Act i. sc. 2).

Also the words in which Cleopatra (in the last scene of the play) expresses her horror of being taken in Octavius Cæsar's triumph to Rome:

"Now, Iras, what thinkest thou? Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown In Rome as well as I: mechanic slaves, With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall Uplift us to the view; _in their thick breaths,"_ _Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclosed_ _And forced to drink their vapour._"

All Shakespeare's principal characters display this shrinking from the mob, although motives of interest may induce them to keep it concealed. When Richard II., having banished Bolingbroke, describes the latter's farewell to the people, he says (_Richard II_., Act i. sc. 4):

"Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green, Observed his courtship to the common people; How did he seem to dive into their hearts With humble and familiar courtesy, Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smile And patient underbearing of his fortune, As 'twere to banish their effects with him. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench, A brace of draymen bid God-speed him well, And had the tribute of his supple knee, With 'Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends.'"

The number of these passages proves that it was, in plain words, their evil smell which repelled Shakespeare. He was the true artist in this respect too, and more sensitive to noxious fumes than any woman. At the present period of his life this particular distaste has grown to a violent aversion. The good qualities and virtues of the people do not exist for him; he believes their sufferings to be either imaginary or induced by their own faults. Their struggles are ridiculous to him, and their rights a fiction; their true characteristics are accessibility to flattery and ingratitude towards their benefactors; and their only real passion is an innate, deep, and concentrated hatred of their superiors; but all these qualities are merged in this chief crime: they _stink_.

"_Cor_. For the mutable _rank-scented_ many, let them Regard me as I do not flatter, and Therein behold themselves" (Act iii. sc. I). "_Brutus_. I heard him swear, Were he to stand for consul, never would he Appear i' the market-place, nor on him put The napless vesture of humility; Nor, showing as the manner is, his wounds To the people, beg their _stinking breaths"_ (Act ii. sc. I).

When Coriolanus is banished by the people, he turns upon them with the outburst:

"You common cry of curs! _whose breath I hate_ As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcases of unburied men That do corrupt my air" (Act iii. sc. 3)

When old Menenius, Coriolanus's enthusiastic admirer, hears that the banished man has gone over to the Volscians, he says to the People's Tribunes:

"You have made good work, You and your apron-men: you that stood so much Upon the voice of occupation and The breath of _garlic-eaters!_" (Act iv. sc. 6).

And a little farther on:

"Here come the clusters. And is Aufidius with him? You are they That made the air unwholesome when you cast Your _stinking_ greasy caps up, hooting at Coriolanus' exile."

If we seek to know how Shakespeare came by this non-political but purely sensuous contempt for the people, we must search for the reason among the experiences of his own daily life. Where but in the course of his connection with the theatre would he come into contact with those whom he looked upon as human vermin? He suffered under the perpetual obligation of writing, staging, and acting his dramas with a view to pleasing the Great Public. His finest and best had always most difficulty in making its way, and hence the bitter words in _Hamlet_ about the "excellent play" which "was never acted, or, if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleased not the _million_."

Into this epithet, "the million," Shakespeare has condensed his contempt for the masses as art critics. Even the poets, and they are many, who have been honest and ardent political democrats, have seldom extended their belief in the majority to a faith in its capacity for appraising their art. The most liberal-minded of them all well know that the opinion of a connoisseur is worth more than the judgment of a hundred thousand ignoramuses. With Shakespeare, however, his artist's scorn for the capacity of the many did not confine itself to the sphere of Art, but included the world beyond. As, year after year, his glance fell from the stage upon the flat caps covering the unkempt hair of the crowding heads down there in the open yard which constituted the pit, his sentiments grew increasingly contemptous towards "the groundlings." These unwashed citizens, "the understanding gentlemen of the ground," as Ben Jonson nicknamed them, were attired in unlovely black smocks and goatskin jerkins, which had none too pleasant an odour. They were called "nutcrackers" from their habit of everlastingly cracking nuts and throwing the shells upon the stage. Tossing about apple-peel, corks, sausage ends, and small pebbles was another of their amusements. Tobacco, ale, and apple vendors forced their way among them, and even before the curtain was lifted a reek of tobacco-smoke and beer rose from the crowd impatiently waiting for the prima donna to be shaved. The fashionable folk of the stage and boxes, whom they hated, and with whom they were ever seeking occasion to brawl, called them _stinkards_. Abuse was flung backwards and forwards between them, and the pit threw apples and dirt, and even went so far as to spit on to the stage. In the _Gull's Hornebooke_ (1609) Dekker says: "The stage, like time, will bring you to most perfect light and lay you open: neither are you to be hunted from thence, though the _scarecrows_ in the _yard_ hoot at you, hiss at you, spit on you." As late as 1614 the prologue to an old comedy, _The Hog has lost his Pearl_, says:

"We may be pelted off for what we know, With apples, eggs, or stones, from _those below_."

Who knows if Shakespeare was better satisfied with the less rowdy portion of his audience? Art was not the sole attraction of the theatre. We read in an old book on English plays:--

"In the play-houses at London it is the fashion of youthes to go first into the _yarde_ and carry their eye through every gallery; then, like unto ravens, when they spy the carrion, thither they fly and press as near to the fairest as they can."[1] These fine gentlemen, who sat or reclined at full length on the stage, were probably as much occupied with their ladies as the less well- to-do theatre-goers. We know that they occasionally watched the play as Hamlet did, with their heads in their mistresses' laps, for the position is described in Fletcher's _Queen of Corinth_ (Act i. sc. 2):

"For the fair courtier, the woman's man, That tells my lady stories, dissolves riddles, Ushers her to her coach, _lies at her feet_ _At solemn masques, applauding what she laughs at._"

Dekker (_Gulfs Hornebooke_) informs us that keen card-playing went on amongst some of the spectators, while others read, drank, or smoked tobacco. Christopher Marlowe has an epigram on this last practice, and Ben Jonson complains in his _Bartholomew Fair_ of "those who accommodate gentlemen with tobacco at our theatres." He gives an elaborate description in his play, _The Case is Altered_ of the manner in which capricious lordlings conducted themselves at the performance of a new piece:--

"And they have such a habit of dislike in all things, that they will approve nothing, be it never so conceited or elaborate; but sit dispersed, making faces and spitting, wagging their upright ears, and cry, filthy, filthy; simply uttering their own condition, and using their wryed countenances instead of a vice, to turn the good aspects of all that shall sit near them, from what they behold" (Act ii. sc. 6).

The fact that women's parts were invariably played by young men may have contributed to the general rowdyism of the play-going public, although, on the other hand, it must have been conducive to greater morality on the part of those directly connected with the theatre. It was surely a real amelioration of Shakespeare's fate that the difficulties with which he had to struggle were not increased by that enthralling and ravishing evil which bears the name of actress.[2].

The notion of feminine characters being taken by a woman was so foreign to England that the individual who ascertained the use of forks in Italy, discovered the existence of actresses at the same time and in the same place. Coryate writes from Venice in July 1608:--"Here I observed certaine things that I never saw before; for I saw women act, a thing I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath been sometimes used in London; and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gestures, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as I ever saw any masculine actor." It was not until forty-four years after Shakespeare's death that a woman stepped on to the English stage. We know precisely when and in what play she appeared. On the 8th of December 1660 the part of Desdemona was taken by an Englishwoman. The prologue read upon this occasion is still in existence.[3]

A theatrical audience of those days was, to Shakespeare's eyes at any rate, an uncultivated horde, and it was this crowd] which represented to him "the people." He may have looked upon them in his youth with a certain amount of goodwill and forbearance, but they had become entirely odious to him now. It was undoubtedly the constant spectacle of the "_understanders_" and the atmosphere of their exhalations, which caused his scorn to flame so fiercely over democratic movements and their leaders, and all that ingratitude and lack of perception which, to him, represented "the people."

With his necessarily slight historical knowledge and insight, Shakespeare would look upon the old days of both Rome and England in precisely the same light in which he saw his own times. His first Roman drama testifies to his innately anti-democratic tendencies. He seized with avidity upon every instance in Plutarch of the stupidity and brutality of the masses. Recall, for example, the scene in which the mob murders Cinna, the poet, for no better reason than its fury against Cinna, the conspirator (_Julius Cæsar_, Act iii. sc. 3):

"_Third Citizen_. Your name, sir, truly.

"_Cinna_. Truly my name is Cinna.

"_First Citizen_. Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.

"_Cinna_. I am Cinna the poet. I am Cinna the poet.

"_Fourth Citizen_. Tear him for his bad verses. Tear him for his bad verses.

"_Cinna_. I am not Cinna the conspirator.

"_Fourth Citizen_. It is no matter, his name's Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

"_Third Citizen_. Tear him, tear him!"

All four citizens are alike in their bloodthirsty fury. Shakespeare displays the same aristocratic contempt for the fickle crowd, whose opinion wavers with every speaker; witness its complete change of front immediately after Antony's oration. It was this feeling, possibly, which was at the bottom of his want of success in dealing with Cæsar. He probably found Cæsar antipathetic, not on the ground of his subversion of a republican form of government, but as leader of the Roman democracy. Shakespeare sympathised with the conspiracy of the nobles against him because all popular rule--even that which was guided by genius--was repugnant to him, inasmuch as it was power exercised, directly or indirectly, by an ignorant herd.

This point of view meets us again and again in _Coriolanus_; and whereas, in his earlier plays, it was only occasionally and, as it were, accidentally expressed, it has now grown and strengthened into deliberate utterance.

I am aware that, generally speaking, neither English nor German critics will agree with me in this. Englishmen, to whom Shakespeare is not only their national poet, but the voice of wisdom itself, will, as a rule, see nothing in his poetry but a love of all that is simple, just, and true. They consider that due attention, on the whole, has been paid to the rights of the people in this play; that it contains the essence, as it were, of all that can be urged in favour of either democracy or aristocracy, and that Shakespeare himself was impartial. His hero is by no means, they say, represented in a favourable light; he is ruined by his pride, which, degenerating into unbearable arrogance, causes him to commit the crime of turning his arms against his country, and brings him to a miserable end. His relations with his mother represent the sole instance in which the inhuman, anti-social intractability of Coriolanus' character relaxes and softens; otherwise he is hard and unlovable throughout. The Roman people, on the other hand, are represented as good and amiable in the main; they are certainly somewhat inconstant, but Coriolanus is no less fickle than they, and certainly less excusable. That plebeian greed of plunder which so exasperated Marcius at Corioli is common to the private soldier of all times. No, they say, Shakespeare was totally unprejudiced, or, if he had a preference, it was for old Menenius, the free-spoken, patriotic soul who always turns a cheerfully humorous side to the people, even when he sees their faults most plainly.

I am simply repeating here a view of the matter actually expressed by eminent English and American critics--a view which, presumably therefore, represents that of the English-speaking public in general.[4]

In Germany also--more particularly at the time when Shakespeare's dramas were interpreted by liberal professors, who involuntarily brought them into harmony with their own ideas and those of the period--many attempts were made to prove that Shakespeare was absolutely impartial in political matters. Some even sought to make him a Liberal after the fashion of those who, early in this century, went by that name in Central Europe.

We have no interest, however, in re-fashioning Shakespeare. It is enough for us if our perception is fine and keen enough to recognise him in his works, and we must actually put on blinders not to see on which side Shakespeare's sympathies lie here. He is only too much of one mind with the senators who say that "poor suitors have strong breaths," and Coriolanus, who is never refuted or contradicted, says no more than what the poet in his own person would endorse.

In the first scene of the play, immediately following Menenius' well-known parable of the belly and the other members of the body, Marcius appears and fiercely advocates the view Menenius has humorously expressed:

"He that will give good words to thee will flatter Beneath abhorring. What would you have, you curs, That like not peace nor war? He that trusts to you, Where he should find you lions, finds you hares; Where foxes, geese; you are no surer, no, Than is the coal of fire upon the ice, Or hailstone in the sun. Your virtue is To make him worthy whose offence subdues him, And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness, Deserves your hate; and your affections are A sick man's appetite, who desires most that Which would increase his coil ... ... Hang ye! Trust ye! With every minute you do change a mind; And call him noble that was now your hate, Him vile that was your garland."

The facts of the play bear out every statement here made by Coriolanus, including the one that the plebeians are only brave with their tongues, and run as soon as it comes to blows. They turn tail on the first encounter with the Volscians.

"_Marcius_. All the contagion of the south light on you, You shames of Rome! You herd of--Boils and plagues' Plaster you o'er! that you may be abhorred Farther than seen, and one infest another Against the wind a mile! You souls of geese, That bear the shapes of men, how have you run From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell! All hurt behind; backs red and faces pale With flight and agu'd fear!" (Act i. sc. 4).

By dint of threatening to draw his sword upon the runaways, he succeeds in driving them back to the attack, compels the enemy to retreat, and forces himself single-handed, like a demigod or very god of war, through the gates of the town, which close upon him before his comrades can follow. When he comes forth again, bleeding, and the town is taken, his wrath thunders afresh on finding that the only idea of the soldiery is to secure as much booty as possible:

"See here these movers, that do prize their hours At a crack'd drachm! Cushions, leaden spoons, Irons of a doit, doublets that hangmen would Bury with those that wore them, these base slaves, Ere yet the fight be done, pack up:--Down with them!"

As far as Coriolanus is concerned the popular party is simply the body of those who "cannot rule nor ever will be ruled" (Act iii. sc. I). The majority of nobles are too weak to venture to oppose the people's tribunes as they should, but Coriolanus, perceiving the danger of allowing these men to gain influence in the government of the city, courageously, if imprudently, braves their hatred in order to thwart and repress them (Act iii. sc. I).

"_First Senator_. No more words, we beseech you. _Coriolanus_. How! no more? As for my country I have shed my blood, Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs Coin words till their decay, against those measels, Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought The very way to catch them."

He further asserts that the people had not deserved the recent distribution of corn, for they had attempted to evade the summons to arms, and during the war they chiefly displayed their courage in mutinying. They had brought groundless accusations against the senate, and it was contemptible to allow them, out of fear of their numbers, any share in the government. His last words upon the subject are:

"... This double worship, Where one part does disdain with cause, the other Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom, Cannot conclude but by the yea and no Of general ignorance,--it must omit Real necessities, and give way the while To unstable slightness: purpose so barr'd it follows, Nothing is done to purpose. ..."

So, in _Troilus and Cressida_, would Ulysses, who represents all that is truly wise in statesmanship, have spoken. There is no humane consideration for the oppressed condition of the poor, no just recognition of the right of those who bear the burden to have a voice in its distribution. That Shakespeare held the same political views as Coriolanus is amply shown by the fact that the most dissimilar characters approve of them in every particular, excepting only the violent and defiant manner in which they are expressed. Menenius' description of the tribunes of the people is not a whit less scathing than that of Marcius.

"Our very priests must become mockers, if they shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you are. When you speak best unto the purpose, it is not worth the wagging of your beards; and your beards deserve not so honourable a grave as to stuff a butcher's cushion, or to be entombed in an ass's pack-saddle. Yet you must be saying, Marcius is proud, who, in a cheap estimation, is worth all your predecessors since Deucalion" (Act ii. sc. I).

When Coriolanus's freedom of speech has procured his banishment, Menenius exclaims in admiration (Act iii. sc. I):

"_His nature is too noble for this world_: He would not flatter Neptune for his trident, Or Jove for's power to thunder. His heart's his mouth."

Thus he is exiled for his virtues, not for his failings, and at heart they all agree with Menenius. When Coriolanus has gone over to the enemy, and their one anxiety is to appease his wrath, Cominius expresses the same view of the culpability of people and tribunes towards him (Act iv. sc. 4):

"Who shall ask it? The tribunes cannot do't for shame; the people Deserve such pity of him as the wolf Does of the shepherd."

Even the voice of one of the two serving-men of the Capitol exalts Coriolanus and justifies his scorn for the love or hatred of the people, the ignorant, bewildered masses--

"... So that, if they love, they know not why, they hate upon no better a ground: therefore for Coriolanus neither to care whether they love or hate him manifests the true knowledgehe has of their dispositions; and out of his noble carelessness lets them plainly see't" (Act ii. sc. 2).

This is almost too well expressed for a servant; we perceive that the poet has taken no particular pains to disguise his own voice. The same man tells how well Coriolanus has deserved of his country; he did not rise, as some do, by standing hat in hand and bowing himself into favour with the people:

"... But he hath so planted his honours in their eyes and his actions in their hearts, that for their tongues to be silent and not confess so much were a kind of ungrateful injury; to report otherwise were a malice, that giving itself to lie, would pluck reproof and rebuke from every ear that heard it."

This uncultured mind bears the same testimony as that of the most refined and intelligent patricians to the greatness of the hero. It is not difficult, I think, to follow the mental processes from which this work evolved. When Shakespeare came to reflect on what had constituted his chief gladness here on earth and made his melancholy life endurable to him, he found that his one lasting, if not too freely flowing, source of pleasure had been the friendship and appreciation of one or two noble and nobly-minded gentlemen.

For the people he felt nothing but scorn, and he was now, more than ever, incapable of seeing them as an aggregation of separate individualities, they were merged in the brutality which distinguished them in the mass. Humanity in general was to him not millions of individuals, but a few great entities amidst millions of non-entities. He saw more and more clearly that the existence of these few illustrious men was all that made life worth living, and the belief gave impetus to that hero-worship which had been characteristic of his early youth. Formerly, however, this worship had lacked its present polemical quality. The fact that Coriolanus was a great warrior made no particular impression on Shakespeare at this period; it was quite incidental, and he included it simply because he must. It was not the soldier that he wished to glorify but the demigod. His present impression of the circumstances and conditions of life is this: there must of necessity be formed around the solitary great ones of this earth a conspiracy of envy and hatred raised by the small and mean. As Coriolanus says, "Who deserves greatness, deserves your hate."

Owing to this turn of thought, Shakespeare found fewer heroes to worship; but his worship became the more intense, and appears in this play in greater force than ever before. The patricians, who have a proper understanding of his merit, regard Coriolanus with a species of lover-like enthusiasm, a sort of adoration. When Marcius's mother tells Menenius that she has had a letter from her son, and adds, "And I think there's one at home for you," Menenius cries:

"I will make my very house reel to-night: a letter for me!

"_Virgilia_. Yes, certain, there's a letter for you; I saw't.

"_Menenius_. A letter for me! It gives me an estate of seven years' health; in which time I will make a lip at the physician: the most sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutic, and, to this preservative, of no better report than a horse-drench" (Act ii. sc. I).

So speaks his friend; we will now listen to his bitterest enemy, Aufidius, the man whom he has defeated and humiliated in battle after battle, who hates him, and vows that neither temple nor prayer of priest, nor any of those things which usually restrain a man's wrath, shall prevail to soften him. He has sworn that wherever he may find his enemy, be it even on his own hearth, he will wash his hands in his heart's blood. But when Marcius forsakes Rome, and repairing to the Volscians, actually seeks Aufidius in his own home, upon his own hearth, we hear only the admiration and genuine enthusiasm which the sound of his voice and the mere majesty of his presence calls forth in the adversary who would gladly hate him, and still more gladly despise him if he could.

"O Marcius, Marcius! Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart A root of ancient envy. If Jupiter Should from yond cloud speak divine things, And say ''Tis true,' I'd not believe them more Than thee, all noble Marcius. Let me twine Mine arms about that body, where against My grained ash an hundred times hath broke, And scarred the moon with splinters: here I clip The anvil of my sword, and do contest As hotly and as nobly with thy love, As ever in ambitious strength I did Contend against thy valour. Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never man Sighed truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold" (Act iv. sc. 5).

We have, then, in this play an almost wildly enthusiastic hero-worship upon a background of equally unqualified contempt for the populace. It is something different, however, from the humble devotion of his younger days to alien greatness (as in _Henry V._), and is founded rather on an overpowering and defiant consciousness of his own worth and superiority.

The reader must recall the fact that his contemporaries looked upon Shakespeare not so much as a poet who earned his living as an actor, but as an actor who occasionally wrote plays. We must also remember that the profession of an actor was but lightly esteemed in those days, and the work of a dramatist was considered as a kind of inferior poetry, which scarcely ranked as literature. Probably most of Shakespeare's intimates considered his small narrative poems--his _Venus and Adonis_, his _Lucretia,_ &c.--his real claim to notoriety, and they would regret that for the sake of money he had joined the ranks of the thousand and one dramatic writers. We are told in the dedication of _Histrio Mastix_ (1634), that the playwrights of the day took no trouble with what they wrote, but covetously pillaged from old and new sources, "chronicles, legends, and romances."

Shakespeare did not even publish his own plays, but submitted to their appropriation by grasping booksellers, who published them with such a mutilation of the text, that it must have been a perfect terror to him to look at them. This mishandling of his plays would be so obnoxious to him, that it was not likely he would care to possess any copies. He was in much the same position in this respect as the modern author, who, unprotected by any law of international copyright, sees his works mangled and mutilated in foreign languages.

He would doubtless enjoy a certain amount of popularity, but he remained to the last an actor among actors (not even then in the first rank with Burbage) and a poet among poets. Never once did it occur to any of his contemporaries that he stood alone, and that all the others taken together were as nothing in comparison with him.

He lived and died one of the many.

That his spirit rose in silent but passionate rebellion against this judgment is obvious. Were there moments in which he clearly felt and keenly recognised his greatness? It must have been so, and these moments had grown more frequent of late. Were there also times when he said to himself, "Five hundred, a thousand years hence, my name will still be known to mankind and my plays read"? We cannot say; it hardly seems probable, or he would surely have contended for the right to publish his own works. We cannot doubt that he believed himself worthy at this time of such lasting fame, but he had, as we can well understand, no faith at all that future generations would see more clearly, judge more truly, and appraise more justly than his contemporaries. He had no idea of historical evolution, his belief was rather that the culture of his native country was rapidly declining. He had watched the growth of narrow-minded prejudice, had seen the triumphant progress of that pious stupidity which condemned his art as a wile of the devil; and his detestation of the mass of men, past, present, and to come, made him equally indifferent to their praise or blame. Therefore it pleased him to express this indifference through the medium of Coriolanus, the man who turns his back upon the senate when it eulogises him, and of whom Plutarch tells us that the one thing for which he valued his fame was the pleasure it gave his mother. Yet Shakespeare makes him say (Act i. sc. 9):

"My mother, Who has a charter to extol her blood, When she does praise me grieves me."

Shakespeare has now broken with the judgments of mankind. He dwells on the cold heights above the snow-line, beyond human praise or blame, beyond the joys of fame and the perils of celebrity, breathing that keen atmosphere of indifference in which the soul hovers, upheld by scorn.

Some few on this earth are men, the rest are _spawn_, as Menenius calls them; and so Shakespeare sympathises with Coriolanus and honours him, endowing him with Cordelia's hatred of unworthy flattery, even placing her very words in his mouth (Act ii. sc. 2):

"But your people I love them as they weigh."

Therefore it is he equips his hero with the same stern devotion to truth with which, later in the century, Molière endows his Alceste, but, instead of in the semi-farcical, it is in the wholly heroic manner (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death, Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger But with a grain a day. I would not buy Their mercy at the price of one fair word."

We see Shakespeare's whole soul with Coriolanus when he cannot bring himself to ask the Consulate of the people in requital of his services. Let them freely give him his reward, but that he should have to ask for it--torture!

When his friends insist upon his conforming to custom and appearing in person as applicant, Shakespeare, who has hitherto followed Plutarch step by step, here diverges, in order to represent this step as being excessively disagreeable to Marcius. According to the Greek historian, Coriolanus at once proceeds with a splendid retinue to the Forum, and there displays the wounds he has received in the recent wars; but Shakespeare's hero cannot bring himself to boast of his exploits to the people, nor to appeal to their admiration and compassion by making an exhibition of his wounds:

"I cannot Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them, For my wounds' sake, to give their suffrage: please you That I may pass this doing" (Act ii. sc. 2).

He finally yields, but has hardly set foot in the Forum before he begins to curse at the position in which he has placed himself:

"What must I say? 'I pray, sir '--Plague upon't! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace:--'Look, sir, my wounds! I got them in my country's service when Some certain of your brethren roared and ran From the noise of our own drums'" (Act ii. sc. 3).

He makes an effort to control himself, and, turning brusquely to the nearest bystanders, he addresses them with ill-concealed irony. On being asked what has induced him to stand for the Consulate, he hastily and rashly replies:

"Mine own desert. "_Second Citizen_. Your own desert!. "_Coriolanus_. Ay, but not mine own desire. "_Third Citizen_. How not your own desire? "_Coriolanus_. No, sir, 'twas never my desire to trouble the poor with begging."

Having secured a few votes in this remarkably tactless manner, he exclaims:

"Most sweet voices! Better to die, better to starve, Than crave the hire which first we do deserve."

When the intrigues of the tribunes succeed in inducing the people to revoke his election, he so far forgets himself in his fury at the insult that they are enabled to pronounce sentence of banishment against him. He then bursts into an outbreak of taunts and threats: "You common cry of curs! I banish _you_!"--which recalls how some thousand years later another chosen of the people and subsequent object of democratic jealousy, Gambetta, thundered at the noisy assembly at Belleville: "Cowardly brood! I will follow you up into your very dens."

The nature of the material and the whole conception of the play required that the pride of Coriolanus should occasionally be expressed with repellant arrogance. But we feel, through all the intentional artistic exaggeration of the hero's self-esteem, how there arose in Shakespeare's own soul, from the depth of his stormy contempt for humanity, a pride immeasurably pure and steadfast.

[1] _Plays confuted in Five several Actions_, by Stephen Gosson, 1580.

[2] It is therefore a droll error into which the otherwise admirable writer, Professor Fr. Paulson, falls in his essay, _Hamlet die Tragedie des Pessimismus (Deutsche Rundschau_, vol. lix. p. 243), when he remarks as a proof of the sensuality of Hamlet's nature: "Man erinnere sich nur seiner Intimität mit der Schauspielern; als sie ankommen, fällt sein Blick sogleich auf die Füsse der _Schauspielerin._

[3] "A Prologue to introduce the first woman that came to act on this stage, in the tragedy called _The Moor of Venice_: "--

"I come unknown to any of the rest To tell you news; I saw the lady drest. The woman plays to day; mistake me not, No man in gown or page in petticoat: A woman to my knowledge, yet I can't If I should die, make affidavit on't.... 'Tis possible a virtuous woman may Abhor all sorts of looseness and yet play, Play on the stage when all eyes are upon her. Shall we count that a crime, France counts an honour?"

[4] See _Shakespeare's Tragedy of Coriolanus_, by the Rev. Henry N. Hudson, Professor of Shakespeare at Boston University. Boston, 1881.

XII

_CORIOLANUS AS A DRAMA_

The tragedy of _Coriolanus_ is constructed strictly according to rule; the plot is simple and powerful, and is developed, with steadily increasing interest, to a logical climax. With the exception of _Othello_, Shakespeare has never treated his material in a more simply intelligible fashion. It is the tragedy of an inviolably truthful personality in a world of small-minded folk; the tragedy of the punishment a reckless egoism incurs when it is betrayed into setting its own pride above duty to state and fatherland.

Shakespeare's aristocratic sympathies did not blind him to Coriolanus' unjustifiable crime and its inevitable consequences. Infuriated by his banishment; the great soldier goes over to the enemies of Rome and leads the Volscian army against his native city, plundering and terrifying as he goes. He spurns the humble entreaties of his friends, and only yields to the women of the city when, led by his mother and his wife, they come to implore mercy and peace.

Coriolanus' fierce outburst when the name of traitor is flung at him proves that Shakespeare did not look upon treason as a pardonable crime:

"The fires of the lowest hell fold in your people! Call me their traitor!--Thou injurious tribune! Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths, In thy hands clutched as many millions, in Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say 'Thou liest,' unto thee, with a voice as free As I do pray the gods" (Act iii. sc. 3).

Immediately after this his outraged pride leads him to commit the very crime he has so wrathfully disclaimed. No consideration for his country or fellow-citizens can restrain him. The forces which arrest his vengeance are the mother he has worshipped all his life and the wife he tenderly loves. He knows that it is himself he is offering up when he sacrifices his rancour on the altar of his family. The Volscians will never forgive him for delivering up their triumph to Rome after he had practically delivered up Rome to them. And so he perishes, finally overtaken by Aufidius' long-accumulated jealousy acting through the disappointed rage of the Volscians. In Plutarch Shakespeare found his plot and the chief characters of his play ready to hand. He added the individuality of the tribunes and of Menenius (with the exception of the parable of the belly). Virgilia, who is little more than a name in the original, Shakespeare has transformed by one of his own wonderful touches into a woman whose chief charm lies in the quiet gentleness of her nature. "My gracious silence, hail!" thus Marcius greets her (Act ii. sc. I), and she is exhaustively defined in the exclamation. Her principal utterances, as well as Volumnia's most important speeches, are mere versifications of Plutarch's prose, and this is why these women have so much genuinely Roman blood in their veins. Volumnia is the true Roman matron of the days of the Republic. Shakespeare has wrought her character with special care, and her rich and powerful personality is not without its darker side. Her kinship with her son is perceptible in all her ways and words. She is more prone, as a woman, to employ, or at least approve of, dissimulation, but her nature is not a whit less defiantly haughty. Her first thought may be jesuitical; her second is always violent:

"_Vol_. Oh, sir, sir, sir, I would have had you put your power well on, Before you had worn it out. _Cor_ Let go. _Vol_. You might have been enough the man you are, With striving less to be so: lesser had been The thwartings of your dispositions, _if You had not showed them how ye were disposed Ere they lacked power to cross you._ _Cor_. Let them hang. _Vol. Ay, and burn too_" (Act iii. sc. 2).

When matters come to a climax, she shows no more discretion in her treatment of the tribunes than did her son, but displays precisely the same power of vituperation. On reading her speeches we realise the satisfaction and relief it was to Shakespeare to vent himself in furious invectives through the medium of his dramatic creations:

"_Vol_.... Hadst thou foxship To banish him that struck more blows for Rome Than thou hast spoken words? _Sic_. O blessed heavens! _Vol_. More noble blows, than ever thou wise words; And for Rome's good. I'll tell thee what; yet go: Nay, but thou shalt stay too: I would my son Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him, His good sword in his hand" (Act iv. sc. 2).

A comparison between Volumnia's final appeal to her son in the last act and the speech as it is given in Plutarch is of the greatest interest. Shakespeare has followed his author step by step, but has enriched him by the addition of the most artlessly human touches:

"There's no man in the world More bound to's mother; yet here he lets me prate Like one i' the stocks. Thou hast never in thy life Showed thy dear mother any courtesy; When she, (poor hen!) fond of no second brood, Has clucked thee to the wars and safely home, Loaden with honour" (Act v. sc. 3).

How the stern, soldierly bearing of the woman is softened by these touches with which Shakespeare has embellished her portrait!

The diction both here and throughout the play is that of Shakespeare's most matured period; but never before had he used bolder similes, shown more independence in his method of expression, nor condensed so much thought and feeling into so few lines. We have already drawn attention to the masterly handling of his material--a handling, however, which by no means precludes the intrusion of several extravagances, some heroic, some simply childish.

The hero's bodily strength and courage, for example, are strained to the mythical. He forces his way single-handed into a hostile town, holds his own there against a whole army, and finally makes good his retreat, wounded but not subdued. Even Bible tradition, in which divine aid comes to the rescue, cannot furnish forth such deeds. Neither Samson's escape from Gaza (Judges xvi.) nor David's from Keilah (1 Sam. xxiii.) can compare with this amazing exploit.

Equally unlikely is the foolishly defiant and arrogant attitude assumed by the senate, and more especially by Coriolanus, towards the plebeian party. Upon what do the nobles rely to support them in such an attitude? They have already been compelled to yield the political power of tribuneship, and it never even occurred to them to defy the sentence of banishment pronounced by these same tribunes. How comes it then that they seize every opportunity to taunt and scorn? How is it that these patricians, who have spoken so many brave words, make so poor a show of resistance when the Volscians are at their gates? They are so steeped in party spirit that their first thought, when defeat comes upon them, is to rejoice in the confusion and discomfiture the plebeians have brought upon themselves, and finally, abandoning all self-respect, they crawl to the feet of their exasperated conqueror.

The confusion of Shakespeare's authority in this part of the story would account for much.[1] According to Plutarch, Coriolanus, in the course of his victorious march from one Latin town to another, plunders the plebeians, but spares the patricians. A sudden change of public opinion occurs in Rome during his siege of Lavinium, and the popular party desires to recall Coriolanus, but the senate refuses--why, we are not told. The enemy is close upon them before a parley is agreed upon. Coriolanus offers easy terms, the admission of the Volscians to the Latin Federation being the chief stipulation. Despite the general feeling of discouragement in Rome, the senate answers haughtily that Romans will never yield to fear, and the Volscians must first lay down their arms if they desire to obtain a "favour." Directly after this defiance they make the most abject submission, and send their women as suppliants to the hostile camp.

While Shakespeare's Coriolanus has none of this consideration for his former friends, his patricians are as cowardly and incapable as the historian's. Cominius, Titus Lartius, and the others, who are originally represented as valiant men, make a very poor show at the end. Several, in short, of Plutarch's abundant contradictions have found their way into Shakespeare's play; they mark the beginning of a certain inconsequence which henceforward betrays itself in his work. From this point onwards his plays are no longer as highly finished as formerly.

I am not alluding here to the inconsistencies of his hero, for they only serve to give life and truth to his character, and the poet either represented them unconsciously, or was too ingenuous to avoid them; witness the reflection made by Coriolanus at the very moment of his rebellious disinclination to ask the suffrages of the people:

"Custom calls me to't; What custom wills, in all things should we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heapt For truth to o'er-peer" (Act ii. sc. 3).

Coriolanus is utterly unconscious that this speech of his strikes at the very root of that ultra-conservatism which he affects. The very thing he has refused to understand is, that if we invariably followed custom, the follies of the past would never be swept away, nor the rocks which hinder our progress burst asunder. To Coriolanus, what is customary is right, and he never realises the fact that his disdain for the tribunes and people has led him into a politically untenable position. We are by no means sure that Shakespeare's perceptions in this case were any keener than his hero's; but, consciously or unconsciously, it is this very inconsistency in Coriolanus' character which makes it so vividly lifelike.

_ Troilus and Cressida_ overflowed with contempt for the feminine sex as such, for love as a comical or pitiable sensuality, for mock heroics and sham military glory. _Coriolanus_ is brimful of scorn for the masses; for the stupidity, fickleness, and cowardice of the ignorant, slavish souls, and for the baseness of their leaders.

But the passionate disdain possessing Shakespeare's soul is destined to a stronger and wilder outburst in the work he next takes in hand. The outbreak in _Timon_ is against no one sex, no one caste, no one nation or fraction of humanity; it is the result of an overwhelming contempt, which excepts nothing and no one, but embraces the whole human race.

[1] The matter is interestingly discussed in Kreyssig's instructive and sympathetic work: _Vorlesungen über Shakespeare_, 1859, vol. ii. p. 110.

XIII

_TIMON OF ATHENS--HATRED OF MANKIND_

Timon of Athens has come down to us in a pitiable condition. The text is in a terrible state, and there are, not only between one scene and another, but between one page and another, such radical differences in the style and general spirit of the play as to preclude the possibility of its having been the work of one man. The threads of the story are often entirely disconnected, and circumstances occur (or are referred to) for which we were in no way prepared. The best part of the versification is distinctly Shakespearian, and contains all that wealth of thought which was characteristic of this period of his life; but the other parts are careless, discordant, and desperately monotonous. The prose dialogue especially jars, thrust as it is, with its long-winded straining after effect, into scenes which are otherwise compact and vigorous.

All Shakespeare students of the present day concur in the opinion that _Timon of Athens_, like _Pericles_, is but a great fragment from the master-hand.

The _Lyfe of Timon of Athens_ was printed for the first time in the old folio edition of 1623. Careful examination shows us that the first pages of the play of _Timon_ (which is inserted between _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Julius Cæsar_) are numbered 80, 81, 82, 81, instead of 78, 79, 80, 81, and end at page 98. The names of the actors, for which in no other case is more than the necessary space allowed, here occupy the whole of page 99, and page 100 is left blank. _Julius Cæsar_ begins upon the next page, which is numbered 109. Fleay noticed that _Troilus and Cressida_, which, as we remarked, is unnumbered, would exactly fill the pages 78 to 108. By some error, which furnishes us with another hint, the second and third pages of this play are numbered 79 and 80. Obviously it was the publisher's original intention to include _Troilus and Cressida_ among the tragedies. On its being subsequently observed that there was nothing really tragic about the play, they cast about, since _Julius Cæsar_ was already printed, for another tragedy which would as nearly as possible fill the vacant space.

Shakespeare found the material for _Timon of Athens_ in the course of his reading for _Antony and Cleopatra_. There is, in Plutarch's "Life of Antony," a brief sketch of Timon and his misanthropy, his relations with Alcibiades and the Cynic Apemantus, the anecdote of the fig-tree, and the two epitaphs. The subject evidently attracted Shakespeare by its harmony with his own distraught and excited frame of mind at the time. He was soon absorbed in it, and in some form or another he made acquaintance with Lucian's hitherto untranslated dialogue _Timon_, which contained many incidents giving fulness to the story, and from which he appropriated the discovery of the treasure, the consequent return of the parasitic friends, and Timon's scornful treatment of them.

Shakespeare probably found these details in some old play on the same subject. Dyce published, in 1842, an old drama on Timon which had been found in manuscript, and was judged by Steevens to date from 1600, or thereabouts. It seems to have been written for some academic circle, and in it we find the faithful steward and the farewell banquet with which the third act closes. In the older drama, instead of warm water, Timon throws stones, painted to resemble artichokes, at his guests. Some trace of these stones may be found in these lines in Shakespeare's play:

"_Second Lord_. Lord Timon's mad. _Third Lord_. I feel't upon my bones. _Fourth Lord_. One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones."

In the old play, when Timon finds the gold, and his faithless mistress and friends flock around him once more, he repulses them, crying:

"Why vexe yee me, yee Furies? I protest, and all the Gods to witnesse invocate, I doe abhorre the titles of a friende, of father, or companion. I curse the aire yee breathe, I lothe to breathe that air."

He naïvely intimates a change of mind in the epilogue:

"I now am left alone: this rascall route hath left my side. What's this? I feele through out a sodeine change: my fury doth abate, my hearte grows milde and lays aside its hate;"

and concludes with a still more ingenuous appeal for applause:

"Let loving hands, loude sounding in the ayre, cause Timon to the citty to repaire."

We have no proof that Shakespeare was acquainted with this particular work. He probably used some other contemporary play, belonging to the theatre, which had proved a failure in its original form, and which both his company and his own inclinations urged him to thoroughly recast. It was not so entirely rewritten, however, that we can look upon the play as actually the work of Shakespeare--there are too many traces of another and a feebler hand; but the vital, lyrical, powerful pathos is his, and his alone.

There are two theories on this subject. Fleay, in his well-known and thorough investigation of the matter, endeavours to prove that the original scheme was Shakespeare's, but that some inferior hand amplified it for acting purposes. Fleay selected all the indubitably Shakespearian portions, and had them printed as a separate play, contending that it "not only included all that was of any value (which will scarcely be disputed), but that, on the score of intelligibility, none of the rejected speeches were needed."[1] Swinburne, who scarcely ever agrees with Fleay, also shares the belief that Shakespeare used no ready-made groundwork for his play. His first opinion was that _Timon of Athens_ was interrupted by Shakespeare's premature death, but later he inclined to the theory that, after working upon it for some time, the poet laid it aside as being little suited to dramatic treatment. Swinburne does not undervalue the work done by Shakespeare on that account, but remarks, on the contrary, that, had Juvenal been gifted with the inspiration of Æschylus, he might have written just such another tragedy as the fourth act of the drama.[2]

The theory that Shakespeare made use of a finished play which he only partially rewrote, leaving the rest in its clumsy imperfection, was originally propounded by the English critics Sympson and Knight. It was first attacked and afterwards eagerly supported by Delius, who gives the reasons for his change of opinion at great length.[3] H. A. Evans, the commentator of the Irving edition, also shares this latter view. There is no dispute between the two parties concerning the portions written by Shakespeare; the contention is simply this: Did Shakespeare remodel another man's play, or did another man complete his?

As Fleay's attempt to construct a connected and intelligible play from the Shakespearian fragments failed, because a great part of the weak and spurious matter is absolutely necessary to the coherence of the whole, it certainly seems more reasonable to accept Shakespeare as the reviser. Some of the English critics incline to the opinion that the inferior scenes were the work of the contemporary poets George Wilkins and John Day.

After a lapse of nearly 300 years it is impossible to give any decided opinion on the matter, more especially for a critic whose mother tongue is not English. In these days of occultism and spiritualism the simplest way out of the difficulty would be for some of those favoured individuals, who hold communion with the other world by means of small tables and pencils, to induce Shakespeare himself to settle the matter once for all. Meanwhile we must be content with probabilities. To those who only know the work through translations, or to those who, like Gervinus and Kreyssig, the German critics, have not devoted sufficient attention to the language, the necessity of assuming a second writer may not be so obvious. It is not impossible, of course, that the feeble, prosy, and long-winded parts were written by Shakespeare, roughly sketched in such a fit of despondency and utter indifference to detail that he could not force himself to revise, re-write, and condense; but the possibility is an exceedingly remote one. We know how finely Shakespeare generally constructed his plays, even in the first rough draft.

The drama, as it stands, presents the picture of a thoughtlessly and extravagantly open-handed nature, whose one unfailing pleasure is to give. King Lear only gave away his possessions once, and then in his old age and to his daughters; but Timon daily bestows money and jewels upon all and sundry. At the opening of the play he is, without appearing to be personally luxurious, living in the midst of all the voluptuousness with which a Mæcenas, in the gayest of all the world's gay capitals, could surround himself. Artists and merchants flock round the generous patron who pays them more than they ask. A chorus of sycophants sing his praises day and night. It is but natural that, under those circumstances, a carelessly good-natured temperament should look upon society as a circle for the exchange of friendly services, which it is equally honourable to render or receive.

He pays no heed to the faithful steward who warns him that this life cannot last. He no more disturbs himself about the melting of his money from his coffers than if he were living in a communistic society with the general wealth at his disposal.

At last the tide of fortune turns. His coffers are empty; the steward is no longer able to find him money to fling away, and Timon must go a borrowing in his turn. Almost before the report of his ruin has had time to spread, bills come pouring in, and his impatient creditors, yesterday his comrades, send messengers for their money. All his requests for a loan are refused by his former friends--one on the ground of his own poverty, while another professes to be offended because he was not applied to in the first instance, and a third will not even lend a portion of the large sums Timon has but lately lavished upon him.

Timon has hitherto been one of fortune's favourites, but now the true nature of the world is suddenly revealed to him, as it was to Hamlet and King Lear. Like theirs, but far more harshly and bitterly, his former confiding simplicity is replaced by frantic pessimism. Wishing to show his false friends all the contempt he feels for them, Timon invites them to a final banquet, and they supposing that he has recovered his wealth, attend with excuses on their lips for their recent behaviour. The table is sumptuously spread, but the covered dishes contain only warm water, which Timon disdainfully flings in the faces of his guests.

