Hazlitt’s Chapter and the Making of the Young-Love Play

William Hazlitt’s chapter on Romeo and Juliet in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, published in 1817, is the founding document of the reading by which the play is generally known: the supreme drama of young love, fresh as spring, true in every pulse of feeling. That reading feels like a fact of nature, something any attentive reader would find in the text unaided. It is nothing of the kind. It was argued into existence, at a specific moment and against specific opponents, by a single critic writing at the height of his powers, and the argument is considerably tougher than the commonplace it produced. Hazlitt did not discover the play’s young lovers swooning in a bower and invite the reader to swoon with them. He defended their passion as healthy, bodily, brief, and founded on everything they had not yet lived, and he defended it against moralists who called it idle, against prudes who cut its frankest speech out of family editions, and against a philosophy of mind that could not explain why first feelings are the strongest. The verdict of this article is plain: Hazlitt’s chapter survives its own success. Read whole, it is not a valentine but a brief for the defence, and the sentimental Romeo and Juliet of later decades is what remained of his reading after his readers kept the warmth and discarded the reasoning.

The chapter’s claims can be stated in a breath, and the rest of this article tests them one by one. Hazlitt held that the tragedy is the one play its author built entirely on a love story, that its passion draws its force from anticipation rather than experience, that Juliet is the finest vindication of the playwright’s female characters against a standing slander, that Romeo is a Hamlet whose thought has been converted into feeling, and that the whole design, from the Nurse’s prattle to old Capulet’s memories, forms a survey of human life at every age. He held these things in prose of extraordinary answering energy, quoting the play the way other critics quote statutes, as evidence. Where he was wrong, he was wrong in ways that instruct: he supposed the play to be its author’s first, which later dating does not sustain, and he had almost nothing to say about Mercutio, whose wit his method could not digest. Where he was right, he was right before nearly everyone else, and the proof is that his rightness has hardened into the clichés of the play’s reputation, repeated by readers who have never opened his book.

The Book of 1817 and the Critic Who Wrote It

Characters of Shakespear’s Plays was Hazlitt’s first book of criticism and the volume that made his name beyond the newspapers. Before it, he had served an apprenticeship exactly fitted to the work: parliamentary reporting, a treatise on the principles of human action published in 1805, and then dramatic reviewing for the Morning Chronicle and the Examiner, where he judged performances as they happened and formed the habit, rare among Shakespeare’s commentators, of treating a play as something enacted by bodies in a room. In February 1816 he reviewed the English translation of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lectures on dramatic literature for the Edinburgh Review, and the encounter with the German critic’s systematic enthusiasm set the plan of his own book: a play-by-play account of the characters, written not as commentary on other men’s notes but as a record of what the plays do to a reader and spectator of genius. The volume appeared in 1817, sold out its first edition within six weeks, and reached a second edition in 1818. A savage assault in the Quarterly Review then did its work on his reputation with the general public, a reminder that the chapter on the lovers was written by a man whose criticism was a form of combat from the start.

The assault deserves a word of specification, since it shaped the conditions under which the chapter was read for a generation. The Quarterly’s notice mingled literary censure with personal and political attack, treating the author’s radical associations and supposed ignorance as licences to dismiss the criticism unread, and for a season the dismissal worked in the drawing rooms where reputations were ratified. The book survived its reviewer, as books with readers tend to do, passing through the second edition of 1818 into the steady afterlife of a standard work, but the episode fixed the fork in Hazlitt’s reception that persists in miniature wherever the chapter is discussed: to the circles that took the Quarterly’s word, he remained the brilliant, unreliable enthusiast of legend; to readers who went to the volume itself, he was something more exacting. The sentimental Hazlitt of the legend and the argumentative Hazlitt of the pages part company at precisely this point, and the legend, being easier to repeat, has had the louder career. Restoring the pages is the only known remedy, which is the errand of the sections that follow.

The book’s Preface declares the method by declaring its enemy. Samuel Johnson, the presiding authority of the previous century, had praised the characters as species rather than individuals, and Hazlitt’s Preface answers that Johnson found in them the general or didactic form because the general form was all he sought. Johnson’s own cooler weighing of this particular play, its pleasures granted and its quibbles taxed, belongs to Samuel Johnson’s verdict on the play and to the editorial century that produced it. Hazlitt’s counter-method is individuation pushed to the point of advocacy: a character is defended the way counsel defends a client, by entering into the person’s own grounds until the conduct explains itself from within. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been lecturing on the plays in London since 1811, and the younger critic had sat in his audiences in earlier years and absorbed the lecture-room habit of treating a speech as a psychological document; how far that influence ran is the subject of Coleridge’s lectures on the play. Hazlitt’s distinction is that he wrote the lecture down in prose built to survive the page, and aimed it at the whole canon in a single volume.

Was Hazlitt a critic of the study or of the stage?

Hazlitt was both, and the doubleness is the chapter’s signature. He spent years reviewing performances for London papers, measured actors against the text line by line, and in this chapter he pauses to judge Edmund Kean’s repetition of a word in the banishment scene. Yet his evidence is quotation, pages of it, marshalled like a reader’s brief.

The doubleness matters because later accounts of Romantic criticism often file Hazlitt among the closet readers, men who preferred the play in the imagination to the play on the boards. The chapter refutes the filing in its own texture. Its longest quotations are speeches whose difficulty is precisely that they must be spoken by a young performer without embarrassment, and its praise of Kean is the praise of a working reviewer who had watched the scene land in a theatre. When Hazlitt writes criticism, the study and the stage keep correcting one another: the text tells him what the actor must find, and the actor’s success or failure tells him what the text contains. A purely bookish critic would not have noticed that the tomb speech defeated the greatest tragedian of the age. A purely theatrical one would not have built an argument about the philosophy of first love around a balcony speech. Hazlitt’s chapter is the record of a mind refusing to choose, and its account of the lovers is all the stronger for having been tested in both places.

The Romantic Moment: Lamb, the Lecture Room, and a New Reading Public

Hazlitt’s book landed in a culture that was renegotiating where a play lives. Charles Lamb, in a celebrated essay of 1811 on the tragedies, had argued that the great plays suffer by representation, that their deepest life is in the reading, and that a spectator’s imagination is a finer stage than any boards in London. The argument flattered an expanding class of solitary readers, nourished on cheap reprints and lending libraries, for whom the canon was becoming a possession of the fireside rather than of the playhouse. Hazlitt, who admired Lamb and moved in his circle, took the new reading public as his given audience while refusing the essay’s central renunciation. His characters are studied in the closet and judged in the theatre in the same breath, and the chapter on the lovers is the proof of the double allegiance: no critic who believed the plays unactable would interrupt a metaphysics of first love to grade an actor’s repetition of a single word, or record, with a reviewer’s exactness, where the leading tragedian of the age fell short of the tomb speech’s stillness.

The lecture room was the third space between print and stage, and it mattered to the chapter’s formation. Coleridge’s courses on the poets had taught a metropolitan audience to hear a speech as the transcript of a mind in motion, and the habit passed into the periodical criticism of the decade as its ruling assumption. Hazlitt radicalized the habit by writing it better than anyone else and by grounding it in a philosophy he had held since his youth: the imagination, not custom or authority, is the faculty by which one person enters another’s feelings, on the page as in the stalls. That is why the chapter’s psychology and its theatre reviewing are a single activity. To say what Juliet feels, the critic performs the act of sympathy his first book had described; to say whether Kean found the feeling, he consults the evidence of a thousand witnesses in a lit room. The Romantic appreciation of the play, which the German lectures had begun and the London lectures had amplified, reaches in Hazlitt a form in which enthusiasm is required to show its credentials nightly.

The consequence for the play’s afterlife was large. A tragedy that a century of editors had treated as a promising irregularity, pleasing in parts and faulty in construction, was handed to the new reading public as a work whose irregularities were the signatures of its truth. Schoolrooms and anthologies of the following generations inherited the transfer wholesale: the play entered the common imagination classified by feeling rather than by form, its lovers installed as the type of first love itself. Genealogies of clichés usually end in a shrug; this one ends in a chapter of some twenty pages, written by a journalist-philosopher in the year of its author’s greatest fluency, and the task here is to read that chapter as the argument it is rather than as the atmosphere it became.

The Only Tragedy Built Entirely on a Love Story

The chapter opens with a classification that has since become the play’s identity papers. Romeo and Juliet, Hazlitt writes, is the only tragedy its author wrote entirely on a love story. The adverb carries the argument. Antony and Cleopatra entwines its passion with empire, war, and the fate of the Roman world; Othello turns on jealousy engineered by a third mind; even Troilus and Cressida sets its lovers inside a war and a council of state. The Veronese tragedy alone stakes everything on the single passion, admitting the feud as weather rather than as a rival subject. Hazlitt’s sentence therefore does critical work far beyond ranking: it tells the reader where the play’s centre of gravity lies, and it licenses everything that follows, since a chapter on the characters of such a play must be a chapter about the physiology and philosophy of love itself. There is, he continues, the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope and in the bitterness of despair, the two poles between which the whole action swings.

One clause of the opening has not survived, and honesty requires the correction to stand beside the praise. Hazlitt supposed the play to have been its author’s first, and thought it deserved the rank. The supposition was respectable guesswork in an age without a settled chronology, and it flattered his reading: a young playwright writing young love, the work and the maker in the same season. Later scholarship, working from the title pages, the records of the playing companies, and the internal evidence of style, places the tragedy in the middle 1590s, after histories, comedies, and narrative poems had already established its author. The correction is worth making precisely because the chapter’s central insight does not need the error. The youth in the play is the subject’s youth, not the author’s biography, and the buoyant spirit Hazlitt detected in every line is a property of the verse and the conception, verifiable by any reader who compares the lyric saturation of the lovers’ scenes with the drier excellences of the chronicle plays. Stripped of its biographical fancy, his opening claim stands: no other tragedy in the canon is built so exclusively on first love, and none sustains its temperature so evenly from the first sonnet of the feast to the last embrace in the tomb.

