The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
infinitesimal in comparison.

Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at "Macbeth." You
may derive abundant instruction from it,--instruction of many kinds.
There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous
ambition; you may say, like Doctor Slop, these things could not have
happened under a constitutional government: or, again, you may take up
your parable against superstition; you may dilate on the frightful
consequences of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior
advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the
story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of
the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we
may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of
these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of
the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the
best of such descriptions would seem!

Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what
he meant; he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever
theories we pleased.

Or, again, look at Homer.

The "Iliad" is from two to three thousand years older than "Macbeth,"
and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have
there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer
had no philosophy; he never struggles to press upon us his views about
this or that; you can scarcely tell, indeed, whether his sympathies are
Greek or Trojan: but he represents t