not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the result
is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is not
poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal; Lessing's
"Nathan" will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it birth.
One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The theory
seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction; but it
is not really so.

Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
king, in "Lear," was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
infinitesimal in comparison.

Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at "Macbeth." You
may derive abundant instruction from it,--instruction of many kinds.
There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous