_Caesar's_ last words were _Et tu Brute? Brutus_,
when resolved to lay violent hands on himself, takes leave of his
friends with these words:
"Countrymen,
My heart doth joy, that yet, in all my life,
I found no man, but he was true to me."
Here Shakspere did not invent. He found both speeches in Plutarch. But
how unerring his choice!
Is the final catastrophe in "Hamlet" such, because Shakspere could do no
better?--It is: he could do no better than the best. Where but in the
regions beyond could such questionings as _Hamlet's_ be put to rest? It
would have been a fine thing indeed for the most nobly perplexed of
thinkers to be left--his love in the grave; the memory of his father a
torment, of his mother a blot; with innocent blood on his innocent
hands, and but half understood by his best friend--to ascend in desolate
dreariness the contemptible height of the degraded throne, and shine the
first in a drunken court!
Before bringing forward my last instance, I will direct the attention of
my readers to a passage, in another play, in which the lesson of the
play I am about to speak of, is _directly_ taught: the first speech in
the second act of "As You Like It," might be made a text for the
exposition of the whole play of "King Lear.
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