He cuts himself adrift from all intercourse with mankind, and retreats to the woods to lead the solitary life of a Stoic. The half-jesting retirement of Jaques in _As You Like It_, and his dismissal of all who trouble his solitude, are here carried out in grim earnest.

It is not for long that he remains poor, for he has hardly begun to dig for the roots on which he lives than he finds treasure buried in the earth. Unlike Lucian's misanthrope, who rejoices in the possession of gold as a means of securing a life free from care, Shakespeare's Timon sickens at the sight of his wealth. Neither does he care for the honourable amends made by his countrymen. We learn it so late in the day that we can scarcely believe that Timon was formerly a skilful general, who had done good service to his country. This feature is taken from Lucian, and the character of the luxurious Mæcenas would have gained in interest and nobility if this trait had been impressed upon us earlier in the play. The senate, meanwhile, being threatened with war, offers Timon the sole command. He proudly rejects the overtures made by these misers and usurers in purple, and even remains unsoftened by the faithful devotion of his steward. He anathematises every one and all things, and returns to his cave to die by his own hand.

The non-Shakespearian elements of the play do not prevent his genius and master-hand from pervading the whole, and it is easy to see how this work grew out of the one immediately preceding it, to trace the connecting links between the two plays.

When Coriolanus is exasperated by the ingratitude of the plebeians, he joins the enemies of his country and people, and becomes the assailant of his native city. When Timon falls a victim to the thanklessness of those he has loaded with benefits, his hatred embraces the whole human race. The contrast is very suggestive. The despair of Coriolanus is of an active kind, driving him to deeds and placing him at the head of an army. Timon's is of the passive sort: he merely curses and shuns mankind. It is not until the discovery of the treasure determines him to use his wealth in spreading corruption and misery that his hatred takes a semi-practical form. This contrast was not an element of the drama until Shakespeare made it so.

The whole conduct of his Alcibiades forms a complete parallel to that of Coriolanus, and here again the connection between the two plays is obvious. Shakespeare found a brief account of the mutual relations of Timon and Alcibiades in North's translation of Plutarch's "Life of Antony," together with a description of Timon's good-will towards the general on account of the calamities that he foresaw he would bring upon the Athenians. The name of Alcibiades would not recall to Shakespeare, as it does to us, the most glorious period of Greek culture, and such names as Pericles, Aristophanes, and Plato--he generally gives Latin names to his Greeks, such as Lucius, Flavius, Servilius, &c.; nor did it represent to him the unrivalled subtlety, charm, instability, and reckless extravagance of the man. He would read Plutarch's comparison of Alcibiades and Coriolanus, in which the Greek and Roman generals are considered homogeneous, and for Shakespeare Alcibiades was merely the soldier and commander; on that account he let him occupy much the same relation to Timon that Fortinbras did to Hamlet.

Where Timon merely hates, Alcibiades seizes his weapons; and when Timon curses indiscriminately, Alcibiades punishes severely but deliberately. He does not tear down the city walls and put every tenth citizen to the sword, as he is invited to do; he only seeks vengeance on his personal enemies and those whom he considers guilty. But Timon, like Hamlet, generalises his bitter experiences, and loathes everything that bears the form or name of man. When Athens sends to entreat him to take the command and save the city from the violence of Alcibiades, he is harder and colder, and a hundred times more bitterly relentless, than Coriolanus, who, after all, could bow to entreaty, or than Alcibiades, who is satisfied with a strictly limited vengeance. Timon's loathing of life and hatred of humanity is consistent throughout.

Like _Coriolanus_, this play was undoubtedly written in a frame of mind which prompted Shakespeare less to abandon himself to the waves of imagination than to dwell upon the worthlessness of mankind, and the scornful branding of the contemptible. There is even less inventiveness here than in _Coriolanus_: the plot is not only simple, it is scanty--more appropriate to a parable or didactic poem than a drama. Most of the characters are merely abstractly representative of their class or profession, _e.g._ the Poet, the Painter, the servants, the false friends, the flatterers, the creditors and mistresses. They are simply employed to give prominence to the principal figure, or rather, to a great lyrical outburst of bitterness, scorn, and execration.

In the poet's description of his work in the first scene of the play, Shakespeare has indicated his point of view with unusual precision:

"I have, in this rough work, shaped out a man Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hug With amplest entertainment. . . . . . His large fortune, Upon his good and gracious nature hanging, Subdues and properties to his love and tendance All sorts of hearts."

He unfolds an allegory in which Fortune is represented as enthroned upon a high and pleasant hill, from whose base all kinds of people are struggling upwards to better their condition:

"Amongst them all Whose eyes are on this sovereign lady fixed, One do I personate of lord Timon's fame, Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her; Whose present grace to present slaves and servants Translates his rivals."

The Painter justly observes that the allegory of the hill and the enthroned Fortune could be equally well expressed in a picture as a poem, but the Poet continues:

"When Fortune, in her shift and change of mood, Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants, Which laboured after him to the mountain's top, Even on their knees and hands, let him slip down, Not one accompanying his declining foot."

Shakespeare has defined his purpose here as clearly as did Daudet, some hundreds of years later, in the first chapter of his _Sappho_, in which the whole course of the story is symbolised in the ever-increasing difficulty with which the hero mounts the stairs, carrying the heroine to the highest story of the house in which he lives. The bitterness of Shakespeare's mood is shown in the distinct indication that the Poet and the Painter, rogues and toadies as they are, stand in the first ranks of their professions, and cannot, therefore, claim the excuse of poverty. It is significant of the dramatist's low opinion of his fellow-craftsmen--not one of them is mentioned in his will--that he should make his Poet most eloquent in condemnation of his own peculiar faults. Hence Timon's ejaculation in the last act:

"Must thou needs stand for a villain in thine own work Wilt thou whip thine own faults in other men?"

In _Timon_, as in _Coriolanus_, Shakespeare put his own thoughts and feelings into the mouths of the various characters of the play. Falseness and ingratitude are the subjects of the most frequent allusion. They were uppermost in the poet's mind at the time, and the changes are rung upon these vices by the Epicurean and the Cynic, by servants and strangers, before and after the climax. Even the fickle Poet serves, as we have seen, as spokesman for the all-prevailing idea; and the Painter, who is every whit as worthless, says with droll irony (Act v. sc. I):

"Promising is the very air o' the time: it opens the eyes of expectation: performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable: performance is a kind of will or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it."

If there was one thing Shakespeare loathed above another, it was the lifeless ceremony which disguises hollowness and fraud. Early in the play (Act i. sc. 2) Timon says to his guests:

"Nay, my lords, Ceremony was but devised at first To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes, Recanting goodness, sorry ere 'tis shown; But where there is true friendship, there needs none."

Although Apemantus is the converse of Timon at every point--coarse where he is refined, mean where he is generous, and base where he is noble--yet in his first monologue the Cynic also strikes the keynote of the piece (Act i. sc. 2):

"We make ourselves fools, to disport ourselves; And spend our flatteries, to drink those men Upon whose age we void it up again, With poisonous spite and envy. Who lives, that's not depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears not one spurn to their graves Of their friend's gift?"

The first stranger says in a speech, whose monotony betrays the fact that it was not entirely Shakespeare's although he has retouched it in several places (notably the italicised lines):

"Who can call him His friend that dips in the same dish? for, in My knowing, Timon hath been this lord's father, And kept his credit with his purse; Supported his estate; nay, Timon's money Has paid his men their wages: _he ne'er drinks, But Timon's silver treads upon his lip_; And yet, (oh, see the monstrousness of man When he looks out in an ungrateful shape!) He does deny him in respect of his, What charitable men afford to beggars" (Act iii. sc. 2).

Finally, like the serving-man in the Capitol, who expresses his approval of Coriolanus' self-conceit, Timon's servant, when his application for a loan is refused, says:

"The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic; he crossed himself by 't: and I cannot think but, in the end, the villainies of men will set him clear. How fairly this lord strives to appear foul! takes virtuous copies to be wicked; _like those that, under hot, ardent zeal, would set whole realms on fire._"

This direct, unmistakable attack upon Puritanism has a remarkable effect coming from the lips of a Grecian servant, and we may gather from it some idea of the general aim of all these outbursts against hypocrisy.

We must now, with a view to defining the non-Shakespearian elements of the play, devote some attention to its dual authorship. In the first act it is particularly the prose dialogues between Apemantus and others which seem unworthy of Shakespeare. The repartee is laconic but laboured--not always witty, though invariably bitter and disdainful. The style somewhat resembles that of the colloquies between Diogenes and Alexander in Lyly's _Alexander and Campaspe_. The first of Apemantus' conversations might have been written by Shakespeare--it seems to have some sort of continuity with the utterances of Thersites in _Troilus and Cressida_--but the second has every appearance of being either an interpolation by a strange hand, or a scene which Shakespeare had forgotten to score out. Flavius's monologue (Act i. sc. 2) never came from Shakespeare's pen in this form. Its marked contrast to the rest shows that it might be the outcome of notes taken by some blundering shorthand writer among the audience.

The long conversation, in the second act, between Apemantus, the Fool, Caphis, and various servants, was, in all probability, written by an alien hand. It contains nothing but idle chatter devised to amuse the gallery, and it introduces characters who seem about to take some standing in the play, but who vanish immediately, leaving no trace. A Page comes with messages and letters from the mistress of a brothel, to which the Fool appears to belong, but we are told nothing of the contents of these letters, whose addresses the bearer is unable to read.

In the third act there is much that is feeble and irrelevant, together with an aimless unrest which incessantly pervades the stage. It is not until the banqueting scene towards the end of the act that Shakespeare makes his presence felt in the storm which bursts from Timon's lips. The powerful fourth act displays Shakespeare at his best and strongest; there is very little here which could be attributed to alien sources. I cannot understand the decision with which English critics (including a poet like Tennyson) have condemned as spurious Flavius's monologue at the close of the second scene. Its drift is that of the speech in the following scene, in which he expresses the whole spirit of the play in one line: "What viler things upon the earth than friends!" Although there is evidently some confusion in the third scene (for example, the intimation of the Poet's and Painter's appearance long before they really arrive), I cannot agree with Fleay that Shakespeare had no share in the passage contained between the lines, "Where liest o' nights, Timon?" and "Thou art the cap of all the fools alive."

One speech in particular betrays the master-hand. It is that in which Timon expresses the wish that Apemantus's desire to become a beast among beasts may be fulfilled:

"If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee: if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee: if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee when, peradventure, thou wert accused by the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee: and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf: if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner."

There is as much knowledge of life here as in a concentrated essence of all Lafontaine's fables.

The last scenes of the fifth act were evidently never revised by Shakespeare. It is a comical incongruity that makes the soldier who, we are expressly told, is unable to read, capable of distinguishing Timon's tomb, and even of having the forethought to take a wax impression of the words. There is also an amalgamation of the two contradictory inscriptions, of which the first tells us that the dead man wishes to remain nameless and unknown, while the last two lines begin with the declaration, "Here lie I, Timon." Notwithstanding the shocking condition of the text, the repeatedly occurring confusion of the action, and the evident marks of an alien hand, Shakespeare's leading idea and dominant purpose is never for a moment obscured. Much in _Timon_ reminds us of _King Lear_, the injudiciously distributed benefits and the ingratitude of their recipients are the same, but in the former the bitterness and virulence are tenfold greater, and the genius incontestably less. Lear is supported in his misfortunes by the brave and manly Kent, the faithful Fool, that truest of all true hearts, Cordelia, her husband, the valiant King of France. There is but one who remains faithful to Timon, a servant, which in those days meant a slave, whose self-sacrificing devotion forces his master, sorely against his will, to except one man from his universal vituperation. In his own class he does not meet with a single honestly devoted heart, either man's or woman's; he has no daughter, as Lear; no mother, as Coriolanus; no friend, not one.

How far more fortunate was Antony! It is a corrupt world in the process of dissolution that we find in _Antony and Cleopatra._ Most of it is rotten or false, but the passion binding the two principal characters together by its magic is entirely genuine. Perdican's profound speech in De Musset's "_On ne badine pas avec l'amour_ applies both to them and the whole play: "Tous les hommes sont menteurs, inconstants, faux, bavards, hypocrites, orgueilleux; toutes les femmes sont artificieuses, perfides, vaniteuses; le monde n'est qu'un égout sans fond; mais il y au monde une chose sainte et sublime, c'est l'union de deux de ces êtres imparfaits." This simple fact, that Antony and Cleopatra love one another, ennobles and purifies them both, and consoles us, the spectators, for the disaster their passion brings upon them. Timon has no mistress, no relation with the other sex, only contempt for it.

There is a significant revelation of the crudity and stupidity with which, even before the end of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare's admirers made free with him, in an adaptation which Shadwell published in 1678 under the title "The History of Timon the Man Hater into a Play." In this Timon is represented as deserting his mistress Evandra, by whom he is passionately loved to the last. This introduction of a sympathetic woman's character naturally secured the play a success which was never attained by Shakespeare's hero, a solitary misanthrope alone with his bitterness. Shakespeare has intentionally veiled the defects of nature and judgment which deprive Timon to some extent of our sympathy, both in his prosperity and his misfortunes. He had never in his bright days attached himself so warmly to any heart that he felt it beat in unison with his own. Had he ever been powerfully drawn to a single friend, he would not have squandered his possessions so lightly on all the world. Because he only loved mankind in the mass, he now hates them in the mass. He never, now as then, shows any powers of discrimination.

Shakespeare merely used him as a well-known example of the punishment simple-minded trustfulness brings upon itself; his indiscretion is the outcome of native nobility, and his wrath is perfectly justifiable. We feel that Timon possesses the poet's sympathy and compassion, even when his abhorrence of humanity passes the bounds of hatred, and becomes a passion for its annihilation. Timon turns hermit in order to escape from the sight of human beings, and this misanthropy is no mere mask worn to conceal his despair at the loss of this world's goods, since it stands the test of the finding of the treasure. He no longer looks upon wealth as the means of procuring pleasure, but only as an instrument of vengeance. It is for that, and that alone, that he rejoices when the "yellow glittering, precious gold" falls into his hands:

"Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, . . . Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves And give them title, knee, and approbation With senators on the bench; this is it That makes the wappened widow wed again; She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again" (Act iv. sc. 3)

When Alcibiades, who was formerly on friendly terms with him and has retained some kindly feeling towards him, disturbs his solitude by a visit, Timon receives him with the exclamation:

"The canker gnaw thy heart For showing me again the eyes of man! _Alcibiades_. What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee That art thyself a man? _Timon_. I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog That I might love thee something" (Act iv. sc.3).

So might old Schopenhauer, with his loathing for men and his love for dogs, have expressed himself. Timon explains this hatred as the result of a dispassionate insight into the worthlessness of human nature:

"For every guise of fortune Is smoothed by that below: the learned pate Ducks to the golden fool: all is oblique; There's nothing level in our cursèd natures But direct villany."

When Alcibiades, who appears in company with two hetæræ addresses Timon in friendly fashion, the latter turns to abuse one of the women, declaring that she carries more destruction with her than the soldier does in his sword. She retorts, and he rails at her in the fashion of _Troilus and Cressida_. In his eyes the wanton woman is merely the disseminator of disease, and he expresses the hope that she may bring many a young man to sickness and misery. Alcibiades offers to serve him:

"Noble Timon, What friendship may I do thee? _Timon_. None, but to maintain my opinion. _Alcibiades_. What is it, Timon? _Timon_. Promise me friendship, but perform none."

When Alcibiades informs him that he is leading his army against Athens, Timon prays that the gods will give him the victory, in order that he may exterminate the people root and branch, and himself afterwards. He gives him gold for his war, and conjures him to rage like a pestilence:

"Let not thy sword skip one: Pity not honoured age for his white beard; He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron, It is her habit only that is honest, Herselfs a bawd: let not the virgin's cheek Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk paps That through the window bars bore at men's eyes Are not within the leaf of pity writ, But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe, Whose dimpled smile from fools exhaust their mercy; Think it a bastard, whom the oracle Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut, And mince it sans remorse: swear against objects; Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes; Whose proofs, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes, Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding, Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay thy soldiers: Make large confusion: and, thy fury spent, Confounded be thyself" (Act iv. sc. 3).

The women, seeing his wealth, immediately beg him for gold, and he answers, "Hold up, you sluts, your aprons mountant." They are not to swear, for their oaths are worthless, but they are to go on deceiving, and being "whores still," they are to seduce him to attempts to convert them, and to deck their own thin hair with the hair of corpses, that of hanged women preferably; they are to paint and rouge until they themselves lie dead: "Paint till a horse may mire upon your face."

They shout to him for more gold; they will "do anything for gold." Timon answers them in words which Shakespeare, for all the pathos of his youth, has never surpassed, words whose frenzied scathing has never been equalled:

"Consumptions sow In hollow bones of men: strike their sharp shins, And mar men's spurring; crack the lawyer's voice, That he may never more false title plead, Nor sound his quillets shrilly: hoar the flamen, That scolds against the quality of flesh, And not believes himself: down with the nose, Down with it flat: take the bridge quite away Of him that, his particular to foresee, Smells from the general weal: make curled-pate ruffians bald, And let the unscarred ruffians of the war Derive some pain from you: plague all: That your activity may defeat and quell The source of all erection. There's more gold: Do you damn others, and let this damn you, And ditches grave you all. _Phrynia and Timandra_. More counsel with more gold, bounteous Timon."

The passion in this is overpowering. One need only compare it with Lucian to realise the fire that Shakespeare has put into the old Greek, whose reflections are only savage in substance, being absolutely tame in expression--"The name of misanthrope shall sound sweetest in my ears, and my characteristics shall be peevishness, harshness, rudeness, hostility towards men," &c. Compare this scene with the latter part of Plutarch's _Alcibiades_, to which we know Shakespeare had referred, and see what the poet's acrimony has made of Timandra, the faithful mistress who follows Alcibiades to Phrygia. They are together when his murderess sets fire to the house, and it is Timandra who enshrouds his body in the most costly material she possesses, and gives him as splendid a funeral as her isolated position can secure.

Apemantus follows close upon Alcibiades, and after he is driven away, two bandits appear, attracted by the report of the treasure. Timon welcomes them, crying, "Rascal thieves, here's gold." He adds good advice to the money. They are to drink wine until it drives them mad, so they may, perchance, escape hanging; they are to put no trust in physicians, whose antidotes are poisons; when they can, they are to kill as well as steal. Theft is universal, the law itself being only made to conceal robbery:

"Rob one another. There's more gold. Cut throats. All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go; Break open shops; _nothing can you steal_ _But thieves do lose it_."

The worthy Proudhon himself has not set forth more plainly his axiom, "Property is theft."

When the Senate appeals to Timon for his assistance as general and statesman, he first professes sympathy, then cries:

"If Alcibiades kill my countrymen, Let Alcibiades know this of Timon, That Timon cares not."

He may sack Athens, pull old men by the beard, and give the sacred virgins over to the mercies of the soldiery. Timon cares as little as the soldier's knife recks of the throats it cuts. The most worthless blade in Alcibiades' camp is more valued by him than any life in Athens. All feeling for country, home, even for the helpless, has utterly perished.

Shakespeare borrows a final touch from Plutarch, which, in his hand, becomes a masterpiece of bloodthirsty irony. He declares he does not, as they suppose, rejoice in the general desolation; his countrymen shall once more enjoy his hospitality. A fig-tree grows by his cave, which it is his intention to cut down; but before it is felled, any friend of his, high or low, who wishes to escape the horrors of a siege, is welcome to come and hang himself. He next announces that his grave is prepared, and they that seek him may come thither and find an oracle in his tombstone, then:

"Lips, let sour words go by and language end: What is amiss, plague and infection mend! Graves only be man's works and death their gain! Sun, hide thy beams! Timon hath done his reign."

These are his last words. May pestilence rage amongst men! May it infect and destroy so long as there is a man left to dig a grave! May the world be annihilated as Timon is about to annihilate himself. The light of the sun will presently be extinguished for him; let it be extinguished for all!

This is not Othello's sorrow over the power of evil to wreck the happiness of noble hearts, nor King Lear's wail over the ever-threatening possibilities and the heaped-up miseries of life: it is an angry bitterness, caused by ingratitude, which has grown so great that it darkens the sky of life and causes the thunder to roll with such threatening peals as we have never heard even in Shakespeare. All that he has lived through in these last years, and all that he has suffered from the baseness of other men, is concentrated in this colossal figure of the desperate man-hater, whose wild rhetoric is like a dark essence of blood and gall drawn off to relieve suffering.

[1] _New Shakespeare Society's Transactions_, 1874, pp. 130-194.

[2] Swinburne: _A Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 212-215.

[3] _Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespearegesellschaft_, iii. pp. 334-361.

XIV

_CONVALESCENCE--TRANSFORMATION--THE NEW TYPE_

The last, wildest words of this bitter outbreak had been spoken. The dark cloud had burst and the skies were slowly clearing.

It seems as though the blackest of his griefs had been lightened in the utterance, and now that the steady _crescendo_ had burst into its most furious _forte_, he breathed more freely again. He had said his say; Timon had called for the extinction of humanity by plague, sexual disease, slaughter, and suicide. The powers of cursing could go no farther.

Shakespeare has shouted himself hoarse and his fury is spent. The fever is over and convalescence has set in. The darkened sun shines out once more, and the gloomy sky shines blue again.

How and why! Who shall say?

In all the obscurity of Shakespeare's life-history, nowhere do we feel our ignorance of his personal experiences more acutely than here. Some have sought an explanation in the resignation which comes with advancing years, and of which we certainly catch glimpses in his latest works. But Shakespeare neither was, nor felt himself, old at forty-five; and the word resignation is meaningless in connection with this marvellous softening of his long exasperated mood. It is more than a mere reconciliation; it is a revival of that free and lambent imagination which has lain so long in what seemed to be its death-swoon. There is no play of fancy in resignation.

Once more he finds life worth living, the earth beautiful, enchantingly, fantastically attractive, and those who dwell upon it worthy of his love.

In the purely external circumstances no change has occurred. The political outlook in England is the same, and it is not likely that he would be greatly stirred by events such as the assassination of Henry IV. of France in 1610 and the consequent expulsion of the Jesuits from Great Britain. Details--like the decree forbidding English Catholics (Recusants) from coming within ten miles of the Court, and James's removal of his mother's bones and their pompous re-interment in Westminster Abbey--could have little effect upon Shakespeare.

What has personally befallen him that has had such power to re-attune his spirit and lead it back from discord to the old melody and harmony? Surely we are now brought face to face with one of the decisive crises of his life.

Let us anticipate the works yet to be written--_Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest._

In this last splendid period of his life's glowing September, his dramatic activity, bearing about it the clear transparent atmosphere of early autumn, is more richly varied now than it has ever been.

What figures occupy the most prominent place in the poet's sumptuous harvest-home but the young, womanly forms of Marina, Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda. These girlish and forsaken creatures are lost and found again, suffer grievous wrongs, and are in no case cherished as they deserve; but their charm, purity, and nobility of nature triumph over everything.

They must have had their prototypes or type.

A new world has opened out to Shakespeare, but it would be profitless to spend much time on more or less probable conjectures concerning how and by whom it was revealed. We will, therefore, only lightly touch upon the possibility that Shakespeare, after and during the violent crisis of his loathing for humanity, was gradually reconciled to life by some young and womanly nobility of soul, and by all the poetry which surrounds it and follows in its train.

All these youthful women are akin, and are sharply separated from the heroines of his former plays. They are half-real, half-imaginary. The charm of youth and fantastic romance shines round them like a halo; the foulness of life has no power to defile them. They are self-reliant without being endowed with the buoyant spirit of his earlier adventurous maidens, and they are gentle without being overshadowed by the pathetic mournfulness of his sacrificial victims. Not one comes to a tragic end, and not one ever utters a jest, but all are holy in the poet's eyes.

The situations of Marina and Perdita are very similar; both are castaways, apparently fatherless and motherless, left solitary amidst dangerous or pitiable circumstances. Imogen is suspected and her life threatened, like Marina's, and although she is suspected and sentenced to death by her nearest and dearest, her strength never falters, and even her love for her unworthy husband is unimpaired.

Miranda is deprived of her rank and condemned to the solitude of a desert island, but is sheltered even there by a father's watchful care. There is indeed a half-fatherly tenderness in the delineation of Miranda, and the conception of the native charm of a young girl as a wonderful mystery of nature. Neither Molière's Agnes nor Shakespeare's Miranda have ever looked upon the face of a young man before they meet the one they love, but Agnes possesses only the artificially-preserved ignorance and innocence which disappear like dew before the sun of love. To Shakespeare, Miranda appears like a being from another world, an ideal of pure spiritual womanhood and maidenly passion, before which he almost kneels in worship.

Let us glance back at Shakespeare's gallery of women.

There are the viragoes of his youth, bloodthirsty women like Tamora, guilty and powerful ones like Margaret of Anjou, and later, Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan; there are feeble women like Anne in Richard III., and shrews like Katharine and Adriana, in whom we seem to detect a reminiscence of the wife at Stratford.

Then we have the passionately loving, like Julia in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, Venus, Titania, Helena in _All's Well that Ends Well_, and, above all, Juliet. There are the charmingly witty and often frolicsome young girls, like Rosaline in _Love's Labours Lost_, Portia in the _Merchant of Venice_, Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind.

Then the simply-minded, deeply-feeling, silent natures, with an element of tragedy about them, pre-ordained to destruction--Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. After these come the merely sensual types of his bitter mood--Cleopatra and Cressida.

And now, lastly, the young girl, drawn with the ripened man's rapture over her youth, and a certain passion of admiration.[1]. She had been lost to him, as Marina to her father Pericles, and Perdita to her father Leontes. He feels for her the same fatherly tenderness which his last incarnation, the magician Prospero, feels for his daughter Miranda.

He had taken a greater burden of life upon himself in the past than he well could bear, and he now lays its heaviest portion aside. No more tragedies! No more historical dramas! No more of the horrors of realism! In their stead a fantastic reflection of life, with all the changes and chances of fairy-tale and legend! A framework of fanciful poetry woven around the charming seriousness of the youthful woman and the serious charm of the young girl.

It works like a vision from another world, an enchantment set in surroundings as dream-like as itself. A ship in the open sea off Mitylene; a strange, delightful, ocean-encircled Bohemia; a lonely, magically-protected island; a Britain, where kings of the Roman period and Italians of the sixteenth century meet young princes who dwell in woodland caves and have never seen the face of woman.

Thus he gradually returns to those brighter moods of his youth from which the fairy dances of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ had evolved, or that unknown Forest of Arden in which cypresses grew and lions prowled, and happy youth and mirthful maidenhood carelessly roamed. Only the spirit of frolic has departed, while free play is given to a fancy unhampered by the laws of reality, and much earnest discernment lies behind the untrammelled sport of imagination. He waves the magician's wand and reality vanishes, now, as formerly. But the light heart has grown sorrowful, and its mirth is no more than a faint smile. He offers the daydreams of a lonely spirit now, rich but evanescent visions, occupying in all a period of from four to five years.

Then Prospero buries his magic wand a fathom deep in the earth for ever.

[1] In Mrs. Jameson's charming old book, _Shakespeare's Female Characters_, she has grouped his women in an arbitrary manner. Disregarding all chronological sequence, she divides twenty-three characters into four groups:--1. Characters of Intellect. 2. Characters of Passion and Imagination. 3. Characters of the Affections. 4. Historical characters. Heine characterises forty-five feminine figures in his _Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen_, but the last twenty-one are only distinguished by a few quotations, and he makes no attempt at any deeper interpretation, historical or psychological.

XV

_PERICLES--COLLABORATION WITH WILKINS AND ROWLEY--SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE_

Sevenfold darkness surrounds Shakespeare's productions in that transition period during which morbid distrust was giving way to the brighter view of life we find in his later plays. We possess a brief series of plays: _Timon of Athens_ and _Pericles_, which are plainly only partially his work, and _Henry VIII._ and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, of which we may confidently assert that Shakespeare had nothing to do with them beyond the insertion of single important speeches and the addition of a few valuable touches.

He had not adapted other men's work since his novitiate, neither had he blended his own intellectual produce with alien and inferior efforts. What is the reason of such an association suddenly and repeatedly occurring now? I will state my view of the matter without any circumlocution or criticism of the opinion of others. We noticed in _Coriolanus_ that Shakespeare's changed attitude towards humanity had also affected his attitude towards his art. A certain carelessness of execution had made itself felt. His steadily increasing despair of finding any virtue or worth in the world, and the ever-growing resentment against the coarseness and thanklessness of men, were accompanied by his corresponding indifference and negligence as a dramatist.

We have followed Shakespeare through his early struggles and youthful happiness to the great and serious epoch of his life, and through the anything but brief period of gloom to its crisis in the wild outburst of _Timon of Athens_; after which we recognised the first symptoms of convalescence. A perspective of not too profoundly-serious nor realistic dramas has opened out before us, whose freely playing fantasy proves that Shakespeare is once more reconciled to life.

It stands to reason that this reconciliation was not effected by any sudden change, and Shakespeare would not immediately return to the old striving after perfection in his profession--did not do so, in fact, until that very last work in which he laid aside his art for ever. We saw that he had strained too much at life, and he now realises that he has done the same with art. Either he no longer taxes his strength to the uttermost when he writes, or he has lost that power for which no task was too heavy, no horror too terrible to depict. From this moment we feel a foreboding that this mighty genius will lay down his pen some years before his life is to end, and we realise that his mind is being gradually withdrawn from the theatre. He has already ceased to act; soon he will have ceased to write for the stage. He longs for rest, for solitude, away from the town, far into the country; away from his life's battlefield to the quietude of his birthplace, there to pass his remaining years and die.

He may have reasoned thus: For whom should he write? Where were they for whom he had written the plays of his youth? They were dead or far away; he had lost sight of them and they of him--how long does any warm sympathy with a productive intellect usually last? With his ever-increasing indifference to fame, he shrank more and more from the exertion entailed by laborious planning and careful execution, and as little did he care whether the work he did was known by his or another man's name. In his utter contempt for what the crowd did or did not believe about him, he allowed piratical booksellers to publish one worthless play after another with his immortal name upon the title-page--_Sir John Oldcastle_ in 1600, _The London Prodigal_ in 1605, _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ in 1608, _Lord Cromwell_ in 1613--and he either obscured or permitted others to obscure his work by associating it with the feeble or affected productions of younger and inferior men. We saw in _Timon_, as we shall presently see in _Pericles_ and other plays, how the lines drawn by his master-hand have been blurred by others, traced by clumsy and unsteady fingers. It is not always easy to distinguish whether it was Shakespeare who began the play and wearied of his work half-way through, as Michael Angelo so frequently did, carelessly looking on at its completion by another hand, or whether he had the attempts of others lying before him and hid his own poetical strength and greatness in these fungus growths of childish versification and unhealthy prose, leaving it to chance whether the future generations, to whom he never gave much thought, would be able to distinguish his part in them. It may be that he treated his work for the theatre much as a modern author does when he makes over his ideas to a collaborator, or writes anonymously in a newspaper or periodical. He believes that among his friends are three or four who will recognise his style, and if they do not (as frequently happens) it is no great matter.

On the title-page of the first quarto edition of _Pericles_, in 1609, are these words: "The late, and much admired play called Pericles, Prince of Tyre.... By William Shakespeare." "The late"--the play cannot have been acted before 1608, for there is no contemporary mention of it before that date, whereas from 1609 onwards it is frequently noticed. "The much admired play"--everything witnesses to the truth of these words.[1] Many contemporary references testify to the favour the play enjoyed. In an anonymous poem, _Pimlyco, or Runne Redcap_ (1609), Pericles is mentioned as the new play which gentle and simple crowd to see:

"Amazde I stood, to see a Crowd Of civill Throats stretched out so lowd (As at a New Play). All the Roomes Did swarm with Gentiles mix'd with Groomes, So that I truly thought all These Came to see _Shore_ or _Pericles_."

The previously mentioned prologue (p. 539) to Robert Tailor's _The Hog has Lost his Pearl_ (1614) cannot wish the play anything better than that it may succeed as well as _Pericles_:

"And if it prove so happy as to please, Weele say 'tis fortunate like _Pericles_."

In 1629, Ben Jonson, exasperated by the utter failure of his play _The New Inn_, affords evidence, in the ode addressed to himself which accompanies the drama, of the persistent popularity of _Pericles_:

"No doubt some mouldy tale Like Pericles, and stale As the shrieves crusts and nasty as his fish-- Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth and raked into the common tub, May keep up the Play-club."

In Sheppard's poem, _The Times displayed in Six Sestyads._ Shakespeare is said to equal Sophocles and surpass Aristophanes, and all for _Pericles'_ sake:

"With Sophocles we may Compare great Shakespeare: Aristophanes Never like him his Fancy could display, Witness the _Prince of Tyre, his Pericles._"

This play was not included in the First Folio edition, probably because the editors could not come to an agreement with the original publisher; for these pirates were protected by law as soon as the book was entered at Stationers' Hall. During Shakespeare's lifetime and after his death it was one of the most popular of English dramas.

_Pericles_ was formerly considered one of Shakespeare's earliest works, an opinion held strangely enough by Karl Elze in our own day. But all English critics now believe, what Hallam was the first to discover, that the language of such parts of it as were written by Shakespeare belongs in style to his latest period, and it is unanimously declared to have been written somewhere about the year 1608, after _Antony and Cleopatra_ and before _Cymbeline_ and _The Tempest_. (See, for example, P. Z. Round's introduction to the Irving edition, or Furnival's _Triar Table of the order of Shakespeare's Plays_, reprinted in Dowden and elsewhere.) My own opinion of course is, that _Pericles_ follows naturally upon _Coriolanus_ and _Timon of Athens_, and forms an appropriate overture to the succeeding fantastically idyllic plays. The reader will have noticed that, unlike Dowden and Furnivall, I have not been able to assign so early a date for the whole series of pessimistic dramas as 1608 would imply.[2] I assume that certain portions of _Pericles_ were forming in Shakespeare's mind even in the midst of the venom to which he was giving vent for the last time in _Timon of Athens_. In such periods of violent upheaval there may be an undercurrent to the surface-current in the mind of a poet as well as in another man's, and it is this undercurrent which will presently gain strength and become the prevalent mood.

The intelligent reader will have realised that all this dating of Shakespeare's pessimistic works can only be approximate. I am inclined to advance them a year, because I fancy I can trace a connection between _Coriolanus_ and Shakespeare's own thoughts of his mother, who died in 1608. But a son does not only think of his mother at the moment she is taken from him, and the fear of losing her in the illness which probably preceded her death may have recalled his mother's image to Shakespeare's mind with special force long before he actually lost her. Here, as in all cases where it is not expressly mentioned, the reader is requested to see an underlying Perhaps or Possibly, and to add one where he feels the need of it. Only the main lines of the sequence are at all certain. Where external criterions are missing, the internal alone cannot determine the question of a year or a month. As far as _Pericles_ is concerned, we do possess some guide, for it is most unlikely that Shakespeare's share in the play would be added after it was performed in 1608, especially in the face of the assurance on the title-page.

The work as it has come down to us is not in reality a drama at all, but an incompletely dramatised epic poem. We are taken back to the childhood of dramatic art. The prologue to each act and the various explanatory passages interpolated throughout the play are supposed to be spoken by the old English poet John Gower, who had treated the subject in narrative verse about the year 1390. He introduces the play to the audience and explains it, as it were, with his pointer. Anything that cannot well be acted he narrates, or has represented in dumb-show. He speaks in the old octosyllabic rhymed iambics, which, as a rule, however, do not rhyme:

"To sing a song that old was _sung_ From ashes ancient Gower has _come_, Assuming man's _infirmities_, To glad your ears and please your _eyes_"

And in the last lines of the prologue to the fourth act:

"Dionyza doth _appear_, With Leonine a _murderer_."

He jestingly alludes to the fact that the play includes nearly the whole of Pericles' life, from youth to old age. Marina is born at the beginning of the third act, and is about to be married at the close of the fifth. Nothing could well be farther from that unity of time and place which was attempted in France at a later period. The first act is laid at Antioch, Tyre, and Tarsus; the second in Pentapolis, on the sea-shore, in a corridor of Simonides' palace, and lastly in a hall of state. The third act opens on board ship and continues in the house of Cerimon at Ephesus. The fourth act begins with an open place near the sea-shore and ends in a brothel at Mitylerie; the fifth, on Pericles' ship off Mitylene, ending in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. There is as little unity of action as of time and place about the play; its disconnected details are merely held together by the individuality of the principal characters, and there is neither rhyme nor reason in its various incidents; pure chance seems to rule all. The reader will seek in vain for any intention--I do not mean moral, but any fundamental idea in the play. Gower certainly institutes a contrast between an immoral princess at the beginning of the play and a virtuous one at the close, but this moral contrast has no connection with the intermediate acts.

Pericles was an old and very popular subject. Its earliest form was probably that of a Greek romance of the fifth century, of which a Latin translation is still extant. It was translated into various languages during the Middle Ages, and one version has found its way into the _Gesta Romanorum_. In the twelfth century it was incorporated by Godfrey of Viterbo in his great _Chronicle_. John Gower, who adapts it in the eighth book of his _Confessio Amantis,_ gives Godfrey as his authority. The Latin tale was translated into English by Lawrence Twine in 1576, under the title of _The Patterne of Paynfull Aduentures_, a second edition of which was published in 1607. In all but the English adaptations the hero's name is given as Apollonius of Tyre. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's play was based upon the 1607 editon, and this in itself is sufficient to refute the antiquated notion that his part in it belonged to his youthful period. It was on the substance of this play, and doubtless also upon Shakespeare's share in it, that George Wilkins founded the romance he published in 1608 under the title of _The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, Being the true history of the Play of Pericles as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient John Gower_. The fact that Wilkins, in the dedication of his book, which is a mere abstract of Twine and the play, calls it "a poor infant of my braine," and the still more remarkable similarity of the style and metrical structure of the first act of _Pericles_ with Wilkins' own play, _The Miseries of enforced Marriage_, would seem to point to him as the author of the extraneous portions of _Pericles_. In both dramas a quantity of disconnected material has been brought together in a long-drawn-out play, destitute of dramatic situations or interest, and in both we find the same jarring and awkward inversions of words. The incidents of the _Enforced Marriage_ recall some of the non-Shakespearian elements of _Timon_; here, also, we are shown a spendthrift, evidently in possession of the sympathies of his author, by whom he is considered a victim. The mingling of prose, blank verse, and clumsily-introduced couplets with the same rhymes constantly recurring, reminds us of those acts and scenes in which Shakespeare had no part. Fleay observes that 195 rhymed lines occur in the two first acts of _Pericles_, and only fourteen in the last three, so marked is the contrast of style between the two parts, and he notices that this frequency of rhyme corresponds closely to the method of George Wilkins' own work. Both he and Boyle agree with Delius, who was the first to express the opinion, that Wilkins is the author of the first two acts. By dint of comparisons of style, Fleay came to the conclusion that Gower's two speeches in five-footed iambics, before and after Scenes 5 and 6 (which differ so markedly in form and language from his other monologues), were written by William Rowley, who had been associated in the previous year with Wilkins and Day in the production of a wretched melodrama, _The Travels of Three English Brothers_. His attempt, however, to ascribe to Rowley the two prose scenes which take place in the brothel is made more on moral than æsthetic grounds, and can have very little weight. My own opinion is that they were entirely written by Shakespeare. They are plainly presupposed in certain passages which are unmistakably Shakesparean; they accord with that general view of life from which he is but now beginning to escape, and they markedly recall the corresponding scenes in _Measure for Measure_.

It is impossible to ascertain the precise circumstances under which the play was produced. Some critics have maintained that it originally began with what is now the third act, and that Shakespeare, having lain it aside, gave Wilkins and Rowley permission to complete it for the stage. But in reality the two men wrote the play in collaboration and disposed of it to Shakespeare's company, which in turn submitted it to the poet, who worked upon such parts as appealed to his imagination. As the play now belonged to the theatre, and Wilkins was not at liberty to publish it, he forestalled the booksellers by bringing it out as a story, taking all the credit of invention and execution upon himself.

Never was a drama contrived out of more unlikely material. The name of the knightly Prince of Tyre is changed, probably because it did not suit the metre, from Apollonius to Pericles, which was corrupted from the Pyrocles of Sidney's _Arcadia_. He comes to Antioch to risk his life on the solution of a riddle. According to his success or failure he is to be rewarded by the Princess's hand or death. The riddle betrays to him the abominable fact that the Princess is living in incest with her own father. He withdraws from the contest, and flies from the country to escape the wrath of the wicked prince, who is even more certain to slay him for success than for failure. He returns to Tyre, but feeling insecure even there, he falls into a state of melancholy, and quits his kingdom to escape the pursuit of Antiochus.

Arriving at Tarsus at a time when its inhabitants are suffering from famine, he succours them with corn from his ships. Soon afterwards he is wrecked off Pentapolis and cast ashore. His armour is dragged out of the sea in fishermen's nets, and Pericles takes part in a knightly tournament. The king's daughter, Thaisa, falls in love with him at first sight, as did Nausicaa with Odysseus. She ignores all the young knights around her for the sake of this noble stranger, who has suffered shipwreck and so many other misfortunes. She will marry him or none; he shines in comparison with the others as a precious stone beside glass. Pericles weds Thaisa, and bears her away with him on his ship. They are overtaken by a storm, during which Thaisa dies in giving birth to a daughter. The superstition of the sailors requires that her corpse shall be immediately thrown into the sea. The coffin drifts ashore at Ephesus, where Thaisa reawakes to life unharmed. The newborn child is left by Pericles to be nursed at Tarsus. As Marina grows up, her foster-mother determines to kill her because she outshines her daughter. Pirates land and prevent the murder; carrying off Marina, they sell her to the mistress of a brothel in Mitylene. She preserves her purity amidst these horrible surroundings, and, finding a protector, gains her release. She is taken on board Pericles' ship that she may charm away his melancholy. A recognition ensues, and, in obedience to a sign from Diana, they sail to Ephesus; the husband is reunited to his wife and the newly-found daughter to her mother.

This is the dramatically impossible canvas which Shakespeare undertook to retouch and finish. That he should have made the first sketch of the play, as Fleay so warmly maintains, seems very improbable upon a careful study of the plot. To write such a beginning to an already finished end would have been an almost impossible task for Wilkins and his collaborator, involving a terribly active vigilance; for the setting of the Shakespearian scenes, Gower's prologues, interludes, and epilogues, &c., is a frame of their own making. Everything favours the theory that it was Shakespeare who undertook to shape a half- or wholly-finished piece of patchwork.

He hardly touched the first two acts, but they contain some traces of his pen--the delicacy with which the incest of the Princess is treated, for example, and Thaisa's timid, almost mute, though suddenly-aroused love for him who at first glance seems to her the chief of men. The scene between the three fishermen, with which the second act opens, owns some turns which speak of Shakespeare, especially where a fisherman says that the avaricious rich are the whales "o' the land, who never leave gaping till they've swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all," and another replies, "But, master, if I had been the sexton, I would have been that day in the belfry.'

