Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

William Hazlitt published Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays in 1817, and the book has never gone out of print. There is a reason for this. Hazlitt was the first great English critic to approach Shakespeare not as a monument to be venerated but as a living imagination to be encountered. Where Samuel Johnson had been magisterial and corrective, where Coleridge was philosophical and sometimes impenetrable, Hazlitt was passionate, direct, and startlingly intimate. He read Shakespeare the way a lover reads a letter—with the whole of himself engaged. His method was not analysis but immersion: he entered the world of each play as though it were a real world, inhabited by real people, and he reported back from that world with the breathless conviction of an eyewitness. What follows are the finest passages from his essays on the major plays, excerpts that reveal not only Shakespeare’s genius but Hazlitt’s own extraordinary capacity for sympathetic understanding. · 11 min read

Hamlet

Hazlitt’s essay on Hamlet contains what is perhaps the most famous single sentence ever written about the play. It is a sentence that has shaped every subsequent reading of the character, and it is worth giving in its full context:

The audacity of that opening declaration—“It is we who are Hamlet”—transforms the entire enterprise of criticism. Hazlitt does not stand outside the play and pass judgment. He dissolves the boundary between reader and character, between the world of the stage and the world of lived experience. This is criticism as identification, and it carries risks—the risk of sentimentality, the risk of projection—but in Hazlitt’s hands, it achieves a power that more detached methods cannot rival.

He continues: “Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is we who are Hamlet.” Here Hazlitt anticipates, by nearly two centuries, the central insight of reader-response criticism: that the meaning of a literary work is not fixed in the text but is created in the encounter between text and reader. But he states it with a directness and a passion that no academic theorist has matched.

On Hamlet’s character itself, Hazlitt is no less penetrating: “The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation.”

What Hazlitt grasps, and what many later critics would miss, is that Hamlet’s irresolution is not a defect but the very substance of his character. He is a thinker compelled to act, a man of sensibility thrust into a world that demands brutality. His delay is not weakness; it is the rebellion of a refined consciousness against the coarseness of the task assigned to it.

Macbeth

If Hazlitt’s Hamlet is a portrait of the thinking man, his Macbeth is a study in the poetry of evil. Hazlitt begins with a claim that few moralists would have dared to make:

“Macbeth and Lear, Othello and Hamlet, are usually reckoned Shakespeare’s four principal tragedies. Lear stands first for the profound intensity of the passion; Macbeth for the wildness of the imagination and the rapidity of the action; Othello for the progressive interest and powerful alternations of feeling; Hamlet for the refined development of thought and sentiment. If the force of genius shown in each of these works is astonishing, their variety is not less so.”

On the peculiar moral atmosphere of the play, Hazlitt writes: “The overwhelming pressure of preternatural agency urges on the tide of human passion with redoubled force. Macbeth himself appears driven along by the violence of his fate like a vessel drifting before a storm: he reels to and fro like a drunken man; he staggers under the weight of his own purposes and the suggestions of others; he stands at bay with his situation; and from the superstitious awe and breathless suspense into which the communications of the Weird Sisters throw him, is hurried on with daring impatience to verify their predictions, and with impious and bloody hand to tear aside the veil which hides the uncertainty of the future.”

Notice how Hazlitt’s own prose takes on the rhythm and momentum of the play it describes. He does not merely analyze Macbeth; he recreates the experience of reading Macbeth. The sentences lengthen, the clauses pile up, the imagery grows wilder, until the reader feels something of the same breathless urgency that drives the character. This is what distinguishes Hazlitt from almost every other critic of Shakespeare: his prose does not describe the effect of the poetry; it reproduces it.

On Lady Macbeth, he is equally vivid: “She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate. She does not excite our loathing and abhorrence like Regan and Goneril. She is only wicked to gain a great end; and is perhaps more distinguished by her commanding presence of mind and inexorable self-will, which do not suffer her to be diverted from a bad purpose, when once formed, by weak and womanly regrets, than by the hardness of her heart or want of natural affections.”

Othello

Hazlitt’s essay on Othello is a masterpiece of sympathetic criticism. He understood, as few critics before or since, that the play’s power lies not in its villain but in its hero—or rather, in the terrible intimacy between the two:

“The picturesque contrasts of character in this play are almost as remarkable as the depth of the passion. The Moor Othello, the gentle Desdemona, the villain Iago, the good-natured Cassio, the fool Roderigo, present a range and variety of character as striking and palpable as that of the modification of scenic appearance in the same play, from the canals and palaces of Venice to the shores and fortifications of Cyprus.”

