And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad.
Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds
are typical axioms in his philosophy of life. And the nearest approaches he has given us to the saintly type of character are the sentimental pietists, Henry VI. and Richard II., both of whom are failures, and border closely on moral imbecility. On the spiritual and moral efficacy of faith, he has nowhere laid stress. In his innumerable reflections on life and man, in his maxims and precepts, there is, as a rule, scarcely any flavour of Christian theology. They are just such as might be expected from a pure rationalist. Such is the philosophy of Hamlet, of Jacques, of the Duke in Measure for Measure, and of Prospero. Even Friar Laurence, though an ecclesiastic, reasons and advises just as a Stoic philosopher might have done. The friars in Much Ado about Nothing, and in Measure for Measure, the Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II., and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in Henry IV. and Henry V., and Cardinal Beaufort in Henry VI., act and speak like mere men of the world. A bulky volume would scarcely sum up the ethical and political reflections scattered up and down his plays; a few pages would comprise all that could be put down as exclusively theological. This complete subordination of the theological element to the ethical is the more conspicuous when we compare his dramas with the Homeric Epics, and with the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles.
And yet if a thoughtful person, after going attentively through the thirty-six plays, were asked what the prevailing impression made on him was, he would probably reply the profound reverence which Shakespeare shows universally for religion—his deep sense of the mysterious relation which exists between God and man. We feel that his silence on transcendental subjects springs not from indifference, but from awe. The remarkable words which he places in the mouth of Lafeu, in All's Well that Ends Well (Act II. 3), merely sum up what we hear sotto voce in various forms of expression throughout his dramas; "we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear." And the same reverence and humility find a voice in the verses in which, in all probability, he took leave of the world of active life.
Now my charms are all overthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint.
... Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,