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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. As such, he was able to publish Characters of Shakespeare's Plays as authored by William Hazlitt in 1817 and 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.

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 The Round Table, a work that was also published in 1817.

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 Chalres 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 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.

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 langauge 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 divinded 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.

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, was 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".

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."

Critical response

John Kinnaird describes Hazlitt's discussion of poets 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".

Notes

1. Kinnaird 1978 p. 166
2. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 166–167
3. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 173–174
4. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 108–110
5. Kinnaird 1978 p. 110
6. Kinnaird 1979 qtd. p. 110
7. Kinnaird 1979 p. 111
8. ^ Kinnaird 1979 qtd. p. 111
9. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 111–112
10. Kinnaird 1978 qtd. p. 112
11. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 171–173
12. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 173–176
13. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 176–176
14. Hazlitt 1906 p. 7
15. Kinnaird 1978 pp. 110–111

References

• Hazlitt, William. Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespear's Plays. London: J. M. Dent, 1906.
• 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.