In praise of Shakespeare. – The most beautiful thing I can say in praise of Shakespeare as a human being is this: he believed in Brutus and didn’t cast a speck of suspicion on this type of virtue! To him he devoted his best tragedy – it is still called by the wrong name46 – to him and to the most dreadful epitome of lofty morality. Independence of soul! That’s what’s at stake here! No sacrifice can be too great for that: one has to be capable of sacrificing even one’s dearest friend for it, even if he should be the most marvellous human being, the ornament of the world, the genius without peer – if one loves freedom as the freedom of great souls and this freedom is endangered because of him: that is what Shakespeare must have felt! The height at which he places Caesar is the finest honour he could bestow on Brutus: only thus does he raise Brutus’ inner problem to immense proportions as well as the strength of mind that was able to cut this knot! And was it really political freedom that drove this poet to sympathize with Brutus – and turned him into Brutus’ accomplice? Or was political freedom only a symbolism for something inexpressible? Could it be that we confront some unknown dark event and adventure from the poet’s own soul about which he wanted to speak only in signs? What is all of Hamlet’s melancholy compared to that of Brutus! And perhaps Shakespeare knew the latter as he knew the former – through first-hand experience! Maybe he also had his dark hour and his evil angel, like Brutus! But whatever such similarities and secret references there may have been: before the whole figure and virtue of Brutus, Shakespeare threw himself to the ground and felt unworthy and distant – he wrote the evidence for this into his tragedy. Twice in the tragedy he introduced a poet,47 and twice he poured such impatient and ultimate contempt upon him that it sounds like a cry – like the cry of self-contempt. Brutus, even Brutus loses patience when the poet enters – conceited, pathetic, obtrusive, as poets usually are – as a being who appears to be bursting with possibilities of greatness, even moral greatness, although in the philosophy of deed and life he rarely attains even a passable integrity. ‘When he knows his time, I’ll know his humour. / What should the wars do with these jiggling fools? / Companion, hence!’48 shouts Brutus. This should be translated back into the soul of the poet who wrote it.