The play is a marvellous piece of unflinching thought. Like all the greatest of the plays, it is so full of illustration of the main idea that it gives an illusion of an infinity like that of life. It is constructed closely and subtly for the stage. It is more full of the ingenuities of play-writing than any of the plays. The verse and the prose have that smoothness of happy ease which makes one think of Shakespeare not as a poet writing, but as a sun shining.

" ... It deserves with characters of brass A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time."

The thought of the play is penetrating rather than impassioned. The poetry follows the thought. There are cold lines like Death laying a hand on the blood. The faultless lyric, "Take, O take those lips away" occurs. Some say Fletcher wrote it, some Bacon. "Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love." The music of the great manner rings—

"Merciful Heaven! Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak, Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep."

The prose accompaniment to what is unrestrained in youth provides a cruel comedy.

Othello, the Moor of Venice.

Written. 1604 (?)

Published, in quarto, and in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. The tale appears in The Hecatomithi of G. B. Giraldi Cinthio. Shakespeare follows Cinthio in the main; but a few details suggest that he knew the story in an ampler version.

The Fable. Iago, ensign to Othello, the Moor of Venice, is jealous of Cassio, his lieutenant. He plots to oust Cassio from the lieutenancy.

Othello marries Desdemona, and sails with her to the wars in Cyprus. Iago resolves to make use of Desdemona to cause Cassio's downfall.

He procures Cassio's discharge from the lieutenancy by involving him in a drunken brawl. Cassio beseeches Desdemona to intercede with Othello for him. Iago hints to Othello that she has good reason to wish Cassio to be restored. He suggests that Cassio is her lover. Partly by fortune, partly by craft, he succeeds in establishing in Othello's mind the conviction that Desdemona is guilty.

Othello smothers Desdemona, learns, too late, that he has been deceived, and kills himself. Cassio's character is cleared. Iago is led away to torture.

A man's greatest works differ from his lesser works in degree, not in kind. They may be more perfect, but they express similar ideas. "A man grows, he does not become a different man." In this play of Othello the ideas are those that inspire nearly all the plays, that life seeks to preserve a balance, and that obsessions, which upset the balance, betray life to evil.

These ideas are in the earliest work of all, in Venus and Adonis. In Othello they are expressed with the variety and power of the great period. The obsession chosen for illustration is that of jealous suspicion. It is displayed at work in a mean mind and in a generous mind. The varying quality of its working makes the action of the play.

As in The Merchant of Venice, the chief character is a man of intellect who has been warped out of humanity by the world's injustice. Iago is a man of fine natural intellect who has not been trained in the personal qualities that bring preferment. An educated man is advanced above him, as in life it happens. He broods over the injustice and schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter and the newly-married wife are lovers.

He succeeds in this, through his natural adroitness, the working of chance, and the generosity of Othello, who has too much passion to be anything but blind under passionate influence like love or jealousy. The mean man's want of emotion keeps always the conduct of the vengeance precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is ruined.

That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection. Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate and instinctive.

The influence and importance of the little thing in the great event is marked in this scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the greater tragedies. We are all or may at any time become immensely important to the play of the world. Had Emilia come a minute sooner or a minute later the end of the play would have been very different. Desdemona would have lived to repent her marriage at leisure, or she would have gone to her grave branded.

Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this play, as in Richard III and The Merchant of Venice, he brooded upon the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only his intellect. What he is in himself is as mysterious as life. Life is clear, up to a point, but beyond that point it is always baffling. Shakespeare's task was to look at life clearly. Looking at it clearly he was as baffled by what he saw, as we, who only see by his aid. He found in Iago an image like life itself, a power and an activity, prompted by something secret and silent.

Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.

The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father. The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights have violent ends and bring violent ends to others.

The poetry of Othello is nearly as well known as that of Hamlet. Many quotations from the play have passed into the speech of the people. A play of intrigue does not give the fullest opportunity for great poetry; but supreme things are spoken throughout the action. Othello's cry—

"It is the very error of the moon. She comes more near the earth than she was wont And drives men mad,"

is one of the most perfect of all the perfect things in the tragedies.

King Lear.

Written. 1605-6.

Published. 1608.

Source of the Plot. The story of Lear is told in Holinshed's Chronicles, in a play by an unknown hand, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and in a few stanzas of the tenth canto of the second Book of Spenser's Faerie Queene.

The character of Gloucester seems to have been suggested by the character of a blind king in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.

The Fable. King Lear, in his old age, determines to give up his kingdom to his three daughters. Before he does so, he tries to assure himself of their love for him. The two elder women, Goneril and Regan, vow that they love him intensely; the youngest, Cordelia, can only tell him that she cares for him as a daughter should. He curses and casts off Cordelia, who is taken to wife by the King of France.

Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his son.

King Lear, thwarted and flouted by Goneril and Regan, goes mad, and wanders away with his Fool. Gloucester, trying to comfort him against the wishes of Goneril and Regan, is betrayed by his bastard Edmund, and blinded. He wanders away with Edgar, who has disguised himself as a madman.

Regan's husband is killed. Seeking to take Edmund in his stead, she rouses the jealousy of Goneril, who has already made advances to him.

Cordelia lands with French troops to repossess Lear of his kingdom. She finds Lear, and comforts him. In an engagement with the sisters' armies, she and Lear are captured.

Edmund's baseness is exposed. He is attainted and struck down. Goneril poisons Regan, and kills herself. Edmund, before he dies, reveals that he has given order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed. His news comes too late to save Cordelia. She is brought in dead. Lear dies over her body.

Albany, Goneril's husband, Kent, Lear's faithful servant, and Edgar, Edmund's slayer, are left to set the kingdom in order.

The play of King Lear is based upon a fable and a fairy story. It illustrates the most terrible forms of treachery, that of child against father, and father against child. It is the most affecting and the grandest of the plays.

The evil which makes the action springs from two sources, both fatal. One is the blindness or fatuity in Lear, which makes him give away his strength and cast out Cordelia. The other, equally deadly, but more cruel in its results, springs from an unrepented treachery, done long before by Gloucester, when he broke his marriage vows to beget Edmund. Memory of the sweetness of that treachery gives to Gloucester a blindness to the boy's nature, just as a sweetness, or ease, in the treachery of giving up the cares of kingship (against oath and the kingdom's good) helps to blind Lear to the natures of his daughters.

The blindness in the one case is sentimental, in the other wilful. Being established, fate makes use of it. One of the chief lessons of the plays is that man is only safe when his mind is perfectly just and calm. Any injustice, trouble or hunger in the mind delivers man to powers who restore calmness and justice by means violent or gentle according to the strength of the disturbing obsession. This play begins at the moment when an established blindness in two men is about to become an instrument of fate for the violent opening of their eyes. The blindness in both cases is against the course of nature. It is unnatural that Lear should give his kingship to women, and that he should curse his youngest child. It is unnatural that Gloucester should make much of a bastard son whom he has hardly seen for nine years. It is deeply unnatural that both Lear and Gloucester should believe evil suddenly of the youngest, best beloved, and most faithful spirits in the play. As the blindness that causes the injustice is great and unnatural, so the working of fate to purge the eyes and restore the balance is violent and unnatural. Every person important to the action is thrust into an unnatural way of life. Goneril and Regan rule their father, commit the most ghastly and beastly cruelty, lust after the same man, and die unnaturally (having betrayed each other), the one by her sister's hand, the other by her own. Lear is driven mad. The King of France is forced to war with his wife's sisters. Edmund betrays his half-brother to ruin and his father to blindness. Cornwall is stabbed by his servant. Edgar kills his half-brother. Gloucester, thrust out blind, dies when he finds that his wronged son loves him. Cordelia, fighting against her own blood, is betrayed to death by one who claims to love her sisters. The honest mild man, Albany, and the honest blunt man, Kent, survive the general ruin. Had Kent been a little milder and Albany a little blunter in the first act, before the fates were given strength, the ruin would not have been. All the unnatural treacherous evil comes to pass, because for a few fatal moments they were true to their natures.

