Orlando describes so perfectly in As You Like It was the beginning and
end of Shakespear's notion of religion. I say almost, because
Isabella in Measure for Measure has religious charm, in spite of the
conventional theatrical assumption that female religion means an
inhumanly ferocious chastity. But for the most part Shakespear
differentiates his heroes from his villains much more by what they do
than by what they are. Don John in Much Ado is a true villain: a man
with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of any use in
a leading part; and when we come to the great villains like Macbeth,
we find, as Mr Harris points out, that they are precisely identical
with the heroes: Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing
murders and engaging in hand-to-hand combats. And Hamlet, who does
not dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always
apologizing because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds, to
his great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it. "It
cannot be," he says, "but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make
oppression bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all the region
kites with this slave's offal." Really one is tempted to suspect that
when Shylock asks "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" he is
expressing the natural and proper sentiments of the human race as
Shakespear understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.



Gaiety of Genius

In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism
as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There
is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the
whole weight of the world's misery without blenching. There is a