Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Portia The Merchant of Venice. Romeo Romeo and Juliet. Rosalind As You Like It. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Hamlet. Shylock The Merchant of Venice. Touchstone As You Like It. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: William Shakespeare , English poet, dramatist, and actor, often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.

This is an alphabetically ordered list of plays by William Shakespeare.

List of Shakespearean characters (A–K)

Dates following titles indicate the dates the plays were written unless otherwise noted. Asterisks indicate plays likely written by Shakespeare and other playwrights, though evidence has been disputed. The Merchant of Venice , comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about —97 and printed in a quarto edition in from an authorial manuscript or copy of one. The witch Sycorax, who formerly ruled the island on which the play is set, had imprisoned the recalcitrant Ariel in a pine tree.

The exiled duke Prospero, who is now in charge, releases him magically and engages…. List of characters in plays by Shakespeare. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources. At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. Internet URLs are the best.

Thank You for Your Contribution! There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later. In the agitation of his thoughts, he envies those whom he has sent to peace. Macbeth endeavours to escape from reflection on his crimes by repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the meditation of future mischief. Macbeth is goaded on to acts of violence and retaliation by necessity; to Richard, blood is a pastime.

Richard may be regarded as a man of the world, a plotting, hardened knave, wholly regardless of everything but his own ends, and the means to secure them. The superstitions of the age, the rude state of society, the local scenery and customs, all give a wildness and imaginary grandeur to his character. From the strangeness of the events that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear; and stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy.

He sees sights not shown to mortal eye, and hears unearthly music. All is tumult and disorder within and without his mind; his purposes recoil upon himself, are broken and disjointed; he is the double thrall of his passions and his evil destiny. Richard is not a character either of imagination or pathos, but of pure self-will.

There is no conflict of opposite feelings in his breast. The apparitions which he sees only haunt him in his sleep; nor does he live like Macbeth in a waking dream. He is sure of nothing but the present moment. Richard in the busy turbulence of his projects never loses his self-possession, and makes use of every circumstance that happens as an instrument of his long-reaching designs. In his last extremity we can only regard him as a wild beast taken in the toils: We can conceive a common actor to play Richard tolerably well; we can conceive no one to play Macbeth properly, or to look like a man that had encountered the Weird Sisters.

All the actors that we have ever seen, appear as if they had encountered them on the boards of Covent Garden or Drury Lane, but not on the heath at Fores, and as if they did not believe what they had seen. The Witches of Macbeth indeed are ridiculous on the modern stage, and we doubt if the furies of Aeschylus would be more respected. The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy.

At last there will be nothing left, good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre or in real life. Lamb in his notes to the Specimens of Early Dramatic Poetry:. His Witches are distinguished from the Witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman plotting some dire mischief might resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men.

That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These Witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them.

The names, and some of the properties which Middleton has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot coexist with mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the Witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their power too is, in some measure, over the mind. Julius Caesar was one of three principal plays by different authors, pitched upon by the celebrated Earl of Halifax to be brought out in a splendid manner by subscription, in the year There perhaps might be political reasons for this selection, as far as regards our author.

It is inferior in interest to Coriolanus, and both in interest and power to Antony and Cleopatra. It, however, abounds in admirable and affecting passages, and is remarkable for the profound knowledge of character, in which Shakespeare could scarcely fail. If there is any exception to this remark, it is in the hero of the piece himself. We do not much admire the representation here given of Julius Caesar, nor do we think it answers to the portrait given of him in his Commentaries. He makes several vapouring and rather pedantic speeches, and does nothing.

List of Shakespearean characters (A–K) - Wikipedia

Indeed, he has nothing to do. So far, the fault of the character might be the fault of the plot. The spirit with which the poet has entered at once into the manners of the common people, and the jealousies and heartburnings of the different factions, is shown in the first scene, when Flavius and Marullus, tribunes of the people, and some citizens of Rome, appear upon the stage. Truly, Sir, all that I live by, is the awl: But wherefore art not in thy shop today? Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?

