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or religious passion is dominant. He could not, of course,--he, the poet of feudalism,--overlook religion as an element of the social organization of Europe, but he did not seize Christian ideas in their essence, or look at the human soul in its direct relations with God. And just think of the field of humanity closed to him! For sixteen hundred years, remarkable men and women had appeared, representing all classes of religious character, from the ecstasy of the saint to the gloom of the fanatic; yet his intellectual curiosity was not enough excited to explore and reproduce their experience. Do you say that the subject was foreign to the purpose of an Elizabethan playwright? The answer is, that Decker and Massinger attempted it, for a popular audience, in "The Virgin Martyr"; and though the tragedy of "The Virgin Martyr" is a huddled mass of beauties and deformities, its materials of incident and characters, could Shakespeare have been attracted to them, might have been organized into as great a drama as Othello. Again, Marlowe, in his play of "Dr. Faustus," has imperfectly treated a subject which in Shakespeare's hands would have been made into a tragedy sublimer than Lear could he have thrown himself into it with equal earnestness. Marlowe, from the fact that he was a positive atheist, and a brawling one, had evidently at some time directed his whole heart and imagination to the consideration of religious questions, and had resolutely faced facts from which Shakespeare turned away. Shakespeare, also, in common with the other dramatists of the time, looked at the Puritans as objects of satire, laughing _at_ them instead of gazing _into_ them. They were doubtless grotesque enough in external appearance; but the poet of human nature should have penetrated through the appearance to the substance, and recognized in them, not merely the possibility of Cromwell, but of the ideal of character which Cromwell but imperfectly represented. You may say that Shakespeare's nature was too sunny and genial to admit the Puritan. It was not too sunny or genial to admit Richards, and Iagos, and Gonerils, and "secret, black, and midnight hags." It may be doubted also if Shakespeare's affinities extended to those numerous classes of human character that stand for the reforming and philanthropic sentiments of humanity. We doubt if he was hopeful for the race. He was too profoundly impressed with its disturbing passions to have faith in
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