"_Second Fisherman_. Why, man?

"_Third Fisherman_. Because he should have swallowed me too: and when I had been in his belly, I would have kept such a jangling of the bells, that he should never have left till he cast bells, steeple, church, and parish up again."

It is not impossible, however, that these gleams of Shakespearean wit are mere imitations of his manner. But, on the other hand, the obvious mimicry of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ in Gower's prologue to the third act is commonplace and clumsy enough:

"Now sleep yslaked hath the rout; No din but snores the house about. . . . . . . . The cat, with eyne of burning coal, Now couches fore the mouse's hole; And crickets sing at the oven's mouth, E'er the blither for their drouth."

Compare this with Puck's:

"Now the wasted brands do glow, Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud," &c.

An awkwardly introduced pantomime interrupts the prologue, which is tediously renewed; then suddenly, like a voice from another world, a rich, full tone breaks in upon the feeble drivel, and we hear Shakespeare's own voice in unmistakable and royal power:

"Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges, Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou, that hast Upon the winds command, bind them in brass, Having called them from the deep! Oh, still Thy deafening, dreadful thunders; gently quench Thy nimble, sulphurous flashes!--Oh, how, Lychorida, How does my queen?--Thou stormest venomously: Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman's whistle Is as a whisper in the ears of death, Unheard."...

The nurse brings the tiny new-born babe, saying:

"Here is a thing too young for such a place, Who, if it had conceit, would die, as I Am like to do: take in your arms this piece Of your dead queen. _Pericles_. How, how Lychorida! _Lychorida_. Patience, good sir; do not assist the storm. Here's all that is left living of your queen, A little daughter: for the sake of it, Be manly and take comfort."

The sailors enter, and, after a brief, masterly conversation, full of the raging storm and the struggle to save the ship, they superstitiously demand that the queen, who has but this instant drawn her last breath, should be thrown overboard. The king is compelled to yield, and turning a last look upon her, says:

"A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear; No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time To give thee hallowed to thy grave, but straight Must cast thee, scarcely coffined, in the ooze; Where, for a monument upon thy bones, And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching whale And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corse, Lying with simple shells."

He gives orders to change the course of the ship and make for Tarsus, because "the babe cannot hold out to Tyrus." There is so mighty a breath of storm and raging seas, such rolling of thunder and flashing of lightning in these scenes, that nothing in English poetry, not excepting Shakespeare's _Tempest_ itself, nor Byron's and Shelley's descriptions of Nature, can surpass it. The storm blows and howls, hisses and screams, till the sound of the boatswain's whistle is lost in the raging of the elements. These scenes are famous and beloved among that seafaring folk for whom they were written, and who know the subject-matter so well.

The effect is tremendously heightened by the struggles of human passion amidst the fury of the elements. The tender and strong grief expressed in Pericles' subdued lament for Thaisa is not drowned by the storm; it sounds a clear, spiritual note of contrast with the raging of the sea. And how touching is Pericles' greeting to his new-born child:

"Now, mild may be thy life! For a more blustrous birth had never babe: Quiet and gentle thy conditions, for Thou art the rudeliest welcomed to this world That ever was prince's child. Happy what follows! Thou hast as chiding a nativity As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven can make, To herald thee from the womb." ...

Although Wilkins' tale follows the course of the play very faithfully, there are but two points in which the resemblance between them extends to a similarity of wording. The first of these occurs in the second act, which was Wilkins' own work, and the second here. In his tale Wilkins says:

"Poor inch of nature! Thou art as rudely welcome to the world as ever princess' babe was, and hast as chiding a nativity as fire, air, earth, and water can afford thee."

Even more striking than the identity of words is the exclamation "Poor inch of nature!" It is so entirely Shakespearian that we are tempted to believe it must have been accidentally omitted in the manuscripts from which the first edition was printed.

It is not until the birth of Marina in the third act that Shakespeare really takes the play in hand. Why? Because it is only now that it begins to have any interest for him. It is the development of this character, this tender image of youthful charm and noble purity, which attracts him to the task.

How Shakespearian is the scene in which Marina is found strewing flowers on the grave of her dead nurse just before Dionyza sends her away to be murdered; it foreshadows two scenes in plays which are shortly to follow--the two brothers laying flowers on the supposed corpse of Fidelio in _Cymbeline_ and Perdita, disguised as a shepherdess, distributing all kinds of blossoms to the two strangers and her guests in _The Winter's Tale_.

Marina says

(Act iv. sc. I):

"No, I will rob Tellus of her weed To strew thy green with flowers: the yellows, blues, The purple violets, and marigolds, Shall as a carpet hang upon thy grave While summer-days do last.--Ay me! poor maid, Born in a tempest, when my mother died, This world to me is like a lasting storm, Whirring me from my friends."

The words are simple, and not especially remarkable in themselves, but they are of the greatest importance as symptoms. They are the first mild tones escaping from an instrument which has long yielded only harsh and jarring sounds. There is nothing like them in the dramas of Shakespeare's despairing mood.

When, weary and sad, he consented to re-write parts of this _Pericles_, it was that he might embody the feeling by which he is now possessed. Pericles is a romantic Ulysses, a far-travelled, sorely tried, much-enduring man, who has, little by little, lost all that was dear to him. When first we meet him, he is threatened with death because he has correctly solved a horrible riddle of life. How symbolic this! and he is thus made cautious and introspective, restless and depressed. There is a touch of melancholy about him from the first, accompanied by an indifference to danger; later, when his distrust of men has been aroused, this characteristic despondency becomes intensified, and gives an appearance of depth of thought and feeling. His sensitive nature, brave enough in the midst of storm and shipwreck, sinks deeper and deeper into a depression which becomes almost melancholia. Feeling solitary and forsaken, he allows no one to approach him, pays no heed when he is spoken to, but sits, silent and stern, brooding over his griefs (Act iv. sc. I). Then Marina comes into his life. When she is first brought on board, she tries to attract his attention by her sweet, modest play and song; then she speaks to him, but is rebuffed, even angrily repulsed, until the gentle narrative of the circumstances of her birth and the misfortunes which have pursued her arrests the king's attention. The restoration of his daughter produces a sudden change from anguished melancholy to subdued happiness.

So, as a poet, had Shakespeare of late withdrawn from the world, and in just such a manner he looked upon men and their sympathy until the appearance of Marina and her sisters in his poetry.

It is probable that Shakespeare wrote the part of Pericles for Burbage, but there is much of himself in it. The two men had more in common than one would be apt to suppose from the only too well-known story of their rivalry on a certain intimate occasion. It is just such trivial anecdotes as this that make their way and are remembered.

Shakespeare has spiritualised Pericles; Marina, in his hands, is a glorified being, who is scarcely grown up before her charm and rare qualities rouse envy and hatred. We first see her strewing flowers on a grave, and immediately after this we listen to her attempt to disarm the man who has undertaken to murder her. She proves herself as innocent as the Queen Dagmar of the ancient ballad. She "never spake bad word nor did ill turn to any living creature." She never killed a mouse or hurt a fly; once she trod upon a worm against her will and wept for it. No human creature could be cast in gentler mould, and truth and nobility unite with this mildness to shed, as it were, a halo round her.

When, after rebuffing and rejecting her, Pericles has gradually softened towards Marina, he asks her where she was born and who provided the rich raiment she is wearing. She replies that if she were to tell the story of her life none would believe her, and she prefers to remain silent. Pericles urges her:

"Prithee, speak: Falseness cannot come from thee; for thou look'st Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace For the crowned Truth to dwell in; I will believe thee. . . . . . . . . . Tell thy story; If thine considered prove the thousandth part Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I Have suffered like a girl: yet thou dost look Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling Extremity out of act."

All this rich imagery brings Marina before us with the nobility of character which is so fitly expressed in her outward seeming. It is Pericles himself who feels like a buried prince, and it is he who has need of her patient sympathy, that the violence of his grief may be softened by her smile. It is all very dramatically effective. The old Greek tragedies frequently relied on these scenes of recovery and recognition, and they never failed to produce their effect. The dialogue here is softly subdued, it is no painting in strong burning colours that we are shown, but a delicately blended pastel. In order to gain an insight into Shakespeare's humour at the time _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_ were written, the reader was asked to think of a day on which he felt especially well and strong and sensible that all his bodily organs were in a healthy condition,--one of those days in which there is a festive feeling in the sunshine, a gentle caress in the air.

To enter into his mood in a similar manner now you would need to recall some day of convalescence, when health is just returning after a long and severe illness. You are still so weak that you shrink from any exertion, and, though no longer ill, you are as yet far from being well; your walk is unsteady, and the grasp of your hand is weak. But the senses are keener than usual, and in little much is seen; one gleam of sunshine in the room has more power to cheer and enliven than a whole landscape bathed in sunshine at another time. The twitter of a bird in the garden, just a few chirps, has more meaning than a whole chorus of nightingales by moonlight at other moments. A single pink in a glass gives as much pleasure as a whole conservatory of exotic plants. You are grateful for a trifle, touched by friendliness, and easily moved to admiration. He who has but just returned to life has an appreciative spirit.

As Shakespeare, with the greater susceptibility of genius, was more keenly alive to the joyousness of youth, so more intensely than others he felt the quiet, half-sad pleasures of convalescence.

Wishing to accentuate the sublime innocence of Marina's nature, he submits it to the grimmest test, and gives it the blackest foil one could well imagine. The gently nurtured girl is sold by pirates to a brothel, and the delineation of the inmates of the house, and Marina's bearing towards them and their customers, occupies the greater part of the fourth act.

As we have already said, we can see no reason why Fleay should reject these scenes as non-Shakespearian. When this critic (whose reputation has suffered by his arbitrariness and inconsistency) does not venture to ascribe them to Wilkins, and yet will not admit them to be Shakespeare's, he is in reality pandering to the narrow-mindedness of the clergyman, who insists that any art which is to be recognised shall only be allowed to overstep the bounds of propriety in a humorously jocose manner. These scenes, so bluntly true to nature in the vile picture they set before us, are limned in just that Caravaggio colouring which distinstinguished Shakespeare's work during the period which is now about to close. Marina's utterances, the best he has put into her mouth, are animated by a sublimity which recalls Jesus' answers to his persecutors. Finally, the whole _personnel_ is exactly that of _Measure for Measure,_ whose genuineness no one has ever disputed. There is also an occasional resemblance of situation. Isabella, in her robes of spotless purity, offers precisely the same contrast to the world of pimps and panders who riot through the play that Marina does here to the woman of the brothel and her servants.

After all that he had suffered, it was hardly possible Shakespeare would relapse into the romantic, mediæval worship of woman as woman. But his natural rectitude of spirit soon led him to make exceptions from the general condemnation which he was inclined for a time to pass upon the sex; and now that his soul's health was returning to him, he felt drawn, after having dwelt solely upon women of the merely sensual type, to place a halo round the head of the young girl, and so he brings her with unspotted innocence out of the most terrible situations.

When she sees that she is locked into the house, she says:

"Alack, that Leonine was so slack, so slow! He should have struck, not spoke; or that these pirates, Not enough barbarous, had but o'erboard thrown me For to seek my mother! _Bawd_. Why lament you, pretty one? _Marina_. That I am pretty. _Bawd_. Come, the gods have done their part in you. _Marina_. I accuse them not. _Bawd_. You are 'light into my hands, where you are like to live. _Marina_. The more my fault To 'scape his hands where I was like to die. . . . Are you a woman? _Bawd._ What would you have me be, an I be not a woman? _Marina._ An honest woman, or not a woman."

The governor Lysimachus seeks the house, and is left alone with Marina. He begins:

"Now, pretty one, how long have you been at this trade? _Marina_. What trade, sir?

_Lysimachus_. Why, I cannot name't but I shall offend.

_Marina_. I cannot be offended with my trade. Please you to name it.

_Lysimachus_. How long have you been of this profession?

_Marina_. E'er since I can remember.

_Lysimachus_. Did you go to't so young? Were you a gamester at five or at seven?

_Marina_. Earlier too, sir, if now I be one.

_Lysimachus_. Why, the house you dwell in proclaims you to be a creature of sale.

_Marina_. Do you know this house to be a place of such resort, and will come into't? I hear say you are of honourable parts, and are the governor of this place.

_Lysimachus_. Why, hath your principal made known unto you who I am?

_Marina_. Who is my principal?

_Lysimachus_. Why, your herb-woman; she that sets seeds and roots of shame and iniquity. Oh, you have heard something of my power, and so stand aloof for more serious wooing. . . . Come, bring me to some private place: come, come.

_Marina_. If you were born to honour, show it now; If put upon you, make the judgment good That thought you worthy of it."

Lysimachus is arrested by her words and his purpose changed. He gives her gold, bids her persevere in the ways of purity, and prays the gods will strengthen her. She succeeds in obtaining her freedom and in supporting herself by her talents. The lasting impression she had made on the governor in her degradation is proved by his sending for her to charm King Pericles' melancholy, and later he aspires to her hand.

The scenes quoted do not give an intellectual equivalent for all that has been dared in order to produce them, but they bear witness to the desire Shakespeare felt of painting youthful womanly purity shining whitely in a very snake-pit of vice, and the spirit in which it is accomplished is that of both Shakespeare and the Renaissance.

At a somewhat earlier period such a subject would have assumed, in England, the form of a _Morality_, an allegorical religious play, in which the steadfastness of the virtuous woman would have triumphed over _Vice_. At a somewhat later period, in France, it would have been a Christian drama, in which heathen wickedness and incredulity were put to confusion by the youthful believer. Shakespeare carries it back to the days of Diana; his virtue and vice are alike heathen, owning no connection with church or creed.

Thirty-seven years later, during the minority of Louis XIV., Pierre Corneille made use of a very similar subject in his but little-known tragedy, _Théodore, Vierge et Martyre_. The scene is laid in the same place in which _Pericles_ begins, in Antioch during the reign of Diocletian.

Marcella, the wicked wife of the governor of the province, determines that her daughter Flavia shall marry the object of her passion, Placidus. He, however, has no thought but for the Princess Theodora, a descendant of the old Syrian kings. Theodora is a Christian, and these are the times of Christian persecution. In order to revenge herself upon the young girl and estrange Placidus from her, Marcella causes her to be confined in just such another house as that into which Marina was sold.

The dramatic interest would naturally lie in the development of Theodora's feelings when, she finds herself abandoned to her fate. But the chaste young girl will not, and cannot, express in words the horror she must feel; and in any case the laws of propriety would not allow her to do so on the French stage. Corneille avoided the difficulty by exchanging action for narrative. Various false or incomplete accounts of what has taken place keep the audience in anxious expectation.

Placidus is told that Theodora's sentence has been commuted to one of simple banishment. He breathes again. Then he hears that Theodora has actually been taken to the house; that Didymus, her Christian admirer, bribed the soldiers to allow him to enter first, and that shortly afterwards he returned, covering his face with his cloak as though ashamed. He is furious. The third announcement informs him that it was Theodora who came out disguised in Didymus's clothes. Placidus' rage now gives way to agonising jealousy. He believes that Theodora has yielded willingly to Didymus, and he suffers tortures. Finally we learn the truth. Didymus himself tells how he rescued Theodora unharmed; he is a Christian, and expects to die. "Live thou without jealousy," he says to Placidus; "I can endure the death penalty." "Alas!" answers Placidus, "how can I be other than jealous, knowing that this glorious creature owes more than life to thee. Thou hast given thy life to save her honour; how can I but envy thy happiness!" Both Theodora and Didymus are martyred, and the pagan lover, who did nothing to help his love, is left alone with his shame.

The sole contrast intended here is between the noble qualities developed by the Christian faith and that baseness which was considered inseparable from heathendom.

Two things arrest our attention in this comparison: firstly, the superiority of the English drama, which openly represents all things on the stage, even such subjects as are only passingly alluded to by society; and, secondly, the marked difference in the spirit of that Old England of the Renaissance from the all-pervading Christianism of the early classic period in "most Christian" France.

The calm dignity of Marina's innocence has none of that taint of the confessional which was plainly obnoxious to Shakespeare, and which neither the mediæval plays before him, nor Corneille and Calderon after, could escape. Corneille's Theodora is a saint by profession and a martyr from choice. She gives herself up to her enemies at the end of the play, because she has been assured by supernatural revelation that she will not again be imprisoned in the house from which she has just escaped. Shakespeare's Marina, the tenderly and carefully outlined sketch of the type which is presently to wholly possess his imagination, is purely human in her innate nobility of nature.

It is deeply interesting to trace in this sombre yet fantastically romantic play of _Pericles_ the germs of all his succeeding works.

Marina and her mother, long lost and late recovered by a sorrowing king, are the preliminary studies for Perdita and Hermione in _A Winter's Tale_. Perdita, as her name tells us, is lost and is living, ignorant of her parentage, in a strange country. Marina's flower-strewing suggests Perdita's distribution of blossoms, accompanied by words which reveal a profound understanding of flower-nature, and Hermione is recovered by Leontes as is Thaisa by Pericles.

The wicked stepmother in _Cymbeline_ corresponds to the wicked foster-mother in _Pericles_. She hates Imogen as Dionyza hates Marina. Pisanio is supposed to have murdered her as Leonine is believed to have slain Marina, and Cymbeline recovers both sons and daughter as Pericles his wife and child.

The tendency to substitute some easy process of explanation, such as melodramatic music or supernatural revelation, in the place of severe dramatic technique, which appears at this time, betrays a certain weariness of the demands of the art. Diana appears to the slumbering Pericles as Jupiter does to Posthumus in _Cymbeline_.

But it is for _The Tempest_ that _Pericles_ more especially prepares us. The attitude of the melancholy prince towards his daughter seems to foreshadow that of the noble Prospero towards his child Miranda. Prospero is also living in exile from his home. But it is Cerimon who approaches more nearly in character to Prospero. Note his great speech:

"I held it ever, Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and richer: careless heirs May the two latter darken and expend; But immortality attends the former, Making a man a god. 'Tis known I ever Have studied physic, through which secret art, By turning o'er authorities, I have, Together with my practice, made familiar To me and to my aid the blest infusions That dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones; And I can speak of the disturbances That Nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me A more content in course of true delight Than to be thirsty after tottering honour Or tie my treasure up in silken bags, To please the fool and death" (Act iii. sc. 2).

The position in which Thaisa and Pericles stand in the second act towards the angry father, who has in reality no serious objection to their union, closely resembles that of Ferdinand and Miranda before the feigned wrath of Prospero. Most notable of all is the preliminary sketch we find in _Pericles_ of the tempest which ushers in the play of that name. Over and above the resemblance between the storm scenes, we have Marina's description of the hurricane during which she was born (_Pericles_, Act iv. sc. I), and Ariel's description of the shipwreck (_Tempest_, Act i. sc. 2).

Many other slight touches prove a relationship between the two plays. In _The Tempest_ (Act ii. sc. I), as in _Pericles_ (Act v. sc. I), we have soothing slumbrous music and, mention of harpies (_Tempest_, Act iii. sc. 3, and _Pericles_, Act iv. sc. 3). The words "virgin knot," so charmingly used by Marina:

"If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep, Untied I still my virgin knot will keep" (Act iv. sc. 2),

are also employed by Prospero in reference to Miranda in _The Tempest_ (Act iv. sc. I); and it will be observed that these are the only two instances in which they occur in Shakespeare.

Thus the germs of all his latest works lie in this unjustly neglected and despised play, which has suffered under a double disadvantage: it is not entirely Shakespeare's work, and in such portions of it as are his own there exist, in the dark shadow cast by her hideous surroundings about Marina, traces of that gloomy mood from which he was but just emerging. But for all that, whether we look upon it as a contribution to Shakespeare's biography or as a poem, this beautiful and remarkable fragment, _Pericles_, is a work of the greatest interest.[3]

[1] The complete title runs thus:--"The late, and much admired Play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with the true Relation of the whole History, adventures, and fortunes of the said Prince: As also, The no lesse strange and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life of his Daughter MARIANA. As it hath been diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the Bancside. By William Shakespeare. Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the Signe of the Sunne in Paternoster Row. 1609."

[2]The Triar Table determines their order thus:--

Troilus and Cressida 1606-7 Antony and Cleopatra 1606-7 Coriolanus 1607-8 Timon of Athens. 1607-8

[3] Delius: _Ueber Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_, iii. 175-205; F. G. Fleay: _On the Play of Pericles. The New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1874, 195-254; Swinburne: _A Study of Shakespeare_, p. 206; Gervinus: _Shakespeare_, vol. i. 187, and Elze: _Shakespeare_, p. 409, still believe _Pericles_ to be a work of Shakespeare's youth.

XVI

_FRANCIS BEAUMONT AND JOHN FLETCHER_

It was a comparatively easy task to distinguish Shakespeare's part in _Timon of Athens_ and _Pericles_, for it consisted of all that was important in either play. The identity of the men who collaborated with him seems to have been decided by pure chance, and is of little interest to us now-a-days. It is a different matter, however, in the case of two other dramas of this period which have been associated with Shakespeare's name--_The Two Noble Kinsmen_ and _Henry VIII_.--for his part in them is unimportant, in one almost imperceptible, in fact. Their real author was a young man just coming into notice, who afterwards became one of the most famous dramatists of the day, and can hardly have been indifferent to Shakespeare. The question, therefore, of their mutual relations and the origin of their collaboration is one of the greatest interest.

A drama entitled _Philaster_ had been played at the Globe Theatre., in 1608 with extraordinary success. It was the joint work of two young men, Francis Beaumont, aged 22, and John Fletcher, aged 28. The play made their reputation, and they found themselves famous from the moment of its representation. A would-be amusing, but in reality rather dull play of Fletcher's, _The Woman-Hater_, had been put on the stage in 1606-7. It contained some good comic parts, but nothing that gave promise of the poet's later works.

After this triumph with _Philaster_, the two friends produced in 1609 or 1611 their masterpiece, _The Maid's Tragedy_, and their scarcely less admired _A King and no King_. This joint activity continued until the death of Beaumont in 1615. During the remaining ten years of his life Fletcher wrote alone, with the single exception of a play produced in collaboration with Rowley, and attained to a fame which probably eclipsed Shakespeare's in these last years of his life, as it certainly did immediately after his death. Dryden remarks, in his well-known _Essay of Dramatic Poetry_ (1668), "Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage, two of them being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." This statement seems somewhat exaggerated if we compare it with the entries in Pepys' Diary; still, we know that Shakespeare's fame was completely eclipsed towards the end of the century by that of Ben Jonson. Samuel Butler not only prefers the latter, but speaks as though his superiority was universally admitted.[1]

The two new poets were neither learned proletaires, like Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, nor of the middle classes, like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, but were both of good family. Fletcher's father was a high-placed ecclesiastic, much experienced in the courts of Elizabeth and James, and Beaumont was the son of a Justice of Common Pleas, and related to families of some standing. One great source of their popularity lay in the fact that they were thus enabled to reproduce to perfection the manners of the fine gentleman, his general dissipation, and his quick repartee.

Francis Beaumont was born somewhere about the year 1586, at Grace Dieu in Leicestershire. His family numbered among those of the legal aristocracy, and many of its members were noted for poetical propensities and abilities; there were no fewer than three poets by name of Beaumont living at the time of Francis' death. The future dramatist was entered at ten years of age as a gentleman-commoner at Broadgate Hall, Oxford. He early left the university for London, where he was made a member of the Inner Temple. His legal studies appear to have sat lightly upon him, and he seems to have devoted himself principally to the composition of those plays and masques which were so frequently performed by the various legal colleges of those days. In 1613 he wrote the masque which was performed by the legal institutions of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn in honour of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage with the Elector-Palatine.

It seems to have been a mutual enthusiasm for Jonson's _Volpone_ (1605) which brought Beaumont and Fletcher together, and united them in a brotherly friendship and fellowship in work of which history affords few parallels. Aubrey, to whom we are indebted for a number of anecdotes about Shakespeare, gives the following vivid picture of their life: "They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse; both batchelors lay together, had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, etc., between them."

The two friends soon set to work, and appear to have planned out the dramas together, each finally working out the scenes most suited to his talents. An anecdote related by Winstanley seems to indicate such a method. One day while they were thus apportioning their parts in a tavern they frequented, a man standing at the door overheard the exclamation, "I will undertake to kill the king;" suspecting some treasonable conspiracy, he gave information, with the result that both poets were arrested. In support of the veracity of this anecdote, George Darley observes that a similar incident occurs in Fletcher's _Woman-Hater_ (Act v. sc. 2). Great bitterness is certainly expressed in this play on the subject of informers; witness the very unflattering sketch of their ways and manners in the third scene of the second act.

In whatsoever fashion _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ may have originally been written, the joint-authors must have finally revised it in company and obliterated to the best of their ability the distinguishing marks of their very different styles. Otherwise it would not offer, now that we are in possession of works executed by each separately, the present difficulty of apportioning to each the honour due to him.

There was no lack of difference, especially of a metrical nature, about their styles. As far as we can judge, Beaumont's was the gift for tragedy; he had less wit and less skill than Fletcher, but he was more genuinely inspired, richer in feeling, and more daring in invention than his brother poet. His noble head is encircled by a halo of sadness, for, like Marlowe and Shelley, two of England's greatest poets, he died before he had completed his thirtieth year.

Beaumont was a devoted admirer of Ben Jonson, and a constant frequenter of that "Mermaid Tavern" whose literary and social gatherings have been celebrated in his poetical epistle to the object of his admiration. His passionate regard for the author of _Volpone_ is shown in a poem addressed to him upon the subject, in which he exalts Jonson's art and the charm of his comedy above all that any other poet (thereby including Shakespeare) had ever produced for the English stage. Jonson replies with his ode "To Mr. Francis Beaumont," in which he reciprocates the admiring attention by a declaration of the warmest affection, and expresses himself "not worth the least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth," assuring his friend that he envies him his greater talent. According to Dryden, Jonson submitted everything he wrote to Beaumont's criticism as long as the young man was alive, and even gave him his manuscripts to correct.

While Beaumont's name is thus associated with Jonson, Fletcher's forms a constellation in conjunction with that of Shakespeare.

John Fletcher was born in December 1579, at Rye in Sussex, and was therefore fifteen years younger than the great poet with whom he is said to have collaborated more than once. His father, the Dean of Peterborough, was successively promoted through the bishoprics of Bristol and Worcester to that of London. He was a handsome, eloquent man, with a luxurious temperament, inclined to display and pleasure of all kinds. Every inch a courtier, all his thoughts were concentrated upon gaining, retaining, or recovering the royal favour.

One episode of his life of an impressively dramatic and historic interest, calculated to make the strongest impression on the imagination of an embryo tragic poet, must have been often related by him to his young son. Dr. Richard Fletcher was the divine appointed by Government to attend on Mary Stuart at the time of her execution, and was therefore both spectator and participator in the closing scene of the Scottish Cleopatra's life.

When he approached the Queen in the great hall hung with black, and invited her, as he was in duty bound to do, to unite with him in prayer, she turned her back upon him.

"Madam," he began with a low obeisance, "the Queen's most excellent majesty. Madam, the Queen's most excellent majesty." Thrice he commenced his sentence, wanting words to pursue it. When he repeated the words a fourth time she cut him short.

"Mr. Dean," she said, "I am a Catholic, and must die a Catholic. It is useless to attempt to move me, and your prayers will avail me little."

"Change your opinion, madam," he cried, his tongue being loosed at last. "Repent of your sins, settle your faith in Christ, by Him to be saved."

"Trouble not yourself further, Mr. Dean," she answered. "I am settled in my own faith, for which I mean to shed my blood."

"I am sorry, madam," said Shrewsbury, "to see you so addicted to Popery!"[2]

Slowly and carefully her ladies removed her veil so as not to disturb the arrangement of her hair. They took off her long black robe, and she stood then in a skirt of scarlet velvet; they removed the black bodice, and revealed one of scarlet silk. Sobbing, they drew on her scarlet sleeves and placed scarlet slippers upon her feet. It was like a transformation scene in a theatre when the proud woman stood suddenly dressed in scarlet in the black funeral hall. When her women wept and wailed she said to them, "_Ne criez pas vous, j'ai promis pour vous. Adieu, au revoir_," and praying in a loud voice, "_In te Domine confido_," she laid her head upon the block. It was impossible that Richard Fletcher should ever forget the inflexible resolution and indomitable courage displayed by the great actress, nor was he likely to forget the terrible mingling of horror with pure burlesque in the final scene. In his agitation, the executioner missed his aim, and a weak blow fell upon the handkerchief with which the Queen's eyes were bound, inflicting a slight wound upon her cheek. The second blow left the severed head hanging by a piece of skin, which the executioner cut as he drew back the axe. Then Dr. Fletcher witnessed a second transformation, as marvellous as any ever produced by a magician's wand: the great mass of thick false hair fell from the head. The Queen who had knelt before the block possessed all the ripened charm and dignified beauty of maturity; the head held up by the executioner to the gaze of the little company was that of a grey, wrinkled, old woman.[3] Could anything in the world have given young Fletcher a keener insight into the horrors of tragic catastrophe, the solemnity of death, and the blending of the terrible with the utterly grotesque which life's most supreme moments occasionally produce? It must have acted like a call and incitement to the creation of tragic and burlesque theatrical effect.

John Fletcher was educated at Cambridge, and probably came to London shortly before Beaumont, to try his fortune as a dramatic writer. His first success was with _Philaster, or Love lies Bleeding_, in 1608. Shakespeare must have witnessed its triumphant performance with strangely mingled feelings, for it could but strike him as being in many ways an echo of his own work. In so far as he is wrongfully deprived of his throne, Prince Philaster occupies much the same position as Hamlet, and several of his speeches to the king are markedly in the style of the Danish Prince of Shakespeare's play. Thus, in the opening scene of the first act:

"_King_. Sure he's possess'd. _Philaster_. Yes, with my father's spirit: It's true, O king! A dangerous spirit. Now he tells me, king, I was a king's heir, bids me be a king; And whispers to me, these are all my subjects. 'Tis strange he will not let me sleep, but dives Into my fancy, and there gives me shapes that kneel And do me service, cry me 'King.' But I'll oppose him, he's a factious spirit, And will undo me. Noble sir, your hand, I am your servant. _King_. Away, I do not like this," &c.

The king, however, has nothing to fear from Philaster, for the prince loves and is beloved by the monarch's daughter, Arethusa, whom her father intends to wed to that arrogant braggart, Prince Pharamond of Spain. Philaster, all unknown to himself, is beloved by Euphrasia, the daughter of the courtier Cleon. Disguised as a page she enters the prince's service under the name of Bellario, and displays a devotion which no trial can shake, not even that of carrying love-letters between Philaster and Arethusa, nor of being transferred to the service of the latter that she may be at hand in case of need. Euphrasia's situation and feelings resemble those of Viola in _Twelfth Night_, but the comedy of Shakespeare's play here becomes serious and romantic tragedy. _Philaster_ must have reminded Shakespeare yet more forcibly of another of his plays, and one to which the second half of the title, _i.e., Love lies Bleeding_, would have been applicable, for in the course of the piece Philaster and Arethusa are brought into a situation which is a counterpart of that of Othello and Desdemona.

It happens in the following manner. The princess treats Pharamond with as much coldness as she dares, allowing her betrothed none of the privileges which he may claim after marriage. Pharamond, who naïvely confides to the audience that his temperament will not stand such treatment, is sympathised with by an exceedingly accommodating court lady. Her name is Megra; she is one of those wanton fair ones whom Fletcher excelled in portraying, and is closely akin to the Chloe of his charming play _The Faithful Shepherd_, The time and place of this assignation being betrayed, the king, enraged at the insult offered to his daughter, breaks in upon them and overwhelms Megra with cruel and coarse abuse. She, on her part, threatens that if her name is publicly disgraced, she will reveal all she knows of a much too tender friendship between the princess and a handsome page lately taken into her service.

The king, finding that Bellario is actually attendant upon Arethusa, believes the slander and insists upon his instant dismissal. The courtiers, who, in common with the people, love Philaster and look to him to dethrone the king and rule in his stead, have watched this obstacle of his passion for the princess with no great favour. They hasten to report the rumour to him. Dion, Euphrasia-Bellario's own father, mendaciously asserts that he has surprised the lovers together. No use is made of this incident, nor of any of the opportunities offered by Euphrasia's disguise, which remains a secret even from the audience until the last scene of the play. Philaster in a jealous frenzy draws his sword upon Bellario and drives him away. The page instinctively guesses that Philaster is caught in the meshes of some intrigue, but does not divine its nature. Her parting words might have been addressed by Desdemona to Othello:

"But through these tears, Shed at my hopeless parting, I can see A world of treason practised upon you, And her, and me."

Just as Desdemona, suspecting nothing, warmly pleads Cassio's cause with Othello, so Arethusa laments to Philaster that she has been forced to dismiss his cherished messenger of love:

"O cruel! Are you hard-hearted too? Who shall now tell you How much I loved you? Who shall swear it to you, And weep the tears I send? Who shall now bring you Letters, rings, bracelets? lose his health in service? Wake tedious nights in stories of your praise?" (Act iii. sc. 2).

Philaster suffers the same agonies as the Moor of Venice, but being of a naturally gentle disposition, he only answers her in terms hardly to be surpassed for mournful and pathetic beauty. Later, coming upon the princess and her page, who have met by chance in a wood, he is so carried away by jealousy that he draws his sword first upon Arethusa and then upon Bellario. The page takes the blow without a murmur, and goes willingly to prison in place of Philaster for the attempt upon the princess's life. The devotion of Desdemona is thus reproduced in both these maidens, and finds in both a striking expression. All comes right eventually. A revolution places Philaster upon the throne, the women who love him recover from their wounds, and the discovery of Bellario's sex puts an end to all scandal. Philaster marries his beloved, and she, even more magnanimous than the queen in De Musset's _Carmosine_, closes the play with an invitation to Bellario-Euphrasia to share their life:

"Come, live with me; Live free as I do. She that loves my lord, Cursed be the wife that hates her."

In spite of its many echoes from his own plays, Shakespeare cannot have failed to appreciate the talent displayed in this drama. The gentleness and charm of the women in the works of both young poets must have appealed to him, offering as they did so marked a contrast to those of Chapman and Marlowe, neither of whom had any appreciation of womanliness or power to depict it. The best of Chapman's tragedies can have contained little that would attract Shakespeare. _The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France_, was rather a ten-act epic than a drama. His comedies, too, even _Eastward Hoe_, with its wonderful picture of the London of the day to which Ben Jonson and Marston contributed their share, must have repelled him by a realism which he always avoided in his own work. Beaumont and Fletcher laid their scenes in Sicily, or rather in some imaginary country, whose abstract poetry, more in accordance with the Romance nation's manner of representing men and their passions, cannot have been unsympathetic to Shakespeare, especially at this period of his life.

_A King and no King_, the play which in all probability immediately succeeded _Philaster_, contains the same merits and defects as the latter, and here also Shakespeare might find reminiscences of his own work. When the king's mother kneels before her son, and is raised by him (Act iii. sc. I), we are reminded of Volumnia kneeling to Coriolanus, and we feel that the same scene was in the mind of the two young poets. The comic character of the play is one Bessus, a soldier by profession, and an arrant coward in spite of his captaincy. He is a braggart, liar, and, if occasion offers, a pander, being equally diverting in all these capacities. Considerable humour is displayed in the elaboration of his character, but the mighty figure of Falstaff is plainly discernible in the background. The authors even go to the length of appropriating some distinctly Falstaffian expressions. A fencing-master says of Bessus (Act iv. sc. 3):

"It showed discretion, the better part of valour."[4]

In _Philaster_ we were shown a strong passion consumed by groundless jealousy. In _A King and no King_ we have a still stronger passion, that of the young Arbaces for Princess Panthea, leading to confusion and disaster. Throughout the whole play Arbaces never doubts for a moment that they are brother and sister. The secret of his birth is not discovered until the last scene, just as Bellario's sex is not made known until the end of _Philaster_. Spaconia discovers that King Tigranes, who is as her very life to her, is in love with Panthea; whereupon she assumes much the same position towards him that Euphrasia did towards her love. But there is profounder study of character in the new play. Arbaces, a mixture of vanity and boastfulness with really excellent qualities, makes an extremely complex personality, though not an unnatural or unsympathetic one, and we are given a study of complicated passion in no way inferior to that in Racine's _Phèdre_, the instinct of love violently and irresistibly aroused, but constantly met by the fear and horror of incest. The subject is treated with great pathos and power of language.[5]

In 1609-10 Fletcher reached the zenith of his fame as sole author and as collaborator with Beaumont. That sweet and fresh pastoral play _The Faithful Shepherdess_, Fletcher's unassisted work, must have been written before the spring of 1610, for Sir William Skipworth, to whom, amongst others, it is dedicated, died in the May of that year. The theme was peculiarly suited to the fresh and delicate grace of Fletcher's lyrical gift, and here again Shakespeare may have perceived a distinct imitation of his _Midsummer Night's Dream_. Here also the lovers are metamorphosed, and Perigot embraces Amaryllis in the form of Amoret, believing her to be his love; he also wounds Amoret as Philaster wounds Arethusa. A still earlier version of the play may be found in Spenser's _Shepherds Calendar_. Darley has observed that Fletcher imitated several lines from the same source, and among them, oddly enough, some which had been appropriated by Spenser from Chaucer, whose verses greatly surpass either of the later poets in charm. In _The Faithful Shepherdess_, for example, we have (v. 5):

"Sort all your shepherds from the lazy clowns That feed their heifers in the budded brooms."

In Spenser's _Shepherds Calendar_ it stands:

"So loytering live you, little herd grooms, Keeping your beasts in the budded brooms."

But in Chaucer's _House of Fame_ we find the following verse (iii. 133):

"And many a floite and litlyng home And pipis made of grenè corne As have these litel herdè-groomes That kepen bestis in the bromes."

Fletcher's principal source, however, was, as the title tells us, Guarini's _Pastor Fido_.

_The Faithful Shepherdess_ is a charming idyl, too airy and delicate to have an immediate success with his own generation, but it may be read with pleasure to this day, and has secured lasting fame to its author. Ben Jonson's later but also admirable pastoral play, _The Sad Shepherd_, is the English poem of that period which most resembles it.

Immediately after the production of this little tragi-comedy, Fletcher offered to the Globe Theatre the most remarkable work which had resulted from the combined labours of himself and Francis Beaumont--_The Maid's Tragedy_.

The first act opens with the preparations for a wedding festivity. The king has commanded the worthy and distinguished Lord Amintor to break off his engagement to the gentle and devoted Aspasia and to marry Evadne, the beautiful sister of his dearest friend and comrade, the great general Melantius. Amintor, to whom the king's command is sacred, and who is, moreover, strongly attracted by Evadne, breaks with Aspasia, dear as she is to him. We witness Aspasia's deep grief, the outburst of rage on the part of her father (the cowardly Calianax), and the performance of the masque on the eve of the wedding, in which some of the poets' sweetest lyrics are to be found.

The second act represents the wedding-night. The disrobing of the bride by her friends, and all the fun and banter attendant on the occasion, form the introduction. Then follows, between bridegroom and bride, the first great scene of the play, as boldly dramatic as any written by Shakespeare before or Webster after this date. Amintor approaches Evadne with tender words, she gently repulses him. He strives to disarm what he supposes to be her bashfulness, but she tells him calmly and coldly that she will never be his. Still he does not understand, and now urges her with impatient desire. Then she rises, like a serpent about to sting, and coldly hisses that she is, and will continue to be, the king's mistress, that the marriage has merely been arranged by him as a screen for his relations with her. The fury and thirst for revenge which seizes Amintor when he realises this outrage gives way to a desperate comprehension that it is the king who has dishonoured him; to a subject the person of the king is inviolable.

The third act opens with an audacious visit from the king on the following morning. With cool patronage he asks Amintor if the night has given him satisfaction. Amintor replies composedly, and answers the king's more particular inquiries quite in the style of the happy husband. It is now the king's turn to be disconcerted. He sends for Evadne and violently accuses her of treachery, against which she, of course, passionately protests. The king, beside himself with rage, sends for Amintor; he is furiously attacked by Evadne for his falsehoods, and the king brutally explains the situation and the part the husband is expected to play. This double scene is written in a masterly fashion, with a strong sense of dramatic effect, but the rest of the act is worthess, being chiefly composed of dialogues between Amintor and Melantius, who learns the truth about his sister from his friend. The two are perpetually drawing upon each other and sheathing their swords again; firstly, because Melantius will not believe in his sister's shame; secondly, because Amintor will not allow Melantius to seek any revenge which will reveal his dishonour. It all reads like a weak imitation of the Spanish dramatists before Calderon.

The fourth act presents another series of effective scenes. The brother accuses the sister of her infamy, and when she coldly denies everything he threatens her with his sword, until she vows that she will take bloody vengeance on the cruel and vicious king who has brought about her degradation. Then the suddenly converted Evadne falls upon her knees and implores her husband's forgiveness, which he, seeing how bitterly she repents the life she has been living, accords. This is followed by a particularly well-imagined scene, in which the ridiculous old Calianax, who hates Melantius, denounces him to the king for his attempt to persuade him, Calianax, to give up the city he held for the monarch. In spite of its truth, Melantius listens to the accusation quite imperturbably, and succeeds in giving it the appearance of being merely the ramblings of an old dotard.

In the fifth act is a skilfully prepared Judith scene--the second great scene of the play. Evadne goes to the king's chamber, passing through the anteroom, which resounds with the profligate jests of the courtiers. The authors linger with a certain voluptuous cruelty over the scene between the king, who does not awake from his sleep until his hands have been tied to the bed, and the woman who has been his mistress, and who now tortures him with scathing words before she murders him. The remaining scenes are marred by their excessive sensationalism. Aspasia, disguised as her brother, seeks Amintor, from whom she can no longer be separated. He receives her with warm cordiality, but she taunts, strikes, and even kicks him, wishing to attain, if possible, the happiness of dying by his hand. He finally loses patience and draws his sword upon her, seeing too late that it is his beloved whom he has slain. Evadne now appears, red-handed and glowing with love, but Amintor repulses her with horror, she is stained with that greatest of all crimes, regicide. She kills herself in despair, and Amintor also dies by his own hand.

Aspasia is the perpetually slighted young woman who appears, always resigned and gentle, in all Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. The old coward Calianax is another of their standing characters. The brotherhood between Melantius and Amintor possesses, in spite of its occasional artificiality, some interest for us, as does the corresponding friendship in the _Two Noble Kinsmen_, from the fact that the mutual relations between the authors evidently served as the prototype in both cases. Evadne's character, if not completely intelligible, is entirely _hors ligne_, and most admirably suited to dramatic treatment. The play indeed is a model of everything which dramatic and theatrical treatment requires, and was well calculated to impress an audience for whom Shakespeare's art was too refined.

We cannot, therefore, be surprised that the friend and fellow-craftsman of the two poets, who was the first to publish a collected edition of their works after their death, should write the following words without fear of contradiction: "But to mention them is to throw a cloud upon all former names and benight posterity; this book being, without flattery, the greatest monument of the scene that time and humanity have produced, and must live, not only the crown and sole reputation of our own, but the stain of all other nations and languages" (Shirley's address to the reader).