Truly, Sir, to wear out their shoes, to get myself into more work. Sir, we make holiday to see Caesar, and rejoice in his triumph. To this specimen of quaint low humour immediately follows that unexpected and animated burst of indignant eloquence, put into the mouth of one of the angry tribunes. What tributaries follow him to Rome, To grace in captive-bonds his chariot-wheels?

Oh you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome! Knew you not Pompey? And when you saw his chariot but appear, Have you not made an universal shout, That Tiber trembled underneath his banks To hear the replication of your sounds, Made in his concave shores? And do you now put on your best attire? And do you now cull out an holiday? Begone— Run to your houses, fall upon your knees, Pray to the Gods to intermit the plague, That needs must light on this ingratitude. The well-known dialogue between Brutus and Cassius, in which the latter breaks the design of the conspiracy to the former, and partly gains him over to it, is a noble piece of high-minded declamation.

But perhaps the whole is not equal to the short scene which follows when Caesar enters with his train. As they pass by, pluck Casca by the sleeve, And he will, after his sour fashion, tell you What has proceeded worthy note today. Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, He thinks too much; such men are dangerous. Would he were fatter; but I fear him not: Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid So soon as that spare Cassius.

He reads much; He is a great observer; and he looks Quite through the deeds of men. We know hardly any passage more expressive of the genius of Shakespeare than this. It is as if he had been actually present, had known the different characters and what they thought of one another, and had taken down what he heard and saw, their looks, words, and gestures, just as they happened. The character of Mark Antony is further speculated upon where the conspirators deliberate whether he shall fall with Caesar.

Brutus is against it:. And for Mark Antony, think not of him: Alas, good Cassius, do not think of him: If he love Caesar, all that he can do Is to himself, take thought, and die for Caesar: There is no fear in him; let him not die. For he will live, and laugh at this hereafter. The honest manliness of Brutus is, however, sufficient to find out the unfitness of Cicero to be included in their enterprise, from his affected egotism and literary vanity.

O, name him not: Shakespeare has in this play and elsewhere shown the same penetration into political character and the springs of public events as into those of everyday life. For instance, the whole design to liberate their country fails from the generous temper and overweening confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their cause and the assistance of others.

Thus it has always been. Those who mean well themselves think well of others, and fall a prey to their security. That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them.

Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator. His heart prompted his head. His habitual jealousy made him fear the worst that might happen, and his irritability of temper added to his inveteracy of purpose, and sharpened his patriotism. The mixed nature of his motives made him fitter to contend with bad men. The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

Tyranny and servility are to be dealt with after their own fashion: All the conspirators, save only he,. Did that they did in envy of great Caesar: He only in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. The quarrel between Brutus and Cassius is managed in a masterly way. The scene between Brutus and Portia, where she endeavours to extort the secret of the conspiracy from him, is conceived in the most heroical spirit, and the burst of tenderness in Brutus:. You are my true and honourable wife; As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart—. The interest which Portia takes in Brutus and that which Calphurnia takes in the fate of Caesar are discriminated with the nicest precision.

The entrance of the conspirators to the house of Brutus at midnight is rendered very impressive. In the midst of this scene we meet with one of those careless and natural digressions which occur so frequently and beautifully in Shakespeare. After Cassius has introduced his friends one by one, Brutus says:. They are all welcome. What watchful cares do interpose themselves Betwixt your eyes and night? O pardon, Sir, it doth; and yon grey lines, That fret the clouds, are messengers of day. Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises, Which is a great way growing on the south, Weighing the youthful, season of the year.

Some two months hence, up higher toward the north He first presents his fire, and the high east Stands as the Capitol, directly here. We cannot help thinking this graceful familiarity better than all the formality in the world. The truth of history in Julius Caesar is very ably worked up with dramatic effect. The councils of generals, the doubtful turns of battles, are represented to the life. The death of Brutus is worthy of him—it has the dignity of the Roman senator with the firmness of the Stoic philosopher. But what is perhaps better than either, is the little incident of his boy, Lucius, falling asleep over his instrument, as he is playing to his master in his tent, the night before the battle.

Nature had played him the same forgetful trick once before on the night of the conspiracy. The humanity of Brutus is the same on both occasions. Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies, Which busy care draws in the brains of men. It has been said that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. That is, it substitutes imaginary sympathy for mere selfishness.

