st
important requirements for good technique is that everything shall be
true to life. When Anne, for the sake of a little bare-faced flattery,
marries a man whom she loathes, we feel that no real woman would have
done this. From that moment Anne becomes a mere paper automaton to us,
and we can no longer be interested in her as we would in a living
woman. The motivation, as it is called, the art of showing adequately
why every person should act as he or she does, is sadly lacking.

Moving onward a few years, we find marked improvement in _I Henry IV_.
It is indeed not technically perfect,--in fact, Shakespeare in the
chronicle play never attained what seems to modern students technical
perfection,--but its minor defects are thrown into shadow by its
splendid virtues. The three stories of Hotspur, the King, and the
Falstaff group, though partially united by their common connection with
Prince Hal, do not blend together as perfectly as the different plots
in _The Merchant of Venice_, and there is some truth in the idea that
the play has four heroes instead of one. But in spite of this, its
general impression as a great panorama of English life is remarkably
clear and delightful; and it improves on _Richard III_ in its swift
succession of incident, and vastly surpasses it in the lifelike truth
of its motivation.

In the middle of his career Shakespeare dropped {100} the chronicle
play, and instead began the writing of tragedies proper. He carried
into this, however, the lessons learned from his experience with
histories, and continued to improve. _Julius Caesar_ marks the
transition from chronicle play to tragedy. The lack of close
connection between the third and fourth acts and the absence of one
central hero are characteristic defects of the chronicle play which the
dramatist had not yet outgrown. _Hamlet_, coming next, has shaken off
all the lingering relics of the older type. Of its general excellence
there is no need to speak. Yet even in _Hamlet_ the action at times
halts and becomes disjointed. _Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are great plays,
the latter, perhaps, the greatest of all plays; but, transfigured as
they are by genius, they show that in the difficult problem of tragic
technique the author was learning still. At the age of forty,
approximately, and a year or two after _Hamlet_, Shakespeare produced
_Othello_, the most perfect, although not necessarily the greatest, of
all his great tragedies. It is