er
chamber? The later Shakespeare might have told us, did tell us, in
regard to more than one other princess; but the young Shakespeare has
nothing to tell.

_Richard III_, which is supposed to have come some three years later,
is a marked advance in characterization, but still far short of the
goal. Here the dramatist attempts, indeed, to analyze the tyrant's
motives and emotions; but he does not yet understand what {92} he is
trying to explain, and for that reason the being whom he creates is
portentous, but not human. To understand this, you need only compare
Richard with Macbeth. In Macbeth we have a host of different
forces--ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacillation,
affection, despair--all struggling together as they might in you or me;
and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize
that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like
ourselves. But in Richard there is no human complexity. His is the
fearful simplicity of the lightning, the battering-ram, the earthquake,
forces whose achievements are terrible and whose inner existence a
blank. Richard hammers his bloody way through life like the legendary
Iron Man with his flail, awe-inspiring as a destructive agency, not as
a human being.

Two or three years later we find Shakespeare in his conception of
Shylock capable of greater things as a student of character. In this
pathetic, lonely, vindictive figure, exiled forever from the warm
fireside of human friendship by those inherent faults which he can no
more change than the tiger can change his claws, the long tragedy which
accompanies the survival of the fittest finds a voice. Yet even in
Shylock the dramatist has not reached his highest achievement in
character study. The old Jew is drawn splendidly to the life, but he
is a comparatively easy character to draw, a man with a few simple and
prominent traits. Depicting such a man is like drawing a pronounced
Roman profile, less difficult to do, and less satisfactory when done,
than tracing the subdued curves of a more evenly rounded face. Still
greater will be the triumph {93} when Shakespeare can draw equally true
to life a many-sided man or woman, in whose single heart all our
different experiences find a sympathetic echo.

And this final triumph is not long in coming. Between his
thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth years, in Falstaff and Hamlet the poet
produced the greatest comic and the greatest tragic