possible effect in making Shakespear think that his public would stand
anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation
of the faults of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that
Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady "cankered and took on proud
flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness." In
Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried
once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is
thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with
theoretical morality, actual law and administration with abstract
justice, and so forth. But Shakespear's perception of the fact that
all men, judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and
by which they justify their punishment of others, are fools and
scoundrels, does not date from the Dark Lady complication: he seems
to have been born with it. If in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer
Night's Dream the persons of the drama are not quite so ready for
treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to
mention the procession of ruffians who pass through the latest plays)
it is certainly not because they have any more regard for law or
religion. There is only one place in Shakespear's plays where the
sense of shame is used as a human attribute; and that is where Hamlet
is ashamed, not of anything he himself has done, but of his mother's
relations with his uncle. This scene is an unnatural one: the son's
reproaches to his mother, even the fact of his being able to discuss
the subject with her, is more repulsive than her relations with her
deceased husband's brother.

Here, too, Shakespear betrays for once his religious sense by making
Hamlet, in his agony of shame, declare that his mother's conduct makes
"sweet religion a rhapsody of words." But for that passage we might
almost suppose that the feeling of Sunday morning in the country which