[35] It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the First Quarto version of ‘To be or not to be,’ to ‘an everlasting judge,’ disappears in the revised versions.
[36] The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus out of character, and Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ (though that is in character), show us Shakespeare’s own mind. It has force, I think, but not compulsory force. The topics of these speeches are, in the old sense of the word, commonplaces. Shakespeare may have felt, Here is my chance to show what I can do with certain feelings and thoughts of supreme interest to men of all times and places and modes of belief. It would not follow from this that they are not ‘personal,’ but any inference to a non-acceptance of received religious ideas would be much weakened. (‘All the world’s a stage’ is a patent example of the suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)
[37] What actions in particular his conscience approved and disapproved is another question and one not relevant here.
[38] This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see, that evil is never to be forcibly resisted.
[39] I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in the Tempest Shakespeare, while he wrote them with a dramatic purpose, also thought of himself. It seems to me likely. And if so, there may have been such a thought in the words,
| And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave; |
and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great seriousness, contrasting most strangely with their context. If they had a grave and personal under-meaning it cannot have been intended for the audience, which would take the prayer as addressed to itself.
[40] It may be added that As You Like It, though idyllic, is not so falsely idyllic as some critics would make it. It is based, we may roughly say, on a contrast between court and country; but those who inhale virtue from the woodland are courtiers who bring virtue with them, and the country has its churlish masters and unkind or uncouth maidens.
[41] This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr. Harris.
[42] It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have mentioned that imaginative ‘unreality’ in love referred to on p. 326. But I do not see in Hamlet either this, or any sign that he took Ophelia for an Imogen or even a Juliet, though naturally he was less clearly aware of her deficiencies than Shakespeare.