The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of his in writing such plays as _Hamlet_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Timon_. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any considerable time, if, ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic' conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in his works. The choice of the subject of ingratitude, for instance, in _King Lear_ and _Timon_, and the method of handling it, may have been due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of _King Lear_ can be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the text.] [Footnote 154: _A Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 171, 172.] [Footnote 155: A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a moral or theological document but as a work of art,--an aesthetic flaw. I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music, which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a subordinate aspect of things.] [Footnote 156: Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the _Antigone_ stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like the _Philoctetes_ is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a play like _Cymbeline_. A drama like the _Agamemnon_ or the _Prometheus Vinctus_ answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is considered as a unit, it answers not to _Hamlet_ but to _Cymbeline_. If the part is considered as a whole, it answers to _Hamlet_, but may then be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with the complete triumph of the worse side: the _Agamemnon_ and _Prometheus_, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some of the historical.]]