It is worth noticing what the classification quietly excludes. A tragedy entirely on a love story might still have been treated as a warning, as the moralizing tradition had treated it, with the lovers’ haste held up for correction and their deaths dispensed as justice. Hazlitt never takes that road. From the first page the passion is the play’s glory and its subject, and the deaths are a catastrophe that befalls it, not a sentence passed on it. The moral question is not evaded; it is relocated. What requires explanation, for Hazlitt, is not why the lovers are punished but why their feeling has the force it has, and that relocation, from judgment to explanation, is the founding gesture of the modern criticism of the play.

The relocation is the more striking against the frame the story carried into the theatre. Arthur Brooke’s narrative poem, the play’s principal source, had prefaced the tale with an address warning young readers against exactly the passion it described, presenting the lovers as a lesson in disobedience, lust, and neglected counsel, their deaths the wages of a course to be shunned. The moralizing frame was the story’s passport for its first English audience, and traces of it survive in the play’s own sententious voices, the Friar’s cautions and the Prince’s closing severity. Hazlitt’s chapter performs, two centuries on, the opposite passport control. The source’s warning goes unmentioned; the Friar’s sermons are demoted to instrumentation; the catastrophe is stripped of juridical meaning and re-described as the subtraction of a total felicity. Where Brooke’s lovers are examples, Hazlitt’s are subjects, minds whose interior economy the critic is bound to render faithfully before any verdict is entertained, and in most cases instead of one. The young-love reading is often described as a softening of an originally stern tale. The chapter suggests the harder truth: the sternness was itself an addition, a frame screwed onto the story by its first English presenter, and Hazlitt’s criticism is an act of restoration, removing the frame and letting the picture’s own lighting operate. A defence that presents itself as archaeology is harder to refute than one that presents itself as taste, and the chapter’s longevity owes much to that presentation.

The Southern Spring Was Schlegel’s Sentence Before It Was Hazlitt’s

The most famous sentence ever attached to Hazlitt’s chapter is not Hazlitt’s. Readers who know one thing about the essay know the play praised as a southern spring, a nightingale’s song, a rose at its first opening; and readers commonly credit the praise to the English critic, whose prose is the vessel in which it reached them. The chapter itself is scrupulous on the point. It has been said of the play by a great critic, Hazlitt writes, that whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this poem. The great critic is Schlegel, whose lectures Hazlitt had reviewed the year before and whose authority the chapter is about to borrow and correct in a single motion. The full history of that German reading belongs to the German Romantics and Schlegel’s reading; what belongs here is the use Hazlitt makes of it, because the use is his method in miniature.

The description is true, he grants, and yet it does not answer to his idea of the play. Then comes the correction, delivered as a series of doublings. If the play has the sweetness of the rose, it has its freshness too; if it has the languor of the nightingale’s song, it has also its giddy transport; if it has the softness of a southern spring, it is as glowing and as bright. Each clause accepts the German’s term and pairs it with the quality the term omitted, sweetness with freshness, languor with transport, softness with glow. The movement is more than local disagreement about a metaphor. Schlegel’s sentence describes a play to be reclined in; Hazlitt’s amendments describe a play that moves, heats, and hurries. Where the lecture offers an atmosphere, the chapter insists on a pulse. It is the first appearance of the distinction that governs the whole essay, between the play as an object of languishing appreciation and the play as an organism of feeling in violent health.

There is a biographical edge to the correction that raises its interest. Hazlitt had introduced Schlegel to English readers with warmth in his Edinburgh Review notice of 1816, commending the lectures as the most valuable body of dramatic criticism available, and the chapter’s borrowings are the acts of a debtor, not a rival. A critic who corrects, in his own first book, the authority he had lately been employed to celebrate is performing a small drama of intellectual independence, and the performance is pointed: the reviewer’s enthusiasm of one year becomes the author’s cross-examination of the next, with the play itself as the court of appeal. The habit persisted throughout his career and accounts for both his unreliability as a partisan and his reliability as a witness. He could not let a fine sentence stand merely because it was fine, or because he had lately endorsed its author. It had to survive the evidence, and the southern spring survived it diminished, a truth retained and a truth qualified in the same paragraph, which is the most that any critical formula in the chapter is ever permitted.

The episode also fixes Hazlitt’s honest relation to his sources. He does not pillage Schlegel in silence, as a lesser borrower would, and he does not submit to him either. He quotes the finest sentence available, marks it as borrowed, and then does the one thing a critic of his stamp exists to do: he tests it against the thing itself and finds it half true. That testing habit is why the chapter can be trusted where later admirers cannot. The young-love reading of the play entered English criticism wearing German colours, and Hazlitt’s service was to naturalize it by subjecting it to an English cross-examination, conducted in the presence of the text. When the verdict later hardened into cliché, the cross-examination was forgotten and only the colours remained, which is the usual fate of borrowed finery and precisely the fate this article is concerned to reverse.

Not Love-Sick: The Refusal of the Sentimental

From the Schlegel correction Hazlitt draws the chapter’s most quoted denial. There is nothing, he writes, of a sickly and sentimental cast in the play at all. Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick. Everything speaks the very soul of pleasure, the high and healthy pulse of the passions: the heart beats, the blood circulates and mantles throughout. The physiology is deliberate. Sentimental love, in the literature Hazlitt despised, is a condition of the nerves, a delicious debility; the passion of the Veronese lovers is a condition of the whole circulation, an excess of life rather than a failure of it. His courtship is not an insipid interchange of lip-deep sentiments learned at second hand from poems and plays, not a structure of sighs that breathe not and delicacy that shrinks from the touch. It is the reverse of all this, he concludes, in a sentence that deserves its italics of emphasis: it is Shakespeare all over, and Shakespeare when he was young.

The physiology does quiet critical work that a merely appreciative reading would miss. A passion described as circulation cannot be pitied in the way a passion described as fever can; fever invites the bedside manner, the cluck of concern from a position of health, while circulation at high pressure invites something closer to awe at a system performing beyond its rated capacity. Hazlitt’s metaphors therefore foreclose the condescension on which sentimental response depends. The sentimental spectator stands outside the feeling, enjoying a refined superiority to it; Hazlitt’s reader is placed inside the current and asked to keep up. That placement explains the chapter’s otherwise puzzling severity toward the era’s favourite emotional machinery. Sighs that breathe not are not merely bad writing, in his accounting; they are evidence of counterfeiting, of an author manufacturing the signs of a passion the author has declined to imagine from within. Against counterfeit feeling the chapter sets a single test, applied impartially to the German dramatists, to the expurgators, and eventually to Romeo’s own first attachment: does the feeling arise from the situation of a mind, or has it been pasted on from the stock of the trade? The play passes the test at every point the chapter examines, and the examination, not the enthusiasm, is the essay’s real bequest to the play’s reputation.

The target of the polemic is worth identifying, because it explains the violence of the denial. Hazlitt names the alternative himself in the pages that follow: the German drama of sentiment, Kotzebue’s The Stranger and its tribe, where passion is taken at the rebound, extracted from wrinkles and expiring sighs, and where feeling is manufactured by contraries to inspire sentiment and create philosophy. Against that school, the chapter’s defence of the lovers is a defence of first-hand passion against a literature of second-hand emotion. The lovers do not perform feelings they have read about; they undergo feelings they cannot yet name. That distinction, between enacted sentiment and undergone passion, is the critical instrument Hazlitt brings to every scene he touches, and it is why the charge that he sentimentalized the play collapses at the chapter’s front door. Sentimentalizing was the crime he had come to prosecute.

His counter-image of the sentimental heroine is drawn with a novelist’s economy: beauties of the most shadowy kind, fancies that hang the pensive head, evanescent smiles, an elaborate vacuity of thought, an artificial dearth of sense, spirit, truth, and nature. Set beside that portrait, Juliet is almost an anti-heroine of the sentimental school: she speaks first, proposes the marriage, rebukes delay, and manages the practicalities of the plot while the men around her versify. Hazlitt’s insistence on health is thus not a critic’s compliment but a classification with consequences. A love-sick heroine invites pity and permits superiority; Hazlitt’s Juliet permits neither, being in fuller possession of her senses and affections than any adult in her city. The reader who comes to the play through the chapter is therefore trained, from the second page onward, to meet the lovers as agents of an overwhelming but lucid passion, and every later page of the essay, the frankness about desire included, is written under the discipline of that first correction.

The Objection of the Boy and the Girl

Every strong reading earns its strength by surviving the strongest objection, and Hazlitt stages the objection himself, in the objectors’ own terms. He has heard it urged, he writes, that the play is founded on an idle passion between a boy and a girl who have scarcely seen each other, who can have but little sympathy or rational esteem for one another, who have had no experience of the good or ills of life, and whose raptures or despair must therefore be equally groundless and fantastical. The summary is fair, which is what gives the answer its force. The objection is the neoclassical and moral case in one breath: no acquaintance, no esteem, no experience, hence no warranted feeling, hence a fable built on vapour. It had been the standing reproach of the previous century’s cooler judges, and it survives wherever the play is dismissed as a celebration of infatuation between children.

