OCR Text |
Show DREW NO STRONG HYPOCRITE Absence of Such a Dominating Character Char-acter From Shakespeare's Pages Explained by English Novelist. Material for discussion among those who more or less know their Shakespeare Shake-speare has been provided by Sir Walter Wal-ter Raleigh's suggestion on the lecture platform that Shakespeare created no complete and carefully drawn figure of a hypocrite because the dramatist had had a free and happy childhood. "It is the child," says Sir Walter, "who sees hypocrites;" and so, as one follows fol-lows the argument at second hand in the column of a newspaper,-Dickens, who had a harsher childhood, was more impressed by hypocrisy, and later wrote about hypocrites. One suspects, however, that there may be readers who will deny that Shakespeare failed to include the hypocrite in his remarkable remark-able gallery of dramatic portraits. Hypocrisy certainly figures; one has only to recall the behavior of Gloster or lago to find the characteristic, but Sir Walter no doubt has ground for his conviction that the plays contain no figure dominated hy It. |