WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

^ Stutig in !£ltjabet{)an ILiterature

BY

BARRETT WENDELL
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT HARVARD COLLEGE

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIRNER'S SONS
1912
 PR

589832
5. 6. S4^

Copyright, 1894,

Bi Charles Scribner's Sons.

 NOTE
As this book has grown from lectures given, at

Harvard College, to classes who were systematicallj

reading the works under discussion, it has been im-
possible to avoid the assumption that a text of Shaks-

pere is always close at hand.

Whoever is familiar with the subject must instantly

perceive my constant obligation to the writings of

Mr. Dowden and Mr. Furnivall. Just as helpful,
though not obvious to the public, have been the manu-
script notes on Shakspere kindly lent me by Messrs.
Charles Lowell Young and Henry Copley Greene, of

Harvard University ; and by Miss M. T. Bennett, of

Radcliffe College. The proof-sheets of an admirable

essay on John Lyly by my colleague, Mr. George
Pierce Baker, unhappily failed to reach me until after

this book was printed.

B. W.
New Castle, N, H.,

23 August. 1894.
 CONTENTS
» -

'
CUAPTZR PaSI
I. Introduction , ... t

II. The Facts of 'Shakspere's Life ..... 7

III. Literature and the Theatre in England

UNTIL 1587 23

IV. The Works of Shakspere 48

V. Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of
Lucrece 51

VI. The Plays of Shakspere, from Titus An-

dronicus to the Two Gentlemen of
Verona 6G

VII. The Plays of Shakspere, from A Mid-

summer Night's Dream to Twelfth
Night 103

VIII. Shakspere's Sonnets 221

IX. The Plays of Shakspere, from Julius

CiESAR TO CORIOLANUS 238

X. TiMON OF Athens, and Pericles, Prince

OF Tyre 345

XI. The Plays of Shakspere, from Cymbeline

TO Henry VIII 355

XII. William Shakspere 395

Authorities, etc 427

Index 429
 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this study is to present a coherent

view of the generally accepted facts concerning the
life and the work of Shakspere. Its object, the
common one of serious criticism, is so to increase
our sympathetic knowledge of what we study that we
may enjoy it with fresh intelligence and appreciation.
The means by which we shall strive for this end will
be a constant effort to see Shakspere, so far as is

possible at this distance of time, as he saw himself.

Of one thing we may be To himself Shaks-
certain.
pere was a very different fact from what he now seems
to the English-speaking world. To people of our time
he generally presents himself as an isolated, supreme
genius. To people of his own time — and he was a
man of his own time himself — he was certainly no-
thing of the kind ; he was no divine prophet, no
superhuman whose utterances should edify and
seer,
guide posterity he was only one of a considerable
;

company of hard-working playwrights, whose work

at the moment seemed neither more nor less serious
X
2 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
than that of any other school of theatrical writers.
Nothing but the lapse of time could have demonstrated
two or three facts now so commonplace that we are
apt to forget they were not always obvious.
First of all, the school of literature in which his
work belongs — the Elizabethan drama — proves to
have been one of the most completely typical phe-
nomena in the whole history of the fine arts. It took
little more than half a century to emerge from an
archaic tradition, to develop into great imaginative
vitality, and to decline into a formal tradition, no
longer archaic, but if possible less vital than the tra-
dition from which it emerged. In this typical liter-

ary evolution, again, Shakspere's historical position

happens to have been almost exactly central; some
of his work belongs to the earlier period of the
Elizabethan drama, much of it to the most intensely
vital, some of it to the decline. This fact alone —
that in a remarkably typical school of art he is the
most comprehensively typical figure — would make
him worth serious attention. The third common-
place invisible to his contemporaries, however, is

so much more important than either of the others

that nowadays it obscures them, and indeed ob-
scures the whole subject. This most typical writer
of our most broadly typical literary school happened
to be an artist of first-rate genius. Canting as such a
phrase must sound, it has something like a precise
meaning. In the fine arts, the man of genius is he
who in perception and in expression alike, in thought
 INTRODUCTION 3

and in phrase, instinctively so docs his work that

his work remains significant after the conditions
which actually produced it are past. Throughout
the Elizabethan drama there were flashes of genius
in general, however, the work of the Elizabethan
dramatists was so adapted to the conditions of the
Elizabethan stage that, after the lapse of three cen-
turies, its flashes of genius have faded into the ob-
scurity of book-shelves, where they serve now chiefly
to lighten the drudgery of men who study the history
of literature. In the case of Shakspere, the genius
was so strong and permeating that his work, from
beginning to end, has survived every vestige of the
conditions for which itwas made. We are apt now
to forget that it vras made for any other conditions
than those amid which, generation by generation, we
find it.

If we would sincerely try to see the man as he saw

himself, we must resolutely put aside these common-
places of posterity. In their stead we must substi-
tute the normal commonplaces of human experience.
Shakspere, we know, was an Elizabethan playwright
and we know enough of the Elizabethan drama to
form, in the end, a pretty clear conception of the pro-
fessional taskwhich was thus constantly before him.
By both temperament and profession, too, Shakspere
was a creative artist and those of us who have had
;

much to do with people who try to create works of

art learn to know that in general the artistic temper-
ament, great or small, develops according to pretty
4 AVILLIAM SIIAKSPERE

well fixed principles. Our effort to understand Shaks-

pere, then, begins to define itself. We shall have done
much if we can learn to see in him a man of normal
artistic temperament, developing, in spite of its scale,

in anormal way, under the known conditions which

surrounded the Elizabethan theatre.
Such definite study of him as this has been possible
only in recent years. Until rather lately one obstacle
to was insurmountable. To study the development
it

of any artist, we must know something of the order in

which his works were produced and Shakspere's ;

works have generally been presented to us in great

chronological confusion. The first collection of his
plays, a very carelessly printed folio, appeared in
1623. Here they were roughly classified as come-
dies, histories, and tragedies under these heads,
;

too, they were arranged in no sort of order. The

book opens with the Tempest^ for example, which is
followed by the Two Gentlemen of Verona; yet nothing
is now much better proved than that the Two Gentle-

men of Verona is the earlier by above fifteen years.

Again, the plays dealing with English history are
printed in the order in which the sovereigns they deal
with ascended the throne of England ;
yet, we except
if

Henry VIII., which stands by itself, nothing is more

certain than that Henry VI. is chronologically the
first of the series, and Henry V. the last, with an in-
terval of at least nine years between them. The
general arrangement of the plays in the first folio,
fairly exemplified by these instances, is still followed
 INTRODUCTION 3

in standard editions of Shakspere. The resulting con-

I
fusion of impression is almost ultimate.
During the past century or so, however, scholarship
has gone far to reduce this chaos to order. On various
grounds, a plausible chronology has arisen. Sixteen
of the plays, and all of the poems, were published in
quarto during Shakspere's lifetime. Entries in the
Stationers' Register — analogous to modern copyright
— exist in many cases. Allusions in the works of con-
temporary writers are sometimes helpful ; so are allu-
sions to contemporary matters in the plays themselves.
More subtle, less certain, but surprisingly suggestive
chronological evidence has been collected by elaborate
analysis of technical style. It has been discovered, for
example, that end-stopped verse, and rhyme are far
more frequent in Shakspere's earlier work than in his
later, and that what are called light and weak endings

to verses occur in constantly increasing proportion

during the last six or eight years of his writing. The
plays have been grouped accordingly.^ By some
means or other, then, and in almost every case by
means foreign to the actual substance of the works
in question, foreign to the matters they deal with or
to the mood in which they deal with them, a conjec-
tural date — as a rule provisionally accepted by
scholars — has been assigned to every work com-
monly ascribed to Shakspere.
Reading the plays and the poems in this conjecturally

^ An adequate discussion of this matter is accessible to everybody

in Dowden's Primer of Shakspere, pp. 32-4G
6 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
chronological order we find in them something far re-
moved from the pristine confusion of the standard
editions. Once for all, of course, we must admit to
ourselves that what results we thus find are not in-
contestable. As our chronology is only conjectural,
so must be any inferences which we may draw from
it. If these inferences be plausible, however, if they
help us to find in Shakspere not only the supreme
genius of English literature, but also a normal hu-
man being, greater than others, but not different in
kind, we are fairly warranted in accepting them as
a matter of faith. At least we may believe, though
we may ne^ er assert, that they can help us in our effort
to see Shakspere as he saw himself ; and so to under-
stand, to appreciate, to enjoy him better than before.
Our purpose, then, is to obtain a coherent view of the
generally accepted facts concerning the life and the
work of Shakspere. To accomplish this, we may best
begin by glancing at the known facts of Shakspere's
life. Then we shall briefly consider the condition of
English literature at the time when his literary ac-
tivity began. Then we shall consider in chronological
order, and with what detail proves possible, all the
works commonly assigned to him. Finally, we shall
endeavor to define the resulting impression of his
individuality.
 n
THE FACTS OF SHAKSPERE'S LIFE
[All the known documents concerning Shakspere are collected in
Mr. HalHwell-Phillips's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. In Mr. F. G.
Fleay's Life and Work of Shakespeare is a masterly discussion of them.
Dowdeu'a Primer, and Furnivall's Introduction to the Leopold Shaks-
pere state the factsmore compactly. In none of the authorities is it
always easy to separate facts from inferences. If Wilder's Life, Boston,
1893, were a bit more careful in detail, it would be perhaps the most
satisfactory, because the least complicated with conjecture]

On April 26th, 1564, William, son of John Shaks-

pere, was baptized at Stratford -on- A von. John Shaks-
pere, the had come from the neighboring
father,
country to Stratford, where he was engaged in fairly
prosperous trade. In 1557 he had married Mary
Arden, a woman of social position somewhat better
than his own. In 1568 he was High Bailiff, or
Mayor of Stratford. Until 1577, indeed, the extant
records indicate that he was constantly looking up
in the world. In that year, they ])egin to indicate
that his circumstances were declining 1578 they ; in
show that he had to put a mortgage for £40 on an
estate called Asbies. Meanwhile he had become the
father of five other children,^ of whom four survived.

1 Gilbert, b. 1S66; Joan, h. 1569; Anne. b. 1571, d 1579; Richard,

b. 1573; Edmund, b. ISSO. Two older daughters had died in infancy.
8 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Of William Shakspere's youth, then, we may be
sure that it began in a well-to-do family of Stratford,
increasing in numbers and prosperity and that when ;

he was about thirteen years old the prosperity came

to an end.
On November 28th, 1582, when he was half-way
between eighteen and nineteen years old, comes the
first record which directly concerns him. A bond
was given for his marriage to Anne Hathaway, a
woman then in her twenty-sixth year, and of social
position in no way better than Shakspere's. On May
26th, 1583, their first child, Susanna, was baptized.
What may be drawn from these dates have
inferences
given rise to much discussion. In all probability they
indicate a practice still common among respectable
country folk, in America sometimes called " keep-
;
ing company " and are interesting chiefly as they
throw light on the manners to which Shakspere was
born. On February 2nd, 1585, his twin children,
Hamnet and Judith, were baptized. In 1587, there
is a record of his sanction, at Stratford, to a proposed
arrangement concerning the Asbies mortgage which
his father, who was now in prison for debt, had exe-
cuted in 1578. This is literally all that is known of
his early life at Stratford. Stories of how he went to
school, how he saw plays, how he was at Kenil worth
when Queen Elizabeth came there in 1575, how he was
apprenticed to a local butcher, how he poached in Sir
Thomas Lucy's park, have no authority. They are
not impossible ; there is nothing to prove them.
 SIIAKSPERE'S LIFE 9

From the actual facts, however, certain inferences

may be drawn. At the age of twenty-threo, he was
the eldest of the five surviving children of a ruined
country tradesman ; he was married to a woman
already about thirty, who had borne him three chil-
dren ; and he had no recorded means of support.
Five years later comes the next reference to him.
On September 3d, 1592, Robert Greene, the dramatist,
died. His last book. Green'' s G-roatsworth of Wit;
bought with a Million of Repentaunce, speaks rather
scurrilously of the theatres where he had rioted away
his life. In the course of it occurs this passage :

" Base minded men al tliree of you, if by my miserie

ye be not warned: for unto none of you (like me) sought
those burres to cleave: those Piippits (I meane) that
speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our
colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have
beene beholding: is it not like that 3'ou, to whome they all
have beene beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am
now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them
not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his Tytjers heart wrapt in a Players
hide,^ supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke
verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes
fac totifin, is in his oune conceit the onely Shake-scene in
a countrie. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be
iraployed inmore profitable courses: lot these Apes cSi;

imitate yourpast excellence, and never more acquaint

them with your admired inventions. ... It is pittio

1 Cf. 3 Ilpnrti VI. Act I. Scene iv. 137.

10 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasures
of such rude groomes. . . . For other new commers, I
leave them to the mercie of these painted monsters, who
(I doubt not) will drive the best minded to despise them;
for the rest its skils not though they make a jeast at
them.''i

From this passage, we may clearly infer that by

the middle of 1592, Shakspere was a recognized
writer of plays in London, that he was more or less
involved in the theatrical squabbles of the time, that
The Third Fart of King Henry VI. was in existence,
and that — at least to the mind of Robert Greene —
he had plagiarized.
Within the year, Henry Chettle, the publisher of
this posthumous diatribe of Greene's, published an
apology for it, in the course of which he writes
thus :
—
'^With neither of them that did take offence was I
acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be
The other, ... at that time 1 did not so much spare, as
since I wish I had, . . . because my selfe have seen his
demeanor no lesse civill than he exelent in the qualitie he
professes: Besides, divers of worship have reported his
uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
facetious grace in writing, that aprooves his Art.'' *

It has been generally inferred that the two persons

1 Shakspere's Centurie of Prayse. Second Edition, London. New

Shakspere Society, 1879, p. 2.
2 Centurie of Prayse, p. 4.
 SIIAKSPERE'S LIFE U
thu3 alluded to are the graceless Marlowe and the
excellent Shakspere.
On April 18th, 1593, about a week before his twenty-
ninth birthday, Venus and Adonis, his first published
work,i was entered in the Stationers' Register. During
the same year it was published in quarto, with Shaks-
pere's name, by one Field, who was Stratford-born. It
proved highly popular ; there were eleven quarto edi-
tions before 1630, and more than twenty allusions to
it during Shakspere's life-time have been discovered.

On February 6th, 1594, A noble Roman history

of Tytus Andronicus was entered in the Stationers'
Register, with no mention of Shakspere's name it was ;

published, thus anonymously, in 1600. On May 9th,

1594, the Rape of Lucrece was entered ; and it was

published within the year. From the terms of the
dedication, compared with those in the dedication of
Venus and Adonis,^ it has been inferred that Shaks-
pere had meanwhile become personally known to his
patron, the Earl of Southampton. The poem, though
popular, was less so than Venus and Adonis ; there
were six quartos before 1624.
At Christmastime, 1594, the "servauntes to the
Lord Chamberlayne " acted twice at court ; and Shaks-
pere is mentioned as one of the members to whom
payment for these performances was made. Mr.
Fleay shows reason to believe that he had belonged
^

* And 1*8 not this the whole meaning of the much-discusged phrase
in the dedication, " the first heir of my invention " ?

^ See p. 51. « Life, pp. 8, 94.

12 WILLIAM SHAIv5iPERE

to this company, under various patrons, since 1587^

in which case he must have acted at court before
but this is the first distinct mention of his name. At
Christmas-tide, 1594, " A
comedy of Errors (like
unto Plautus his Menoechmi ") was played at Gray's
Inn, Clearly, by this time Shakspere was established
in his profession. Just how he became so there is no
record ; the tales of his holding horses at the theatre-
door, and so on, rest on no valid authority.
So far, then, the records show Shakspere first as
a probably imprudent and needy youth, saddled with a
family at twenty -three and secondly, at thirty, as
;

a fairly es!:ablished theatrical man in London. In

view of these facts, the next records ^ are significant.
A conveyance of land at Stratford, dated January
26th, 1596, describes John Shakspere, the father,
as yeoman." In the Heralds' College, a draft grant
''

of arms to this same John Shakspere, dated October

20th, 1596, describes him as a "- gentleman." From
the fact that this implied return of prosperity to the
family has no other apparent source than the growing
prosperity of the dramatist, it has been inferred that,
like any other normal Englishman, Shakspere wished
to inherit arms and to found a family. If so, another
record, of the same year, is doubly pathetic on August ;

11th, his only son, Hamnet, was buried at Stratford,

in the twelfth year of his age.
The record of Shakspere's material prosperity, how-
ever, continues. In Easter Term, 1597, he bought
^ Leopold S/iakspcre, p. ciii.
 SHAKSPERE'S LIFE lo

\cw Place, a mansion and grounds in Stratford, for

L60 ; thereby becoming a landed proprietor. During
the same year appeared the first quarto editions of his
plays namely, Romeo and Juliet in a very imperfect
:

state and })robably pirated, Richard 11.^ and Richard

III. ; his name, however, did not appear on any of
the titlepages. Another indication of prosperity is
that in November his father filed a bill in Chancery to
recover the Asbies estate which he had mortgaged nine-
teen years before. At Christmas time Lovers Labour '«
Lost was played before the Queen at Whitehall.
In 1598 this play was published, with Shakspere's
name so was the First Part of Henry IV, ; so were
;

fresh quartos of Richard II. and Richard III. ; and

the Merchant of Venice was both entered in the
Stationers' Register and published.
Tn this year, too, a fragment of old correspondence
gives us a glimpse of Shakspere. On the 24th of Jan-
uary one Abraham man, wrote to
Sturley, a Stratford
his kinsman Richard Quiney, who had gone to London
on business, as follows :
—
"Our countriman, Mr Shaksper, is willinge to disburse
some monie upon some od yarde land or other at Shotterie
. (Ur father) thinketh it a veri fitt patterns to move
. .

him to deale in the matter of our tithes. Bi the instruc-

cion u can give him thearof, and bi the frends he can
make therefore, we thinke it a fair marke for him to shoote
att, and not impossible to hitt."

