"a consummation devoutly to be wished." Vincentio's mood is
half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no "more than
sleep," he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this
same play shudders away from death as from annihilation, or worse, in
words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's:

"Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot...."

A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness:
"there's nothing serious in mortality"; life's

"a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful
ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even
when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the
bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in
almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save
that "our little life is rounded with a sleep."

It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic
questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations,[1]
and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who
is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods.

[Footnote 1: One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has
been kind enough to send me an article contributed to "Colbourn's