THERE can be little doubt that Shakespeare found the nucleus of fact on which he based his characters in real intercourse with men. But he did more than transfer the figures he saw in life to the canvas of his invention. If he had merely set down, however faithfully, the men and women he actually beheld in the flesh, he must soon have been forgotten. Some of his contemporaries did that, and with what results we know. He doubtless saw many a Sir John Falstaff strutting bodily before him at the Mermaid Tavern, but he did not depict under that name any individual charlatan he chanced to meet there. If he had done so, we who live in days when soldiers do not think it necessary for the better support of their valor to forswear thin potations, and addict themselves to sack, would probably care very little for the character, notwithstanding the attractions pertaining to it of that Rabelaisean humor which never disturbs us with any question as to the side of our face on which the laugh should be. But the whole family of swaggering topers from Sir John’s day down to our own have had certain features of family resemblance, and these features Shakespeare waited for and portrayed. So Sir John Falstaff becomes a type, and hence is applicable to every age, because representative of his phase of humanity in every age. The same truth that explains to us the basis of the immortality of Falstaff applies to every notable character Shakespeare depicts. The poet never goes to work (as, according to an acute critic, the young pre-Raphaelites did in 1850) as a photographic camera, but always as a creative intelligence, and this is what Coleridge means in the argument in which he shows that Shakespeare passed every conception through the medium of his meditative genius. Nor is this true merely of Shakespeare’s method of projecting character in the realm of what the actors call eccentric comedy, for in dealing with heroic character his art is the same. Glance at Romeo. It is hardly to be supposed that an individual answering to the young Montague engaged in that shadowy historical occurrence which is referred to the first years of the fourteenth century; but none the less on that account is he typical of certain romantic young lovers in all ages. He begins by sighing over some fugitive passion for a mythical Rosaline, and presently forgets the paragon in his new-found passion for the more responsive Juliet. There may not exist either historical or traditional ground for believing that the original of the Romeo of Luigi da Porto and Bandello had in fact any such preliminary passion; but Shakespeare knew from observation, and perhaps from personal experience, that a vague, indeterminate condition of mind and heart usually precedes the ordeal known as falling in love, and therefore (following Arthur Brooke in part) he gave Romeo an unrequited attachment, or shadow of attachment, in which he is much more in love with his own thoughts than with anything more substantial. So Romeo, without ceasing to be a son of the house of Montague, becomes a type of all the sons of the house of Love. It was the typical feature of Romeo’s character that Mr. Irving brought most into prominence in his recent impersonation of the part, and in giving relief to so salient a characteristic Mr. Irving did well; but perhaps the chief imperfection of his performance was a too prolonged dwelling upon this subjective side of Romeo’s passion, apparently to the total disregard of the clear fact that Shakespeare meant no more by it than to generalize on the beginnings of all human passion, and then pass on to the story of an individual and very concrete affection.

  Look now at Hamlet. When Shakespeare took up that character it was a bald, traditional conception, simply of a commonplace young prince, having coarse appetites and gross passions, who had been supplanted in the royal succession by an uncle who had murdered his father and married his mother; but Shakespeare shed a flood of light upon the character, and the traditional prince became the representative man. When Shakespeare took in hand the character of Macbeth, it was (in the Holinshed Chronicle) a tradition of individual ambition and cruelty; but from him it was to get a world of purpose that should make it typical of a vast section of humanity. In order to realize how exactly Hamlet and Macbeth are of opposite types, let us glance at one scene from each of the plays in question. Immediately after the play in “Hamlet,” the guilty king, whose conscience has been caught by the trap laid for it, retires to a chamber to pray. Hamlet is now convinced of his uncle’s guilt; he will take the word of the ghost for a thousand pounds; in the heat of his resolve he believes he could drink hot blood, his purpose is so firm that he prays that the soul of Nero may not enter into his bosom, and that to his mother, at least, he may speak daggers, but use none. In this crowning witness of the justice of the act he contemplates, he shrieks frantic and bitter doggerel. He is summoned to his mother’s chamber, and on the way thither he passes through the room where the stubborn knees of the king are bent in the prayer that is meant to purge the black bosom of its rank offense. Now might Hamlet do the deed his soul is bent on; but no, the king prays, and Hamlet dares not to raise the sword against him. Would not the murderer go to heaven if taken in this purging of his soul? Here creeps in Hamlet’s apology to himself for doing nothing, and he goes out again, his purpose shaken and undone. Contrast this conduct of Hamlet with that of Macbeth at a juncture no less terrible. After he has murdered Duncan, and possessed himself of the sovereignty, he is more than ever tossed about with fears. He cannot sleep; he has murdered the innocent asleep; he thinks it were better to be with the dead, whom he has sent to rest, than to lie upon the rack of a tortured mind. Duncan is in his grave. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. Banquo is dead, but Fleance has escaped, and Macbeth’s fears stick deep in Banquo’s issue. He will seek afresh the Weird Sisters, and so goes to the pit of Acheron. Small comfort he gets there, the secret, black, and midnight hags show him apparitions that foretell his speedy overthrow, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight kings pass before his eyes, and the last bears a glass in hand that shows him many more. He curses the witches; infected be the air whereon they ride, and damned all those that trust them! But what is the result? Does Macbeth arrest himself in his deeds of blood? A hundreth part of such an evidence against him would have seemed to Hamlet excuse enough for ignoring the “canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” Macbeth is of another mettle; he is so far steeped in blood that to go backward were as hard as to go on. This is what he says as he comes out of the cave:—

