If we turn now from the substance of the tragedies to their style and versification, we find on the whole a corresponding difference between the earlier and the later.  The usual assignment of Julius Caesar, and even of Hamlet, to the end of Shakespeare’s Second Period—­the period of Henry V.—­is based mainly, we saw, on considerations of form.  The general style of the serious parts of the last plays from English history is one of full, noble and comparatively equable eloquence.  The ‘honey-tongued’ sweetness and beauty of Shakespeare’s early writing, as seen in Romeo and Juliet or the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, remain; the ease and lucidity remain; but there is an accession of force and weight.  We find no great change from this style when we come to Julius Caesar,[28] which may be taken to mark its culmination.  At this point in Shakespeare’s literary development he reaches, if the phrase may be pardoned, a limited perfection.  Neither thought on the one side, nor expression on the other, seems to have any tendency to outrun or contend with its fellow.  We receive an impression of easy mastery and complete harmony, but not so strong an impression of inner power bursting into outer life.  Shakespeare’s style is perhaps nowhere else so free from defects, and yet almost every one of his subsequent plays contains writing which is greater.  To speak familiarly, we feel in Julius Caesar that, although not even Shakespeare could better the style he has chosen, he has not let himself go.

In reading Hamlet we have no such feeling, and in many parts (for there is in the writing of Hamlet an unusual variety[29]) we are conscious of a decided change.  The style in these parts is more rapid and vehement, less equable and less simple; and there is a change of the same kind in the versification.  But on the whole the type is the same as in Julius Caesar, and the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly more marked than the difference.  If Hamlet’s soliloquies, considered simply as compositions, show a great change from Jaques’s speech, ’All the world’s a stage,’ and even from the soliloquies of Brutus, yet Hamlet (for instance in the hero’s interview with his mother) is like Julius Caesar, and unlike the later tragedies, in the fulness of its eloquence, and passages like the following belong quite definitely to the style of the Second Period: 

Mar. It faded on the crowing of the cock.  Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

     Hor. So have I heard and do in part believe it. 
     But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
     Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.