racters of their kind. In "Richard III." he merely
painted a highly colored historical portrait; and Parolles, in "All's
Well that Ends Well," and Iachimo, in "Cymbeline," do not rise to the
dignity of even third-rate personages. Iago, it need hardly be said, is
the most perfect of all his creatures in this kind, and indeed he is the
most admirably detestable and infamous character in all literature.
Edmund is equally base and cruel; but compared with Iago he is a coarse,
low, brutal, and rabid animal. In Iago all the craft and venom of which
the human soul is capable is united with an intellectual subtlety which
seems to reach the limit of imagination or conception. There are some
who see in the making the bastard son in "Lear" the monster of
ingratitude and villany and the legitimate a model of all the manly and
filial virtues an evidence of Shakespeare's judgment and discrimination.
But this is one of those fond and over-subtle misapprehensions from
which Shakespeare has suffered in not a few instances, even at the hands
of critics of reputation. It suited Shakespeare's plot that the villain
should be the bastard; that is all; and Lear's legitimate daughters
Goneril and Regan are as base, as bad, and as cruelly ungrateful as
Gloucester's illegitimate son. Shakespeare knew human nature too well,
and handled it with too just and impartial a hand, to let the question
of legitimacy influence him in one way or the other. In "King John" we
have, on the contrary, the mean-souled Robert Faulconbridge and his
gallant and chivalrous bastard brother Philip.

About the same time, or if not in the same time, perhaps in the same
year which saw the production of "King Lear," "Macbeth" was written. But
its date is not certain within four or five years. It was surely written
before 1610, in which year a contemporary diary records its performance
on the 20th of April. The Cambridge editors, in their annotated edition
of this play, in the "Clarendon Press" series, prefer the later date;
but notwithstanding my great respect for their judgment, I hold to my
conclusion for the earlier, for the reasons given in my own edition. The
question has not in itself much pertinence to our present purpose, as
there is no doubt that the tragedy was produced in this period, and its
general style, both of thought and versification, is that of Shakespeare
in its fullest development and vigor. But with the question of date
there is involved another of gre