Eight months later, on the 25th of October, Quiney

wrote thus :
—
14 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE
" To my loveinge countreymann Mr. Wm.
good ffrend &
Shackspere. ... I am bolde of you as of a ffrende, crave-
inge yowr helpe with xxx li uppon Mr. Bushells and my
securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Yow shall . . .

ffrende me much in helping me out of all the dehettes

I owe in London, I thancke God, and much quiet my
mynde, which wolde not be indebeted.*'

Some word seems to have been sent to

of this letter
Sturley, for on the 4th of November, Sturley wrote to
Quiney, acknowledging

*'ur letter of the 25 of October . which imported

. .

that our countriman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us

monie, which I will like of as I shall heare when and
wheare and howe; and I prai let not go that occasion if

it mai sort to our indifferent condicions.''

Later still, Richard Quiney 's father wrote his son

on the subject in person, perhaps a shade less
confidently :
—
** Yff yow bargen with Wm. Sha. ... or receve money
therefor, bring youre money homme that yow may."

Whatever these transactions were, Shakspere seems

by this time to have presented himself to his fellow-
townsmen at Stratford as a well-to-do man, and possi-
bly a useful friend at court.
In 1598, furthermore, Shakspere acted in Ben Jon-
son's Every Man in his Humour. But the most
notable fact of the year for us is the publication of
Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia} In this book, which
* Or WiVs Treasury.
 SIIAKSriCKF/S IJFK 15

was entered in the Stationers' Register on September

7th, Shakspere is mentioned at least six times as ^

among the best of English authors. The most cele-

brated and familiar of these passages is the following,
so obviously helpful in fixing the chronology of Shaks-
pere's plays :
—
**As the soule of Euphorhus was thought to live in
JPythagoras : so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives
in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his
Venus SLudAdoniSy his Lacrece, his sugred Sonnets among
his private friends, &c.
**As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for
Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines ? so Shakespeare
among y* English is the most excellent in both kinds for
the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Getleme of Verona, his
Errors, his Love labors Love labours wonne, his
lost, his
Midsummers night dreame, &
Merchant of Venicehis
for Tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the S. Henry
the 4* King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and

Juliet.
**As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speake
with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say

that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed

phrase, if they would speake English.'^

At thirty-four, then, Shakspere had pretty clearly

established himself as a poet, as a dramatist, and as
an actor ; and, in the opinion of Stratford people, as
a well-to-do, influential man of business and land-
holder.
* Centurie of Pray se^ 21-23.
10 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
In these characters the records maintain him with
little change for above ten years to come. In 1599
two of his Sonnets^and three poems from Love's La-
bour ^s Lost, appeared in a volume called the Passionate
Pilgrim, ascribed at the time to him, but otherwise
probably spurious. In 1609 appeared the quarto of
the Sonnets as we have them.
To pass from poems to plays, in 1599 appeared a
fairly complete quarto of Romeo and Juliet, In 1600,
As You Like Henry V., Much Ado About Nothing,
It,

the Second Part of Henry IV., the Midsummer

NigMs Dream, and the Merchant of Venice were en-
tered in the Stationers' Register, and all of these
except As You Like It were published in quarto,
Henry V. without his name ;same year appeared
in the
anonymously the first extant quarto of Titus Andro-
nicus. In 1602, Twelfth Night was acted the Merry ;

Wives of Windsor was entered and published and in ;

the same 3^ear were entered the First and Second Parts
of Henry VI. and the Revenge of Hamlet. This is
believed to be the version which appeared in quarto
in 1603 the full text of Hamlet appeared in 1604.
;

In 1607 King Lear was entered " as yt was played

before the Kinges Majestic at Whitehall uppon St
Stephens night at Christmas last." In the following
year it appeared in two separate quartos, on the title-
pages of which Shakspere's name is printed with very
marked conspicuousness. In 1608, too, Pericles and
Anthony ^ Cleopatra were entered. In 1609 Troylus
^ Cressida was entered and twice published and ;
 SHAKSPERE'S LIFE 17

Pericles^ too, twice appeared in quarto. This was the

year, we may remember, in which the Sonnets ap-
peared. From this time on, although a number of
the foregoing plays were reprinted during his lifetime,
no new work of his is known to have been either
entered or printed until after his death ; and the only
one which appeared before the folio of 1623 was
Othello^ entered in 1621, and published in 1622. From
these facts it would appear that his popularity as a
dramatist was at its height in 1600 ; and that at least
his activity diminished after 1609.
To pass from works to his acting, he became, in
his
1599, a partner in the Globe Theatre, then just erected ;

and his company performed at court during Christmas-

tide, in 1599, 1600, and 1602. It has been inferred by

Mr. Fleay * that their absence from court in 1601 was

connected with Essex's rebellion. It is possible that the
play concerning Richard II., performed on the eve of
that insurrection, was Shakspere's ; Queen
if so, the
probably had reason to withhold her favor from hira
and his associates ; but the matter is all conjectural.
Queen Elizabeth died on March 24th, 1603. On May
19th, King James granted a license to Shakspere and
others by name, to perform plays and to be called the
King's Players. The company in question gave sev-
eral plays at court each year until 1609 and in 1604, ;

on the occasion of the King's entry into London,

Shakspere, along with the other players, was granted
four yards and a half of red cloth. During the years
» Life, 143-144.
2
18 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
in question, then, he was j)rofessionally at the height
of his prosperity.
The records of his private affairs maintain this
conclusion. In 1600 he brought an action for £7
against a certain John Clayton, and won it; in 1602
he bought one hundred and seven acres of land near
Stratford, as well as other real property in the town in *,

1604 there came another small action, and some large

and small purchases of land. The records, in short,
show him constantly and punctiliously thrifty ; and as
early as the purchase of 1602 he was legally described
as " Wm. Shakespere of Stratford-uppon-Avon, gen-
tleman." This description occurs a few months after
he became the head of his family ; for on September
8th, 1601, the year of the Essex conspiracy, his father
was buried. In 1605, his fellow-player, Augustine
Phillips, bequeathed him " a thirty-shilling piece in
gold." On June 25th, 1607, Shakspere's elder daugh-
ter, Susanna, then twenty-four years old, was married
to Dr. John Hall, a physician of Stratford ; on Feb-
ruary 21st, 1608, Elizabeth Hall, his grandchild, was
baptized. Two months before, his youngest brother,
Edmund, *'
a player," had died in London, and had
been buried in S. Saviour's, Southwark. On Septem-
ber 9th, 1608, Shakspere's mother was buried at
Stratford; on October 16th, he stood godfather there
to one William Walker. These dry facts tell us
Bomething. Throughout the period of his professional
prosperity he was demonstrably strengthening his
position as a local personage at Stratford and the :
 SHAKSPERE'S LIFE 19

chances seem to be that he came thither in person

more and more.
From this time on, what records touch him person-
ally show him chiefly at Stratford. In 1611, to be
sure, the surprisingly detailed note-book of Dr. Simon
Forraan mentions performances of Macbeth, Cymheline,
and the Winter's Tale, In 1613, along with some
older plays, the Tempest was performed at court ; in
the same year, when the Globe Theatre was burned,
the fire started from a discharge of cannon in a play
about Henry VIII., which may have been Shakspere's
and certainly in the same year he bought, and mort-
gaged, and leased, a house and shop in Blackfriars,
London. What attracts one's attention more, however,
is his presence in the country. In 1610 he bought
more land from the Combes ; in 1611 he subscribed to
a fund for prosecuting in Parliament a bill for good
roads ; in 1612, described as " William Shackspeare,
of Stratford-uppon-Avon, . . gentleman," he joined in
a suit of which the object was to diminish his taxes
in 1614 he received a legacy of £5 from his Strat-
ford neighbor, John Combe ; in 1614, too, he was
deep in a local controversy about the fencing of com-
mons. Meanwhile there is said to be no record
directly connecting him with theatrical life after 1609,
when his publication ceased.
In view of this, the last paragraph of the Dedica-
tion of John Webster's White Devil^ is in a way
significant :
—
* Centurie of Pray se, 100.
20 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
** Detraction is the sworne friend to ignorance: Foi
mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion
of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and
haightned stile of maister Chapman : The labor'd and
understanding workes of maister Johnson: The no lesse
worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Maister
Beaumont & Maister Fletcher: And lastly (without
wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious in-
dustry of M. Shakespeare^ M. Decker, & M. Heywood,
wishing what I write may be read by their light: Pro-
testing, that, in the strength of mine owne judgement, I
know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my
owne worke, yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery)
fix that of Martiall.

-non norunt, Hsec monumenta mori/'

This was written in 1612. The first play of Chap-

man was published in 1598 Heywood, in
; the first of

1599 the first of Jonson and the first of Dekker

;

in 1600; the first of Beaumont and Fletcher in

1607. Webster, probably a greater man than any
of these, speaks of them all, in his first words,
as traditional models. He groups Shakspere with
them; and Shakspere had certainly begun his work,
as a rival of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, years be-
fore any of these others except perhaps Dekker. In
1612 he was already, in a way, a tradition.
What little more is recorded of him belongs to
the year 1616. On January 25th, his will was pre-
pared. On February 10th, his younger daughter,
Judith, married Thomas Quiney. On March 25th he
signed his will. Just one month later, on April 25th,
 SHAKSPERE'S LIFE 21

1616, " Will. Shakspere, gent.," was buried in the

church of Stratford.
All the rest of the story — how he died on his
fifty-second birthday, how undue merry-making had
something to do with it, how he made a doggerel
epitaph for John Combe, and so on — is mere legend.
Every known fact we have before us, except per-
haps the fact that the editors of the Centurie of
Prayse^ who are a shade over-eager, have discovered
more than a hundred ^ allusions to Shakspere between
1592 and 1616. At first sight, the record seems
very meagre.
On reflection, though, it tells more of a story than
at first seems the case. The son of a country trades-
man who was beginning to improve his condition,
Shakspere, in early youth, met with family misfor-
tune, and made at best an imprudent marriage.
Until the age of twenty-three, he was still in these
circumstances. At twenty-eight he had established
himself as an actor, a dramatist, and a poet in Lon-
don. At thirty-two he had begun to help his
father, and incidentally the family name of Shakspere,
back into local consideration. At thirty-four he was
a landed proprietor, a person vvho could be useful to
country friends visiting London, and — at least in
the opinion of Francis Meres —a first-rate literary
figure. Till forty-five he maintained his professional
position, constantly strengthening himself as a land-

* Including those publisliod in F>€sh Allusions : New Shakspere

Societ}', 1886.
22 WILLIAM SHAKSPEKE

holder meanwhile. From forty-five to fifty-two, he

was a country gentleman of Stratford. Prosaic
enough this looks at first sight whoever will
; but, to
sympathetically appreciate the motives which have
made Englishmen what Englishmen have been, it is
not without its heroic side. We have had cant
enough about snobbishness. A true-hearted Eng-
lishman always wants to die a gentleman if he can
and here, in the facts of Shakspere's life, we have
the record of an Englishman, who, from a position
which might easily have lapsed into peasantry,
worked his way, in the end, to one of lasting local
dignity.
 Ill

LITERATURE AND THE THEATRE IN ENGLAND

UNTIL 1587

[The best popular history of English Literature is still Stopford

Brooke's Primer. The best popular work on Elizabethan Literature
is Saintsbury's the best on the early drama is Addington Symonds's
;

Shakspere's Predecessors. More satisfactory than any of these, as far

as it goes, is Frederick Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Litera-
ture, For whoever wishes more thorough treatment of the English
stage, Mr. A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature is
useful and Mr. Fleay's Chronicle History of the London Stage, and
;

Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama are very valuable.]

From we have just considered, it is clear

the facts
that in 1587 Shakspere was still at Stratford and ;

that by 1592 he was already so established a dram-

grouped by Robert Greene with Peele
atist as to be

and Marlowe. In the next year, 1593, the publica-

tion of Venus and Adonis brings him finally before
us as a man of letters. The fact that, in 1587, the
Earl of Leicester's players, the company with which
he was later associated, paid a professional visit to
Stratford, has ledsome people to surmise that when
they returned to London they took him along. What-
ever the facts were, we cannot be far wrong in as-
suming that the state of English Literature in 1587
fairly represents wliat Shakspere found, just as the
24 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
state of things in 1612 fairly represents what Shaks-
pere left.

His literary activity, then, his productive period, we

may assume to be limited to twenty-five years, the last
sixteen of the reign of Elizabeth and the first nine of
the reign of James I. The state of our dramatic lit-

erature during this period, and to a great degree that

of English poetry, may be adequately studied, for our
purposes, in works generally assigned to him. To ap-
preciate these, however, we must first glance at the
state of English Literature which immediately pre-
cedes them.
Putting 8 side Chaucer, who was already as solitary
a survival of a time long past as he is to-day, we may
broadly say that during the first twenty-nine years of
Queen Elizabeth's reign, English Literature contained
and produced hardly anything permanent; a few
lyrics, like Wyatt's Forget not Yet, or Lyly's Cupid
and Campaspe, still to be found in any standard
collection, may be said to comprise the whole
literature of that period which has survived. In a
traditional way, however, certain writers of the time
remain familiar ; without knowing quite what their
work is like, people in general have a nebulous idea
that the work exists, and at least formerly was of some
importance. The earliest of these writers do not
strictly belong to the time of Elizabeth at all. Both
Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who are
commonly regarded as the pioneers of our modern
literature, died in tlie reign of Henry VIII. Their
 ENGLISH LITERATURE UNTIL 1587 'J.'j

writings, however, remained chiefly in manuscript

until 1557, the year before the accession of Elizabeth.
In that year, together with a considerable number of

lyrics by other and later men, their songs and sonnets

were published in Tottel's Miscellany. With that pub-
lication, modern English Literature, we may say, first
became accessible to the general public.
By that time, as a hasty glance at the Miscellany^
will suffice to movement begun fifteen
show, the
or twenty years before by Wyatt and Surrey had
already progressed considerably. Wyatt was a gen-
tleman, an ambassador, a statesman; Surrey, eldest
son of the Duke of Norfolk, was a man of the highest
rank and fashion. Wyatt, the elder by fourteen
years, was by far the more serious character. The
fact that nowadays they are commonly grouped
together is due not so much to any close personal
relation, as to the accident that their works were
first printed in the same volume. It is justified his-

torically, however, by the relation which their work

bears to what precedes and to what follows. These
courtiers, these men whose lives were passed in the
most distinguished society of their time, found not
only the literature, but even the language, of their
native England in a state which, compared with the
contemporary French or Italian, may fairly be called

barbarous. Each alike did his best to imitate or to

reproduce in English the civilized literary forms al-

ready prevalent on the Continent. Each, for example,

translated sonnets of Petrarch ; each made original
26 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
sonnets after the manner of that master ; and Sur.
rey, among other things, was the first to use English
blank verse, in a careful, and by no means ineffec-
tive, translation of two books of the ^neid. Each,
in short, made a considerable number of linguistic
and metrical experiments and neither seems to
;

have thought of publication. Manuscript copies of

their verses were multiplied among their private
friends. A fashion was started, until at last the
ability to play gracefully with words became almost
as essential to the equipment of an Elizabethan gen-
tleman as the ability to ride or to fence. As a
rule, how3ver, these men of fashion followed the
example of Wyatt and Surrey to the end. They im-
proved the power and the flexibility of the language
surprisingly ; but they did not publish. In 1586, for
example. Sir Philip Sidney died ; the Arcadia, the
first of his published works, did not appear till 1590.
As late as 1598, too, we may remember that, accord-
ing to Meres, the " sugred sonnets " of Shakespere,
who was by no means a man of rank, followed the
fashion in being reserved for his private friends. In
1587, then, one may safely say that for above thirty
years a certain graceful poetic culture had been the
fashion ; that its chief conscious object — so far as it

