Philadelphia 1881) even goes as far as making him a princess, educated as prince, because a male heir was wanted.„It is not claimed that any such thought was in our immortal poet's mind, when first he conceived and put the drama into shape: the evidence is strongly to the contrary. It is not even claimed that Shakespeare ever fully intended to represent Hamlet as indeed a woman. It is claimed that in the gra- dual evolution of the feminine element in Hamlet's character the time arrived, when it occurred to the dramatist that so might a woman act and feel, if educated from infancy to play a prince's part, and that thereafter the changes in the character and in the play were all in the direction of a de- velopment of this idea. Very possibly the poet half juggled with himself in the matter.“

I mention Shylock, who has been thought— for instance by Lee and Grätz— drawn to amuse the mob, and call to their minds a cruel execution, and who has been brought on the stage according to this interpretation, throwing back on the poet himself the blame of being a predecessor to antisemitism. Shylock, on the other hand, has been inter- preted— for instance by Ihering and Honigmann— as a martyr, as the typical figure of the jew in mediaeval times, that outcast from society, who vainly cried for- right; and how could it be otherwise, in their opinion, with our noble humane poet?

Citing Leighton and Vining, I have transgressed the limits of my task, viz. to prove by the testimony of sober man and able critics that the same character may be ascribed to the poet„in the workshop“, and to the poet„on the heights“, and that the play may be placed accordingly in the chrono- logical order, that this may be done the more easily, if the critic's opinion is biased by other evidence: metre, language, style etc.

And now I choose a few examples among our poet's creations. The date of a Midsummer Night's dream is a disputed one, and the delineation of the characters has been alleged as an argument by either party in the controversy.

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