 to about 1608, comes tragedy after tragedy—­Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus; and their companions are plays which cannot indeed be called tragedies, but certainly are not comedies in the same sense as As You Like It or the Tempest.  These seven years, accordingly, might, without much risk of misunderstanding, be called Shakespeare’s tragic period.[26] And after it he wrote no more tragedies, but chiefly romances more serious and less sunny than As You Like It, but not much less serene.

The existence of this distinct tragic period, of a time when the dramatist seems to have been occupied almost exclusively with deep and painful problems, has naturally helped to suggest the idea that the ‘man’ also, in these years of middle age, from thirty-seven to forty-four, was heavily burdened in spirit; that Shakespeare turned to tragedy not merely for change, or because he felt it to be the greatest form of drama and felt himself equal to it, but also because the world had come to look dark and terrible to him; and even that the railings of Thersites and the maledictions of Timon express his own contempt and hatred for mankind.  Discussion of this large and difficult subject, however, is not necessary to the dramatic appreciation of any of his works, and I shall say nothing of it here, but shall pass on at once to draw attention to certain stages and changes which may be observed within the tragic period.  For this purpose too it is needless to raise any question as to the respective chronological positions of Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.  What is important is also generally admitted:  that Julius Caesar and Hamlet precede these plays, and that Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus follow them.[27]