These certainly are imperfections; yet the astonishing thing is that they pass almost unnoticed in Shakespeare. He reflected his age, the evil and the good of it, just as it appeared to him; and the splendor of his representation is such that even his faults have their proper place, like shadows in a sunlit landscape. [Sidenote: HIS VIEW OF LIFE] Of Shakespeare's philosophy we may say that it reflected equally well the views of his hearers and of the hundred characters whom he created for their pleasure. Of his personal views it is impossible to say more than this, with truth: that he seems to have been in full sympathy with the older writers whose stories he used as the sources of his drama. [Footnote: The chief sources of Shakespeare's plays are: (1) Older plays, from which he made half of his dramas, such as _Richard III_, _Hamlet_, _King John_. (2) Holinshed's _Chronicles_, from which he obtained material for his English historical plays. (3) Plutarch's _Lives_, translated by North, which furnished him material for _Caesar_, _Coriolanus_, _Antony and Cleopatra_. (4) French, Italian and Spanish romances, in translations, from which he obtained the stories of _The Merchant of Venice_, _Othello_, _Twelfth Night_ and _As You Like It_.] Now these stories commonly reflected three things besides the main narrative: a problem, its solution, and the consequent moral or lesson. The problem was a form of evil; its solution depended on goodness in some form; the moral was that goodness triumphs finally and inevitably over evil. Many such stories were cherished by the Elizabethans, the old tale of "Gammelyn" for example (from which came _As You Like It_); and just as in our own day popular novels are dramatized, so three centuries ago audiences demanded to see familiar stories in vigorous action. That is why Shakespeare held to the old tales, and pleased his audience, instead of inventing new plots. But however much he changed the characters or the action of the story, he remained always true to the old moral: That goodness is the rule of life, And its glory and its triumph. Shakespeare's women are his finest characters, and he often portrays the love of a noble woman as triumphing over the sin or weakness of men. He has little regard for abnormal or degenerate types, such as appear in the later Elizabethan drama; he prefers vigorous men and pure women, precisely as the old story-tellers did; and if Richard or some other villain overruns his stage for an hour, such men are finally overwhelmed by the very evil which they had planned for others. If they drag the innocent down to a common destruction, these pure characters never seem to us to perish; they live forever in our thought as the true emblems of humanity. [Sidenote: MORAL EMPHASIS]