ruin of domestic relations, that it was the only expedient for the two, favoured moreover by a holy man, and offering a prospect of peace between the discordant houses. Here on the contrary, the peace of a family was disturbed, and the happiness and life of a father destroyed. If even there the secret union bore its bitter fruit, if there wild joy had a wild end, here also according to the words of the demon-like Iago, the violent commencement must have an answerable sequestration. Not alone did Othello intend, but the poet intended also that the death of Desdemona should be brought as a sacrifice, and that of Othello as an atonement, to the manes of the broken-hearted father. The tidings of this death no longer reach Desdemona. "I am glad thy father's dead", says the uncle who brings the tidings, otherwise the fate of his child "would do him a desperate turn". But this sentence is also true in its reverse sense. If Desdemona had lived to know it, not the death of her father, but the cause of his death would have been an experience to her just as fearfully undeceiving, as the lost confidence of Othello. For just as she had no foreboding of this, she had none also of the effect which her independent step had had upon her father. The same nature and qualities were at work in her, when she gave the fatal blow to the life of her father, and when she gave occasion for the suspicion of her husband. The same innocence of heart, the same lack of suspicion, the same inability to intend any harm to any one, allowed no touch of bashfulness to appear in her in the first instance before the public council, and placed in her lips subsequently the dangerous intercession on behalf of Cassio. In both cases

she intended to do right and good, and from the very purity of her consciousness arose her misinterpreted actions. Like Othello, like Romeo and Juliet, she falls a sacrifice to her own nature, and not to the law of any arbitrary and unjust moral statute; to a nature, which in the strength of that directness and originality, which interests us in all, oversteps the limits of social custom, unites guilt and innocence in strange combination, which draws death as a punishment upon itself, and endures death like a triumph, a nature, which divides our feelings between admiration and pity. It seems as if here perfect satisfaction was afforded to all the demands of tragedy. It seems also, that this performance is consistent with the freest moral view. For the poet, by this conclusion, has not once for all condemned every unequal marriage, nor every secret union, just as little as in Romeo he has condemned all passionate love. With such partiality, Shakespeare has never and nowhere meditated upon moral problems. Otherwise, in All's Well that Ends Well he would not have carried an unequal marriage to a prosperous end through so many difficulties; he would not in Cymbeline have suffered a secret union to turn out for good, nor in the Merchant of Venice would he have justified the abduction of a child and a self-willed marriage. Not the letter of the law, but the circumstances. and nature of men, are in the poet's wise opinion the spring from which good and evil, happiness and unhappiness arise. These furnish also the line of conduct, according to which both must be measured. In proportion to the circumstance and nature of the man, evil often becomes a source of good, and good a source of evil, apparent hap

piness a misfortune, and misfortune a happiness. And this is with conscious intention observed and carried out in this play, in which the noble Desdemona falls into sin through innocence and goodness, and by a sinful lie commits the most beautiful act of forgiveness.

HAMLET.

The story of Hamlet originally appeared in a clumsy form in Saxo Grammaticus; it was afterwards treated more gracefully in Belleforest's Tales (1564), and from this was taken the English edition of "the Hystorie of Hamblet", the earliest known impression of which was in 1608. According to this fable, Horvendile was killed by his brother Fengon, who took possession of his dominions and of his wife Geruth. The feigned madness of Hamlet is the central point of the story, and his ambiguous, ingenious, yet insane propositions were, to a Scandinavian taste, the main charm of the narrative, which concludes with Hamlet's successful revenge and his elevation to the throne. The scene, in which Hamlet endeavours to recall his mother to the path of virtue, murdering the listening spy, and the snare, which he lays for the ambassadors sent to England, are the only touches, which could guide Shakespeare in his own different comprehension and treatment of the story. The characters of Laertes and Ophelia are wanting in the original; utterly unconnected with the main action there is a maiden, brought up with Hamlet and beloved by him, whose last affection he gains, conjuring her to hold this secret in the

profoundest silence. Poor, crude, and clumsy, the one touch is a type of the whole story. To no other play of Shake speare's, is there a source of such rude deformity assigned, and just from it has he formed this tragedy, which, wherever the poet's name is mentioned, comes first to remembrance; which appears to unite the most contradictory points of his art and genius; which surpasses in originality every other of his dramas, and is yet so popular and so free from all artifice. It is a text from nature of truest life, and therefore a mine of the profoundest wisdom; a play, which next to Henry IV., contains perhaps the most express information of Shakespeare's character and nature; a work of such a prophetic design, of such anticipation of the growth of mind, that after nearly three centuries it is first perceived and appreciated; a poem, which has so influenced and entwined itself with our own later German life, as no other poem even of our own age and nation could boast, with the exception of Faust alone.

There were special historical and literary circumstances in Shakespeare's time, which must have animated this rough legend in an unusual manner to the poet's mind, and must have brought it before him for closer consideration. The events, which took place in Scotland in 1567, on the murder of Darnley and the marriage of his widow, Mary Stuart, with Lord Bothwell, offered in the latest Past a living counterpart to the action in Hamlet, to which Karl Silberschlag has lately drawn attention. There was too an older play of Hamlet, which intervened between the original source and Shakespeare's tragedy. At the close of the 16th century, when revenge was the theme for competition throughout a whole series of tragedies, this subject