It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity as such. It raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near. It makes man a partaker with his kind. It subdues and softens the stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that there are and have been others like himself, by showing him as in a glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that can affect our common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimes to which they have led others.

Tragedy creates a balance of the affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life. It is the refiner of the species; a discipline of humanity. The habitual study of poetry and works of imagination is one chief part of a well-grounded education. A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical.

It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests. It excites our sympathy in an extraordinary degree. We have not the same degree of sympathy with the passions described in Macbeth. The interest in Hamlet is more remote and reflex. That of Othello is at once equally profound and affecting. The picturesque contrasts of character in this play are almost as remarkable as the depth of the passion. The Moor Othello, the gentle Desdemona, the villain Iago, the good-natured Cassio, the fool Roderigo, present a range and variety of character as striking and palpable as that produced by the opposition of costume in a picture.

Complete List of Shakespeare's Characters

These characters and the images they stamp upon the mind are the farthest asunder possible, the distance between them is immense: What a contrast the character of Othello forms to that of Iago: The making one black and the other white, the one unprincipled, the other unfortunate in the extreme, would have answered the common purposes of effect, and satisfied the ambition of an ordinary painter of character. Shakespeare has laboured the finer shades of difference in both with as much care and skill as if he had had to depend on the execution alone for the success of his design.

On the other hand, Desdemona and Aemilia are not meant to be opposed with anything like strong contrast to each other. Both are, to outward appearance, characters of common life, not more distinguished than women usually are, by difference of rank and situation. The difference of their thoughts and sentiments is, however, laid as open, their minds are separated from each other by signs as plain and as little to be mistaken as the complexions of their husbands. The movement of the passion in Othello is exceedingly different from that of Macbeth.

In Macbeth there is a violent struggle between opposite feelings, between ambition and the stings of conscience, almost from first to last: The revenge of Othello, after it has once taken thorough possession of his mind, never quits it, but grows stronger and stronger at every moment of its delay. The nature of the Moor is noble, confiding, tender, and generous; but his blood is of the most inflammable kind; and being once roused by a sense of his wrongs, he is stopped by no considerations of remorse or pity till he has given a loose to all the dictates of his rage and his despair.

The third act of Othello is his masterpiece, not of knowledge or passion separately, but of the two combined, of the knowledge of character with the expression of passion, of consummate art in the keeping up of appearances with the profound workings of nature, and the convulsive movements of uncontrollable agony, of the power of inflicting torture and of suffering it. Not only is the tumult of passion heaved up from the very bottom of the soul, but every the slightest undulation of feeling is seen on the surface, as it arises from the impulses of imagination or the different probabilities maliciously suggested by Iago.

She is introduced, just before lago begins to put his scheme in practice, pleading for Cassio with all the thoughtless gaiety of friendship and winning confidence in the love of Othello. But presently after, on brooding over his suspicions by himself, and yielding to his apprehensions of the worst, his smothered jealousy breaks out into open fury, and he returns to demand satisfaction of Iago like a wild beast stung with the envenomed shaft of the hunters. In his conversations with Desdemona, the persuasion of her guilt and the immediate proofs of her duplicity seem to irritate his resentment and aversion to her; but in the scene immediately preceding her death, the recollection of his love returns upon him in all its tenderness and force; and after her death, he all at once forgets his wrongs in the sudden and irreparable sense of his loss:.

This happens before he is assured of her innocence; but afterwards his remorse is as dreadful as his revenge has been, and yields only to fixed and death like despair. Such an ending was alone worthy of such a commencement. If anything could add to the force of our sympathy with Othello, or compassion for his fate, it would be the frankness and generosity of his nature, which so little deserve it. When Iago first begins to practise upon his unsuspecting friendship, he answers:.

Log in or Register

This character is beautifully and with affecting simplicity confirmed by what Desdemona herself says of him to Aemilia after she has lost the handkerchief, the first pledge of his love to her:. Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse Full of cruzadoes. And but my noble Moor Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness, As jealous creatures are, it were enough To put him to ill thinking.

After Othello has resolved upon the death of his wife, and bids her dismiss her attendant for the night, she answers:. Shakespeare has here put into half a line what some authors would have spun out into ten set speeches. There is one fine compliment paid to her by Cassio, who exclaims triumphantly when she comes ashore at Cyprus after the storm:. The lady protests so much herself, and she is as good as her word. The truth of conception, with which timidity and boldness are united in the same character, is marvellous.

The extravagance of her resolutions, the pertinacity of her affections, may be said to arise out of the gentleness of her nature. They imply an unreserved reliance on the purity of her own intentions, an entire surrender of her fears to her love, a knitting of herself heart and soul to the fate of another. Bating the commencement of her passion, which is a little fantastical and headstrong though even that may perhaps be consistently accounted for from her inability to resist a rising inclination [Footnote: Her resignation and angelic sweetness of temper do not desert her at the last.

After he has struck her, and called her names, she says:. Good friend, go to him; for by this light of heaven, I know not how I lost him. Unkindness may do much, And his unkindness may defeat my life, But never taint my love. I pray you be content: The business of the state does him offence. So would not I: This dialogue takes place just before the last fatal scene.

If Othello had overheard it, it would have prevented the whole catastrophe; but then it would have spoiled the play. Some persons, more nice than wise, have thought this whole character unnatural, because his villainy is without a sufficient motive. Shakespeare, who was as good a philosopher as he was a poet, thought otherwise. He knew that the love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, is natural to man.

He would know this as well or better than if it had been demonstrated to him by a logical diagram, merely from seeing children paddle in the dirt or kill flies for sport. Iago in fact belongs to a class of characters common to Shakespeare and at the same time peculiar to him; whose heads are as acute and active as their hearts are hard and callous. Iago is, to be sure, an extreme instance of the kind; that is to say, of diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter, because it falls more readily in with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and scope to his actions.

Navigation menu

He is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own fate as to that of others; he runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ruling passion—an insatiable craving after action of the most difficult and dangerous kind. His gaiety, such as it is, arises from the success of his treachery; his ease from the torture he has inflicted on others.

He is an amateur of tragedy in real life; and instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters, or long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends and connexions, and rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolution. We will just give an illustration or two. Call up her father: In the next passage, his imagination runs riot in the mischief he is plotting, and breaks out into the wildness and impetuosity of real enthusiasm.

Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell, As when, by night and negligence, the fire Is spied in populous cities. One of his most favourite topics, on which he is rich indeed, and in descanting on which his spleen serves him for a Muse, is the disproportionate match between Desdemona and the Moor.

This is a clue to the character of the lady which he is by no means ready to part with. It is brought forward in the first scene, and he recurs to it, when in answer to his insinuations against Desdemona, Roderigo says:. The wine she drinks is made of grapes. If she had been blest, she would never have married the Moor. This is probing to the quick. Iago here turns the character of poor Desdemona, as it were, inside out. It is certain that nothing but the genius of Shakespeare could have preserved the entire interest and delicacy of the part, and have even drawn an additional elegance and dignity from the peculiar circumstances in which she is placed.

His imagination rejects everything that has not a strong infusion of the most unpalatable ingredients; his mind digests only poisons. In the scenes where he tries to work Othello to his purpose, he is proportionably guarded, insidious, dark, and deliberate. We believe nothing ever came up to the profound dissimulation and dexterous artifice of the well-known dialogue in the third act, where he first enters upon the execution of his design.

O Heaven forgive me! Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense? To be direct and honest, is not safe. If Iago is detestable enough when he has business on his hands and all his engines at work, he is still worse when he has nothing to do, and we only see into the hollowness of his heart. His indifference when Othello falls into a swoon, is perfectly diabolical. The part indeed would hardly be tolerated, even as a foil to the virtue and generosity of the other characters in the play, but for its indefatigable industry and inexhaustible resources, which divert the attention of the spectator as well as his own from the end he has in view to the means by which it must be accomplished.

Zanga is a vulgar caricature of it. Timon of Athens always appeared to us to be written with as intense a feeling of his subject as any one play of Shakespeare. It is one of the few in which he seems to be in earnest throughout, never to trifle nor go out of his way. He does not relax in his efforts, nor lose sight of the unity of his design.

