In nearly all the plays the main interest is not in plot, as in the eighteenth century, and not primarily in story, as in the Elizabethan period, but in the delineation of individual passion. "Lear," "Othello," "Hamlet," and "Macbeth" are the models; but the passions are more distempered, more isolated, more abstracted from reason or sense than in Shakespeare. As in the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the influence of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans is most unmistakable in the prominence given to insanity and villany. But this prominence is also a natural result of the romanticists' prepossession with passion. In tragedy, they felt that some passions must be very evil and some ruinous; hence they devoted themselves to a study of malice and madness. Their villains are more vigorous than those of the eighteenth century, but they, too, imitate Iago; and the mad scenes always recall either Lear or Ophelia. The romanticists can realize passion for the moment, or display its variable moods; but they rarely succeed in making its extended portrayal convincing. They clung to the idea that the only way to depict passion was to eliminate all else. Even in the great writers passion absorbs the interest; in the minor plays it tears itself to tatters. Tragedy after tragedy represents passions, not conflicting but alternating, until one or the other turns to madness. As Lewis's prologue declared, Romance "raves away the hours." The conception of tragedy seems to be the burning up of the soul in passion, and the poets' main concern to describe the conflagration. The romanticists needed Lyttleton's advice, to read Shakespeare, but to study Racine.
The conception of tragedy that requires the expression of passion working in individual men, and seeks in history or legend for examples of isolated effects of the great emotions, clearly involves something different from a veracious representation of life as we all see it, and something more than the confusion of passions run wild. According to contemporary philosophical criticism, as that of Schiller and Schelling, or that of Coleridge and Shelley, tragedy should take part in the search for universal truth; not universal in the eighteenth-century conception of typical characters and aphoristic generalizations, but universal in the sense that, in the words of Carlyle, it seeks the "interpretation of the divine idea in the world." Tragedy should investigate, as Lamb declared, "the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great and heroic nature," and should also seek to find in the riots of evil or the storms of passion symptoms of the struggle of Nature to rid itself of disease and fever, the presage of a higher unity for both man and the universe. Something of this is discernible in "Remorse" or elsewhere; there is a passionate demand for ethical realities in "Cain"; but the only positive presentation of an idealistic theory of tragedy is "The Cenci."