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For the men, Yudishtura, Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most of the Old and New Testament characters; Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus, Prometheus, Hercules, Aeneas, Plutarch's heroes; the Merlin of Celtic bards; the Cid, Arthur and his knights, Siegfried and Hagen in the Nibelungen; Roland and Oliver; Roustam in the Shah-Nemah; and so on to Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakspere's Hamlet, Richard II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern Faust.
Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style more massive and splendid than Shakspere's, and comparable, like Tertullian's Latin, to a river of molten gold. Of the countless single beauties that sow his page Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Valombrosa,
There the story turned on a single "humor," Katharine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's Silent Woman turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The Taming of the Shrew is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays; a bourgeois domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest.
Every fibre in Shakspere's artistic mind would have rebelled against the idea of making a lunatic the chief figure of his greatest drama.
The Arcadia, like Euphues, was a lady's book. It was the favorite court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been dedicated.
This was probably the position in which the majority of thoughtful men found themselves; and it is accurately reflected in three of Shakspere's plays, which, for other and weightier reasons, are grouped together in the same chronological division "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth," and "Hamlet."
Unfortunately for Lanier, his admiration for George Eliot is felt now to be excessive; and few of us are ready to accept Gwendolen Harleth as a more successful attempt at portraiture than any one of half a score of Shakspere's heroines, so convincingly feminine.
The third and concluding section, will embody an attempt to trace the growth of Shakspere's thought upon religious matters through the medium of his allusions to this subject. The empire of the supernatural must obviously be most extended where civilization is the least advanced.
This criticism is so entirely subjective and unsupported by evidence that it is difficult to deal satisfactorily with it. It will be shown hereafter that this description does not apply in the least to the Scandinavian Norns, while, so far as it is true to Shakspere's text, it does not clash with contemporary records of the appearance and actions of witches.
These early plays are of interest to students of the history of the drama, and throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like Shakspere's; but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary value. There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players, who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens.
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