It is the only play of our author in which spleen is the predominant feeling of the mind. It is as much a satire as a play: The latter remind the classical reader of the force and swelling impetuosity of the moral declamations in Juvenal, while the former have all the keenness and caustic severity of the old Stoic philosophers. The soul of Diogenes appears to have been seated on the lips of Apemantus. The churlish profession of misanthropy in the cynic is contrasted with the profound feeling of it in Timon, and also with the soldierlike and determined resentment of Alcibiades against his countrymen, who have banished him, though this forms only an incidental episode in the tragedy.

The fable consists of a single event—of the transition from the highest pomp and profusion of artificial refinement to the most abject state of savage life, and privation of all social intercourse. The change is as rapid as it is complete; nor is the description of the rich and generous Timon, banqueting in gilded palaces, pampered by every luxury, prodigal of his hospitality, courted by crowds of flatterers, poets, painters, lords, ladies, who:. Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance, Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear; And through him drink the free air—.

He grudges himself the means of life, and is only busy in preparing his grave. The manners are everywhere preserved with distinct truth. The poet and painter are very skilfully played off against one another, both affecting great attention to the other, and each taken up with his own vanity, and the superiority of his own art.

Shakespeare has put into the mouth of the former a very lively description of the genius of poetry and of his own in particular. The hollow friendship and shuffling evasions of the Athenian lords, their smooth professions and pitiful ingratitude, are very satisfactorily exposed, as well as the different disguises to which the meanness of self-love resorts in such cases to hide a want of generosity and good faith.

The lurking selfishness of Apemantus does not pass undetected amidst the grossness of his sarcasms and his contempt for the pretensions of others. He owed this character to the good-natured solicitations of his Muse. Every topic of contempt or indignation is here exhausted; but while the sordid licentiousness of Apemantus, which turns everything to gall and bitterness, shows only the natural virulence of his temper and antipathy to good or evil alike, Timon does not utter an imprecation without betraying the extravagant workings of disappointed passion, of love altered to hate.

Apemantus sees nothing good in any object, and exaggerates whatever is disgusting: Timon is tormented with the perpetual contrast between things and appearances, between the fresh, tempting outside and the rottenness within, and invokes mischiefs on the heads of mankind proportioned to the sense of his wrongs and of their treacheries.

He impatiently cries out, when he finds the gold,. Let me look back upon thee, O thou wall, That girdlest in those wolves! Dive in the earth, And fence not Athens! Matrons, turn incontinent; Obedience fail in children; slaves and fools Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench, And minister in their steads. Large-handed robbers your grave masters are, And pill by law. Fear and piety, Religion to the Gods, peace, justice, truth, Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood, Instructions, manners, mysteries and trades, Degrees, observances, customs and laws, Decline to your confounding contraries; And let confusion live!

Thou cold sciatica, Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt As lamely as their manners! Timon is here just as ideal in his passion for ill as he had before been in his belief of good. Apemantus was satisfied with the mischief existing in the world, and with his own ill-nature. This is not the case with Timon, who neither loves to abhor himself nor others. All his vehement misanthropy is forced, up-hill work. From the slippery turns of fortune, from the turmoils of passion and adversity, he wishes to sink into the quiet of the grave.

On that subject his thoughts are intent, on that he finds time and place to grow romantic. He digs his own grave by the sea-shore; contrives his funeral ceremonies amidst the pomp of desolation, and builds his mausoleum of the elements. Come not to me again; but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood; Which once a-day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover. These well express in thee thy latter spirits: Shakespeare has in this play shown himself well versed in history and state affairs.

Coriolanus is a storehouse of political commonplaces. The arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher. Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble. What he says of them is very true: The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.

The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: The one is a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty. The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium.

It is everything by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance. It shows its head turretted, crowned, and crested. Its front is gilt and blood-stained. It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human sacrifices. Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers, tyrants and slaves its executioners. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right.

A lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild asses is a more poetical object than they; and we even take part with the lordly beast, because our vanity or some other feeling makes us disposed to place ourselves in the situation of the strongest party. There is nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that they are like to be so: The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of necessity.