Hazlitt’s answer is to concede every fact and reverse every valuation. Yes, the lovers have no experience; the passion is founded on that vacancy, and its truth consists in it. Whoever demands a first love carried on into a good old age, its force spent and its transports taken at the rebound, is asking for a different work, the work the German sentimentalists supplied, and is in effect complaining that the play is not about something else. The playwright, Hazlitt counters, proceeded in a more straightforward and effectual way: he gave a picture of human life such as it is in the order of nature, declining to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. The scriptural shrug of that last quotation is the whole rebuttal in miniature. A critic who requires the spring to behave like autumn has misunderstood what season the poem keeps, and a morality that can only approve passion after experience has audited it has misunderstood what passion is.

Buried in the objection is a criterion worth exhuming, because Hazlitt’s answer demolishes more than a quibble about ages. The demand for sympathy and rational esteem as the warrants of a credible passion is the eighteenth century’s theory of love imported into criticism: affection is respectable in proportion as it is justified, justified in proportion as it is informed, and a feeling that precedes information is by definition a disorder. Hazlitt’s counter-theory, fully stated only in the anticipation argument that follows, inverts the epistemology. First love is not esteem’s defective draft; it is a different faculty’s perfect act, in which the object is apprehended whole because the future it promises is whole. To require esteem of it is to require the account books of a later stage of life as the entry fee for an earlier one, a confusion of seasons as complete as demanding fruit of the blossom by way of proving the blossom genuine. The objection about the boy and girl thus fails twice over in his handling: as natural history, because youth is the season of the passion described; and as criticism, because the standard it invokes belongs to a stage of the affections the play deliberately precedes. Later defences of the lovers have rarely matched the completeness of the manoeuvre, which grants the prosecutors their facts, denies their framework, and leaves them praising the German drama of wrinkles by implication.

Does Hazlitt think the lovers’ haste is a moral fault?

Hazlitt does not think it, and the chapter’s logic forbids the thought. Haste in the lovers is not a vice superadded to their love but the form that hope takes before experience has taught it delay; their speed is the measure of a world in which everything is still to come and nothing has yet been lost.

The point needs care, because the play itself keeps a cautionary voice in good supply. Juliet names the contract too rash, too unadvised, too sudden (2.2), and Friar Laurence preaches violent delights and violent ends to the bridegroom he is about to marry (2.6). A moralizing criticism seizes on those lines as the author’s own verdict, the wisdom of the work set against its infatuation. Hazlitt’s reading dissolves the seizure. The cautionary speeches are weather inside the poem, the resistance against which the passion defines itself, not a bench from which it is judged; the Friar who preaches moderation also performs the marriage within the hour, and the Juliet who calls the contract too sudden is the same Juliet who sends the Nurse for a ladder and a wedding night. In Hazlitt’s economy of the play, the warnings raise the pressure and thereby certify the force they fail to govern. To treat them as the author’s sentence on the lovers is to mistake the friction for the meaning, an error the chapter’s opening classification had already ruled out: in a tragedy built entirely on a love story, the love is the subject, and everything else, sermons included, is instrumentation.

Founded on Pleasures Not Experienced

The chapter’s centre, and the passage on which its claim to permanence chiefly rests, is a single piece of psychological reasoning about why this love is as strong as it is. Shakespeare, Hazlitt writes, founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced. All that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught made them drunk with love and joy. They were in full possession of their senses and their affections. Their hopes were of air, their desires of fire.

Unpack the claim and a complete theory of first love falls out of it. A passion founded on experience has a ledger: it can compare, discount, and remember satiety, and its object is valued against a market of substitutes. A passion founded on the unexperienced has no ledger and no market. Its object is not one pleasure among others but the imagined sum of all pleasures, the door through which an entire unlived life is expected to enter. That is why the feeling is, in Hazlitt’s sequence of adjectives, infinite, extravagant, and inexhaustible: desire has no limit but itself, and passion, defined as the love and expectation of pleasure, feeds on a future that cannot be exhausted because it has not begun to be spent. It is also why the feeling is mortal in a special way. Experience, when it comes, checks and kills it, Hazlitt says, not by refuting the object but by replacing the imagined totality with a series of finite facts. First love dies of information.

Juliet’s own arithmetic is produced as the doctrine’s witness. On her first interview with Romeo she exclaims that her bounty is as boundless as the sea, her love as deep (2.2). And why should it not be, Hazlitt asks, in a volley of rhetorical questions that carry the argument better than any treatise: what was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure from flowing on without stint or measure, but the experience she was yet without? What was to abate the transport of the first sweet sense of pleasure, but the indifference she was yet a stranger to? What was to check the ardour of hope, of faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but the disappointment she had not yet felt? The questions answer themselves by inventory: every governor that ordinarily regulates feeling, satiety, indifference, disappointment, memory, is an acquisition of experience, and Juliet has made none of them yet. Her boundlessness is not a lover’s hyperbole. It is an exact report of an unregulated state.

The image Juliet reaches for repays the attention Hazlitt pays it. A bounty boundless as the sea, a love as deep, both grow by the paradox she states in the same breath, that giving increases the store. Ordinary bounty obeys the arithmetic of the purse: expenditure diminishes, and prudence is the virtue of the diminishing fund. The lovers’ economy inverts the purse because its capital is not experience banked but expectation outstanding; every gift drawn on the future enlarges the future’s apparent size, since each pleasure tasted for the first time certifies the existence of a continent of pleasures untasted. Hazlitt does not spell the paradox out in terms, but his whole argument is its commentary, and it explains a feature of the play that moral readings persistently mishandle. The lovers are not reckless with a known quantity; they are solvent in a currency that has never been devalued, and their generosity, their oaths, their haste are the rational conduct of minds whose bank has never reported a loss. Experience is the auditor that eventually arrives. In the tragedy, catastrophe sends the auditor early, and the crash, when it comes, is total for the reason the solvency was total: there were no reserves of indifference in which a survivor might have taken refuge.

From the same premise Hazlitt derives the tragedy’s peculiar pain, and the derivation is the finest stroke in the chapter. As are the desires and hopes of youthful passion, such is the keenness of its disappointments. The transition of the play, from the highest bliss to the lowest despair, from the nuptial couch to an untimely grave, is the premise acted out in five acts. The only evil that befalls the lovers, even in apprehension, is the loss of the greatest possible felicity; yet the loss is fatal to both, because they would rather part with life than bear the thought of surviving all that had made life dear to them. Critics who find the suicides disproportionate are answered out of the same theory that explains the love: a passion whose object is the totality of the future cannot survive the future’s cancellation. The lovers do not die for each other, in Hazlitt’s scheme. They die of the subtraction of everything, which is a different and far more interesting account of the catastrophe than either fate or folly supplies.

Ignorance of the Future: Why First Love Idealizes Its Object

Hazlitt was not content to describe the mechanism of anticipation; he wanted its philosophy, and he found the reigning philosophy of his circle inadequate to it. The inadequacy, he writes, of a system that reduces the mind to habitual impressions is what led William Wordsworth to the mystical Platonism of his great Ode, with its pre-existent state and its trails of glory trailing behind the child. Wordsworth had described the vividness of early impressions and their fading into the light of common day, and had ascribed the splendour to a former existence, as if the soul arrived trailing reflections of a heaven it had left. This is idle, Hazlitt says, with a bluntness that still startles in a Shakespeare essay. The gloss and splendour of first impressions derive not from knowledge of the past but from ignorance of the future, which fills the void to come with the warmth of our desires, with our gayest hopes and brightest fancies. It is the obscurity spread before the mind that colours the prospect of life with hope, as the cloud reflects the rainbow.

Here, stated in the middle of a chapter on a love tragedy, is the general theory the brief for this article calls the idealizing of love, and its reach extends well beyond Verona. The heaven that lies about us in infancy, Hazlitt argues, quoting Wordsworth against Wordsworth, is only a new world of which we know nothing but what we wish it to be, and believe all that we wish. Idealization, in this account, is not an error the lover commits upon the beloved; it is the default condition of a mind facing an unwritten future. The beloved, encountered at the exact moment when the future first becomes desirable, is credited with the whole of it. Romeo does not exaggerate Juliet’s worth by the ordinary machinery of flattery; he assigns her the value of everything he has not yet lived, which is why his language of worship, suns and stars and deified eyes, is closer to bookkeeping than to bombast. The beloved is the future’s local habitation, and the future is infinite until further notice.

Hazlitt had the equipment for this argument long before the chapter. His first book, the 1805 Essay on the Principles of Human Action, had staked its case on the imagination’s power to carry a person out of the present self into future states and other lives; sympathy and desire alike were, for the young philosopher, feats of projection. The Shakespeare chapter applies the doctrine to eros. What sheds a dewy light round the evening star, he asks, what makes the daisy bright and perfumes the hyacinth and embalms the first kiss of love? It is the delight of novelty, and the seeing no end to the pleasure fondly believed to be still in store. The heart revels in the luxury of its own thoughts and is unable to sustain the weight of hope and love that presses upon it. Even love’s lateness in the life is folded into the theory: the purple light of love is no reflection of celestial bliss, for love does not appear in infancy at all; it waits for the ripening of the youthful blood, and with the sense of pleasure, as soon as it is felt, come thronging infinite desires and hopes of pleasure. Love is mature as soon as born. It withers and dies almost as soon, a cadence Hazlitt drops into the argument like a tolling bell, since the whole tragedy is contained in the interval between the two sentences.