The play is an excessive image of all that was most constant in Shakespeare's mind. Being an excessive image, it contains matter nowhere else given. It is all schemed and controlled with a power that he shows in no other play, not even in Macbeth and Hamlet. The ideas of the play occur in many of the plays. Many images, such as the blasted oak, water in fury, servants insolent and servile, old honest men and young girls faithful to death, occur in other plays. That which each play added to the thought of the world is expressed in the single figure of someone caught in a net. Macbeth is a ruthless man so caught. Hamlet is a wise man so caught. Othello is a passionate and Antony a glorious man so caught. All are caught and all are powerless, and all are superb tragic inventions. King Lear is a grander, ironic invention, who hurts far more than any of these because he is a horribly strong man who is powerless. He is so strong that he cannot die. He is so strong that he nearly breaks the net, before the folds kill him.

No image in the world is so fierce with imaginative energy. The stormy soul runs out storming in a night of the soul as mad as the elements. With him goes the invention of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool, like conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him mad with ironic comment and bitter song.

The verse is as great as the invention. It rises and falls with the passion like music with singing. All the scale of Shakespeare's art is used; the terrible spiritual manner of

"You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,"

as well as the instinctive manner of a prose coloured to the height with all the traditions of country life.

Dramatic genius has the power of understanding half-a-dozen lives at once in tense, swiftly changing situations. This power is shown at its best in the last act of this play. One of the most wonderful and least praised of the inventions in the last scene is that of the dying Edmund. He has been treacherous to nearly every person in the play. His last treachery, indirectly the cause of his ruin, is still in act, the killing of Cordelia and the king. He has been stricken down. "The wheel has come full circle." He has learned too late that

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us."

He can hardly hope to live for more than a few minutes. The death of his last two victims cannot benefit him. A word from him would save them. No one else can save them. Yet at the last minute, his one little glimmer of faithfulness keeps the word unspoken. He is silent for Goneril's sake. If he ever cared for any one in the world, except himself, he may have cared a little for Goneril. He thinks of her now. She has gone from him. But she is on his side, and he trusts to her, and acts for her. He waits for some word or token from her. He waits to see her save him or avenge him. The death of Lear will benefit her. It will be to her something saved from the general wreck, something to the good, in the losing bout. An impulse stirs him to speak, but he puts it by. He keeps silent about Lear, till one comes saying that Goneril has killed herself. Still he does not speak. The news pricks the vanity in him. He strokes his plumes with a tender thought for the brightness of the life that made two princesses die for love of him. When he speaks of Lear, it is too late, the little, little instant which alters destiny has passed. Cordelia is dead. No mist stains the stone. She will come no more—

"Never, never, never, never, never."

The heart-breaking scene at the end has been blamed as "too painful for tragedy." Shakespeare's opinion of what is tragic is worth that of all his critics together. He gave to every soul in this play an excessive and terrible vitality. On the excessive terrible soul of Lear he poured such misery that the cracking of the great heart is a thing of joy, a relief so fierce that the audience should go out in exultation singing—

"O, our lives' sweetness! That we the pain of death would hourly die Rather than die at once!"

Tragedy is a looking at fate for a lesson in deportment on life's scaffold. If we find the lesson painful, how shall we face the event?

Macbeth.

Written. 1605-6 (?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. Raphael Holinshed tells the story of Macbeth at length in his Chronicle of Scottish History. He indicates the character of Lady Macbeth in one line.

When Shakespeare wrote the play, London was full of Scotchmen, brought thither by the accession of James I. Little details of the play may have been gathered in conversation.

The Fable. Macbeth, advised by witches that he is to be a king, is persuaded by his wife to kill his sovereign (King Duncan) and seize the crown. King Duncan, coming to Macbeth's castle for a night, is there killed by Macbeth and his lady. Duncan's sons fly to England. Macbeth causes himself to be proclaimed king.

Being king, he tries to assure himself of power by destroying the house of Banquo, of whom the witches prophesied that he should be the father of a line of kings. Banquo is killed; but his son escapes.

The witches warn Macbeth to beware of Macduff.

Macduff escapes to England, but his wife and children are killed by Macbeth's order.

Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of the Scottish crown.

Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill him.

Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shakespearean plays. In the order of composition it is either the fourth or the fifth of the seven. In point of merit it is neither greater nor less than the other six. It is different from them, in that it belongs more wholly to the kingdom of vision.

Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man betrayed by an obsession. Caesar is betrayed by an obsession of the desire of glory, Antony by passion, Tarquin by lust, Wolsey by worldly greed, Coriolanus and Timon by their nobleness, Angelo by his righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. God sends on many men "strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie." Othello is one such. Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true, half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like love; love feels like nobility; spiritualism seems like revelation.

Among these things few are stronger than the words spoken in unworldly states, in trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by soothsayers, by the wholly excited people who are also half sane, by whoever obtains a half knowledge of the spirit by destruction of intellectual process.

"to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence."

Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us. Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him. Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief in life would lead to peace. This thought passes through his mind. Then fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for treachery. The king had an "absolute trust" in him; but there is no judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act of murder.

The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed, but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary. He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them. The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.

"And you all know security Is mortal's chiefest enemy,"

He has supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he has been tricked by—

"the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth."

His queen has killed herself. All the welter of murder has been useless. All that he has done is to damn his soul through the centuries during which the line of Banquo will reign. He dies with a courage that is half fury against the fate that has tricked him.

No play contains greater poetry. There is nothing more intense. The mind of the man was in the kingdom of vision, hearing a new speech and seeing what worldly beings do not see, the rush of the powers, and the fury of elemental passions. No play is so full of an unspeakable splendour of vision—

"his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued."

"And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air."

"Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents terrible."

"In the great hand of God I stand."

"A falcon towering in her pride of place Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed. And Duncan's horses—a thing most strange and certain— Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make War with mankind. 'Tis said they eat each other."

"the time has been That, when the brains were out, the man would die."

All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and re-praised. Noble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less noble, is less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words—

"I did hear The galloping of horse: who was't came by?"

It was the galloping of messengers with the news that Macduff, who is to be the cause of his ruin, has fled to England. An echo of the galloping stays in the brain, as though the hoofs of some horse rode the night, carrying away Macbeth's luck for ever.

Antony and Cleopatra.

Written. 1607-8 (?)

Published, in the folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives.