  “But no more sights!” This man can do any deed of horrible cruelty, but he cannot now, he will not, think; he will not count the cost. By thinking too precisely on the event, Hamlet’s purposes lost the name of action. Hamlet’s flighty purpose never was overtaken (it may be said to have overtaken him), because the deed never did go with it. Hamlet could look on thoughts, but not on blood; Macbeth could look on blood, but not on thoughts. Macduff’s wife and little ones Macbeth could cruelly butcher in “one fell swoop,” but he could not, would not, look on the future. “This deed I’ll do,” he says, “but no more sights!” Here, then, we have two types of character: the man that can think and will not act, and the man that can act and will not think; and these together represent, perhaps, a full half of the entire human family. In the one we have the dread of action which never fails to present itself in the meditative genius; in the other we have the impatience of brooding reflection which as constantly exhibits itself in the active intelligence. Hamlet envies Laertes, fresh from France, the good opinion he has won for skill with rapier and dagger, but despises Rosencrantz, who, straight, probably from Wittenberg, talks metaphysics to him; he is never so satisfied with himself as when he recalls his speedy dispatch of his base companions to sudden and unshriven death in England, and never so strong in his own strength of arm as when he reflects that the news must shortly reach the king of the issue of the business in his tributary state. “It will be short: the interim is mine.” Macbeth reserves no pity in his heart for the partner of his great crime, when, tortured by the memory of it, she dies of remorse, and it adds one more anticipatory pang to the humiliation of possible overthrow, that he may have to kiss the dust before the feet of young Malcolm (who has never given proof of active power), while before the resolute Macduff the relentless monarch quails.

  Let us look at Othello. The Moor of Venice was a figure in Cinthio’s “Hecatomithi” before Shakespeare began to deal with him; but he was, as the facetious Rymer so playfully puts it, a mere jealous blackamoor. The black generals having beautiful wives liable to be courted by their husbands’ officers are necessarily few. One in a century would be a liberal estimate, probably, and perhaps one in a cycle would be enough. Therefore the interest attaching to such unions must be slight. A passion must touch a large part of humanity before it can be universally appreciated. Now see what marvelous re-creation the story undergoes in Shakespeare, and what a magnificent type the poet makes of Othello. Lifting him entirely out of the originally vulgar character of the black man with a fair wife, he makes him a perfect gentleman. It has been well said that Othello is, perhaps, the most faultless gentleman in Shakespeare, for not Hamlet himself is so peerless a gentleman. What is Shakespeare’s aim in this? He is going to do far greater business than to show us the power of jealousy. Cinthio’s original blackamoor would have done for that. He intends to show us what it is to have our ideals shattered, our gods overthrown, our hopes withered, our aims blasted. Othello shall have no touch of jealousy; he shall have a greatness of soul with which jealousy cannot live. Othello at first adores his wife, worships her beyond all limit or control of reason. Then comes up the spirit of envy. Iago whispers that his fair idol is not so flawless as he thinks. He laughs at the imputation. Presently, that old relentless enemy, Circumstance (the vis matrix of Shakespearean tragedy, as a critic most aptly terms her) steps in and mars everything, as she so often does. When Circumstance frowns on Desdemona, Othello is trapped. Can it be that she whom he thought so pure is yet so guilty? “But yet the pity of ’t! O Iago, the pity of ’t!” Of what now is Othello thinking? Of killing his supposed rival! Never at all; that way jealousy lies. He thinks of killing her slanderer. Holding Iago by the throat, he tells him to prove what he has said, or he had better have been born a dog than answer his awakened wrath. But fate is against Othello, and the proof seems to be forthcoming. Then, indeed, the joys of life are gone; his advancements had been the sweeter, because she had shared them; his hairbreadth ’scapes had been no longer terrible memories, because she had pitied them. Desdemona must die, and he, too, with her; for surely we must believe that Othello projected his own death at the moment that he conceived the idea of compassing his wife’s. Here, then, is another magnificent type, representative of an enormous section of the human family. Othello has all the weaknesses of the man who builds his ideals too high: distrustful of himself and of the passion he generates; too quick to suspect treachery for one who has none of the little vices that verify it; as apt to clutch at straws as he is swift to raise an idol out of slender virtues. If Othello had been a jealous man he would not have killed his wife; for he would never have contented himself with the evidence of a lost handkerchief. But he was at once superior to the mean, prying suspiciousness of Leontes, in the “Winter’s Tale,” and rendered, by his frantic idolatry, so destitute of a rational idea of female frailty as to accept the most innocent intercourse as conclusive evidence of guilt.