The polemic against Wordsworth does double duty, defending the play by defending the psychology the play presupposes. If Wordsworth were right, the lovers’ transports would be memories, visitations from a better world, and the proper critical tone toward them would be elegy. If Hazlitt is right, the transports are projections, the mind’s own wealth cast forward, and the proper tone is the one the chapter adopts: analysis of a natural process at its highest pressure. The distinction also predicts the tragedy with a precision the fate-reading never achieves. A love built on the unexperienced future is invulnerable to everything except the future’s arrival or cancellation; banishment, forced marriage, and the tomb are three forms of cancellation, and the lovers meet each with the same arithmetic of total loss. Hazlitt’s quarrel with the Ode is therefore not a digression from the chapter’s subject. It is the chapter’s engine room, where the theory that explains the balcony scene is forged in open combat with the most famous alternative theory of youthful feeling in the language.

A Whole Life in One Play: The Panorama of the Ages

A reader seduced by the chapter’s reputation might expect it to be a duet for the lovers alone. Hazlitt surprises that reader with a claim about the play’s total population. The tragedy, he writes, presents a beautiful prospect of the progress of human life; in thought it occupies years, and it embraces the circle of the affections from childhood to old age. Juliet has become a young woman since the audience first remembers her as a little thing in the idle prattle of the Nurse; Lady Capulet was about her daughter’s age when she became a mother; old Capulet impatiently recalls the day when he wore a visor and could whisper a tale in a fair lady’s ear, and concludes that those days are gone, gone, gone. Thus one period of life makes way for the following, Hazlitt observes, and one generation pushes another off the stage.

The observation transforms the young-love reading from a lyric into a structure. The lovers burn at the centre of a complete society of ages: the child Juliet of the Nurse’s anecdotes, the barely marriageable girl of the first act, the mother who was a mother at fourteen, the father who was a masquer thirty years back and now limps in gout at the edge of his own feast, the Nurse suspended between the generations as their go-between and their warning. The feud’s households are not young; the city is old, and its aged institutions, its arrangements and enmities, are what the lovers’ season must survive. Hazlitt’s spring imagery finds its proper scope in this arrangement. One of the most striking passages for the intense feeling of youth, he notes, is not spoken by a lover at all but by Capulet, inviting Paris to behold the earth-treading stars of the feast, and comparing the delight of lusty young men to the comfort felt when well-apparelled April treads on the heel of limping winter (1.2). The feelings of youth and of the spring are here blended together, he writes, like the breath of opening flowers, and the blending is the point: in this play even the old speak spring when they speak of the young, because the young are the season the whole calendar turns on.

Which members of the older generation does Hazlitt single out?

Hazlitt singles out the Nurse, Lady Capulet, and old Capulet, the three elders who frame Juliet’s girlhood. The Nurse survives in her prattle as the child’s first historian; Lady Capulet stands as proof of how early the marriage market opens; Capulet, remembering his masquing days, embodies the generation already pushed from the stage.

His treatment of the bud speech in the first scene sharpens the point. Montague, describing a son smit with a hopeless passion he will not reveal, reaches for the image of the bud bit with an envious worm before it can spread its sweet leaves to the air or dedicate its beauty to the sun (1.1). The description is casual, Hazlitt remarks, brought in by the necessities of exposition, and yet it is as full of passionate beauty as Romeo’s most frantic fondness at the feast. A father’s worried metaphor for a lovesick boy thus carries the same charge as the lover’s own rapture, because in this play the imagery of germination and blight is the common tongue of every age, spoken by parents about children and by lovers about themselves. Hazlitt’s panorama is not a decorative widening of the chapter’s lens. It establishes that the young-love reading, properly understood, is a reading of the entire society arranged around the lovers’ brief season, and it quietly disposes of the notion that his essay is a swoon over two teenagers. The swoon does not pause for prosody lessons in the mouths of gouty fathers. Hazlitt’s essay does, because his subject is not the lovers in isolation but the place of first love in the whole economy of a life, and of a city that has forgotten how to make room for it.

The panorama has a comic machinery that the chapter’s brevity leaves for the reader to assemble, and it is worth assembling here because it completes the proof. The ages in the play are not merely present; they are measured, obsessively, by the older generation itself. The Nurse computes her charge’s age by Lammas-tide, by an earthquake eleven years past, by a weaning and a broken brow, arriving at fourteen by a route of pure anecdote (1.3). Lady Capulet performs the colder arithmetic of the marriage market, informing her daughter that she was herself a mother much upon these years that Juliet is now a maid (1.3), a sentence in which an entire system announces that girlhood’s term is set by precedent rather than by readiness. Between the Nurse’s warm reckoning and the mother’s cold one, the play constructs its generational trap: the elders who measure the girl most exactly are the ones least able to imagine her interior calendar, on which four days suffice for a whole life. Hazlitt’s prospect of the progress of human life catches what the measurements miss, that the ages coexist without comprehension, each generation fluent in its own season and illiterate in the next. The tragedy, in this light, is partly a failure of translation between ages, and the critic who arranged the play as a survey of the affections from childhood to old age had located the failure’s map.

Juliet First: The Answer to Collins

For all the chapter’s balance, its centre of gravity is Juliet, and Hazlitt announces the priority as a correction of the record. It is wonderful, he writes, how William Collins, a critic and poet of great sensibility, could have encouraged the common error by saying that stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone. The error is the standing slander that the playwright’s women are lesser creations, sketched where the men are painted. Hazlitt’s rebuttal is not an argument but an exhibit: he quotes, at generous length, Juliet’s apology for her maiden boldness in the orchard scene, the speech in which she confesses that the mask of night hides the blush on her cheek and begs that her yielding not be imputed to light love (2.2). One passage of the garden scenes is enough, he says, to shew the perfect refinement and delicacy of the conception of the female character, and the choice of passage is itself the argument. He does not exhibit a speech of lamentation or of picturesque distress. He exhibits the moment at which a girl of fourteen audits her own forwardness in real time, anticipates the construction a censorious world will place on it, and answers the construction before it can be made.

The exhibit is introduced by a refusal that is itself a critical judgement of the first order. It would be hard to say, Hazlitt writes, which of the two garden scenes is the finest, the scene in which Romeo first converses with his love or the scene in which he takes leave of her the morning after their marriage; both are like a heaven upon earth, the blissful bowers of Paradise let down upon this lower world. Critics of the anthology school live by ranking beauties; Hazlitt declines the sport at the threshold of his best evidence, because the two scenes are not rivals but phases of a single element. The orchard conversation is anticipation in its purity, two voices constructing a world out of vows in the dark; the leave-taking is anticipation under sentence, the same voices arguing with the dawn over whether the bird they hear is the nightingale or the lark (3.5), whether the future may be postponed by an act of hearing. Between the scenes lies the marriage, and Hazlitt’s pairing quietly asserts that the play’s paradise is not a place but a tense: the future, entertained first as promise and then as reprieve. A criticism that takes the lovers’ element to be a grammatical mood has moved well beyond the swoon imputed to it, and the refusal to rank is the signature of the movement, the critic declining to break into excerpts a continuum he has just defined.

The portrait he builds from the speech has become the standard account of the character. In this and in all the rest, he writes, her heart fluttering between pleasure, hope, and fear seems to have dictated to her tongue. The character is one of perfect truth and sweetness. It has nothing forward, nothing coy, nothing affected or coquettish about it; it is a pure effusion of nature, as frank as it is modest, for it has no thought that it wishes to conceal. The paradox of the frank modest girl is then theorized with real daring. Her delicacy does not consist in coldness and reserve, Hazlitt insists, but in combining warmth of imagination and tenderness of heart with the most voluptuous sensibility; her innocence reposes on the strength of its affections, and love, a gentle flame, rarefies and expands her whole being. Every term in the account is calibrated against the prudery it opposes. Where the age’s ideal of female delicacy required ignorance and retreat, Hazlitt’s Juliet is delicate through knowledge and advance: she is modest not because she feels little but because what she feels is single, undisguised, and owned.

The tragic Juliet receives the same treatment in a single sentence that later criticism has done little to improve. The tragic part of the character, he writes, is of a piece with the rest: it is the heroic founded on tenderness and delicacy. Her resolution to follow the Friar’s desperate advice, and the conflict in her breast between apprehension and love as she comes to take the sleeping potion (4.3), are not a second character bolted onto the girl of the orchard; they are the first character under load. Tenderness, in Hazlitt’s scheme, is not the opposite of heroism but its ground, and the potion soliloquy is what the apology for maiden boldness becomes when the stakes are raised from reputation to death. Few single sentences in the criticism of the play have organized so much subsequent reading. The Juliet of the chapter, frank in love and heroic in suffering by the same quality, is the direct ancestor of every account that finds her, rather than her lover, the tragedy’s moral and imaginative centre, and the genealogy begins with a critic answering a poet’s slander by the simple expedient of quotation.

The Speech the Family Shakespeare Cut

The boldest act of the chapter is an act of printing. Juliet’s soliloquy on her wedding night, the great invocation that begins by calling on the fiery-footed steeds to gallop apace toward nightfall (3.2), is quoted at length, and Hazlitt states his reason without euphemism: the passage is inserted the rather because he has no doubt it has been expunged from the Family Shakespear. The Bowdler family’s expurgated edition, which undertook to make the plays fit for a daughter’s reading by removing whatever could raise a blush, is named here as the enemy in its most concrete form, and the chapter meets it by restoring, in a respectable critical volume, the very speech the expurgators could not afford to print: a bride’s frank anticipation of her wedding night, in which she has bought the mansion of a love but not yet possessed it, and counts the day tedious as the night before a festival to a child forbidden new robes.

Hazlitt’s doctrine is delivered in two sentences that deserve their currency. Such critics, he writes of the expurgators, do not perceive that the feelings of the heart sanctify, without disguising, the impulses of nature. Without refinement themselves, they confound modesty with hypocrisy. The distinction drawn is the chapter’s ethical core. Sanctification, in Hazlitt’s usage, is not a laundering operation that makes desire respectable by hiding it; it is the quality desire acquires when it is total, faithful, and undisguised, the condition he had already named in Juliet’s frankness. The expurgator and the libertine make the same mistake from opposite ends: both assume that nature requires either disguise or apology. The chapter’s Juliet requires neither, and the proof is staged editorially, by the simple act of leaving the speech in.