[1] See Richard Garnett: _The Age of Dryden_, p. 249

[2] Froude: _History of England_, vol. xii. p. 254.

[3] J. St. Loe Strachey: _Beaumont and Fletcher_, vol. i. p. xv.

[4] It is Falstaff who says in the _First Part of Henry IV_. (Act v. sc. 4), "The better part of valour is discretion." This parallel has been overlooked both in Ingleby's _Shakespeare's Century of Praise_ and in Furnivall's _Fresh Allusions to Shakespeare_.

[5]

"Know I have lost The only difference betwixt man and beast, My reason. PANTHEA. Heaven forbid! ARBACES. Nay, it is gone, And I am left as far without a bound As the wide ocean that obeys the winds; Each sudden passion throws me where it lists, And overwhelms all that oppose my will. I have beheld thee with a lustful eye; My heart is set on wickedness, to act Such sins with thee as I have been afraid To think of.... I have lived To conquer men, and now am overthrown Only by words, brother and sister. Where Have those words dwelling? I will find 'em out And utterly destroy'em; but they are Not to be grasped Accursed man! Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate; For thou hast all thy actions bounded in With curious rules, where every beast is free; What is there that acknowledges a kindred But wretched man? Who ever saw the bull Fearfully leave the heifer that he liked Because they had one dam?"

XVII

_SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER--THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN AND HENRY VIII_.

In the year 1684 a drama was published for the first time under the following title:

"_The Two Noble Kinsmen_; presented at the Blackfriars, by the King's Maiesties Servants, with great applause. Written by the memorable Worthies of their time Mr. _John Fletcher_ and Mr. _William Shakespeare_, Gent: Printed at _London_ by _Tho. Cotes_ for _John Waterson_, and are to be sold at the signe of the _Crown_ in Paul's Churchyard."

This play was not included in the First Folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher (1647), but it appeared in the second (1679). Even supposing the editors of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's works to have entertained no doubt of his share in it, it would probably remain in Fletcher's possession until his death in 1625, and would therefore be inaccessible to them.

The play is of no particular value; it is far inferior to Fletcher's best work, and not to be compared with any of Shakespeare's completed dramas. Nevertheless, many eminent critics of this century have found distinct traces in this play of the styles of both greater and lesser poet.

Like that of _Troilus and Cressida_, the theme found its way from the pages of an old-world poet, Statius' _Thebaide_ in this case, into those of Boccaccio, and through him it came to Chaucer. Under the form given it by the latter it proved the foundation of several dramas of the reigns of Elizabeth and James.[1] Most of the essential details of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ may be found in Boccaccio's _La Teseide._

It is a tale of two devoted friends, both suddenly seized by a romantic passion for a woman whom they have watched walking in a garden from the window of the tower in which they are held prisoners of war. Their friendship is shattered, each claiming the exclusive right to the affections of this lady, who is the Duke's sister Emilia. One of the friends is set at liberty upon the express condition of his quitting the country for ever. His irresistible longing for the fair one, however, draws him back to live disguised in her neighbourhood. The second friend escapes from prison, and meeting the first, engages him in a duel, which is interrupted by Duke Theseus. They explain their position to him, and their passion for his sister. The Duke arranges a formal tournament between the suitors; Emilia's hand is to reward the victor, and the vanquished is to suffer death. The conqueror, however, is fatally injured by a fall from his horse, and it is the defeated man who marries the princess.

There can be no reasonable question of the traces of Fletcher's hand in this play, for in it we find not only his easily recognised metrical style, but many features peculiar to his poorer work--the lax composition which permits of two plots running side by side with no connection between them, a tendency to merely theatrical effect and entirely motiveless action, contrived to surprise the audience at the cost of psychology, and finally his conception of virtue and vice in the relations between man and woman. To Fletcher, chastity meant entire abstinence, and side by side with this "chastity" he places, and delineates with relish, an immodest and purely sensual passion. Thus Emilia talks of her "chastity," and the jailer's daughter alludes to her passion for Palamon in terms which are repulsively shameless. When Shakespeare's women love, they are neither chaste in this fashion nor passionate in this fashion. They are sympathetically and reverentially drawn as loving only one man and loving him faithfully, whereas the affections of Fletcher's heroines veer round as suddenly as we saw Evadne's veer in _The Maids Tragedy_. Therefore it is possible for him to portray such women as Emilia, who during the tournament loves first one and then the other of her suitors as his chances of victory are in the ascendant. That it contains many reminiscences of Shakespeare is no argument against Fletcher's responsibility for the greater part of the play, but quite the contrary; we have already seen how many of these traces are to be found even among his best works. In the _Two Noble Kinsmen_ we find echoes from _The Midsummer Night's Dream,_ from _Julius Cæsar_ (the quarrel between Brutus and Cassio), and, above all, a tasteless and offensive imitation of Ophelia's madness, when the jailer's daughter goes crazy for fear while seeking Palamon in the wood at night, and in her raving and singing later in the play. Shakespeare never repeated without excelling, and certainly never parodied himself in this fashion.[2]

Shakespeare evidently had no part in the planning of the play. There is no originality in it, and if we do obtain a glimpse of some sort of life's philosophy, it is certainly not his. Swinburne's surmise that the play was sketched by Shakespeare and completed by Fletcher, can therefore hardly be correct. Among other arguments, we may mention that the part in which, according to Swinburne's own opinion, Shakespeare's hand is most traceable, is the conclusion, which is hardly likely to have been written first.

Can any part of the play be ascribed to Shakespeare? Gardiner and Delius believe not, and the Danish critics a few years ago shared the same scarcely justifiable opinion. Bierfreund is uninfluenced by the fact that many of the most eminent English critics hold a contrary view, but such a circumstance should impose the very closest study of the play on the part of foreign critics. In my case this has led me to the conclusion that although the drama was planned and the greater part executed by Fletcher, he had Shakespeare's assistance in finishing the work. We can hardly imagine that Shakespeare vouchsafed his help from any motive but that of interest in, and a friendly feeling for, the younger poet, who had submitted his work to him and appealed for his assistance.

It would but weary the reader to go through the work from beginning to end to show how the seal of Shakespeare's style is stamped upon it. The traces of his pen are most frequent in the opening act; the appeal of the first queen to Theseus ("We are three queens," &c.), in the introductory scene, for example. These lines possess all the rhythm peculiar to the productions of the last years of the poet's life; and how boldly figurative and genuinely Shakespearian in expression is the same queen's fanciful expression:

"Dowagers, take hands; Let us be widows to our woes; delay Commends us to a famishing hope."

Theseus' last speech in this act (the summing up of the situation and circumstances) reminds us of Hamlet's monologue, "The whips and scorns of life, the oppressors' wrongs," &c., and "Ulysses' beauty, wit, high birth," &c.

"Since I have known frights, fury, friends' behests, Love's provocations, zeal, a mistress' task, Desire of liberty, a fever, madness."...

Mere imitations must not be confounded with Shakespeare's own style, however. The passage in which Emilia speaks of the ardent and tender friendship that united her to her dead friend, Flavina, which in England has been mistakenly admired as Shakespeare's work, is in reality a poor copy of the passage in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ (Act iii. sc. 2) where Helena describes the love between herself and Hermia. The unhealthy affection here set forth bears Fletcher's stamp upon it, and is made particularly unpleasant by the use Emilia makes of the word "innocent."

We are again sensible of Shakespeare's touch in the monologue spoken by the jailer's daughter, which constitutes the second scene of the third act. Note the picturesque expression, "In me has grief slain fear," and many others. From the moment she goes out of her mind down to the last word she utters, Shakespeare has neither part nor lot in those speeches whose uncouth imitation of his style must have been singularly offensive to him.

The greater part of the first scene of the fifth act is undoubtedly Shakespeare's. Theseus' first speech is superb, and Arcite's address to the knights and invocation of Mars is delightful. The lines at the close of the play have also a Shakespearian ring about them, especially the words so much admired by Swinburne:

"That nought could buy Dear love but loss of dear love."

But there is no deeper, no intellectual interest for us in all this. Shakespeare had nothing to do with the psychology, or rather want of it, in this play.[3]

Had he any greater share in _Henry VIII_.? The play was first published in the Folio edition of 1623, where it closes the series of Historical Plays. The first four acts are founded on Holinshed's Chronicle, and the last upon Fox's _Acts and Monuments of the Church_, commonly known as the _Book of Martyrs_. The authors were also directly or indirectly indebted to a book which at that date only existed in manuscript, George Cavendish's _Relics of Cardinal Wolsey_, which had been largely drawn upon by Holinshed and Hall. The earliest reference to a play of Henry VIII. may be found in the Stationers' Hall Registry for the 12th of February 1604-5, where the "Enterlude for K. Henry VIII." is entered; but this refers to Rowley's worthless and fanatically Protestant play "_When you see mee you know mee._" The next mention of such a drama occurs in the well-known oft-quoted letters concerning the burning of the Globe Theatre on the 29th of June 1613. In an epistle from Thomas Larkin to Sir Thomas Pickering, dated "This last of June 1613," we read: "No longer since than yesterday, while Burbege's company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII., and there shooting off certain chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched and there burnt so furiously, as it consumed the whole house, all in less than two hours, the people having enough to do to save themselves." Also Sir Henry Wotton in a letter to his nephews, dated the 6th of July 1613, writes: "Now let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you at the present with what happened at the Bankside. The king's players had a new play, called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII., which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats and the like; sufficient, in Truth, within a while to make greatness very familiar if not ridiculous. Now King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's House, and certain canons being shot off at his entrance, some of the paper, or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole House to the very grounds."

The emphatic and thrice repeated assertion of the prologue that all that is about to be represented is _the truth_, taken in conjunction with other details, proves that the play described is our _Henry VIII_., and at that date, therefore, a new work.

Although never very highly esteemed, it was not until somewhere about the year 1850 that it was ever doubted that _Henry VIII_. was entirely written by Shakespeare. It would now be impossible to find any one holding such an opinion; some of the most competent critics, indeed, maintain that Shakespeare had nothing whatever to do with it.[4]

That keen observer, Emerson, alluding to _Henry VIII_. in his book _Representative Men_ draws attention to the two entirely different rhythms of its verse--one that is Shakespearian, and another much inferior. Almost simultaneously, Spedding published an article in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for August 1856 (afterwards reprinted under the title "Who Wrote Shakespeare's Henry VIII?"), in which he points out these differing rhythms, affirming one of them to be Fletcher's. Furnivall and Fleay declared themselves of the same opinion in 1874. To understand this criticism, the reader must bear in mind the following simple evolution of English five-footed iambics. The language does not possess what Scandinavians call feminine rhymes, alternating and contrasting with the masculine. The first attempt to break the monotony of the blank verse simply consisted in the addition of an extra syllable to the original ten--_double ending_. The proportion of these lengthened lines in Shakespeare's _Henry V._ is 18 in 100. Ben Jonson long adhered to the old regular construction, but finally yielded to the newer fashion. Fletcher constantly used the eleven-syllabled lines, employing them indeed so regularly and consciously that he is betrayed into a certain monotoneous mannerism. Instance the following from _The Wild Goose Chase_:

"I would I were a woman, sir, to fit you, As there be such, no doubt, may engine you too, May with a countermine blow up your valour. But in good faith, sir, we are both too honest; And the plague is, we cannot be persuaded; For look you, if we thought it were a glory To be the last of all your lovely ladies."...

This will also show that Fletcher did not, as a rule, allow the idea to overlap from one line to the next.

In Shakespeare's later works the proportion of eleven-syllabled lines is 33 in 100; in Massinger it is 40, and in Fletcher 50 to 80, or even more. Again, Shakespeare made use, with ever-increasing frequency, of _enjambement_ or "run on" lines. This style is particularly noticeable in the passionate dramas of his bitter period, and the growing habit of employing them led to the more and more frequent appearance of lines ending with an adverb, article, or preposition (light and weaking endings). There may be a hundred such in his later plays; there are, for instance, 130 in _Cymbeline_. This feature became an extravagance with his successors. Massinger, whose dramas are considerably shorter than Shakespeare's, has from 150 to 170 of these weak endings in each play.

In comparison with Shakespeare's work there is an effeminate ring about Fletcher's verse, and his was the Corinthian, if Shakespeare's was the Ionic style. Separate and unalloyed, it would be impossible to mistake them, but it is a very different matter when they are blended together in one and the same work as in _Henry VIII_. And here again the problem offered by the _Two Noble Kinsmen_ presents itself. Did Shakespeare leave the play unfinished, and was it completed by Fletcher after his death? or did he help Fletcher by writing or re-writing certain scenes of his play? The first supposition is an utter impossibility, as far as I am concerned. The planning of the drama was not Shakespeare's; never in his life did anything so shapeless come from his pen. Is any part of the play due to him? In spite of the verdicts of Furnivall and Symons, I think so. In the first place, we are not justified in ignoring the testimony borne by Heminge and Condell in the First Folio edition. We have always hitherto taken for granted that they were better qualified to judge of the authenticity of a play than we of the present day; not one of the plays accepted by them has since been rejected by posterity, and we need a very good reason for making an exception of _Henry VIII_. The sole pretext we can offer is the weakness of the whole play, including those portions of which we are in doubt. But this weakness cannot in any way be considered as decisive. Here, working with another man, Shakespeare did not put forth his full strength, exercise all his powers, nor give free play to his imagination. Of this, _Henry VIII_. is not the only example. Moreover, there are strong points of resemblance between those parts of the play which the majority of English critics ascribe to him and works of the same period which were unmistakably his and his alone.

So far back as 1765, Samuel Johnson, who never doubted that the whole play was due to Shakespeare, remarked that the poet's genius seemed to rise and set with Queen Katharine, and that any one might have invented and written the rest. In 1850 James Spedding, moved thereto by some suggestive criticism by Tennyson, came to the conclusion already mentioned, that only certain parts were written by Shakespeare, and that the remainder was due to Fletcher. This opinion was confirmed by Samuel Hickson, who remarked that he had arrived at the same decision three or four years previously, and even with the same results as far as the separate scenes were concerned. This theory was, after a careful examination of the metrical structure, still further corroborated by Fleay.

That the general scheme of the drama was not due to Shakespeare is self-evident. Spedding observed how utterly ineffective the play is as a whole, how the interest collapses instead of increasing, and how the sympathy aroused in the audience is in steady opposition to the actual development of events. The centre of interest in the first act is undeniably Queen Katharine, and, although the deference due to so recent a king as Elizabeth's father forbade too plain speaking, the audience is clearly given to understand that the monarch's passion for Anne Boleyn was really at the bottom of his conscientious scruples concerning the wedlock in which he had lived for twenty years. Notwithstanding this, the spectators are expected to feel joy and satisfaction when Anne is solemnly crowned queen, and actual triumph when she gives birth to a daughter. In the last act we have the impeachment of Archbishop Cranmer, his acquittal by the king, and his appointment to the godfathership of Elizabeth, all of which has no connection whatever with the real action of the play. Wolsey, one of the two chief characters, the evil principle in opposition to the good Queen Katharine, disappears before her, not even surviving the close of the third act. The whole play, in fact, resolves itself into a succession of spectacular effects, processions, songs, dances, and music. We are shown a great assembly of the State Council in connection with Buckingham's trial; a great festival in Wolsey's palace, with masquerade and dance; the great trial scene, with England's queen at the bar; a great coronation scene, with canopy, crown jewels, and flourish of trumpets; the dying Katharine's vision of dancing angels, with golden vizards and palm branches in their hands; and lastly, the great christening scene in the palace, with another procession of canopy, trumpets, and heralds.

An invisible writing inscribes on every page the words _Written to order_. In all probability it was a hurriedly written piece, hastily put together for performance at the court gaieties in honour of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage. It was for those festivities that Beaumont's little play, _The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn,_ and Shakespeare's own masterpiece, _The Tempest_, were written. Shakespeare's part in _Henry VIII_ is limited to Act i. sc. I and 2, Act ii. sc. 3 and sc. 4, Act iii. sc. 2 as far as Wolsey's first monologue, "What should this mean," and Act v. sc. 1 and 4.

This play cannot be classed with Shakespeare's other historical dramas, for, as we have already observed, its events were of too recent occurrence to allow of a strictly veracious treatment. How was it possible to tell the truth about Henry VIII., that coarse and cruel Bluebeard, with his six wives? Did he not inaugurate the Reformation, and was he not the father of Queen Elizabeth? As little could the material interests which furthered the Reformation be represented on the stage, or the various religious and political aspects of the Reformation itself. Fettered and bound as he was by a hundred different considerations, Shakespeare acquitted himself of his difficult task with tact and skill. When Henry, immediately after his encounter with the beauteous court lady, began, after all those years, to feel scruples on the score of his marriage with his brother's wife, Shakespeare, without making him a hypocrite, allows us to perceive how the new passion acted as a spur to his conscience. The character of Wolsey is founded upon the Chronicle, and the clever parvenu's bold, unscrupulous, yet withal self-controlled nature, is indicated by a few light touches. Fletcher has spoiled the character by the introduction of the badly-written monologues uttered by Wolsey after his fall. We recognise the voice of the clergyman's son in their feeble, pastoral strain. The picture of Anne Boleyn, delicately outlined by Shakespeare, was also put out of drawing later in the play by Fletcher. All the light of the piece, however, is concentrated around the figure of the repudiated Catholic queen, Katharine of Arragon, for in her (as he found her character in the Chronicle) Shakespeare recognised a variant of his present all-absorbing type--the noble and neglected woman. She closely resembles the misjudged Queen Hermione, so unjustly separated from her husband and thrown into prison in the _Winter's Tale_. As in _Cymbeline_ Imogen still loves Posthumus although he has cast her off, so Katharine continues to love the man who has wronged her.

Shakespeare has hardly put a word into the mouth of the Queen which may not be found in the Chronicle, but he has created a character of mingled charm and distinction, a union of Castilian pride with extreme simplicity, of inflexible resolution with gentlest resignation, and of a quick temper with a sincere piety, through which the temper sometimes shows. He has drawn with a caressing touch the figure of a queen neither beautiful nor brilliant, but true--true to the core, proud of her birth and queenly rank, but softer than wax in the hands of her royal lord, whom she loves after twenty-four years of married life as dearly as on her wedding-day. Her letters show how devoted and lovable she was, and in them she addresses Henry as "Your Grace, my husband, my Henry," and signs herself "Your humble wife and true servant." In those scenes in which it has fallen to Fletcher's lot to represent the Queen, he has adhered faithfully to Shakespeare's conception of her, which was virtually that of the Chronicle. Even in the hour of her death, Katharine does not forget to rebuke and punish the messenger who has failed in due respect by omitting to kneel; but she forgives her enemy the Cardinal and sends the King this last greeting:

"Remember me In all humility unto his highness: Say his long trouble now is passing Out of the world: tell him in death I bless'd him, For so I will.--Mine eyes grow dim."

Her stately dignity resembles that of Hermione, but she differs from the latter in her pride of race and piety. Hermione is neither pious nor proud; neither was Shakespeare. We find a little proof of his detestation of sectarianism even in the pompous play of _Henry VIII_. In the third scene of the fifth act the porter exclaims of the inquisitive multitude crowding to watch the christening procession:

"There are the youths that thunder at the playhouse and fight for bitten apples; that no audience but the Tribulation of Tower Hill or the limbs of Limehouse, their dear brothers, are able to endure."

Limehouse was an artisan house in London; there also the foreigners settled, and it resounded with the strife of religious sects. It is amusing to note how Shakespeare contrived to have a fling at his detested _groundlings_ and his Puritan enemies at one and the same time.

As we all know, the drama closes with Cranmer's lengthy and flattering prediction of the greatness of Elizabeth and James, which is marred by the monotony of Fletcher's worst mannerisms. Shakespeare clearly had no share in this tirade, which makes all the more strange the part it has played in the discussions which have been carried on with so little psychology relative to Shakespeare's religious and denominational standpoint. How many times has the prophecy that under Elizabeth "God shall be truly known" been quoted in support of the great poet's firmly Protestant convictions? Yet the line was evidently never written by him, and not a single turn of thought in the whole of this lengthy speech owns any suggestion of his pathos and style. It is only here and there in the play that we obtain a glimpse of Shakespeare, and then he is fettered and hampered by collaboration with another man and by an uncongenial task, to which only a great exertion of his genius could here and there impart any dramatic interest.

[1] A careful study of the plot may be found in Theodor Bierfreund's book: _Palamon og Arcite_, 1891.

[2] A similar opinion is skilfully maintained by Bierfreund, but I cannot agree with his main contention that Shakespeare had no part in this play whatever.

[3] Compare Hickson, Fleay, and Furnivall upon the subject of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_. _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1874. R. Boyle maintains that he can trace Massinger's hand in the play.

[4] In his prefatory treatise to the _Leopold Shakspere_ (136 quarto pages), F. J. Furnivall has dealt with this play as being in part Shakespeare's. Now he is of a different opinion, and in a copy of the book presented by him to me, he has written on the margin against _Henry VIII_. "Not Shakspere's." Arthur Symons, who edits and prefaces the play in the Irving edition, told me that he now inclines, on account of its metrical structure, to the belief that Shakespeare had no share in it. P. A. Daniels, the erudite editor of so many Shakespearian quartos, said that he had arrived at no decision respecting its authorship, and characteristically added that the identity was a matter of indifference to him so long as the play was good. This is not the psychological standpoint.

XVIII

_CYMBELINE--THE THEME--THE POINT OF DEPARTURE--THE MORAL--THE IDYLL --IMOGEN--SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE--SHAKESPEARE AND CALDERON_

In _Cymbeline_ Shakespeare is once more sole master of his material, and he works it up into such a many-coloured web as no loom but his can produce. Here, too, we find a certain off-hand carelessness of technique. The exposition is perfunctory; the preliminaries of the action are conveyed to us in a scene of pure narrative. The comic passages are, as a rule, weak, the mirth-moving device being for one of the other characters to ridicule or parody in asides the utterances of the coarse and vain Prince Cloten. In the middle of the play (iii. 3), a poorly-written monologue gives us a sort of supplementary exposition, necessary to the understanding of the plot. Finally, the dramatic knot is loosed by means of a _deus ex machinâ_, Jupiter, "upon his eagle back'd," appearing to the sleeping Posthumus, and leaving with him an oracular "label," in which, as though to bear witness to the poet's "small Latin" the deity childishly derives _mulier_ from _mollis aer_, or "tender air." But, in spite of all this, Shakespeare is here once more at the height of his poetic greatness; the convalescent has recovered all his strength. He has thrown his whole soul into the creation of his heroine, and has so enchased this Imogen, this pearl among women, that all her excellences show to the best advantage, and the setting is not unworthy of the jewel.

As in Cleopatra and Cressida we had woman determined solely by her sex, so in Imogen we have an embodiment of the highest possible characteristics of womanhood--untainted health of soul, unshaken fortitude, constancy that withstands all trials, inexhaustible forbearance, unclouded intelligence, love that never wavers, and unquenchable radiance of spirit. She, like Marina, is cast into the snake-pit of the world. She is slandered, and not, like Desdemona, at second or third hand, but by the very man who boasts of her favours and supports his boast with seemingly incontrovertible proofs. Like Cordelia, she is misjudged; but whereas Cordelia is merely driven from her father's presence along with the man of her choice, Imogen is doomed to death by her cruelly-deceived husband, whom alone she adores; and through it all she preserves her love for him unweakened and unchanged.

Strange--very strange! In Imogen we find the fullest, deepest love that Shakespeare has ever placed in a woman's breast, and that although _Cymbeline_ follows close upon plays which were filled to the brim with contempt for womankind. He believed, then, in such love, so impassioned, so immovable, so humble--believed in it now? He had, then, observed or encountered such a love--encountered it at this point of his life?

Even a poet has scant enough opportunities of observing love. Love is a rare thing, much rarer than the world pretends, and when it exists, it is apt to be sparing of words. Did he simply fall back on his own experiences, his own inward sensations, his knowledge of his own heart, and, transposing his feelings from the major to the minor key, place them on a woman's lips? Or did he love at this moment, and was he himself thus beloved at the end of the fifth decade of his life? The probability is, doubtless, that he wrote from some quite fresh experience, though it does not follow that the experience was actually his own. It is not often that women love men of his mental habit and stature with such intensity of passion. The rule will always be that a Molière shall find himself cast aside for some Comte de Guiche, a Shakespeare for some Earl of Pembroke. Thus we cannot with any certainty conclude that he himself was the object of the passion which had revived his faith in a woman's power of complete and unconditional absorption in love for one man, and for him alone. In the first place, had the experience been his own, he would scarcely have left London so soon. Yet the probability is that he must just about this time have gained some clear and personal insight into an ideal love. In the public sphere, too, it is not unlikely that Arabella Stuart's undaunted passion for Lord William Seymour, so cruelly punished by King James, may have afforded the model for Imogen's devotion to Leonatus Posthumus in defiance of the will of King Cymbeline.

_Cymbeline_ was first printed in the Folio of 1623. The earliest mention of it occurs in the _Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof_ kept by the above-mentioned astrologer and magician, Dr. Simon Forman. He was present, he says, at a performance of _A Winters Tale_ on May 15, 1611, and at the same time he sketches the plot of _Cymbeline_, but unfortunately does not give the date of the performance. In all probability it was quite recent; the play was no doubt written in the course of 1610, while the fate of Arabella Stuart was still fresh in the poet's mind. Forman died in September 1611.

In depth and variety of colouring, in richness of matter, profundity of thought, and heedlessness of conventional canons, _Cymbeline_ has few rivals among Shakespeare's plays. Fascinating as it is, however, this tragi-comedy has never been very popular on the stage. The great public, indeed, has neither studied nor understood it.

In none of his works has Shakespeare played greater havoc with chronology. He jumbles up the ages with superb indifference. The period purports to be that of Augustus, yet we are introduced to English, French, and Italian cavaliers, and hear them talk of pistol-shooting and playing bowls and cards. The list of characters ends thus--"Lords, ladies, Roman senators, tribunes, apparitions, a soothsayer, a Dutch gentleman, a Spanish gentleman, musicians, officers, captains, soldiers, messengers, and other attendants." Was there ever such a farrago?

What did Shakespeare mean by this play? is the question that now confronts us. My readers are aware that I never, in the first instance, try to answer this question directly. The fundamental point is, What impelled him to write? how did he arrive at the theme? When that is answered, the rest follows almost as a matter of course.

Where, then, is the starting-point of this seeming tangle? We find it on resolving the material of the play into its component parts.

There are three easily distinguishable elements in the action.

In his great storehouse of English history, Holinshed, Shakespeare found some account of a King Kymbeline or Cimbeline, who is said to have been educated at Rome, and there knighted by the Emperor Augustus, under whom he served in several campaigns. He is stated to have stood so high in the Emperor's favour that "he was at liberty to pay his tribute or not" as he chose. He reigned thirty-five years, was buried in London, and left two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. The name Imogen occurs in Holinshed's story of Brutus and Locrine. In the tragedy of _Locrine_, dating from 1595, Imogen is mentioned as the wife of Brutus.

Although Cymbeline, says Holinshed, is declared by most authorities to have lived at unbroken peace with Rome, yet some Roman writers affirm that the Britons having refused to pay tribute when Augustus came to the throne, that Emperor, in the tenth year after the death of Julius Cæsar, "made prouision to passe with an armie ouer into Britaine." He is said, however, to have altered his mind; so that the Roman descent upon Britain under Caius Lucius is an invention of the poet's.

In Boccaccio's _Decameron_, again (Book II. Novel 9), Shakespare found the story of the faithful Ginevra, of which this is the substance:--At a tavern in Paris, a company of Italian merchants, after supper one evening, fall to discussing their wives. Three of them have but a poor opinion of their ladies' virtue, but one, Bernabo Lomellini of Genoa, maintains that his wife would resist any possible temptation, however long he had been absent from her. A certain Ambrogiuolo lays a heavy wager with him on the point, and betakes himself to Genoa, but finds Bernabo's confidence fully justified. He hits upon the scheme of concealing himself in a chest which is conveyed into the lady's bedroom. In the middle of the night he raises the lid. "He crept quietly forth, and stood in the room, where a candle was burning. By its light, he carefully examined the furnishing of the apartment, the pictures, and other objects of note, and fixed them in his memory. Then he approached the bed, and when he saw that both she and a little child who lay beside her were sleeping soundly, he uncovered her and beheld that her beauty in nowise consisted in her attire. But he could not discover any mark whereby to convince her husband, save one which she had under the left breast; it was a birth-mark around which there grew certain yellow hairs." Then he takes from one of her chests a purse and a night-gown, together with certain rings and belts, and conceals them in his own hiding-place. He hastens back to Paris, summons the merchants together, and boasts of having won the wager. The description of the room makes little impression on Bernabo, who remarks that all this he may have learnt by bribing a chambermaid; but when the birth-mark is described, he feels as though a dagger had been plunged into his heart. He despatches a servant with a letter to his wife, requesting her to meet him at a country-house some twenty miles from Genoa, and at the same time orders the servant to murder her on the way. The lady receives the letter with great joy, and next morning takes horse to ride with the servant to the country house. Loathing his task, the man consents to spare her, gives her a suit of male attire, and suffers her to escape, bringing his master false tidings of her death, and producing her clothes in witness of it. Ginevra, dressed as a man, enters the service of a Spanish nobleman, and accompanies him to Alexandria, whither he goes to convey to the Sultan a present of certain rare falcons. The Sultan notices the pretty youth in his train, and makes him (or rather her) his favourite. In the market-place of Acre she chances upon a booth in the Venetian bazaar where Ambrogiuolo has displayed for sale, among other wares, the purse and belt he stole from her. On her inquiring where he got them, he replies that they were given him by his mistress, the Lady Ginevra. She persuades him to come to Alexandria, manages to bring her husband thither also, and makes them both appear before the Sultan. The truth is brought to light and the liar shamed; but he does not escape so easily as Iachimo in the play. He who had falsely boasted of a lady's favour, and thereby brought her to ruin, is, with true mediæval consistency, allotted the punishment he deserves: "Wherefore the Sultan commanded that Ambrogiuolo should be led forth to a high place in the city, and should there be bound to a stake in the full glare of the sunshine, and smeared all over with honey, and should not be set free till his body fell to pieces by its own decay. So that he was not alone stung to death in unspeakable torments by flies, wasps, and hornets, which greatly abound in that country, but also devoured to the last particle of his flesh. His white bones, held together by the sinews alone, stood there unremoved for a long time, a terror and a warning to all."

These two tales--of the wars between Rome and heathen Britain, and of the slander, peril, and rescue of Ginevra--were in themselves totally unconnected. Shakespeare welded them by making Ginevra, whom he calls Imogen, a daughter of King Cymbeline by his first marriage, and therefore next in succession to the crown of Britain.

There remains a third element in the play--the story of Belarius, his banishment, his flight with the king's sons, his solitary life in the forest with the two youths, the coming of Imogen, and so forth. All this is the fruit of Shakespeare's free invention, slightly stimulated, perhaps, by a story in the _Decameron_ (Book II. Novel 8). It is in this invented portion, studied in its relation of complement and contrast to the rest, that we shall find an unmistakable index to the moods, sentiments, and ideas under the influence of which he chose this subject and shaped it to his ends.

I conceive the situation in this wise: the mood he has been living through, the mood which has left its freshest impress on his mind, is one in which life in human society seems unendurable, and especially life in a large town and at a court. Never before had he felt so keenly and indignantly what a court really is. Stupidity, coarseness, weakness, and falsehood flourish in courts, and carry all before them. Cymbeline is stupid and weak, Cloten is stupid and coarse, the queen is false.

Here the best men are banished, like Belarius and Posthumus; here the best woman is foully wronged, like Imogen. Here the high-born murderess sits in the seat of the mighty--the queen herself deals in poisons, and demands deadly "compounds" of her physicians. Corruption reaches its height at courts; but in great towns as a whole, wherever multitudes of men are gathered together, it is impossible even for the best to keep himself above reproach. The weapons used against him--lies, slanders, and perfidy--force him to employ whatever means he can in self-defence. Let us then turn our backs on the town, and seek an idyllic existence in the country, in the lonely woodland places.

This note recurs persistently in all the works of Shakespeare's latest period. Timon longed to escape from Athens and make the solitudes echo with his invectives. Here Belarius and the king's two sons live secluded in a romantic wilderness; and we shall presently find Florizel and Perdita surrounded by the autumnal beauty of a rustic festival, and Prospero dwelling with Miranda on a lovely uninhabited island.

When Shakespeare, in early years, had conjured up visions of a fantastic life in sylvan solitudes, it was simply because it amused him to place his Rosalinds and Celias in surroundings worthy of their exquisiteness, ideal Ardennes, or perhaps we should say ideal Forests of Arden like that in which, as a boy, he had learnt to read the secrets of Nature. In these regions, exempt from the cares of the working-day world, young men and maidens passed their days together in happy idleness, pensive or blithesome, laughing or loving. The forest was simply a republic created by Nature herself for a witty and amorous _élite_ of the most brilliant cavaliers and ladies he had known, or rather had bodied forth in his own image that he might live in the company of his peers. The air resounded with songs and sighs and kisses, with wordplays and laughter. It was a dreamland, a paradise of dainty lovers.

How differently does he now conceive of the solitude of the country! It has become to him the one thing in life, the refuge, the sanctuary. It means for him an atmosphere of purity, the home of spiritual health, the stronghold of innocence, the one safe retreat for whoso would flee from the pestilence of falsehood and perfidy that rages in courts and cities.

There no one can escape it. But now, we must observe, Shakespeare no longer regards this contagion of untruth and unfaith with the eyes of a Timon. He now looks down from higher and clearer altitudes.

It is true that no one can keep his life wholly free from falsehood, deceit, and violence towards others. But neither falsehood nor deceit, nor even violence is always and inevitably a crime; it is often a necessity, a legitimate weapon, a right. At bottom, Shakespeare had always held that there were no such things as unconditional duties and absolute prohibitions. He had never, for example, questioned Hamlet's right to kill the king, scarcely even his right to run his sword through Polonius. Nevertheless he had hitherto been unable to conquer a feeling of indignation and disgust when he saw around him nothing but breaches of the simplest moral laws. Now, on the other hand, the dim divinations of his earlier years crystallised in his mind into a coherent body of thought to this effect: no commandment is unconditional; it is not in the observance or non-observance of an external fiat that the merit of an action, to say nothing of a character, consists; everything depends upon the volitional substance into which the individual, as a responsible agent, transmutes the formal imperative at the moment of decision.

In other words, Shakespeare now sees clearly that the ethics of intention are the only true, the only possible ethics.

Imogen says (iv. 2):

"If I do lie, and do No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope They'll pardon it."

Pisanio says in his soliloquy (iii. 5):

"Thou bidd'st me to my loss: for, true to thee, Were to prove false, which I will never be To him that is most true."

And he hits the nail on the head when he characterises himself in these words (iv. 3):

"Wherein I am false, I am honest; not true, to be true."

That is to say, he lies and deceives because he cannot help it; but his character is none the worse, nay, all the better on that account. He disobeys his master, and thereby merits his gratitude; he hoodwinks Cloten, and therein he does well.

In the same way, all the nobler characters fly in the face of accepted moral laws. Imogen disobeys her father and braves his wrath, and even his curse, because she will not renounce the husband of her choice. So, too, she afterwards deceives the young men in the forest by appearing in male attire and under an assumed name--untruthfully, and yet with a higher truth, calling herself Fidele, the faithful one. So, too, the upright Belarius robs the king of both his sons, but thereby saves them for him and for the country; and during their whole boyhood he puts them off, for their own good, with false accounts of things. So, too, the honest physician deceives the queen, whose wickedness he has divined, by giving her an opiate in place of a poison, and thereby baffling her attempt at murder. So, too, Guiderius acts rightly in taking the law into his own hands, and answering Cloten's insults by killing him at sight and cutting off his head. He thus, without knowing it, prevents the brutish idiot's intended violence to Imogen.

Thus all the good characters commit acts of deception, violence, and falsehood, or even live their whole life under false colours, without in the least derogating from their moral worth. They touch evil without defilement, even if they suffer and now and then feel themselves insecure in their strained relations to truth and right.

Beyond all doubt, it must have been actual and intimate experience that first darkened Shakespeare's view of life, and then opened his eyes again to its brighter aspects. But it is the idea which he here indirectly expresses that seems to have played the essential and decisive part in uplifting his spirit above the mood of mere hatred and contempt for humanity: the realisation that the quality of a given act depends rather on the agent than on the act itself. Although it be true, for example; that falsehood and deceit encounter us on every hand, it does not necessarily follow that human nature is utterly corrupt. Neither deceit nor any other course of action in conflict with moral law is absolutely and unconditionally wrong. The majority, indeed, of those who speak falsely and act unlawfully are an ignoble crew; but even the best, the noblest, may systematically transgress the moral law and be good and noble still. This is the meaning of moral self-government; the only true morality consists in following out our own ends, by our own means, and on our own responsibility. The only real and binding laws are those which we lay down for ourselves, and it is the breach of these laws alone that degrades us.

Seen from this point of view, the world puts on a less gloomy aspect. The poet is no longer impelled by a spiritual necessity to bring down his curtain to the notes of the trump of doom, to make all voyages end in shipwreck, all dramas issue in annihilation, or even to leaven the tragedy of life with consistent scorn and execration for humanity at large.

In his present frame of mind there is a touch of weary tolerance. He no longer cares to dwell upon the harsh realities of life; he seeks distraction in dreaming. And he dreams of retribution, of the suppression of the utterly vile (the queen dies, Cloten is killed), of letting mercy season justice in the treatment of certain human beasts of prey (Iachimo), and of preserving a little circle, a chosen few, whom neither the errors into which passion has led them, nor the acts of deceit and violence they have committed in self-defence, render unworthy of our sympathies. Life on earth is still worth living so long as there are women like Imogen and men like her brothers. She, indeed, is an ideal, and they creatures of romance; but their existence is a condition-precedent of poetry.

It is to this fertilising mist of feeling, this productive trend of thought, that the play owes its origin.

Shakespeare has so far taken heart again that he can give us something more and something better than poetical fragments or plays which, like his recent ones, produce a powerful but harsh effect. He will once more unroll a large, various, and many-coloured panorama.

The action of _Cymbeline,_ like that of _Lear_, is only nominally located in pre-Christian England. There is not the slightest attempt at representation of the period, and the barbarism depicted is mediæval rather than antique. For the rest, the starting-point of _Cymbeline_ vaguely resembles that of _Lear_. Cymbeline is causelessly estranged from Imogen, as Lear is from Cordelia; there is something in Cymbeline's weakness and folly that recalls the unreason of Lear. But in the older play everything is tragically designed and in the great manner, whereas here the whole action is devised with a happy end in view.

The consort of this pitiful king is a crafty and ambitious woman, who, by alternately flattering and defying him, has got him entirely under her thumb. She says herself (i. 2):--

"I never do him wrong But he does buy my injuries to be friends, Pays dear for my offences."

In other words, she knows that she can always find her profit in a scene of reconciliation. Her object is to make Imogen the wife of Cloten, her son by a former marriage, and thus to secure for him the succession to the throne. This scheme of hers is the original source of all the misfortunes which overwhelm the heroine. For Imogen loves Posthumus, in spite of his poverty a paragon among men, and cannot be induced to renounce the husband she has chosen. Therefore the play opens with the banishment of Posthumus.

The characters and incidents of Shakespeare's own invention give perspective to the play, the underplot forming a parallel to the main action, as the story of Gloucester and his cruel son forms a parallel to that of Lear and his heartless daughters. Belarius, a soldier and statesman, has twenty years ago fallen into unmerited disgrace with Cymbeline, who, listening to the voice of calumny, has outlawed him with the same unreasoning passion with which he now sends Posthumus into exile. In revenge for this wrong, Belarius has carried off Cymbeline's two sons, who have ever since lived with him in a lonely place among the mountains, believing him to be their father. To them comes Imogen in her hour of need, disguised as a boy, and is received with the utmost warmth and tenderness by the brothers, who do not know her, and whom she does not know. One of them, Guiderius, kills Cloten, who insulted and challenged him. Both the young men take up arms to meet the Roman invaders, and, together with Belarius and Posthumus, they save their father's kingdom.

Gervinus has acutely and justly remarked that the fundamental contrast expressed in their story, as in Cymbeline's political situation, in Imogen's relation to Posthumus and Pisanio's relation to them both, is precisely the dual contrast expressed in the English words _true_ and _false_--_true_ meaning at once "veracious" and "faithful" (ideas which, in the play, shade off into each other), while _false,_ in like manner, means both "mendacious" and "faithless."

Life at court is beset with treacherous quicksands. The king is stupid, passionate, perpetually misguided; the queen is a wily murderess; and between them stands her son, Cloten, one of Shakespeare's most original figures, a true creation of genius, without a rival in all the poet's long gallery of fools and dullards. His stupid inefficiency and undisguised malignity have nothing in common with his mother's hypocritical and supple craft; he takes after her in worthlessness alone.

For the sake of an inartistic stage effect, Shakespeare has endowed him with a bodily frame indistinguishable from that of the handsome Posthumus, leaving it to his head alone to express the world-wide difference between them. But how admirably has the poet characterised the dolt and boor by making him shoot forth his words with an explosive stammer! With profound humour and delicate observation, he has endowed him with the loftiest notions of his own dignity, and given him no shadow of doubt as to his rights. There are no bounds to his vanity, his coarseness, his bestiality. If words could do it, not a word of his but would wound others to the quick. And not only his words, but his intents are of the most malignant; he would outrage Imogen at Milford Haven and "spurn her home" to her father. His stupidity, fortunately, renders him less dangerous, and with delicate art Shakespeare has managed to make him from first to last produce a comic effect, thereby softening the painful impression of the portraiture. We take pleasure in him as in Caliban, whom he foreshadows, and who had the same designs upon Miranda as he upon Imogen. We might even describe Caliban as Cloten developed into a type, a symbol.

It is such personages as these that compose the world which Belarius depicts to Guiderius and Arviragus (iii. 3), when the two youths repine against the inactivity of their lonely forest life, and yearn to plunge into the social turmoil and "drink delight of battle with their peers:"

"How you speak! Did you but know the city's usuries, And felt them knowingly: the art o' the court, As hard to leave as keep; whose top to climb Is certain falling, or so slippery, that The fear's as bad as falling: the toil o' the war, A pain that only seems to seek out danger I' the name of fame and honour; which dies i' the search, And hath as oft a slanderous epitaph. As record of fair act; nay, many times Doth ill deserve by doing well; what's worse, Must court'sy at the censure.--O boys! this story The world may read in me."

Amid these surroundings two personages have grown up whom Shakespeare would have us regard as beings of a loftier order.

He has taken all possible pains, from the very first scene of the play, to inspire the spectator with the highest conception of Posthumus. One nobleman speaks of him to another in terms such as, in bygone days, the poet had applied to Henry Percy:

"He liv'd in court (Which rare it is to do) most prais'd, most lov'd; A sample to the youngest, to the more mature A glass that feated them; and to the graver A child that guided dotards."

A little farther on, Iachimo says of him to Imogen (i. 6):

"He sits 'mongst men like a descended god; He hath a kind of honour sets him off More than a mortal seeming;"

and finally, at the close of the play (v. 5), "He was the best of all, amongst the rar'st of good ones"--an appreciation which it is a pity Iachimo did not arrive at a little sooner, as it might have prevented him from committing his villainies. Shakespeare throws into relief the dignity and repose of Posthumus, and his selfpossession when the king denounces and banishes him. We see that he obeys because he regards it as unavoidable, though he has set at naught the king's will in relation to Imogen. In the compulsory haste of his leave-taking, he shows himself penetrated with a sense of his inferiority to her, and appeals to us by the way in which he tempers the loftiness of his bearing towards the outer world with a graceful humility towards his wife. It is rather surprising that he never for a moment seems to think of carrying Imogen with him into exile. This passivity is probably explained by her reluctance to take any step not absolutely forced upon her, that should render more difficult an eventual reconciliation. He will wait for better times, and long and hope for them.

As he is on the point of departure, Cloten forces himself upon him, insults and challenges him. He remains unruffled, ignores the challenge, contemptuously turns his back upon the oaf, and calmly leaves him to entertain the courtiers with boasts of his own valour and the cowardice of Posthumus, well knowing that no one will believe him.

The character, then, is well sketched out. But his mediæval fable compelled Shakespeare to introduce traits which, in the light of our humaner age, seem inconsistent and inadmissible. No man with any decency of feeling would in our days make such a wager as his; no man would give a stranger, and one, moreover, who is to all appearance a vain and quite unscrupulous woman-hunter, the warmest and most insistent letter of recommendation to his wife; and still less would any one give the same man an unwritten license to employ every means in his power to shake her virtue, simply in order to enjoy his discomfiture when all his arts shall have failed. And even if we could forgive or excuse such conduct in Posthumus, we cannot possibly extend our tolerance to his easy credulity when Iachimo boasts of his conquest, his insane fury against Imogen, and the base falsehood of the letter he sends her in order to facilitate Pisanio's murderous task. Even in the worst of cases we do not admit a man's right to have a woman assassinated because she has forgotten her love for him. They thought otherwise in the days of the Renaissance; they did not look so closely into the plots of the old _novelle_, and were content, in the domain of romance, with traditional views of right and duty.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare has done what he could to mitigate the painful impression produced by Posthumus's conduct. Long before he knows that Iachimo has deceived him, he repents of his cruel deed, bitterly deplores that Pisanio has (as he thinks) obeyed him, and speaks in the warmest terms of Imogen's worth. He says, for instance (v. 4):

"For Imogen's dear life take mine; and though 'Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life."

He imposes upon himself the sternest penance. He comes to England with the Roman army, and then, nameless and disguised as a peasant, fights against the invaders. Together with Belarius and the king's sons, he is instrumental in staying the flight of the Britons, freeing Cymbeline, who has already been taken prisoner, winning the battle, and saving the kingdom. This done, he once more assumes his Roman garb, and seeks death at the hands of his countrymen, whose saviour he has been. He is taken prisoner and brought before the king, when all is cleared up.

From the moment he sets foot on English ground, there is in his course of action a more high-pitched and overstrained idealism than we are apt to find in Shakespeare's heroes--a craving for self-imposed expiation. Still the character fails to strike us as the perfect whole the poet would fain make of it. Posthumus impresses us, not as a favourite of the gods, but as a man whose penitence is as unbridled and excessive as his blind passion.

Far other is the case of Imogen. In her perfection is indeed attained. She is the noblest and most adorable womanly figure Shakespeare has ever drawn, and at the same time the most various. He has drawn spiritual women before her--Desdemona, Cordelia--but the secret of their being could be expressed in two words. He has also drawn brilliant women--Beatrice, Rosalind--whereas Imogen is not brilliant at all. Nevertheless she is designed and depicted as incomparable among her sex--"she is alone the Arabian bird." We see her in the most various situations, and she is equal to them all. We see her exposed to trial after trial, each harder than the last, and she emerges from them all, not only scatheless, but with her rare and enchanting qualities thrown into ever stronger relief.

At the very outset she gives proof of perfect self-command in her relation to her weak and passionate father, her false and venomous stepmother. The treasure of tenderness that fills her soul betrays itself in her parting from Posthumus, in her passionate regret that she could not give him one kiss more, and in the fervour with which she reproaches Pisanio for having left the shore before his master's ship had quite sunk below the horizon. During his absence her thoughts are unceasingly fixed on him. She repels with firmness the advances of her clownish wooer, Cloten. Brought face to face with Iachimo, she first receives him graciously, then sees through him at once when he begins to speak ill of Posthumus, and finally treats him with princely dignity when he has excused his offensive speeches as nothing but an ill-timed jest.

Next comes the bedroom scene, in which she falls asleep, and Iachimo, as she slumbers, paints for us her exquisite purity. Then we have her disdainful dismissal of Cloten; her reception of the letter from Posthumus; her calm confronting (as it seems) of certain death; her exquisite communion with her brothers; her death-like sleep and horror-struck awakening beside the body which she takes to be her husband's; her denunciations of Pisanio as the supposed murderer; and, finally, the moment of reunion--all scenes which are pearls of Shakespeare's art, the rarest jewels in his diadem, never outshone in the poetry of any nation.

He depicts her as born for happiness, but early inured to suffering, and therefore calm and collected. When Posthumus is banished, she acquiesces in the separation; she will live in the memory of her love. Every one commiserates her; herself, she scarcely complains. She wishes no evil to her enemies; at the end, when the detestable queen is dead, she laments her father's bereavement, little dreaming that nothing but the death of the murderess could have saved her father's life.

Only one relation in life can stir her to passionate utterance--her relation to Posthumus. When she takes leave of him she says (i. 2):

"You must be gone; And I shall here abide the hourly shot Of angry eyes; not comforted to live, But that there is this jewel in the world, That I may see again."

And to his farewell she replies:

"Nay, stay a little. Were you but riding forth to air yourself, Such parting were too petty."

When he is gone she cries:

"There cannot be a pinch in death More sharp than this is."

Her father's upbraidings leave her cold:

"I am senseless of your wrath'; a touch more rare Subdues all pangs, all fears."

To his continued reproaches she only replies with a rapturous eulogy of Posthumus:

"He is A man worth any woman; overbuys me Almost the sum he pays."

And her passion deepens after her husband's departure. She envies the handkerchief he has kissed; she laments that she could not watch his receding ship; she would have "broke her eye-strings" to see the last of it. He has been torn away from her while she had yet "most pretty things to say;" how she would think of him and beg him to think of her at three fixed hours of every day; and she would have made him swear not to forget her for any "she of Italy." He was gone before she could give him the parting kiss which she had set "betwixt two charming words."

She is devoid of ambition. She would willingly exchange her royal station for idyllic happiness in a country retreat such as that for which Shakespeare is now longing. When Posthumus has left her she exclaims (i. 2):

"Would I were A neatherd's daughter, and my Leonatus Our neighbour shepherd's son!"

In other words, she sighs for the lot in life which we shall find in _The Winters Tale_ apportioned to Prince Florizel and Princess Perdita. In the same spirit she reflects before the coming of Iachimo (i. 7):

"Blessed be those, How mean soe'er, that have their honest wills, Which seasons comfort."

And then when Iachimo ("little Iago") slanders Posthumus to her, as he will presently slander her to Posthumus, how different is her conduct from her husband's! She has turned pale at his entrance, at Pisanio's mere announcement of a nobleman from Rome with letters from her lord. To Iachimo's first whispers of Posthumus's infidelity, she merely answers:

"My lord, I fear, Has forgot Britain."

But when Iachimo proceeds to draw a gloating picture of her husband's debaucheries, and offers himself as an instrument for her revenge upon the faithless one, she replies with the exclamation:

"What, ho, Pisanio!"

She summons her servant; she has seen all she wants of this Italian.

Even when she says nothing she fills the scene, as when, having gone to rest, she lies in bed reading, dismisses her attendant, closes the book and falls asleep. How wonderfully has Shakespeare brought home to us the atmosphere of purity in this sleeping-chamber by means of the passionate words he places in the mouth of Iachimo (ii. 2):

"Cytherea, How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch! But kiss; one kiss!--Rubies unparagon'd, How dearly they do't!--'Tis her breathing that Perfumes the chamber thus."

The influence of this scene--interpreting as it does the overpowering impression that emanates even from the material surroundings of exquisite womanhood, the almost magical glamour of purity and loveliness combined--may in all probability be traced in the rapture expressed by Goethe's Faust when he and Mephistopheles enter Gretchen's chamber. Iachimo is here the love-sick Faust and the malign Mephistopheles in one. Remember Faust's outburst:

"Willkommen, süsser Dämmerschein, Der Du dies Heiligthum durchwebst Ergreif mein Herz, du süsse Liebespein, Die Du vom Thau der Hoffnung schmachtend lebst! Wie athmet hier Gefühl der Stille."

Despite the difference between the two situations, there can be no doubt that the one has influenced the other.[1]

As though in ecstasy over this incomparable creation, Shakespeare once more bursts forth into song. Once and again he pays her lyric homage; here in Cloten's morning song, "Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings," and afterwards in the dirge her brother's chant over what they believe to be her dead body.

Shakespeare makes her lose her self-control for the first time when Cloten ventures to speak disparagingly of her husband, calling him a "base wretch," a beggar "foster'd with cold dishes, with scraps o' the court," "a hilding for a livery," and so on. Then she bursts forth into words of more than masculine violence, and almost as opprobrious as Cloten's own (ii. 3):

"Profane fellow! Wert thou the son of Jupiter, and no more But what thou art besides, thou wert too base To be his groom: thou wert dignified enough, Even to the point of envy, if't were made Comparative for your virtues, to be styl'd The under-hangman of his kingdom, and hated For being preferr'd so well."

It is in the same flush of anger that she speaks the words which first sting Cloten to comic fury, and then inspire him with his hideous design. Leonatus' meanest garment, she says, is "dearer in her respect" than Cloten's whole person--an expression which rankles in the mind of the noxious dullard, until at last it drives him out of his senses.

New charm and new nobility breathe around her in the scene in which she receives the letter from her husband, designed to lure her to her death. First all her enthusiasm, and then all her passion, blaze forth and burn with the clearest flame. Hear this (iii. 2):

"_Pisanio_. Madam, here is a letter from my lord. _Imogen_. Who? thy lord? that is my lord: Leonatus. O learn'd indeed were that astronomer That knew the stars as I his characters; He'd lay the future open.--You good gods, Let what is here contain'd relish of love, Of my lord's health, of his content,--yet not, That we two are asunder,--let that grieve him: Some griefs are medicinable; that is one of them, For it doth physic love:--of his content, All but in that!--Good wax, thy leave.--Bless'd be You bees, that make these locks of counsel!"

She reads that her lord appoints a meeting-place at Milford Haven, little dreaming that she is summoned there only to be murdered:

"O for a horse with wings!--Hear'st thou, Pisanio? He is at Milford Haven: read, and tell me How far 'tis thither. If one of mean affairs May plod it in a week, why may not I Glide thither in a day?--Then, true Pisanio, (Who long'st, like me, to see thy lord; who long'st,-- O let me 'bate!--but not like me;--yet long'st,-- But in a fainter kind:--O not like me, For mine's beyond beyond) say, and speak thick, (Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing, To the smothering of the sense), how far it is To this same blessed Milford: and, by the way, Tell me how Wales was made so happy as To inherit such a haven: but, first of all, How we may steal from hence; and, for the gap That we shall make in time, from our hencegoing And our return, to excuse: but first, how get hence: Why should excuse be born or e'er begot? We'll talk of that hereafter.... Prithee, speak, How many score of miles may we well ride 'Twixt hour and hour? _Pis_. One score, 'twixt sun and sun, Madam's, enough for you: [_Aside_] and too much too. _Imo_. Why, one that rode to's execution, man, Could never go so slow; I have heard of riding wagers, Where horses have been nimbler than the sands That run i' the clock's behalf. But this is foolery: Go bid my woman feign a sickness."

These outbursts are beyond all praise; but quite on a level with them stands her answer when Pisanio shows her Posthumus's letter to him, denouncing her with the foulest epithets, and the whole extent of her misfortune becomes clear to her. It is then she utters the words (iii. 4) which Sören Kierkegaard admired so deeply:

"False to his bed! what is it to be false? To lie in watch there and to think on him? To weep 'twixt clock and clock? if sleep charge nature To break it with a fearful dream of him And cry myself awake? that's false to's bed, is it?"

It is very characteristic that she never for a moment believes that Posthumus can really think it possible she should have given herself to another. She seeks another explanation for his inexplicable conduct:

"Some jay of Italy, Whose mother was her painting, hath betray'd him."

This is scant comfort to her, however, and she implores Pisanio, who would spare her, to strike, for life has now lost all value for her. As she is baring her breast to the blow, she speaks these admirable words:

"Come, here's my heart: Something's afore't:--soft, soft! we'll no defence; Obedient as the scabbard.--What is here? The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus, All turn'd to heresy? Away, away, Corrupters of my faith! you shall no more Be stomachers to my heart."

With the same intentness, or rather with the same tenderness, has Shakespeare, all through the play, imbued himself with her spirit, never losing touch of her for a moment, but lovingly filling in trait upon trait, until at last he represents her, half in jest, as the sun of the play. The king says in the concluding scene:

"See, Posthumus anchors upon Imogen; And she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye On him, her brothers, me, her master, hitting Each object with a joy: the counterchange Is severally in all."

Early in the play Imogen expressed the wish that she were a neatherd's daughter, and Leonatus a shepherd's son. Later, when, clad in manly attire, she chances upon the lonely forest cave in which her brothers dwell, she feels completely at ease in their neighbourhood, and in the primitive life for which she has always longed--as Shakespeare longs for it now. The brothers are happy with her, and she with them. She says (Act iii. sc. 6):

"Pardon me, gods! I'd change my sex to be companions with them, Since Leonatus's false."

And later (Act iv. sc. 2):

"These are kind creatures. Gods! what lies I have heard! Our courtiers say all's savage but at court."

Belarius exclaims in the same spirit (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Oh, this life Is nobler than attending for a check, Richer than doing nothing for a bauble, Prouder than rustling in unpaid for silk."

The princes, in whom the royal soldierly blood asserts itself in a thirst for adventure, reply in a contrary strain:

"_Guiderius_. Haply this life is best If quiet life be best; sweeter to you That have a sharper known; well corresponding With your stiff age; but unto us it is A call of ignorance, travelling a-bed; A prison for a debtor, that not dares To stride a limit."

And his brother adds:

"What should we speak of When we are as old as you? When we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December. . . . . We have seen nothing; We are beastly."

Shakespeare has diffused a marvellous poetry throughout this forest idyl; a matchless freshness and primitive charm pervade the whole. In this period of detestation for the abortions of culture, the poet has beguiled himself by picturing a life far from all civilisation, an innately noble youth in a natural state, and he depicts two young men who have seen nothing of life and never looked upon the face of woman; whose days have been passed in the pursuit of game, and who, like the Homeric warriors, prepared and cooked with their own hands the spoil procured by their bows and arrows. But their race shines through, and they prove of better stock than we should have looked for in the sons of the contemptible Cymbeline. Their instincts all tend towards the noble and princely ideal.

In the Spanish drama, which twenty-five years later received such an impetus under Calderon, it became a leading motive to portray young men and women brought up in solitude without having seen a single being of the other sex, and without knowledge of their rank and parentage. Thus in Calderon's _Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño_) of 1635, we are shown a king's son leading a solitary life in utter ignorance of his royal descent. He is seized by a passionate love on his first meeting with mankind kind, and is crudely violent in the face of any opposition, but, like the princes in _Cymbeline_, the seeds of majesty are lying dormant and the princely instincts spring readily into life. In the play _En esta vida todo as verdad y todo es mentira_ of 1647, a faithful servant carries off the emperor's son from the pursuit of a tyrant, and seeks refuge in a mountain cave of Sicily. He also takes charge of a base-born son of the tyrant, and the two lads are brought up together. They see no one but their foster-father, are clad in the skins of animals and live upon game and fruit. When the tyrant appears to claim his child and slay the emperor's son, none can tell him which is which, and neither threats nor entreaties can prevail upon the servant to yield the secret. Here, as in _Life is a Dream_, the first glimpse of a woman rouses instant love in both young men. In _A Daughter of the Air_ (_La hija del ayre_) of 1664, Semiramis is brought up by an old priest, as Miranda is by Prospero in _The Tempest_. Like all these beings reared in solitude remote from the turmoil of life, Semiramis nourishes an impatient longing to be out in the world. In the two plays of 1672, _Eco y Narciso_ and _El monstruo de los jardines_, Calderon employs a variation of the same idea. Narcissus in the one and Achilles in the other are brought up in solitude in order that we may see all the emotions aroused, especially those of love and jealousy, in a being so primitive that it cannot even name its own sensations.

In this episode, and throughout this last period of his poetry, Shakespeare entered a realm which the imagination of the Latin races immediately seized upon and made their own. But in all their dramatic poetry of this nature they never surpassed that of the English poet.

He refrained entirely from the erotic in this idyl, and instead of the demands of a lover's passion, he portrayed unconscious brotherly love offered to a sister disguised as a boy. Imogen and the two strong-natured, high-minded youths dwell charmingly together, but their companionship is destroyed in the bud when Imogen, after having drunk the narcotic supplied by the physician to the queen instead of poison, lies as one dead. A gently touching element is introduced into this moving play when the two brothers bear her forth and sing over her bier. We witness a burial without rites or ceremonies, requiems or church formalities, an attempt being made to fill their place with spontaneous natural symbols. A similar attempt was made by Goethe in the double chorus sung over Mignon's body in _Wilhelm Meister_ (Book VIII. chap. viii.). Imogen's head is laid towards the east, and the brothers sing over her the beautiful duet which their father had taught them at the burial of their mother. Its rhythm contains the germ of all that later became Shelley's poetry.

The first verse runs:

"Fear no more the heat of sun, Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweeper, come to dust."[2]

The concluding verses, in which the voices are heard first in solo and then in duets, form a wonderful harmony of metric and poetic art.

This idyl, in which he found and expressed his reawakened love for the heart of Nature, has been worked out by Shakespeare with especial tenderness. He by no means intended to represent a flight from scorn of mankind as a thing desirable in itself, but merely to depict solitude as a refuge for the weary, and existence in the country as a happiness for those who have done with life.

As a drama, _Cymbeline_ contains more of the nature of intrigue than any earlier play. There is no little skill displayed in the way Pisanio misleads Cloten by showing him Posthumus's letter, and where Imogen takes the headless Cloten, attired in Posthumus's clothes, for her murdered husband. The mythological dream vision seems to have been interpolated for use at court festivities. The explanatory tablet left by Jupiter, and the king's joyful outburst in the last scene, "Am I a mother to the birth of three?" prove that even at his fullest and ripest Shakespeare was never securely possessed of an unfailing good taste, but such trifling errors of judgment are more than counterbalanced by the overflowing richness of the fairylike poetry of this drama

[1] Scarcely any poet has been more followed in modern times than Shakespeare. We have already drawn attention to the by no means accidental resemblances in Voltaire, Goethe, and Schiller, and we have further instances. Schiller's _D. Jungfrau von Orleans_ is markedly indebted to the first part of _Henry VI_. The scene between the maid and the Duke of Burgundy (ii. 10) is fashioned after the corresponding scene in Shakespeare (iii. 3), and that between the maid and her father in Schiller (iv. II) answers to Shakespeare's (v. 4). The apothecary in Oehlenschläger's _Aladdin_ is borrowed from the apothecary in _Romeo and Juliet_. In Björnstjerne Björnson's _Maria Stuart_ (ii. 2) Ruthven rises from a sick bed to totter into the conspirators with Knox, and take the more eager share in the plot to murder Rizzio, as the sick Ligarius makes his way to Brutus (_Julius Cæsar_, ii. I) to join the conspiracy to murder Cæsar.

[2] It is somewhat remarkable that Guiderius and Arviragus should know anything about chimney-sweepers.

XIX

_WINTER'S TALE--AN EPIC TURN--CHILDLIKE FORMS--THE PLAY AS A MUSICAL STUDY--SHAKESPEARE'S ÆSTHETIC CONFESSION OF FAITH_

We are now about to see Shakespeare enthralled and reinspired by the glamour of fairy tale and romance.

The _Winter s Tale_ was first printed in the Folio of 1623, but, as we have already mentioned, an entry in Dr. Simon Forman's diary informs us that he saw it played at the Globe Theatre on the 15th of May 1611. A notice in the official diary of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, goes to prove that at that date the play was quite new. "For the king's players. An olde playe called Winter's Tale, formerly allowed of by Sir George Bucke, and likewyse by mee on Mr. Hemmings his word that nothing profane was added or reformed, though the allowed book was missinge; and therefore I returned itt without fee this 19th of August 1623." The Sir George Bucke mentioned here did not receive his official appointment as censor until August 1610. Therefore it was probably one of the first performances of the _Winters Tale_ at which Forman was present in the spring of 1611.

We have already drawn attention to Ben Jonson's little fling at the play in the introduction to his _Bartholomew's Fair_ in 1614.

The play was founded on a romance of Robert Greene's, published in 1588 under the title of "Pandosto, the Triumph of Time," and was re-named half-a-century later "The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia." So popular was it, that it was printed again and again. We know of at least seventeen editions, and in all likelihood there were more.

Shakespeare had adapted Lodge's _Rosalynde_ in his earlier pastoral play, _As You Like It_, very soon after its publication in 1590. It is significant that this other tale, with its peculiar blending of the pathetic and idyllic, should only now, though it must have long been familiar to him, strike him as suitable for dramatic treatment. Karl Elze's theory that Shakespeare had adapted the story in some earlier work, which Greene had in his mind when he wrote his famous and violent accusation of plagiarism, cannot be considered as more than a random conjecture. Greene's attack was sufficiently accounted for by that remodelling and adaptation of older works which was practised by the young poet from the very first, and it clearly aimed at _Henry VI_.

Shakespeare, who could not, of course, use Greene's title, called his play _A Winters Tale_; a title which would convey an impression, at that time, of a serious and touching or exciting story, and he plainly strove for a dream-like and fantastic effect in his work. Mamillius says, when he begins his little story (Act ii. sc. I), "A sad tale's best for winter," and in three different places the romantic impossibility of the plot is impressed upon the audience. In the description of the discovery of Perdita we are warned that "this news, which is called true, is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion" (Act v. sc. 2).

The geographical extravagances are those of the romance; it was Greene who surrounded Bohemia with the sea and transferred the Oracle of Delphi to the Island of Delphos. But Shakespeare contributed the anachronisms; it was he who made the oracle exist contemporaneously with Russia as an empire, who made Hermione a daughter of a Russian Emperor and caused her statue to be executed by Giulio Romano. The religion of the play is decidedly vague, the very characters themselves seem to forget at times what they are, one moment figuring as Christians, and the next worshipping Jupiter and Proserpina. In the same play in which a pilgrimage is made to Delphi to obtain an oracle, a shepherd lad says there is "but one puritan amongst them, and he sings songs to hornpipes" (Act iv. sc. 2). All this is unintentional, no doubt, but it greatly adds to the general fairy tale effect.

We do not know why Shakespeare transposed the localities. In Greene's book the tragedy of the play occurs in Bohemia, and the idyllic part in Sicily; in the drama the situations are reversed. It might be that Bohemia seemed to him a more suitable country for the exposure of an infant than the better known and more thickly populated island of the Mediterranean.

All the main features of the play are drawn from Greene, first and foremost the king's unreasonable jealousy because his wife, at his own urgent request, invites Polixenes to prolong his stay and speaks to him in friendly fashion. Among the grounds of jealousy enumerated by Greene was the naïve and dramatically unsuitable one that Bellaria, in her desire to please and obey her husband by showing every attention to his guest, frequently entered his bed-chamber to ascertain if anything was needed there.[1] Greene's queen really dies when she is cast off by the king in his jealous madness, but this tragic episode, which would have deprived him of his reconciliation scene, was not adopted by Shakespeare. He did, however, include and amplify the death of Mamillius, their little son, who pines away from sorrow for the king's harsh treatment of his mother. Mamillius is one of the gems of the play; a finer sketch of a gifted, large-hearted child could not be. We can but feel that Shakespeare, in drawing this picture of the young boy and his early death, must once again have had his own little son in his mind, and that it was of him he was thinking when he makes Polixenes say of his young prince (Act i. sc. 2):

"If at home, sir, He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter; Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy; My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all: He makes a July's day short as December; And with his varying childness, cures in me Thoughts that would thick my blood." _Leontes_. So stands this squire Offic'd with me."

The father's tone towards little Mamillius is at first a jesting one.

"Mamillius, art thou my boy?" _Mamillius_. Ay, my good lord. _Leontes_. Why, that's my bawcock. What, hast smutch'd thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine."

Later, when jealousy grows upon him, he cries:

"Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear'st! my collop!--Can thy dam?--may'st be?"

The children of the French poets of the middle and end of that century were never childlike. They would have made a little prince destined to a sad and early death talk solemnly and maturely, like little Joas in Racine's _Athelie_; but Shakespeare had no hesitation in letting his princeling talk like a real child. He says to the lady-in-waiting who offers to play with him:

"No, I'll none of you. _lst Lady_. Why, my sweet lord? _Mamillius_. You'll kiss me hard, and speak to me as if I were a baby still."

He announces that he likes another lady better because her eyebrows are black and fine; and he knows that eyebrows are most becoming when they are shaped like a half-moon, and look as though drawn with a pen.

"_2nd Lady_. Who taught you this? _Mamillius_. I learn'd it out of women's faces. Pray, now. What colour are your eyebrows? _lst Lady_. Blue, my lord. _Mam_. Nay, that's a mock; I have seen a lady's nose That has been blue, but not her eyebrows."

The tale he is about to tell is cut short by the entrance of the furious king.

During the trial scene, which forms a parallel to that in _Henry VIII_., tidings are brought of the prince's death (Act iii. sc. I):

"----whose honourable thoughts (Thoughts too high for one so tender) cleft the heart That could conceive a gross and foolish fire Blemished his gracious dam."

In Greene's tale the death of the child causes that of his mother, but in the play, where it follows immediately upon the king's defiant rejection of the oracle, it effects a sudden revulsion of feeling in him as a punishment direct from Heaven. Shakespeare allowed Hermione to be merely reported dead because his mood at this time required that the play should end happily. That Mamilius seems to pass entirely out of every one's memory is only another proof of a fact we have already touched upon, namely, Shakespeare's negligent style of work in these last years of his working life. The poet, however, is careful to keep Hermione well in mind; she is brought before us in the vision Antigonus sees shortly before his death, and she is preserved during sixteen years of solitude that she may be restored to us at the last. It is, indeed, chiefly by her personality that the two markedly distinct parts of this wasp-waisted play are held together.

Although, as in Pericles, there is more of an epic than a dramatic character about the work, it possesses a certain unity of tone and feeling. As a painting may contain two comparatively unconnected groups which are yet united by a general harmony of line and colouring, so, in this apparently disconnected plot, there is an all-pervading poetic harmony which we may call the tone or spirit of the play. Shakespeare was careful from the first that its melancholy should not grow to such an incurable gloom as to prevent our enjoyment of the charming scenes between Florizel and Perdita at the sheep-shearing festival, or the thievish tricks of the rascal Autolycus. The poet sought to make each chord of feeling struck during the play melt away in the gentle strain of reconciliation at the close. If Hermione had returned to the king at once, which would have been the most natural course of events, the play would have ended with the third act. She therefore disappears, finally returning to life and the embrace of the weeping Leontes in the semblance of a statue.

Looked upon from a purely abstract point of view, as though it were a musical composition, the play might be considered in the light of a soul's history. Beginning with powerful emotions, suspense and dread; with terrible mistakes entailing deserved and undeserved suffering, it leads to a despair which in turn gradually yields to forgetfulness and levity; but not lastingly. Once alone with its helpless grief and hopeless repentance, the heart still finds in its innermost sanctuary the memory which, death-doomed and petrified, has yet been faithfully guarded and cherished unscathed until, ransomed by tears, it consents to live once more. The play has its meaning and moral just as a symphony may have, neither more nor less. It would be absurd to seek for a psychological reason for Hermione's prolonged concealment. She reappears at the end because her presence is required, as the final chord is needed in music or the completing arabesque in a drawing.

Among Shakespeare's additions in the first part of the play we find the characters of the noble and resolute Paulina and her weakly good-natured husband. Paulina, who has been overlooked by both Mrs. Jameson and Heine in their descriptions of Shakespeare's feminine characters, is one of the most admirable and original figures he has put upon the stage. She has more courage than ten men, and possesses that natural eloquence and power of pathos which determined honesty and sound common sense can bestow upon a woman. She would go through fire and water for the queen whom she loves and trusts. She is untouched by sentimentality; there is as little of the erotic as there is of repugnance in her attitude towards her husband. Her treatment of the king's jealous frenzy reminds us of Emilia in _Othello_, but the resemblance ends there. In Paulina there is a vein of that rare metal which we only find in excellent women of this not essentially feminine type. We meet it again in the nineteenth century in the character of Christiana Oehlenschläger as we see it in Hauch's beautiful commemorative poem.

The rustic fête in the second part of the play, with the conversations between Florizel and Perdita, is entirely Shakespeare's work; above all is the diverting figure of Autolycus his own peculiar property.

In Greene's tale the king falls violently in love with his daughter when she is restored to him a grown woman, and he kills himself in despair when she is wedded to her lover. Shakespeare rejected this stupid and ugly feature; his ending is all pure harmony.

Here, as in _Cymbeline_, we see the poet compelled by the nature of his theme to dwell upon the disastrous effects of jealousy. This is the third time he treats of such suspicions driving to madness. Othello was the first great example, then Posthumus, and now Leontes.

The case of Leontes is so far unique that no one has suggested causes of jealousy, nor slandered Hermione to him. His own coarse and foolish imaginings alone are to blame. This variation of the vice was evidently intended to darken the background against which womanly high-mindedness and blamelessness were to shine forth.

Mrs. Jameson has charmingly said that Hermione combines such rare virtues as "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness." As queen, wife, and mother, there is a majestic lovableness about her, a grand and gracious simplicity, a natural self-control, the proverb, "Still waters run deep," being eminently applicable to her. Her gentle dignity contrasts well with Paulina's enthusiastic intrepidity, and her noble reticence with Paulina's free outspokenness. Her attitude and language during the trial scene are superb, far outshining Queen Katherine's on a similar occasion. Her nature, the ideal Englishwoman's nature, all meekness and submissiveness, rises in dignified protest. She is brief in her self-defence; life has no value for her since she has lost her husband's love, since her little son has been removed from her as though she were plague-stricken, and her new-born daughter "from her breast, the innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, haled out to murder." Her only desire is to vindicate her honour, yet the first words of this cruelly accused and shamefully treated woman are full of pity for the remorse which Leontes will some day suffer. Her language is that of innocent fortitude. When about to be taken to prison she says:

"There's some ill planet reigns: I must be patient till the heavens look With an aspect more favourable. Good my lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities: but I have That honourable grief lodged here which burns Worse than tears drown."

She bids her women not weep until she has deserved imprisonment; then indeed their tears will have cause to flow.

In the second half of the _Winters Tale_ we are surrounded by a fresh and charming country, and shown a picture of rustic happiness and well-being. No one was less influenced by the sentimental vagaries of the fantastic pastorals of the day than Shakespeare. He had drawn in Corin and Phebe, in _As You Like It_, an extremely natural, and therefore not particularly poetical, shepherd and shepherdess; and the herdsmen in the _Winters Tale_ are no beautiful languishing souls. They do not write sonnets and madrigals, but drink ale and eat pies and dance. The hostess serves her guests with a face that is "o' fire with labour and the thing she took to quench it." The clowns' heads are full of the prices of wool; they have no thought for roses and nightingales, and their simplicity is rather comical than touching. They are more than overmatched by the light-fingered Autolycus, who educates them by means of ballads, and eases them of their purses at the same time. He is a Jack-of-all-trades, has travelled the country with a monkey, been a process-server, bailiff, and servant to Prince Florizel; he has gone about with a puppet-show playing the Prodigal Son; finally, he marries a tinker's wife and settles down as a confirmed rogue. He is the clown of the piece--roguish, genial, witty, and always master of the situation. In spite of the fact that Shakespeare seized every opportunity to flout the lower classes, that he always gave a satirical and repellent picture of them as a mass, yet their natural wit, good sense, and kind-heartedness are always portrayed in his clowns with a sympathetic touch. Before his time, the buffoon was never an inherent part of the play; he came on and danced his jig without any connection with the plot, and was, in fact, merely intended to amuse the uneducated portion of the audience and make them laugh. Shakespeare was the first to incorporate him into the plot, and to endow him, not merely with the jester's wit, but with the higher faculties and feelings of the Fool in _Lear_, or the gay humour of the vagabond pedlar, Autolycus.

The clown in the _Winter's Tale_ is the drollest and sharpest of knaves, and is employed to unravel the knot in the story. He it is who transports the old shepherd and his son from Bohemia to the court of King Leontes in Sicily.

The ludicrous features of rustic society, however, are quite overpowered by the kind-heartedness which stamps every word coming from the lips of these worthy country folk, and prepares us for the appearance of Perdita in their midst.

She has been adopted out of compassion, and, with her gold, proves a source of prosperity to her adoptive parents. Thus she grows up without feeling the pressure of poverty or servitude. She wins the prince's heart by the beauty of her youth, and when we first see her she is attired in all her splendour as queen of a rural festival. Modest and charming as she is, she shows the courage of a true princess in face of the difficulties and hardships she must encounter for the sake of her love.

She is one of Shakespeare's cherished children, and he has endowed her with his favourite trait--a distaste for anything artificial or unnatural. Not even to improve the flowers in her garden will she employ the art of special means of cultivation. She will not have the rich blooms of "carnations and streaked gillyflowers" there; they do not thrive and she will not plant them. When Polixenes asks why she disdains them, she replies (Act iv. sc. 3):

"For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature."

To which Polixenes makes the profound response:

"Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so over that art Which you say adds to nature is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race; this is an art Which does mend nature,--change it rather; but The art itself is nature." With great creating nature."

These are the most profound and subtle words that could well be spoken on the subject of the relations between nature and culture; the clearest repudiation of that gospel of naturalism against which the figure of Caliban and the ridicule cast upon Gonzalo's Utopia in _The Tempest_ are protests. Perdita herself is one of those chosen flowers which are the product of that true culture which preserves and ennobles nature.

They are also words of genuine wisdom on the relative positions of nature and art. Shakespeare's art was that of nature itself, and in this short speech we possess his æsthetic confession of faith.

His ideal was a poetry which strayed neither in matter nor manner from what Hamlet calls "the modesty of nature." Although he did not wholly succeed in escaping its infection, Shakespeare invariably pursued the artificial taste of the times with gibes. From the days when he made merry at the expense of Euphuisms in _Love's Labours Lost_ and Falstaff, until now, when he puts such affectedly poetical language in the mouths of his courtiers in the _Winter s Tale_, he has always ridiculed it vigorously.

In the first scene of the play Camillo says in praise of Mamillius:

"They that went on crutches before he was born desire still their life to see him a man.

Whereupon Archidamus sarcastically inquires:

"Would they else be content to die?"

and Camillo is forced to laughingly confess:

"Yes, if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live."

Still more absurd is the style in which the Third Gentleman describes, in the last scene of the play, the meeting between the king and his long-lost daughter and the aspect of the spectators. He says of Paulina:

She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled.[2]

This comical diction reaches a climax in the following expressions:

"One of the prettiest touches of all, and that _which angled for mine eyes, caught water though not the fish_, was when at the relation of the queen's death, with the manner how she came to't, bravely confessed and lamented by the king, how attentiveness wounded his daughter; till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an 'Alas,' I would fain say, _bleed tears_, for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed colour; some swooned, all sorrowed: if all the world could have seen't _the woe had been universal_."

That Shakespeare's æsthetic sense did not sanction such expressions as these of the Third Gentleman scarcely needs stating. Perdita's language is that of nature itself. So great is her dislike of artificiality, that she will not even plant gardener's flowers in her garden, saying:

"No more than were I painted I would wish This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore Desire to breed by me."

Nowhere is Shakespeare's knowledge of nature more charmingly displayed than in her speeches. It is not only the poetic expression that is so wonderful in Perdita's distribution of flowers; it is the intimacy shown with their habits. She says (Act iv. sc. 3):

"Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun And with him rises weeping."

How well she knows that in England the daffodils bloom as early as February and March, while the swallow does not come till April:

"----O Proserpina, For the flowers now that, frighted, thou lett'st fall From Dis's waggon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phœbus in his strength--a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one! Oh, these I lack To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o'er and o'er! _Florizel_. What, like a corse? _Perdita_. No, like a bank for love to lie and play on: Not like a corse; or if, not to be buried, 'But quick and in mine arms." ...

Florizel's answer describes her with a lover's eloquence:

"What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it ever: when you sing I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms, Pray so, and, for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too."...

Her charm is equalled by her pride and resolution. When the king threatens to have her "beauty scratched with briars" if she dares retain her hold upon his son, although she believes all is lost, she says:

"I was not much afraid; for once or twice I was about to speak and tell him plainly, The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike." ...

The delineation of the love between Florizel and Perdita is marked by certain features not to be found in Shakespeare's youthful works, but which reappear with Ferdinand and Miranda in _The Tempest_. There is a certain remoteness from the world about it, a tenderness for those who are still yearning and hoping for happiness and a renunciation of any expectation as far as himself is concerned. He stands outside and beyond it all now. In the old days the poet stood on a level, as it were, with the love he was portraying; now he looks upon it from above with a fatherly eye.

As in _Cymbeline_, the court is here placed in contrast with idyllic life, and shown as the abode of cruelty, stupidity, and vice. Even the better of the two kings, Polixenes, is rough and harsh, and Leontes, whom we are not to look upon as criminal, but only as misled by his miserable suspicions, offers a true picture of the princely attitude and princely behaviour of the time of the Renaissance, during the sixteenth century in Italy and about a century later in England. It was with good reason that Belarius said in _Cymbeline_ (Act iii. sc. 3):

"And we will fear no poison, which attends In place of greater state."

We see that the thoughts of the king immediately turn to poison when he believes that his wife has deceived him, and we also see that the courtier in whom he confides has all the means ready to hand (Act i. sc. 2):

"And thou ... ... might'st bespice a cup, To give mine enemy a lasting wink; Which draught to me were cordial. _Camillo_. Sir, my lord, I could do this, and that with no rash potion, But with a lingering dram that should not work Maliciously like poison."

When, to escape committing this crime, Camillo takes flight with Polixenes, and the king has to be content with wreaking his vengeance on the hapless Hermione and her infant, he returns again and again to the thought of having them burned:

"Say that she were gone, Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest Might come to me again."'

Then the command with regard to the child:

"Hence with it, and, together with the dam, Commit them to the fire!" (Act ii/sc. 3).'

Paulina shall share their fate for daring to oppose him:

"I'll ha' thee burnt!"

When she is gone, he repeats his order for the burning of the infant:

"Take it hence And see it instantly consumed with fire.... ... If thou refuse, And wilt encounter with my wrath, say so; The bastard brains with these my proper hands Shall I dash out. Go, take it to the fire!"

We can see that Shakespeare had no intention of allowing the drama to become mawkish by giving too free scope to the humours of a pastoral play.

The resemblance between the sufferings of the infant Perdita, put ashore on the coast of Bohemia during a tempest, and those of the infant Marina, born during a storm at sea, is accentuated by lines which markedly recall a well-known passage in _Pericles._ In the _Winter's Tale_ we have (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Thou'rt like to have A lullaby too rough: I never saw The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour!"[3]

The impression designedly produced upon the audience, that all this is not serious earnest, enables Shakespeare to approach more nearly to tragic dissonance than would otherwise be permissible in a work of this kind. The atmosphere of fairy tale, so skilfully breathed here and there throughout the play, carries with it a certain playfulness of expression which gives a touch of raillery to incidents which would otherwise be horrible. Playfulness it is, and we once more obtain a glimpse of this quality which has so long deserted Shakespeare. It would be difficult to find a more roguish bit of drollery than the old shepherd's monologue on finding the child (Act iii. sc. 3):

"A pretty one; a very pretty one: sure, some 'scape: though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the 'scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work: they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here."

The same tone is preserved in the young shepherd's account of how he saw Antigonus torn to pieces by a bear. Impossible to feel horror-stricken or solemn over this:

"And then for the land-service, to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone; how he cried to me for help, and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman. But to make an end of the ship, to see how the sea flap-dragoned it; but first how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them; and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than sea or weather."

It does not seem very likely that the unfortunate man's chief anxiety while the bear was tearing him to pieces would be to inform the shepherd of his name and rank. He forgot to add his age, although, through a slip on Shakespeare's part, the old shepherd knows without being told that Antigonus was aged.

Shakespeare did not concentrate his whole strength on this play either. He took no great pains to reduce his scattered materials to order, and, as if in defiance of those classically cultivated people who demanded unity of time and place, he allowed sixteen years to elapse between two acts, leaving us on the voyage between Sicily and Bohemia, between reality and wonderland. In other words, he has freely improvised on his instrument upon a given poetic theme; he has painted purely decoratively, content with a general harmony of colour and unity of tone, without giving much thought to any ultimate meaning.

[1] _The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia_. Shakespeare's Library. T. P. Collins. Vol. i. p. 7.

[2] Julius Lange positively asserts that these expressions are not to be taken as an intentional jest on the part of Shakespeare, but are to be regarded as part of his style ("said in sober earnest," to quote his own words), and he makes them the pretext of an attack upon the "then, as now, idolised Shakespeare--in whose works, after all, we find more high-sounding and highly-coloured words than any meaning or real understanding of life." (_Tilskueren_, 1895, p. 699.)

[3] In _Pericles_:

"For thou'rt the rudliest welcome to this world That e'er was prince's child."

XX

_THE TEMPEST--WRITTEN FOR THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH'S WEDDING_

It is a different matter with that rich, fantastic wonder-poem, _The Tempest_, on which Shakespeare concentrated for the last time all the powers of his mind. Everything here is ordered and concise, and so inspired with thought that we seem to be standing face to face with the poet's idea. In spite of all its boldness of imagination, the dramatic order and condensation are such that the whole complies with the severest rules of Aristotle, the action of the entire play occupying in reality only three hours.

Owing to a notice by the Master of the Revels concerning a performance of the play at Whitehall in 1611, the date 1610-11 was long accepted as the year of its production. This memorandum is, however, a forgery, and the sole bit of reliable information we possess of _The Tempest_, before its appearance in the Folio edition of 1613, is a notice in Vertue's Manuscripts of a performance at court in February 1613, as one of the festivities celebrating the Princess Elizabeth's wedding. We can prove that this was its first performance and that it was written expressly for the occasion.