had any — was to civilize a barbarous language ; that

it delighted in oddity and novelty, and that it inclined
to disdain publication.
There was no want of publication, however. The
prose books of Roger Ascham, already rather anti-
 ENGLISH LITERATURE UNTIL 1587 27

quated, proved that a scholarly man could write very

charmingly in English prose. Aschara was tutor to
both Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth. He pub-
lished abook on archery, and another on education,
which are still pleasant to read and he intended to
;

write one on cock-fighting, which might have been

more amusing than either of the others. Again, Foxe's
great Acts and Monuments, traditionally called the
Book of Martyrs, was, from 1563, as generally acces-
sible as was the early version of the English Bible.
Both of these naturally concerned themselves little
with literary form Foxe was so grimly in earnest
;

that his views still affect the opinion held by English-

speaking people concerning the Roman Catholic
Church. Incidentally, however, he proved with what
tremendous effect the English language might be
used for serious narrative. There were increasing
numbers of translations from the classics, too, of
which the most generally remembered now are prob-
ably Gelding's Ovid and North's Plutarch. There
were popular translations, as well, of less serious
foreign literature, of which the most familiar in tra-
dition is Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, a collection
of tales largely from Boccaccio. These translations,
from classic tongues or from foreign, were alike in
their object of supplying to a people whose curiosity was
awakened material that should for the moment have
the charm of novelty. Novelty, too, was what gave a
charm hardly yet exhausted to those records of ex-
ploration and discovery which are best typified bj^
28 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Hakluyt's Voyages. By these, also, a sentiment of
patriotism was alike stimulated and gratified ; a state
of things, which, in a less stimulating form, was repro-
duced by such historical chronicles as those of Stowe
and of Holinshed.
most notable publication for the
Decidedly the
moment, however, was one which in its day was the
most popular book in English, and which was subse-
quently so completely neglected that for a century or
more it was hardly known to be in existence. This
was John Lyly's Uuphues, first published in 1579,
and four times republished within six years. In 1587,
accordingly, its popularity had hardly begun to wane.
Professedly a novel, this book has no plot to speak of,
and does not pretend to develop character, or either
fantastically or plausibly to describe any real or imagi-
nary state of life. It does pretend to be aphoristic
but the aphorisms it formulates are blamelessly ob-
vious throughout. In none of the generally essential
traits of popular fiction, then, does Euphues show
a trace of such excellence as should account for its

popularity. The secret of this is to be sought wholly

in its formal style. This which is said by mod-
style,
ern critics to be closely imitated from the Spanish,
is probably the most elaborately, fantastically, obvi-
ously affected in the English language. To any mod-
ern reader, in spite of a certain prettiness of phrase
and rhythm, it is persistently and emptily tedious
to the Elizabethan public, on the other hand, it was
clearly, for a good while, completely fascinating. It
 ENGLISH LITERATURE UNTIL 1587 29

not only set a formal fashion of expression which

was palpable for years in English prose, and is said
greatly to have influenced actual conversation it ;

gave our language the word "euphuism," which re-

mains to this day a generic term for saccharine liter-
ary affectation. When what seems mere affectation
has such marked effect, it becomes historically im-
portant; to understand the period to which it ap-
pealed, we must make ourselves somehow feel its

charm. In the case of Euphues this is not an easy

task : charm is almost impossible.
actually to feel its
To appreciate wherein its old charm lay, however, is
not so hard as at first one fears from beginning to
;

end, the book phrases everything — no matter how

simple — most elaborately unexpected way that
in the
Lyly, who was perhaps the most ingenious writer
> known to English literature, could devise. The only
kind of taste to which its far-fetched allusions, its

thin juvenile pedantry, its elaborate circumlocutions,

its endless balance and alliteration, can appeal is a
tastewhich incessantly craves verbal novelty. Were
there no other proof than the popularity of Euphues
affords, therewould be proof enough that, in 1587,
the one thing which the literary and fashionable
public of England most admired was a new, palpably
clever turn of phrase.
If further proof were demanded, however, the next
piece of evidence might be Spenser's ShephenVs Cal-
endar, and his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey
concerning English versifying. These two works,
30 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
exactly contemporary with Uuphues, were almost
all that Spenser had as yet published. Not a line

of the Faerie Queene, or of the Amoretti, or of the

lesser verse by which he is now known, was as yet
before the public ; nor was there yet in print a line
of either Bacon, Marlowe, Sidney, Drayton, Ralegh,
Daniel, Chapman, Hooker, Dekker, Middleton, Hey-
wood, or Ben Jonson. Elizabethan Literature, as we
now understand the term, was still a thing of the
future.
To sum up this necessarily hasty review : in 1587,
English Literature, which was between forty and
fifty years old, consisted in the first place of increas-
ingly successful efforts to reduce to literary form a
hitherto barbarous language, and in the second, of
such technical feats of skill with this new vehicle of
expression as were bound by ingenious novelty to
please both cultivated and popular fancy. Besides
these, to be sure, it contained a fair amount of pass-
able translationfrom classical and foreign authors,
O amount of sometimes drv and
and an increasino* ft/

sometimes vigorously effective narrative, generally

historical. In a word, the curiosity of England was
aroused ; whatever, in substance or in form, satisfied
curiosity was welcome ; and among the more fashion-
able classes this passion for curious novelty took the
form of inexhaustible appetite for verbal ingenuity.
So much for what was then recognized as litera-
ture, —
what was circulated in manuscript among
people of fashion, and what found its way, either
 THE THEATRE CNTIL 1587 31

directly or surreptitiously, into print. Along with this

there was beginning to flourish a distinct school of

literature which as yet had hardly been recognized
as such. This was the theatre. From time imme-
morial something like a popular drama had flourished
in England. The earliest form in which we know it
is the Miracle Plays, which were popular dramatic

presentations, often in startlingly contemporary

terms, of Scriptural stories, originally produced by
the clergy, and always more or less under church
supervision. These were followed by what are called
" Moralities," where actors personifying various virtues
and vices would go through some very simple dra-
matic action, usually enlivened by the pranks of
*'
Iniquity " or some other Vice.^ Then came similar
productions, called " Interludes," which differed
from the Moralities only in pretending to deal with
less abstract personages. The Miracle Plays, which
persisted at least well into the Sixteenth Century,
were generally performed on large portable stages,
wheeled through the streets like the " floats " in a
modern procession the actors were generally the
;

members of the local guilds, each one of which would

traditionally have in charge its own part of the Scrip-
ture story and its own travelling stage. The Mo-
ralities and Interludes, on the other hand, which

^ These old Moralities act better than you would suppose. One
given verbatim not long ago, though acted by amateurs who were all
friends of the audience, had enough dramatic force to hold attention
like a good modern play.
'iO
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
required hardly any stage setting, might be played
anywhere —
in an inn-yard, in a gentleman's hall, |

in some open square. While sometimes performed

by such occasional actors as always kept charge of
the Miracle Plays, the Moralities and Interludes
tended to fall into the hands of strolling players and
such other half-artistic vagrants as are sure to exist
anywhere. The mountebanks whom one may still

see here and there, at country fairs or in the train

of quack doctors, preserve, with little change, the
aspect of things in which the English drama grew.
When the classical scholarship of the Renaissance
began to declare itself in England, it attempted, as
in other countries, to revive something resembling
the Roman stage. In Ralph Roister Boister and
in Gammer GurtorCs Needle we have examples of
efforts, at once human and scholarly, to civilize the
English theatre. In Gorhoduc, the first English work
In which blank verse is used for dramatic purposes,
we have a conscientious effort, on the part of schol-
arly people, to produce in English a tragedy which
should emulate what were then deemed the divine
excellences of Seneca. These efforts, essentially
similar to those which until the present century con-
trolled the development of the theatre in France,
were very pleasing to the learned few ; witness the
familiar passage about the theatre in Sir Philip
Sidney's Defence of Poesy. On the other hand,
there is little evidence that they ever appealed much
to the popular fancy, which certainly persisted in
 THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 33

enjoying the wholly unscholarly traditions of Mir-

acles, Moralities, and Interludes. These permitted in

I matters theatrical a range of conventional freedom,

a serene disregard of limitations either of time or of
place, a bold mixture of high matters and low, serious
and comic, spiritual and obscene, — which, to any
cultivated taste, was quite as barbarous as were the
linguistic and metrical crudities reduced to formal
civilization by the literary successors of Wyatt and
Surrey. For a while it looked as if the theatre of
the people would permanently separate itself from
all serious literary tradition.
At least from 1576, however, there were regular
theatres in London. To a modern mind, though, that
very term is misleading. An Elizabethan theatre,
a structure adapted to conventions which had arisen
among was very unlike a theatre of
strolling players,
the present day. At least the pit was open to the
sky; there was no scenery in the modern sense of
t the word there was no proscenium, no curtain
; and ;

the more fashionable part of the audience sat in

chairs on either side of the stage, smoking pipes after
tobacco came into fashion, eating fruit, and, if they
saw fit, making game of the performance. The
actors, meanwhile, invariably male, —
for no woman
appeared on the English stage until after the Resto-
ration, — appeared with what dignity they could be-
tween these two groups of spectators ; and whatever
the period of the play they were performing, — clas-
sical, mediaeval, or contemporary, — they always wore
34 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

gorgeous clothes of recent fashion, perhaps discarded

court finery bought second-hand, and the like. Al-
together, the nearest modern approach to the stage
conditions of an Elizabethan theatre is to be found
in those of the Chinese theatres which may some-
times be discovered in the Chinese quarters of
American cities. It was for such a stage as this
that all the plays of Shakspere were written.
Decidedly before 1587, however, this unpromising
place had begun to produce plays still of some in-

terest, at least historically. Three names of that

period are remembered in all histories of English
Literature, —
the names af Robert Greene, George
Peele, and Christopher Marlowe. These men, all
under thirty years of age, had all been educated
at one of the universities, and were all black sheep.
Greene, for example, is known to have deserted his
wife,and to have lived with a woman named Ball,
whose brother was hanged at Tyburn Peele, whether ;

rightly or wrongly, was, almost in his own time, made

the hero of a crudely obscene jest-book ; Marlowe was
killed at the age of twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl.
Yet, by 1587, all three of these men had produced
plays of which any reader of Shakspere may form an
idea by glancing at Henry VI., Richard IIL, and
Richard II. There is much argument among critics
as to whether a considerable part of Henry VI. may
not actually have been written by one or more of the
three, and as to whether Richard HI. be not rather
Marlowe's work than Shakspere's while Richard H.y
;
 THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 35

i hough generally admitted to be Shakspere's own, is

undoubtedly written in Marlowe's manner. All three

of these men combined good education with graceless
lives and active wits. Historically they mark a fusion
between the traditions of culture and those of the
popular theatre. Far removed as their work is from
the pseudo-classic tendency so much admired by
Sidney, itremoved from the crudely
is just as far
popular Interludes and Moralities and in technical ;

style —
in freedom and fluency of verse it is much —
better than anything before it. Some of Greene's
lyrics are thoroughly good; at least in David and
Bethsahe, Peele's work shows signs of lasting dra-
matic merit ^ while Marlowe not only made blank
;

verse the permanent vehicle of English tragedy, but

actually expressed in dramatic form a profound sense
of tragic fact.
Tamhurlalne^ to be sure, the first of Marlowe's
tragedies, is assigned to this very year, 1587 ; and is

commonly spoken of as if chiefly remarkable for its

use of blank verse, finally delivering the stage " from

jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits," and for such
indubitably bombastic passages as ''
Holla ! ye pam-
!
per'd jades of Asia " ^ In point of fact, however, it

is still more notable for real power. This shows itself

clearly in occasional passages, like the famous one on

beauty : ^ —
1 See particularly the notable scene of the drunken loyal Urias and
the perfidious David.
"^
Part I. Act IV. sc. iii. » Part I. Act V. sc. ii.
36 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
" If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes ;

If all the heavenly quintessence they still

From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit
If these had made one poem's period,
And combin'd in beauty's worthiness,
all

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest."

Still more clearly, however, the lasting power of

Marlowe shows itself in his whole conception even of
Tamburlaine. If we will but accept the conventions,
and forget them if we will admit the monotony of
;

end-stopped lines and the sonorous bombast which

delighted the crude lyric appetite of early Elizabethan
playgoers ; if we will only ask ourselves what all this

was meant to express, we shall find in Tamburlaine

itself a profound, lasting, noble sense of the great
human truth reiterated by the three later plays ^

which Marlowe has left us. Like these, Tamburlaine

expresses, in grandly symbolic terms, the eternal
tragedy inherent in the conflict between human aspira-
tionand human power. No poet ever felt this more
genuinely than Marlowe none ever expressed it more
•

firmly ormore constantly. By 1587, then, the English

stage had already become the seat not only of very
animated play-writing, and of charming lyric verse.
1 Dr. Faustus, the Jew of Malta, and Edward II.
 THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 37

but actually, though unobserved, of noble philosophic

poetry.
It is with these men, and other men like them, that
Shakspere is grouped by Robert Greene in the Groats-
worth of Wit, which we remember belongs to 1592.
Perhaps even more than theirs, however, the dramatic
work John Lyly marks the permanent divergence
of
of English taste from the pseudo-classic principles
commended by Sidney. Lyly's Uuphues, as we have
seen, was in its day the most popular book in the
English language. It appeared in 1579; the next
year appeared its sequel, Uuphues and his England,
Like the play-writing roysterers at whom we have just
glanced, Lyly was a university man unlike them,
;

he seems to have had a strong tendency to respect-

able life. For some ten years after the success of
Euphues there is evidence that he hung about the
court, seeking office or some such advancement;
and during these ten years, his literary work took
a dramatic form. Written rather for court pag-
eants, or for performance by choir-boys, than for the
popular stage, Lyly's plays seem nowadays thin and
amateurish ; thfey quite lack the robust, unconscious
carelessness of the regular Elizabethan theatre. Like
Euphue8,\io\YQ\QY, they are distinctly things of fashion ;

as such, they prove that, in theatrical affairs as well

as in popular, fashionable taste had taken a definitely
romantic turn. While Lyly threw classic form to the
winds, caring as little for the unities as the wildest
scribbler of Moralities, a thousand allusions and
38 .WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

turns of thought and phrase prove that he had read

pretty deep in the classics, and read for fun. He was
romantic in form, then, not for want of knowing better,
but as a matter of deliberate taste or policy. As such,
too,he was not only persistently euphuistic in style,
but he was also constantly experimental in matters of
mere stage-business. In his comedies, for example,
one finds, for the first time in English, such fan-
tastically ingenious plays on words and repartee as
nowadays, reaching their acme in Much Ado About
Nothing^ are commonly thought peculiar to Shakspere.
Again, perhaps influenced by the fact that all his
players were male, and consequently ill at ease in
skirts, he first introduced on the English stage the
device so repeatedly used by Shakspere of disguis-
ing his heroine as a man. Throughout, in sliort,

with frankly persistent ingenuity, these light, grace-

ful, fantastic plays of Lyly's appeal, like the style of
Uuphues, to a taste which delights above all else in
clever, apparently civilized novelty.
Such, in general, was the state of the English
stage in 1587. Committed to the still untrammelled
freedom of romantic form, it displayed in its fashion-
able aspect and in its popular alike every evidence of
appealing to an insatiable taste for novelty. The very
simplicity of its material conditions, however, combined
with the prevalent literary taste of the time to make the
actual novelties it offered to its public principally ver-
bal. With none of the modern distractions of scenery
or of realistic costume, with hardly any mechanical help
 THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 39

to the temporary iHusion which must always be dear to

a theatre-going heart, an Elizabethan audience found its
attention centred, to a degree now hardly imaginable,
on the actual words of the play. While certain con-
ventional kinds of drama, then, which may be discussed
best in connection with the actual works of Shakspere,
were beginning to define themselves, all had in com-
mon the trait of a constantly ingenious, experimental
phrasing, to be appreciated nowadays only when you
can force yourself into the mood of an every-day
theatre-goer who should enjoy a new turn of language
as heartily as a modern playgoer would enjoy a new
popular tune. What now appeals to us in Marlowe's
Tamhurlaine is the profound tragic feeling which
underlies it ; in its own day what made it popular was
the ranting sonorousness of its verse.

