He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon_, _Macbeth_, is correct, these
tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and _King Lear_ and
_Timon_ lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the
earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' _Measure for Measure_ and _Troilus
and Cressida_, and perhaps _All's Well_. But about these comedies there
is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little
mirth; in _Measure for Measure_ perhaps, certainly in _Troilus and
Cressida_, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an
intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With _Macbeth_
perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed,
the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity
which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth
almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these
facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the
plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was
simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or
even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the
arrival and progress of middle age.
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