With his wonderful quickness of intuition and his unsurpassed subtlety
of expression Shakespeare drew the characters of the Englishmen that he
saw around him. Why is it that he has given us no full-length portrait,
carefully drawn, of a hypocrite? It can hardly have been for lack of
models. Outside England, not only among our enemies, but among our
friends and allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national vice,
our ruling passion. There must be some meaning in so widely held an
opinion; and, on our side, there are damaging admissions by many
witnesses. The portrait gallery of Charles Dickens is crowded with
hypocrites. Some of them are greasy and servile, like Mr. Pumblechook or
Uriah Heep; others rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadband
or Mr. Squeers. But Shakespeare's hypocrites enjoy themselves too much;
they are artists to the finger-tips. It may be said, no doubt, that
Shakespeare lived before organized religious dissent had developed a new
type of character among the weaker brethren. But the Low Church
Protestant, whom Shakespeare certainly knew, is not very different from
the evangelical dissenter of later days; and he did not interest
Shakespeare.
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