In all but purely lyric style^ clearly enough, the

taste of 1587 was still rather childishly crude. With
lyric verse the case was different. The fashion of
verbal experiment, which had persisted since the
time of Wyatt, combined with the thin melody of
contemporary music not only to make words do much
of the essentially musical work of which modern song-
writers are relieved by our enormous musical develop-
ment, but also to develop the positive lyric power of
the language to a degree which has never been sur-
passed. Wyatt himself, we have seen, wrote Forget
not Yet; John Lyly wrote Cupid and Campaspe.
What delights one in these, and in the hundreds of
songs for which we must here let them be typical, is
40 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
not that they mean much, but that, with indefinable
subtlety, they are so exquisitely musical. To such
effects as theirs the public of 1587 was sensitive to a
degree now hard to imagine the purity of a sense of
;

beauty new to a whole nation had not yet been cor-

rupted. By 1587, then, the Elizabethan lyric was
almost at its best. Fantastic as the statement seems,
though, it is probably true that the ultimate secret of
lyric beauty — the only permanent effect which Eliza-
bethan literature had as yet achieved — is identical
with that which made Euplmes so popular. The
lyric poet is technically the most ingenious conceiv-
able juggler with words.
For all their common verbal ingenuity, however,
and their common, eager endeavor to carry out the
work begun by Wyatt and lastingly to civilize what
had seemed a wildly barbarous language, the pure
men of letters, for whom Sidney and Lyly may stand
representative, differed very widely in private consider-
ation from the men of the theatre, such as Greene, or
Peele, or Marlowe. As a class the former were respect-
able or better ; as a class the latter were disreputable.
For the moment fashion favored polite literary effort

to a degree unusual in human history ; the theatre,

meanwhile, was what the theatre always has been
everywhere, — the centre not only of artistic activity,

but also of organized vice.

We touch here on a delicate matter, which of late
it has been the fashion to ignore. By rather deliber-
ately ignoring it, however, most modern critics have
 THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 41

failed to make clear the actual circumstances in which

Shakspere found himself when he came to London.
Beyond doubt there were good and sturdy men con-
nected with the Elizabethan stage, just as good and
sturdy people may always be found among stage-folk
everywhere. Beyond doubt, the remaining fragments
of Elizabethan dramatic writing, even if we throw out
of our consideration the works of Shakspere, comprise
much, indeed most, of the noblest poetry of their
time. Equally beyond doubt, however, the Elizabethan
theatre of 1587 was not a socially respectable place,
and Elizabethan theatrical people — the Bohemians
of a societywhere there was no alternative between
formal respectability and the full license of profes-
sional crime — were very low company.
As early as 1579, one Stephen Gosson, then an
ardent Puritan, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney an
attack on the immorality of poetry and of the stage,
under the apt title, the School of Abuse. Sidney, who
had not authorized the dedication, evinced his dis-
pleasure by coming to the rescue with his Defence of
Poesy. Gosson was certainly scurrilous, and modern
critics have usually confined themselves to this aspect
of his work, which they attribute to the fact that he
himself had once been little better than one of the
wicked ; it is said that he had unsuccessfully tried to
write plays. Sidney's Defence remains a beautiful, ele-
vated piece of English prose, full of a peculiar quality
which faintly suggests what the charm of Sidney's
actual personality must have been. For all this,
42 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
however, for all the snarling vulgarity of Gosson and
the noble amenity of Sidney, there is an aspect in
which Gosson rather than Sidney is in the right.
Wherever an organized theatre develops itself, one is
sure to find along with this centre of more or less
serious art an equally organized centre of moral cor-
ruption. Without the Elizabethan theatre, to be sure,
we could never have had Shakspere yet the very ;

forces which produced Shakspere were producing at

the same time a growing state of social degradation.
To our minds, at a distance of three hundred years,
the Elizabethan theatre seems chieflv the source from
which has come to us a noble school of poetry. To
Elizabethan Puritans, to the very men whose blood
still runs in the veins of New England, the Elizabethan
poets were the panders who kept full those schools of
vice, the play-houses. Nor can all the patronizing
amenity of Sir Philip Sidney, blinding himself like
other apologists to what he did not choose to see, blind
us to the fact that the evils which Gosson so hatefully
attacked were real, lasting, and bound to be the price
which any society must pay for the enjoyment of a
professional stage. ^
In Gosson's time, too, this state of things affected
the personal life of theatrical people rather more
than usual. They were then just emerging from
the condition of strolling players. None of them
were yet rich enough to emerge, as Shakspere
emerged thirty years later, into a solidly respectable
social station. We have seen what sort of life Greene
 THE TIIP:ATKE until 1587 4o

lived, and Pecle, and Marlowe. Greene, like Marlowe,

died in a public-house, of which the hostess is said tr
have crowned his body with a laurel wreath. Rol
licking, reckless, wicked these old playwrights w^ere,.
for all the beauty of their verse, all the nobility oi
their perceptions. They had their public with them,
to be sure ; if their plays succeeded, they might prob-
ably be better paid than any other men of their time
who had only their wits to live by. Once paid,
however, they would do little better than riot away
their earnings in London taverns.
In view of this, a very familiar part of Shakspere's
writing seems freshly significant. It was in 1596, we
may remember, that John Shakspere, for the first

time described as " gentleman," applied for arms ; and

in 1597 that Shakspere himself, by the purchase of
New Place, first became a landed proprietor. To the
latter of these years, at latest, we must attribute the
first part of Henry IV., which was entered in the
Stationers' Register on February 25th, 1597-98. In
Henry IV. occur those vivid scenes concerning Fal-
staff and his crew on which our actual knowledge of

Elizabethan tavern-life is chiefly based. It was in such

a tavern as makes classic the name of Eastcheap that
Marlowe met his end in just such a place that Greene
;

lived with the sister of Cutting Ball, hanged at Tyburn ;

in such a place, too, must have been cracked the bawdy

jokes of George Peele. It seems hardly unreasonable,*

then, to guess tliat Shakspere's wonderful picture of
the cradle of the Elizabethan drama may have been
44 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
made at the moment when prosperity at length allowed
him to emerge into a more decent way of life. How
ever this may be, there can be /no doubt that, in 1587,
any professional actor must perforce have found him-
self in such environment as surrounded Falstaff and
Gadshill, and Peto, and Bardolph, and Mistress
Quickly.
To sum up this cursory view of the state of English
Literature and the English stage at the moment when
Shakspere's professional life Formal Eng-
began :

lish Literature, which had begun with the work of

Wyatt, had accomplished only three things, all rather
slight : it had reduced a barbarous language to
something had supplied the
like a civilized form ; it

newly awakened national curiosity with a good deal

of compendious information; and it had at once
stimulated and gratified an excessive appetite for
verbal ingenuity, which delighted in the affectations
of euphuism, and at the same time relished lyric
verse of lasting beauty. Meanwhile, this kind of
thing, though highly fashionable, did not pay particu-
larly well ; to all appearances not even John Lyly
made any money to speak of. The theatre, on the
other hand, had developed the popular trifles of stroll-

ing players into a fairly established and tolerably

lucrative kind of drama, whose vigorously romantic
tendency was much to the taste of fashionable and
popular audiences alike. In the hands of Marlowe,
this drama had already at least once been the vehicle
of profound tragic feeling yet Marlowe himself was
;
 THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 45

popular, not as a great tragic poet, but as a daring

verbal and formal innovator. The stage and litera-
ture alike, then, were chiefly notable for eager, experi-
mental pursuit of novelty. They differed chiefly in
the fact that while literature, though respectable, was
merely fantastic, the stage, though increasingly human,
was very disreputable indeed. >

Among works attributed to Shakspere, there are

several which, genuine or not, are certainly character-
istic rather of the period than of the man. In the
beginning of what purports to be our study of Shaks-
pere himself, then, we shall find ourselves in some
degree continuing our study of his time. There,
rather than here, seems the best place to consider
such phases of literature as appear in his poems, and
in the various kinds of drama — comedy, tragedy, and
history — which had begun to define themselves on
the stage. All we need now remember is that, at the
age of twenty three or four, Shakspere found himself,
with all his work still to do, in the environment at
which we have just glanced. As we study the devel-
opment of his work, we shall incidentally glance, too,
at certain changes in theatrical conditions. Wliat
our study should begin with is simply this environ-
ment with which he began.
Of the temperament of the man whose active life
began under these circumstances we have no record,
beyond what we may infer from his work. One very
familiar passage in his later writing, however, when
taken in connection with a familiar piece of contem-
46 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
porary gossip, seems at least suggestive of the possi-
bilities which lay within him. The bit of gossip is a

random note preserved in the diary of one John Man-

ningham, Barrister-at-Law of the Middle Temple, and
of Bradbourne, Kent. Writing in 1602 or 1608, with
no more authority than one " Mr. Curie," he tells a
story which very possibly is apocryphal, but which
certainly what manner
indicates in of estimation
Shakspere was held after he had been fifteen years at
work ^ :
—
" Upon a tyme when Burbidge played Kick. 3 there
was a Citizan gaene soe farr in liking with him, that before
shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that
night unto hir by the name of Ri: the 3. Shakespeare
overhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained,
and at his game ere Burbedge came. Then message being
brought that Bich. the 3*^ was at the dore, Shakespeare
caused returne to be made that William the Conquerour was
before Kich. the 3. Shakespere's name William."

The from Shakspere's own writ-

familiar passage
ing is the 111th sonnet, which was certainly written
within a few years of the same date. It gives at least
a plausible inner glimpse of a life whose outward aspect
might have justified Manningham's gossip :
—
**
0, for my sake do you with Fortune ckide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.

1 Centurie of Prayse, 45.

 THE TIIKATKi: IXTIf. 1587 47

Thence comes it that iny name receives h brand,

And ahnost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like a dyer's hand:
Pity me then, and wish I were renew'd
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eiseP 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think.
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me."

1 Vinegar.
 IV
THE WORKS OF SHAKSPERE

From now forth, we shall devote our attention

chiefly to the works of Shakspere, in which we shall
endeavor constantly to find traces of his artistic

individuality. Though, like any technical term of

criticism, the phrase sound canting, it has a real
meaning. Any artist, in whatever art, whose work
deserves serious attention, must either perceive or
express the matters with which he deals —
or better
still both perceive and express them —
in a way pecu-
liar to himself. The artist's work need not be auto-
biographic everybody knows, for example, that a most
;

erratic man may write noble poetry, or an estimable

young girl produce a novel which shocks her mother.
Any work of art, however, must express something
which the artist, either in experience or by imagina-
tive sympathy, has perceived or known. If in the
work of any artist, then, we succeed in defining traits
not perceptible in that of others, we succeed, so far as
these go, in defining his artistic individuality.
The generally accepted works of Shakspere con-
sist of two rather long poems, a few short ones not
distinguishable from his other lyrics, a collection of
sonnets, and thirty-seven five-act plays, if we count
 THE WORKS OF SHAKSPERE 49

separately the two parts of Henry IV. and the three

of Henry VI. These works we shall generally con-
sider in what appears to be their chronological order.
Partly because the two long poems were undoubtedly
his first publications, however, and partly because
they are by far the most careful work of his earlier
period, — and so the most seriously and consciously
expressive, — we shall consider them first. The plays
we shall try to arrange in their original order, placing
the Sonnets, where they probably belong, in the midst
of the dramatic work.
In reading this dramatic work, we must never allow
ourselves to forget that it is not, like the poems and
the sonnets, pure literature, addressed primarily to
readers. From beginning was written for
to end it

an actual stage, at the general condition of which we

have already glanced. So far, then, as we try to
find the plays expressive of the artistic individ-
uality of Shakspere, we must keep in mind that they
are not mere writings, but texts intended to be recited
by professional actors, under conditions long since
obsolete, to popular audiences. Incidentally, then,
while studying the work of Shakspere we must find
ourselves continually studying the conditions and the
development of the Elizabethan stage.
For this reason, our first glance at this stage could
properly be hasty. As we shall find when we ex-
amine the first plays attributed to Shakspere, if not
certainly his own, this stage had already begun to
develop certain definite kinds of drama, tragic, his-
60 WILLIAM SlIAKSPEKE

toric,and comic. In a way, then, it is a fortunate

chance that what seem beyond doubt the earliest of
the plays are thought by many critics not to be genuine.
From an uncertainty full of historical suggestion, and
beyond question full of information concerning his
artistic environment when his work began, we can
proceed to certainties among which our earlier doubts
may help us to define the traits which make Shakspere
artistically individual.
For our purposes, we may conceive his complete
work as grouping itself, in four parts. The first in-
cludes his poems and the plays from Titus Andronicus.
to theTwo G-entlemen of Verona ; the second includes
the plays from the Midsummer Nighfs Dream to
Twelfth Night; between this and the third, as in
some degree contemporaneous with both, we shall
consider the Sonnets; after them we shall consider
the third group of plays, from Julius Ccesar to Corio-
lanus ; Timon. of Athens^ and Pericles^ Prince oj
Tyre^ as transitional and peculiar, we shall glance at
^oy themselves ;and finally we shall consider the
fourth group of plays, from Cymheline to Henry VIIL
 VENUS AND ADONIS, AND THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
[Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers' Register on Ajjril

I8th, 1593, by Richard F'ield, a publisher, who originally came from

Stratford. It was pul)lished in the same year, with a dedication to

the Earl of Southampton, signed " William Shakespeare." In this

dedication, of which the terms suggest very slight acquaintance be-
tween poet and patron, occurs the familiar passage, " But if the first
heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble
a god-father, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me
still so bad a harvest." The poem seems to have been popular. Seven
editions were published during Shakspere's life-time, and more than
twenty allusions to it before 1616 have been discovered. Its source, to
which it does not closel}' adhere, was probably Golding's translation
of Ovid, published in 1567. Concerning its date, we can assert only
that was finished, in its present form, by 1593.
it

The Rape of Lucrece was entered in the Stationers' Register on

May 9th, 1594. It was published in the same year, by Richard Field,
with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, from the terms of which
it has been inferred that since the publication of Venus and Adonis

the poet had had personal intercourse with his patron " The love I :

dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet,

without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have
of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines,
makes it assured of acceptance." Prefixed to the poem is an " Argu-
ment," the only known example of Sliakspere's non-dramatic prose.
Five editions were published before 1616, and the Centnrie of Prai/se
cites fourteen allusions to it meanwhile. Its precise source is not
known; the time very familiar, occurs in Paynter's Palace
story, at the

of Pleasure. Concerning its date, we can assert only that it seems

distinctly to have been subsequent to Venus and Adonis, and that it
was finished, in its present form, by 1594.]

For our purposes, these two poems may be grouped

together. Venus and Adonis, in Its own day some-
52 WILLIAM SHAKSPERfi
what the more popular, still seems the more notable
in certain aspects the merits of Lucrece are un-
doubtedly more respectable. Together, however,
these two poems, so nearly of the same period, rep-
resent a kind of Elizabethan Literature on which
we have not as yet touched; together they reveal
the same sort of artistic mood and power. In dis-

cussing them, then, we need not carefully separate

them; and if most of our attention be centred on
Venus and Adonis^ we may safely assume that what
we find true of that is in general terms true also of
Lucrece,
From what we have already seen of Elizabethan
Literature, we have assured ourselves that, at the time
when these poems were written, polite literature was
highly fashionable, and the stage in doubtful repute.
From the recorded facts of Shakspere's life we ven-
tured to make some guesses concerning his tempera-
ment which might lead us to suppose that, at any
given moment, his serious interest would centre in
reputable things. It seems reasonable, then, to infer
that these poems, in all respects far more careful
than his early dramatic writings, represent the kind of
thing to which, at least for the moment, he would
have preferred to devote himself. If so, he would
probably have thought this purely literary work far
more important than his better paid, but less elaborate,
work for the stage.
The kind of pure literature represented by these
poems is akin to what we have already considered.
 VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 53

From the time of Wyatt and Surrey forward, fashion-

able literature had shown the influence of the Re-
naissance in two ways. In the first place, starting
with Wyatt's sonnets, it had constantly, and with
increasing success, tried to imitate and to domesti-
cate the formal graces of foreign culture. In the
second place, starting perhaps with Surrey's trans-
lation of the ^neid, it had tried to inspire itself with
the spirit of the classics, — for the moment as fresh
to people who cared for literature as to-day, after
three centuries of pedantry and editing, they seem
stale, — and to reproduce in the native language of
England something resembling their effect. To this
latter tendency we owe such literature as the poems
of Shakspere exemplify. What they attempt is

simply to tell, in new and excellent phrase, stories

which have survived from classical antiquity.
In this respect, as well as in some others, they
have many points of likeness to much Italian paint-
ing of the preceding century. In each case, the artist
— poet or painter — turned to the revived classics
with a full appetite for pagan enjoyment ; in each, he
endeavored to tell in rich contemporary terms the
stories he found there ; in each, the phase of classical
literature which appealed to his taste was chiefly
the decadent literature of Rome. At first, it would
seem as if the great popularity of Ovid were due half
to his erotic license, and half to the fact that he wrote
easy Latin. On further consideration, the question
looks less simple. The liking of Renascent Europe
54 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
for the later classics is very similar to the liking of
our grandfathers for the Apollo Belvedere and the
Venus de' Medici, for Guido Reni and Carlo Dolce.
Freshly awakened artistic perception is apt to prefer
the graces of some past decadence to the simple, pure
beauty of really great periods. Such final culture

as can separate good from bad, cleaving only to what

is best, is the fruit of prolonged critical earnest-

ness. What these poems of Shakspere, and the others

of their kind, first evince, then, is a state of culture
alive to the delights of past civilization, but too young
to be soundly critical.
Choosing their subjects, accordingly, not from the
grander myths of Greece, but from the later ones of
Rome, the Elizabethan narrators of classic story pro-
ceeded to treat them in a spirit very different from
what generally prevails nowadays. A contemporary
of our own who should choose to relate anew some
familiar classic tradition would be apt to infuse into
it, if he could, some new significance, somewhat as
Goethe infused permanent philosophic meaning into
the mediaeval legend of Faust. The object of the
Elizabethan narrative poet, on the other hand, like
that of the Italian painters, was simply to tell the
story as effectively as he could. He bothered himself
little about what
might signify he permitted him-
it ;

self the utmost freedom of phrase and accessory as a ;

rule, he never thought of employing any but contem-

porary terms. Like his own stage, he dressed his
characters in the actual fashions of his own day; if
 VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 55

he made them splendid and attractive, he had done

his work. What might show was al-
originality he
most wholly a matter of phrase. His plot he frankly
borrowed his style was his own, and the more ingen-
;

iously novel he could make it, the better. Like the

other writers of the early Elizabethan period, he
proves ultimately to have been an enthusiastic verbal
juggler.
To understand Shakspere's poems, then, we must
train ourselves to consider them as, in all probability,

little else than elaborate feats of phrase-making. This

does not mean that they are necessarily empty. A
line or two from Lucrece^ chosen quite at random,
will serve to illustrate the real state of things :
—
*' For men have marble, women waxen, minds,
And therefore are they form'd as marble will." *

Here is clearly a general truth about human nature,

expressed with considerable felicity ; and that is the
aspect in which any modern reader would consider it.