On Iago, Hazlitt produces one of his finest passages of psychological insight: “He is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own fate as to that of others; he runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ruling passion—an insatiable craving after action of the most difficult and dangerous kind. Our ‘Ancient’ is a philosopher, who fancies that a lie that kills has something more in it than if it were merelya flourish of his will.”

On the destruction of Othello, Hazlitt writes with a tenderness that reveals the depth of his engagement: “His nature is noble, confiding, tender, and generous; but his blood is of the most inflammable kind; and being once roused by a sense of his wrongs, he is stopped by no considerations of remorse or pity from carrying out his purposes of revenge. It is in working his noble nature up to this extremity through rapid but gradual transitions, in raising passion to its height from the smallest beginnings and in spite of every obstacle, in painting the expiring conflict between love and hatred, tenderness and resentment, jealousy and remorse, in unfolding the strength and the weaknesses of our nature, that Shakespeare has shown the mastery of his genius and of his power over the human heart.”

King Lear

Hazlitt regarded King Lear as the greatest of all Shakespeare’s works, and his essay on it is perhaps the finest thing he ever wrote. It begins with a sentence of devastating simplicity:

“We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it.”

This confession of inadequacy is not false modesty. It is the honest response of a man who has been overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has encountered. Hazlitt knows that King Lear exceeds the capacity of criticism to account for it, and he says so. But he then proceeds, in defiance of his own disclaimer, to write criticism of the highest order:

“The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, yet that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.”

The cascade of similes is not ornamental but functional: Hazlitt needs multiple images because no single image can capture the magnitude of Lear’s suffering. The mind, the ship, the rock, the promontory—each image is larger and more elemental than the last, as though the critic is reaching for a scale of comparison adequate to the play’s cosmic scope.

On the storm scenes, Hazlitt writes: “The scene on the heath is the grandest and most truly dramatic scene in the world. The mind is here laid bare to all the storms of passion, and nature seems to take part in and side with the human passions that rage and whirl about it. The old king, stripped of his royalty, becomes a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man; but his mind rises in proportion to the grandeur of the elements about him. He keeps up a continual struggle with the extremities of his condition, and towers above it.”

This is the core of Hazlitt’s reading: that Lear’s greatness is revealed, not destroyed, by his suffering. The stripping away of power, dignity, and sanity does not diminish Lear; it reveals the human being beneath the king, and that human being, for all his frailty, is magnificent.

The Comedies

Hazlitt’s treatment of the comedies is lighter in tone but no less perceptive. He understood that Shakespeare’s comic genius was not inferior to his tragic genius but complementary to it—that the playwright who could imagine Lear on the heath could also imagine Falstaff at the Boar’s Head, and that both imaginations sprang from the same source: an inexhaustible sympathy with human nature in all its forms.

On A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he writes: “When we read this play in youth, it seemed to us a dream ourselves, and we did not know when we were awake and when we were asleep. The golden age of poetry was then, and the enchanted ground was before us. The world of spirits was opened to our fancy, and a thousand phantoms shimmered before our eyes in the light of the imagination.”

On Twelfth Night: “This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shakespeare’s comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind, not despise them, and still less bear any ill-will towards them.”

On The Merchant of Venice and the character of Shylock, Hazlitt is at his most politically engaged: “He is honest in his vices; they are hypocrites in their virtues. In all his answers and retorts upon his adversaries, he has the best not only of the argument but of the question, reasoning on their own principles and practice. They are so far from allowing of any measure of equal dealing, of common justice, or even of a common humanity towards him, that even when they have the worst of it, they carry it off with a high hand.” This defense of Shylock against the Christians who persecute him was, in 1817, a radical act of sympathetic imagination.

And on Falstaff, whom he loved above almost all of Shakespeare’s creations: “The secret of Falstaff’s wit is for the most part a masterly presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. He has the most contemptuous indifference for anything that can happen to him, and turns every occasion, however unpromising, to advantage.”

Reading Hazlitt on Shakespeare, one comes to understand something about criticism itself: that the greatest criticism is not judgment but love—not the soft, indiscriminate love that praises everything, but the fierce, discriminating love that sees clearly and admires without illusion. Hazlitt saw Shakespeare more clearly than any critic of his age, and he admired him more deeply. The two capacities were not in tension; they were the same capacity, differently expressed.