It is at this point that Schlegel returns to the chapter, summoned as a witness for the defence. Not so the German critic, Hazlitt writes, introducing the second great borrowing: Schlegel had said of the play’s heroine that it was reserved for her author to unite purity of heart and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of manners, and passionate violence, in one ideal picture. The quotation is deployed with precision. On Juliet’s purity, the German idealist and the English radical are made to stand together against the English expurgators, a piquant alignment that Hazlitt clearly savours. The chapter then seals the portrait with the Friar’s greeting as Juliet comes to the cell to be married, light of foot as a lover who may bestride the gossamer that idles in the summer air and yet not fall (2.6). What an idea of trembling haste and airy grace, borne upon the thoughts of love, the exclamation gives of her, Hazlitt exclaims in turn. Trembling haste and airy grace: the formula holds the whole characterization in suspension, a girl at once hurried and weightless, desiring and innocent, and it is earned by the chapter’s double refusal, of the prude’s disguise and of the sentimentalist’s swoon alike.

Notice, as a parting observation on the portrait, that Hazlitt’s Juliet never sits still. She is rendered in verbs of approach and urgency: fluttering between pleasure, hope, and fear; borne upon the thoughts of love; coming light of foot across the Friar’s cell; galloping in imagination against the sun to fetch the night. The later tradition would freeze her into an attitude, the girl at the balcony with a hand to her heart, an emblem to be embroidered rather than a person to be followed. The chapter’s heroine is unembroidable because she is never at rest long enough to pose; her stillnesses, the potion soliloquy and the tomb, are loaded pauses between actions she has chosen, and even her death is a piece of dispatch. Criticism that preserves a character’s motion preserves the character, and the difference between Hazlitt’s Juliet and the icon that succeeded her can be stated as a difference of tense: his is a girl in the act of becoming, hers a maiden already framed. The young-love reading lost something essential when it traded his verbs for the icon’s posture, and recovering the verbs is the quickest route back to the chapter’s actual heroine.

Romeo Is Hamlet in Love

If Juliet receives the chapter’s advocacy, Romeo receives its most famous formula. Romeo, Hazlitt writes, is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and sentiment in the one that there is of thought and sentiment in the other. Both are absent and self-involved, both live out of themselves in a world of imagination. Hamlet is abstracted from everything; Romeo is abstracted from everything but his love, and lost in it. He is himself only in his Juliet; she is his only reality, his heart’s true home and idol. The rest of the world is to him a passing dream.

The formula has been quoted so often as a flash of critical wit that its analytical content is easily missed. Hazlitt is making a claim about the architecture of the character: Romeo’s consciousness, like Hamlet’s, is a chamber in which the outer world registers only as it is refracted through an inner weather. His frail thoughts dally with faint surmise and are fashioned out of the suggestions of hope, the flatteries of sleep. The two exhibits Hazlitt chooses are both moments of failed attention. At the tomb, Romeo recollects himself over Paris’s corpse and wonders what his man said as they rode, whether Balthasar told him that Paris should have married Juliet, or whether he dreamed it (5.3). On the road from Mantua, his dream has presaged joyful news, his bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne, and he reports the dream of his lady reviving him with kisses in the very hour of the catastrophe (5.1). A mind that dreams its wishes on the edge of the grave is Hamlet’s mind with the polarity reversed: where the prince’s imagination multiplies reasons for delay, the lover’s imagination multiplies assurances of bliss, and both are equally deaf to the evidence arriving by horse. To call Romeo Hamlet in love is to credit him with the full inwardness of the canon’s most inward hero, and to deny, in advance, the long tradition of treating him as a charming nullity who exists to be looked at. Hazlitt’s Romeo thinks; he simply thinks in the grammar of desire, and the tragedy is what happens when that grammar meets a world conjugated in the indicative.

The Rosaline episode is the one place where the advocate turns auditor, and the coolness is instructive. Romeo’s passion for Juliet, Hazlitt notes, is not a first love: it succeeds and drives out his passion for another mistress, Rosaline, as the sun hides the stars. The judgement that follows is almost grudging. The device is perhaps an artifice, not absolutely necessary, to give the audience a higher opinion of the lady, the first absolute surrender of her heart enhancing the richness of the prize; the second passion is complete in itself, neither injured nor much bettered by the first. The waning of one attachment and the waxing of another has its own full history in Romeo’s Rosaline problem and the love that came before Juliet; Hazlitt’s contribution to that history is a refusal. Where a devotional reading must either excuse the transfer or spiritualize it, and where a hostile reading wields it as proof of the hero’s shallowness, Hazlitt files it under machinery: a dramatist’s convenience for scaling the heroine’s value, beneath the dignity of either blame or allegory. The refusal is bracing, and it is of a piece with his method throughout. His sympathy is not indiscriminate warmth sprayed over the whole text; it is an instrument he aims, and where the text offers him contrivance instead of nature, he says so and moves on. The chapter’s credibility as advocacy depends on such moments of withheld praise, and this is the clearest of them.

Construction, Transitions, and the Testimony of the Stage

A criticism of feeling might be expected to neglect carpentry. Hazlitt does the opposite, pausing in the middle of the raptures to admire the joins. The outline of the fable is taken from an Italian tale, he grants, but the dramatic arrangement of the scenes between the lovers, the development of the characters with time and circumstances, exactly proportioned to the interest excited, is not inferior to the expression of passion and nature. His prize exhibit is a piece of quiet engineering. The improbability of the plot’s main incident, the administering of the sleeping potion, is softened and obviated from the beginning by the Friar’s first appearance, culling his simples and discoursing on their virtues (2.3): the audience that has watched a herbalist catalogue the powers of plants accepts the philtre two acts later without a murmur. It is an editor’s observation delivered in a rhapsodist’s chapter, and it signals that Hazlitt’s respondents who call him a mere enthusiast have read the reputation and skipped the pages.

His account of the passionate scenes turns on a principle that editors and actors alike have since made their own. In the great crises, he writes, it is not merely the force of any one passion that is given, but the slightest and most unlooked-for transitions from one feeling to another, the mingling currents of every different emotion rising and prevailing in turn. The exhibit is Juliet in the scene of Tybalt’s death, who has by her own complaints encouraged the Nurse to curse her husband, and then instantly repels the wish she had herself occasioned: blistered be thy tongue for such a wish, he was not born to shame (3.2). Remorse and returning fondness chase one another through the speech until they arrive at the wish that treads on the brink of impiety, that father, mother, or both were dead rather than Romeo banished. Hazlitt’s point is about the unit of dramatic truth. Single passions, however violent, are cheap; what certifies the writing is the speed and fidelity of the reversals, feeling correcting feeling at the tempo of thought. His own prose, with its swerves and recoveries, is built to the same specification, which is one reason the chapter convinces as testimony: the instrument resembles the phenomenon.

The stage supplies the chapter’s final tribunal. Perhaps one of the finest pieces of acting ever witnessed, Hazlitt writes, is Edmund Kean’s manner of doing the banishment scene and his repetition of the single word banished, in the scene with the Friar (3.3); he treads close indeed upon the genius of his author. Actors, the parenthesis runs, are the best commentators on the poets. The compliment is structural, not gallant: a great actor is a critic whose reading is tested nightly against the resistance of an audience, and Kean’s success with one iterated word demonstrated something about the scene that no annotator had stated, that its passion is percussive, a mind striking the same fact until it sparks. Hazlitt is equally willing to record the failure. The tomb speech, in which Romeo peruses Juliet’s face and takes his last embrace (5.3), Kean did not give with equal truth or force of feeling; the stillness at the centre of that rhetoric defeated the tragedian of velocity. Criticism that can praise and blame the same performer in the same chapter is criticism with its eyes open, and the eyes, in this chapter, are the point.

The tomb speech draws from Hazlitt one further manoeuvre that discloses his whole economy of judgement. The lines describing the loveliness of the supposedly dead Juliet, beauty’s ensign still crimson in her lips and cheeks with death’s pale flag not advanced there (5.3), had been compared by others to the description of Cleopatra after her death, lying as she would catch another Antony in her strong toil of grace, and a question had been started which passage is the finest. Hazlitt declines the question with a courtesy that conceals a doctrine: the comparison is one he does not pretend to decide, since it is easier to decide between the author and any other writer than between the author and himself. The aphorism is the Sheridan joke translated into metaphysics. Where beauties are the product of a single imagination working at full pressure, ranking among them is a category error, like asking which of the sea’s tides is wettest; the critic’s business is to register the pressure, not to handicap the instances. Coming at the end of a chapter that has graded actors, corrected Schlegel, refuted Collins, and audited the Rosaline device, the refusal is earned rather than lazy. Hazlitt ranks freely wherever an external standard exists, a performance against a text, a metaphor against a play, a predecessor against the evidence. He refuses only where the standard would have to be invented for the occasion, and the discrimination between the two cases is as good a definition of critical maturity as the period affords.

Does Hazlitt defend the play’s low characters?

He defends them in a sentence aimed at the decorum of the previous century. The playwright is blamed, he writes, for the mixture of low characters; if this is a deformity, it is the source of a thousand beauties. His proof is the Nurse, whose convenient policy in advising a second marriage throws the heroine’s guileless simplicity into relief.

