, equally important, (1) On the
one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after
_Twelfth Night_ Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play
which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less
merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon_, _Macbeth_, is correct, these
tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and _King Lear_ and
_Timon_ lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the
earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' _Measure for Measure_ and _Troilus
and Cressida_, and perhaps _All's Well_. But about these comedies there
is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little
mirth; in _Measure for Measure_ perhaps, certainly in _Troilus and
Cressida_, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an
intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With _Macbeth_
perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed,
the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity
which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth
almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these
facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the
plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was
simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or
even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the
arrival and progress of middle age.

(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the
multitudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited
power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we
have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased
to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental
activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (_Troilus and
Cressida_ and his part of _Timon_ are the possible exceptions) in which
there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously
endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally
it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening _personal_
note: for although _Othello_ is darker than _Hamlet_ it surely strikes
one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style
and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring
_Troilus and