[Footnote 23: I do not discuss the general question of the justification of soliloquy, for it concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all dramatists down to quite recent times. I will only remark that neither soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that they are 'unnatural.' No dramatic language is 'natural'; _all_ dramatic language is idealised. So that the question as to soliloquy must be one as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of advantages and disadvantages. (Since this lecture was written I have read some remarks on Shakespeare's soliloquies to much the same effect by E. Kilian in the _Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_ for 1903.)] [Footnote 24: If by this we mean that these characters all speak what is recognisably Shakespeare's style, of course it is true; but it is no accusation. Nor does it follow that they all speak alike; and in fact they are far from doing so.] LECTURE III SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET 1 Before we come to-day to _Hamlet_, the first of our four tragedies, a few remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare's literary career. But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our restricted purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be stating widely accepted results of investigation, without going into the evidence on which they rest.[25] Shakespeare's tragedies fall into two distinct groups, and these groups are separated by a considerable interval. He wrote tragedy--pure, like _Romeo and Juliet_; historical, like _Richard III._--in the early years of his career of authorship, when he was also writing such comedies as _Love's Labour's Lost_ and the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_. Then came a time, lasting some half-dozen years, during which he composed the most mature and humorous of his English History plays (the plays with Falstaff in them), and the best of his romantic comedies (the plays with Beatrice and Jaques and Viola in them). There are no tragedies belonging to these half-dozen years, nor any dramas approaching tragedy. But now, from about 1601 to about 1608, comes tragedy after tragedy--_Julius Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon of Athens_, _Macbeth_, _Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_; and their companions are plays which cannot indeed be called tragedies, but certainly are not comedies in the same sense as _As You Like It_ or the _Tempest_. These seven years, accordingly, might, without much risk of misunderstanding, be called Shakespeare's tragic period.[26] And after it he wrote no more tragedies, but chiefly romances more serious and less sunny than _As You Like It_, but not much less serene.