Shakespeare was the mirror of his time in things small as well as great.  How far he drew his characters from personal acquaintances has often been discussed.  The clowns, tinkers, shepherds, tapsters, and such folk, he probably knew by name.  In the Duke of Manchester’s “Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne” is a curious suggestion about Hamlet.  Reading some letters from Robert, Earl of Essex, to Lady Rich, his sister, the handsome, fascinating, and disreputable Penelope Devereaux, he notes, in their humorous melancholy and discontent with mankind, something in tone and even language which suggests the weak and fantastic side of Hamlet’s mind, and asks if the poet may not have conceived his character of Hamlet from Essex, and of Horatio from Southampton, his friend and patron.  And he goes on to note some singular coincidences.  Essex was supposed by many to have a good title to the throne.  In person he had his father’s beauty and was all that Shakespeare has described the Prince of Denmark.  His mother had been tempted from her duty while her noble and generous husband was alive, and this husband was supposed to have been poisoned by her and her paramour.  After the father’s murder the seducer had married the guilty mother.  The father had not perished without expressing suspicion of foul play against himself, yet sending his forgiveness to his faithless wife.  There are many other agreements in the facts of the case and the incidents of the play.  The relation of Claudius to Hamlet is the same as that of Leicester to Essex:  under pretense of fatherly friendship he was suspicious of his motives, jealous of his actions; kept him much in the country and at college; let him see little of his mother, and clouded his prospects in the world by an appearance of benignant favor.  Gertrude’s relations with her son Hamlet were much like those of Lettice with Robert Devereaux.  Again, it is suggested, in his moodiness, in his college learning, in his love for the theatre and the players, in his desire for the fiery action for which his nature was most unfit, there are many kinds of hints calling up an image of the Danish Prince.

This suggestion is interesting in the view that we find in the characters of the Elizabethan drama not types and qualities, but individuals strongly projected, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions.  These dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative of human life today, because they reflected the human life of their time.  This is supremely true of Shakespeare, and almost equally true of Jonson and many of the other stars of that marvelous epoch.  In England as well as in France, as we have said, it was the period of the classic revival; but in England the energetic reality of the time was strong enough to break the classic fetters, and to use classic learning for modern purposes.  The English dramatists, like the French, used classic histories and characters.  But two things are to be noted