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Characters of Shakespear's Plays is an 1817 collection of 34 essays by William Hazlitt. A theatre reviewer, Hazlitt decided to publish an analysis of William Shakespeare's characters. However, collections of reviews were rare at the time, and Hazlitt's publication of the work with his name on the title page suggests Hazlitt's popularity before publication. The book was immediately successful in both Britain and the United States, and it soon went into a second edition. The second edition was not as fortunate as the first, and he blamed its failure on a bad review by the politically motivated Quarterly Review.

Hazlitt's essays seek to challenge the traditional view of Shakespeare that was established by earlier critics including Samuel Johnson. Following Charles Lamb, Hazlitt argues for the primacy of reading the plays over watching the plays, and argues for the understanding of characters as entities within the plays instead of generic types. Of the plays, Hazlitt places particular emphasis on Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello as the four most important Shakespeare tragedies. In essays on these tragedies, along with the others, Hazlitt analyses how Shakespeare uses passion to drive characters to tragic moment and revealing aspects about humanity as he does.

Many of his essays are important in regards to Hazlitt's groundbreaking analysis of various plays. Within "Coriolanus", he argues against the idea that poetry should be used to shape humanity, as such an attribute can only bring about greater problems. The essays "The Tempest" and "The Merchant of Venice" argues that even characters traditionally seen as base or weak should be acknowledged as having a just cause. Within "King Lear", Hazlitt argues that tragedy merges the strengths and weaknesses of the characters in order to be successful while "Othello" describes how an individual's strength can easily be used against them in order to push that character towards a tragic fate. In his essay on Hamlet, Hazlitt argues that Hamlet is different from the other tragic heroes in that he acts more like a spectator than a participant in the action of the play.

Background

Hazlitt was a writer of theatrical reviews since 1813. By 1816, his reviews were becoming popular and they were carried by the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). However, Hazlitt sought to earn money through publishing books. His popularity allowed him to successfully publish and sell Characters of Shakespeare's Plays in 1817.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). Before it was printed, the book was bought by Hazlitt's friend Carew Reynell, who paid £100 for the copyright. Hazlitt worked on the promotion of the book and managed to the essay on Hamlet printed in The Times. A notice ran in the Edinburgh Review along with the future book being promoted by word of mouth during the spring of 1817.

In June, Hazlitt approached printers to buy the work for 200 guineas, and Rowland Hunter agreed to publish the work along with the booksellers Charles and James Ollier. It appeared for sale on 9 July 1817. The works openly state their authorship by Hazlitt, which verifies his popularity as a theatre critic at the time. The work was to become so successful that a second edition was soon called for while it was rare for critical reviews to be published as books.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). In 1818, the book was published in Boston by Wells and Lilly.

In total, thirty four essays on the characters of Shakespeare. The length of each review is similar to reviews in the Spectator and the style is similar to the reviews found in his book The Round Table. The Round Tables collected the essays from the Edinburgh Review under the title "Round Table" along with essays printed in the Examiner.

Essays

Hazlitt was connected to theatre and apprenticed in the theatre, and he sought to describe his view of Shakespeare. Hazlitt's essays shifted Shakespeare from being a writer of plays that were to be acted to a writer of plays that were to be read. This is pursued in a similar manner to the views of Charles Lamb, a fellow poet, and Edmund Kean, an actor, when Hazlitt stresses how the stage cannot truly bring about the imagination. The problem with the theatre was the atmosphere of the theatre itself and those who filled the theatre.

The essays are prefaced with a statement in which Hazlitt approved of the method in August Wilhelm Schlegel's Lectures on Drama. He also criticizes the view held by those like Samuel Johnson that defines Shakespeare's characters in terms of types instead of individuals. To Hazlitt, the characters are unique, and he especially emphasizes the character within Shakespeare's dramas. The purpose of the work was to study the form of tragedy, and he argued that Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello were the four main tragedies of Shakespeare.