Here too, though, and equally plainly, is an allitera-

tive, euphuistic between the hardness of

antithesis
marble and the softness of wax, resulting in a meta-
phor probably fresher three hundred years ago than it

seems to day, but even then far-fetched and that is ;

the aspect in which the Elizabethan reader would have

been apt to see it. What he would have relished is
the subtle alliteration on m and ic, the obvious anti-
thesis, and the slight remoteness of the metaphor; so

1 Liicrece, 1240.
56 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
far ashe was concerned, the fact that the lines com-
pactly express a general truth would have seemed,
if meritorious at all, only incidentally so. We touch
here on a state of things now rarely understood ; it

ismore than probable that the lasting felicity of much

Elizabethan poetry, and so of Shakspere's own, is
largely accidental. Words and ideas are not easily
extricable ; whoever plays with either is sure to do
something with the other. Nowadays it is the fashion
to disdain verbal ingenuity, to look always rather at
the thought than at the phrase ; in Shakspere's time

this state of things was completely reversed. As

surely as our own thinkers sometimes blunder upon
phrases, though, the Elizabethan phrase-makers — by
Shakspere's time far more skilful in their art than our
modern thinkers in their cogitations —
oftener and
oftener managed incidentally to say something final.
In deciding that the poems of Shakspere show him
to be chiefly an enthusiastic, careful maker of phrases,
and so incidentally of aphorisms, we declare him to
have been, in temper and in method, Elizabethan we ;

do not individualize him. Our object throughout this

study, however, is if possible to see him as an indi-
vidual. To do this we may best compare his work
with other work of the same period. The comparison
is obviously at hand. In 1593, the year when Venus
and Adonis appeared, Marlowe was killed. He left
unfinished a poem called Hero and Leander, subse-
quently concluded by Chapman. By comparing Mar-
lowe's poem with the poems of Shakspere, we may
 VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 57

get some notion of Shakspere's literary individuality.

What we have seen so far is true not only of Shaks-
pere, but of Marlowe too, and generally of their con-
temporaries what we shall try to see now is something
;

more definite.
The effect of Marlowe's Hero and Leander is very
distinct. Frankly erotic in motive, thoroughly sen-
suous in both conception and phrase, it never seems
corrupt. Beyond doubt it is a nudity ; but it is among
the few nudities in English Literature which one
groups instinctively with the grand, unconscious nudi-
ties of painting or sculpture. Conscienceless it seems,
impulsive, full of half-fantastic but constant imagina-
tion, unthinkingly pagan, — above all else, in its own
way normal. One accepts it, one delights in it, one
does not forget it, and one is not a bit the worse for
the memory, in thought or in conduct.
Equally distinct is the effect of Venus and Adonis^
whose motive resembles that of Hero and Leander
enough to make it the better of Shakspere's poems
for this comparison. No more erotic, rather less
sensuous in both conception and phrase, it some-
how seems, for all its many graver passages, more
impure. It is such a nudity as suggests rather the
painting of modern Paris than that of Titian's Yenice.
It is not conscienceless, not swiftly impulsive, not
quite pagan, — above all, not quite normal. If one
think only of its detail, it is sometimes altogether
delightful and admirable ; if one think of it as a
whole, — particularly at austere moments, — one be-
58 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
gins to wonder whether an ideal Shakspere, in maturer
life, ought not to have been a bit ashamed of it.
Surely, one feels, the man who wrote this knew per-
fectly well the difference between good and evil, and
did not write accordingly.
hard to realize that such a contrast of lit-
It is
erary effect must come largely from differences in
style; yet obviously this is the fact. One chief dis-
tinction between Marlowe's poem and Shakspere's
is clearly that in the one case a number of words
were chosen and put together by one man, and in
the other by another. The cause of their notable
differences, then, may confidently be sought in specific
comparison of detail ; if we can discover this cause
we shall have discovered something which clearly
distinguishes Shakspere from Marlowe, and so helps
us toward a notion of his individuality.
The first lines of Venus and Adoyiis describe
sunrise :
—
" Even, as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping mom,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn."

In Hero and Leander there is a similar description

of the same time of day ^ :
—
" Now had the Morn esDied her lover's steeds ;

Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds, '

And, red for anger that he stay'd so long,

All headlong throws herself the clouds among."

1 Second Sestiad.
 VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 59

fu both descriptions there is conventional mytho-

logical allusion, in both the figurative language refers
to the purple hue often perceptible at dawn ;
yet de-
spite this similarity, the difference of effect is almost
as marked as that of the poems they come from.
This difference is not all due to the greater compact-
ness of Shakspere, who tells in two lines as much as
Marlowe tells in four ; it is due still more to the fact
that of Shakspere's four lines all but the second
might, in real life, be literally true, while all four
lines of Marlowe deal with pure mythological
fancy.
The contrast thus indicated persists throughout.
Here is Marlowe's description of Hero's costume :
^

" The outside of her garmerits were of lawn,

The lining, purple silk, with gilt stars drawn
Her wide sleeves green, and border 'd with a grove
Where Venus in her naked glory strove
To please the careless and disdainful eyes
Of proud Adonis, that before her lies ;

Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain,

Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.
Upon her head she ware a myrtle wreath.
From whence her veil reach'd to the ground beneath :

Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves,

Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives."

Compare with this Shakspere's description of the

horse of Adonis ^ — in Shakspere's poem, we may
remember, no one is quite so thoroughly clothed as
Hero :
—
1 First Sestiad. • Line 295 seq.
60 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
" Round-hoof d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,

High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,

Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back."

Again, compare the similes and the action and the

generalizations in the passages which follow. Here is
Marlowe's description of the first meeting of Hero and
Leander :

" It
lies not in our power to love or hate,

For will in us is over-rul'd by fate.

When two are stript, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win ;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect
The reason no man knows let it suffice
;

What we behold is censur'd by our eyes.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight
Who ever lov*d, that lov'd not at first sight 1*

He kneel'd ; but unto her devoutly pray'd

Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said,
*
* Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him ;

And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him."

And here is Shakspere's description of the last meet-

ing^ of Venus and Adonis. Having caught sight of
him wounded,
•*A8 the snail, whose tender horns being hit,

Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,

And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,

Long after fearing to creep forth again ;

1 Cited, we remember, in As You Like It, HI. v. 83.

« Lines 1033-1068.
 VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 61

So, at his bloody view, her eyes are fled

Into the deep dark cabins of her head."
• • • • • •

[Then] " being open'd, threw unwilling light

Upon the wide wound that the boar had trench'd
In his soft flank whose wonted lily white
;

With purple tears, that his wound wept, was drench*d :

No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed.

But stole his blood and seem'd with him to bleed.
. • • * . •

"Upon his hurt she looks so steadfastly,

That her sight dazzling makes the wound seem three
And then she reprehends her mangling eye.
That makes more gashes where no breach should be :

His face seems twain, each several limb is doubled ;

For oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled.'*

These examples are more than enough to indi-

cate both the precise difference in the effect of

the two poems, and its cause. From beginning
to end, Marlowe is not literal, not concrete he ;

never makes you feel as if what he described were

actually happening in any real world. From begin-
ning to end, on the other hand, Shakspere is con-
stantly, minutely true to While the action
nature.
of Hero and Leander occurs in some romantic no-
where, inhabited by people whose costume, if des-
cribable, is quite unimaginable, the action of Venus
and Adonis occurs in Elizabethan England, where men
know the points of horses. The absence from Mar-
lowe's poem of all pretence to reality saves it from
apparent corruption in Shakspere's poem, incessant
;

suggestions of reality produce the contrary effect.

62 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
A very brief comparison of detail will show the
technical means by which this difference is made ap-
parent. Take two lines from Marlowe one a simile, —
the other a generalization —
and place beside them
two lines of similar import from Shakspere :
—
*' When two axe stript, loug ere the course begin,*'

writes Marlowe
** Or as the snail, whose tender horns being hit,**

writes Shakspere. In Marlowe's line, only one word —

stript — is concrete enough to suggest a vivid visual
image ; in Shakspere's line, there are four words —
87iail^ tender, horns, and hit — each of which is as
vividly concrete as the most vivid word of Marlowe's.
Again,
" Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight ?
'*

writes Marlowe

" For oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled,"

writes Shakspere. In Marlowe's generalization, the

words are simply general throughout ; in Shakspere's,
they are so concrete as to amount to a plain statement
of physiological fact.
This distinguishing trait — that, to a remarkable
degree, Shakspere's words stand for actual con-
cepts — pervades not only Venus and Adonis, but
also Lucrece, It is more palpable in the former
poem only because its effect there is so start-
lingly different from that produced by Marlowe's
more nebulous vocabulary. It pervades not only the
 VKNL'S AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 63

poems, but the plays, too ; beyond reasonable doubt

it is the trait which distinguishes iShakspere not only
among his contemporaries but from almost any other
English writer.
At first sight, this concretcncss of phrase seems to
indicate extreme intensity of conscious thought, on
which conclusion have been based many worship-
ping expositions of the almost divine wisdom and
philosophy of Shakspere. The conclusion cannot
be denied ; may, however, be reasonably questioned
it

even to the point of growing doubt as to whether

Shakspere himself, the Elizabethan playwright, could
have had much realizing sense of his own philosophy
and wisdom. As we have seen, the literary fashion
of his time delighted above all things else in fresh, in-
genious turns of phrase; in Sliakspere's work, accord-
ingly, fresh, ingenious turns of phrase abound. As we
have seen, too, one cannot combine words and phrases
without also combining ideas; when language grows
definite, words and thoughts combine inextricably.
Such a phenomenon as Shakspere's style, then, may
well proceed from a cause surprisingly remote from
conscious intensity of thought ; it may indicate noth-
ing more than a constitutional habit of mind by which
words and concepts are instinctively allied with un-
usual firmness. We all know palpable differences in
the habitual alliances of word and concept among our
own friendswe know, too, that these differences,
;

which often make uneducated or thoughtless people

appear to advantage, are a matter not so much of train-
64 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

ing, as of temperament. Of course the felicities of

phrase, and the incidental wisdom, which come from

such natural marriages of words and concepts are not
absolutely thoughtless but the difference between
;

them and the feebler expressions of people whose

natural style lacks precision is often that while the
latter involve acute consciousness of thought, the
former involve little more than alert consciousness

of phrase. Take care of your words, if your words

naturally stand for real concepts, and your thoughts
will take care of themselves. Given such a natural
habit of mind as this in a healthy human being, given
too the immense skill in phrase-making which per-
vaded the literary atmosphere of Shakspere's time,
given an eager effort on Shakspere's part to make
phrases which should compare with the best of them,
and very surely the you would expect is just
result
such a style as distinguishes Venus and Adonis and
Lucrece.
To dwell on this trait of style, even at the risk
of tedium, has been well worth our while. Palpable
throughout Shakspere's work, it is nowhere more
easily demonstrable than here, in the poems which
were clearly the most painstaking productions of
his early artistic life ; for in the poems, admi-
rable as they so often ai'e in phrase, one can find
ultimately little else than admirably conscientious
phrase-making. Shakspere tells his stories with typi-
cal Elizabethan ingenuity ; incidentally he infuses
them with a permeating sense of fact, astonishingly
 VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECK 65

different from the untrammelled imagination of Mar-

lowe ;
yet plausibly, if not certainly, this effect is trace-
able to the instinctive habit of a mind in which the
natural alliance of words and concei)ts was uniquely
close. Here, then, we have the trait which, above all

others, defines the artistic individuality of Shakspere.

To him, beyond any other writer of English, words
and thoughts seemed naturally identical.

i
 VI
THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM TITUS ANDRONI-
CUS TO THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA

I. Titus Andronicus

[A Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus was entered in

the Stationers' Register on February 6th, 1593-94. In 1598, Meres
mentioned Titus Andronicus as among Shakspere's tragedies. The
was published in quarto, without
play, virtually in its present form,
Shakspere's name, in 1600. There was another anonymous quarto in
1611. Besides Meres's allusion to it, the Centurie of Prayse cites two
others during Shakspere's lifetime, neither of which mentions his
name. The second of these is in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair,
which appeared in 1614 " Hee that will sweare Jeronimo'^ or Androni-
:

cus are the best playes, yet shall passe unexcepted at, heere, as a man
whose Judgement shewes it is constant, and hath stood still, these five
and twentie, or thirtie yeeres." From this, as well as from its general
archaism, the inference has been drawn that the play belongs, at latest,
to 1589. As Shakspere was not in London before 1587, then, a rea-
sonable conjectural date for it is 1588,
Its precise source is unknown. The story seems to have been
familiar. Possibly the play, as we have it, is a retouched version of
an older play called Titus and Vespasian, of which a German adapta-
tion exists.
The genuineness been much questioned, on
of Titus Andronicus has
the ground that it unworthy of Shakspere the arguments in its
is ;

favor rest on Meres's allusion, and on the fact that it was included in
the folio of 1623. If Shakspere's, it is probably his earliest work.]

The frequent doubt as to the genuineness of Titus

Andronicus gains color from the place where the
play is generally printed. In most editions of Shaks-

1 Le., Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, circ. 1588.

 TITUS AXUKOXICUS 67

pere it occurs between Corwlanus and Romeo and

Juliet. Thus placed, it seems little more than a mon-
strous tissue of absurdities, — a thing of which no
author who wrote such tragedies as the others could
conceivably have been guilty.
Read by itself, however, particularly at a moment
when one is not prepossessed by Shakspere's greater
work, it does not seem so bad. Crude as it is in
general conception and construction, free as it is from
any vigorous strokes of character, it has, here and
there, a rhetorical strength and impulse which sweep
you on unexpectedly. In the opening scene, for ex-
ample, where Andronicus commits to the tomb the
bodies of his sons,^ who have fallen in battle, his half-
lyric lament has real beauty :
—
" In peace and honour rest you here, my sons ;

Rome's you here in rest,

readiest champions, repose
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no damned grudges here are no storms, ;

No noise, but silence and eternal sleep:

I In peace and honour rest you here, my sons " !

Or again, when Lavinia is brought to him, maimed

and ravished, his speech,^ whoever wrote it, has a
rude power of its own :
—
" It was my and he that wounded her
deer ;

Hath hurt me more than had he kill'd me dead:

For now I stand as one upon a rock
Environ 'd with a wilderness of sea,
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
1 I. i. 150 seq. 2 jn. i. 91 seq.
68 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Expecting ever when some envious surge

Had I
•••••
Will in his brinish bowels swallow him.
•

but seen thy picture in this plight,

Itwould have madded me: what shall I do,
Now I behold thy lively body so ?

Thou hast no hands, to wipe away thy tears;

Nor tongue, to tell me who hath martyr'd thee:
Thy husband he is dead; and for his death
Thy brothers are condemn'd, and dead by this.
Look, Marcus ! ah, son Lucius, look on her
When I did name her brothers, then fresh tears
Stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-dew
Upon a gather'd lily, almost wither'd."

