New Exegesis of Shakespeare Author:William Shakespeare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. HAMLET. AS TYPE OF THE TEUTONIC RACE. 1. This masterpiece of Shakespeare as a portrait, not a play, has been already claimed as an ideal of ... more »the Gothic race ; and the likeness is attested by the native admiration. The English poet must have best painted what he had studied most; the English public must, through sympathy, have most admired its own resemblance. But German critics, who were first perhaps to speculate on the relation, should not have kept to the fair side, and sought to hide the blind profile. It was especially an outrage on the author criticised, whom they proportionably crowned with flowers for what they caricatured in fact. They lauded Shakespeare in proportion (and perhaps also in compensation) as they eluded or disguised the harsh fidelity of his portraiture. But English writers will never hesitate between such puerile prepossessions, and the complete illustration of the genius of their national poet. Beside, the bias would be repugnant to the purpose of this enquiry, which proposes to identify the true Hamlet described by Shakespeare with the race called the Teutonic as shaped by nature and shewn by history. The leading marks of this powerful race will be admitted to be these. In the highest or mental order, the faculty of Reflection as distinguished from the passive receptivity of the senses. In morality, the test of Conscience as against religious tradition. In politics, the strife of Liberty in opposition to authority, and of the interests ofhe person against the interests of the public. In philosophy, Metaphysics, as contrasted with scholastics, or, in the native phrase, the subjective in preference to the objective. In fine, in body, the Muscularity befitting this complex struggle, and in manners a correlative degree of roughness and ...« less