higher standard, Shakespeare's conformity to the inner
law outstrips all those regular dramatists who learned from
Aristotle, not the spirit of regularity, but mechanical
imitation.--GERVINUS.

CHARACTERIZATION.

I am next to consider Shakespeare's peculiar mode of conceiving and
working out character; as this stands next in order and importance to
the article of Dramatic Composition.

Now, in several English writers before him, we find characters
discriminated and sustained with considerable judgment and skill.
Still we feel a want of reality about them: they are not men and women
themselves, but only the outsides and appearances of men and women;
often having indeed a good measure of coherence and distinctness, but
yet mere appearances, with nothing behind or beneath, to give them
real substance and solidity. Of course, therefore, the parts actually
represented are all that they have; they stand for no more than simply
what is shown; there is nothing in them or of them but what meets the
beholder's sense: so that, however good they may be to look at, they
will not bear looking into; because the outside, that which is
directly seen or heard, really exhausts their whole force and meaning.

Instead, then, of beginning at the heart of a character, and working
outwards, these authors began at the surface, and worked the other
way; and so were precluded from getting beyond the surface, by their
mode of procedure. It is as if the shell of an egg should be fully
formed and finished before the contents were prepared; in which case
the contents of course could not be got into it. It would have to
remain a shell, and nothing more: as such, it might do well enough for
a show, just as well indeed as if it were full of meat; but it would
not stand the weighing.

With Shakespeare all this is just reversed. His egg is a real egg,
brimful of meat, and not an empty shell; and this, because the
formation began at the centre, and the shell was formed last. He gives
us, not the mere imitations or appearances of things, but the very
things themselves. His characters _have_ more or less of surface, but
they _are_ solids: what is actually and directly shown, is often the
least part of them, never the whole: the rest is left to be inferred;
and the showing is so managed withal as to start and propagate the
inferring process in the beholder's mind.

All which clearly implies that Shakespeare conceived his persons, not
fr