Coriolanus

Hazlitt was affected by Edmund Burke's Reflections and commented that the work described a political system that had some advantages. As he was treating the work with such an analysis, he slowly became a Whig in political terms and began to accept the monarchial governmental form; to Hazlitt, the problem was not the monarchy but corrupt ministers taking advantage of monarchs. In various political works, Hazlitt began to turn to tradition and a view of the English past as heroic but he was unwilling to accept strong patriotic sentiment in his contemporary era. The people were supposed to keep up an imaginative continuity with the English past, but this continuity was not to be done beyond a rational manner. After Waterloo, Hazlitt distrusted an irrational patriotism even further, and this comes out in his essay about Coriolanus.

Within the essay, Hazlitt describes his view of imagination, which stood in contrast to the view put forth by Burke, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In particular, Hazlitt describes the nature of being a poet:

The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a divined and measuring faculty: it judges of things not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is monopolising 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 effects, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium Poetry is a right-royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right.

Hazlitt challenges the humanistic aspect of poetry, which is to claim that poetry is not to benefit mankind. Instead of helping, Hazlitt suggests that the madness of imagination can harm morality.

This view is the result of Hazlitt interpreting Coriolanus as if there was a hero within the play. Humans wants a hero, and do not want that hero to be a common man. However, when that hero tries to separate himself from humanity by letting others suffer as Coriolanus does, the people reject him as a hero. Hazlitt explains Coriolanus's response: "Coriolanus complains of the fickleness of the people: yet, the instant he cannot gratify his pride and obstinacy at their expense, he turns his arms against his country. If his country was not worth defending, why did he build his pride on its defense? 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 rates the people 'as if he were a God to punish, and not a man of infirmity.'"

The character Coriolanus needs to be played in an aristocratic manner, and actors failed in portraying Coriolanus correctly because of their own republican sympathies. Coriolanus responds to his banishment by society within the play by stating that he, instead, banishes society from himself. As Hazlitt was to later write in his A View of the English Stage, should be "delivered with calm, majestic self-possession, as if he remained rooted to the spot, and his least motion, word, or look, must scatter them like chaff or scum from his presence." Only with such a corrected portrayal can the allegory of the tragedy be understood, which Hazlitt defines:

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: to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes. 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.

After publication of the essay, the Quarterly Review printed a review by William Gifford in which Gifford asked, "Do we read with more pleasure of the ravages of a best of prey, than of the shepherd's pipe upon the mountain." Hazlitt, in his response titled Letter to William Gifford in 1819, said, "No, but we do read with pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey, and we do so on the principle I have stated, namely, from the sense of power abstracted from the sense of good; and it is the same principle that makes us read with admiration and reconciles us in fact to the triumphant progress of the conquerors and mighty hunters of mankind, who come to stop the shepherd's pipe upon the mountains and sweet away his listening flock."

Hazlitt's point was to suggest that poets, like the rest of mankind, were too busy admiring those in power, including Napoleon, and that this happened through abuse of the imagination. He explained this in his essay as he claims that the imagination and passions "seek to aggrandize whatever 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: to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of poetical justice".

Hamlet

To Hazlitt, Hamlet is different from the other tragic heroes of Shakespeare's plays; he does not have the passion or the will of the others. The tragedy within Hamlet is that Hamlet is different from other characters within the play. He is unable to directly act and, in Hazlitt's view, Hamlet serves more as a spectator within the tragedy instead of the main character. As such, he is transformed into a sort of commentator on tragedy as a whole. Hazlitt explains: "Hamlet is a name It is we who are Hamlet. The play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them—this is the true Hamlet."

Coleridge believes that, in Hamlet, Shakespeare wished to impress upon us the truth that action is the chief end of existence—that no faculties of intellect, however brilliant, can be considered valuable, or indeed otherwise than as misfortunes, if they withdraw us from or render us repugnant to action, and lead us to think and think of doing, until the time has elapsed when we can do anything effectually." Unlike Coleridge, Hazlitt is unwilling to determine an exact moral from literature or create a static reading of the play. However, Hazlitt's general view of Hamlet differs from Coleridge's interpretation of Hamlet only in the addition of a connection between Hamlet's meditating on potential actions to with his understanding of actors within the play. The idea of acting, to Hamlet, is a replacement of actual action. This is not a fault of Hamlet's personality, but merely the results of the condition he is forced into by the actions of others.