Whatever else this is, and there is plenty like it in

Titus Andronicus, it is good, sonorous rant.
As sonorously ranting, then, whether Shakspere's
or not, the play is a typical example of English tra-
gedy at the moment when Shakspere's theatrical life

began. If, in his earlier months of work, he tried

his hand at tragedy at all, he certainly must have
tried it at this kind of thing ; for in substance, as well
as in style, Titus Andronicus typifies the early Eliza-
bethan tragedy of blood. The object of this, like

that of cheap modern newspapers, was to excite crude

emotion by heaping up physical horrors. The penny
dreadfuls of our own time preserve the type perenni-
ally something of the port always persists in theatres
;

of the lower sort and it is perhaps noteworthy that

;

the titles, and in some degree the mod-

style, of these
ern monstrosities preserve one of the most marked
traits of Elizabethan English, — extravagant allitera-
 TITUS ANDRONICUS 69

tion. Not only in extravagance of alliterative horrors,

but also in serene disregard of historic fact, the lower
literature of our own time preserves the old type.
Both traits appear, too, in the romantic fancies of
young children who take to literature. There has
lately been in existence, for example, an appalling
melodrama on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, writ-
ten at the age of ten by an American youth, wherein
Charles IX., Catherine de' Medici, and Coligny figured
along with a very heroic Adrien de Bourbon, who
assassinated Charles, and, serenely ascending the
throne, proceeded to govern France according to
the liberal principles generally held axiomatic in the
United States. It took no more liberty with French
history than Titus Andronicus takes with Roman
and both plays are of the same school.
In a way, such stuff seems hardly worth serious
attention. At the very moment
which we have
to
attributed Titus Andronicus^ however, Marlowe was
certainly developing the traditional tragedy of blood
into a form which remains grandly if unequally signifi-

cant in the Jew of Malta. Less than twenty years later,

this same school of literature had produced Hamlet
and Othello^ and King Lear, and Macbeth. Even in
them, many of its traits persist. Like their crude
prototypes, they appeal to the taste prevalent in all
Elizabethan audiences for excessive bloodshed, and
stentorian rant. Until we understand that there is an
aspect in which these great tragedies and this grotesque
Titus Andronicus may rationally be grouped together,
we shall not understand the Elizabethan theatre.
70 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Whether Shakspere's or not, then, Titus Andronicus
deserves a passing glance in any serious study of
Shakspere. If his, as many of the soundest critics

are disposed to believe, it deserves more ; for, at least

in the fact that it from any conventional

differs little

drama of its time, it throws light on his artistic char-

acter. Marlowe and Shakspere were just of an age.
T}ie year before that to which we have attributed
Titus Andronicus, Marlowe had produced in Tambur-
laine not only a popular play but a great tragic poem
in 1588, he produced another, the Jew of Malta.
Whatever Marlowe touched, from the beginning, he
instantly transformed into something better. Shaks-
pere, meanwhile, if this play be his, contented himself
with frankly imitative, conventional stage-craft.

II. Henry YL
[The First and Second Parts of Henry VI., together with Titus
Andronicus., were entered in the Stationers' Register, on April 19th, 1602,
as transferred from Thomas Millington to Thomas Pavier. There is

no mention of the Third Part until November 8th, 1623, when it

specific
was entered for publication in the folio. In their present form, all three
parts first appeared in the folio of 1623.
No is known.
other version of the First Part The Second Part is
obviously a version ofThe First Part of the Contention betwixt the two
famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, entered on March 12th, 1593-94,
and published by Millington in the same year. The Third Part is a
similar version of The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, etc.,
published by Millington in 1595. Both of these quartos were repub-
lished in 1600. In none of these entries or publications, prior to 1623,
is there any mention of Shakspere's name, Greene's allusion in 1592 is

the only contemporary one directly connecting any of these plays with
Shakspere. Nash, in the same year, alluded to the popularity of
Talbot on the stagre.
 HENRY VI 71

The question of the authorship of all these plays, as well as of the

relation of the quartos to the folio, has been much disputed.^
The weight of opinion seems to favor the supposition that Greene,
I'eele, Kyd, and Marlowe had a hand in them, and that so far as

Shakspere touched them it was by way of collaboration, interpolation,

or revision.
Whoever wrote them, they are clearly conventional examples of
Elizabethan chronicle-history, based for the most part on the chroni-
cles of Holinshed, Hall, and Stowe. Their obvious crudities, as well as
metrical tests, place them early ; a reasonable conjecture might put
them from 1590 to 1592. J '

Titus Andronicus^ we found, whether Shakspere's

or not, throws light on the dramatic environment in
which his work began. In Henry FZ, which for our
purposes we may we shall
consider as a single play,
find a similar state of things this three-part drama ;

certainly makes clear two facts still new to us con-

cerning the Elizabethan stage. The first is that, at
least among the earlier playwrights, collaboration was
habitual ; the second is — a kind
that chronicle-history
of thing which has long been theatrically obsolete —
is probably the most characteristic type of play pro-
duced by that stage. These matters we may well
glance at before attending in detail to Henry VL
Collaboration has always been more common in
dramatic literature than in other kinds. One reason
for this lies in the obvious difference between a play
written for acting, and a book or what else addressed
solely to readers. The author of a book can address

^ See, for example, Miss J. Lee's paper in the New Shakspere

Society's Transactions for 1876; and Fleay's discussion in the Lijt
and Works, pp. 255-283.
72 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

his public, with no other intervention than that of

printers and proof-readers, over whom, if be choose,
he may exercise constant controL A play, on the
other hand, can be put before the public, at least
in the form which the author intends, only by the
intervention of a number of trained performers ; each
of them, moreover, must not only intervene in all

the visible complexity of his own personality, but

he must furthermore be conditioned in his methods
of expressing the author's meaning by the elaborate
physical and mechanical circumstances of a theatre.
A dramatic author, then, needs not only the equip-
ment of an ordinary man of letters — grasp of sub-
ject and mastery of literary style — but
also a
knowledge of the resources and limits of the actual
stage closely akin to the knowledge of the orchestra
essential to a skilful composer of music. For this
reason, few men of letters pure and simple have ever
succeeded in writing an actable play and those who
;

have succeeded prove often to have done so only with

the help of presumably humbler collaborators inti-
mately familiar with the theatre.
When any school of dramatic literature is thoroughly
developed, to be sure, as the Elizabethan drama became
in Shakspere's time, or as the French has been in our
own, theatrical people, and literary too, sometimes be-
came accomplished enough to take the full burden of
authorship on themselves. Even then, however, as —
the mere mention of Beaumont and Fletcher, or a
glance at the collected works of any modern French
 HENRY VI 73

dramatist, will suggest, — collaboration is at least

frequent ; while in such an early stage of dramatic
literature as prevailed when Shakspere's work began,
collaboration will generally be the rule.
The stage for which Shakspere wrote, in fact, was
a true stage, where plays were rated successful in
accordance with their power of drawing audiences.
Whoever suggested a touch which should
in a play
increase its power of attraction was welcome to any
manager; and if four or five men working together
made a play more attractive than one man working
by himself, so much the better. As literature, of
course, the play would probably suffer but even to ;

this day no successful manager troubles himself much

about the merely literary aspect of plays which draw.

It is more than probable, then, that like any other

professional playwright of his time Shakspere began

his work, and learned his trade, either by actual col-
laboration with more practised men, or by retouching
plays which for one reason or another they had aban-
doned. The result of some such process would surely
resemble Henry VI.
Just how such collaboration took place or resulted,
of course, we cannot assert. In a familiar passage of
Henry VI., however, there is a line which we may rea-
sonably guess to be an example. Greene, we remem-
Groatsworth of Wit, strengthened his abuse
ber, in his
of Shakspere ^ by parodying a line from the tirade of
the captured Duke of York against the triumphant
^ See p. 9.
74 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Queen Margaret. Here is the passage,^ which occurs
both in the True Tragedy and in the folio :
—
" Thou art as opposite to every good
As the Antipodes are UDto us,
Or as the south to the septentrion.
tiger^s heart wrapt in a woman^s hide !
How couldst thou drain the hfe-blood of the child ?
'*
etc.

The italicized linewas imitated in 1600 by one Nich-

olson,2 from which fact, as well as from Greene's
allusion and its own inherent rant, one may reasonably
infer that was thought effective. Now a glance at
it

the passage where it occurs will show that the sense

would be complete without it and what is more, that ;

the line differs both in concreteness of conception and

in general sound from the two lines immediately pre-
ceding, which are much in the manner of Greene
himself. If Shakspere, touching up an old tirade of

Greene's, had introduced —

for pure ranting effect —
a stray line of his own, we might have expected just
such a result as is before us. The example, of course,
is completely hypothetical ; it will serve, however, to
suggest what Elizabethan collaboration was.
Collaborative, beyond doubt, though just where and
how we can never be sure, Henry VI. is still more
significant to us as an example of chronicle-history, a
kind of drama peculiar to the Elizabethan stage. The
object of chronicle-history distinctly differed from any
which we now recognize as legitimately theatrical

1 3 Henry VI. L iv. 134-138.

2 Centurit of Pray se, 33.
 HENRY VI 75

The tragedy of blood, as we have seen, was after all

only an extravagant kind of juvenile sensationalism,
whose object was to thrill an audience the object of ;

Elizabethan comedy, to which we shall come later, was

the perennial object of comedy, — to amuse. The ob-
ject of chronicle-histor\ on the other hand, though of
,

course even this kind of play had to be incidentally

interesting, was to teach a generally illiterate public
the facts of national historv.
As a rule, the lower classes of the time could not
read. Even when they could, the history of England
was not conveniently accessible ; was rather crudely
it

digested in certain folio volumes, heavy in every sense

lof the word, and expensive. At the same time, im-
Imemorial dramatic traditions which survived from the
[miracle plays made the stage a normal vehicle of
[popular instruction, while the state of public affairs
when Mary Stuart was lately beheaded and the Armada
stillmore lately dispersed — stimulated patriotic en-
thusiasm and curiosity. To this demand the theatre re-
sponded by producing a series of plays, from various
hands, which together comprised pretty nearly the
whole of English history. The most familiar of the
series, of course, are the plays of Shakspere ; but to
go no further, there were an Edward I. by Peele, an
admirable Edward II. by Marlowe, and an Edward
III. sometimes thought Shakspere's own, to prepare
the way Richard II,
for
Throughout the series — in Shakspere's work as
elsewhere — the writer of chronicle-history conceived
76 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
his business in a way now foreign to anything theatri-
caL He did not trouble himself to compose a play in
the modern sense of the word ; there was no ques-
tion of formally developed plot or situation. He
simply went to Holinshed or some other conventional
authority, read the narrative sufficiently for his pur-
poses, selected — with disregard of detail, chronologic

and other —
what seemed to him theatrically effective,
and translated his selections into blank verse dialogue.
Incidentally, to be sure, as chronicle-history strength-
ened, particularly in the hands of Marlowe and Shaks-
pere, the^e grew up in it some very vital characters.

We may best understand Richard III. or Hotspur, how-

ever, if we realize that, from the dramatist's point of

view, their very vitality is a part of his effort to trans-

late into vivid theatrical terms a patriotic story which
he found in ponderous, lifeless narrative.

Translation, then, rather than creation, even the most

serious writer of chronicle-history must have thought
his task. If he succeeded in translating Holinshed, or
form which should entertain an
Hall, or Stowe, into a
audience while informing them, he did all he tried to
do. When we consider the chronicle-histories as origi-
nally meant to be anything more than translations from
narrative into presentably dramatic terms, we fail to

understand them. So much is clear. Less clear, but

equally true, is the fact that an Elizabethan dramatist
at work on tragedy, comedy, or romance, really re-
garded his task as identical with his obvious task when
he wrote chronicle-history. He never invented his
 HENRY VI 77

he could help himself; except in presenting his

plot, if

material more effectively than it had been presented

by others, he never, for a moment, considered himself
bound, as modern writers of plays or fiction apparently
consider themselves bound, to be original. He turned
to novels, to poems, to stories, to old plays, as directly

as to chronicles. When he found anything to his pur-

pose he took it and used it, with as little qualm of
conscience as a modern man of science would feel in

availing himself of another's published investigation.

Whatever the origin of his plot — history, novel, poem,
story, old play — the dramatist treated it not as a
creator, but as a translator.
So to Henry VI. As one generally reads it, — after
Henri/ V., a chronicle-history far riper in form, — it

seems grotesquely archaic. Approached by itself,

however, it proves more powerful than one expects.

To appreciate it, one must read fast, one must make
an effort not to notice but to accept the obsolete con-
ventions of a theatre which, with no more sense of
oddity than Kingsley felt in making Hypatia speak
English, compressed into less than eight thousand
lines of bombastic dialogue forty-nine years of English
history. After all, these conventions, though obsolete,
are not actually more absurd than many of our own.
We can learn, if we will, not only to accept, but to for-
get them and then, by placing ourselves so far as we
;

can in the mood of an Elizabethan playgoer, we may

get even from Henri/ VI. an impression of grand his-
torical movement. The times the play deals with
78 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
were stirring and turbulent. Historic forces, of one
and another kind, were beyond the control of any in-
dividual; and in Henry VL, after a while, one begins
to feel them, in all their maddening, tragic confusion.
One feels, too, one hardly knows how, the lapse of
time, the growth and the change which years bring.
Strangely, unexpectedly, one finds even in this crudely
collaborative old play the stuff of which real history
is made.
An accident which helps this effect is that, as a
mere piece of literature, the Second Part is distinctly
better than the First, and the Third nearly maintains
the level of the Second. In the total effect, then, the

comparative crudity of the First makes it seem long

past. Even this First Part, though, has a force of its
own. Take the very opening. After the extremely
human courtship of Henry V., which closes the pre-
ceding play, the consecutive and ranting latnents
uttered by four uncles of the infant Henry VI., —
*'
Hung be the heavens with black 1
*'
and so on —
seem very absurd. We must remember, however, that
they follow the conventions of a stage very different
from and that Henry V. comes about halfway
ours,
between. If, remembering this, and remembering,

too, the keen lyric appetite of the Elizabethan public,

we liken these laments to those of the modern lyric

stage, we see them in a different light. Sung in con-
cert, with impressive music, they might still make a
fine operatic quartette. Then, immediately, the tone
 iiEXRv vr 7^

of these lialf-lyric speeches changes. Instantly comes

the discord of quarrel,— a quarrel which is to end, after
half a century of bloodshed, in the death of the un-
happy Henry. This example typifies a fact which we
must keep constantly in mind. At least in its earlier
period, the Elizabethan stage tried constantly to pro-
- duce, by purely dramatic means, effects which would
now be reserved for the opera. Without understand-
ing this, we cannot quite understand what a play like
Henry VL means. Appreciating the operatic nature
of the ranting declamation throughout, and of such
half-lyric passages as this opening quartette, we can
begin to feel what power the play has.
In the Second Part, for all its neglect of the great
dramatic possibilities inherent in the adulterous love
of Suffolk and the Queen, there are two passages better
than anything in the others. Both of these, in the
folio version, seem at least Shaksperean, if not cer-

tainly Shakspere's. The first is the death-scene of

Cardinal Beaufort ; the second is the rebellion of Jack
Cade.
In the death-scene^ we have a wonderfully vivid
picture of dying delirium, from which we would not
spare a word. In the Contention there is a mere
sketch of it, which would seem wholly like a careless
abridgment but for the change in a single line. In
the Contention^ the speech which stands for the famous

••
Comb down his hair; look, look ! it stands upright,
Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul," etc.,

1 2 Henry Vf. III. iii.

80 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
is followed directly by a speech of Salisbury, —
** See, how the pangs of death do gripe his heart."

lu the folio, Beaufort's delirium is followed by a fer-

vent prayer for him by the King, who is interrupted

by Salisbury thus :
—
" See, how "
the pangs of death do make him grin !

That change — from " do gripe his heart " to " do

make him grin " — may not be a deliberate change by
Shakspere's hand, but surely nothing could be more
like one. It has just the added concreteness of phrase,
just the enormous gain in vividness, which distin-
guishes his style from any other.
Shaksperean, too, seem all the Cade scenes,^ though
clearly they existed in the Contention^ and doubtless
those that played your clowns spoke more than was
set down for them. Though it be virtually in the
Contention^ however, the reasoning of the rioter who
maintains Cado to be a legitimate Mortimer seems too
like Shakspere's fun not to be his. Cade, we remem-
ber, declared that his princely father had been stolen
in infancy and apprenticed to a bricklayer : the rioter
confirms him ^ :
—
" Sir, he made a chimney in my father's house, and
the bricks are alive at this day to testify it; therefore deny
it not."

What makes the scenes seem Shaksperean, however,

is not so much any matter of detail as the general

1 2 Henry VI. IV. ii.-viii. 2 2 Henry VI. IV. ii. 156.

 HENRY Vi 81

temper which pervades them. Cade's mob, though far

more lightly treated, is essentially the mob of Julius
Ccesar and of Coriolanus, In an earlier, simpler form,
it expresses what by and by we shall see to be a dis
tinet trait of Shakspere. His personal convictions,
of course, we can never know ; as an artist, however,
he was consistent throughout in his contempt — here
laughing, but later serious — for the headless rabble :

wherefore, very properly, Shakspere is nowadays taken

to task by virtuous critics of a democratic turn.
Tn the Third Part of Henry VI. there are no passages
so indubitably effective as those at which we have just
glanced. As one reads the play hastily, however,
one feels in it more than in the two others a definite
tendency. From the opening quartette of lament
breaking into discord, the First Part and the Second
have been full of turbulent, confused disintegration.
Here at last, in the Third Part, things good and evil,
order and chaos, begin at last to range themselves
and slowly but surely defining itself as the embodi-
ment of all the evil, we feel the personality of Glost<}r.
The Third Part of Henri/ VI. tends straight to Richard
III. In the Richard III. of our modern stage, indeed,
some of the earlier scenes are actually taken directly
from Henry VI.
Our discussion of Richard III., however, must come
later. For our present purposes we have traced the
early chronicle-history far enough. Whatever part
Shakspere had in Henry VI., we liave found the
play, like Titus Andronicus^ suggestive of the en-
82 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
vironment in which Shakspere's work began. It has
helped, then, to define our notion of the Elizabethan
stage. Essentially collaborative rather than individual,
frankly translative rather than creative in method,
designed quite as much to inform as to divert, often
more than half lyric in mood, the chronicle-history
is the most typical kind of Elizabethan drama. As-
suming its conventions, we may find in Henry VI.
much that is permanently admirable, and some touches
which seem too good for any hand but Shakspere's.
What part he had in it, however, must remain doubt-
ful. The real light it surely throws on his individu-
ality amounts only to this like Titus Andronicus,
:

if either play be in any degree genuine, it shows him

in his beginning frankly imitative and conventional.

His work is the work of a man patiently mastering
the technicalities of his art, not of one who instantly
impresses whatever he touches with that trait now-
adays so much admired, — originality.

III. Love's Labour's Lost.

[Love's Labour 's Lost was published in quarto, in 1598. On the title-
page we are informed that this version was "presented before her
Highness this last Christmas," and is *' newly corrected and augmented
by W. Shakespere." It is mentioned by Meres and the Centurie of
;

Prayse cites a slightly doubtful allusion to it in 1594. The source of

the plot is unknown. The weight of opinion makes this the earliest
play unquestionably assigned to Shakspere. It is conjectured from
internal evidence to have been written as early as 1589 or 1590, but to
have been revised in 1597 for the performance at court mentioned on
the titlepagej
 LOVK'S LABOUR'S LOST 83

111 its present form, Loves Labour'' 8 Lost is puzzling.

There seems no reasonable doubt that it is a very
early play, carefully revised for performance at court
at a time when Shakspere had completely mastered
liis art. Just what is old in it and what new we have
no certain means of judging; yet for our study of
Shakspere's development we wish to consider not the
revised play, but the original. While of course we
can never be sure, however, we may reasonably guess
that the correction and augmentation of 1597 was
chiefly a matter of mere style, — a conclusion in which
we are supported by the fact that out of some 1600 lines
of verse nearly 1100 are rhymed. The shallowness of
character throughout, too, and the obviously excessive
ingenuity of plot and situation, as well as of phrase,
are unlike Shakspere's later work. Assuming, then,
that in general character Love's Labour 's Lost is con-
temporary with the First Part of Henry VI., but that
in detail it is often seven or eight years later, we are
warranted, for the moment, in neglecting matters of
detail, and in considering the play very generally.
Thus considered, it groups itself immediately with
Titus Andronicus and Henry VI. Disregarding the
mere matter of style, —
where Shakspere's concreteness
of phrase appears throughout, —
we find it essentially
not an original work, but a vigorous comedy in the
then fashionable manner of John Lyly. Lyly's come-
dies, and this too, are really dramatic phases of tlie

Renascent mood which started, not in the translations

of Surrey, but in the Sonnets of Wyatt. Beginning
with a powerful effort to civilize the forms of a bar-
84 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
barous language, this movement, in little more than
fifty years,had resulted in a literature which at once
stimulated and gratified an insatiable appetite for
graceful verbal novelty. In Love's Labour '5 Lost we
have a capital example of this, running now and again
into frank, good-natured burlesque of itself. Graceful
as they are, these frothy, overwrought fantasies of
phrase and character are nowadays puzzling; it is

hard to realize quite how they could ever have been

popular on the stage.
To appreciate this, we may conveniently recall a
fact we detected in Henry VL What seemed there mere
bombast toon: on another aspect when we considered
it not as primarily dramatic, but rather as operatic.
On the Elizabethan stage, we found, mere turns of
language and half-lyric cadences were conventionally
used to express moods which in our own time would
certainly prefer the completely lyric form of operatic
compositions. Looked at in this light, Love'^s Labour 's
Lost grows more intelligible. In conception and in
style alike, it expresses a state of artistic feeling
which would now express itself in polite comic opera
its endless rhymes and metrical oddities, its quips
and cranks, are really not theatrical at all ; like
Lyly's over-ingenious turns of phrase, they are the
airs, the duets, the trios, the concerted pieces of a
stage not yet fully operatic only for want of adequate
development in the art of music. Nor is Lovers La-
bour 's Lost operatic only in detailmodern comic
: like
opera, such essentially lyric work as this has no pro-
found meaning its object is just to delight, to amuse
;
 LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 85

whoever searches for significance in such literature

misunderstands it.

The excessive ingenuity of Love's Labour'* s Lost,

which often makes it hard to read, makes it all the
more worth the attention of whoever should minutely
study Elizabethan style. The scope with which, in its
final form, it at once exemplifies and burlesques the
literary fashionsand affectations of its day, is astonish-
ing. The deliberate euphuism of Armado,^ the son-
neteering of the King and his courtiers,^ the pedantry
of the schoolmaster and the curate,^ the repartee of
the Princess and her ladies,* the pertness of the boy
Moth,^ the blunders of the clowns,^ the outworn, but at
the time not yet outstripped conventions of the Masque
of the Worthies," the permanent freshness of the clos-
ing song, the lyric ingenuity of every page, — all

these, in their bewildering confusion, typically express

the temper of a time w^hen whoever wanted amuse-
ment was most amused by verbal novelt3^ Through-
out, too, one can at last begin to realize how the ears
of Elizabethan audiences were as eagerly sensitive to
fresh, graceful, ingenious turns of phrase as modern
ears are to catching melodies ; and fresh turns of
plirase Shakespere gave them here, to their heart's
content, — now in contented conventional serious-
ness, the next minute in a frank, good-natured burst
of burlesque, — with a paradoxical comprehensiveness
thoroughly, if still superficially, individual.

1 E.g. L i. 232 seq. - IV. iii. 2fi, GO, 101. 3 E.g. V. I.

* E.g. V. ii. 1-78. ^ E.g. I. ii. « E.g. I. i. 182 seq

' V. ii. 523 seq.
86 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
From all this, one would naturally expect Love's
Labour 's Lost to be far from amusing on the modern
stage. Within a few years, however, it has been
acted with considerable success. The secret of vital-
ity like this is not to be found in such matters as
we have glanced must be sought in something
at ; it

not merely contemporary, but of more permanent

dramatic value. Several things of this kind are soon
perceptible. In the first place, the play has an open-
air atmosphere of its own, a bit conventional, to be
sure, but romantic and sustained ;
you feel through-
out that what is going on takes place in just the sort
of world where it belongs. In the second place, there
are various perennially effective situations, such as the
elaborate concealment and eavesdropping by which
the King and his lords discover that they have all
fallen from their high resolves in common ^ and ;

more notably still such as the elaborate confusion of

identity, when the Princess and her ladies mask them-
selves to bewilder their disguised lovers.^ In the
third place, the elaborate repartee of the dialogue,
particularly in the passages which make Biron and
Rosaline so suggestive of Benedick and Beatrice,
though very verbal, is very sparkling.^ In the fourth
place, the elaborate introduction of a play within a
play,^ broadly burlesquing a kind of literature which
was passing out of fashion, must always have been

1 IV. iii. 1-210.

2 V. ii. 158-265.
« See IL i. 114-128 ; and cf. Much Ado, I. i. 117-14*.
* V. ii. 523-735.
 LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 87

diverting, if only by way of contrast. Finally, to go

no further, the contrast of clowns and courtiers in

this very scene emphasizes what pervades the play,
constant caricature of contemporary absurdity along
with frequent serious perpetration of the like.

To specify these details has been worth while,

because, as we shall see later, they constantly reappear
in the later work of Shakspere, who is remarkable
among dramatists for persistent repetition of whatever
has once proved dramatically effective. We might
have specified more such detail we might have studied
;

Lovers Labour 's Lost far more profoundly, defining

the various affectations it commits or satirizes, dis-
cussing whether this part of was meant for
it or that
a personal attack on a rival company, and so on.
For our purposes, however, we have touched on the
play sufficiently. Contemporary, in a general way,
with Titus Andronicus and Henry FZ, and — per-
haps because so palpably corrected and augmented
— vastly better than either of them, it groups itself

with them in our view of Shakspere as an artist.

When he began to write, comedy was more highly de-

veloped, than tragedy or history. His first comedy,
then,was more ripe than his first work of other kinds ;

but like them it may be regarded, in the end, as a

successful experiment in the best manner of his time,
— not as a new contribution to dramatic literature.

I
88 WILLIAM SHAKSrERE

TV, The Comedy of Errors.

[At Christmas time, 1594, a " Comedy of Errors (like to Plautm
his Mehechmus) " was played at Gray's Inn. Meres, in 1598, men-
tioned Errors among the comedies of Shakspere. The play was first
entered in 1 623, and published in the folio.
Its source is clearly the Menechmi of Plautus, probably in some
translation, and one or two scenes from his Amphitryon. Modern
critics generally agree in placing it, on internal evidence, before 1591,

with a slight preference for 1589 ^ or 1590.]

In the three plays we have considered, assuming

them to be at least partly we found
Shakspere's,
him, in his earliest dramatic work, by no means origi-
nal. Instead of* trying to do something new, he
devoted himself to writing a tragedy of blood much in
the manner of Kyd or Marlowe, to collaborating in
a conventional chronicle-history in which various
contemporary manners appear, and to making a
comedy manner of Lyly. If we try to charac-
in the
terize this work by a single word, we can hardly find
a better term than experimental.
As apparently an experiment, the Comedy of Errors.,
like the play we shall consider next, groups itself with
what precede. Like the next play, however, the —
Two Gentlemen of Verona^ —
it differs from the others

in not imitating any one else. The first three experi-

ments seem unpretentiously imitative the two follow- ;

ing seem independent.

1 1589 is the latest year in which the allusion to France "making

war against her heir —" III. ii. 127 — would have been literally

true.
 THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 89

Clearly enough, the Comedy of Errors attempts

to adapt for the Elizabethan stage — to translate into
contemporary theatrical terrns —a classic comedy. In
a way, the effort is akin to that of the poems, which,
as we saw, exemplified the phase of Renascent feeling
which delighted not so much in the formal graces of
foreign culture as in the humane spirit of ancient

literature. While in the poems, however, Shakspere

altered and adapted Ovid or whom else, with excessive
verbal care, to the taste of the literary public, he
altered Plautus, in the Comedy of Errors^ for purely
theatrical purposes. The resulting contrast is curious.
The poems, in their own day far more reputable litera-
ture than any contemporary plays, became, from the
very concreteness of their detail, rather more cor-
rupt in effect than the originals from which they
were drawn. At all events, they carry that sort of
thing as far as it can tolerably go ; for throughout,
while dealing with matters which demand pagan
unconsciousness, they are studiously conscious. The
Comedy of Errors, on the other hand, — in its own
day a purely theatrical affair, — Shakspere altered in
a way which the most prim modern principles would
unhesitatingly pronounce for the better. In Plau-
tus, for example, the episode of the courtesan and
the chain is frankly licentious ; in Shakspere, it is so
different ^ that without a reference to Plautus one can
hardly make out why the lady in question is called a
courtesan at all. This trait we shall find to be gen-

1 III. ii. 169 seq. ; IV. i., iii.

90 WILLIA^I SIIAKSPERE

erally characteristic of Shakspere. Always a man of

his time, to be sure, he never lets the notion of pro-
priety stand between him and an effective point ; when
there is nothing to prevent, however, he is decent;
among his contemporaries, he is remarkable for refine-
ment of taste.
This incidental refinement of plot is by no means
his only addition to the material of Plautus. The
second Dromio is Shakspere's, so is the conventional
pathos of ^geon, so the effort to contrast the shrewish
Adriana with her gentler sister. The very mention
of these characters, however, calls our attention to
the most obvious weakness of the Comedy of Errors.
Except for conventional dramatic purposes, the char-
acters throughout are little more than names ; they
are not seriously individualized. A convenient rhe-
torical scheme of criticism sometimes states the prin-
ciple that any story or play must have a plot, the —
actions or events it deals with and that as actions
;

or events must be performed by somebody, or happen

to somebody, somewhere, any play or novel must also
include characters and descriptions. A theoretically
excellent play, then, consists of an interesting plot,
which involves individual characters, in a distinct
local atmosphere. Applying this test to the Comedy
of Errors^ we find a remarkably ingenious and well-
constructed plot, and little else. Characters and
background might be anybody and anywhere.
As a piece of untrammelled construction, as a plot
put together with what seems almost wilful disregard
 THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 91

of other complications, the Comedy of Errora most

clearly shows itself experimental. In construction, to
be sure, the play is theatrically as successful as any
in the Elizabethan drama. Indeed, it sometimes ap-
proaches the niceties of the classic tradition ; hardly
anything else in Shakspere so nearly observes the
unities. When we have sufficiently admired its con-
struction, liowever, and the general ease and smooth-
ness of its style, we have nearly exhausted it.

Shakspere, in his mature years, is not so soon ex-

haustible. This very fact, apart from other evidence,
would make us guess the Comedy of Errors to come
early among his writings.
In the plot thus carefully composed, there are at
leasttwo features worth our notice. The first, at
which we need merely glance, is the vigorous effect
of dramatic contrast produced by beginning this pro-
longed farce with the romantic narrative of ^'Egeon's
shipwreck and misfortunes and wanderings, and by
ending it with the still more romantic discovery that
the Abbess of Ephesus is the long-lost wife whom he
has so faithfully mourned. The second, on which we
may dwell a little longer, is the fundamental source
of all the fun and trouble, — the elaborate, double
confusion of identity. Confusion of identity, we
remember, was one of the effective stage devices in
Love's Labour 's Lost ; but there it was merely a bit of
episodic masking. Here it is the very essence of the
plot. It is taken, of course, straight from Plautus
\t remains effective in extravagant acting to this day.
92 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Nowadays, however, and just as much in Shakspere's
time, it could never have been plausible. In so ex-
travagant a form as that in which we here find it,
nothing could make it plausible except the actual con-
ventions of the classic stage. There, we remember,
the actors wore masks. Mask two
them alike, and of

no eye could tell at a glance which was which. No

" make-up " on any modern stage which reveals human
features, however, could possibly make two people
look enough alike to warrant such theatrically effec-
tive confusion of identity as pervades the Comedy of
Errors,

V, The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

[The Two Gentlemen of Verona was mentioned by Meres in 1598.

Beyond a stray allusion in 1615 to making "a virtue of necessity," ^
there seems to be no other extant notice of it until its publication in
the folio of 1623.
Its source is some English version of the Diana of Montemayor, a
Portuguese poet.
On internal evidence modern critics generally agree in placing it

early, — from 1591 to 1593 or so.]

Like all the plays we have considered so far, the

Two Gentlemen of Verona seems experimental ; like

the Comedy of Errors^ it is not imitative, but inde-

pendent, and its experimental effect is caused chiefly
by the abnormal development of one essential feature,
to the neglect of the other two. Here the resemblance
1 IV. i. 62.
 THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA 93

ends. The essential feature abnormally developed in

the Two Gentlemen of Verona is not the plot, but the
characters. More than what precede, then, this play
tends straight toward the unmistakably greater work
to come.
At bottom, like all the rest, it is a dramatic version
of narrative material. The kind of narrative here
chosen for this translation is akin to what probably
gave rise to Love's Labour ^s Lost Substantially, both
of these plays, like most of the following, amount to
more than such stories as are familiar in the
little

Decameron and its numerous polyglot descendants.

