Hamlet's pretended
madness would make a very good real madness in any other author.] as
from the babbling of the fool; the contrast between wit and folly in
Falstaff and Shallow is not more characteristic though more obvious
than the gradations of folly, loquacious or reserved, in Shallow and
Silence; and again, the gallantry of Prince Henry is as little
confounded with that of Hotspur as with the cowardice of Falstaff,
or as the sensual and philosophic cowardice of the Knight is with
the pitiful and cringing cowardice of Parolles. All these several
personages were as different in Shakespeare as they would have been
in themselves: his imagination borrowed from the life, and every
circumstance, object, motive, passion, operated there as it would in
reality, and produced a world of men and women as distinct, as true
and as various as those that exist in nature. The peculiar property
of Shakespeare's imagination was this truth, accompanied with the
unconsciousness of nature: indeed, imagination to be perfect must be
unconscious, at least in production; for nature is so. We shall
attempt one example more in the characters of Richard II and Henry
VI.
The characters and situations of both these persons were so nearly
alike, that they would have been completely confounded by a
commonplace poet. Yet they are kept quite distinct in Shakespeare.
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