King Lear

King Lear, to Hazlitt, was the best of Shakespeare's plays because it was the truest tragedy. Shakespeare, as he argues within the essay, was able to describe the power of passions and the mind. The character Lear transitions from the role of a king to the lowest of men. The passion that drives the plot of the play comes from Shakespeare's use of a character's relationship within their family structure to define his characters. The characters Lear and his daughter Cordelia are separated because of their similarity, and the subplot of the character Gloucester serves to contrast this tension. Lear's other daughters, Goneril and Regan, are opposite to Lear/Cordealia, and they serve as a foil to the character Edmund. The character of the Fool within the play points out the weakness of Lear along with discussing the idea of madness, including the madness assumed by the character Edgar, that drives the final moments of the play.

Tragedy, to Hazlitt, is supposed to merge weakness and strength within the play while allowing the audience to benefit. The passion stems from the filial bond that the characters feel or don't feel, and the end results in chaos that results in both the good and the bad dying. Although this would seem to take away from the audience's ability to benefit from the play, Hazlitt argues: "The concluding events are sad, painfully sad; but their pathos is extreme. The oppression of the feelings is relieved by the very interest we take in the misfortunes of others, and by the reflections to which they give." Hazlitt, in a similar manner to Lamb, continues with a statement of disapproval for the revision of the play in which there is a happier ending. Unlike Lamb, Hazlitt argues that the power of the ending comes from despair within the original lines and not from any redemption that Lear may have sought in his final moments.

Macbeth

Hazlitt's essay on Macbeth is the first on a Shakespeare tragedy in the series of essays and discusses his views on character development. Before Hazlitt, Macbeth was seen as a crude play that lacked credibility because of the contradictions in Macbeth's character. Hazlitt, to the contrary, argues "Macbeth in Shakespear no more loses his identity of character in the fluctuations of fortune or the storm of passion, than Macbeth in himself would have lost the identity of his person." The changes in Macbeth's character, as Hazlitt explains, are the result of a chaotic world that results in his feelings of anxiety. Macbeth's imagination pushes him towards the point of tragedy, and he murders Duncan in order to achieve a heroic destiny. However, Macbeth recognizes with horror what he actually did.

Lady Macbeth contrasts with Macbeth as she is firm in the actions as her husband reacted against the murder. However, the characters switch roles, as Hazlitt explains, " becomes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt and he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, while she for want of the same stimulus of action goes mad and dies. Macbeth endeavors to escape from reflection on his crimes by repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the meditation of future mischief." The audience is supposed to sympathise with Macbeth, because his desires for greatness caused his destruction. The tragedy is one of the soul, and Macbeth serves as the representative of the world around him.

As for the world of the play, Hazlitt explains that "It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures, which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings." This chaos goes against the 18th-century belief in the unity of interest because the play is unified not from the external components of the play but the internal aspects of the characters. The tragedy, then, is transformed into a tragedy not of the characters but of imagination itself.

The Merchant of Venice

Taking a skeptical approach, Hazlitt analyzes the character Shylock from The Merchant of Venice in a manner that does not seek to describe a set interpretation of the play. He is unwilling to look for a resolution as he describes his sympathy for Shylock:

Shylock is a good hater; 'a man no less sinned against than sinning.' If he carries his revenge too far, yet he has strong grounds for 'the lodge hate he bears Anthonio,' which he explains with equal force of eloquence and reason. He seems the depositary of the vengeance of his race; and though the long habit of brooding over daily insults and injuries has crusted over his temper with inveterate misanthropy, and hardened him against the contempt of mankind, this adds but little to the triumphant pretensions of his enemies. There is a strong, quick, and deep sense of justice mixed up with the gall and bitterness of his resentment The desire of revenge is almost inseparable from the sen of wrong; and we can hardly help sympathising with the proud spirit, hide beneath his 'Jewish gaberdine,' stung to madness by repeated undeserved provocations, and labouring to throw off the load of obloquy and oppression heaped upon him and all his tribe by one desperate act of 'lawful' revenge, till the ferociousness of the means by which he is to execute his purpose, and the pertinacity with which he adheres to it, turns us against him; but even at last, when disappointed of the sanguinary revenge with which he had glutted his hopes, and exposed to beggary and contempt by the letter of the law on which he had insisted with so little remorse, we pity him, and think him hardly deal t with by his judges.

Portrayals previous to Hazlitt's essay emphasized only the bad aspects of Shylock, and audiences applauded this depiction. Hazlitt's split from the traditional view was, in part, from Kean's portrayal of Shylock in 1814. Kean portrayed Shylock with vigor and strength, which contradicted the weaker version played by other actors. When Hazlitt's view in praise of Kean's portrayal differed from the views of others, Hazlitt blamed the difference on his viewing the play as the public viewed it. From Hazlitt's perspective in watching the play up close, he was able to measure the facial expressions which shined on the true passion of Kean's version. Thus, Hazlitt believed that Shylock was serious about revenge and true to himself, a view that Hazlitt declared in his early reviews of Kean's performance up until the publication of Characters of Shakespear's Plays.

The immediate affect of Hazlitt's early argument in support of Kean's portrayal was for audiences to find the traditional depiction of Shylock intolerable and lacking in power. Before the publication of Characters of Shakespear's Plays, reviewers began to agree with Hazlitt's statements that Shylock was a respectable figure. Other critics argue that the character of Shylock is that of an outsider that is separated from society, and that Jewish Shylock represents an older form of justice while the character Portia argues for a newer form based on mercy. To these critics, Shylock must be removed in order to allow for society to attain a Christian form of peace. However, Hazlitt believes such interpretations are limited and that Shylock's beliefs must be seen as sincere and true, and he cannot be viewed merely as a villain.

Othello

Hazlitt compares Othello with Macbeth in order to describe Othello as the more human of the tragedies. Hazlitt argues, "In Macbeth there is a violent struggle between opposite feelings, between ambition and the stings of conscience, almost from first to last: in Othello, the doubtful conflict between contrary passions, though dreadful, continues only for a short time, and the chief interest is excited by the alternate ascendancy of different passions, by the entire and unforeseen change from the fondest love and most unbounded confidence to the tortures of jealousy and the madness of hatred." A human tragedy, in Hazllit's terms, emphasizes not contrast but a change in feelings.

Great tragedy, to Hazlitt, contains what Hazlitt calls a "sense of power" that operates through the imagination. Unlike classical theatre characters, Shakespeare's characters retained a vulnerability that made them human. These characters would be subdued by either their passions or by misfortune within the plays, and their desire for power is motivated by their weakness. This creates a paradox in which the strengths and weaknesses of Shakespeare's characters, as common to human nature, are interconnected.

Hazlitt contradicts the belief of those that would characterize Othello as rash and aggressive. Instead, Othello acts calmly, and he is only drawn to act in an aggressive manner because he is controlled by his passions. Othello's strength and greatness become his weakness, as Iago is able to manipulate Othello. It is not Othello's natural character to act out of revenge; he is merely drawn into the situation. Hazlitt declares that,

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. It is in working his noble nature up to this extremity through rapid but gradual transitions, in raising passion to its height from the smallest beginnings and in spite of all obstacles, in painting the expiring conflict between love and hatred, tenderness and resentment, jealousy and remorse, in unfolding the strength and the weakness of our nature, in uniting sublimity of thought with the anguish of the keenest woe, in putting in motion the various impulses that agitate this our mortal being, and at last blending them in that noble tide of deep and sustained passion, impetuous but majectic that Shakespeare has shewn the master of his genius and of his power over the human heart.

There is irony in Othello transitioning from nobility to beastliness within the third act of Othello. Iago operates as the creator of this irony. He is able to use truth and knowledge as a to make Othello suspicious of Desdemona's intentions in pursuing Othello, a suspicion that Hazlitt, unlike other 19th-century Shakespeare critics, believes was correct. However, Hazlitt only stated such suspicions in an earlier Examiner essay and he retracted his suspicions of Desdemona by the time he wrote Characters of Shakespear's Plays.

Within Shakespeare, the tormentors and tormented contain the same sense of power. This is similar to the the way poetry is conceived, and the poet receives pleasure in creating both a character that torments and is tormented. As such, Iago represents artists within the play. If Shakespeare truly intended Iago to be interpreted as Hazlitt argues, then Shakespeare is a Romantic poet. However, it is possible that Hazlitt did not intend to suggest Iago represents art within the essay. Instead, Hazlitt refused to connect the characters within the plays to Shakespeare as a poet.