The tame submission to usurped authority or even the natural resistance to it has nothing to excite or flatter the imagination: We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right. If his country was not worth defending, why did he build his pride on its defence? He is a conqueror and a hero; he conquers other countries, and makes this a plea for enslaving his own; and when he is prevented from doing so, he leagues with its enemies to destroy his country.

He scoffs at one of their tribunes for maintaining their rights and franchises: If the great and powerful had the beneficence and wisdom of Gods, then all this would have been well: But this is not the case. This is but natural: The care of the state cannot, we here see, be safely entrusted to maternal affection, or to the domestic charities of high life. The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of our weakness; their riches of our poverty; their pride of our degradation; their splendour of our wretchedness; their tyranny of our servitude.

If they had the superior knowledge ascribed to them which they have not it would only render them so much more formidable; and from Gods would convert them into Devils. The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left. The people are poor; therefore they ought to be starved. They are slaves; therefore they ought to be beaten. They work hard; therefore they ought to be treated like beasts of burden. They are ignorant; therefore they ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest, that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable.

This is the logic of the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandize what excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate: The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of Poetical Justice ; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.

We may depend upon it that what men delight to read in books, they will put in practice in reality. One of the most natural traits in this play is the difference of the interest taken in the success of Coriolanus by his wife and mother. The one is only anxious for his honour; the other is fearful for his life. Away, you fool; it more becomes a man Than gilt his trophy.

These are the ushers of Martius: Coriolanus himself is a complete character: His pride consists in the inflexible sternness of his will; his love of glory is a determined desire to bear down all opposition, and to extort the admiration both of friends and foes. His contempt for popular favour, his unwillingness to hear his own praises, spring from the same source.

• K 37472591 One Soldiers Story.
• After Iris: The Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby (A Bluebell Gadsby Book Book 1).
• Papa’s Letters: Love via First-Class Male!

He cannot contradict the praises that are bestowed upon him; therefore he is impatient at hearing them. He would enforce the good opinion of others by his actions, but does not want their acknowledgements in words. Pray now, no more: His magnanimity is of the same kind. He admires in an enemy that courage which he honours in himself: The first is as follows:.

It was even twilight when he entered the city of Antium, and many people met him in the streets, but no man knew him. They of the house spying him, wondered what he should be, and yet they durst not bid him rise. For ill-favouredly muffled and disguised as he was, yet there appeared a certain majesty in his countenance and in his silence: Tullus rose presently from the board, and coming towards him, asked him what he was, and wherefore he came. Then Martius unmuffled himself, and after he had paused awhile, making no answer, he said unto himself, If thou knowest me not yet, Tullus, and seeing me, dost not perhaps believe me to be the man I am indeed, I must of necessity discover myself to be that I am.

For I never had other benefit nor recompence of the true and painful service I have done, and the extreme dangers I have been in, but this only surname; a good memory and witness of the malice and displeasure thou shouldest bear me. Indeed the name only remaineth with me; for the rest, the envy and cruelty of the people of Rome have taken from me, by the sufferance of the dastardly nobility and magistrates, who have forsaken me, and let me be banished by the people. This extremity hath now driven me to come as a poor suitor, to take thy chimney-hearth, not of any hope I have to save my life thereby.

For if I had feared death, I would not have come hither to put myself in hazard; but pricked forward with desire to be revenged of them that thus have banished me, which now I do begin, in putting my person into the hands of their enemies. Wherefore if thou hast any heart to be wrecked of the injuries thy enemies have done thee, speed thee now, and let my misery serve thy turn, and so use it as my service may be a benefit to the Volsces: Knowing that they fight more valiantly who know the force of the enemy, than such as have never proved it.

And if it be so that thou dare not, and that thou art weary to prove fortune any more, then am I also weary to live any longer. And it were no wisdom in thee to save the life of him who hath been heretofore thy mortal enemy, and whose service now can nothing help, nor pleasure thee. Now was Martius set then in the chair of state, with all the honours of a general, and when he had spied the women coming afar off, he marvelled what the matter meant: But overcome in the end with natural affection, and being altogether altered to see them, his heart would not serve him to tarry their comming to his chair, but coming down in haste, he went to meet them, and first he kissed his mother, and embraced her a pretty while, then his wife and little children.