The Princess Elizabeth had been educated at Combe Abbey, far from the impure atmosphere of the court, under the care of Lord and Lady Harrington, an honourable and right-minded couple. When returned to her parents at the age of fifteen, she was distinguished by a charm and dignity beyond her years, and soon became the special favourite of her brother Henry, then seventeen years of age. Claimants for her hand were not long in appearing. The Prince of Piedmont was among the first, but the Pope would not consent to a marriage between a Catholic potentate and a Protestant princess. The next wooer was no less a person than Gustavus Adolphus, and his suit was rejected because James refused to bestow his daughter upon the enemy of his friend and brother-in-law, Christian IV. of Denmark. As early as December 1611 negotiations were entered upon on behalf of Prince Frederick V., who had just succeeded his father as Elector of the Palatinate. There was much to be said in favour of an alliance with a son of the man who had stood at the head of the Protestant League in Germany, and in May 1612 a preliminary contract of betrothal was signed. In the August of the same year an ambassador from the young Elector came to England. Meanwhile the first suitor, strongly supported by the Queen's Catholic sympathies, had reappeared. The King of Spain had also made some overtures, but they had fallen through on account of their implying the conversion of the Princess to the Catholic faith. It was the Elector Frederick, therefore, who was finally victorious in the contest, and matters were soon so far settled that he could set out on his journey to England. He was very popular there by reason of his Protestantism, and he arrived at Gravesend amid general rejoicing. He sailed up to Whitehall on the 22nd of October, and was enthusiastically greeted by the crowd. King James received him warmly, and presented him with a ring worth eighteen hundred pounds. He was ardently supported by the young Prince of Wales, who announced his intention of following his sister on her wedding-tour to Germany, where it was his secret purpose to look for a bride for himself, regardless of political intrigue.

The Elector Palatine was a remarkably handsome and prepossessing young man. Born on the 16th of August 1596, he was at this time just sixteen years of age, and nothing in his conduct suggested the unmanly and contemptible character he displayed eight years later, when he, as King of Bohemia, lost the battle of Prague through a drunken revel. The contemporary English accounts of him abound with his praise. He made an excellent impression everywhere, and we read, of his dignified and princely behaviour in a letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, dated 22nd October 1612: "He hath a train of very sober and well-fashioned gentlemen, his whole number is not above 170, servants and all, being limited by the King not to exceed." The condition of the exchequer would not permit of any unnecessary extravagance, and in less than a month after the wedding the whole retinue appointed to attend on the Prince during his stay in England was dismissed--a slight which the young Princess took very much to heart.

The much beloved Prince Henry was far from well at the time of his future brother-in-law's arrival in London. He had injured himself by violent bodily exercise during the unusually hot summer, and had ruined his digestion by eating great quantities of fruit. We now know that the illness by which he was attacked was typhus fever, and it appears that not many days after he was convalescent he incurred a severe relapse by playing tennis in the cold open air with no more clothing on the upper part of his body than a shirt.

High-minded, enlightened, and honourable as he was, Prince Henry was the idol and hope of the English nation. Queen Anne had taken the Prince, while he was yet a boy, to visit Raleigh at the Tower, soon after the illustrious prisoner had been forced to abandon those hopes of the Admiralship of the Danish fleet which he had based on the visit of Christian the Fourth, to England. Prince Henry had been intimate with Raleigh since 1610, and is reported to have said, "No man but my father would have kept such a bird in a cage!" He had, with great difficulty, obtained from the King a promise that Raleigh should be released at Christmas 1612--a promise which was never kept.

On the morning of the 6th of November the Prince's condition was declared hopeless. The Queen sent to the Tower for a bottle of Raleigh's famous cordial, which she believed to have once saved her own life, and in which Raleigh himself placed the greatest faith. He despatched it with a message that it would save the Prince's life, unless he were dying of poison. It only availed to ease his death struggles, however, and, barely nineteen years of age, he died before the day was out.

Never before in the history of England had such hopes been fixed and such affection lavished on an heir-apparent, and we can realise how great would be the grief of the entire nation for his loss. According to the manner of the times, it was generally supposed that he had been poisoned. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, says that grave doubts were entertained, but adds that no traces of poison were found when the body was opened on the second day. The editor of these letters however (author of the _Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea_), remarks: "There is nothing conclusive in this; for, in the first place, there were poisons which left no trace of their presence; and, in the next, if the effects of poisoning had been visible, the physicians would have been afraid to say so. More than one writer has ventured to assert that the atrocious crime was perpetrated with the connivance of the king, whose notorious jealousy of the popular young prince at this period, and foolish fondness for his brother Charles, induced a wretch well known to have been guilty of similar practices--the King's favourite, Viscount Rochester--to cause the prince to be secretly put out of the way. It was hoped by all who objected to the marriage of the Princess to the German Elector that Prince Henry's death would stand in the way of the wedding, for it could hardly be celebrated at a time of such deep mourning. The Elector, however, had come over to England on purpose to be married, and it was not possible to delay the ceremony long. The final marriage contract was signed by the King on the 17th of November, and the formal betrothal took place on the 27th of the same month. The wedding was postponed, but only until February. Sir Thomas Lake writes on the 6th of January that mourning is given up, and the wedding festivities are arranged.

The bride of seventeen was solemnly united to the bridegroom of sixteen to the general gratification of the court, on the 14th of February, in the presence of many spectators. On the 18th of the same month John Chamberlain writes to Mrs. Carleton: "The bridegroom and bride were both in a suit of cloth of silver, richly embroidered with silver, her train carried up by thirteen young ladies, or lord's daughters at least, besides five or six more that could not come near it. These were all in the same livery with the bride, though not so rich. The bride was married in her hair, that hung down long, with an exceeding rich coronet on her head, which the King valued at a million of crowns."

The bridegroom, with the King and Prince Charles, took part in a tournament of the wedding, and earned great applause in the evening by a display of his splendid horsemanship (_Court and Times of James the First_). In Wilson's _Contemporary History_ (p. 64) we read of the bride: "Her vestments were white, the emblem of Innocency, her hair dishevel'd, hanging down her back at length, an ornament of Virginity; a crown of pure gold upon her head, the cognizance of Majesty, being all beset with precious gems, shining liking a constellation, her train supported by twelve young ladies in white garments, so adorned with jewels that her passage looked like a milky way."

Among the various plays chosen for performance at court during these wedding festivities was _The Tempest_, and we shall see that it was written expressly for the occasion.

It is hardly necessary to confute Hunter's theory, argued at great length, that the play dates from 1596. One fact alone will sufficiently prove its absurdity, namely, that use is made in the play of a passage from Florio's translation of Montaigne, which was not published until 1603. Nor is there any foundation for Karl Elze's opinion (also lengthily set forth) that _The Tempest_ was written by 1604. The metre shows that it belongs to Shakespeare's latest period. It has a proportion of 33 in the 100 of eleven-syllabled lines, whereas _Antony and Cleopatra_, written long after 1604, has but 25, and _As You Like It_, of the year 1600, only 12 in the 100.

We have another fragment of internal evidence against the play having been written before 1610. In May 1609 Sir George Somer's fleet was scattered by a storm in mid-ocean while on its way to Virginia. The admiral's ship, driven out of its course, was blown by the gale unto the Bermudas. After all hope had been abandoned, the vessel was saved by being stranded between two rocks in just such a bay as that to which Ariel guides the king's ship in _The Tempest_. A little book was written on the subject of this shipwreck, and the adventures connected with it, by Sylvester Jourdan, and was published in 1610 under the title, "Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called, The Isle of Devils." The storm and the peril of the admiral's ship are described; the vessel had sprung a leak, and the sailors were falling asleep at the pumps out of sheer exhaustion when she grounded. They found the island (hitherto regarded as enchanted) uninhabited, the air mild, and the soil remarkably fertile.

Shakespeare borrowed several details from this book, the name of Bermoothes, mentioned by Ariel in the first act, for instance; and his only reason for not following the narrative in detail was his desire to lay the scene in an island of the Mediterranean.

The play, then, was written for the royal wedding in 1613. This date was first surmised by Tieck, and later declared probable by Johan Meissner, being finally confirmed by Richard Garnett in the _Universal Review_ of 1889. The latter maintains and proves that _The Tempest_ was written for a private audience on the occasion of a wedding; that the nature of the audience and the identity of the wedding are determined by unmistakable references to the personality of the bridegroom, to the early death of Prince Henry, and to the qualities which King James prided himself on possessing, and for which he loved to be praised. Over and above all this, there is internal evidence for the year 1613, and none for any other date.

The play is much shorter than the generality of Shakespeare's dramas, there being only 2000 lines in _The Tempest_ against the average 3000. It was not permitted to take up too much of the King's time nor of that of his guests; moreover, the play had to be written and learned and put on the stage all within the course of, at most, a few months. Thus there was every inducement to make it short.

Not being written for performance in an ordinary theatre, it was desirable to have as few changes of scene as possible, and in this respect _The Tempest_ is unique among Shakespeare's plays. After the opening scene on the deck of the ship, no change of scenery whatever is necessary, although the action transpires on different parts of the island. The occasion of the play made it equally desirable to avoid change of costume, and of this there is actually none, except where Prospero attires himself in ducal robes at the close of the play, and even this he effects on the stage with the assistance of Ariel. We have already referred to the compression of the play, which, instead of extending, as is usual with Shakespeare, over a long period, or even (as in _Pericles_ and _The Winter's Tale_) over a whole lifetime, merely occupies three hours, not much longer than was required for the performance of the play.

In spite of its brevity, two masques, of the kind generally represented before royalty on such occasions, are introduced into the play.

The pantomime and ballet, with its transformations, are much more elaborate than would have been necessary if the scene was only there for its own sake. "Enter several strange Shapes, bringing in a banquet; they dance about it with gentle actions of salutation; and inviting the king, &c., to eat, they depart. Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy; claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes." King James had, as we know, a fancy for all manner of stage machinery, and Inigo Jones contrived quantities of it for use at court festivities.

Still more suggestive is the great wedding masque, which, with its mythological figures, Juno, Ceres, and Iris, occupies nearly the whole of the fourth act. If it were not that _The Tempest_ was written for a bridal performance, this masque would be condemned, so extraneous is it to the plot, as a later interpolation, and as such, indeed, it was considered by Karl Elze. Without it, however, the fourth act dwindles to nothing, and the ballet is obviously required to give it its proper length. Moreover, masque and play are inseparably connected by the famous lines, "and like the baseless fabric of this vision," &c. It has been attributed, without sufficient reason, to Beaumont; but even supposing him to have composed it, it must have been planned by the author of the play and written to his order, and it affords unmistakable proof that _The Tempest_ was composed as an occasional play for the diversion of princes and courtiers. The audience must have been in possession of circumstances justifying the introduction of the masque, and those circumstances could not be anything but a wedding. We may now assert with absolute certainty that _The Tempest_ was performed on the occasion of the Princess Elizabeth's wedding. They would not revive an old play, originally written for the stage, for such a purpose, still less would they use one which had been composed for a previous wedding. Shakespeare would never allow anything unsuitable to be performed; moreover, at no former marriage would such a play have been appropriate. The fact that it was one of the king's musicians who composed the music for Ariel's songs, "Full fathom five" in the first act, and "Where the bee sucks" in the last, renders it still more probable that this of the court was its first performance. Everything indicates a royal wedding.

We find many flattering allusions in this play to King James, who could not possibly be neglected on such an occasion as that of his daughter's bridal. When Prospero, explaining his position to his daughter (Act i. sc. 2), tells how he was foremost among all the dukes for dignity and knowledge of the liberal arts, his special study, and how, absorbed in secret studies, he grew a stranger to his state, his speech conveys that interpretation of James's position and character which he himself favoured, and implies, at the same time, that the possession of these qualities was the cause of his unpopularity. Possibly there was a touch of well-concealed irony in all this. Garnett, indeed, finds an intentional dramatic satire in the crustiness and self-sufficiency of the character, proving that even the development of the highest human qualities is attended by drawbacks. But this is carrying the parallel between the characteristics of Prospero and James too far. Garnett can truly say, however, that just such a prince as Prospero, wise, humane, peace-loving, pursuing distant aims which none but he could realise or fathom; independent of counsellors and more than a match for his enemies in sagacity, holding himself in reserve until the decisive moment and then taking effective action, a devoted student of every lawful science but a sworn foe to the black art, did James imagine himself to be, and as such did he love to be represented.

We have seen with what mingled feelings the King and court would prepare for the Princess's wedding. The grief for Prince Henry's death was still so fresh that all rejoicing must be overshadowed by it. A noisy joyous play would have been out of place, while, upon the other hand, it would not do to destroy all festive feeling by directly recalling the loss the royal family and the nation had so lately sustained. Shakespeare performed this difficult task with admirable tact and good feeling. He alluded to the death of the Prince, but in such a manner that grief was lost in joy. Until the last act of the play the youthful Prince Ferdinand is believed by his father and the courtiers to be dead, and frequent expression is given to their sorrow over their supposed loss. The Prince is not the son of Prospero, but of Alonso, and the sonless Duke finds a son in Ferdinand, as James found one in the Elector Palatine.

The fact that these guarded allusions to Prince Henry's death are found throughout the play prove that it must have been written after the 6th of November, and, since it was evidently performed before the wedding, which was celebrated on the 14th of February, we may see how little time was needed by Shakespeare in which to produce a work actually brimming over with genius, and how far he was from being enfeebled or exhausted when, in this play, he bade farewell for ever to his art and his position in London.

The entire drama is permeated by the atmosphere of that age of discovery and struggling colonists. It has been admirably shown by Watkins Lloyd that all the topics and problems it deals with correspond to the colonisation of Virginia--the marvels brought to light by the discovery of new countries and new races; by the wonderful falsehoods, and still more wonderful truths, of travellers concerning natural phenomena and the superstitions arising from them. Sea perils and shipwreck, the power that lies in such calamities to provoke remorse for crimes committed; the quarrels and mutinies of colonists, the struggles of their leaders to preserve their authority; theories on the civilisation and government of new countries, the reappearance of old world vices on a new soil, the contrast between the reasoning powers of man and those of the savage; and lastly, all the demands made upon the activity, promptitude, and energy of the conquerors.

The date of the first Virginian settlement was May 1607, and it then consisted of 107 colonists. The Virginia Company was not founded until 1609 and very little was known about it before 1610. Not before 1612 could they write home, "Our colony is now seven hundred strong." These circumstances all seem to point to 1612-13 as the period during which _The Tempest_ was produced.

XXI

_SOURCES OF THE TEMPEST_

We possess no knowledge of any one particular source from which _The Tempest_ might have been drawn, but it seems probable that Shakespeare constructed his drama upon some already existing foundation. A childishly old-fashioned play by Jacob Ayrer, _Comedia von der schönen Sidea_, seems to have been founded upon a variant of the story used by Shakespeare.[1] Ayrer died in 1605, and his work, therefore, cannot have owed anything to that of the great dramatist. The similarity between the two plays is confined to the relations between Prospero and Alonso, and Ferdinand and Miranda. In the German play we have a banished sovereign, his daughter, and a captive prince, who is compelled to atone for his audacity in making love to the daughter by carrying and cutting firewood. He promises his beloved she shall be queen, and attempting to draw his sword upon his father-in-law, is rendered powerless by magic. There is no real resemblance between the dramas. It is, of course, possible that Dowland, or some other English actor, might have introduced the _Sidea_ from Germany, but Shakespeare did not know German, and in any case the play was too poor a one to interest him. Moreover, since we know that Ayrer did occasionally copy English works, we may safely conclude that both dramatists were indebted to some earlier English source. There is nothing specially original about the above incidents. In Greene's _Friar Bacon_, four men make fruitless efforts to draw swords held in their scabbards by magic, and _The Tempest_ would naturally possess traits in common with other plays representing sorcery upon the stage. In Marlowe's drama, _Dr. Faustus_, for instance, the hero punishes his would-be murderers by making them wallow in filth (_Faustus_, Act iv. sc. 2), just as Prospero drives Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano into the marsh and leaves them there up to their chins in mire (_Tempest_, Act iv.).

It is a most arbitrary and unreasonable supposition of Meissner's that Shakespeare borrowed his wedding masque from the one performed at Prince Henry's christening, in which also Juno, Ceres, and Iris appear. Shakespeare was never so lacking in inventive power that he needed to unearth a description of an old play which had been acted before King James at Stirling Castle some nineteen years previously. We know that the masque itself was not yet in print.

It was an early and correct observation that various minor details of _The Tempest_ were taken from different books of travel. Shakespeare found the name of Setebos, and, possibly, the first idea of Caliban himself, in an account of Magellan's voyage to the south pole in Eden's _Historye of Travaile in East and West Indies_ (1577). From Raleigh's _Discovery of the large, rich, and bewtiful Empire of Guiana_ (1596) he took the fable of the men whose heads stood upon their breasts. Raleigh writes that, though this may be an invention, he is inclined to believe it true, because every child in the provinces of Arromai and Canuri maintains that their mouths were in the middle of their breasts.[2] (See Gonzalo's speech in _The Tempest_, Act iii. sc. 2.)

It was Hunter who first suggested that Shakespeare might have taken some hints from Ariosto. It is possible that he had in mind some stanzas from the 43rd canto of _Orlando Furioso_. The 15th and 14th contain a faint foreshadowing, as it were, of Prospero and Miranda, and the 187th stanza alludes to the power of witchcraft to raise storms and calm seas again. The _Orlando_ had been translated into English by Harrington, but, as we have already observed, Shakespeare was fully qualified to read it in the original. Too much, however, has already been made of these trivial, nay, utterly insignificant coincidences.[3]

It is far more remarkable that the famous and beautiful passage (Act iv.) proclaiming the transitoriness of all earthly things--a passage which seems to be a mournful epitome of the philosophy of Shakespeare's last years of productiveness--may be an easy adaptation of an inferior and quite unknown poet of his day. When the spirit play conjured up by Prospero has vanished he says:

"These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air, And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

In Count Stirling's tragedy of _Darius_, published in London, 1604, the following verses occur:

"Let Greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt, Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruis'd, soon broken; And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant, All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token. Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls, With furniture superfluously fair, Those stately courts, those sky-encount'ring walls, Evanish all like vapours in the air."

History could scarcely afford a more striking proof that in art the style is all, subject and meaning being of comparatively small importance. Stirling's verses are by no means bad, nor even poor, and their decidedly pleasing rhymes express, in very similar words, exactly the same idea we find in Shakespeare's lines, and were, moreover, their precursors. Nevertheless, both they and the name of their author would be utterly forgotten long since if Shakespeare had not, by a marvellous touch or two, transformed them into a few lines of blank verse which will hold their own in the memory of man as long as the English language lasts.

As Meissner[4] pointed out, Shakespeare was indebted to Frampton's translation of Marco Polo (1579) for one or two suggestive hints. For example, we read in Frampton of the desert of Lob in Asia: "You shall heare in the ayre, the sound of _Tabers and other instruments_, to putte the travellers in feare, and to make them lose their way, and to depart their company and loose themselves: and by that meanes many doe die, being deceived so, by evill spirits, that make these soundes, and also doe call diverse of the travellers _by their names_." Compare this with Caliban's words in _The Tempest_ (Act iii. sc. 2):

"The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a _thousand twangling instruments_ Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices."

And Trinculo's subsequent jesting remark, which evidently refers to the accompaniment of a clown's morris dance: "I would I could see this _tabourer_; he lays it on." Compare also Alonso's lament (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Oh, it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced _The name of Prospero_: it did bass my trespass."

Shakespeare may have found the first suggestions of Caliban and Ariel in Greene's _Friar Bacon_. In the ninth scene of this play, two necromancers, Bungay and Vandermast, dispute as to which possess the greater power, the pyromantic (fire) spirits or the geomantic (earth) spirits. The fire spirits, says Bungay, are mere transparent shadows that float past us like heralds, while the spirits of earth are strong enough to burst rocks asunder. Vandermast maintains that earth spirits are dull, as befits their place of abode. They are coarse and earthly, less intelligent than other spirits, and thus it is they are at the service of jugglers, witches, and common sorcerers. But the fine spirits are mighty and swift, their power is far-reaching.

A more direct suggestion of Ariel's charming ways was probably found by Shakespeare at the close of the already mentioned _Faithful Shepherdess_, written by his young friend Fletcher. In it the satyr offers his services to the beautiful Corin in terms which recall Ariel's speech to Prospero (Act i. sc. 2):

"All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curled clouds, to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality."

Fletcher's satyr makes the same offer:

"Tell me, sweetest, What new service now is meetest For a satyr? Shall I stray In the middle air, and stay The sailing rack, or nimbly take Hold by the moon, and gently make Suit to the pale queen of night For a beam to give thee light? Shall I dive into the sea, And bring thee coral, making way Through the rising waves that fall In snowy fleeces?" &c.

But a much more striking example of Shakespeare's taste and talent for adaptation is presented by Prospero's farewell speech to the elves (Act v. sc. I), "Ye elves of hills, brooks," &c. Warburton was the first to draw attention to the fact that this speech, in which Shakespeare bids farewell to his art, and tells, through the medium of Prospero's marvellous eloquence, of all that he has accomplished, was founded upon the great incantation in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ (vii. 197-219), where, after the conquest of the golden fleece, Medea, at Jason's request, invokes the spirits of night to obtain the prolongation of his old father's life. A comparison of the text plainly proves Shakespeare's indebtedness to Golding's translation of the Latin work:

"Ye Ayres and Windes: _ye Elites of Hillies, of Brooks, of Woods alone_, _Of standing Lakes_, and of the Night approche ye everyone _Through helpe of whom_ (the crooked bankes much wondring at the thing) _I haue compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring_. By charmes I make the calme seas rough, and make the rough seas playne, _And cover all the Skie with clouds and chase them thence againe._ _By charmes I raise and lay the windes_ and burst the Viper's iaw, _And from the bowels of the earth both stones and trees do draw._ _Whole woods and Forrests I remoouve: I make the Mountains shake_, And euen the earth it selfe to grone and fearefully to quake. _I call up dead men from their graues_, and thee, O lightsome Moone, I darken oft, though beaten brass abate thy perill soone. _Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire, and darkes the Sun at Noone._ . . . . . . . . . . Among the earth-bred brothers you a mortall warre did set And brought asleepe the Dragon fell whose eyes were neuer shet."

The corresponding lines in _The Tempest_ run:

"_Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves_; And ye that on the sands with printless foot _Do chase the ebbing Neptune_, and do fly him When he comes back; you . . . . . . . . _by whose aid_-- Weak masters though ye be--_I have bedimm'd_ _The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds_, And twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault Set roaring war: to the dread-rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt: _the strong-bas'd promontory_ _Have I made shake;_ and by the spurs _pluck'd up_ _The pine and cedar: graves at my command_ _Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd and let 'em forth_ By my so potent art."

The words employed in addressing the elves are actually the same. Medea's power to raise and calm the waves becomes the elfin chase of and flight from the advancing and retreating billows. Both Medea and Prospero proclaim their power to overcloud the sky and darken the sun, to raise winds and shatter trees, tearing them up by the roots. They can make the very mountains tremble, and can compel the grave to give up its dead.

The names Prospero and Stephano may be found in Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_ (1595). Prospero was also the name of a riding-master well known in the London of Shakepeare's day.

Malone has suggested that the name "Caliban" was derived from "cannibal." Although the creature displays no tendency towards cannibalism, it is possible that Shakespeare had this term for a man-eater in his mind when he invented the name; it is even probable, seeing that the passage in Montaigne from which he drew Gonzalo's Utopia is contained in a chapter headed "Les Cannibales." Furness, who has inaugurated such an admirable edition of Shakespeare, considers this surmise an improbable one. He and Th. Elze incline to the belief that the name was derived from Calibia, a town in the neighbourhood of Tunis, but the connection is scarcely more obvious. Shakespeare found the name Ariel in Isaiah xxix. 1, the name of a city in which David dwelt, and he doubtless appropriated it on account of its similarity in sound to both English and Latin words for air.

We now seem to have exhausted all the available literary sources of _The Tempest_, and we need only add that Dryden and Davenant, in their abominable adaptation of the play (published in London 1670), made free use of Calderon's already mentioned "En esta vida todo es vertad y todo es mentira," and thus provided the Miranda, who has never seen a young man, with a counterpart in Hippolyto, who has never seen the face of woman.

[1] Jacob Ayrer: _Opera Theatricum_. Nurnburg, 1618. L. Tieck: _Deutsches Theater_, i. p. 323. Albert Cohn: _Shakespeare in Germany_, ii. pp. 1-75.

[2]

"Or that there were such men Whose heads stood in their breasts? which now we find, Each putter-out of five for one will bring us Good warrant of."

[3] We read of the old man:

"Nella nostra cittade era un uom saggio Di tutte l'arti oltre ogni creder dotto."

Of his arrangements for his daughter, due to the bad character of his wife, we are told:

"Fuor del commercio popolo la invola, Ed ove piu solingo il luogo vede, Questo amplo e bel palagio e ricco tanto Fece fare a demonj per incanto."

Of the storm, which, by the way, is not raised by the said old man, but by hermit, we are merely told:

"E facea alcuno effetto soprumano . . . . . . . Fermare il vento ad un segno di croce E far tranquillo il mar quando è più atroce."

[4] Johan Meissner: _Untersuchungen über Shakespeare's Sturm_.

XXII

_THE TEMPEST AS A PLAY--SHAKESPEARE AND PROSPERO--FAREWELL TO ART_

Although, taken from the point of view of a play, _The Tempest_ is lacking in dramatic interest, the entire work is so marvellously rich in poetry and so inspired by imagination, that it forms a whole little world in itself, and holds the reader captive by that power which sheer perfection possesses to enthrall.

If the ordinary being desires to obtain a salutary impression of his own insignificance and an ennobling one of the sublimity of true genius, he need only study this last of Shakespeare's masterpieces. In the majority of cases the result will be prostrate admiration.

Shakespeare gave freer rein to his imagination in this play than he had allowed himself since the days of the _Midsummer Nights Dream_ and the _First Part of Henry IV_. He felt able, indeed compelled to do this; and, in spite of the restraint imposed upon him by the occasion for which it was written, he devoted his whole individuality to the task with greater force than he had done for years. The play contains far more of the nature of a confession than was usual at this period. Never, with the exception of _Hamlet_ and _Timon_, had Shakespeare been so personal.

It may be said that, in a manner, _The Tempest_ was a continuation of his gloomy period; once again he treated of black ingratitude and cunning and violence practised upon a good man.

Prospero, Duke of Milan, absorbed in scientific study, and finding his real dukedom in his library, imprudently intrusted the direction of his little state to his brother Antonio. The latter, betraying his trust, won over to his side all the officers of state appointed by Prospero, entered into an alliance with the Duke's enemy, Alonso, King of Naples, and reduced the hitherto free state of Milan to a condition of vassalage. Then, with the assistance of Alonso and his brother Sebastian, Antonio attacked and dethroned Prospero. The Duke, with his little three-year-old daughter, was carried out some leagues to sea, placed in a rotten old hull, and abandoned. A Neapolitan noble, Gonzalo, compassionately supplied them with provisions, clothes, and, above all, the precious books upon which Prospero's supernatural powers depended. The boat was driven ashore upon an island whose one inhabitant, the aboriginal Caliban, was reduced to subjection by means of the control exercised over the spirit world by the banished man. Here, then, Prospero dwelt in peace and solitude, devoting himself to the culture of his mind, the enjoyment of nature, and the careful education of his daughter Miranda, who received such a training as seldom falls to the lot of a princess.

Twelve years have passed, and Miranda is just fifteen when the play begins. Prospero is aware that his star has reached its zenith and that his old enemies are in his power. The King of Naples has married his daughter, Claribel, to the King of Tunis, and the wedding has been celebrated, oddly enough, at the home of the bridegroom; but then it was probably the first time in history that a Christian King of Naples had bestowed his daughter upon a Mohammedan. Alonso, with all his train, including his brother and the usurper of Milan, is on his homeward voyage when Prospero raises the storm which drives them on his island. After being sufficiently bewildered and humiliated, they are finally forgiven, and the King's son, purified by the trials through which he has passed, is as Prospero has all along intended that he should be, united to Miranda.

It was evidently Shakespeare's intention in _The Tempest_ to give a picture of mankind as he now saw it, and we are shown something quite new in him, a typical representation of the different phases of humanity.

In Caliban we have the primitive man, the aboriginal, the animal which has just evolved into the first rough stages of the human being. In Prospero we are given the highest development of Nature, the man of the future, the superhuman man of spirit.

We have seen that Shakespeare roughly planned such a character some years back, in the faintly outlined sketch of Cerimon in _Pericles_ (_ante_ p. 591). Prospero is the fulfilment of the promise contained in Cerimon's principal speech, a man, namely, who can compel to his uses all the beneficent powers dwelling in metals, stones, and plants. He is a creature of princely mould, who has subdued outward Nature, has brought his own turbulent inner self under perfect control, and has overpowered the bitterness caused by the wrongs he has suffered in the harmony emanating from his own richly spiritual life.

Prospero, like all Shakespeare's heroes and heroines of this last decade--Pericles, Imogen, and Hermione no less than Lear and Timon--suffers grievous wrong. He is even more sinned against than Timon, has suffered more and lost more through ingratitude. He has not squandered his substance like the misanthrope, but, absorbed in occupations of a higher nature, he has neglected his worldly interests and fallen a victim to his own careless trustfulness.

The injustice offered to Imogen and Hermione was not so detestable in its origin as that suffered by Prospero; the wrong done them sprang from misguided love, and was therefore easier to condone. The crime against the Duke was actuated by such low motives as envy and covetousness.

Tried by suffering, Prospero proves its strengthening qualities. Far from succumbing to the blow, it is not until it has fallen that he displays his true, far-reaching, and terrible power, and becomes the great irresistible magician which Shakespeare himself had so long been. His power is not understood by his daughter, who is but a child, but it is felt by his enemies. He plays with them as he pleases, compels them to repent their past treatment of him, and then pardons them with a calmness of superiority to which Timon could never have attained, but which is far from being that all-obliterating tenderness with which Imogen and Hermione forgive remorseful sinners.

There is less of charity towards the offenders in Prospero's absolution than that element of contempt which has so long and so exclusively filled Shakespeare's soul. His forgiveness, the oblivion of a scornful indifference, is not so much that of the strong man who knows his power to crush if need be, as that of the wisdom which is no longer affected by outward circumstance.

Richard Garnett aptly observes, in his critical introduction to the play in the "Irving Edition," that Prospero finds it easy to forgive because, in his secret soul, he sets very little value on the dukedom he has lost, and is, therefore, roused to very little indignation by the treachery which deprived him of it. His daughter's happiness is the sole thing which greatly interests him now, and he carries his indifference to worldly matters so far that, without any outward compulsion, he breaks his magic wand and casts his books into the sea. Resuming his place among the ranks of ordinary men, he retains nothing but his inalienable treasure of experience and reflection. I quote the following passage from Garnett on account of its remarkable correspondence with the general conception of Shakespeare's development set forth in this book.

"That this Quixotic height of magnanimity should not surprise, that it should seem quite in keeping with the character, proves how deeply this character has been drawn from Shakepeare's own nature. Prospero is not Shakespeare, but the play is in a certain measure autobiographical.... It shows us more than anything else what the discipline of life had made of Shakespeare at fifty--a fruit too fully matured to be suffered to hang much longer on the tree. Conscious superiority untinged by arrogance, genial scorn for the mean and base, mercifulness into which contempt entered very largely, serenity excluding passionate affection while admitting tenderness, intellect overtopping morality but in no way blighting or perverting it--such are the mental features of him in whose development the man of the world kept pace with the poet, and who now shone as the consummate perfection of both."

In other words, it is Shakespeare's own nature which overflows into Prospero, and thus the magician represents not merely the noble-minded great man, but the genius, imaginatively delineated, not, as in _Hamlet_, psychologically analysed. Audibly and visibly does Prospero's genius manifest itself, visible and audible also the inward and outward opposition he combats.

The two figures in which this spiritual power and this resistance are embodied are the most admirable productions of an artist's powers in this or any other age. Ariel is a supernatural, Caliban a bestially natural being, and both have been endowed with a human soul. They were not seen, but created.

Prospero is the master-mind, the man of the future, as shown by his control over the forces of Nature. He passes as a magician, and Shakespeare found his prototype, as far as external accessories were concerned, in a scholar of mark and man of high principles, Dr. Dee, who died in 1607. This Dr. Dee believed himself possessed of powers to conjure up spirits, good and bad, and on this account enjoyed a great reputation in his day. A man owning but a small share of the scientific knowledge of our times would inevitably have been regarded as a powerful magician at that date. In the creation of Prospero, therefore, Shakespeare unconsciously anticipated the results of time. He not merely gave him a magic wand, but created a poetical embodiment of the forces of Nature as his attendant spirit. In accordance with the method described in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ he gave life to Ariel:

"The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends the bringer of that joy."

Ariel is just such a harbinger of joy; from the moment he appears we are content and assured of pleasurable impressions. In the whole record of poetry he is the one good spirit who arrests and affects us as a living being. He is a non-christian angel, a sprite, an elf, the messenger of Prospero's thought, the fulfiller of his will through the elementary spirits subject to the great magician's power. He is the emblem of Shakespeare's own genius, that "affable, familiar ghost" (as Shakespeare expresses it in his 86th sonnet) which Chapman boasted of possessing. His longing for freedom after prolonged servitude has a peculiar and touching significance as a symbol of the yearning of the poet's own genius for rest.

Ariel possesses that power of omnipresence and all those constantly varying forms which are the special gift of imagination. He skims along the foam, flies on the keen north wind, and burrows in the frozen earth. Now he is a fire spirit spreading terror as he flashes in cloven flame, encircling the mast and playing about the rigging of the vessel, or as one great bolt hurls himself to strike with all the power and speed of lightning. Now again, he is a mermaid, seen in fitful glimpses, and chanting alluring songs. He sounds the magic music of the air, he mimics the monotonous splashing of the waves, or barks like a dog and crows like a cock. In every essence of his nature as well as name he is a spirit of the air, a mirage, a hallucination of light and sound. He is a bird, a harpy, and finds his way through the darkness of night to fetch dew from the enchanted Bermudas. Faithful and zealous servant of the good, he terrifies, bewilders, and befools the wicked. He is compounded of charm and delicacy, and is as swift and bright as lightning.

He was formerly in the service of the witch Sycorax, but, incurring her displeasure, was imprisoned by her in the rift of a cloven pine. There he was held in suffering many years, until delivered at last by Prospero's supernatural powers. He serves the magician in return for his release, but never ceases to long for his promised freedom. Although a creature of the air, he is capable of compassion, and can understand a sentiment of devotion which he does not actually feel. His subject condition is painful to him, and he looks forward with joy to the hour of liberty. Spirit of fire and air as he is, his essence exhales itself in music and mischievous pranks.

Caliban, on the other hand, is of the earth earthy, a kind of land-fish, a being formed of heavy and gross materials, who was raised by Prospero from the condition of an animal to that of a human being, without, however, being really civilised. Prospero made much of the creature at first, caressed him and gave him to drink of water mixed with the juice of berries; taught him the art of speech and how to name the greater and the lesser light, and lodged him in his cell. But from the moment Caliban's savage instinct prompted him to attempt the violation of Miranda, Prospero treated him as a slave and made him serve as such. Strangely enough, however, Shakespeare has made him no prosaically raw being, untouched by the poetry of the enchanted island. The vulgar new-comers, Trinculo and Stephano, speak in prose, but Caliban's utterances are always rhythmic; indeed, many of the most exquisitely melodious lines in the play fall from the lips of this poor animal. They sound like an echo from the time he lived within the magic circle and was the constant companion of Prospero and Miranda.

But since, from being their fellow, he has been degraded to their slave, all gratitude for former benefits has disappeared from his mind; and he now employs the language they have taught him in cursing the master who has robbed him, the original inhabitant, of his birthright. His is the hatred of the savage for his civilised conquerors.

We have seen that the abhorrence Shakespeare felt for the vices of the court and fashionable life inclined him during these later years to dream of some natural life far from all civilisation (_Cymbeline_). But his instinct was too sure and his judgment too sound to allow of his ever believing, with the Utopists of his day, that the natural primitive state of man was one of innocence and nobility of soul in the golden age of prehistoric times. Caliban is a protest against this very theory, and Shakespeare distinctly ridicules all such fanaticism in the lines copied from Montaigne, and placed in Gonzalo's mouth, concerning the organisation of an ideal commonwealth; without commerce, law, or letters, without riches or poverty, without corn, oil, or wine, and without work of any kind, but a happy idleness for all.

Caliban represents the primitive, the prehistoric man; yet, such as he is, a poetically inclined philosopher of our day has discovered in him the features of the eternal plebeian. It is instructive to witness with how few reservations Renan was enabled to modernise the type, and shown how, tidied up and washed and interpreted as the dull fickle democracy, Caliban was as capable as the old aristocratic-religious despotism of sounding a conservative note, of protecting the arts and graciously patronising the sciences, &c.

Shakespeare's Caliban was the offspring of Sycorax and begotten by the Devil himself. With such a pedigree he could hardly be expected to rise to any height of angelic goodness and purity. He is, in reality, more of an elemental power than a human being; and therefore rouses neither indignation nor contempt in the mind of the audience, but genuine amusement. Invented, and drawn with masterly humour, he represents the savage natives found by the English in America, upon whom they bestowed the blessings of civilisation in the form of strong drink. There is not only wit but profound significance in the scene (Act ii. sc. 2) in which Caliban, who at first takes Trinculo and Stephano for two spirits sent by Prospero to torment him, allows himself to be persuaded that Trinculo is the Man in the Moon, shown to him by Miranda on beautiful moonlight nights, and forthwith worships him as his god, because he alone possesses the bottle with the heavenly liquor which has been put to the creature's lips, and given him his first taste of the wonderful intoxication produced by fire-water.

Midway between these symbols of the highest culture and of Nature in its crudest form Shakespeare has placed a young girl, as noble in body and soul as her father, and yet so purely and simply a child of Nature that she unhesitatingly follows her instincts, including that of love. She is the counterpart of the masculine ideal in Prospero, being all that is admirable in woman; hence her name, Miranda. To preserve her absolutely unspotted and fresh, Shakespeare has made her almost as young as his Juliet; and to still further accentuate the impression of maidenly immaculateness, she has grown up without seeing a single youth of the other sex, a trait which was used and abused by the Spaniards later in the same century. Hence the wondering admiration of the first meeting between Ferdinand and Miranda:

"What! is't a spirit? Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir, It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit."

When her father denies this she says:

"I might call him A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble."

And Ferdinand:

"My prime request, Which I do last pronounce, is, O you wonder! If you be maid or no?"

It is Prospero, whose greatness shows no less in his power over human beings than over the forces of Nature, who has brought these two together, and who, although assuming displeasure at their mutual attraction, causes all which concerns them to follow the exact course his will has marked out.

He sees into the soul of mankind with as sure an eye as Shakespeare himself, and plays the part of Providence to his surroundings as incontestably as did the poet to the beings of his own creation.

When Prospero shows the young people to his guests, they are playing chess, and there would seem to be a touch of symbol in the fact that they are playing, not only because they wish to do so, but because they must. There is, moreover, something almost personal in the way Prospero trains and admonishes the loving couple. Garnett is inclined to infer from the repeated exhortations to Ferdinand to restrain the impulse of his blood until the wedding-hour has struck, that the play was acted some days before the royal wedding ceremony. But if these warnings were intended for the Elector in his capacity of bridegroom, they were a piece of tasteless impertinence. No, it is far more likely that, as before suggested, they contain a melancholy confession, a purely personal reminiscence. Shakespeare cannot be accused of any excessive severity in such questions of morals. We saw in _Measure for Measure_ that he considered the connection between the two lovers, for which they are to be so severely punished, was to the full as good as marriage, although entered upon without ceremonies. It was no mere formalism which spoke here, but bitter experience. Now that he was already, in thought, on his way back to Stratford, and was living in anticipation of what awaited him there, Shakespeare was reminded of how he and Anne Hathaway forestalled their ceremonial union, and he spoke of the punishment following on such actions as a curse, which he knew:

"Barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both" (Act iv. sc. I).

As already observed, Shakespeare appropriated from some source or another the incident of the youthful suitor being obliged to submit to the trial of carrying and piling wood. It almost seems that his motive in including such an incident was to show that it is man's great and noble privilege to serve out of love. To Caliban all service is slavery; throughout the whole play he roars for freedom, and never so loudly as when he is drunk. For Ariel, too, all bondage, even that of a higher being, is mere torment. Man alone finds pleasure in the servitude of love. Thus Ferdinand bears uncomplainingly, and even gladly, for Miranda's sake, the burden laid upon him (Act iii. sc. I):

"I am in my condition A prince, Miranda, I do think, a king. . . . . . . . . The very instant that I saw you, did My heart fly to your service; there resides To make me slave to it."

She shares this feeling:

"I am your wife if you will marry me! If not, I'll die your maid; to be your fellow You may deny me; but I'll be your servant Whether you will or no."

It is a feeling of the same nature which impels Prospero to return to Milan to fulfil his duty towards the state whose government he has so long neglected.

There are certain analogies between _The Tempest_ and the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In both we are shown a fantastic world in which heavenly powers make sport of earthly fools. Caliban discovering a god in the drunken Trinculo reminds us of Titania's amorous worship of Bottom. Both are wedding-plays, and yet what a difference! _The Midsummer Night's Dream_ was one of Shakespeare's earliest independent poetical works, written at the age of twenty-six, and his first great success. _The Tempest_ was written as a farewell to art and the artist's life, just before the completion of his forty-ninth year, and everything in the play bespeaks the touch of autumn.

The scenery is autumnal throughout, and the time is that of the autumn equinox with its storms and shipwrecks. With noticeable care all the plants named, even those occurring merely in similes, are such flowers and fruit, &c., as appear in the fall of the year in a northern landscape. The climate is harsh and northerly in spite of the southern situation of the island and the southern names. Even the utterances of the goddesses, the blessing of Ceres, for example, show that the season is late September--thus answering to Shakespeare's time of life and frame of mind.

No means of intensifying this impression are neglected. The utter sadness of Prospero's famous words describing the trackless disappearance of all earthly things harmonises with the time of year and with his underlying thought--"We are such stuff as dreams are made on:" a deep sleep, from which we awaken to life, and again, deep sleep hereafter. What a personal note it is in the last scene of the play where Prospero says:

"And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave."

How we feel that Stratford was the poet's Milan, just as Ariel's longing for freedom was the yearning of the poet's genius for rest. He has had enough of the burden of work, enough of the toilsome necromancy of imagination, enough of art, enough of the life of the town. A deep sense of the vanity of all things has laid its hold upon him, he believes in no future and expects no results from the work of a lifetime.

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors . . . . . . . . . . were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air."

Like Prospero, he had sacrificed his position to his art, and, like him, he had dwelt upon an enchanted island in the ocean of life. He had been its lord and master, with dominion over spirits, with the spirit of the air as his servant, and the spirit of the earth as his slave. At his will graves had opened, and by his magic art the heroes of the past had lived again. The words with which Prospero opens the fifth act come, despite all gloomy thoughts of death and wearied hopes of rest, straight from Shakespeare's own lips:

"Now does my project gather to a head; My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time Goes upright with his carriage."

