page_title: Characters of Shakespear's Plays
section_title: Tragedies
hierarchical_section_title: Characters of Shakespear's Plays / Essays / Others / Tragedies
caption_attribution_description: English: Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene II, engraving by Luigi Schiavonetti after a painting by Angelica Kauffmann. In Kaufmann's own words: "[Troilus] sees his wife in loving discourse with Diomedes and he wants to rush into the tent to catch them by surprise, but Ulysses and the other keep him back by force". Français&#160;: Troïlus et Cressida, Acte V, Scène 2, une gravure de Luigi Schiavonetti, d'après un tableau d'Angelica Kauffmann. Commentaire de la peintre sur son tableau «&#160;Troïlus voit sa femme échangeant des mots d'amour avec Diomède. Il veut entrer dans la tente pour les surprendre, mais Ulysse et d'autres l'en empêchent par la force.&#160;».
context_page_description: Characters of Shakespear's Plays is an 1817 book of criticism of Shakespeare's plays, written by early nineteenth century English essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt. Composed in reaction to the neoclassical approach to Shakespeare's plays typified by Samuel Johnson, it was among the first English-language studies of Shakespeare's plays to follow the manner of German critic August Wilhelm Schlegel, and, with the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, paved the way for the increased appreciation of Shakespeare's genius that was characteristic of later nineteenth-century criticism. It was also the first book to cover all of Shakespeare's plays, intended as a guide for the general reader.
  Then becoming known as a theatre critic, Hazlitt had been focusing increasingly on drama as literature, contributing miscellaneous literary criticism to various journals, including the prestigious Edinburgh Review. This was the first of his book-length literary studies. The plays, the thirty-five that Hazlitt considered to be genuine, are covered in thirty-two chapters, with new material added to passages reworked from periodical articles and reviews.
context_section_description: Hazlitt believed that because tragedy engages our emotions most profoundly, it is the greatest kind of drama. Of the tragedies based on Greek and Roman history, he ranked Julius Caesar beneath the other Roman tragedies, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. But, as elsewhere, he expresses admiration for the fine discrimination of character, the depiction of "the manners of the common people, and the jealousies and heart-burnings of the different factions" in Julius Caesar.
  In Antony and Cleopatra, "Shakespear's genius has spread over the whole play a richness like the overflowing of the Nile". Overall, this play "presents a fine picture of Roman pride and Eastern magnificence: and in the struggle between the two, the empire of the world seems suspended, 'like the swan's down feather,/That stands upon the swell at full of tide,/And neither way inclines.'"
  Timon of Athens, to Hazlitt "as much a satire as a play", seemed to him "to be written with as intense a feeling of his subject as any one play of Shakespear" and "is the only play of our author in which spleen is the predominant feeling of the mind."
  A focal point of Hazlitt's account of Troilus and Cressida is a comparison of the characterisation in this play and that in Chaucer's poem Troilus and Criseyde (one of Shakespeare's sources). Chaucer's characters are full and well developed; but Chaucer unfolded each character in itself, one at a time. Shakespeare displayed characters as they see themselves as well as how others see them, and showed the effects each has on the others. Shakespeare's characters were so distinctive that it is as if each were expressed by a distinct "faculty" of his mind; and, in effect, these faculties could be considered as showing "excessive sociability", notable for "how they gossiped and compared notes together." Twentieth-century critic Arthur Eastman thought that, although these remarks did insufficient justice to Chaucer, they were particularly original in revealing "the sophisticated genius of Shakespeare."
  For Hazlitt, the essence of Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare's portrayal of the love that comes with "the ripening of the youthful blood"; and with that love the imagination of the youthful lovers is stirred to dwell not so much on present pleasure but "on all the pleasures they had not experienced. All that was to come of life was theirs. [...] Their hopes were of air, their desires of fire." In many beautiful poetic passages, "the feelings of youth and of the spring are [...] blended together like the breath of opening flowers." Assessing the character of the play as a whole, he states: "This play presents a beautiful coup-d'oeil of the progress of human life. In thought it occupies years, and embraces the circle of the affections from childhood to old age."
caption: Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene II (1795)
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