  The character of Iago is of a type the exact contrary of this, Iago represents the men who take a low view of humanity, believing there is no friendship but self-interest, no affection but self-love, no honesty but personal gain. He begins with the meanest estimate of woman, from whom he expects neither chastity nor constancy, and whose love, in his eyes, is lust. There is not to be seen so bitter an enemy of woman in any other character in Shakespeare, where the hardest things ever, perhaps, said against the sex are to be found. Iago has a stubborn pride of intellectuality, too, that makes him believe he can use all men as his tools. His envy is not limited to Michael Cassio, who stands between him and a lieutenancy, but is even more active in the sight of Othello’s domestic happiness than in view of his own military retrogression. With the consciousness of villainy in every scheme he concocts, he is constantly hugging to his bosom the idea that what he does is less than the just revenge of his honor, which he reminds himself has been outraged. In no man whatever, and of course in no woman, can he perceive positive virtues; in Othello alone he recognizes a certain absence of vice. Such a man must needs have injured his associates by suspicion, calumny, or some of the other and secret machinations of envy; and if Shakespeare meant anything (beyond furnishing a dramatic contrast to Othello) by the realization of the type which Iago represents, it was surely to point to the inevitable pitfalls that lie in the path of the born skeptic.

  Lear, again, is of a great and familiar type; he furnishes an admirable generalization on the impotence of those who, in their anxiety to govern others, have neglected to master themselves. It is significant that, both in Holinshed and in “The True Chronicle History of King Leir,” the army of Lear is victorious, and the king is reinstated in his kingdom. After Lear’s death, too, Cordelia succeeds to his sovereignty, and dies by her own hand during a war waged against her by her sisters’ sons. Now, the mere necessities of tragic drama made demand of radical change in certain of these particulars; but the most material deviation from the story, as Shakespeare found it, was entailed upon the dramatist by the necessity under which he lay to purge the old king of his pride and willfulness, by leading him forward to some great catastrophe of suffering and death. Gloucester and his sons are foreign to the chronicle on which this play is founded, and come, no doubt, from Sidney’s “Arcadia,” probably being introduced for precisely similar purposes of typical portraiture. Indeed, it may, I think, safely be said that wherever Shakespeare departs from tradition in his plots he does so to perfect his types.

  Glance further at the boy-woman characters in Shakespeare: I mean, of course, the women who assume the disguise of pages. This is a class of character of which the Elizabethans were especially fond. Nearly every popular dramatist of Shakespeare’s age introduces us to one or more of these charming creations. Perhaps it may be objected that the class, if it ever existed, is extinct. And this being so, it may be said that Shakespeare here reversed his usual methods of portraiture and presented us in his Rosalinds and Violas, not with a type of female character, but merely with a picture of a class that was, at the most, peculiar to his own and earlier times. Not so, however. Shakespeare created in his girl-page characters a type of womanhood which for purity and strength, for modesty and self-sacrifice, must always stand highest in fiction, and can never, one may trust, be extinct in life. Herein he introduces into literature the type of girl who unites the tenderness of a woman to the strength of a man; and this is, perhaps, the most fascinating type of female character ever conceived. Yet Shakespeare never unsexes his boy-women. Viola is not a whit less womanly because she dons the doublet and hose, and plays page to the Duke. Nay, for her very disguise she seems almost the more womanly, because the more under restraint in the expression of those emotions which belong to woman only.

  It is necessary to leave such readers as feel an interest in this theory of Shakespeare’s method as a dramatist to work it out in fuller detail. It would be interesting to pursue investigations further, and see how Shakespeare came by such characters as Polonius, Benedick, Beatrice, Mercutio, Dogberry, Verges, Justice Shallow, Prospero, Leonatus, and among historical personages, Henry V., Richards II. and III. What has here been said has been intended to show, with somewhat more fullness of illustration than Coleridge employs, that Shakespeare’s method of projecting character was to generalize on character: not to reproduce individuals, but to create types. That the poet never paints a character direct from some single example in life can hardly be maintained. It has been said that Pistol is a portrait, and perhaps the same may be affirmed, with reason, of Justice Shallow and Dogberry. The opposite was, however, his natural method, and the exceptions to his adoption of it are rare. It would be interesting to tabulate his types in groups, and so note their similitudes and differences. Lear, Timon, and Coriolanus might be taken together in a first group; Hamlet, Richard II., and Prospero in a second; Richard III. and Macbeth in a third; and perhaps Leontes and Leonatus would have to go with Iago rather than with Othello. To study Shakespeare in such groups of types might perhaps be more profitable, because more systematical and philosophical, than to study him merely chronologically. At least it would afford an agreeable and valuable change. It can hardly be possible to overstate the importance of the poet’s love of the type in all human portraiture. To gratify it he sacrificed legend and history, and sometimes probability also. It is quite the highest factor in his art, for it has given permanence to what must have been as ephemeral as the forgotten chronicles without it.