In Macbeth, indeed, the
Weird Sisters introduce an element very like Fate; but generally it may
be said that with the Greeks the character is involved in the action,
while with Shakespeare the action is evolved from the character. In the
one case, the motive of the play controls the personages; in the other,
the chief personages are in themselves the motive to which all else is
subsidiary. In any comparison, therefore, of Shakespeare with the
ancients, we are not to contrast him with them as unapproachable models,
but to consider whether he, like them, did not consciously endeavor,
under the circumstances and limitations in which he found himself, to
produce the most excellent thing possible, a model also in its own
kind,--whether higher or lower in degree is another question. The only
fair comparison would be between him and that one of his contemporaries
who endeavored to anachronize himself, so to speak, and to subject his
art, so far as might be, to the laws of classical composition. Ben Jonson
was a great man, and has sufficiently proved that he had an eye for the
external marks of character; but when he would make a whole of them, he
gives us instead either a bundle of humors or an incorporated idea. With
Shakespeare the plot is an interior organism, in Jonson an external
contrivance.
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