ABSTRACT
Shakspeare’s plays have been frequently charged with immoral tendencies; than which a more unfounded and injurious charge could not well be made. Like various other charges visited upon them, it has generally sprung either from a disposition to fix upon certain detached expressions, or from inability to take in the impression of a vital, organic whole. Shakspeare, it is true, never lays off the poet to put on the moralist; never goes out of his way to inculcate morality in an abstract, scientific form. He does not anatomize virtue, to make us skilful casuists and dialecticians. Fortunately for Shakspeare’s honour, this charge cannot be denied. This rigid dispensation of moral justice, which brings virtue and vice down to a calculation of profit and loss, however favourable it might have been to his popularity, would have been fatal to his morality.