And nature so wrought with him, that the tears fell from his eyes, and he could not keep himself from making much of them, but yielded to the affection of his blood, as if he had been violently carried with the fury of a most swift-running stream. After he had thus lovingly received them, and perceiving that his mother Volumnia would begin to speak to him, he called the chiefest of the council of the Volsces to hear what she would say.

Then she spake in this sort: For we cannot, alas, together pray, both for victory to our country, and for safety of thy life also: For the bitter sop of most hard choice is offered thy wife and children, to forgo one of the two; either to lose the person of thyself, or the nurse of their native country. For myself, my son, I am determined not to tarry till fortune in my lifetime do make an end of this war. And I may not defer to see the day, either that my son be led prisoner in triumph by his natural countrymen, or that he himself do triumph of them, and of his natural country.

For if it were so, that my request tended to save thy country, in destroying the Volsces, I must confess, thou wouldest hardly and doubtfully resolve on that. For as to destroy thy natural country, it is altogether unmeet and unlawful, so were it not just and less honourable to betray those that put their trust in thee. But my only demand consisteth, to make a gaol delivery of all evils, which delivereth equal benefit and safety, both to the one and the other, but most honourable for the Volsces.

• .
• How To Market & Sell Your Ebook: A Quick Guide To Marketing & Selling Kindle eBooks.
• Unicorns Guitar Concerto : guitar solo: independent orchestral parts.
• ?
• Origine du prénom Ludivine (Oeuvres courtes) (French Edition).

For it shall appear, that having victory in their hands, they have of special favour granted us singular graces, peace and amity, albeit themselves have no less part of both than we. Of which good, if so it came to pass, thyself is the only author, and so hast thou the only honour. But if it fail, and fall out contrary, thyself alone deservedly shalt carry the shameful reproach and burthen of either party. So, though the end of war be uncertain, yet this notwithstanding is most certain, that if it be thy chance to conquer, this benefit shalt thou reap of thy goodly conquest, to be chronicled the plague and destroyer of thy country.

And if fortune overthrow thee, then the world will say, that through desire to, revenge thy private injuries, thou hast for ever undone thy good friends, who did most lovingly and courteously receive thee. No man living is more bound to show himself thankful in all parts and respects than thyself; who so universally showest all ingratitude. Moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of thy country, exacting grievous payments upon them, in revenge of the injuries offered thee; besides, thou hast not hitherto showed thy poor mother any courtesy.

And therefore it is not only honest, but due unto me, that without compulsion I should obtain my so just and reasonable request of thee. But since by reason I cannot persuade thee to it, to what purpose do I defer my last hope?

Shakespeare has, in giving a dramatic form to this passage, adhered very closely and properly to the text. He did not think it necessary to improve upon the truth of nature. Troilus himself is no character: The following is a very stately and spirited declamation:. The specialty of rule hath been neglected.

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order: But, when the planets, In evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues and what portents? What raging of the sea? Commotion in the winds?

O, when degree is shaken, Which is the ladder to all high designs The enterprise is sick! How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows! The bounded waters Would lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe: Strength would be lord of imbecility, And the rude son would strike his father dead: Force would be right; or rather, right and wrong Between whose endless jar Justice resides Would lose their names, and so would Justice too.

Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power Must make perforce an universal prey, And last, eat up himself. Great Agamemnon, This chaos, when degree is suffocate, Follows the choking: And this neglection of degree it is, That by a pace goes backward, in a purpose It hath to climb. To end a tale of length, Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength. He gave heaped measure, running over. This was his greatest fault. There is another passage, the speech of Ulysses to Achilles, showing him the thankless nature of popularity, which has a still greater depth of moral observation and richness of illustration than the former.

It is long, but worth the quoting. O, let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was; for beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time: The present eye praises the present object. Then marvel not, thou great and complete man, That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax; Since things in motion sooner catch the eye, Than what not stirs. The throng of images in the above lines is prodigious; and though they sometimes jostle against one another, they everywhere raise and carry on the feeling, which is metaphysically true and profound.

