in real life, then suddenly Harry
turns upon Falstaff, or Olivia on Sir Toby, and vice is called by its
right name.

And as life awakens and reality enters, either the grace or the
sentiment or the passion of unworldliness is more and more distinctly
present. And in the tragedies even the pleasant vices are seen as part
of a world-wide corruption that wrongs, debases, and betrays.
Shakespeare has painted every phase of antagonism to the world, from the
pensive aloofness of Antonio to the impassioned misanthropy of Timon.
Every excited feeling emits light into the dark places of the earth, and
every suffering is a revelation of more than its own injury. It is as if
the soul, fully aroused, became aware by its own light of the oppression
and injustice abroad upon the earth.

But there is a more vague and general disaffection to the world than is
the outcome of any particular experience. It may be called a spiritual
discontent which few have felt as a passion, but many have known as a
mood: when that average goodness of human nature which we have found so
companionable, and to which we have so pleasantly adapted ourselves,
becomes "very tolerable and not to be endured;" when the world seems to
be made of our vices, and our virtues seem to be looking on, or if they
enter into the fray are too tame and conventional for the selfish fire
and unscrupulous industry of their rivals; and when to our excited
sensibility there is a taint in the moral atmosphere, and we long to
escape if only to breathe more freely. This is more than a mood with
Shakespeare, and is present in those slight but distinctive touches that
mark the unconscious intrusion of character in an artist's work; and is
frankly confessed in one of his Sonnets:---

"Tired with all these; for restful death I cry;
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing drest in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn.....
Tired with all these, from, these would I be gone."

We find, then, scattered through the dramas of Shakespeare a
disaffection to the world as deep-grained as it is comprehensive; and we
find the various elements of it--the contempt of fortune, the ideal
virtue, the disinterested passion, the mysticism, the fellowship with
the oppressed, the distaste of the world's enjoyment and the weariness
of its burden--concentrated in Hamlet for full and exhaustive study;
thus presenting what I have called the interior or fundamental drama o