When I speak of a hero I do not imply the possession of those qualities which we normally think of as heroic. I do not mean courage in battle, constancy in love, generosity in triumph, resignation in defeat; I do not mean the glamour of physique and the leadership of arms, although we shall find these qualities in many of Shakespeare’s people. I mean by a Shakespearean hero, not the character whom his judgment approved, but the character with whom his imagination was identified.

A very penetrating critic, Mr. Middleton Murry, to whose recent book on Shakespeare I am greatly indebted, has written as though he did not exercise the prerogative of moral judgment. He would have us believe that Shakespeare’s genius was a mirror wherein the contradictions and the multiplicity of life expressed themselves, and that it was not in his nature to interpret this movement in the light of moral principles. In a word, he was a man of imagination rather than a man of character. I do not question a limited truth in this. Shakespeare was a man of his own time. The romantic tradition of criticism, to which we owe the dangerous elucidations of Coleridge, so stressed the universal character of his genius that it forgot that he had also a “local habitation and a name.” It ignored his particularity of time and place. I can see no reason to doubt that he shared the baffled and half-sceptical philosophy of his time; nor that in the person of Hamlet he gave it a definitive voice. His mind did not move against any fixed background of theological beliefs, as Dante’s did, but he clearly inherited, along with many others of his time, a hierarchy of moral values which were the legacy of a Christian and a classical culture. He will indict Goneril and Regan for filial ingratitude, Anthony for excess of passion, Macbeth for treachery and murder. Even when his characters have committed crime or folly they are haunted by a high conception of honour.