The Fable. Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He makes a pact with the young Caesar, by marrying Caesar's sister Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra, he falls into wars with Caesar. Being unhappy in his fortune and deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having lost her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Caesar, also kills herself.

In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some obsession.

"Strange it is That nature must compel us to lament Our most persisted deeds."

It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the poetry answer the greatness of the subject.

Shakespeare's later tragedies, King Lear, Coriolanus, Othello, and this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in Richard II, Richard III, and Henry IV, but the man of large and generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute, astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund, the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls. All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a colourable cloak of human excuse.

The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon Octavius to meet him in single combat.

"men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike."

"when we in our viciousness grow hard, O misery on't—the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut To our confusion."

The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once, this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the senate house, before Caesar's murderers. He was very great and noble then. Now

"The star is fall'n And time is at his period."

"The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"

has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.

The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry—

"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble, Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, And make Death proud to take us ... .... we have no friend But resolution and the briefest end,"

begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays. Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words—

"Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the dark,"

and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling—

"O eastern star! Peace, peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?"

are among the most beautiful things ever written by man.

Coriolanus.

Written. 1608 (?)

Published. 1623.

Source of the Plot. The life of Coriolanus in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives.

The Fable. Marcius, a noble Roman, of an excessive pride, bitterly opposes the rabble.

In the war against the Volscians he bears himself so nobly that he wins the title of Coriolanus. On his return from the wars he seeks the Consulship, woos the voices of the multitude, is accepted, and then cast by them. For his angry comment on their behaviour the tribunes contrive his banishment from the city.

Being banished, he makes league with the Volscians. He takes command in the Volscian army and invades Roman territory.

Coming as a conqueror to the walls of Rome, his mother and wife persuade him to spare the city. He causes the Volscians to make peace. The Volscians return home dissatisfied.

On his return to the Volscian territory Coriolanus is impeached as a traitor, and stabbed to death by conspirators.

Shakespeare's tragical characters are all destroyed by the excess of some trait in them, whether good or ill matters nothing. Nature cares for type, not for the excessive. Sooner or later she checks the excessive so that the type may be maintained. She is stronger than the excessive, though she may be baser. To Nature, progress, though it be infinitesimal, must be a progress of the whole mass, not a sudden darting out of one quality or one member.

Timon of Athens is betrayed by an excessive generosity. Coriolanus is betrayed by an excessive contempt for the multitude. He is one born into a high tradition of life. He has the courage, the skill in arms, and the talent for affairs that come with high birth in the manly races. He has also the faith in tradition that makes an unlettered upper class narrow and obstructionist. Like the rich in France before the Revolution, he despises the poor. He denies them the right to complain of their hunger. Rather than grant them that right, or the means of urging redress, he would take a short way with them, as was practised here, at Manchester and elsewhere.

"Would the nobility lay aside their ruth, And let me use my sword, I'ld make a quarry With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high As I could pick my lance."

Like all conservative, aristocratic men, he sees in the first granting of political power to the people the beginning of revolution.

"It will in time Win power upon and throw forth greater themes For insurrection's arguing."

He regards the people as a necessary, evil-smelling, many-headed beast, good enough, under the leadership of men like himself, to make inferior troops to be spent as the State pleases. It is possible that Napoleon and Bismarck looked upon the mob with similar scorn. The ideas are those of an absolute monarch or super-man. The country squire holds those ideas, though want of power and want of intellect combine to keep him from applying them. The sincerity of the ideas is tested from time to time, in free countries, by general elections.

Much of the pride of Coriolanus springs from a sense of his superiority to others in the gifts of fortune. Much of it comes from the knowledge that he is superior in himself. Leading, as becomes his birth, in the war against the Volscians he shows himself so much superior to others that the campaign is his triumph. He is "the man" whom Napoleon counted "everything in war." The knowledge of his merit is so bright within himself that he is unable to see that it is less bright in others. He is willing to become the head of the State if the post may be given to him as a right due to merit, not as a favour begged. He has no lust for power. But knowing himself to be the best man in Rome, he thinks that his merit is sufficiently great to excuse him from the indignity of sueing for it. The laws of free countries prescribe that he who wishes to be elected must appeal to the electors whether he love them or loathe them. Instead of appealing to them, Coriolanus insults them with such arrogance that they drive him from the city.

He fails as a traitor, because he is too noble to be fiercely revengeful. A lesser man, a Richard III, or an Iago, would have exacted a bloody toll from Rome. Coriolanus cannot bring himself to be stern, in the presence of his old mother and his wife. Something generous and truly aristocratic in him makes him a second time a traitor, this time to his hosts the Volscians. He spares Rome by the sacrifice of those who have given him a shelter and a welcome. Treachery (even from a noble motive) is never forgiven in these plays. It is always avenged, seldom mercifully. The Volscians avenge themselves on Coriolanus by an act of treachery that brings the noble heart under the foot of the traitor.

Coriolanus is one of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country. Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the four most popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's Plutarch, Cinthio, and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic has supplanted fable, and subject comes to the artist untrimmed and unlit by the vitality of many minds. In reading Coriolanus and the other plays of the great period a man feels that Shakespeare fed his fire with all that was passionate in the thought about him. He appears to be his age focussed. The great man now stands outside his age, like Timon.

Coriolanus is a play of the clash of the aristocratic temper with the world. It contains most of the few speeches in Shakespeare which ring with what seems like a personal bitterness. Hatred of the flunkey mind, and of the servile, insolent mob mind, "false as water," appears in half-a-dozen passages. Some of these passages are ironic inventions, not prompted by Plutarch. The great mind, brooding on the many forms of treachery, found nothing more treacherous than the mob, and nothing more dog-like, for good or evil, than the servant.

Greatness is sometimes shown in very little things. Few things in Shakespeare show better the fulness of his happy power than the following—

(Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils.)

1st Roman. This will I carry to Rome.

2nd Roman. And I this.

3rd Roman. A murrain on't. I took this for silver.

Timon of Athens.

Written. 1606-8 (?)

Published. 1623.

Source of the Plot. William Paynter's Palace of Pleasure. Plutarch's Life of Antonius. Lucian's Dialogue.

The Fable. Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him. None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens, finding a like ingratitude in the State, openly makes war upon it, reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.

Timon of Athens is a play of mixed authorship. Shakespeare's share in it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked personality. It cannot now be known how the collaboration was arranged. Either the unknown collaborated with Shakespeare, or the unknown wrote the play and Shakespeare revised it.

Ingratitude is one of the commonest forms of treachery. It is the form that leads most quickly to the putting back of the world, because it destroys generosity of mind. It creates in man the bitter and destructive quality of misanthropy, or a destroying passion of revenge. In this play the two authors show the different ways in which the human mind may be turned to those bitter passions.

Apemantus is currish, because others are not. He has wit without charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish, nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a noble mind embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend, shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the noble generosity in faithful service.

Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography. Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more difficult and more noble to do than to pin their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth, and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as the hundred other passionate moods that built up the system of his soul.

The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner—

"will these moss'd trees, That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels, And skip when thou point'st out?"

"Come not to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood: Who, once a day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover."

