t's
mind, and asks if the poet may not have conceived his character of Hamlet
from Essex, and of Horatio from Southampton, his friend and patron. And
he goes on to note some singular coincidences. Essex was supposed by many
to have a good title to the throne. In person he had his father's beauty
and was all that Shakespeare has described the Prince of Denmark. His
mother had been tempted from her duty while her noble and generous
husband was alive, and this husband was supposed to have been poisoned by
her and her paramour. After the father's murder the seducer had married
the guilty mother. The father had not perished without expressing
suspicion of foul play against himself, yet sending his forgiveness to
his faithless wife. There are many other agreements in the facts of the
case and the incidents of the play. The relation of Claudius to Hamlet is
the same as that of Leicester to Essex: under pretense of fatherly
friendship he was suspicious of his motives, jealous of his actions; kept
him much in the country and at college; let him see little of his mother,
and clouded his prospects in the world by an appearance of benignant
favor. Gertrude's relations with her son Hamlet were much like those of
Lettice with Robert Devereaux. Again, it is suggested, in his moodiness,
in his college learning, in his love for the theatre and the players, in
his desire for the fiery action for which his nature was most unfit,
there are many kinds of hints calling up an image of the Danish Prince.

This suggestion is interesting in the view that we find in the characters
of the Elizabethan drama not types and qualities, but individuals
strongly projected, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions.
These dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative
of human life today, because they reflected the human life of their time.
This is supremely true of Shakespeare, and almost equally true of Jonson
and many of the other stars of that marvelous epoch. In England as well
as in France, as we have said, it was the period of the classic revival;
but in England the energetic reality of the time was strong enough to
break the classic fetters, and to use classic learning for modern
purposes. The English dramatists, like the French, used classic histories
and characters. But two things are to be noted in their use of them.
First, that the characters and the play of mind and passion in them are
thoroughly English and of the mo