The Tempest

On 9 February 1818, The Courier printed a notice of a lecture held by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The lecture claims, "The character of Caliban, as an original and caricature of Jacobinism, so fully illustrated at Paris during the French Revolution, he described in a vigorous and lively manner, exciting repeated burst of applause That play and The Tempest were the chief objects of his discourse, into which, however, he introduced a great variety of new and striking remarks, not confined to any particular play. As, for instance, he said, wherever Shakspeare had drawn a character addicted to sneering, and contempt for the merits of others, that character was sure to be a villain."

Immediately, Hazlitt submitted a reply to The Yellow Dwarf and it was printed 14 February: "Caliban is so far from being a prototype of modern Jacobinism, that he is strictly the legitimate sovereign of the isle, and Prospero and the rest are usurpers, who have ousted him from his hereditary jurisdiction by superiority of talent and knowledge that the superior beauty and accomplishments of Ferdinand and Miranda could no more be opposed to the legitimate claims of this deformed and loathsome monster, than the beauty and intellect of the Bonaparte family can be opposed to the bloated and ricketty minds and bodies of the Bourbons, cast, as they are, in true Jus Divinum mould! This is gross. Why does Mr. Coleridge provoke us to write as great nonsense as he talks?"

In Hazlitt's essay dealing with The Tempest, he sought to discuss Caliban's true character. To Hazlitt, Caliban's language is the most poetic and natural while the characters Antonio and Sebastian are coarse. Caliban's cause is also just and the play involving this theme even in scenes that lack him as an active character. As a character, he is also essential for the character Ariel to exist within the play, and the two are able to have a relationship that is deeply connected to all of humanity. As Hazlitt explains, "Shakespear has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban the elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound them in the unearthly mould of Ariel. Nothing was ever more finely conceived than this contrast between the material and the spiritual, the gross and delicate. Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified."

Caliban, by existing, forces the audience to question the role of government, justice, and society. Although Coleridge viewed Caliban as representing uncivilized man that seeks to spread anarchy, Hazlitt believed that Caliban represented the common individual and puts forth truth in coarse manner, and he is a character that demands to have what he deserves. Hazlitt's defense of Caliban continued in multiple essays, including "What Is the People?" and "On Vulgarity and Affectation".

Others

In the essay on "Antony and Cleopatra", Hazlitt argues that failure within a stage production of a play is the inability of the production to capture the passion within Shakespeare's plays. The only way to truly witness the passion within the works is to read the plays and use the imagination to realize what is happening. Only through the imagination can someone attain a perspective of the actions, which, as Hazlitt argues on Antony and Cleopatra, "The jealous attention which has been paid to the unities both of time and place has taken away the principle of perspective in the drama, and all the interest which objects derive from distance, from contrast, from privation, from change of fortune, from long-cherished passion".

Hazlitt uses the essay to argue that Shakespeare's audience must abandon the idea of the unities that was common to 18th-century theatre. In doing so, he does not abandon the theatre as a whole and argue only for reading the works. Instead, Hazlitt emphasizes the use of the imagination even in a theatrical production of plays.

Regarding Cymbeline, Hazlitt emphasized the power of Shakespeare in creating characters that exist as individuals. He also believed that their individuality came out in the contrast with other characters. Within the play, as Hazlitt argues, "there is not only the utmost keeping in each separate character; but in the casting of the different parts, and their relation to one another, there is an affinity and a harmony, like what we may observe in the gradation of color in a picture."

Themes

Hazlitt, having written many reviews on the theatre in general, connected many of his ideas within his theatre criticism to his essays on Shakespeare. Hazlitt believed that acting itself was artificial and that many actors failed at being true to Shakespeare, but he was approving of the manner in which Kean held himself on stage. What made Kean's acting worthwhile to Hazlitt was Kean's ability to portray Shakespeare's characters, especially Richard III. However, Kean's acting style was in the minority, and the theatre public, to Hazlitt, was too distant from the text of Shakespeare's plays to understand how the characters are supposed to be portrayed.