The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades after he has read the epitaph, with which Timon goes down to death, like some hurt thing shrinking even from the thought of passers, is one of the most lovely examples of the power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech.

Alcib. (reading) Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and stay not here thy gait.

These well express in thee thy latter spirits: Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs, Scorned'st our brain's flow and those our droplets which From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead Is noble Timon: of whose memory Hereafter more. Bring me into your city, And I will use the olive with my sword, Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each Prescribe to other as each other's leech. Let our drums strike.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Written. 1607-8 (?)

Published. 1608.

Source of the Plot. The plot is taken from an English prose version of a Latin translation of a fifth century Greek romance. This version was published by Lawrence Twine, in the year 1576, under the name of The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures (etc., etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his Confessio Amantis. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.

The Fable. Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.

Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and marries her.

Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter, dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ashore at Ephesus, and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina, the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus. He then returns to Tyre.

Act IV. The years pass. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm that she passes the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen, deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina. Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and musician.

Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great melancholy for the loss of wife and child, hears Marina sing. He learns that she is his daughter. The goddess Diana bids him go to her temple at Ephesus. He goes, and finds Thaisa. The play ends happily with the reuniting of the family.

The acts are opened by rhyming prologues designed to be spoken by John Gower. The prologues to each of the three first acts are followed by Dumb Shows, an invention of the theatre to explain those things not easily to be shown in action. The prologues, the invention of the dumb shows, and the first two acts, are not by Shakespeare. They are like the poetical work of George Wilkins, who published a prose romance of The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre in the year 1608, probably after the play had been produced.

The construction of the last three acts makes it likely that the play (in its original state) was by the constructor of the first two acts. It is not known how it came to pass that Shakespeare took the play in hand. From the comparative feebleness of his work upon it, it may be judged that it was not a labour of love. The impression given is that nothing in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great mind, that Shakespeare was not deeply interested in the play, but that he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a theatre on which many depended for bread.

There is little that is precious in the play. The scenes in the brothel at Mitylene (in Act IV) have power. Many find their unpleasantness an excuse for saying that Shakespeare never wrote them. They are certainly by Shakespeare. Cant would always persuade itself that the power to see clearly ought not to be turned upon evil. Those who can read—

Bawd. ... they are so pitifully sodden.

Pandar. ... The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little baggage.

Boult. Ay ... she made him roast-meat for worms—

with disgust at Shakespeare's foulness, yet without horror of heart that the evil still goes on among human beings, must be strangely made. These scenes, the very vigorous sea scenes, including the account of the storm at sea, put into the mouth of Marina—

"My father, as nurse said, did never fear, But cried 'Good seamen!' to the sailors, galling His kingly hands, haling ropes; And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea That almost burst the deck.... Never was waves nor wind more violent: And from the ladder-tackle washes off A canvas-climber. 'Ha,' says one, 'wilt out?' And with a dropping industry they skip From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles, and The master calls and trebles their confusion"—

and the scene in which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most lovely things in the play.

Cymbeline.

Written. (?)

Published, in the folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. Holinshed's Chronicles tell of Cymbeline and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's Decameron (giorn. 2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's Westward for Smelts, and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman falsely accused of adultery.

The Fable. Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten, may marry Imogen.

Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an incomparable chastity. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste. Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is killed by one of the sons.

The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished. Cymbeline's queen kills herself. Posthumus is taught that Iachimo deceived him. Imogen is restored to him. The lost sons are restored to Cymbeline. Prophecy is fulfilled and pardon given. All ends happily.

It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun as a tragedy during the great mood of tragical creation, then laid aside unfinished, from some failure in the vision, or change in the creative mood, and brought to an end later in a new spirit, perhaps in another place, in the country, away from the life which makes writing alive. It is the least perfect of the later plays. The least soft of Shakespeare's critics calls it "unresisting imbecility." It is perhaps the first composed of the romantic plays with which Shakespeare ended his life's work.

Though the writing is so careless and the construction so loose that no one can think of it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes, one faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty. It deals with the Shakespearean subject of craft working upon a want of faith for personal ends, and being defeated, when almost successful, by something simple and instinctive in human nature. It is thus not unlike Othello; but in Othello the subject is simple, and the treatment purely tragic. In Cymbeline the subject is only partly extricated, and the treatment is coloured with romance, with that strange, touching, very Shakespearean romance, of the thing long lost beautifully recovered before the end, so that the last years of the chief man in the play may be happy and complete. The end of life would be as happy as the beginning if the dead might be given back to us. Shakespeare had lost a child.

There can be no doubt that when the play was first conceived, the craft of the queen, working upon the insufficient faith of Cymbeline, was designed to be as important to the action as the craft of Iachimo working upon the insufficient faith of Posthumus. This was never wrought out. The play advances and halts. As in all unfinished works of art one sees in it something fine trying to get free but failing.

The lyric "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" is the most lovely thing in the play. The most powerful moment is that which exposes the poisoning of a generous mind by false report. Posthumus believes Iachimo's lie and breaks out railing against women.

"For there's no motion That tends to vice in man but I affirm It is the woman's part."

Noble instants are marked in the lines—

"Be not, as in our fangled world, a garment Nobler than that it covers,"

and in the symbol of the eagle—

"the Roman eagle, From south to west on wing soaring aloft, Lessen'd herself and in the beams o' the sun So vanished."

The Winter's Tale.

Written. 1610-11.

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. The story appears in Robert Greene's romance of Pandosto. Shakespeare greatly improves the fable by completing it. Greene ends it. Greene makes the story an accident with an unhappy end. Shakespeare makes it a vision of the working of fate with the tools of human passion.

The Fable. Leontes, King of Sicilia, suspecting that his wife Hermione is guilty of adultery with Polixenes, King of Bohemia, tries her on that count. He causes her daughter to be carried to a desert place and there exposed.

The oracle of Apollo declares to him that Hermione is innocent, that he himself is a jealous tyrant, and that he will die without an heir should he fail to recover the daughter lost. The truth of the oracle is confirmed by the (apparent) death of Hermione and the real death of Mamillius, his son. Repenting bitterly of his obsession of jealousy he goes into mourning.

The little daughter is found by country people who nourish and cherish her. She grows up to beautiful and gracious girlhood. Florizel, the son of Polixenes, falls in love with her, and seeks to marry her without his father's knowledge. Being discovered by Polixenes, he flies with her to the sea. Taking ship, the couple come to Leontes' court, where it is proved that the girl is the lost princess. She is married to Florizel. Leontes is reconciled to Polixenes. Hermione completes the general happiness by rejoining the husband who has so long mourned her.

Dr. Simon Forman, the first critic of this play, made note to "remember" two things in it, "how he sent to the orakell of Appollo," and "also the rog that cam in all tottered like Coll Pipci." He drew from it this moral lesson, that one should "Beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouse."

The moral lesson is still of value to the world, and it is most certainly one which Shakespeare strove to impress. Shakespeare's mind was always brooding on the working of fate. He was always watching the results of some obsession upon an individual and the people connected with him. He saw that a blindness falling upon a person suddenly, for no apparent reason, except that something strikes the something not quite sound in the nature, has the power to alter life violently. It was his belief that life must not be altered violently. Life is a thing of infinitely gradual growth, that would perfect itself if the blindness could be kept away. Any deceiving thing, like a passion or a feigned beggar, is a cause of the putting back of life, indefinitely.

In this play, he followed his usual practice, of showing the results of a human blindness upon human destiny. The greater plays are studies of treachery and self-betrayal. This play is a study of deceit and self-deception. Leontes is deceived by his obsession, Polixenes by his son, the country man by Autolycus, life, throughout, by art. In the last great scene, life is mistaken for art. In the first great scene a true friendship is mistaken for a false love.

It may be called the gentlest of Shakespeare's plays. It is done with a tenderer hand than the other works. The name, A Winter's Tale, is taken from a scene in the second act. Hermione sits down with her son, by the winter fire, to listen to his story. It is the last time she ever sees her son. He has hardly opened his lips when Leontes enters to accuse her of adultery. She is hurried off to prison, and Mamillius dies before the oracle's message comes to clear her. The sudden shocks and interruptions of life, which play so big a part in the action of these late romances, have full power here. The winter's tale is interrupted. The rest of the play results from the interruption. Much of it is very beautiful. To us, the wonderful thing is the strangeness of the tenderness which makes some scenes in the fifth act so passionate with grief for old injustice done to the dead. The cry of Leontes remembering the wronged dead woman's eyes—

"Stars, stars, And all eyes else dead coals,"

is haunting and heart-breaking. All his longing of remorse gives to the last great scene, before the supposed statue, an intensity of beauty hardly endurable.

The passion of remorse is a romantic, not a tragic passion. It is the mood which follows the tragic mood. Shakespeare's creative life is like a Shakespearean play. It ends with an easing of the strain and a making of peace.

It is said that an old horse near to death turns towards the pastures where he was foaled. It is true of human beings. Man wanders home to the fields which bred him. A part of the romance of this poem is the turning back of the poet's mind to the Cotswold country, of which he sang so magically, in his first play, sixteen or eighteen years before. There are fine scenes of shepherds at home, among the sheep bells and clean wind. There is a very lovely talk of flowers—

"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 Phoebus in his strength."

To Shakespeare, the magically happy man, the going back to them must have been a time for thanksgiving. But to the supremely happy man all times are times of thanksgiving, deep, tranquil and abundant, for the delight, the majesty and the beauty of the fulness of the rolling world.

The Tempest.

Written. 1610-11.

Published, in the folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. It is likely that many sources contributed to the making of this plot. If Shakespeare took the fable from a single source, that source is not now known. He may have taken suggestions for it from the following books:—

1st. From a little collection of novels by Antonio de Eslava, a Spanish writer, whose book, Noches de Invierno, was published in Barcelona in 1609. Three tales in this collection seem to have given hints for the play. The fourth chapter, about "The Art Magic of King Dardano," helped him more than the others. Whether the title of the book suggested the title of A Winter's Tale is not known.

2nd. From a German play, Die schoene Sidea, by a Nuremberg dramatist, named Jacob Ayrer.

3rd. From the tracts relating to the discovery of the Bermuda Islands in 1609. Of the known tracts, A Discovery of the Bermuda Islands, by Sylvester Jourdain, gave Shakespeare the most hints.

Several other books may have suggested lines and passages.

The Fable. Prospero, Duke of Milan, having been driven from his dukedom by Antonio his brother, flies to sea with his daughter Miranda, lands on an island, and there lives, served by two creatures, one an airy spirit, the other a loutish monster.

By art magic, he brings to the island his usurping brother and the king and heir of Naples. Miranda falls in love with the heir of Naples. Prospero dismisses his spirits, reconciles himself with his brother, and plans to sail at once for Milan.

In this play, as in the two other original romantic plays, Shakespeare follows the workings of a treacherous act from its performance to the repentance of the sinner and the granting of the victim's forgiveness. In the great plays the victim dies and the sinner does not repent. Presently the wheel comes full circle, and a justice from outside life smites him dead. In these plays the betrayed live to forgive the traitors—

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further."

In this play, as in the other two and in Pericles, much is made of the chances and accidents of life, and of the sudden changes of worldly circumstance due to them. In this play, for the first and last time, Shakespeare treats of the power of the resolved imagination to command the brutish, the base, the noble and the spiritual for wise human ends.

It is easy to interpret the play as allegory. Youth in this country has reason to regard allegory as a clumsy man's way of introducing Sunday on a weekday. It is so seldom successful that it may be called the literary method of creative minds below the first rank. Shakespeare's method was never allegorical. The Tempest is perhaps no more allegorical than any other good romance. But the thought of it is so clear that the first impression given is that it is thin. It is the study of a man of intellect, who has been forced from power by a treacherous brother. Living alone with his bright, unspoiled daughter, he attains, by intellectual labour, to a power over destiny. Like the wise man of the proverb, he learns to master his stars. He uses this power nobly to put an end to ancient hatred and old injustice.

The minor vision of the play is a study, often very amusing, but deeply earnest, of the coming of the fifth part civilised to the mostly brutal. In Shakespeare's time, men like the quite thoughtless and callous Stephano and Trinculo, the "sea-dogs" who manned our ships, and of whom Raleigh wrote that it was an offence to God to minister oaths to the generality of them, were "spreading civilisation" in various parts of the world. Shakespeare, looking at them gravely, saw them to be, perhaps, more dangerous to the needs of life, to wisdom, and to unlit animal strength than the base Sebastian and the treacherous Antonio.

The exquisite lyrics, and the masque of the goddesses, show that the taste of the audience of 1610-11 needed to be tickled. Times had changed since the lion-like and ramping days, eighteen years before, when "Jeronimy" was a new word, and Tamora a serious invention. The man who had changed the times was thinking, like Prospero, that he had "got his dukedom," and that now, having "pardoned the deceiver," he might go to Stratford to enjoy it.

King Henry VIII, or All is True.

Written. 1611-13 (?)

Produced. (?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. Holinshed's Chronicles. Hall's Chronicles. Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

The Fable. Act I. Two of the scenes in this act are by Shakespeare. In the first, Cardinal Wolsey contrives the attainting of his enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. In the other he procures to bring Queen Katharine into disfavour.

Act II. In this act, Buckingham is beheaded, the King shows favour to Anne Bullen, and Queen Katharine is brought to trial. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare wrote any part of this act. He is often credited with the third scene, apparently on the ground that though it is bad it is still too good to be by Bacon.

Act III. In this act, the King shows Wolsey that he has discovered his plottings. About half of the second scene (all the masculine part of it) is by Shakespeare. The rest (very beautiful) is by Fletcher.

Act IV. Anne Bullen is crowned. Wolsey dies. Queen Katharine dies. None of this act is by Shakespeare.

Act V. Cranmer escapes from his enemies in time to be godfather at the christening of Anne Bullen's daughter Elizabeth. If any of this act be by Shakespeare it can only be the first scene.

Little of this play is by Shakespeare. The greater part of it is by John Fletcher. Some scenes bear the marks of a third hand, like that of Philip Massinger. The play reads as though the two lesser poets had worked from a scenario of Shakespeare's less complete than the draft of Troilus and Cressida. It is certain that they received no hint of the lines on which Shakespeare meant to proceed after the end of Act III. Not knowing what to do, they patched up a piece without any central tragical idea, and hid their want of thought with much effective theatrical invention, pageants, a trial, a coronation, a christening, etc., and with bright, facile, vinous dialogue, of the kind that will hold an uncritical audience. The play, when done, was mounted with extreme splendour at the Globe Theatre. Wadding from the cannons discharged in the first act set fire to the theatre, and burned it to the ground, June 29, 1613.

Shakespeare's dramatic intention is indicated in the scenes written by him. Knowing his practice, and having before us Holinshed, his authority, it is easy to sketch out the kind of play that he would have written by himself. Wolsey, eaten up by his obsession for worldly power, betraying Buckingham to his fall, breaking the power of the Queen, and ruling England, would have filled the first two acts. The third act would have told (much more subtly than Fletcher has told) of his downfall. Fletcher attributes the downfall to the chance discovery of his attempt to thwart the king's marriage with Anne Bullen. That discovery would have been put to full dramatic use by Shakespeare; but it would have been represented as something working from beyond the grave, the result of many unjust acts that have cried to God for justice till God hears. The last acts would have exposed other sides of Wolsey's character. The play would have been a fuller, nobler work than Richard II, and of an ampler canvas than Timon. Shakespeare's share in the play as we have it is all noble work. Wolsey, Katharine and the King are drawn with the great, sharp, ample line of a master. The difference between genius and supreme genius is shown very clearly in the first act, where a great work, greatly begun, with the masterly power of exposition that makes Shakespeare's first acts like daybreaks, is ended by another spirit, without vision, but with a tremendous sense of Vanity Fair.

WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE

A play called Cardenno, or Cardenna, was acted at Court by Shakespeare's company in 1613. It is thought that this play was the History of Cardenio, described as "by Fletcher and Shakespeare," which was licensed for publication in 1653 but never published. The play is now lost. It was attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare on very poor authority.

Arden of Feversham is a domestic tragedy founded on a story told by Holinshed. It was published anonymously in 1592. It is held by some to be an early work of Shakespeare's, on the ground that no other known poet, then living, could have written it. It is a strong play, but it is the work of a joyless mind. It bears no single trace of Shakespeare's mind. It could not have been written by him at any stage in his career.

Edward III is an historical chronicle play by at least two unknown hands. It was published anonymously in 1596. Some think that part of Act I and the whole of Act II (dealing with the King's obsession of passion for the Countess of Salisbury) were by Shakespeare, on the grounds that the writing is too good to be by anybody else then living, and that the unknown author makes use of a line and a phrase which occur in the genuine sonnets of Shakespeare. The scenes attributed to Shakespeare contain several beautiful lines in something of the Shakespearean manner. The construction of the scenes, and their relation to the rest of the play is un-Shakespearean. It is unlikely that Shakespeare wrote them.

The Spanish Tragedy, a play by Thomas Kyd, published in 1592 and reprinted with many additions ten years later, contains in the additions several magnificent scenes of the passion of grief raised to madness. Some think that Ben Jonson wrote these scenes; others, that they are too good to be by any one but Shakespeare. They are not like Shakespeare's work.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, a romantic tragedy on the subject of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, was first published in 1634. It was described on the title-page as the joint work of Fletcher and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's hand is plainly marked upon the play; but it seems likely that most of the scenes usually credited to him are by Massinger. Few can have ears dull enough to credit Shakespeare with all the scenes that are plainly not by Fletcher.

About a dozen other plays and parts of plays have been attributed to Shakespeare, either by lying publishers, anxious to make money, or by foolish critics eager to make a noise. "Evil men understand not judgment: and he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." There is not a glimmer of evidence in any line or scene to show that Shakespeare had a hand in any of them.

THE POEMS

Venus and Adonis.—This poem was published in 1593 with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, then a youth. In the dedication Shakespeare speaks of the poem as "the first heire of my invention," from which some conclude that it was the first poem ever made public by him.

Though it may be his earliest poem, the thought expressed by it is the thought expressed in the greatest of the plays, that evil comes of obsession.

Venus, a lustful woman, pursuing her opposite, a chaste youth, comes to misery. Adonis, a chaste youth, fleeing from her, comes to death.

The poem is beautiful and wild blooded. It is fierce with the excelling animal zest of something young and untainted.

"The sun ariseth in his majesty Who doth the world so gloriously behold, That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."

It is full of the images of delicate quick-blooded things going swiftly and lustily from the boiling of the April in them.

* * * * *

The Rape of Lucrece.—This poem was published in 1594, with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton. Like so many of the works of Shakespeare, it describes at length the prompting, acting, and results of a treachery inspired by an obsession. Tarquin, hearing of Lucrece's chastity, longs to attempt her. Coming stealthily to her home, in her lord's absence, he foully ravishes her. She kills herself and he is banished from Rome. The subject is not unlike that of Venus and Adonis, with the sexes reversed. In both poems the subject is sexual obsession and its results.

Lucrece is a wiser and a finer poem than Venus and Adonis. It is constructed with the art of a man familiar with the theatre. The delaying of the great moments so as to heighten the expectation, is contrived with rapturous energy. The poem is heaped and overflowing with the abundance of imaginative power. The wealth of the young man's mind is poured out like life in June.

It is strange that both Lucrece and Hamlet, in their moments of distraction, turn to the image of Troy blazing with the punishment of treachery.

The Passionate Pilgrim.—This little collection of poems was published in 1599, under Shakespeare's name, by William Jaggard, a dishonest bookseller. It contains poems by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, Christopher Marlowe, and one or more unknown hands. It also contains two genuine Shakespearean sonnets, three more from the text of Love's Labour's Lost, and three (less certainly his) on the subject of Venus and Adonis, which have the ring of his freshest youthful manner. Whether any others in the collection be by Shakespeare can only be a matter of opinion. The nineteenth poem has a smack of his mind about it. If it be by him it must be his earliest extant work.

* * * * *

The Sonnets.—Written between 1592 and 1609. Published (piratically) 1609.

These personal poems have puzzled many readers. Many writers have tried to interpret them. Although their first editor tells us that they are "serene, cleare, and elegantlie plaine (with) no intricate and cloudie stuffe to trouble and perplex the intellect," much good and bad brain work has been spent on them. Some have held that they are poetical exercises. Others find that they are confessions. Others wrest from dark lines dark meanings, till they have laid bare a story from them. Others interpret spiritually. Others find evidence in them that Shakespeare was guilty of an abnormal form of passion. The facts about them may be stated—

1. They are personal poems. Some of them are of great beauty; others are unsuccessful.

2. They were written in many moods. Some were written in a mood of the intensest tranquil ecstasy, others in a fit of earthly passion, others in a trivial mood.

3. They were written to more than one person. Many were written to an attractive, handsome, young, unmarried man, Shakespeare's dear friend. Men with imagination enjoy sweeter and closer friendships than the many know. The many, mulish as ever, therefore imagine evil.

4. Some of the sonnets were written to a woman, of the kind described in two or three of the plays, viz. a black-haired, black-eyed, white-faced, witty wanton, false to her marriage vows and the cause of similar falseness in Shakespeare himself, and in his friend.