All will soon be accomplished and Ariel's hour of deliverance is nigh. The parting of the master from his genius is not without a touch of melancholy:

"My dainty Ariel! _I shall miss thee_, But yet thou shalt have freedom."

Prospero has determined in his heart to renounce all his magical powers:

"To the elements Be free, and fare thee well!"

He has taken leave of all his elves by name, and now utters words whose personal application has never been approached by any character hitherto set upon the stage by Shakespeare:

"But this rough service I here abjure, and, when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, . . . . . I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book."

Solemn music is heard, and Shakespeare has bidden farewell to his art.

Collaboration in _Henry VIII_. and the production and staging of _The Tempest_ were the last manifestations of his dramatic activity. In all probability he only waited for the close of the court festivities before carrying out his plan of leaving London and returning to Stratford; and Ben Jonson's foolish thrust at _those who beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries_, would not find him in town. When we drew attention to his efforts to increase his capital, and his purchase of houses and land at Stratford, we showed that, even at that early period, he hoped eventually to quit the metropolis, to give up the theatre and literature and to spend the last years of his life in the country. Even supposing him to have delayed his departure until after the performance of _The Tempest_, an event which happened only four months later would have supplied the final inducement to leave. In the month of June 13 a fire broke out, as we know, at the Globe Theatre during a performance of _Henry VIII._, and the whole building was burned to the ground. Thus the scene of his activity for so many long years disappeared, as it were, in smoke, leaving no trace behind. He was probably part owner of the stage properties and costumes, which were all consumed. In any case, the flames devoured all the manuscripts of his plays then in the possession of the theatre, a priceless treasure--for him surely a painful, and for us an irreparable, loss.

XXIII

_THE RIDE TO STRATFORD_

That must have been a momentous day in Shakespeare's life on which, after giving up his house in London, he mounted his horse and rode back to Stratford-on-Avon to take up his abode there for good.

He would recall that day in 1585 when, twenty-eight years younger, with his life lying before him veiled in the mists of expectation and uncertainty, he set out from Stratford to London to try his fortunes in the great city. Then his heart beat high, and he must have felt towards his horse much as the Dauphin did in _Henry V_. (Act iii. sc. 7) when he said, "When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it, the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes."

Life lay behind him now. His hopes had been fulfilled in many ways; he was famous, he had raised himself a degree in the social scale, above all he was rich, but for all that he was not happy.

The great town, in which he had spent the better part of a lifetime, had not so succeeded in attaching him to it that he would feel any pain in leaving it. There was neither man nor woman there so dear to him as to make society preferable to solitude, and the crowded life of London to the seclusion of the country and an existence passed in the midst of family and Nature.

He had toiled enough, his working days were over, and now, at last, the cloud should be lifted from his name which had so long been cast upon it by his profession. It was nine years since he had actually appeared upon the stage, since he had made over his parts to others, and now he had ceased to take any pleasure in his pen. None of those were left for whom he had cared to write plays and put them upon the stage; the new generation and present frequenters of the theatre were strangers to him. There was no one in London who would heed his leaving it, no friends to induce him to stay, no farewell banquet to be given in his honour.

He would remember his first arrival in London, and how, according to the custom of all poor travellers, he sold his horse at Smithfield. He could, if he wished, keep many horses now, but no power could renew the joyous mood of twenty-one. Then the wind had played with the long curls hanging below his hat, now he was elderly and bald.

The journey from London to Stratford took three days. He would, put up at the inns at which he was accustomed to stay on his yearly journey to and fro, and where he was always greeted as a welcome guest, and given a bed with snow-white sheets, for which travellers on foot were charged an extra penny, but which he, as rider, enjoyed gratis. The hostess at Oxford, pretty Mistress Davenant, would give him a specially cordial greeting. The two were old and good friends. Little William, born in 1606, and now seven years old, possessed a certain, perhaps accidental, resemblance of feature to the guest.

As Shakespeare rode on, Stratford, so well known and yet, as settled home, so new, would (as Hamlet says) rise "before his mind's eye." A life of daily companionship with his wife was to begin afresh after a break of twenty-eight years. She was now fifty-seven, and consequently much older, in proportion, than her husband of forty-nine than when they were lovers and newly married, the one under and the other somewhat over twenty. There could be no intellectual bond between them after so long a separation, and their married life was but an empty form.

Of their two daughters, Susanna, the elder, was now thirty, and had been married for six years to Dr. John Hall, a respected physician at Stratford. Judith, the younger daughter, was twenty-eight and unmarried.

The Halls, with their little five-year-old daughter, lived in a picturesque house in Old Stratford, at that time surrounded by woods. Mrs. Shakespeare and Judith lived at New Place, and the spirit prevailing in both establishments was not the spirit of Shakespeare.

Not only the town of Stratford, but his own home and family were desperately pious and puritanical. That power which had been most inimical to him in London, which had dishonoured his profession, and with which he had been at war during all the years of his dramatic activity; that very power against which he had striven, sometimes by open attack, more often by cautious insinuation, had triumphed in his native town behind his back and taken complete possession of his only home.

The closing of the theatre, which did not occur in London until the Puritans had completely gained the upper hand many years later, had already been anticipated in Stratford. The performance of those plays at which Shakespeare in his youth had made acquaintance with the men, his future brother professionals, with whom he sought refuge in London, was strictly forbidden. So long ago as 1602 the town council had carried a resolution that no performance of play or interlude should be permitted in the Guildhall, that long, low building with its eight small-paned windows. It was the only place in Stratford suitable for such a purpose, and was connected with many of Shakespeare's memories. Directly above the long narrow hall, on the first floor, was the school which he had attended daily as a child. Into the hall itself he had awesomely penetrated the day the glories of a theatre were first displayed before his childish eyes. And now eleven years had passed since that wise Council had decreed that any alderman or citizen giving his consent to the representation of plays in this building should be fined ten shillings for every infringement of the prohibition. This not proving a sufficient deterrent, the fine was raised in 1612 from ten shillings to the extravagant sum of £10, equivalent to about £50 in our day. Fifty pounds for allowing a play to be performed in the only hall in the town suitable for the purpose! This was rank fanaticism!

Moreover, it was a fanaticism which had found its way into his own home. That strong tendency to Puritanism which was so marked among his descendants until the race died out, had already developed in his family. His wife was extremely religious, as is often the case with women whose youthful conduct has not been too circumspect. When she captured her boy husband of eighteen, her blood was as warm as his, but now she was vastly his superior in matters of religion. Neither could he look for any real intellectual companionship from his daughters. Susanna was pious, her husband still more so. Judith was as ignorant as a child. Thus he must pay the penalty of his long absence from home and his utter neglect of the education of his girls.

It was to no happy harmony of thought and feeling, therefore, that the poet could look forward as he rode away from his dramatic fairyland to the simplicities of domestic life. The only attractions existing for him there were his position as a gentleman, the satisfaction of no longer being obliged to act and write for money, and the pleasure of living on and roaming about his own property. The very fact that he did go back to Stratford with the little there was to attract him there proves how slight a hold London had taken upon him, and with what a feeling of loneliness, and (now that the bitterness was past) with what indifference, he bade farewell to the metropolis, its inhabitants and its pleasures.

It was the quietude of Stratford which attracted him, its leisure, the emptiness of its dirty streets, its remoteness, from the busy world. What he really longed for was Nature, the Nature with which he had lived in such intimate companionship in his early youth, which he had missed so terribly while writing _As You Like It_ and its fellow-plays, and from which he had so long been separated.

Far more than human beings was it the gardens which he had bought and planted there which drew him back to his native town--the gardens and trees on which he looked from his windows at New Place.

XXIV

_STRATFORD-UPON-AVON_

He was home again. Home once more, where he knew every road and path, every house and field, every tree and bush. The silence of the empty streets struck him afresh as his footsteps echoed down them, and the river Avon shone bright and still between the willows bending down to the water's edge. He had shot many a deer in the neighbourhood of that stream, and it was by its banks that Jaques, in _As You Like It_, had sat as he watched the wounded stag that sighed as though its leathern coat would burst, while the big round tears coursed down its innocent nose. The fine arched bridge was erected in the time of Henry VIII. by the same Sir Hugh Clopton who had built New Place, the house which Shakespeare had bought, and been obliged to restore before his family could live in it.

Close by the river stood the avenue leading to the beautiful Gothic church of the Holy Trinity, with its slender spire and handsome windows. Within were the graves and monuments of the neighbouring gentry, and there, so much sooner than he could possibly have dreamed, was Shakespeare himself to lie.

Passing through Church Street, he would come upon the Guild Chapel, a fine square building, from whose tower rang the weekly bells calling to Sunday-morning service. He remembered those bells from of old, and now they would be constantly sounding in his ears, for New Place lay just across the road. Soon they would be tolling his own funeral knell. Directly adjoining the chapel stood the timbered building which represented both Guildhall and school. Once it had seemed large and spacious; how small and mean it looked now! It was more satisfactory to glance on to the corner where his large garden and green lawns stood, and his eye would rest affectionately upon the mulberry-tree his own hands had planted. Ten steps from his door lay the tavern, quaint and low, and how familiar! Not the first time would it be that he had sat at that table, the largest, it was said, that had ever been cut in England from a single piece of wood. He would at least find something to drink there, and a game of draughts or dice. With a sigh he realised that this tavern was likely to prove his chief refuge from his loneliness.

Every spot was rich in memories. Five minutes' walk would bring him to Henley Street, where he had played as a child, and where stood the old house in which he was born. He would enter; there was the kitchen, which had been the living room as well in his parents' time; near the entry was the woman's storeroom, and above, the sleeping-room in which he was born. How little he dreamed that this spot was to become a place of pilgrimage for the whole Anglo-Saxon race--nay, for the whole civilised world.

He would take the road to Shottery, along which he had walked times out of number in his youth--for had not he and Anne Hathaway kept their trysts there? Right and left rose the high hedges separating the fields. Trees, standing singly or in groups, were scattered about the country, and the road, lined with elms, beeches, and willows, wound its way through the undulating country lying between Stratford and Shottery. Half-an-hour's walk would bring him to Anne Hathaway's cottage, with the moss-grown roof. He would enter, and look once more upon the wooden bench in the chimney-corner on which he and she had sat in their ardent youth. How long ago it all seemed! There was the old fifteenth-century bed in which Anne's parents had slept, with her, as a child, at their feet. The mattress was nothing but a straw palliasse, but the bedstead was beautifully carved with figures in the old style. When, a year or two later, he bequeathed to his wife "the second best bed," did he remember that this bed was already hers, I wonder?

Another day he would make his way as far as Warwick and its castle. The town was not unlike that of Stratford; it had the same timbered houses, but here the two great towers of the castle rose and predominated over the beautiful scenery. How vividly the past would rise up before him as he stood on the bridge and gazed up at the castle. He would remember his own youthful dreams concerning it, and the forms he had conjured up from their graves to people it afresh. There was the Earl of Warwick, who enumerated all the proofs of Gloucester's violent death in _Henry VI._ and that other Earl in the _Second Part of Henry IV_, (Act iii. sc. I) into whose mouth he had put words whose truth he was now proving:

"There is a history in all men's lives Figuring the nature of the times deceased."

Charlcote House he would see too. He had stood as a culprit before its master once, and had suffered the bitterest humiliation of his life, one so deep that it had driven him away from home, and had thus been the means of leading him to success and prosperity in London.

How strange it was to be here again where every one knew and greeted him. In London he had been swallowed up in the crowd. How familiar, too, the homely provincial version of his name, with the abbreviated first syllable. In town that first syllable was always long, a pronunciation, which left no doubt as to the etymology of the name.[1] It was on account of these differing pronunciations that he had, while in London, changed the spelling of his name. He had always written it _Shakspere_, but in town it had from the first (the dedication of _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_) been printed _Shakespeare_: a spelling always followed by the various publishers of the quarto editions of his dramas, only one adopting the orthography _Shakspeare_.[2]

Every one knew him, and he must exchange a word with all--with the ploughman in the field, the farmer's wife in her poultry-yard, the mason on the scaffolding, the fish-dealer at his stall, the cobbler in his workshop, and the butcher in the slaughter-house. How well he could talk to each, for no human occupation, however humble, was unfamiliar to him. He had a thorough acquaintance from of old with the butcher's trade. It had formed a part of his father's business, and his early tragedies contain many a proof of his familiarity with it. The Second and Third Parts of _Henry_ VI. are full of similes drawn from it.[3].

There was hardly any trade, calling, or position in life which he did not understand as if he had been born to it. Doubtless the simple folk of his native town respected him as much for his sound judgment and universal knowledge as for his wealth and property. It would be too much to expect that they should recognise anything more and greater in him.

Many years ago, at the outset of his career as a dramatist, he had made a defeated king praise a country life for its simplicity and freedom from care (_Third Part of Henry VI._, ii. 5):

"O God! methinks it were a happy life To be no better than a homely swain; To sit upon a hill, as I do now, To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run, How many make the hour full complete; How many hours bring about the day; How many days will finish up the year; How many years a mortal man may live. When this is known, then to divide the times: So many hours must I tend my flock; So many hours must I take my rest; So many hours must I contemplate; So many hours must I sport myself; So many days my ewes have been with young; So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean; So many years ere I shall shear the fleece: So minutes, hours, days, months and years, Passed over to the end they were created, Would bring white hairs and a quiet grave."

In just such a regular monotony were Shakespeare's own days now to pass.

[1] In 1875 Charles Mackay made an attempt, in the _Athenaum_, to prove a Celtic origin for the name, deriving it from _seac_ = dry, and _speir_--shanks, thus dry or long shanks. If we take into consideration the numerous other names and nicknames of the day which began with Shake--Shake-buckler, Shake-launce, Shake-shaft, &c., this explanation does not seem very probable. Another argument in favour of its Anglo-Saxon origin and simple meaning, _Spearshaker_, is the contemporaneous existence of the Italian surname Crollalanza.

[2] It may be mentioned that there were no less than fifty-five different ways of writing the name at that time. It is well known that such spellings were quite arbitrary. In Shakespeare's wedding contract, for example, we have the version _Shagspere_.

[3]

"And as the butcher takes away the calf, And binds the wretch and beats it when it strays, Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house" (II. iii. I)

"Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh, And sees fast by a butcher with an axe, But will suspect 'twas he that made the slaughter" (II. iii. 2).

"_Holland_. And Dick the butcher. "_Bevis_. Then is sin struck down like an ox and iniquity's throat cut like a calf." (II. iv. 2).

"_Cade_. They fell before thee like sheep and oxen, and thou behavedst thyself as if thou hadst been in thine own slaughter-house." (II. iv. 3).

"So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece, And next his throat unto the butcher's knife." (III. v. 6).

In _As You Like It_ (ii. 2) Rosalind says, using a simile drawn from the same trade: "This way will I take upon me to wash your liver clean as a sound sheep's heart, that there shall be not one spot of love in it."

See Alfred C. Calmon, who in _Fact and Fiction about Shakespeare_ has been very successful in pointing out the numerous reminiscences of Stratford to be found in Shakespeare's plays.

XXV

_THE LAST YEARS OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE_

Did Shakespeare find that peace and contentment at Stratford which he sought? From one thing and another we are almost forced to conclude he did not. His own family seem to have looked upon him in the light of a returned artist-bohemian, of a man whose past career and present religious principles were anything but a credit to them. Elze and others believe, indeed, that, like Byron's descendants at a later date, Shakespeare's family considered him a stain upon their reputation. This surmise may be correct, but there is no very great foundation for it.

It has long been inferred, from the fact that he made her his heiress, that Susanna was Shakespeare's favourite daughter. She was probably the individual to whom he felt most drawn in Stratford; but we must not conclude too much from a testamentary disposition. It was plainly the poet's intention to entail his property, and his original desire was that his little son Hamnet, as bearer and continuer of the name, should succeed to everything. Upon the death of the son, the elder daughter would naturally take his place.

It is not conceivable that Susanna could have any real understanding of, or sympathy with, her father. Her very epitaph places her in direct contrast with him in matters of religion, distinctly maintaining that though she was gifted above her sex, which she owed partly to her father, she was also wise with regard to her soul's salvation, and that was entirely due to Him whose happiness she was now sharing. Shakespeare had none of the credit for that.[1] Her natural inclination to bigoted piety was confirmed and augmented by the influence of her husband, whose sectarian zeal and narrow-minded hatred of Catholicism are plainly shown in such of his journals and books as have been preserved. We can fancy how Shakespeare's depth and delicacy of feeling must have suffered under all this. It is even possible that Susanna and her husband may have burned, on the score of what they considered his irreligious principles, any papers that Shakespeare left behind, as Byron's family destroyed his memoirs. This would explain their total disappearance, which, after all, is no more strange than the utter absence of any manuscripts belonging to Beaumont or Fletcher, or any other dramatic writer of the period.

The younger daughter, Judith, could not even write her own name, and signed her mark with a quaint little flourish when she was married. It is clearly impossible, therefore, that she could have taken any interest in her father's manuscripts. In the seventeenth century it was no very liberal education that a poet's daughter received; even Milton's eldest daughter, at a much later period, was unable to write. Susanna could just inscribe her own name, but that seems to have been the limit of her literary accomplishments. Her utter indifference to all such matters would sufficiently account for the destruction of her father's papers, and this surmise is confirmed by a remarkable statement made in his preface by Dr. John Cooke, the editor of her husband's papers. Whilst serving as army surgeon during the Civil War, he was stationed at Stratford to defend the bridge over the Avon. One of his men, lately an assistant of Dr. Hall's, told him that the books and manuscripts left by the doctor were still in existence, and offered to accompany him to the widow's house in search of them. Cooke examined the books, and Mrs. Hall informed him that she had others which had belonged to her husband's partner, and had cost a considerable sum. He replied that if the books pleased him he would be willing to pay the original price. She then produced them, and they proved to be the very book from which we are quoting, and some others' all ready for printing. Cooke, who knew Dr. Hall's handwriting, told her that at least one of these books was her husband's, and showed her the writing. She denied it, and finding that his persistence was giving offence, he paid the sum she named and carried off the books.

This extract proves that Susanna neither knew her husband's handwriting nor recognised his own books. So entirely lacking was she in any interest in intellectual matters, that she, a rich woman, set no greater value on her husband's works than to sell them for a trifle on the first opportunity that offered.

We can draw a tolerably reliable inference from this anecdote of the interest she was likely to take in any written or printed papers left by her father. In all probability she did not even take the trouble to burn them, but either threw them away or sold them as waste paper.

If we reflect that Susanna, born in better circumstances and better educated than her mother, must have been decidedly her superior, we can see how little Shakespeare's wife, now well stricken in years, could have understood or appreciated her husband. She undoubtedly preferred sermons to plays, and both her heart and house were always open to itinerant Puritan preachers. Of this we possess reliable information.

Shakespeare returned to London during the winter of 1614. Letters have been preserved from his cousin Thomas Greene, the town-clerk, proving that he was in the capital on the 16th of November and the 23rd of December. This visit of his is interesting in two ways, for we know that Shakespeare, capable man of business as he was, was defending the rights of his fellow-citizens against the country gentry; and we also know the use his family made of his absence.

The town records of Stratford show that Shakespeare's family was entertaining a travelling Puritan preacher just at this time, for, according to custom, the town presented this man with a quart of sack and a quart of claret, and we read in the municipal accounts: "_Item, for one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine geven to a preacher at the New Place, xxd._"

It is a significant fact that his family should be entertaining a member of the sect Shakespeare held to be peculiarly inimical to himself whilst he, the master of the house, was absent on business.

Probably his family never saw one of his plays performed, nor even read such of them as were printed in the pirated editions.

Anne Hathaway's cottage, which stands unchanged, though the roof is gradually falling in, was visited by the present writer in 1895. An old woman lived in it, the last of the Hathaways. She was sitting on a chair opposite the _courtship bench_, on which, according to tradition, the lovers used to sit. In the family Bible, lying open before her, she pointed with pride to a long list of names inscribed by the Hathaways during hundreds of years, and forming a kind of genealogical tree. The room was filled with all manner of pictures of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, with relics of the poet, and of famous actors and critics of his plays. The old woman, who lived among and by these comparatively valueless treasures, explained the meaning and story of each thing, but to the cautiously ventured inquiry whether she had ever read anything by this same Shakespeare who surrounded her on every side, and on whose memory she was actually living, she returned the somewhat astonished reply, "Read anything of him! No, I read my Bible." If this female Hathaway has never read anything of Shakespeare, was Anne, who must have been far behind this last scion of her race in general and certainly Shakespearian culture, likely ever to have done so?

Seeing that his own family had no great opinion of him, we can hardly be surprised that, in spite of his wealth and his oft-mentioned kindliness of disposition, he was hardly appreciated by the upper ten of Stratford's 1500 citizens. Although he was one of its richest inhabitants, he was never appointed to one of the public offices of the town during the years of his residence there.

There were few with whom he could associate in the little town. The most frequently alluded to of his Stratford acquaintances was a certain John Combe (steward of Ambrose, Earl of Warwick), a man of low repute as tax-collector and worse as money-lender and usurer. That he figured as a philanthropist in his will does not prove very much, but he must have been better than his reputation, or he would surely never have been one of Shakespeare's companions. Tradition tells that the poet and Combe not only spent much time together in their own houses, but were also in the habit of passing their evenings in the tavern (now called the Falcon) which lay just across the road. Here, then, the mighty genius, stranded in a little country town, sat at the same great table which stands there to-day, tossing dice and emptying his glass in company with a country bumpkin of doubtful reputation.

Tradition further adds that it was one of Shakespeare's few amusements to compose ironical epitaphs for his acquaintances, and he is said to have written an exceedingly contemptuous one upon John Combe in his character of usurer and extortioner. This epitaph, however, which has survived to us in various forms, is proved to have been printed, with its many variations, as early as 1608. It was probably only assigned to Shakespeare in the same manner that all the Danish witticisms of the following century were attributed to Wessel. John Combe died in 1614, leaving Shakespeare a legacy of five pounds. If he was the best of Shakespeare's Stratford associates, we can figure to ourselves the rest.

His chief companionship must have been that of Nature.

Wiser and more profound than any other in Voltaire's _Candide_ is its closing utterance, "_Il faut cultiver notre jardin_" Candide and his friends, at the end of the story, come across a Turk who, absolutely indifferent to all that is occurring in Constantinople, is entirely absorbed in the cultivation of his garden. The only communication he holds with the capital is to send thither for sale the fruit that he grows. This Turk's philosophy of life makes a great impression upon Voltaire's hero, who has known and experienced the dangers and difficulties of nearly every human lot, and his constant refrain throughout the last pages of the book is, "_Je sais qu'il faut cultiver notre jardin_" "You are right," answers another character; "let us work and give up brooding; only work makes life bearable." When Pangloss undertakes, for the last time, to prove how wonderfully everything is linked together in this best of all possible worlds, Candide adds the final apostrophe, "Well said! but we must cultivate our gardens."

This was the thought which was now singing its meagre, sad little melody in Shakespeare's soul.

His two gardens stretched from New Place down to the Avon; the larger had one fault--it only communicated by a narrow lane with the bit of ground that lay directly round the house, two small properties on the Chapel Lane side intervening between house and garden. The smaller garden was probably given up to flowers, the larger to the cultivation of fruit. Warwickshire is especially noted for its apples.

Thus Shakespeare could now improve the quality of his own fruit by that process of grafting which Polixenes had so lately taught Perdita in the _Winter's Tale_. He could now, as did the gardener long ago in _Richard II_, bid his assistants bind up the dangling apricots and prop the bending branches.

He had planted the famous mulberry-tree with his own hand, and it stood until the Rev. Francis Gastrell, who owned New Place in 1756, cut it down in a fit of exasperation with the crowds who requested admission to see it. Any one who has visited Stratford knows of the endless pieces of furniture and little boxes which were made from its wood. Garrick, who revived Shakespeare upon the stage, sat under it in 1744; and when, in 1769, he was presented with the freedom of the city, the casket in which the charter was enclosed was made from a portion of the tree. In the same year, when, on the occasion of Shakespeare's Jubilee, he sang his song, _Shakespeare's Mulberry-Tree_, he held in his hand a goblet made from its wood.

A serious attempt was made in Shakespeare's time to introduce the breeding of silkworms at Stratford, and the planting of the mulberry-tree may have had some connection with this experiment.

Not even the ruins of New Place are in existence to-day, but only the site where the house once stood, and the old well in the yard, which is so overgrown with ivy that the windlass looks like a handle of greenery. The foundation-stones of the boundary wall are covered with earth and grass, and form a sort of embankment towards the road. The gardens, however, are much as they were in Shakespeare's day; the larger is spacious and beautiful. Wandering there of an autumn afternoon, when the leaves are beginning to turn faintly golden, a strange feeling comes over one--a feeling belonging to the place, from which it is very difficult to tear oneself away.

One seems to see him walking with grave stateliness there, clad in scarlet, with the broad white collar falling over the sleeveless black tunic. We see the hand which has written so many ill-understood and insufficiently appreciated masterpieces binding up branches or lopping off stray tendrils, while the sunlight sparkles on the plain gold signet ring with its initials, W.S., which is still in our possession.

The numerous portraits and the famous death-masque discovered in Germany are all forgeries. The only genuine likenesses are the bad engraving by Droeshout prefixed to the first Folio and the poorly executed coloured bust by the Dutchman Gerhard Johnson on the monument in the Church of the Holy Trinity, which was probably done from a death-masque. It may be added that a painting was discovered at Stratford eight years ago, which purports to be the original of Droeshout's engraving, and the genuineness of which is still a matter of dispute.[2]

It holds us captive, this head with the healthy, full, red lips, the slight brownish moustache, the fine, high, poet's brow, with the reddish hair growing naturally and becomingly at the sides. The expression is speaking; Shakespeare must surely have looked like this. Even if the painting should prove a forgery, an imitation of Droeshout's work instead of its original, it will still retain an artistic and psychological value possessed by none of the other portraits. As he looks out at us from the canvas, we seem to see him as he was in those last years at Stratford, chatting with the townsfolk and "cultivating his garden."[3]

[1] "Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse."

[2] In the Halliwell-Phillips collection of Shakespearian rarities, stored at the Safe Deposit, Chancery Lane, there was a copy of the print which, according to the catalogue of the collection, is in its original proof condition, before it was altered by "an inferior hand." As traces of what is called the "inferior hand" are to be found in the painting, it would seem that the latter was copied from the print. (See John Corbin: _Two Undescribed Portraits of Shakespeare. Harpers New Monthly Magazine_.)

[3] R. E. Hunter: _Shakespeare and Stratford_. 1864. Halliwell-Phillips _A Brief Guide to the Gardens_. 1863. G.L. Lee: _Shakespeare's Home And Rural Life_. 1874. W. H. H.: _Stratford-Upon-Avon. Historic Stratford_. 1893. _The Home and Haunts of Shakespeare_, With An Introduction by H. H. Furness. 1892. Karl Elze: _Shakespeare_, Chap. viii.

XXVI

_SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH_

On the 9th of July 1614 a terrible calamity fell upon the little town in which Shakespeare dwelt, and a great fire destroyed no less than fifty-four houses, besides various barns and stables. In spite of a prohibitive law, the houses of most of the poorer citizens were thatched with straw, which proved, of course, highly inflammable. Doubtless Shakespeare, whose house was spared, contributed generously towards the alleviation of the general distress.

In March 1612, Shakespeare, jointly with Will Johnson, a wine merchant, John Jackson, and his friend and editor John Heminge, bought a house at Blackfriars in London. The deed of purchase which is still in existence in the British Museum, bears Shakespeare's authentic signature written above the first of the appended seals. His name above and in the body of the document has a different spelling. This property must have necessitated a certain amount of attention, and probably occasioned more than one journey up to town. The already mentioned sojourn there at the close of the year 1614 was not one of these, however. Shakespeare's object then was the fulfilment of a commission intrusted to him by his fellow-townsfolk.

For more than a century past, the great families had been enclosing all the land they could seize, and their parks and preserves began to usurp the old common lands and hunting-grounds, their object being to crush the mediæval custom of the whole community's joint interest in agriculture and cattle-rearing. A steady withdrawal of land from agricultural purposes went on, and the peasant classes were growing gradually poorer as the large landowners arbitrarily raised the prices of meat and wool. Under these circumstances the country people naturally did their best to prevent the enclosure of land.

In 1614 Shakespeare's native town was agitated by a proposal to enclose and parcel out the common land of Old Stratford and Welcombe. That Shakespeare was averse to this plan and determined to oppose it we learn from an utterance of his preserved in the memoranda of his cousin, Thomas Greene, which have been published by Halliwell-Phillips. According to these, Shakespeare said to his cousin that _he was not able to bear the enclosing of Welcombe_. We also learn that he concluded an agreement on the 28th of October, on behalf of his cousin and himself, with a certain William Replingham of Great Harborough, an ardent supporter of the enclosure project. Replingham thereby pledged himself to indemnify the persons concerned for any loss or injury entailed upon them by the enclosure. Shakespeare was also induced to plead the cause of his fellow-townsmen in London, the Stratford town council sending Thomas Greene thither to beg him to use all his influence for the benefit of the town, which had already suffered grievous loss through the fire. That Greene fulfilled his commission is proved by his letter to the council of the 17th of November 1614, in which he says he received reassuring intelligence from Shakespeare, and that both the poet and his son-in-law, Dr. Hall, believe that the dreaded plan will never be carried into execution.[1].

They were right. In 1618, in answer to a petition from the corporation, Government decreed that no enclosure was to be made, and gave orders that any fences already erected for that purpose were to be pulled down.

The year 1615 seems to have passed quietly enough in that country solitude and peace which Shakespeare had so long desired.

He must have been taken seriously ill in January 1616, for above the actual date of his will, _March 25th_, stands that of _January_, as though he had begun to draw it up, and then, feeling better, had postponed his intention of making a will.

The last event of any importance in Shakespeare's life took place on the 10th of February 1616; on that day his daughter Judith was married. She was no longer quite young, being thirty-one, and it was no very brilliant match she made. The bridegroom, Thomas Quiney, was a tavern-keeper and vintner in Stratford, and a son of the Richard Quiney who applied eighteen years before to his "loving countryman," William Shakespeare, for a loan of £30. Thomas Quiney was four years younger than his bride, therefore the maxim of _Twelfth Night_, "Let still the woman take an elder than herself," was as little heeded in his daughter's case as it had been in Shakespeare's own. A vintner in a town the size of Stratford is not likely to have been either a very wealthy man or one of such education that Shakespeare would take any pleasure in his society.

The last wedding festivity in which Shakespeare had taken part was the ideally royal marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. What a contrast was this of Judith and her vintner! It was prose after poetry.

Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton are supposed to have come down for the wedding, but of this we have no certain information; The supposition rests entirely on the following brief statement, written at least fifty years afterwards by the rector of Stratford, John Ward. "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted." He does not say that this merry meeting was held at the time of the wedding, but the probabilities are that it was. Drayton was a Warwickshire man, and possessed intimate friends in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Ben Jonson may have been invited in return for his having asked Shakespeare to stand as godfather to one of his children. There are good grounds for the surmise that in any case the wine was supplied by the son-in-law, and that the silver-gilt bowl bequeathed to Judith was used upon this occasion.

It was childish of the cleric to connect this little drinking party with Shakespeare's illness. The tradition of Shakespeare's liking for a good glass was rife in Stratford as late as the eighteenth century. Numerous pictures of the crab-apple tree preserve the legend that Shakespeare started off for Bidford one youthful day for the sake of the lively topers he had heard dwelt there, and the tale runs that he drank so hard he had to lie down under the _crab-tree_ on his way home, and sleep for several hours. The story repeated by Ward probably originated in these reports. All we know for certain is that some days after the wedding Shakespeare was taken ill.

Several circumstances tend to prove that the poet was attacked by typhus fever. Stratford, with its low, damp situation and its filthy roads, was a regular typhus trap in those days. Halliwell-Phillips has published a list of enactments and penalties promulgated by the magistrates with a view to the clearing of the streets. They extend into the latter half of the eighteenth century, and that there are none for the years in question is accounted for by the fact that the documents for 1605-1646 are missing. Even so late as the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, Garrick, who was fêted by the town on this occasion, described it as "the most dirty, unseemly, ill-pav'd, wretched-looking town in all Britain." Chapel Lane, towards which Shakespeare's house fronted, was one of the unhealthiest streets in the town. It hardly possessed a house, being but a medley of sheds and stables with an open drain running down the middle of the street. It was small wonder that the place was constantly visited by pestilential epidemics, and little was known in those days of any laws of hygiene, and as little of any treatment for typhus. Shakespeare's son-in-law, who was probably his doctor, knew of no remedy for it, as his journals prove.

Shakespeare drew up his will on the 25th of March. As we have already said, it is still in existence, and is reproduced in facsimile in the twenty-fourth volume of the German Shakespeare Year-book.

The fact that it was dictated, and the extreme shakiness of the signature at the foot of the three lengthily detailed folio pages, prove that Shakespeare was very ill when his will was made.

His daughter Susanna is the principal heiress. Judith receives £150 ready money and £150 more after the lapse of three years, under certain conditions. These are the principal bequests. Joan Hart, his sister, is remembered in various ways. She is to receive five pounds in ready money and all his clothes. Her three sons are separately mentioned, although Shakespeare cannot remember the baptismal name of the second, and are to have five pounds each. To his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, he leaves his silver plate. Ten pounds is to go to the poor of Stratford, and his sword to Thomas Combe. Various good burghers of the town, including Hamlet Sadler, after whom Shakespeare's son was named, are left twenty-six shillings and eightpence each, wherewith to buy a ring in memory of the deceased. A line inserted later bequeaths a similar sum for a similar purpose to the three actors with whom Shakespeare was most intimately associated in his late company, and whom he calls "my comrades"--John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell. As is well known, it is to the first and last of these three that we owe the first Folio edition, containing nineteen of Shakespeare's plays which would otherwise have been lost to us.

A peculiar psychological interest attaches to the following features of the will.

In the first place, the much discussed and remarkable fact that in making his last will Shakespeare apparently entirely forgot his wife. Not until it was completed and read aloud to him did he remember that she, who would receive, of course, the legal widow's share, should at least be named; and then, between the last lines, he has inserted: "_Item, Igyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture._" The poverty of the gift is the more obvious when we recall how Shakespeare's father-in-law remembered his wife in his will.

It is also significant, more especially as it was contrary to the custom of the times, that not a single member of Mrs. Shakespeare's family was mentioned in the will. The name Hathaway does not occur, although it is frequently mentioned in the wills of Shakespeare's descendants; in that of Thomas Nash, for instance, and of Susanna's daughter Elizabeth, who became Lady Barnard by her second marriage. The inference is plain, that Shakespeare was on very unfriendly terms with his wife's family.

The next peculiarity is that Shakespeare never refers to his position as a dramatic writer, nor makes any allusion to books, manuscripts, or papers of any kind, as forming part of his property. This absence of all concern for his poetical reputation is in complete accord with the sovereign contempt for posthumous fame which we have already observed in him.

Finally, it is not without significance that there was neither poet nor author mentioned among those to whom Shakespeare left money for the purchase of that ordinary token of friendship, a ring to be worn as a memento. It would seem as though he felt himself under no obligation to any of his fellow-authors, and had nothing to thank them for. This neglect is quite in harmony with the contempt he always displayed for his brother craftsmen when he had occasion to represent them upon the stage. He may have been willing enough to drink in company with Ben Jonson, the honest and envious friend of so many years' standing, but he had no more depth of affection for him than for any other of the dramatists and lyric poets among whom his lot had been cast. As Byron says of Childe Harold--he was one among them, not of them.

He lingered on for four weeks, and then he died.

He had probably completed his fifty-second year the day before, thus dying at the same age as Molière and Napoleon. He had lived long enough to finish his work, and the mighty turbulent river of his life came to an end among the sands, in the daily drop, drop, drop.[2]

A monument was erected by his family in Stratford church before the year 1623. Below the bust is an inscription, probably of Dr. Hall's composition. The first two lines liken him, in badly constructed Latin, to a Nestor for judgment, a Socrates for genius, and a Virgil for art.[3]

We could imagine a more appropriate epitaph.

[1] The passage runs: "My cosen Shakespeare comyng yesterday to town, I went to See him, how he did. He told me that they assured him they ment to inclose no further than to Gospell Bush, and so upp straight (leavyng out part of the dyngles to the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedg, and take in Salisburyes peece; and that they mean in Aprill to survey the land, and then to give satisfaccion, and not before; and he and Mr. Hall say they think ther will be nothyng done at all.

Also C. M. Ingleby: _Shakespeare and the Welcombe Enclosures_, 1883.

[2] It is not altogether correct to say that Shakespeare died on the same day as Cervantes. True, they both died on the 23rd of April 1616, but the Gregorian calendar was then in use in Spain, while England was still reckoning by the Julian; there is an actual difference of ten days therefore.

[3]

"Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem arte Maronem, Terra tegit, populus moeret, Olympus habet."

XXVII

_CONCLUSION_

Even a long human life is so brief and fugitive that it seems little short of a miracle that it can leave traces behind which endure through centuries. The millions die and sink into oblivion and their deeds die with them. A few thousands so far conquer death as to leave their names to be a burden to the memories of school-children, but convey little else to posterity. But some few master-minds remain, and among them Shakespeare ranks with Leonardo and Michael Angelo. He was hardly laid in his grave than he rose from it again. Of all the great names of this earth, none is more certain of immortality than that of Shakespeare.

An English poet of this century has written:

"Revolving years have flitted on, Corroding Time has done its worst, Pilgrim and worshipper have gone From Avon's shrine to shrines of dust; But Shakespeare lives unrivall'd still And unapproached by mortal mind, The giant of Parnassus' hill, The pride, the monarch of mankind."

The monarch of mankind! they are proud words those, but they do not altogether over-estimate the truth. He is by no means the only king in the intellectual world, but his power is unlimited by time or space. From the moment; his life's history ceases his far greater history begins. We find its first records in Great Britain, and consequently in North America; then it spread among the German-speaking peoples and the whole Teutonic race, on through the Scandinavian countries to the Finns and the Sclavonic races. We find his influence in France, Spain, and Italy; and now, in the nineteenth century, it may be traced over the whole civilised world.

His writings are translated into every tongue and all the languages of the earth do him honour.

Not only have his works influenced the minds of readers in every country, but they have moulded the spiritual lives of thinkers, writers and poets; no mortal man, from the time of the Renaissance to our own day, has caused such upheavals and revivals in the literatures of different nations. Intellectual revolutions have emanated from his outspoken boldness and his eternal youth, and have been quelled again by his sanity, his moderation, and his eternal wisdom.

It would be far easier to enumerate the great men who have known him and owed him nothing than to reckon up the names of those who are far more indebted to him than they can say. All the real intellectual life of England since his day has been stamped by his genius, all her creative spirits have imbibed their life's nourishment from his works. Modern German intellectual life is based, through Lessing, upon him. Goethe and Schiller are unimaginable without him. His influence is felt in France through Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. Ludovic Vitet and Alfred de Musset were from the very first inspired by him. Not only the drama in Russia and Poland felt his influence, but the inmost spiritual life of the Sclavonic story-tellers and brooders is fashioned after the pattern of his imperishable creations. From the moment of the regeneration of poetry in the North he was reverenced by Ewald, Oehlenschläger, Bredahl, and Hauch, and he is not without his influence upon Björnson and Ibsen.

This book was not written with the intention of describing Shakespeare's triumphant progress through the world, nor of telling the tale of his world-wide dominion. Its purpose was to declare and prove that Shakespeare is not thirty-six plays and a few poems jumbled together and read _pêle-mêle,_ but a man who felt and thought, rejoiced and suffered, brooded, dreamed, and created.

Far too long has it been the custom to say, "We know nothing about Shakespeare;" or, "An octavo page would contain all our knowledge of him." Even Swinburne has written of the intangibility of his personality in his works. Such assertions have been carried so far that a wretched group of _dilettanti_ has been bold enough, in Europe and America, to deny William Shakespeare the right to his own life-work, to give to another the honour due to his genius, and to bespatter him and his invulnerable name with an insane abuse which has re-echoed through every land.

It is to refute this idea of Shakespeare's impersonality, and to indignantly repel an ignorant and arrogant attack upon one of the greatest benefactors of the human race, that the present attempt has been made.

It is the author's opinion that, given the possession of forty-five important works by any man, it is entirely our own fault if we know nothing whatever about him. The poet has incorporated his whole individuality in these writings, and there, if we can read aright, we shall find him.

The William Shakespeare who was born at Stratford-on-Avon in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who lived and wrote in London in her reign and that of James, who ascended into heaven in his comedies and descended into hell in his tragedies, and died at the age of fifty-two in his native town, rises a wonderful personality in grand and distinct outlines, with all the vivid colouring of life from the pages of his books, before the eyes of all who read them with an open, receptive mind, with sanity of judgment and simple susceptibility to the power of genius.

