That _realism_ is the whole secret of Shakespeare's success as a dramatist, is made more evident by the fact that he avows it himself in "Hamlet," as the mainspring of dramatic success, in the celebrated "advice to the players." This being the only passage on record in which Shakespeare lays down his principles of art, has always been held as of great value, and has probably done more to improve the English stage than most people imagine. It has been always available as a canon to which to refer unnatural ranters, and to prevent the robustious school from tearing a passion to tatters. It sobered down Forrest in his old age into a model Othello, and constitutes the secret that has placed Lester Wallack and Joseph Jefferson at the head of their respective lines of light comedy. I think, however, it has hardly been recognized fully enough as the principle on which Shakespeare worked, for here at least he does seem to have held to a rigidly defined and artificial principle of action. This was to take a given passion and treat it with the utmost realism from every point of view, making that the _motive_ of a play, being otherwise careless of construction. This principle appears very clearly in "Lear," the most artificial in construction of all Shakespeare's tragedies. His theme was _filial ingratitude_, and hardly a scene in the whole drama turns aside from that theme. It appears in the two plots about Lear and Gloucester, both having exactly the same lines of actors, the last obviously a reflex of the first. It is perhaps the only play of Shakespeare in which the _moral_ obtrudes itself forcibly all through the action, as plainly as in the stories of an old-fashioned primer, and I cannot help thinking that if the whole story of Edgar and Edmund had been left out, the play would have gained in unity and nature. In "Richard III." ambition is the ruling passion, treated in the same realistic fashion, conjoined with the extreme sensitiveness of personal deformity to strictures on itself. In "Macbeth" ambition pure and simple is treated from every point, first in man, then in woman; afterward remorse is dissected with equal skill. The ruling passion in "Hamlet" is somewhat more difficult to analyze than the rest, but I think that the renowned soliloquy of "To be or not to be" discloses it more clearly than any other part of the play. It is _fear_. Fear appears in Hamlet all through the play, from the first ghost scene to the death of Ophelia--an excessive caution, a hesitation, a timidity, a want of resolution, mental more than physical, which lasts till he returns from his travels and is stung into manliness over poor Ophelia's grave. Then at last he does what he ought to have done at first, but for his lack of good, honest pluck--gets savage and breaks things, and so works poetical justice.