Item 137 - Letter from Julius Charles Hare

JCH is unsure whether Christian C. J. Bunsen is at home. When JCH last saw him he mentioned that he had had to decline a kind invitation from WW to come to Cambridge. Bunsen is concentrating on the printing of his book on Egypt. JCH gives his opinion of a recent Shakespeare production. It seems to JCH 'that the principle of the greatest dramatic poets has not been to make their characters talk in the form of thought which prevailed in their own times, but they have made them give utterance to the deepest thoughts of their own age & of their own individual minds. The most remarkable example of this is of course Hamlet, the Dane, who went to study at Wittenburg, under Doctor Martin Luther. But the same principle prevails in Macbeth, Lear, & indeed everywhere in Shakespeare; one of the chief marvels in whom is the manner in which he combines this with a sufficient regard to the characteristic spirit and manners of the age which he is representing'.