The defence is brief because the chapter has been conducting it all along by quotation. The Nurse’s prattle supplies the childhood that makes the panorama possible; her bawdy is the bass note against which Juliet’s frankness sounds as purity rather than ignorance; her betrayal in the Paris counsel (3.5) is the hinge on which the heroine’s isolation turns, drawing from Juliet the cry of ancient damnation against the most trusted voice in her world. Remove the low characters, Hazlitt’s logic runs, and the high ones lose the medium in which their altitude is measured. The deformity is the design. It is a very Romantic argument, the dignity of mixture against the decorum of kinds, and it arrives in the chapter without fanfare, as an aside, which is where Hazlitt habitually keeps his most consequential judgements.

Why does the chapter end by letting the play speak for itself?

Because quotation is the chapter’s method and its honesty. Having quoted the tomb speech at length, Hazlitt asks whether more passages should be quoted to shew the genius of the work, and answers that at that rate he might quote the whole. The essay ends by surrendering its voice to the text it has been defending.

The surrender is framed by an anecdote that has outlived most of the criticism of its decade. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, shewn a volume of the Beauties of Shakespeare, very properly asked where the other eleven volumes were. The joke does Hazlitt’s epistemology in one line: a beauty extracted is a beauty diminished, and a play whose excellence is distributed through its whole body cannot be sampled, only undergone. It also explains the chapter’s strangest feature, its ending. After the tomb speech and the Sheridan story, Hazlitt gives Mercutio exactly one sentence: the character is among the most mercurial and spirited of the productions of the author’s comic muse, and the chapter closes. The wit who dominates the play’s first half receives a single clause from the critic of feeling. Whether the sentence is a dismissal or a genuflection has been debated wherever the essay is taught; the likelier reading is structural. Mercutio’s excellence is real and irrelevant to the argument, since Queen Mab’s fantastical wit is the one element of the play that neither anticipation nor sympathy can explain, and Hazlitt, whose honesty about his instrument is part of his greatness, registers the fact by brevity rather than by forcing the fit. The silence at the end of the chapter is the sound of a method acknowledging its boundary.

Gusto: Prose That Thinks by Feeling

No account of the chapter is complete that treats its style as the clothing of its thought. Hazlitt had a word for the quality he valued above all others in art, and he had defined it the year before the book appeared, in an essay on gusto published in the Examiner in 1816. Gusto, in his definition, is power or passion defining any object: the quality by which a feeling or a form is rendered at the pressure of full conviction, without slackness or dilution. Titian’s flesh had it; the antique statues had it; a sentence could have it or want it. The chapter on the lovers is gusto applied to criticism itself. Its sentences do not describe the pulse of the passions from a sanitary distance; they reproduce it, accelerating through catalogues of imagery, breaking into rhetorical questions at the points of highest pressure, recovering into aphorism as the wave subsides. When Hazlitt writes that the desires and hopes of youthful passion determine the keenness of its disappointments, the prose performs the symmetry it asserts. When he asks what was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure from flowing on without stint or measure, the question’s own onward flow is the exhibit.

The method courts an obvious objection, and the chapter’s durability depends on how the objection is met. If the critic’s answering pulse is the instrument of proof, what distinguishes criticism from contagion? A swooning reader also has a pulse. Hazlitt’s implicit defence, visible across the chapter’s conduct rather than stated in it, is that his responses are everywhere answerable to checks that a mere contagion could not survive. The pulse is cross-examined by quotation: every surge of feeling in the prose is tethered to a passage produced in evidence, and the reader is invited to test the response against the passage rather than against the prose. It is cross-examined by antagonists: Collins, the objectors to the boy and girl, the expurgators, and Wordsworth are all brought into the room and answered, so that the feeling on record is feeling that has survived crossfire. It is cross-examined by the stage, where Kean’s successes and failures supply experimental results no solitary reader could manufacture. And it is cross-examined by the critic’s own refusals, the declined rankings, the audited artifice, the single sentence for Mercutio, each a point at which the instrument reports its limit instead of forging a reading. Gusto, so disciplined, is not the opposite of rigour. It is rigour conducted at temperature, and the chapter remains the standing demonstration that the two are compatible.

The bequest of the method to the play’s criticism is double, and the halves must be kept apart if the sentimental charge is to be judged fairly. The first half is liberation: after Hazlitt, a critic of the play was licensed to write as if feeling were evidence, to quote at length and argue from the quotation’s effect, to treat the reader’s experience as a datum rather than an embarrassment. Nearly every strong piece of writing on the lovers since, admiring or dissenting, works under that licence, including the ones that define themselves against him. The second half is hazard: the licence is transferable without the discipline, and the nineteenth century availed itself of the transfer on an industrial scale. Gusto without cross-examination decays into gush within a generation, and the gift-book Juliet, all sweetness and no dialectic, is gusto’s degenerate heir. Hazlitt cannot be acquitted of fathering the hazard in the sense that he made the style imitable; he can be acquitted, and this article acquits him, of practising the decay. The chapter’s own pages contain the antidote to its posterity, administered on every leaf: feel strongly, quote exactly, name the opponent, answer the objection, and stop where the evidence stops.

The Sentimental Charge Weighed and Answered

The complication this article was charged to address can now be stated in its strongest form. Hazlitt founded the reading of the play as the poem of young love; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries turned that reading into a swoon; therefore Hazlitt sentimentalized the play, whatever his intentions. The charge has scholarly backing of a sophisticated kind. Jonathan Bate, in Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, argued that the Romantic critics collectively remade the plays as works for the closet, substituting the reader’s reverie for the spectator’s experience and fixing images of the characters that the stage then had to obey. Under that description, Hazlitt’s chapter is a prime instrument of the transformation: it calls the tragedy a poem, it quotes speeches as lyrics, and it locates the work’s value in states of feeling rather than in action. On Bate’s showing, the young-love Romeo and Juliet is substantially a Romantic invention, and Hazlitt is among its inventors.

The stage record gives the charge a sharper edge, and also its limit. For most of the century before Hazlitt wrote, playgoers had not seen the tragedy’s own ending at all. David Garrick’s alteration, first performed in 1748 and dominant for decades, adjusted the potion’s timing so that Juliet wakes before Romeo dies, granting the lovers a final interview in the tomb: the period’s taste required the pathos of recognition and farewells exchanged, and the text’s bleaker arrangement, in which Romeo dies addressing a wife he believes dead and she wakes to find him gone, was judged insupportable. The alteration is the sentimental reading embodied in stagecraft, feeling maximized by forgery. Against that tradition, the Romantic critics’ insistence on the written text, on the speeches as printed and the catastrophe as constructed, functioned as a restoration movement in criticism before it became one in the theatre. When Samuel Phelps, at Sadler’s Wells in the 1840s, returned the play to its own ending, the stage was ratifying a sentence the reading public had already passed, and Hazlitt’s chapter, with its long quotation of the tomb speech exactly as written and its refusal to improve on it, was among the instruments of the verdict. A critic cannot be convicted of sentimentalizing a work on the evidence of a career spent arguing the work out of the sentimentalists’ hands, in the study and in the playhouse alike.

The evidence of the chapter complicates the indictment at every count, and the adjudication this article reaches is a split verdict. On the large charge, sentimentalizing the play, Hazlitt is acquitted by his own text. A sentimentalizer does not open by denying the sickly and sentimental cast, does not print the wedding-night soliloquy in defiance of the family edition, does not define his heroine’s delicacy as voluptuous sensibility undisguised, and does not equip his lovers with a psychology in which their feeling is fatal precisely because it is total. The softening of the play into a valentine happened downstream, in the girlhood literature and the gift-book tradition, where his conclusions circulated without his arguments; Mary Cowden Clarke’s novelized girlhood for the heroine, a generation later, shows the destination of the thinned reading, a Juliet supplied with a childhood of reveries by a writer who kept the warmth and dropped the dialectic. On the narrower charge, Hazlitt is guilty and proudly so: he lyricized the evidence. His method is quotation and response, his tribunal is the answering pulse, and the play’s civic machinery, the feud’s economics, the Prince’s law, the marriage market’s arithmetic, enters his account hardly at all. Feeling is his only instrument of proof, and an instrument, handed on without its owner’s antagonists, becomes a licence.

The Hazlitt scholars divide along exactly this seam, and their disagreement sharpens the verdict. David Bromwich, in Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, reads the prose as the exercise of a moral faculty: sympathy, disciplined by imagination, is how this critic knows anything, and the rhapsody is argument conducted by other means. Uttara Natarajan, in Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, makes the complementary case that the style enacts the doctrine, that the sentences think in the act of responding, so that the chapter’s heat is a form of cognition rather than its decoration. Tom Paulin, in The Day-Star of Liberty, presses further outward and finds a politics in the prose itself, its energy a radical refusal of the chilled, correct sentence. All three accounts agree against the swoon theory in one respect: the famous warmth is worked for, generated by an intelligence in motion. The disagreement worth adjudicating is between Bromwich’s moralist and Bate’s closet poet, and the chapter supports Bromwich with one amendment. Hazlitt’s sympathy is real cognition, but it is cognition with a preferred register; it hears feeling at concert pitch and plot, law, and society at a murmur. The amendment does not overturn the acquittal. It explains, as Bate’s account alone cannot, why the same chapter could be at once so robust in itself and so easy to soften in transmission: readers inherited a tuning, mistook it for the whole instrument, and played the play at the volume of a single stop.

The InsightCrunch Hazlitt Summary: His Claims at a Glance

The argument of the chapter is distributed through quotation and combat, which makes it exhilarating to read and easy to misremember. The InsightCrunch Hazlitt summary gathers its claims about the characters into a single reference, each claim stated in the critic’s own terms and keyed to the passages on which he rested it. Readers who keep the essay and the summary side by side in a study file, using a notes tool such as VaultBook, can test every row against the chapter in minutes, which is the use Hazlitt would have demanded: his claims were built to be checked against the text, not to be believed on his authority. The summary also exposes the chapter’s shape at a glance, its Juliet-weighted centre, its single-sentence Mercutio, its cool machinery note on Rosaline, in a way that twenty pages of rhapsody can conceal. Equally instructive are the rows the table cannot fill. The feud as a system, the Prince as an officer of the city’s peace, the marriage market as an economy in which daughters are assets with settlement dates: none of these earns a claim in the chapter, because none of them is a character in Hazlitt’s sense of an interior life to be entered and defended. A summary faithful to its source must leave those cells empty, and the emptiness is itself a finding, marking the exact frontier where the greatest defence of the play’s feeling stops and the work of other kinds of criticism, social, legal, and economic, has since had to begin.

Subject	Hazlitt’s claim	The play’s evidence
The play as a whole	The only tragedy written entirely on a love story, buoyant with youth in hope and in despair	The feud supplies the frame while every crisis turns on the lovers’ feeling (1.5; 5.3)
First love itself	A passion founded on the pleasures not experienced, feeding on the whole unlived future	Juliet’s bounty, boundless as the sea and deep as her love (2.2)
Juliet’s boldness	The perfect refinement and delicacy of the female character, against the error that the author felt for man alone	Her apology for her maiden boldness in the orchard (2.2)
Juliet’s desire	As frank as it is modest; delicacy is warmth undisguised, not coldness or reserve	The wedding-night invocation the family edition expunged (3.2)
Juliet’s courage	The heroic founded on tenderness and delicacy, of a piece with the girl of the orchard	Her resolution and conflict at the sleeping potion (4.3)
Romeo	Hamlet in love, the same exuberance turned from thought to sentiment, himself only in his Juliet	The dream of joyful news (5.1); the recollection at the tomb (5.3)
Rosaline	An artifice, and not a necessary one, that raises the audience’s opinion of the heroine	The passion that succeeds and drives out the first attachment (1.2; 1.5)
The Nurse and the low characters	A blamed mixture that is the source of a thousand beauties, setting guileless simplicity against convenient policy	The counsel to marry Paris and the heroine’s repudiation of it (3.5)
Mercutio	Among the most mercurial and spirited of the comic creations, granted a single sentence	The Queen Mab speech (1.4), the limit the critic’s method acknowledges
The older generation	One generation pushes another off the stage; the play surveys the progress of a whole life	Capulet’s visor memory (1.5); the April invitation to Paris (1.2)
The catastrophe	The only evil is the loss of the greatest possible felicity, fatal because survival would be life emptied	The banishment scenes (3.2; 3.3) and the double death (5.3)

Read down the middle column and the chapter’s unity appears: every claim is a corollary of the first two. A tragedy built entirely on first love, whose passion is anticipation feeding on an unwritten future, must have a heroine frank rather than coy, a hero absorbed rather than active, a catastrophe measured by subtraction rather than by crime, and a surrounding society arranged by age to mark the season the lovers occupy. The summary also performs the critic’s own service in reverse: where a row looks thin, the thinness is in the chapter and not in the play. Mercutio’s row is the honest instance, and it is worth more than a page of forced commentary would be, since it tells the reader exactly where the greatest critic of the play’s feeling stopped being able to feel his way.

What the Chapter Proves, and What It Cost

The verdict can be rendered in three findings. First, Hazlitt relocated the play’s excellence. Before the chapter, the standing accounts weighed the tragedy in the scales of construction, decorum, and moral tendency, and found it pleasing but irregular, a youthful indiscretion of genius. After it, the play’s centre of value sits where he put it, in the truth of the feeling, tested by quotation and by the answering pulse of the reader. Second, he gave first love a psychology durable enough to organize two centuries of discussion: anticipation as the passion’s fuel, ignorance of the future as the imagination’s licence, total loss as the catastrophe’s arithmetic. Readers who reject the account still conduct the argument on his ground, which is the definition of a critical founding. Third, he defended the heroine’s frankness at the moment when the culture was paying good money to have it cut, and he defended it not as an indulgence but as the character’s moral substance, the point at which her modesty and her desire are the same fact. Restoration work of that order is not sentimentality. It is rescue.

Did later readers inherit Hazlitt’s argument or only his warmth?

Only the warmth, in the main, and the chapter’s subsequent history is the proof. The conclusions detached themselves from the reasoning that produced them and circulated as atmosphere: the play of spring, the poem of young love, the heroine of sweetness. What dropped away was the machinery, the anticipation theory, the Wordsworth quarrel, the expurgation fight.

The costs of the chapter are the shadow of its gifts, and candour requires them on the record. Its author supposed the play to be the first its maker wrote, and the supposition, false by later dating, still echoes wherever the tragedy is patronized as a young man’s lyric effusion rather than weighed as a mature construction. His civic blindness is real: the feud in his account is a pressure, not a system, and the Verona of law, money, and arranged marriage that modern criticism has recovered is largely absent from his pages. His Mercutio is a sentence. Against those costs stand the acquisitions, and the balance is not close. A reader who returns to the play through the chapter will find the lovers neither excused nor swooned over but explained, their rapture given a mechanism, their deaths given an arithmetic, their frankness given a defence that the expurgators’ descendants have never answered. The cliché of young love owes its existence to Hazlitt and its weakness to his imitators. Hazlitt’s chapter, restored to its argument, remains what it was in 1817: the strongest brief ever drawn for the defence of two children of Verona, by the critic who understood that they had never needed one half so much as they needed to be understood.

One measure of the chapter’s victory is the fate of its formulas. Romeo is Hamlet in love detached itself from its context within a generation and entered the language as a freehold proverb, quoted by writers who could not have said what argument it once concluded. The heroic founded on tenderness and delicacy performed the same migration for Juliet, supplying the formula under which her potion scene and her repudiation of the Nurse have been read ever since. Formulas are the small change of criticism, and they debase as they circulate; yet their circulation is also the certificate of the mint. No other critic of the play coined phrases that the culture found worth stealing at this scale, because no other critic had compressed so much verified observation into so portable a form. The theft is the tribute, and the work of a later age is simply to reattach the coins to the arguments that gave them value, which restores both the critic’s credit and the play’s.

There is a practical corollary for any reader coming to the play through its reputation, and the chapter itself supplies it. The reputation arrives as a set of conclusions: spring, youth, sweetness, doom. The chapter, read in sequence, converts each conclusion back into the question it once answered. Spring becomes a dispute with a German lecturer about whether softness or glow governs the work’s weather. Sweetness becomes a bride’s unsanitized soliloquy defended against the men who cut it. Youth becomes a theory of expectation with a quarrel against Wordsworth in its engine room. Doom becomes an arithmetic of total loss. A classic of criticism earns the name by surviving this treatment at the reader’s hands indefinitely, each generation finding the arguments still load-bearing under the patina of the phrases. Hazlitt’s chapter survives it. The patina is thick, the phrases having passed into the language’s small change, but the structure underneath has not cracked, and the test applied throughout the preceding sections, quotation against claim and opponent against verdict, remains the test the chapter itself demands and passes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the InsightCrunch Hazlitt summary, and what does it collect?

The InsightCrunch Hazlitt summary collects the claims of William Hazlitt’s 1817 chapter on the play, stated in his own terms and keyed to the passages he rested them on. It gathers his verdicts on the play as a whole, on first love, on Juliet’s boldness, desire, and courage, on Romeo, on Rosaline, on the Nurse and the low characters, on Mercutio, on the older generation, and on the catastrophe. Its use is verification: Hazlitt built his claims to be checked against the text, and the summary lets a reader perform the check row by row instead of trusting the critic’s reputation or the clichés that descended from it.

Q: Where did Hazlitt’s essay on the play first appear, and in what book?

The essay appeared as the chapter on the play in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, Hazlitt’s first book of criticism, published in London in 1817. The volume worked through the canon play by play, setting out the character criticism he had been developing as a dramatic reviewer for the Morning Chronicle and the Examiner. The first edition sold out within six weeks, a second followed in 1818, and a hostile assault in the Quarterly Review damaged the author’s standing with the general public. The chapter was therefore a public act in a critical war, not a private meditation, and its combative energy belongs to its circumstances.

Q: What did Hazlitt claim about the play’s place among the tragedies?

Hazlitt claimed that the tragedy is the only one its author wrote entirely on a love story, and that it deserves the proud rank he supposed it to hold as the author’s first play. The dating supposition has not survived later scholarship, which places the work in the middle 1590s, but the classification has endured because the adverb does the work: other tragedies entwine love with empire, war, or jealousy, while this one stakes everything on the single passion. He added that the buoyant spirit of youth runs through every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope and in the bitterness of despair.

Q: Who wrote the description of the play as a southern spring that Hazlitt quotes?

The description was written by August Wilhelm Schlegel, the German critic whose lectures on dramatic literature Hazlitt had reviewed in English translation the year before the book appeared. Hazlitt is explicit about the borrowing: it has been said of the play by a great critic, he writes, that whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this poem. Later readers, meeting the sentence inside Hazlitt’s celebrated chapter, have often credited it to Hazlitt himself, one of the durable misattributions in the play’s critical history.

Q: What did Hazlitt say Schlegel’s spring description left out?

Hazlitt granted the description’s truth and denied its sufficiency. The play, he answered, has the sweetness of the rose but also its freshness; it has the languor of the nightingale’s song but also its giddy transport; it has the softness of a southern spring but is as glowing and as bright. Each amendment pairs Schlegel’s quality of repose with a quality of motion and heat. The correction is the chapter in miniature: an admired authority quoted exactly, then tested against the work itself and found half true, since a tragedy of pulse and hurry cannot be rendered by a metaphor of languishing atmosphere alone.

