Types of characters in Shakespeare

Aren’t you amazed at the range of characters in Shakespeare? I mean not just a range in backgrounds, identities, personalities, viewpoints, but also a range in types of characters? 

Shakespeare can create both larger-than-life characters (the Macbeths, Lear, Othello) and small, ordinary characters (Juliet’s nurse, Celia, Hero); both complex, multifaceted characters (Hamlet, Hal, Cleopatra) and caricatures (Pistol, Dogberry, Perdita’s adoptive father). He can create utterly charming characters (Rosalind, Beatrice). He can depict, convincingly, wholly good characters (Desdemona, Kent, Imogen) and wholly evil characters (Goneril, Regan, Iago). He can delineate characters who are charismatic and lovable despite their bad traits (Falstaff) or sympathetic despite their villainy (Shylock), as well as characters who are repulsive despite their intelligence (Portia) or deeply unpleasant despite their virtue (Isabella). He can get you to dislike a character then feel ashamed for having laughed at their humiliation (Malvolio). He can create a two-dimensional comic relief character then, with a single line, give him depth (Sir Andrew Aguecheek). He can depict an utterly ordinary character then transfigure her in the last act (Emilia), or elevate her into a quasi-mythological being (Cleopatra). He can create characters who continue to puzzle, who continue to be analysed and discussed centuries later (Hamlet, Iago). 

It’s astonishing. (Most) other writers don’t have such range.

At the risk of being accused of denigrating other writers in order to praise Shakespeare, let me explain what I mean. I think, for example, that Chekhov can’t create larger-than-life characters and Tolstoy can’t really write caricatures (except for Napoleon), not for lack of talent but because of their sensibilities. Dostoyevsky probably can’t write small, ordinary characters. George Eliot and Edith Wharton can’t portray a charming character, especially if they themselves disapprove of them, as Jane Austen (Henry and Mary Crawford) and Thackeray (Becky Sharp) can. Jane Austen, like Shakespeare, can depict a two-dimensional foolish character and then make us feel ashamed when we realise they have feelings (Miss Bates), but she doesn’t create a character whose name becomes a byword for something, the way Shakespeare (Othello, Shylock) and some other writers can (Melville: Bartleby, Ahab; Nabokov: Lolita; Dickens: Scrooge). Dickens, like Shakespeare, can give us a caricature and then in last few chapters give them complexity and depth (Sir Leicester Dedlock), but readers tend to complain about his wholly good characters, something very few writers can convincingly pull off. 

Shakespeare’s genius is miraculous.