Juliet, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, and Olivia loved,--and
Ophelia, Desdemona, Hermione and Miranda."

[21. Chr. Collin, Christiania. 1914. H. Aschehoug & Co.]

In the second chapter Collin argues, as he had done in his essay on
_Hamlet_[22] that Shakespeare's great tragedies voice no pessimism, but
the stern purpose to strengthen himself and his contemporaries against
the evils and vices of Jacobean England--that period of moral and
intellectual disintegration which followed the intense life of the
Elizabethan age. Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the
Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers
of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against
the forces of ruin and decay. "To hold the mirror up to nature," that
men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the
social body. And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun
moralizing. He warns against sensual excess in Adam's speech in _As You
Like It_, II, 3:

Let me be your servant;
Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood;
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility;

[22. See pp. 71 ff. below.]

Or, compare the violent outburst against drunkenness in _Hamlet_ Act 1,
Sc. 4, and the stern warning against the same vice in _Othello_, where,
indeed, Cassius' weakness for strong drink is the immediate occasion of
the tragic complication. In like manner, Shakespeare moralizes against
lawless love in the _Merry Wives_, in _Troilus and Cressida_, in
_Hamlet_, in _Lear_.

On the other hand, Shakespeare never allows artistic scruples to
stand in the way of exalting simple, domestic virtues. Simple conjugal
fidelity is one of the glories of Hamlet's illustrious father and of the
stern, old Roman, Coriolanus; the young prince, Malcolm, is as chaste
and innocent as the young barbarians of whom Tacitus tells.

In a final section, Collin connects this view of Hamlet which he has
developed in his essay on _Hamlet_ and the Sonnets, with the theory of
human civilization which his book so suggestively advances.

The great tragedies from _Hamlet_ to _Timon of Athens_ are not
autobiographical in the sense that they are reflections of Shakespeare's
own concrete experience. They are not the record of a bitter personal
pessimism. In the years when they were