Q: Did Hazlitt think the lovers were sentimental or love-sick?

He thought the opposite, and said so in the chapter’s most quoted denial. There is nothing, he wrote, of a sickly and sentimental cast in the play; Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick. Everything speaks the soul of pleasure and the high and healthy pulse of the passions, the heart beating and the blood circulating throughout. The target of the denial was the sentimental drama of his day, with its lip-deep interchange of learned sighs. Hazlitt’s lovers feel at first hand, in full possession of their senses and affections, and the vigour of the passion is precisely what separates his reading from the swooning tradition later fathered on him.

Q: What objection to the lovers’ ages was Hazlitt answering?

Hazlitt was answering the standing objection that the play is founded on an idle passion between a boy and a girl who have scarcely seen each other, who can have little sympathy or rational esteem, who have no experience of the good or ills of life, and whose raptures or despair must therefore be groundless and fantastical. His rebuttal concedes the facts and reverses the valuation. Inexperience is not the passion’s defect but its ground: a first love audited by experience would be a different and lesser subject, fit for the German dramas of sentiment he despised. The objection, in his handling, convicts its makers of asking the spring to behave like autumn.

Q: On what did Hazlitt say Shakespeare founded the lovers’ passion?

Hazlitt said the passion was founded not on the pleasures the lovers had experienced but on all the pleasures they had not experienced. All that was to come of life was theirs, and at that untried source of promised happiness they slaked their thirst, the first eager draught making them drunk with love and joy. A passion built on experience can compare and discount; a passion built on the unexperienced has no ledger, since its object stands for the totality of an unlived life. That is why Hazlitt calls youthful desire infinite and extravagant, and why experience, when it arrives, checks and kills it.

Q: How does Hazlitt explain why first love idealizes its object?

Hazlitt explains idealization as the mind’s treatment of an unwritten future. The splendour of first impressions comes not from knowledge of the past but from ignorance of the future, which fills the void to come with the warmth of desires, gay hopes, and bright fancies. The new world of youth is one of which we know nothing but what we wish it to be, and believe all that we wish. A beloved met at that threshold is therefore credited with the whole of the life not yet lived, and the language of worship that results is less exaggeration than arithmetic: the object has been assigned the value of everything.

Q: Why does Hazlitt quarrel with Wordsworth’s Ode in the middle of the essay?

Hazlitt quarrels with the Ode because Wordsworth explained the splendour of early feeling by a pre-existent state, the soul arriving from heaven with trails of glory. Hazlitt calls the supposition idle and substitutes his own mechanism: obscurity about the future, not memory of a former world, colours the prospect of life with hope, as the cloud reflects the rainbow. The quarrel is load-bearing rather than decorative. If Wordsworth is right, the lovers’ rapture is a recollection and invites elegy; if Hazlitt is right, it is a projection of desire into an unknown future, which explains both its infinity and its vulnerability to cancellation by banishment, forced marriage, and death.

Q: Why does Hazlitt quote Juliet’s apology for her boldness at such length?

Hazlitt quotes the orchard apology to refute a standing slander, the poet William Collins’s line encouraging the common error that stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone. Against the charge that the female characters are the lesser creations, he exhibits the speech in which Juliet confesses that the mask of night hides her blush, audits her own forwardness, and begs that her yielding not be imputed to light love (2.2). One such passage, he says, shews the perfect refinement and delicacy of the conception of the female character. The method is forensic: a received opinion about the women of the canon is dismantled by a single exhibit, chosen because the character there cross-examines herself.

Q: Why did Hazlitt print the wedding-night speech that a family edition had cut?

Hazlitt printed Juliet’s invocation to the fiery-footed steeds (3.2) at length and said plainly that he inserted it the rather because he had no doubt it was expunged from the Family Shakespear, the Bowdlers’ edition prepared for blushing readers. His doctrine answers the expurgators directly: the feelings of the heart sanctify, without disguising, the impulses of nature, and critics without refinement confound modesty with hypocrisy. A bride’s frank anticipation of her wedding night was, for Hazlitt, not an embarrassment to be pruned but the strongest evidence for his reading of the character, in which desire and innocence are the same undisguised fact. Printing the speech was the chapter’s boldest editorial act.

Q: What did Hazlitt say about Juliet’s delicacy?

Hazlitt redefined delicacy against the prudery of his age. Juliet’s character, he wrote, is one of perfect truth and sweetness, nothing forward, nothing coy, nothing affected, a pure effusion of nature, as frank as it is modest because it has no thought it wishes to conceal. Her delicacy does not consist in coldness and reserve but in combining warmth of imagination and tenderness of heart with the most voluptuous sensibility. Where the conventional ideal made female delicacy a function of ignorance and retreat, Hazlitt made it a function of singleness: the girl is delicate because her feeling is whole, owned, and undisguised, in desire as in suffering.

Q: What did Hazlitt mean by the formula that Romeo is Hamlet in love?

Hazlitt meant that Romeo has Hamlet’s inward architecture with its polarity reversed. There is the same rich exuberance in the one, of passion and sentiment, that there is in the other, of thought and sentiment; both are absent and self-involved, living out of themselves in a world of imagination. Hamlet is abstracted from everything, Romeo from everything but his love, in which he is lost; he is himself only in his Juliet, and the rest of the world is to him a passing dream. The formula credits the lover with the full consciousness of the canon’s most conscious hero, and reads his failures of attention, the joyful dream on the Mantua road and the dazed recollection at the tomb, as the lover’s form of the prince’s abstraction.

Q: How did Hazlitt judge Romeo’s earlier passion for Rosaline?

Hazlitt judged it coolly, as machinery. Romeo’s passion for Juliet, he observes, is not a first love; it succeeds and drives out the passion for Rosaline as the sun hides the stars. The earlier attachment he calls perhaps an artifice, and not a necessary one, whose function is to raise the audience’s opinion of the heroine, the first absolute surrender of her heart enhancing the richness of the prize. The second passion, he adds, is complete in itself, neither injured nor bettered by the first. The judgement matters for his reputation as a critic: his sympathy is aimed, not sprayed, and where the text offers contrivance instead of nature he says so and moves on.

Q: What did Hazlitt mean by calling the play a survey of the whole progress of life?

Hazlitt meant that the tragedy embraces the circle of the affections from childhood to old age, occupying years in thought though days in action. Juliet is remembered first as a little thing in the Nurse’s prattle; her mother was a mother at about her age; old Capulet recalls wearing a visor and whispering in a fair lady’s ear, and finds those days gone. One period of life makes way for the following, and one generation pushes another off the stage. The observation widens the young-love reading into a social structure: the lovers burn at the centre of a complete arrangement of ages, and even Capulet’s invitation to the feast blends the feelings of youth and of the spring in an old man’s mouth.

Q: What did Hazlitt praise in the play’s construction?

Hazlitt praised the engineering that a rhapsodist might have been expected to skip. The dramatic arrangement of the scenes, the development of the characters with time and circumstances, exactly proportioned to the interest excited, he rated not inferior to the expression of passion itself. His prize exhibit is the quiet preparation of the plot’s least probable device: the improbability of the sleeping potion is softened from the beginning by the Friar’s first appearance, culling his simples and discoursing on their virtues (2.3), so that the audience accepts the philtre when it comes. He praised likewise the transitions of feeling in the great scenes, the mingling currents of emotion rising and prevailing in turn, as the signature of the writing at its most truthful.

Q: What did Hazlitt praise in Edmund Kean’s acting of the banishment scene?

Hazlitt praised Kean’s repetition of the single word banished in the scene with the Friar (3.3) as perhaps one of the finest pieces of acting ever witnessed on a stage, the actor treading close upon the genius of his author. His parenthesis carries the doctrine: actors are the best commentators on the poets, since a performer’s reading is tested nightly against an audience’s resistance. The praise was not indiscriminate. Kean’s delivery of the tomb speech (5.3) Hazlitt found wanting in equal truth and force of feeling, the stillness of that rhetoric defeating the tragedian of velocity. The chapter’s willingness to praise and blame the same performer is its certificate of honesty as theatre criticism.

Q: Why does Hazlitt’s account of Mercutio take a single sentence?

The account takes a single sentence because Mercutio is the one excellence of the play that Hazlitt’s method could not metabolize. After quoting the tomb speech at length and telling Sheridan’s story of the Beauties of Shakespeare, the chapter grants the character a lone clause: among the most mercurial and spirited of the productions of the author’s comic muse. Queen Mab’s wit is neither anticipation nor sympathy, the two instruments of Hazlitt’s criticism; it is invention at play, self-delighting and unaccountable. Rather than force the fit, the critic registers the limit by brevity. The silence is eloquent evidence about the method, marking the boundary where the greatest reader of the play’s feeling acknowledged a kind of genius his feeling could not follow.

Q: How did Hazlitt’s chapter shape the later reading of the play as the story of young love?

The chapter supplied the later reading with its vocabulary, its heroine, and its temperature. Its classification of the tragedy as the one work built entirely on a love story, its spring imagery corrected from Schlegel, its frank and heroic Juliet, and its psychology of anticipation passed into the common stock of the play’s reputation, repeated by generations who never opened the book. The transmission thinned what it carried: the conclusions survived as atmosphere while the arguments, the Wordsworth quarrel, the expurgation fight, the psychology of the unexperienced future, dropped away. The sentimental young-love play of the later tradition is therefore best described as Hazlitt’s reading with its reasoning removed, which is why restoring the chapter restores the play’s defence.