ABSTRACT
Sympathy would seem to have been responsible in the first place for the psychological interpretation of Shakespeare, and it is no coincidence that the new interpretation made its first appearance in the latter eighteenth century. The reading of a Hamlet soliloquy depends, on whether it gives more emphasis to Hamlet's moral problem or facing the problem. All the subtleties of nineteenth-century Iago criticism are attempts to account for the fact that, in spite of Iago's villainy, people find him attractive. A propitious age for psychological criticism, Maurice Morgann, the projector of the new Sir John Falstaff, was liberal in politics and in literature endowed with the new sensibility. The dramatic monologue brings to the surface what is underground in drama; what in drama resists the law of the form becomes the law of the dramatic monologue.
