The great distinction between Shakspeare and almost every other dramatic writer arises from his developement and variety of character: all his personages are individuals. In other authors, we have a lover, an ambitious man, a tyrant, or a victim of tyranny; but in Shakspeare it is not the passion that makes the man, but the peculiar character of the person that gives reality and life to the passion. Thus Richard III. and Macbeth are both ambitious; but how differently do their respective dispositions modulate their conduct and feelings! The cruel, remorseless Richard can never, in a single line he utters, be mistaken for the weak, vacillating usurper, whose cruelties result from the necessities of his situation, and not from inborn ferocity of character. Juliet, Imogen, and Rosalind, are alike girls in love; but how variously do they display their sentiments! the ardent Italian, the fond, devoted wife, and the sprightly, spirited daughter of an exiled prince, are all individuals characterised by distinctive marks; so that a painter would give to each a physiognomy utterly dissimilar the one from the other. If Alfieri had read Shakspeare, he might have discovered and appreciated this incomparable mark of his excellence; and his knowledge of the human heart would have led him to imitate a model which, if succeeded in, could not, from its very nature, bear any resemblance to mere plagiarism. He himself felt that one tyrant should not quite resemble another, nor one lover be but the mirror of another: but so it is with him, with few exceptions--situation, not character, forms the interest of his pieces.
Besides this, Alfieri was not an imaginative poet: his sonnets and longer poems are failures; his tragedies are vacant of ideal imagery; his sensible objects are never animated by a soul infused into them by the speaker; his daggers and poisons, and all the other tragic paraphernalia, are the mere things themselves--the poet's eye never gives "to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." His inventive powers consisted in being able to conceive situations of passion and interest, and giving to his personages feelings and language at once natural, powerful, and pathetic.