If we consider the tragedies first on the side of their substance, we find at once an obvious difference between the first two and the remainder.  Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit.  Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense.  Each, being also a ‘good’ man, shows accordingly, when placed in critical circumstances, a sensitive and almost painful anxiety to do right.  And though they fail—­of course in quite different ways—­to deal successfully with these circumstances, the failure in each case is connected rather with their intellectual nature and reflective habit than with any yielding to passion.  Hence the name ‘tragedy of thought,’ which Schlegel gave to Hamlet, may be given also, as in effect it has been by Professor Dowden, to Julius Caesar.  The later heroes, on the other hand, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus, have, one and all, passionate natures, and, speaking roughly, we may attribute the tragic failure in each of these cases to passion.  Partly for this reason, the later plays are wilder and stormier than the first two.  We see a greater mass of human nature in commotion, and we see Shakespeare’s own powers exhibited on a larger scale.  Finally, examination would show that, in all these respects, the first tragedy, Julius Caesar, is further removed from the later type than is the second, Hamlet.

These two earlier works are both distinguished from most of the succeeding tragedies in another though a kindred respect.  Moral evil is not so intently scrutinised or so fully displayed in them.  In Julius Caesar, we may almost say, everybody means well.  In Hamlet, though we have a villain, he is a small one.  The murder which gives rise to the action lies outside the play, and the centre of attention within the play lies in the hero’s efforts to do his duty.  It seems clear that Shakespeare’s interest, since the early days when under Marlowe’s influence he wrote Richard III., has not been directed to the more extreme or terrible forms of evil.  But in the tragedies that follow Hamlet the presence of this interest is equally clear.  In Iago, in the ‘bad’ people of King Lear, even in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, human nature assumes shapes which inspire not mere sadness or repulsion but horror and dismay.  If in Timon no monstrous cruelty is done, we still watch ingratitude and selfishness so blank that they provoke a loathing we never felt for Claudius; and in this play and King Lear we can fancy that we hear at times the saeva indignatio, if not the despair, of Swift.  This prevalence of abnormal or appalling forms of evil, side by side with vehement passion, is another reason why the convulsion depicted in these tragedies seems to come from a deeper source, and to be vaster in extent, than the conflict in the two earlier plays.  And here again Julius Caesar is further removed than Hamlet from Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.