5. Many of them show that Shakespeare, loving this woman, against his better nature, was wilfully betrayed by her to all the devils of jealousy, craving and self-loathing, which follow the banner of lechery. Among the objects of the jealousy another poet figured.

No one knows who the friend, the lady and the rival poet were. The discovery of letters and manuscripts may some day remove the mystery. "Against that time, if ever that time come," men of intellect would do well to accept the sonnets as beautiful poems, and try to write as good ones to their wives.

Beautiful as many of the sonnets are, they are less wonderful achievements and less important to the soul of man than the plays. Few people thought much of them until the degradation of the English theatre had hidden from English minds the greater glory of the creative system. That they are now widely read while the plays are seldom acted, is another proof that this age cares more for what was perishing and personal in Shakespeare than for that which went winging on, in the great light, surveying the eternal in man.

What Shakespeare thought of his perishing self is expressed in the noblest of the sonnets. Two syllables are missing from the second line.

"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, ( ) these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end? Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine with selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then."

The sonnets were piratically published in a quarto volume in 1609. At the end of the volume a narrative poem was printed, under the name A Lover's Complaint. It tells in the first person the story of a girl who has been seduced by a plausible villain. It is a work of Shakespeare's youth, fresh and felicitous as youth's work often is, and very nearly as empty.

* * * * *

The Phoenix and The Turtle.—This strange, very beautiful poem was published in 1601 in an appendix to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr, or Rosalin's Complaint, to which several famous poets contributed. In dark and noble verse it describes a spiritual marriage, suddenly ended by death. It is too strange to be the fruit of a human sorrow. It is the work of a great mind trying to express in unusual symbols a thought too subtle and too intense to be expressed in any other way. Spiritual ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that key it can only be so many strange words set in a noble rhythm for no apparent cause.

Poetry moves in many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind with their crying.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Shakespeare's plays were printed carelessly, often from imperfect, torn, ill-written or stolen copies. When printed, they were seldom corrected. When reprinted, the original errors were often made much worse. Thus, "he met the night-mare," or "a met the night-mare," in the original manuscript, was printed "a nellthu night more," and reprinted "anelthu night Moore." Those who lightly read the modern editions seldom know that years of mental toil went to the preparation of the texts so easily read to-day.

Many English minds have paid tribute to Shakespeare. Few of them deserve more praise than the Cambridge Editors, whose six years of labour cleared the text of countless errors and corruptions. The correction of a corrupt text by collation and conjecture, is one of the most difficult and least amusing tasks that a fine mind can have. The Cambridge Shakespeare, the work of William George Clark and Dr. William Aldis Wright, gives a text not likely to be improved until the poet's corrected manuscripts are found.

The Life of William Shakespeare has been ably written by Dr. Sidney Lee, whose judgment equals his learning.

Some of the dramatic methods of Shakespeare have been nobly studied by Dr. A. C. Bradley in his Shakespearean Tragedy.

To these books and to the Shakespearean Essays in Mr. W. B. Yeats's Ideas of Good and Evil, I am deeply indebted, as all modern students of Shakespeare must be.

Our knowledge of Shakespeare is imperfect. It can only be increased by minute and patient study, by the rejection of surmise about him, and by the constant public playing of his plays, in the Shakespearean manner, by actors who will neither mutilate nor distort what the great mind strove to make just.



INDEX OF CHARACTERS

Achilles, 169, 170

Adonis, 241, 242

Adriana, 46, 47

AEgeon, 44, 46, 49

Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, 139

Ajax, 169, 172

Albany, Duke of, 187, 190

Alcibiades, 214, 215, 217, 218

Angelo, 174, 175, 177, 196

Anne Bullen, 236, 237

Anne, Lady, 93, 100

Antipholus of Ephesus, 44, 46

Antipholus of Syracuse, 44

Antonio (Merchant of Venice), 103

Antonio (Tempest), 232, 235

Antonio (Two Gentlemen of Verona), 34

Apemantus, 215

Armado, 30, 31

Arthur, Prince, 75, 80, 83, 84

Audrey, 129

Austria, Lymoges, Duke of, 81

Autolycus, 228

Banquo, 195, 200

Bardolph, 122, 124, 125

Bassanio, 103

Beatrice, 133, 134, 136, 137

Beaufort, Cardinal, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59

Belarius, 223

Belch, Sir Toby, 82, 138, 139, 217

Benedick, 133, 134, 136

Bertram, 144, 145, 146

Bianca, 105, 108

Biondello, 107

Biron, 24, 25, 32, 36

Blanch of Spain, 75, 79

Borachio, 134, 135

Bottom, 63

Boyet, 30

Brutus, 149, 150, 154, 156

Buckingham, Duke of (Richard III), 94, 98, 99

Buckingham, Duke of (Henry VIII), 235, 237

Cade, Jack, 55, 57

Caius, Dr., 124, 125

Calchas, 169

Carlisle, Bishop of, 89, 92

Cassio, 180, 181, 183

Cassius, 149

Cawdor, 198

Celia, 128, 129

Cerimon, 222

Clarence, George, Duke of, 93, 94, 98, 100

Claudio (Measure for Measure), 174, 177, 178

Claudio (Much Ado), 133, 134, 135

Claudius (Hamlet), 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166

Cleopatra, 202, 203, 207, 217

Cloten, 223

Cordelia, 187, 188, 190, 192

Coriolanus, 196, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212

Cornwall, Duke of, 190

Costard, 30, 31

Cranmer, 236

Cressida, 169

Cymbeline, 223, 225

Demetrius, 63

Desdemona, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185

Diana (All's Well), 144

Diana (Pericles), 219, 220

Don John, 133, 134, 135

Don Pedro, 133, 134, 136

Dorset, Marquess of, 98

Dromio of Ephesus, 44

Dromio of Syracuse, 44, 46

Dumaine, 24, 32

Duncan, King, 154, 195, 198, 201

Edgar, 187, 190

Edmund, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 204

Edward III, 239

Edward IV, 93, 94

Edward, Prince of Wales (Henry VI), 62

Edward, Prince of Wales (Richard III), 99

Eglamour, 41

Elinor, Queen, 78

Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, 94

Elizabeth, Princess, 236

Emilia, 183, 184

Evans, Sir Hugh, 124, 125

Falstaff, Sir John, 112, 113, 116, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126

Flavius, 216

Florizel, 227

Fluellen, 123

Fool (Lear), 192

Ford, Mistress, 124, 125

Fortinbras, 161

Frederick, Duke, 128, 129, 132

Friar Laurence, 68, 71, 74

Gertrude, Queen, 157, 158, 161, 165

Ghost (Hamlet), 158

Gloucester, Earl of, 187, 188, 189, 190

Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59

Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (Henry VI), 61

Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (Richard III), 93, 115

Goneril, 187, 189, 193

Grey, Lord, 98, 99

Hamlet, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 191, 196, 243

Hastings, Lord, 99

Hector, 169, 170

Helen, 171

Helena (Midsummer Night's Dream), 63

Helena (All's Well), 144, 145, 147

Henry IV, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116

Henry V, 120, 121

Henry VI, 51, 52, 60, 61, 62

Henry VIII, 235, 236, 237, 238

Henry, Prince of Wales, 109, 111, 112, 114, 118

Henry Bolingbroke, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92

Hermia, 63

Hermione, 226, 227, 229

Hero, 133, 134, 135

Hippolyta, 63

Hotspur, Henry Percy, surnamed, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 119

