THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
are in life, and the poet, reflecting life, mirrored more than he knew. The chanson d'aube and the aubade are in old French literature, but Shakspere never found them there; he found them, where the old French poets found them, in a dramatic situation of real life. Hamlet was the victim of heredity; the conflict of the vacillating mother and of the downright father was in him; yet Shakspere only perceived in life what we have perceived there also and have learned to call heredity. When Macbeth says that he has murdered sleep, and we trace through the play the remorseful sleeplessness which finally drives Lady Macbeth to suicide, we may call Shakspere a criminal psychologist if we choose, but he only observed what we have classified. He saw that we are such stuff as dreams are made of, but he probably would not have agreed with
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