The debates beween the Trojan chiefs on the restoring of Helen are full of knowledge of human motives and character. Troilus enters well into the philosophy of war, when he says in answer to something that falls from Hector:. Were it not glory that we more affected, Than the performance of our heaving spleens, I would not wish a drop of Trojan blood Spent more in her defence. But, worthy Hector, She is a theme of honour and renown, A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds. The character of Hector, in the few slight indications which appear of it, is made very amiable.

His death is sublime, and shows in a striking light the mixture of barbarity and heroism of the age. The threats of Achilles are fatal; they carry their own means of execution with them. Come here about me, you my Myrmidons, Mark what I say. Strike not a stroke, but keep yourselves in breath; And when I have the bloody Hector found, Empale him with your weapons round about: In fellest manner execute your arms. Follow me, sirs, and my proceeding eye.

He then finds Hector and slays him, as if he had been hunting down a wild beast. There is something revolting as well as terrific in the ferocious coolness with which he singles out his prey: The characters of Cressida and Pandarus are very amusing and instructive. The disinterested willingness of Pandarus to serve his friend in an affair which lies next his heart is immediately brought forward. Paris, Paris is dirt to him, and I warrant Helen, to change, would give money to boot.

Her head is as light and fluttering as her heart. In Chaucer, Cressida is represented as a grave, sober, considerate personage a widow—he cannot tell her age, nor whether she has children or no who has an alternate eye to her character, her interest, and her pleasure: The difference of the manner in which the subject is treated arises perhaps less from intention, than from the different genius of the two poets.

There is no double entendre in the characters of Chaucer: In Shakespeare the ludicrous and ironical are constantly blended with the stately and the impassioned. He is as deeply implicated in the affairs of his personages as they could be themselves. He had to go a long journey with each of them, and became a kind of necessary confidant.

There is little relief, or light and shade in his pictures. The conscious smile is not seen lurking under the brow of grief or impatience. Everything with him is intense and continuous—a working out of what went before. He trifled, laughed, or wept with them as he chose. He has no prejudices for or against them; and it seems a matter of perfect indifference whether he shall be in jest or earnest.

He saw both sides of a question, the different views taken of it according to the different interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and spectator in the scene. If anything, he is too various and flexible; too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points. If Chaucer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakespeare was too volatile and heedless.

He made infinite excursions to the right and the left. Chaucer attended chiefly to the real and natural, that is, to the involuntary and inevitable impressions on the mind in given circumstances: Shakespeare exhibited also the possible and the fantastical,—not only what things are in themselves, but whatever they might seem to be, their different reflections, their endless combinations. He lent his fancy, wit, invention, to others, and borrowed their feelings in return.

Chaucer excelled in the force of habitual sentiment; Shakespeare added to it every variety of passion, every suggestion of thought or accident. Chaucer described external objects with the eye of a painter, or he might be said to have embodied them with the hand of a sculptor, every part is so thoroughly made out, and tangible: Everything in Chaucer has a downright reality. A simile or a sentiment is as if it were given in upon evidence. In Shakespeare the commonest matter-of-fact has a romantic grace about it; or seems to float with the breath of imagination in a freer element.

No one could have more depth of feeling or observation than Chaucer, but he wanted resources of invention to lay open the stores of nature or the human heart with the same radiant light that Shakespeare has done. He arrived at truth through a certain process; Shakespeare saw everything by intuition, Chaucer had great variety of power, but he could do only one thing at once. He set himself to work on a particular subject. His ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled out in a set form, in pews and compartments by themselves.

There is something hard and dry in them. We must conclude this criticism; and we will do it with a quotation or two. O, that I thought it could be in a woman; And if it can, I will presume in you, To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love, To keep her constancy in plight and youth, Out-living beauties outward, with a mind That doth renew swifter than blood decays. These passages may not seem very characteristic at first sight, though we think they are so. We will give two, that cannot be mistaken. Patroclus says to Achilles;. Troilus, addressing the God of Day on the approach of the morning that parts him from Cressida, says with much scorn:.

Go, sell it them that smalle seles grave. If nobody but Shakespeare could have written the former, nobody but Chaucer would have thought of the latter. This is a very noble play. What he has added to the history, is upon a par with it. His genius was, as it were, a match for history as well as nature, and could grapple at will with either.