Hubert de Burgh, 80, 83

Iachimo, 223, 225

Iago, 181, 182, 181, 185, 204, 211

Imogen, 223

Isabella, 174, 175

Jaques, 129, 131, 132

Joan of Arc, 51, 54

John, King of England, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80

John of Gaunt, 86, 89, 91

John of Lancaster, 114, 118

Julia, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42

Juliet, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71

Julius Caesar, 149, 153, 154, 156, 196

Katharina, 106, 108

Katharine, 32

Katharine of France, 120

Katharine, Queen, 235, 236, 237, 238

Kent, 187, 190

Laertes, 158, 161

Launce, 42

Lear, King, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194

Lennox, 202

Leonato, 135, 136

Leontes, King of Sicilia, 226, 227, 228, 229

Lewis the Dauphin, 75, 79

Longaville, 24, 32

Lucio, 177,178

Lucrece, 243

Lysander, 63

Macbeth, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 217

Macbeth, Lady, 195, 199, 200

Macduff, 195, 202

Malcolm, 195

Malvolio, 138, 139, 140, 141

Mamillius, 227, 229

Marcius, 208

Margaret of Anjou, 52, 55, 62, 94

Maria, 139

Mariana, 174, 175

Marina, 219, 220, 222

Mark Antony, 149, 191, 196, 202, 204, 206

Mercutio, 68, 70

Milan, Duke of, 34, 35, 38, 39

Miranda, 232

Mortimer, 53

Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of, 86, 119

Northumberland, Henry Percy, Earl of, 114

Nurse to Juliet, 74

Nym, 123, 124

Oberon, 63

Octavia, 202

Octavius Caesar, 149, 202, 203, 205

Olivia, 138, 140, 141

Oliver, 128, 129

Ophelia, 157, 158, 166

Orlando, 128, 129, 131

Orsino, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142

Othello, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 191, 196

Page, Anne, 124

Page, Mistress, 124

Pandarus, 169

Pandulph, Cardinal, 75

Paris, 68

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 213, 219, 220

Petruchio, 105, 107

Phebe, 129, 132, 133

Philip the Bastard, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83

Philip of France, 75, 80

Pistol, 117, 122, 123, 124

Polixenes, King of Bohemia, 226, 227, 228

Polonius, 158, 161

Portia, 102, 103, 104, 132

Posthumus, 223, 225

Prospero, Duke of Milan, 232, 235

Proteus, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41

Puck, 63

Pyramus, 63

Queen (Cymbeline), 223, 225

Quickly, Mrs., 124

Regan, 187, 189

Richard II, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 115, 119

Richard III, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 211

Richard, Duke of York, 99

Rivers, Earl, 98, 99

Roderigo, 183

Romeo, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71

Rosalind, 128, 129, 132

Rosaline, 25, 31, 32, 69, 133

Salisbury, Countess of, 239

Scroop, Lord, 122

Sebastian (Tempest), 235

Sebastian (Twelfth Night), 138

Shallow, Justice, 82, 124

Shylock, 103, 104

Silvia, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41

Simpcox, 65, 59

Slender, Master, 124

Sly, Christopher, 105, 107

Somerset, Earl of, 51

Stephano, 234

Suffolk, Earl of, 52, 55, 57

Talbot, 51, 54

Tamora, 49, 50

Tarquin, 196, 243

Thaisa, 219, 220, 222

Thersites, 172

Theseus, 63, 66

Thisbe, 63

Thurio, 34, 35, 37, 38

Timon of Athens, 196, 209, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218

Titania, 63

Titus Andronicus, 49, 50

Touchstone, 129

Trinculo, 234

Troilus, 169

Tybalt, 68, 70

Ulysses, 170

Ursula, 133

Valentine, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41

Venus, 241, 242

Vienna, Duke of, 174, 178

Viola, 138, 139, 141, 142

Warwick, Earl of, 59, 61

Wolsey, Cardinal, 196, 235, 236, 237, 238

York, Edmund of Langley, Duke of, 89, 92

York, Edward, Duke of, 61

York, Richard, Duke of, 51, 55, 57, 62

Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

* * * * *

Home University Library of Modern Knowledge

A Comprehensive Series of New and Specially Written Books

EDITORS:

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A. HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. PROF. WM. T. BREWSTER, M.A.

* * * * *

The Home University Library

"Is without the slightest doubt the pioneer in supplying serious literature for a large section of the public who are interested in the liberal education of the State."—The Daily Mail.

"The fact is," says the Pall Mall Gazette, "that this remarkable library helps to realise one of those functions of a true University which English Universities have culpably neglected. ... This Library makes a most effective and useful beginning in the popularisation of knowledge.... The scope of the series is as wisely outlined as its methods are effective and praiseworthy."

"The Home University Library places within the reach of every man, woman, or child with a shilling to spend fruitfully, the products of the best brains of to-day in all departments of modern knowledge."—Morning Leader.

"Each volume represents a three-hours' traffic with the talking-power of a good brain, operating with the ease and interesting freedom of a specialist dealing with his own subject.... A series which promises to perform a real social service."—The Times.

"We can think of no series now being issued which better deserves support."—The Observer.

"Certainly no publishing enterprise of our time is more remarkable or better deserving of success."—Manchester Guardian.

"Here is the world's learning in little, and none too poor to give it house-room!"—Daily Telegraph.

1/- net 256 Pages 2/6 net in cloth in leather



History and Geography

3. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A. (With Maps.) "It is coloured with all the militancy of the author's temperament."—Daily News.

4. HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE

By G. H. PERRIS. The Rt. Hon. JAMES BRYCE writes: "I have read it with much interest and pleasure, admiring the skill with which you have managed to compress so many facts and views into so small a volume."

8. POLAR EXPLORATION

By Dr W. S. BRUCE, F.R.S.E., Leader of the "Scotia" Expedition. (With Maps.) "A very freshly written and interesting narrative."—The Times. "A fascinating book."—Portsmouth Times.

12. THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA

By Sir H. H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. (With Maps.) "The Home University Library is much enriched by this excellent work."—Daily Mail.

13. MEDIAEVAL EUROPE

By H. W. C. DAVIS, M.A. (With Maps.) "A good specimen of the work of the modern historian,"—Christian World. "One more illustration of the fact that it takes a complete master of the subject to write briefly upon it."—Manchester Guardian.

14. THE PAPACY & MODERN TIMES (1303-1870)

By WILLIAM BARRY, D.D. "Dr Barry has a wide range of knowledge and an artist's power of selection."—Manchester Guardian.

23. HISTORY OF OUR TIME, 1885-1911

By G. P. GOOCH, M.A. "Mr Gooch contrives to breathe vitality into his story, and to give us the flesh as well as the bones of recent happenings."—Observer.

25. THE CIVILISATION OF CHINA

By H. A. GILES, LL.D., Professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge. "In all the mass of facts, Professor Giles never becomes dull. He is always ready with a ghost story or a street adventure for the reader's recreation."—Spectator.