ffence there may be in the play
to modern taste.

* * * * *

I have already referred to certain characteristics of style and temper
which this play shares with several others probably written about the
same time, and which, as before observed, have been thought to mark
some crisis in the Poet's life. It cannot well be denied that the
plays in question have something of a peculiar spirit, which might
aptly suggest that some passage of bitter experience must have turned
the milk of his genius for a time into gall, and put him upon a course
of harsh and indignant thought. The point is well stated by Hallam:
"There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare's life when his heart was
ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience:
the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or
unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature, which intercourse
with ill-chosen associates peculiarly teaches,--these, as they sank
down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired
into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary
character, the censurer of mankind."[21] And Verplanck speaks in a
similar strain of "that portion of the author's life which was
memorable for the production of the additions to the original
_Hamlet_, with their melancholy wisdom; probably of _Timon_, with its
indignant and hearty scorn, and rebukes of the baseness of civilized
society; and above all of _Lear_, with its dark pictures of unmixed,
unmitigated guilt, and its terrible and prophet-like denunciations."

[21] "This type," continues the writer, "is first seen in the
philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished
serenity, and with a gayety of fancy, though not of manners, on
the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled
Duke of the same play, and one rather more severe in the Duke of
_Measure for Measure_. In all these, however, it is merely a
contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet this is mingled with the
impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of
extraordinary circumstances: it shines no longer, as in the
former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful
coruscations amid feigned gayety and extravagance. In Lear, it
is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous
imagery of madness; in Timon, it is obscured by the
exaggerations of misant