ontains a large
proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of
early work. He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his
blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of
its feet. _Romeo and Juliet_ is also unique, among his tragedies, in
this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as
in the Greek drama. It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic
conclusions from within, through character, rather than through
external chances. This is true of all the great tragedies of his
middle life, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Lear_, _Macbeth_, in every one of
which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the
hero. This is so, in a special sense, in _Hamlet_, the subtlest of all
Shakspere's plays, and if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one
which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds. It is
observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central figure,
but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the
attention upon a single character. This difference is seen, even in
the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their titles from
their heroes, the comedies never.

Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned, were
the three Roman plays, _Julius Caesar_, _Coriolanus_, and _Antony and
Cleopatra_. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the
plot of none of his plays, but took {117} material that he found at
hand. In these Roman tragedies, he followed Plutarch closely, and yet,
even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real
creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from
some Italian novelist. It is most instructive to compare _Julius
Caesar_ with Ben Jonson's _Catiline and Sejanus_. Jonson was careful
not to go beyond his text. In _Catiline_ he translates almost
literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline.
Sejanus is a mosaic of passages, from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is
none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play. Having grasped the
conception of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as
Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every
word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously
with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no
further warrant for it than Shakspere's own. _Timon of Athens_ is the
l