THE END

INDEX

AARON the Moor in 'Titus Andronicus' Abbess in 'Comedy of Errors' Abbot, Archbishop Achilles in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare,' by John Weever (1595) Adam in 'As You Like It' Adriana in 'Comedy of Errors' 'Æneid' Æschylus 'Æsthetiske Studier,' by George Brandes 'Agamemnon,' by Seneca Agamemnon in 'Troilus and Cressida' Agincourt, Battle of, in 'Henry V.' Ajax in 'Troilus and Cressida' Albius in 'The Poetaster' 'Alceste,' Molière's Alcibiades in 'Timon of Athens' 'Alexander and Campaspe', by Lyly 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's Labour's Won' (1602-1603), chief characters in--Attack on Puritanism in, Alonso in the 'Tempest' 'Alphonsus, King of Arragon,' by Robert Greene Ambrogiuolo in Boccaccio's 'Decameron' Amintor in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Amleth in 'Saxo Grammaticus' 'Amores,' by Ovid 'Amoretti,' by Spenser 'Amphitruo,' by Plautus Amyot, Jacques Andersen, Hans Christian Andromache in 'Troilus and Cressida' Angelo in 'Measure for Measure' Angiers in 'King John' Anne Boleyn in 'Henry VIII.' Anne in 'Richard III.' Anne, James I.'s queen Antenor in 'Troilus and Cressida' Antigonus in 'Winter's Tale' Antiochus in 'Pericles' Antipholus of Syracuse in 'Comedy of Errors' Antonio in-- 'Merchant of Venice' 'Tempest' 'Twelfth Night' Antony, Mark, in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Antony and Cleopatra' Attractions for Shakespeare in-- Sources of 'Dark Lady,' as model in--Fall of the Republic as a world-catastrophe Apemantus in 'Timon of Athens' 'Apology, The,' by Socrates Apothecary in 'Romeo and Juliet' Appleton, Morgan's 'Shakespearean Myth' Arbaces in 'King and No King,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Arbury, Mary Fitton's portrait at 'Arcadia,' by Philip Sidney Archbishop of Canterbury in 'Henry V.' Archidamus in 'Winter's Tale, Arden, Edward ----Mary, mother of William Shakespeare ----Robert, grandfather of Shakespeare 'Arden of Feversham' Arethusa in 'Philaster,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Ariel in the 'Tempest' Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso' Aristotle Armada, Spanish Armado in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Armitage, Charles Artemidorus in 'Julius Cæsar' Arthur in 'King John' Arviragus in 'Cymbeline' 'As You Like It' (1600), Shakespeare's roving spirit and longing for nature--Wit and chief characters in Asbies at Wilmecote Aspasia in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher 'Athelie,' Racine's Aubrey Audrey in 'As You Like It' Aufidius in 'Coriolanus' Augustus in Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster' Aumerle in 'Richard II.' Autolycus in 'Winter's Tale' 'Axel and Valborg,' by Oehlenschläger Ayrer's, Jacob, 'Comedia von der schönen Sidea'

BACON, Anthony, patronised by Essex ----Delia, Miss, supporting the Baconian Theory (1856) ----Francis Baconian Theory concerning Shakespeare's plays Baif, De Balthasar in Merchant of Venice Romeo and Juliet Bandello Banquo's ghost in 'Macbeth' Barabas in C. Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta' Bardolph in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Barnabe Richs translation of Cinthios 'Hecatomithi' (1581) Barnadine in 'Measure for Measure' Barnes, Barnabe Barnfield, Richard Barnstorff 'Bartholomew Fair,' by Ben Jonson (1614) Basianus in 'Titus Andronicus' Bassanio in 'Merchant of Venice' Bates in 'Henry V.' 'Battle of Alcazar,' by George Peele Baynard's Castle Bear Garden Beards 'Theatre of God's Judgements' (1597) Beatrice in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Beaumont's, Francis, plays and career Belarius in 'Cymbeline' Bellay, Joachim du Belleforest's 'Histoires Tragiques' 'Ben Jonson,' by Symonds Benedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Benoit de St. Maures 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' (1160) Benvolio in 'Romeo and Juliet' Bermudas Bernabo in Boccaccio's 'Decameron' Berni's 'Orlando Innamorato' Bertram in 'All's Well that Ends Well' Beyersdorff's, Robert, 'Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare' Bianca in Othello Bierfreund, Theodor Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Bishop of Ely in 'Henry V.' Blackfriars Theatre Blade's 'Shakespeare and Typography' Blanch in 'King John' Blount, Edward Boaden Boccaccio's plays Boece's, Hector, 'Scotorum Historiæ' Boétie, Estienne de la, Montaigne's friendship for Bolingbroke in 'Richard II.' 'Book of Martyrs, Foxe's 'Book of Troy,' Lydgate's 'Booke of Ayres' (1601) 'Booke of Plaies, and Notes thereon,' by Dr. Simon Forman Börne Bosworth Field in 'Richard III.' Bothwell, Earl of Bottom in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Boyet in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Brabantio in 'Othello' Brandes, George Bright, James Heywood, 267 Briseida in Benoit's 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' (1160) Brown, Henry Browning, Robert Browne's, Sir Thomas, 'Religio Medici' (1642) Brown's, C. A., 'Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems' Brunnhofer, 350 Bruno's, Giordano, supposed influence over Shakespeare 'Brut,' by Layamon (1205) Brutus, Junius, in 'Coriolanus' ----Marcus, in 'Julius Cæsar' Bryan, George Buckingham, Duke of, in 'Richard III.' Bucknill, Dr., on Shakespeare's Medical Knowledge Burbage, James ----Richard, actor Burghley, Lord Butler, Samuel Byron

CADE, Jack, in 'Henry VI.' 'Cæsar's Fall' (1602) Caius Lucius in 'Cymbeline' Calchas in 'Troilus and Cressida' Calderon Calianax in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Caliban in the 'Tempest' Calphurnia in 'Julius Cæsar' Cambyses Camden, William Camillo in 'Winter's Tale' Campbell's, Lord, Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements 'Candelajo,' by Giordano Bruno 'Candide,' by Voltaire Caphis in 'Timon of Athens' Capulet in 'Romeo and Juliet' Carleton, Sir Dudley 'Carmosine,' by De Musset Carr, Robert, Viscount Rochester and Earl of Somerset, James I.'s favourite--Lady Essex's marriage with-- Crime and fall of Casca in 'Julius Cæsar' Cassio in 'Othello' Cassius in 'Cæsar' Catesby, Sir William, in 'Richard III.' 'Catiline,' by Ben Jonson Cato Cavalieri, Tommaso de' Cavendishs, George, 'Relics of Cardinal Wolsey' Cecil, Sir Robert Celia in 'As You Like It' Ceres in the 'Tempest' Cerimon in 'Pericles' Cervantes 'Don Quixote' Chalmers, Alexander Chamberlain, John Chapman Charlcote Charmian in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Chaucer Chettle, Henry Chief-justice in 'Henry IV.' Christian IV. of Denmark Christopher Sly in 'Taming of the Shrew' 'Chronicle History of King Leir' Cicero Cinna in 'Julius Cæsar' Cinthio 'Clärchen,' Goethe's Clarence, George, Duke of, in 'Richard III.' Clarendon's estimate of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke Claudio in-- 'Measure for Measure' 'Much Ado About Nothing' 'Clavigo,' by Goethe Cleopatra, in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Cleopatra,' by Daniel (1594) Clifford, Lord, in 'Henry VI.' 'Cloaca Maxima,' 181 Cloten in 'Cymbeline' Clown in-- 'All's Well that Ends Well, or 'Love's Labour's Won' 'Othello' 'Twelfth Night' Cobham, Lord Cobweb in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Coleridge 'Colin Clouts come Home Again,' by Spenser Colliers 'Shakespeare's Library' 'Comedia von der shönen Sidea,' by Jacob Ayrer 'Comedy of Errors' (1589-1591) Cominius in 'Coriolanus' Commedia dell' Arte 'Comus,' by Milton Condell 'Confessio Amantis,' by John Gower 'Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle, by Alfred de Musset Conrad, Hermann 'Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron,' by Chapman Constable, Henry Constance in 'King John' 'Contemporary History,' Wilson's Copernicus Cordelia in 'King Lear' Corin in 'As You Like It' 'Coriolanus' ---- Date of production--Shakespeare's hatred of the masses ---- Dramatic power of--Inconsistencies in Corneille Coryat Costard in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' Countess in 'Alls Well that Ends Well,' Cranmer in 'Henry VIII.,' Cressida in 'Troilus and Cressida,' Crispinus in 'Poetaster,' by Ben Jonson, Curius in Jonson's 'Catiline' 'Cymbeline' (1610), Shakespeare's country idyll and conception of morality in--Dual contrast and chief characters in Cynthia in Lyly's 'Endymion' 'Cynthia's Revels,' by Jonson

'DÆMONOLOGIE,' by James I. Dame Quickly in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Damon and Pythias in the Hero and Leander puppet-show in Jonson's 'Bartholomew Fair' Daniel, Samuel Danvers, Sir Charles Dares Phrygius, 'De Bello Trojano' 'Darius,' Count Stirling's 'Dark Lady,' or Mary Fitton (see that title) Darley, George Darnley, Lord Daudet's 'Sappho' 'Daughter of the Air' (1664) Dauphin in-- 'Henry V.' 'King John' Davenant, Mrs., courted by Shakespeare ---- Sir William, probable son of W. Shakespeare Davison's 'Poetical Rhapsody,' 'Day of the Seven Sleepers,' by T. L. Heiberg 'De Amicitia,' by Cicero 'De Analogia,' by Julius Cæsar 'De Bello Trojano,' by Dares Phrygius 'De Bello Trojano,' by Dictys Cretensis 'De la Causa' by Giordano Bruno 'Decameron,' by Boccaccio Decius in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Declaration of Popish Impostures,' by Harsnet 'Defence of Poesy,' by Sir Philip Sidney (1583) Dekker "Delia," by Daniel Delius, Nikolaus Demetrius in 'Midsummer Dream' 'Der bestrafte Brudermord' 'Der junge Tischermeister,' by Tieck 'Der Kinder Sünde der Vater Fluck,' by Paul Heyse Desdemona in 'Othello' Desportes, Philippe 'Dial of Princes,' by Guevara 'Diana,' by Montemayor (1520-1562) Diana in 'Pericles' Dick in 'Henry VI.' (2nd Part) 'Dictionary of National Biography,' by Robert Devereux Dictys Cretensis' 'De Bello Trojano' 'Die Räuber,' by Schiller Digges, Leonard Diomedes in Benoit's 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' 'Troilus and Cressida' Dionyza in 'Pericles' 'Discour sur la Tragédie,' by Voltaire 'Discoveries,' by Ben Jonson 'Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana' (1596) Doctor Caius in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 'Dr. Faustus,' by Marlowe Dogberry in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Dolabella in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Doll Tearsheet in 'Henry IV.' 'Doll's House' Don John, in 'Much Ado About Nothing' 'Don Juan,' by Byron ----Mozart's Don Pedro in 'Much Ado About Nothing' 'Don Quixote,' by Cervantes Donne, Dr. John Douglas in 'Henry IV.' Dowden Drake, Sir Francis Drayton Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare Dromio of Syracuse in 'Comedy of Errors' Drummond, William Dryden Duke in-- 'As You Like It' 'Measure for Measure' 'Othello' 'Twelfth Night' Dumain in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Dürer's, Albert, 'Melancholia'

EAST India Company 'Eastward Ho!' by Chapman Eden's 'Historye of Travaile in East and West Indies' (1577) Edgar in 'King Lear' Edmund in 'King Lear' 'Edward II.,' by C. Marlowe 'Edward III.,' authorship of Edward IV. in-- 'Henry VI.' 'Richard III.' Edward V., son of Edward IV., in 'Richard III.' Edward, Prince of Wales, in 'Henry VI.' 'El Principe Constante' 'El Secreto a Voces' Elizabeth, Princess, her marriage with the Elector Palatine, Tempest written for ---- Queen Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., in 'Richard III.' 'Elves,' by J. L. Heiberg Elze, Karl Emerson's 'Representative Men' Emilia in-- 'Othello,' 'Two Noble Kinsmen' 'Endymion,' by John Lyly Enobarbus in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' Escalus in 'Measure for Measure,' 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy,' by Dryden Essex, Earl of ---- Lady Frances, afterwards Lady Somerset ---- Lettice, Countess of Eudemus in 'Sejanus' Euphrasea or Bellario in 'Philaster,' by Beaumont and Fletcher 'Euphues,' by Lyly Evadne in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Evans, Sir Hugh, in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 'Every Man in His Humour' (1595), by Ben Jonson 'Every Man out of His Humour' (1599), by Ben Jonson

FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS, by Fletcher Falstaff in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor 'Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, containing the Honorable Battell of Agin-court Farmer, Dr. 'Fasti,' by Ovid Faulconbridge in King John Faust Feis', Jacob, 'Shakespeare and Montaigne' Fenton in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Ferdinand in 'Tempest' Fiammetta, Maria 'Filostrato,' by Boccaccio Fiorentino's, Sir Giovanni, 'Il Pecorone' (1558) Fitton's, Mary, relations with Shakespeare and Earl of Pembroke-- Addressed in the Sonnets as the Dark Lady Fitton, Anne, elder sister of Mary Fitton Flaubert Flavina in 'Two Noble Kinsmen' Flavius in-- 'Julius Cæsar' 'Timon of Athens' Fleance in 'Macbeth' Fleay Fletcher's, John, plays and career Florio Florizel in 'Winter's Tale' Fluellen in 'Henry V.' Fool in 'King Lear' Ford, Master and Mistress, in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Forest of Arden in 'As You Like It' Forman, Dr. Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, in 'Hamlet' Fortunate Shipwreck Frampton's translation of 'Marco Polo' (1579) Frederick in 'As You Like It' Frederick the Great and Voltaire Freiligrath Friar Bacon, by Greene Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet Friesen, Herr von Fuller Fulvia, wife of Mark Antony, 465, 468, 473 Fulvia in Jonson's Catiline, 337 Furnivall, 334, 578, 600, 608-610

'GALLIC WAR,' Cæsar's Gallus in Ben Jonsons 'Poetaster' 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' Gardiner Garnett, Richard Garnier's 'Henriade' Gaveston in C. Marlowe's 'Edward II.' Gawsworth Church, in 'Cheshire' Gerutha in 'Saxo Grammaticus' Gervinus 'Gesta Romanorum' Ghost in 'Hamlet' 'Gilette of Narbonne,' Boccaccio's story of Giordano Bruno. _See_ Bruno Glendower in 'Henry IV.' Globe Theatre Gloucester, Duke of, in-- 'Henry VI.' 'King Lear,' Gloucester, Richard, Earl of, in 'Henry VI.,' afterwards 'Richard III.' Gobbo in 'Merchant of Venice' Goethe Gogol's 'Revisor' Golding's, Arthur, translation of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' Gondomar, Count of Goneril in 'King Lear' Gontscharoff Gonzago in 'Hamlet' Gonzalo in the 'Tempest' Gosse 'Gossip from a Muniment-Room, being Passages in the lives of Anne and Mary Fitton,' published by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate Gosson, Stephen Gower, John Gracioso Gravedigger in 'Hamlet' Green, Robert, plays of Shakespeare attacked by ---- Thomas, Shakespeare's cousin Gremio in 'Taming of the Shrew' Gretchen in Goethe's 'Faust' Greville, Fulk Griseida or Cryseida in Boccaccio's 'Filostrato' 'Groat's Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance' by Greene (1592) Guarini's 'Pastor Fido' Guiderius in 'Cymbeline' Guido delle Columne Guildenstern in 'Hamlet' Gull's Hornebooke' (1609), by Dekker, 539 Gunpowder Plot

HALL, Elizabeth, Shakespeare's grand-daughter ---- John, Dr., husband of Susanna Shakespeare Hall, William Hallan, Brown Halliwell-Phillips Hamlet Antecedents in fiction, history, and drama--Parallels to circumstances in Criticism on dramatic art in--Shakespeare's attack on Kemp and eulogy of Tarlton--Danish March played in Dramatic features of Influence of 'Hamlet' on foreign literature Local colour in Montaigne's and Giordano Bruno's influence over Shakespeare-- Parallels in Lyly's 'Euphues' to 'Hamlet' Ophelia's relations with Hamlet compared with 'Faust' Personal element in Psychology of Hansen, Adolf Harington, Sir John Lord Harrison, Rev. W. A. Harsnet's 'Declaration of Popish Impostures' Hart, Joan, Shakespeare's sister ---- William, Shakespeare's nephew Hart's attack on Shakespeare in 1848 Harvey Hastings, Lord, in 'Richard III.' Hathaway, Anne, her marriage with Shakespeare--Children of William Hecate in 'Macbeth' 'Hecatomithi,' by Giraldi Cinthio (1565) Hector Hector in 'Troilus and Cressida' Heiberg, J. L. Heine, Heinrich Helen in 'Troilus and Cressida' Helena in-- 'All's Well that Ends Well' 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Helwys, Sir Gervase Heminge 'Henriade,' by Garnier 'Henry IV.' (1597), chief characters and scenes in--Freshness and perfection of the play 'Henry IV.':-- First Part Second Part 'Henry V.,' or Prince of Wales in 'Henry IV.' (1599), as a national drama--Patriotism and Chauvinism of--Vision of a greater England in--'Henry V.' as typical English hero 'Henry VI.':-- First Part Second Part Third Part Trilogy--Greene attacking Shakespeare on Shakespeare's authorship of 'Henry VIII.,' Shakespeare's part in Henry, Prince, son of James I. Henslow 'Heptameron of Civil Discourses,' by George Whetstone (1582) Herbert William. _See_ Earl of Pembroke Hericault, C. d' Hermann, Conrad Hermia in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Hermione in 'Winter's Tale' Hermogenes in 'Poetaster,' by Jonson 'Hero and Leander,' by C. Marlowe (1598) 'Hero and Leander,' or 'Touchstone of True Love,' by Ben Jonson Hero in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Hertzberg, W. Heyse's, Paul, 'Der Kinder Sünde der Vater Fluch' Hieronimo in Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy' Hippolyta in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' (1160), by Benoit de St. Maure 'Histoires Tragiques,' by Belleforest 'Historia Trojana,' by Guido delle Columne 'History of the Rebellion,' by Clarendon 'Historye of Travaile in East and West Indies' (1577), by Eden 'Histriomastix', by Prynne Hogarth Holberg Holinshed's Chronicle Holofernes in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Homer's 'Iliad' compared with 'Troilus and Cressida'

Horace Horatio in 'Hamlet' Hotspur or Henry Percy in 'Henry IV.' --Mastery of the character-drawing --Achilles compared with 'House of Fame,' by Chaucer Hubert de Burgh in 'King John,' Hudson, H. N. Hughes, William Hunsdon, Lord 'Hystoria novellamente ritrovata di dui nobili Amanti,' by Luigi da Porta

IACHIMO in 'Cymbeline' Iago in 'Othello' Iden in 'Henry VI.' Ides of March in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Il Pecorone,' by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino (1558) 'Iliad' Imogen in 'Cymbeline' 'Inganni' Ingleby Inigo Jones 'Iphigenia in Aulis,' by Racine 'Iphigenia in Tauris,' by Goethe Iras in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Iris in the 'Tempest' Isaac, Hermann Isabella in 'Measure for Measure' Italy visited by Shakespeare

JAGGARD, bookseller James I. of England and VI. of Scotland Jameson, Mrs. Jamy in 'Henry V.' Jaques in 'As You Like It' Jeanne d'Arc 'Jeppe pas Bjerget,' by Ludwig Holberg Jessica in 'Merchant of Venice' 'Jew of Malta,' by C. Marlowe Joan of Arc or La Pucelle in 'Henry VI.' John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in 'Richard II.' Jonson, Ben, his career, plays, and learning--Shakespeare compared with Julia in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,'; in the 'Poetaster' Juliet in-- 'Measure for Measure' Romeo and Juliet 'Julius Cæsar' (1601), Plutarch's Lives forming material for-- Defective representation of Cæsar's character--Characters of Brutus and Portia--Antony's Oration Juno in the 'Tempest' Jupiter in 'Cymbeline'

'KABALE UND LIEBE,' by Schiller Kalisch 'Käthchen von Heilbronn,' by Kleist Katherine in-- 'Henry V.' 'Henry VIII.' 'Taming of the Shrew' Kemp, William, actor Kent, Earl of, in 'King Lear' 'Kind-hart's Dreame' King in 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'King and no King,' by Beaumont and Fletcher King Claudius in 'Hamlet' King Duncan in 'Macbeth' 'King John,' Shakespeare's sorrow at death of Hamnet --Old play basis for--Patriotism and chief characters in 'King Lear' Ingratitude denounced by Shakespeare in--Sources of, 449-453 Titanic tragedy of human life--Construction of, 454-460 'King Leir' King of France in-- 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's Labour's Won' 'King John' 'King Lear' 'Kitchen-Stuff Woman,' by W. Kemp Kleist Klinger, Max Knight 'Knight's Conjuring' (1607), by Dekker Knollys, Sir William, admirer of Mary Fitton Kohélet König Krasinskis 'Undivine Comedy' and 'Temptation' Kreyssig Kronborg Kyd

'LA CENA DE LE CENERI,' by Giordano Bruno 'La Dama Duende' 'La Gran Cenobia' 'La Hija del Ayre' 'La Princesse d'Elde,' by Molière 'La Puente de Mantible' 'La sfortunata morte di due infelicissimi amanti,' by Bandello 'La Teseide, by Boccaccio' 'La Tosca,' by Victorien Sardou 'La Vida es Sueño' 'Lady of the May,' by Sir Philip Sidney Laertes in 'Hamlet' Lafeu in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's Labour's Won' Lambert, Edmund ---- John Languet's tenderness for Philip Sidney Launce in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Launcelot in 'Merchant of Venice' Lavinia in 'Titus Andronicus' Layamons 'Brut' (1205) Le Beau in 'As You Like It' Leander in Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' Sidney, 'Life of Shakespeare' Leicester, Earl of Lennox in 'Macbeth' Leonato in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Leonine in 'Pericles' Leontes in 'Winter's Tale' Lepidus in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Life is a Dream,' by Calderon (1635) Limoges in 'King John' Lion in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Livia in 'Sejanus' Livy 'Locrine' Lodge, Thomas 'London Prodigal' (1605) Longaville in 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Lord Cromwell' (1613) Lord Mayor of London in 'Richard III.' Lorenzo in 'Merchant of Venice' 'Los Empeños de un Acaso' Lougher, John, Mary Fitton's second husband 'Love's Labour's Lost' (1589), matter, style, and motives of 'Love's Labour's Won,' or 'All's Well that Ends Well' (_see_ that title) 'Lucan,' Marlowe's translation of Lucentio in 'Taming of the Shrew' Lucetta in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona Luciana in 'Comedy of Errors' Lucio in 'Measure for Measure' Lucius in-- 'Julius Cæsar' 'Timon of Athens' 'Titus Andronicus' 'Lucrece,' relation to painting in Lucy, Sir Thomas, Shakespeare's relations with Ludovico in 'Othello' Ludwig, Otto Lupercal Feast in 'Julius Cæsar' Lychorida in 'Pericles' Lydgate Lyly, John Lysander in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Lysimachus in Pericles

'MACBETH' (1604-1605), similarity between 'Hamlet' and 'Macbeth' Belief in Witches--Defective text--Macbeth's children--Moral lesson ---- Lady, in 'Macbeth' Macduff in 'Macbeth' ---- Lady, in 'Macbeth' Macmorris in 'Henry V.' Magna Charta ignored by Shakespeare 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Malcolm in 'Macbeth' 'Malcontent,' by Marston Malone, Edmund Malvolio in 'Twelfth Night' Mamillius in 'Winter's Tale' 'Manfred,' by Byron Manningham, John 'Marco Polo,' Frampton's translation of (1579) Mardian in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Margaret in 'Much Ado About Nothing' ---- Henry VI.'s widow in 'Richard III.' ---- of Anjou in 'Henry VI.' Maria in-- 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Twelfth Night' Mariana in 'Measure for Measure' Marianus, Byzantine scholar Marina in 'Pericles' Marlowe, Christopher, English tragedy created by Shakespeare influenced by Marlowe Marston, John Marullus in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Masque of Blackness,' by Ben Jonson 'Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn,' by Beaumont Massey Massinger Mauvissière, French ambassador 'Maydes Metamorphosis,' by Lyly 'Measure for Measure,' chief characters and scenes in--Pessimism and monarchical tone of Meissner, Johan 'Melancholia,' by Albert Dürer Melantius in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Menelaus in 'Troilus and Cressida' Menenius in 'Coriolanus' 'Menœchmi' of Plautus Mephistopheles in 'Faust' 'Merchant of Venice' (1596-1598), Shakespeare's craving for wealth and position--Sources of--Chief characters in--Shakespeare's love of music shown in Mercutio in 'Romeo and Juliet' Meres (1598) 'Mermaid' Tavern 'Merry Wives of Windsor' (1599), prosaic and bourgeois tone of--Fairy scenes in 'Metamorphoses', Ovid's Michael Angelo Mickiewicz Middleton 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Miles Gloriosus' Milton Minto, Professor Miranda in the 'Tempest' 'Mirror of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir Iohn Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham,' by John Weever 'Mirrour of Policie' (1598) 'Miseries of Enforced Marriage', by George Wilkins Mistress Overdone in 'Measure for Measure' 'Mitre' Tavern Molière Mommsen Montague in 'Romeo and Juliet' Montaigne Montemayor's 'Diana' Montgomery, Lord Moonshine in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' More's 'Utopia' 'Mort de César,' by Voltaire Mortimer in 'Henry IV.' Moth in 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Much Ado About Nothing' Muley Hamlet or Muley Mahomet in 'G. Peele's Battle of Alcazar' Munday Musset, Alfred de Mustard-seed in 'Midsummer Nights Dream' 'Mydas,' by John Lyly

NASH, Thomas 'Natural History,' by Pliny 'Natural History of the Insects mentioned by Shakespeare,' by R. Paterson (1841) Navarre, King of, in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Neile, Bishop Nerissa in 'Merchant of Venice' Nestor in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'New Inn,' by Ben Jonson 'New Shakspere Society's Transactions' Newdigate-Newdegate, Lady 'News of Purgatory,' by Tarlton Nicholson Niels Steno on Geology Nietzsche 'Night Raven,' by Samuel Rowland 'Nine Daies Wonder,' by Kemp Norfolk, Duke of, in-- 'Richard II.' 'Richard III.' North Northampton, Lord Northumberland, Earl of, in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Richard II.' Nottingham, Lord 'Nouvelles Françaises du 14me Siècle' 'Nugæ Antiquæ,' by Rev. H. Harington (1779) Nurse in 'Romeo and Juliet' 'Nutcrackers,' by J. L. Heiberg Nym in 'Merry Wives of Windsor'

OBERON in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Octavia in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Octavius Cæsar in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Odyssey' Oehlenschläger Oldcastle, Sir John. _See_ Falstaff Oldys Oliver in 'As You Like It' Olivia in 'Twelfth Night' 'On Poet-Ape,' by Ben Jonson Ophelia in 'Hamlet' Orlando in 'As You Like It' 'Orlando Furioso,' Ariosto's 'Orlando Innamorato,' by Berni Osrick in 'Hamlet' 'Othello' (1605) Iago's character and significance Theme and origin of--Othello as a monograph Overbury, Sir Thomas Ovid Oxford Oxford, Earl of

'PÆAN TRIUMPHALL,' by Drayton Wage, Mr., Mrs., and Anne, in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 'Palace of Pleasure,' by Paynter Palamon in 'Two Noble Kinsmen' Palatine Anthology, The 'Palladis Tamia,' by Francis (1598) Pandarus in 'Troilus and Cressida' Pandulph in 'King John,' 'Panegyrike Congratulatorie to the King's Majestie,' by Samuel Daniel Panurge compared with Sir John Falstaff Paris in-- 'Romeo and Juliet' 'Troilus and Cressida' Parolles in 'Love's Labour's Won,' or 'All's Well that Ends Well' Pascal 'Passionate Pilgrim' (1599) 'Pastor Fido,' by Guarini Patroclus in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'Patterne of Paynfull Adventures,' by Lawrence Twine Patterson's, R., 'Natural History of the Insects mentioned by Shakespeare' (1841) Paulina in 'Winter's Tale' Pavier Paynter's 'Palace of Pleasure' Pease-blossom in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Peele, George Pembroke, Lady Mary ---- William Herbert, Earl of, passionately loved by Shakespeare --Sonnets addressed to Mary Fitton's relations with--Career of 'Penates,' by Ben Jonson 'Pensées,' by Pascal Percy, Henry. _See_ Hotspur Lady, wife of Hotspur, in 'Henry IV.' Perdita in 'Winter's Tale' 'Pericles,' Shakespeare's collaboration with Wilkins and Rowley --Corneille compared with Shakespeare--Shakespeare's restoration to happiness 'Persæ' of Æschylus Peter in 'Romeo and Juliet' Petrarch Petruchio in 'Taming of the Shrew' Phebe in 'As You Like It' 'Phèdre,' by Racine 'Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Philippi, 307 Phrynia in 'Timon of Athens' 'Pimlyco, or Runne Redcap' (1609) Pindar Piombo, Sebastian del Pisanio in 'Cymbeline' Pistol in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Henry V.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Plato Platonism in Shakespeare's Sonnets Plautus 'Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie,' by John Davies 'Pleasant Comedie called Common Conditions' Pliny's 'Natural History' Plutarch 'Poetaster,' by Ben Jonson (1601) 'Poetical Rhapsody,' by Davison 'Poet's Vision and a Prince's Glorie,' by Thomas Greene Poins in 'Henry IV.' Polixenes in 'Winter's Tale' Polonius in 'Hamlet' Polwheele, William, Mary Fitton's first husband Pompey in 'Measure for Measure' Pompey the Great Pope, Thomas Porter in 'Macbeth' Portia in-- 'Julius Cæsar' 'Merchant of Venice' Posthumus in 'Cymbeline' 'Précieuses Ridicules' Priam in 'Troilus and Cressida' Princess in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Propertius Prospero in the 'Tempest' Proteus in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Provost in 'Measure for Measure' Prynne's 'Histriomastix' 'Psyché,' by Molière Puck in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Puritanism hated and attacked by Shakespeare Pushkin, influence of 'Hamlet' on Pyramus in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Pyrgopolinices Pythagoreans

QUEEN in-- 'Cymbeline' 'Hamlet' 'Queen of Corinth' Quince in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Quiney, Adrian ---- Richard ---- Thomas, husband of Judith Shakespeare

RABELAIS compared with Shakespeare Racine Raigne of King Edward Third (1596) Raleigh, Sir Walter, career of--Accusations against--Fate of 'Ralph Roister Doister' Raoul le Fevre's 'Recueil des Histoires de Troyes' 'Ratsey's Ghost' Regan in 'King Lear' 'Relics of Cardinal Wolsey,' by George Cavendish 'Religio Medici,' by Sir Th. Browne Renaissance 'Representative Men,' by Emerson 'Return from Parnassus' (1606), by Ben Jonson 'Revisor,' by Gogol Rich, Lady Penelope 'Richard II.,' C. Marlowe's Edward II. used by Shakespeare as model for 'Richard III.,' principal scenes and classic tendency of Richard of York. _See_ York and Gloucester Richter, Jean Paul 'Right Excellent and Famous History of Promos and Cassandra' (1578), by George Whetstone Rivers, Earl, in 'Richard III.' Rizzio Rochester, Viscount. _See_ Robert Carr Roderigo in 'Othello' Romano, Giulio, in 'Winter's Tale' 'Romeo and Juliet' (1591), Romanesque structure of --Conception of love in Ronsard Rosalind in 'As You Like It' Rosaline in-- 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Romeo and Juliet' 'Rosalynde,' by Lodge Rosencrantz in 'Hamlet' Rosse in 'Macbeth' Rossetti, W. M. Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer Rowland's, Samuel, 'Night Raven' Rowley, William Rushtons 'Shakespeare's Euphuism' (1871) Russell, Mrs. Anne Russell, Mrs. Bess Rutland, Lord Rutland's death in 'Henry VI.,

SACKVILLE, Thomas 'Sad Shepherd, The,' by Ben Jonson Sadler, Hamlet, Shakespeare's friend Sallust in 'Catiline,' by Ben Jonson 'Sappho,' by Daudet Sardou's, Victorien, La Tosca 'Satiromastix,' by Marston and Dekker Saturninus in 'Titus Andronicus' Saxo Grammaticus Scheffler, Ludwig von Schiller 'School of Abuse,' by Stephen Gosson (1579) Schopenhauer Schück, Henry 'Scotorum Historiæ,' by Hector Boece Seasons of Shakspeare's Plays Sebastian in-- 'Tempest' 'Twelfth Night, Segar, Maister William, Garter King at Armes, notebook of 'Sejanus,' by Ben Jonson (1603) Seneca, poet 'Sententiæ Pueriles' Servilia, Brutus's mother Servilius in Timon of Athens Seven Ages of Man, Shakespeare's speech in 'As You Like It' Sextus in 'Rape of Lucrece' Sextus Pompeius in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Seymour's, Lord William, marriage with Arabella Stuart Shadow of the Night, by Chapman (1594) Shakespeare, John, father of William Shakespeare ---- Richard, grandfather of William Shakespeare ---- William, Anne Hathaway's marriage with--Shakespeare's conception of relation of the sexes Aristocratic principles of--Shakespeare's hatred of the masses, Associates of Attacks upon--The Baconian Theory Biographies of Bohemian life and dissipation of Brilliant and happiest period of--Feminine types belonging to it Bruno's, Giordano, supposed influence over Corneille, Pierre, compared with Davenant, Mrs., courted by Heath of Diction of Dramatic art, Shakespeare's conception of Elizabeth, Queen, cause of Shakespeare's coolness towards Elizabethan England in the youth of Euphuism and pedantry ridiculed by--Traces of John Lyly's Euphues' in 'Hamlet' Fitton, Mary, or the Dark Lady, loved by Greene's, Robert, attack on Hamnet, son of Shakespeare's sorrow at death of Italy visited by--Discussion on James I.'s patronage of--Relations between Jonson, Ben, compared with--Relations between Judith, daughter of Kemp's, actor, relations with Knowledge of physical and philosophical London, Shakespeare's first arrival in--Buildings, costumes, manners --Political and religious conditions of the period Lucy's, Sir Thomas, relations with--Shakespeare's consequent departure from Stratford Marlowe's, C., influence on Melancholy, pessimism, and misanthropy of causes of--Shakespeare's restoration to happiness Montaigne's influence over Morality--Shakespeare's conception of true morality Music, Shakespeare's love of Nature and solitude, Shakespeare's love and longing for Painting described by Parentage and boyhood of Shakespeare at Stratford Pembroke, William Herbert, Earl of, passionately loved by-- Shakespeare's Platonism and idolatry in friendship Position of Prosperity and wealth of--Shakespeare's purchase of New Place, houses, and land--Money transactions and lawsuits Puritanism hated and attacked by Rabelais compared with Return of Shakespeare to Stratford--Surroundings of--Visit of Shakespeare to London--Last years of his life Rivalry, Shakespeare's sense of Self-transformation, Shakespeare's power of Susannah, daughter of Tarlton eulogised by Tavern life of Theatres in time of, situation and arrangements of--Costumes, players and audiences Will of Womanhood, Shakespeare's ideal of Women, Shakespeare's contempt for 'Shakespeare and Montaigne,' by Jacob Feis 'Shakespeare and Typography,' Blades 'Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems,' by C. A. Brown 'Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse,' by Ingleby 'Shakespeare's Euphuism,' by Rushton (1871) 'Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible,' by Bishop Charles Wordsworth 'Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements,' by Lord Campbell 'Shakespeare's Library, Collier's' 'Shakespeare's Mulberry Tree,' sung by Garrick 'Shakespearean Myth,' by Appleton Morgan Shallow in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Sheffield, Countess of Shelley 'Shepheard's Spring Song for the Entertainment of King James,' by Henry Chettle 'Shepherdess Felismena' 'Shepherd's Calendar,' by Spenser Sheppard Sherborne 'Shirley's Eulogy' of Beaumont and Fletcher Shottery, Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shrewsbury battlefield in 'Henry IV.' Shylock in 'Merchant of Venice' Sicinius in Coriolanus Sidney, Sir Philip Silence, Justice, in 'Henry IV.' 'Silent Woman, The,' by Ben Jonson (1609) Silvayn's, Alexander, 'Orator' Silvia in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Simonides in 'Pericles' Simpson, Mr. Richard Sir Andrew Aguecheek in 'Twelfth Night,' Sir John Oldcastle (1600) Sir Tobby Belch in 'Twelfth Night' Slender in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Slowacki Smith in Henry VI. Smith, William, founding the Baconian Theory (1856) Smith's, Thomas, 'Voiage and Entertainement in Rushia' Snug in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Socrates 'Apology' 'Solyman and Perseda,' by Kyd Somer, Sir George Somerset, Earl of _See_ Robert Carr Sonnets (1601), melancholy and sadness of--Date of Pembroke and Mary Fitton addressed in Shakespeare's Platonism, idolatry in friendship, and inner life shown in--Form and poetic value of Sören Kierkegaard Southampton, Earl of, Shakespeare's patron--Conspiracy of Southampton, Lady Southwell, Elizabeth ---- Robert Spaccio, by Giordano Bruno Spanish Alliance 'Spanish Tragedy,' by Kyd Spedding James Speed in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Spenser Stanley, Lord, in Richard III. Stationers' Register Statius' 'Thebaide' Stedefeld, G. F. Stephano in the 'Tempest' Stern, Alfred Stirling's, Count, 'Darius' Story of 'Troylus and Pandor' (1515) Stows Summarie of the Chronicles of England, 111 Straparola's Two Lovers of Pisa Stratford on Avon-- Birth of Shakespeare at--Description of town and Shakespeare's boyhood at Departure of Shakespeare from Property bought by Shakespeare at Shakespeare restoring position and prosperity of his family at Return of Shakespeare to--Surroundings of--Visit of Shakespeare to London--Last years of his life at Stuart, Arabella ---- Mary, mother of James I. Study of Shakespeare, by Swinburne Sturley, Abraham Suffolk, Duke of, in 'Henry VI.' Sullivan, E. Summarie of the Chronicles of England, by Stow Surrey, Henry, Earl of 'Swan' Theatre Swinburne Sycorax in the Tempest Sylvia in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Symonds, John Addington Symons, Arthur Syren, literary club founded by Sir Walter Raleigh

TADEMA, ALMA-- Tagelied Tailor's, Robert, 'Hog has Lost his Pearl' (1614) Taine Talbot, Lord 'Tamburlaine the Great,' by C. Marlowe 'Taming of the Shrew' (1596) Tamora in 'Titus Andronicus' 'Tancred and Gismunda' Tantalus in Seneca's 'Thyestes' Tarlton, actor, Shakespeare's eulogy of 'Tarlton's Jests and News, &c.' 'Tartuffe,' by Molière 'Tears of Fancie,' by Watson 'Tears of the Muses,' by Spenser 'Tempest' (1612-1613) Dramatic value of--Chief characters in--Shakespeare's farewell to Art Sources of Wedding of Princess Elizabeth celebrated by Temptation, by Krasinski Thaisa in Pericles 'The Case is Altered,' by Ben Jonson 'The Hog has Lost His Pearl' (1614), by Robert Tailor 'The Orator,' by Alexander Silvayn 'The Prince,' 'The Puritan' (1607) 'The Supposes' 'The Theatre,' first play-house erected in London and owned by James Burbage 'The Witch,' by Middleton 'Theatre of God's Judgements' (1597) 'Theatrum Licentia,' in Laquei Ridiculosi (1616) 'Thebaide,' by Statius 'Théodore, Vierge et Martyre,' by Pierre Corneille Thersites in 'Troilus and Cressida' Theseus in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Two Noble Kinsmen' 'Third Blast of Retraite from Plaies' (1580) Thisbe in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Thorpe, Thomas Thorvaldsen 'Thyestes,' by Seneca Thyreus in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Tiberius in Sejanus, by Ben Jonson Tibullus in Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster' Tieck Timandra in 'Timon of Athens' 'Timbreo of Candona,' Bandello's story of 'Times displayed in Six Sestyads,' by Sheppard 'Timon of Athens,' sources of--Shakespeare's part and purpose in--Coriolanus compared with Timon--Non-Shakespearian elements in--Shakespeare's bitterness and hatred of mankind, Titania in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Titus and Vespasian' (1592) 'Titus Andronicus,' Shakespeare's authorship of Titus Lartius in "Coriolanus" Tolstoi, influence of 'Hamlet' on 'To the Majestie of King James, a Gratulatorie Poem,' by Michael Drayton Tophas, Sir, in John Lyly's 'Endymion' 'Tottel's Miscellany' (1557) 'Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem,' motto on sign of Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's allusion to Touchstone in 'As You Like It' Touchstone of True Love, or Hero and Leander, by Ben Jonson (_see_ that title) 'Tragedie of Antonie' 'Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,' etc., etc. 'Travels of Three English Brothers' 'Treatise on Education,' by Plutarch 'Triar Table of the Order of Shakespeare's Plays,' by Furnival Trinculo in the 'Tempest' 'Troilus and Cressida' (1609) Contempt for women portrayed in Cressida's character Historical material for Homer's 'Iliad' compared with Scorn of woman's guile and public stupidity in 'Troilus and Cressida,' by Chaucer, (1630) 'Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, with the discouerie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named the Bastard Fawconbridge): also the death of King John at Swinstead Abbey' Troy, destruction of 'True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death of the good King Henrie the Sixt' 'True Tragedy of Richard III.' Tschischwitz Tubal in 'Merchant of Venice' Tucca in Dekker's 'Satiromastix' Türck, Hermann Turgueneff, influence of 'Hamlet' on 'Turkish Mahomet and Hyren the Fair Greek,' by George Peele Turner, Mrs. 'Twelfth Night' (1601), gibes at Puritanism and chief characters in--Melancholy tone of Twine's, Lawrence, 'Patterne of Paynfull Adventures' 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' 'Two Lovers of Pisa,' by Straparola 'Two Noble Kinsmen,' Shakespeare's and Fletcher's parts in Tybalt in 'Romeo and Juliet' Tycho Brahe Tyler, Mr. Thomas Tyrone's, O'Neil, Earl of, rebellion in Ireland Tyrwhitt, Thomas

ULYSSES in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'Ulysses von Ithacia,' by Holberg 'Undivine Comedy,' by Krasinski 'Utopia,' More's

VALENTINE in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Venice Ventidius in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Venus and Adonis' (1590-1591), descriptions of nature in Vere, Bridget Verges in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Vernon, Lady Elizabeth, Earl of Southampton's marriage with Sir Richard in 'Henry IV.' Verona Vespasian in 'Titus and Vespasian' Victor Hugo Vidushakus Vigny, Alfred de Villiers, Sir George, James I.'s favourite Viola in 'Twelfth Night' Virgil in 'Poetaster,' &c., by Ben Jonson Virgilia in 'Coriolanus' Virginia 'Vittoria Corombona,' by Webster 'Voiage and Entertainement in Rushia,' by Th. Smith 'Volpone,' by Jonson Voltaire Voltemand in 'Hamlet' Volumnia in 'Coriolanus' Vorstius, Conrad

WALKER, Henry Wall in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Walsingham Ward, John, Vicar of Stratford Warner Warwick, Earl of, in-- 'Edward III.' 'Henry IV.' 'Henry VI.' Watkins, Lloyd Watson's 'Tears of Fancie,' sonnets Webster, John Weever, John 'Mirrors of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir John Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham' Weldon, Sir Anthony Werder, K. Weston, Richard Whetstone, George 'White Divel' (1612), by John Webster Whyte, Rowland Widow of Florence in 'Alls Well that Ends Well' or 'Love's Labour's Won' 'Wild Goose Chase,' by Fletcher 'Wilhelm Meister,' by Goethe Wilkins, George William Rufus, King William in 'As You Like It' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Williams in 'Henry V.' Willoughby, Ambrose Wilmecote Wilson, Arthur Wilton Winstanley Winter, Sir Edward 'Winter's Tale,' Greene supplying material for--Euphuism ridiculed in--Chief characters in Winwood, Lord Witches in 'Macbeth' 'Wit's Miserie,' by Thomas Lodge Witt, Jan de Wittenberg Wolsey in 'Henry VIII.' 'Woman-Hater,' by Fletcher Worcester in 'Henry IV.' Wordsworth 'Worthies,' by Fuller Wotton, Sir Henry Wrightman, Edward Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton, Wynkyn de Worde

YONG's, Bartholomew, translation of 'Diana' York in 'Richard II.' York, Duchess of, mother of Edward IV. in 'Richard III.' ---- Duke of, father of Edward IV., in 'Henry VI.' ---- Edward of. _See_ Edward IV. ---- Edward of, son of Edward IV. _See_ 'Edward V.' ---- Richard of, afterwards Earl of Gloucester and Richard III. _See_ Gloucester Yorkshire Tragedy" (1608)

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