d. (1)
It viewed the individual characters of the plays as if they were real
persons, analyzing their motives and elaborating or repainting their
portraits, as in the analyses of Hamlet by Goethe and Coleridge, or in
the brilliant sketches of Hazlitt. The few hundred lines spoken by a
leading character have thus been expanded by the impressions made on
successive critics into volumes of biography. (2) Shakespeare's works
were studied as a whole in an effort to study the development of his art
and mind. Schlegel and Coleridge gave a unity to the phenomena of the
thirty-seven plays that had not been recognized hitherto; but they and
their followers naturally tended to make of their author a sort of
nineteenth-century romanticist. (3) Exalting the services of poetry and
the creative imagination, they viewed Shakespeare's exhibition of human
nature and his incidental wisdom as profound, consistent, and immensely
valuable for the human race. Hence they were ever seeking in his work
for a philosophy, a synthetic ethics, and making the widest applications
of his words to conduct. Believing that he could do no wrong, they
inevitably came to attribute to him ideas and morals that were of their
own creation.

The defects of this criticism are most apparent in critics like Ulrici
and Gervinus who carry its methods to extremes. Personal, fanciful,
unhistorical, idolatrous, it is yet a tremendous tribute and an amazing
record of the sway that Shakespeare has exerted on the human mind. The
writings of no other man have been studied so intimately by so many
sympathetic readers, or have excited such different impressions.
Throughout the nineteenth century this appreciative criticism has
continued, and Shakespeare has been interpreted through the personality
of many critics, German and American, as well as British, more recently
through the delicate sensibility of Professor Dowden, and the
penetrating reflection of Professor A. C. Bradley.

[Page Heading: The Nineteenth Century]

At the end of the nineteenth century, Shakespearean criticism has become
too varied for a brief survey. Textual and esthetic criticism both
continue. The biography has been established on a sound basis of fact by
Halliwell-Phillipps and Sidney Lee; and still new facts reward patient
investigators of the legal and court documents, almost the only records
preserved that can possibly bear on Shakespeare's life. Special studies
of all sorts have been numerous, a