Characters of Shakespear's Plays Merry Wives of Windsor". The bulk of Hazlitt's commentary on the two history plays is devoted to Falstaff, whom he considers to be "perhaps the most substantial comic character ever invented". Falstaff had been of interest to Shakespearean commentators for years. Forty years earlier, a full-length book had appeared, "An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff" (1777), by Maurice Morgann, often taken as the beginning of that school of Shakespearean criticism which considers the characters of Shakespeare's plays as though they were real people. Hazlitt, who seems to have had little acquaintance with Morgann's work, is careful
Giuseppe Verdi in 1871 "I won't say [Verdi] is an atheist, but he is not much of a believer." Rosselli comments that in the Requiem "The prospect of Hell appears to rule...[the Requiem] is troubled to the end," and offers little consolation. "See also List of compositions by Giuseppe Verdi and individual articles on the works." The writer Friedrich Schiller (four of whose plays were adapted as operas by Verdi) distinguished two types of artist in his 1795 essay "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry". The philosopher Isaiah Berlin ranked Verdi in the 'naïve' category—"They are not...self-conscious. They do not...stand aside to contemplate