Note 11 — Chapter XIII
Bernard Miall translation
"King Lear is a very poor drama, very carelessly constructed, which can inspire nothing but weariness and disgust."—Othello, for which Tolstoy evinces a certain sympathy, doubtless because the work is in harmony with his ideas of that time concerning marriage and jealousy, "while the least wretched of Shakespeare's plays, is only a tissue of emphatic words." Hamlet has no character at all: "he is the author's phonograph, who repeats all his ideas in a string." As for The Tempest, Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida, &c., Tolstoy only mentions them on account of their "ineptitude."
The only character of Shakespeare's whom he finds natural is Falstaff, "precisely because here the tongue of Shakespeare, full of frigid pleasantries and inept puns, is in harmony with the false, vain, debauched character of this repulsive drunkard."
Tolstoy had not always been of this opinion. He read Shakespeare with pleasure between 1860 and 1870, especially at the time when he contemplated writing a historical play about the figure of Peter the Great. In his notes for 1869 we find that he even takes Hamlet as his model and his guide. Having mentioned his completed works, and comparing War and Peace to the Homeric ideal, he adds:
"HAMLET and my future works; the poetry of the romance-writer in the depicting of character."