Unfortunately for Kean, his take on individual characters was not always correct in Hazlitt's eyes. When some of Kean's portrayals failed, Hazlitt blamed it on a lack of imagination. In order to correct this, Hazlitt provided interpretations of how the characters should be understood. As such, Hazlitt emphasizes the psychological aspects of characters while attacking the view held by Johnson that places the characters as personality types instead of unique individuals. Only through understanding the characters can Shakespeare's power as a playwright be understood. Hazlitt's literary theory within the essays emphasizes that theatre's purpose is to teach mankind about morality and humanity, and it can only do so through tragedy and the pathos that comes from tragedy. Shakespeare, as a master playwright, understood this purpose of tragedy.

What constitutes the power of Shakespeare's plays is the way Shakespeare relies on reality and nature in his plays. The only way for Shakespeare to be great at theatre was for him to master an understanding of nature. This is achieved through Shakespeare's use of the imagination in order to unify each play within itself and create a realistic world. As such, every component of the world within the plays is an unique individual, and each character exists as independent from every other character. The characters interact and are connected, but within the drama their own personalities come out. In Hazlitt's theory, the contrast of characters was very important as Hazlitt explains: "The striking and powerful contrasts in which Shakespeare abounds could not escape observation; but the use he makes makes of the principle of analogy to reconcile the greatest diversities of character and to maintain a continuity of feeling throughout, has not been sufficiently attended to."

Shakespeare's characters, according to Hazlitt, are dramatic based. The characters in a work written by someone like Chaucer are based on the narrative. The separation between the two types is a fixed type of character in Chaucer as opposed to a fluid character that changes based on the situation. Shakespeare's characters do have a type of essence that makes up their general disposition, but this disposition does not control the personality of the characters. Consistency of character results from a constant in the evolution of the characters and how they respond to situations. This consistency makes it impossible for character to separate their feelings from their identity, and it allows the characters to attain a kind of humanity. In arguing this view, Hazlitt contradicts the traditional view of theatre characters held during the 18th century.

An important component of Hazlitt's theory on characters is his emphasis on the term passion and passion's effect on Shakespeare's characters. Hazlitt's understanding of the term is not limited to a feeling within characters. Instead, the passions of each character creates a force that drive individual characters into conflict with each other. Actors fail at bringing Shakespeare to the stage successfully because they fail to capture this passion. However, the fault is not primarily theirs but the fact that only reading, and not watching, the plays is how the imagination can fully recognize the passion.

Critical response

The book was very successful and sold all of its copies by the sixth week, and the American edition of the work helped build Hazlitt's reputation overseas. Although most of the early reviews favoured the work, the Quarterly Review attacked Hazlitt's treatment of Henry VIII in a 9 June 1818 review following the second edition of Characters of Shakespear's Plays. The Tory-inclined journal criticized the work because it did not accept Hazlitt's negative portrayal of the king. The negative review hurt sales and Hazlitt blamed William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review: "My book sold well till that review came out. I had just prepared a second edition but then the Quarterly told the public that I was a fool and a dunce; and more, that I was an evil-disposed person; and the public, supposing Gifford to know best, confessed it had been a great ass to be pleased where it ought not to be, and the sale completely stopped."

Similarly, the British Critic, of the same political disposition as the Quarterly Review, argues "Prejudice is always disgusting, political prejudices peculiarly so; but to open a work of taste with the expectation of being able to indulge in the pleasures of the imagination, and to find it stuffed with dull, common-place, Jacobin declamation and then to be caught, entrapped, surprised into reading tirades of democratic trash, fit for the columns of a Sunday newspaper is a disappointment too severe not to irritate the sufferer beyond the bounds of patience."

Twentieth-century critic John Kinnaird describes Hazlitt's discussion of the poetic imagination in his essay on Coriolanus as containing "perhaps the most original, and surely the most heretical, idea in the entire range of his criticism. Indeed, there is good reason to approach this idea with gingerly caution: for not only does the main thrust of its argument run counter to Hazlitt's own earlier doctrine but it seems even to challenge one of the sacred articles of humanist faith since the Renaissance—belief in the beneficence of poetry". David Bromwich agrees that "the passage on Coriolanus extraordinary" in its implications and that "no such passage will be found in the whole range of Coleridge's criticism".

Later, Duncan Wu declares the importance of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays in marking Hazlitt as a serious critic, "If The Round Table announced the arrival of a new talent, here was evidence that it was more than a flash in the pan Characters played to Hazlitt's strength—to articulate the motivations and morality of individuals in Shakespeare. While Hazlitt was a shrewd psychologist, his judgements come from the viscera Here was a new approach responsive to the Romantic fascination with psychology. And therein lies the key to Hazlitt's modernity. It was a perspective that shocked and stimulated those who read it."

Notes

1. ^ Wu 2008 p. 184
2. ^ Wu 2008 p. 211
3. Wu 2008 p. 212
4. Kinnaird 1978 p. 173
5. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 166–167
6. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 173–176
7. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 108–110
8. Kinnaird 1978 p. 110
9. Hazlitt 1854 p. 53–54
10. Kinnaird 1979 p. 111
11. Bromwich 1999 pp. 315–317
12. Hazlitt 1854 p. 55
13. Bromwich 1999 pp. 317–318
14. Hazlitt 1854 p. 252
15. Bromwich 1999 pp. 318–319
16. Hazlitt 1906 p. 57
17. ^ Kinnaird 1979 qtd. p. 111
18. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 111–112
19. Kinnaird 1978 qtd. p. 112
20. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 193–191
21. Hazlitt 1906 pp. 79–80
22. Coleridge 1987 p. 458
23. Bromwich 1999 pp. 268–270
24. ^ Kinnaird 1978 p. 190
25. Bromwich 1999 pp. 194–195
26. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 189–191
27. Hazlitt 1906 p. 134
28. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 189–191
29. Kinnaird 1978 p. 181
30. Hazlitt 1906 p. 20
31. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 181–182
32. Kinnaird 1978 p. 182
33. Hazlitt 1906 pp. 21–22
34. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 182–183
35. Hazlitt 1906 p. 18
36. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 183–185
37. Bromwich 1999 p. 4–5
38. Hazlitt 1906 pp. 206–207
39. Bromwich 1999 pp. 402–404
40. Bromwich 1999 pp. 403–405
41. ^ Kinnaird 1978 p. 185
42. Hazlitt 1906 p. 34
43. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 185–186
44. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 186–187
45. Hazlitt 1906 p. 35
46. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 187–189
47. Bromwich 1999 pp. 136–137
48. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 188–189
49. Bromwich 1999 pp. 135–136
50. Bromwich 1999 p. 270
51. Coleridge 1987 p. 124
52. Bromwich 1999 p. 271
53. Hazlitt 1904 p. 417
54. Bromwich 1999 pp. 271–272
55. Hazlitt 1906 p. 92
56. Bromwich 1999 pp. 273–2742
57. Kinnaird 1978 p. 180
58. Hazlitt 1906 p. 77
59. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 180–181
60. Kinnaird 1978 p. 177
61. ^ Hazlitt 1906 p. 7
62. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 171–173
63. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 173–176
64. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 176–177
65. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 178–179
66. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 179–180
67. Wu 2008 pp. 212–213, 246
68. Hazlitt 1867 qtd p. 229
69. Wu 2008 p. 212
70. The British Critic 1818 p. 19
71. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 110–111.
72. Bromwich 1999 pp. 314, 232.
73. Wu 2008 pp. 211–212

References

• Anonymous. Review "Hazlitt's Characters of Shakspeare's Plays", The British Critic. Volume IX (July–December 1818): 15–22
• Bromwich, David. Hazlitt: Mind of a Critic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Lectures 1818-1819: On Literature II. London: Routledge, 1987.
• Hazlitt, William. Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespear's Plays. London: J. M. Dent, 1906.
• Hazlitt, William. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt: Fugitive Writings. London: J. M. Dent, 1904.
• Hazlitt, William. Criticisms and Dramatic Essays of the English Stage. London: G. Routledge, 1854.
• Hazlitt, W. Carew. Memoirs of William Hazlitt Vol 1. London: Richard Bentley, 1867.
• Kinnaird, John. William Hazlitt: Critic of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
• Wu, Duncan. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

• 1817 books
• English drama
• English non-fiction literature
• William Shakespeare plays