At least in English, the old translators of such fic-

tion pretended, with true British cant, to didactic

purpose.^ Clearly, however, their real purpose was
to amuse and their efforts took the form of such
;

unadorned plots as to-day suffice to stimulate the

imagination of children, and sufficed three hundred
years ago to stimulate anybody's. When translating
such narrative into dramatic terms, then, a play-
wright found his attention centred elsewhere than
when he was similarly translating chronicle-history.
In that case, he was bound, while interesting his
audience, to instruct them ; for, after all, they received
chronicle-histories rather in the mood of thoughtless
students than in that of theatre-goers. The old
chronicles, too, contained a great deal more matter
than a dramatist could possibly use. With Italian
novels the case was different. Often they were so
^ See the Introduction to Paynter's Palace of Pleasure.
94 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
short as to need rather amplification than condensa-
tion. The dramatist, then, was forced to invent
something; and here, as much as when dealing
with classic comedy, his object, like that of his
original, was to be as entertaining as he could.
With such an object, we have seen, Shakspere
experimentally introduced new factors into the plot
of the Comedy of Errors, handling the plot throughout
as carefully as he handled the verses of his poems.
In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he let his plot take
care of itself ; but, without apparently conceiving his
characters as very consistently individual, he enlivened
them throughout, and thus incidentally gave their
surroundings some definite atmosphere, by adding to
the bare outline of his plot any number of subtle
touches based on observation of real life.

These touches of character, which make you feel

at any given moment as if these people were real,
pervade the play. Typical ones may be found in the
first scene between Julia and Lucetta,^ so frankly
^
repeated and improved in the Merchant of Venice ;

in the mission of the disguised Julia to Sylvia,^ so

admirably improved in Twelfth Night ;^ and in the
less beautiful but perhaps more final episode of

Launce and his dog.^ They are not only true to life ;

the observation, the temper, they imply has a distinct

character of its own, —a character which anybody

1 I. ii. 2 L ii.
3 IV. iv. 113 seq. * L v. 178 seq.
6 IL iii. ; IV. iv.
 THE TWO GEXTLEMEX OF VERONA 95

familiar with the ripe work of Shaksporc knows,

without knowing why, to be peculiar to him. Here,
at last, then, in the experimental detail of a roman-
tic comedy, Shakspere firstshows himself original.
The vitality of detail in the Two Gentlemen of Verona
gives it a vigor of effect previously unknown to the
English stage.
This vigor of effect, however, is not so obvious as
it would have been if Shakspere, in his later work,
had been less economical of invention. Economy of
invention— perhaps another name for professional
prudence — made him more apt than almost any
other known writer to use again and again de-
vices which had once proved effective. Among
mendacious proverbs, few are so completely false as
that which declares Shakspere never to repeat it ;

were truer to say that he rarely did much else if he

could help it. Whatever is notable in the Two Gen-
tlemen of Verona^ then, appeared later, and more
effectively, in his more mature work. To people
familiar with that mature work, this earlier version
of its excellences must generally seem thin and
weak. Considered where we have placed it, however,
— after what has preceded, before w^hat is to come, —
it still produces an effect of great vitality.

There are two or three situations, also, which, wlien

new, must have been effective on the stage. Per-
haps the most effective of these come from Julia's
disguising herself as a boy,^ —a device which, as we
1 II. vii. ; IV. ii., iv. ; V. iv.
96 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
have seen, must have been convenient in a theatre
where female parts were played by boys, then, as now,
not habituated to skirts. Less palpably effective, but
still unquestionably so, are the scenes where Proteus
plays false to Valentine.^ The more one considers the
fresh detail of this play, the cleverer it seems.
Detail once admired, however, the Two Gentlemen
of Verona is by no means masterly. Not only is the
plot hastily and clumsily put together, and therefore
far from plausible, but the characters themselves are
not generally conceived as consistent individuals.
Their vitality is a matter of detail. Ethically they
are incomplete, out of scale. From all this results
an effect which, even in its own day, must have been
unsatisfactory. At the end, our sympathy is clearly
expected to be with both gentlemen, who are duly
rewarded with such brides as romantic tradition ex-
pects them to live happily with ever after. In fact,

we cannot sympathize with either of them. Proteus

has behaved too outrageously to be rewarded at all

there is no reason for his change of heart ; and there

is no excuse for the conventional magnanimity of

Valentine. For all its merits, the Two Gentlemen of

Verona remains in total effect unplausible, experi-
mental, artistically unsatisfactory.

1 II. iv. 100 seq. ; II. vi. ; III. i,, ii. ; IV. ii. etc. -
 SHAKSPERE ABOUT 1593 97

VI. Shakspere about 1593.

Uncertain as our chronology must be, we may feel

tolerably assured that, whatever their actual dates,

and whatever subsequent revision they may have had,
the works now before us were substantially finished
by 1593. With one or two possible exceptions,
furthermore, and exceptions which hardly alter the
general case, we may fairly assume that in 1593 Shaks-
pere had accomplished little more. It is worth while,

then, to pause for a moment, and define our impres-

sion of him at that time. Venus and Adonis, we
remember, was published in that yeai', just about his
twenty -ninth birthday. This first serious publication
may fairly be counted an epoch in his career.
In the course of six years at most, — the years from
twenty-three to twenty-nine, — he
had certainly suc-
ceeded in establishing himself as an actor, in writing,
wholly or in part, at least seven noteworthy plays
which have survived, and in composing at least one
poem, of the highest contemporary fashion, which not
only succeeded in public, but attracted to him the
friendly patronage of a great nobleman. When we
stop to consider how much, even of the works we
have now touched on, has remained in permanent lit-
erature, the achievement seems astounding.
When we turn to consider what English literature
had otherwise produced meantime, however, we find a
state of things almost equally notable. In 1587, we
7,
98 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
have seen, Elizabethan literature, as we now know it,
hardly existed. In 1588 ^ the " Martin Marprelate "
controversy began. In 1589 came the first publications
of Bacon and of Nash, and the first volume of Hak-
luyt's Voyages. In 1590 appeared Tamburlaine, the
first publication of Marlowe ; the Arcadia, the first of

Sidney and the first three books of Spenser's Faerie

;

Queene. In 1591 came the first publications of Dray-

ton and of Ralegh, Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, and
two volumes minor verse by Spenser. In 1592,
of
along with publications by Constable, Greene, Gabriel
Harvey, Lyly, Marlowe, and Nash, came Damel's first
publication, — the Sonnets to Delia. By 1593, then,
Elizabethan literature was well under way the period
;

since 1587 had been one of unprecedented literary

fertility.

The mental activity displayed in the early work of

Shakspere, then, was a more normal fact than it would
have been during almost any other six years of Eng-
lish history. During the same six years, too, Mar-
lowe, who was had been almost
just Shakspere's age,
equally active. In 1593 he was killed. Except
Shakspere, he proves, on the whole, the most notable
literar}' figure of his day. By comparing his work,
then, with the work which Shakspere accomplished
during his lifetime we may most conveniently define
our impression of Shakspere himself.
Tamburlaine, Marlowe's first extant play, is believed
^ All notes of publication in this study are taken from Rylaud's
Chronological Outlines of English Literature: Macmillan : 1890.
 SIIAKSPEIM-: ABOL'T 15!)3 99

to have been acted in 1587, when he was twenty-four

years old. was followed by a Second Part, analo-
It

gous to the Second Part of Henry VI., by Dr. Faiistus,

by the Jew of Malta, and by Edward 11. There is a
fragment, too, of a play on the Massacre at Paris
(S. Bartholomew), and of another on Dido, as well as
a series of very loose translations from Ovid, and the
Hero and Leander which we have already considered.
Doubtless, too, Marlowe had a hand in other plays, —
perhaps in Henry VI. and Richard III. The works
we have mentioned, however, undoubtedly his, are
enough for our purpose.
Putting aside Hero and Leander, to which we have
given attention enough, we see at once that Marlowe's
completed work consisted of four blank- verse trage-
dies. In all of these the plots are not very carefully
composed, the characters — though broadly conceived
— are not minutely individualized^ and the general
atmosphere is one of indefinite grandeur. In all four
there are many passages full of noble, surging imagina-
tion ; and many more which seem inferior. Yet the
total effect of any one of these tragedies, more
still

[the total effect of all four, is among the most im-

Ipressive in English literature. From the beginning,
[Marlowe, as an was passionately sensitive to
artist,

Ithe eternal tragedy which lies in the conflict between

[human aspiration and the inexorable limit of human
[achievement. In Tamburlaine this passionate sense
[of truth is expressed in terms of a material struggle
[in Faustus the struggle is spiritual ; in the Jetv qf
100 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Malta it is racial ; in Edward II. it is personal.
Whether the struggle be with the limits of the con-
querable earth, however, or with those of human
knowledge, or with those of ancestral inheritance, or
with our own warring selves, the struggle is forever
the same. We would be other than we are ; other
than we are, we may not be. In all four of Marlowe's
tragedies that great, true note vibrates. Knowingly
or not, Marlowe expressed himself greatly. Dead in
degradation before he was thirty years old, he must
always remain a great poet.
In turning from this work to Shakspere's, we are
instantly aware of a marked contrast, not wholly to
Shakspere's advantage. If all four of Marlowe's trage-
dies expressed but one profound sense of truth, at least,
they expressed that one tragic fact in lastingly noble
terms. So far, on the other hand, Shakspere's tragedy,
and history, and comedy has expressed nothing more
serious than, is expressed in his poems, a flexible —
eagerness to adapt himself to the popular taste. Ex-
perimental we have called his plays, and the word will
equally apply to his poems. Clearly the first six years
of Shakspere's work indicate no profound perception,
no serious artistic purpose.

When we consider Shakspere's experiments, how-

*^ver, ranging over these first six years of his pro-
fessional life, we are presently impressed by the
fact that no two of them are alike. One is a
tragedy of blood, one is a chronicle-history, one is a
fantastic comedy after the manner of Lyly, one is
 SHAKSPERE ABOUT 1593 101

something resembling a pseudo-classic comedy, one is a

kind of romantic comedy which later Shakspere made
peculiarly his own, one is a fashionable erotic poem.
Clearly another trait besides lack of serious artistic
purpose distinguishes him from Marlowe ; in view
of the comparative excellence of all these works, it

would be hard to find a more excellent versatility than

Shakspere's.
In our study of his poems, we dwelt enough on the
peculiarly concrete habit of thought which marked
him ; we assured ourselves that in his mind words so
naturally stood for real concepts, that by merely play-
ing with words he played unwittingly with thoughts,
too. His notable versatility proves to be a second
trait as marked and as permanent. In neither is there
so far a trace of conscious originality, such as one
feelsmust surely have underlain the passionate phi-
losophy of Marlowe. Yet, in the Two Gentlemen of
Verona we found Shakspere at last as freshly original
as he had already been versatile. The originality there
displayed, however, was not a matter of philosophy,
not of generalization, not of wisdom. It was an origi-
nality of observation, and of humanly concrete state-
ment what he did was only to try a new theatrical
;

experiment, — to introduce into popular comedy gleams

of real human life hitherto unknown there. This
originality seems only half-conscious ; it seems simply
the experimental adaptation to his professional work
of what he had learned by actual experience of life as ;

such, it would very likely have seemed to him almost

accidental.
102 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE
In three ways, then, although his accomplishment
was not yet permanently great, Shakspere's power
had displayed itself by 1593. In the first place, his
mind was so made that words and concepts seemed
one, and so his verbal gymnastics proved unwittingly
wise ; in the second place, whatever he turned his
hand to he did as well as the next man, and he turned
his hand to everything in the third place, in experi-
;

menting with comedy he had stumbled on the fact and

the use of his own great faculty of observation. None
of these traits, however, are showy, none of the kind
which either require or command instant recognition.
To Shakspere, we may guess, they may well have
seemed humdrum and these six years little else than
;

a prolonged apprenticeship. He had learned his trade

apart from this, he would probably have thought that
he had accomplished nothing.
 VII

THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM A MmSUMMER

NIGHT'S DREAM TO TWELFTH NIGHT
I.

As the general uncertainty of our chronology must

indicate, the separation of some plays in this chapter
from those in the last is arbitrary. Its justification

must rest chiefly on two facts which broadly distin-

guish the groups : In the first place, while the interest
of the preceding plays is chiefly historical, the interest
of those to come remains intrinsic ; apart from any
historical conditions they are often in themselves de-
lightful. In the second place, while in the preceding
plays one finds at bottom hardly anything more signi-
ficant than versatile technical experiment, one finds
throughout those to come constant indications of
growing, spontaneous, creative imagination.
In an artist of whatever kind, a period of vigorous
creative imagination declares itself after a fashion
which people who arc not of artistic temperament
rarely understand. The artist does not feel that he
has something definite to say, — that he has a state-
ment to make ; but when he is about his work, or
perhaps before, he is constantly aware of a haunting
mood which will not let him rest until he has some
104 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
how expressed it. What that mood signifies in the
scheme of the eternities he may as likely as not neither
know nor care. All he need certainly know is that,
without being able to tell why, he feels somehow with
painful acuteness what he cares for is chiefly to
;

express his feeling in such manner as shall get rid of

it. If he be a man of genius, his work under these
conditions will be of lasting value ; if not, it may be
comically insignificant. To the artist, this is a matter
of accident : to himself a man of genius is as common-
place as a plough-boy. The thing for us to remark,
then, in this chapter and in the two following, is that
throughout, to greater or less degree, the plays and
the poems seem born of true artistic impulse, of that
trait, uncomfortable to great folk and small, which at
times, to any artistic temperament, makes the legends
of inspiration seem almost credible.
As generally of lasting artistic value, then, — as
palpably works of genius, — the writings to come must
be read in a different mood from those which pre-
cede. To understand them we must not only train
ourselves to appreciate how they impressed Eliza-
bethans three hundred years ago we must actually ;

enjoy them ourselves. So essential is this, indeed,

and so great the lasting enjoyment which, as we

know them better, we may find throughout them, that
in many moods to busy ourselves with them further
seems wasted time, — worse still, it often seems like
pedantic blindness to the constant delights which
alone have made them permanent. In the end, how-
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 105

ever, if we assume in ourselves the full power of

enjoyment, of artistic appreciation, and if we test it

now and again by reading for pure pleasure the works

which in our coming study we must discuss, we shall
gain from our discussion the only thing which could
really justify it, — an increased power of enjoyment.

These general facts are nowhere clearer than in the

Midsummer NigMs Dream.

II. A Midsummer Night's Dream.

[The Midsummer Night's Dream was entered in the Stationer*'

Register on October 8th, 1600. During the same year it was twice
published in quarto, with Shakspere's name. It was mentioned by-

Meres, in 1598.
The sources, none of them closely followed, are many and various.
Among them are probably the life of Theseus in North's Plutarch ;

Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Wife of Bath's Tah, and Legend of Good

Women ; and perhaps Golding's Ovid. The fairy scenes have obvious
relation to the actual folk-lore of the English peasantry. Besides, the
sources of both the Comedy of Errors and the Two Gentlemen of Verona
probably affect this play, too.
Conjectures as to the origin and date of the Midsummer Night's
Dream vary. Some hold that the play was made, like Milton's Comiis,
for a wedding festival. The conjectures as to date, based on internal
evidence, — verse-tests and allusions, — vary from 1590 to 1595, wth a
slight preference for 1594.]

The first, constant, and last effect of the Mid-

summer NighVs Dream is one of poetry so pervasive
that one feels brutally insensitive in seeking here
anything but delight. Nowhere does Shakspcre mor«
fully justify Milton's words :
^ —
1 V Allegro.
106 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
" Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson*8 learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancj^s child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild."

Nothing of Shakspere's, on the other hand, better

confutes the saying which Drammond of Hawthornden
attributes to Ben Jonson, that Shakspere wanted art.

While it is undoubtedly true that, over and over again,

Shakspere stopped far short of such laborious finish as
makes the plays of Jonson, whatever else, so admirably
conscientious, it is equally true that when Shakspere
chose to take pains his technical workmanship was
as artistic as his imaginative impulse. Few works
in any literature possess more artistic unity than
theMidsummer NigMs Dream^ few reveal on study
more of that mastery whose art is so fine as to
seem artless. Alike in spirit and in form, then,
in motive and in technical detail, — this play is a true
work of art ; its inherent beauty is the chief thing to
realize, to appreciate, to care for.
we would understand why the Midsummer Nighfs
If

Dream seems to belong in Shakspere's work where

we have placed it, however, we must for a while
neglect this prime duty of enjoyment, and consider
the play minutely, attending first to the materials
of which it is made, and then to the way in which it

handles them.
Putting aside, as needless for our purpose, those
various and scattered sources which are believed pecu-
liarly its own, we may conveniently recall the fact
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 107

that in the three comedies already considered we

found certain devices and situations which seemed
notably effective.* In Love's Labour '« Lost, among
other matters, we noted a fresh, open-air atmosphere,
a burlesque play performed by characters whose rude-
ness and eccentricity was in broadly comic contrast to
the culture of their audience, and the perennially
amusing confusion of identity. In that case, however,
the confusion was reached by the unplausible device
of masking. A stage mask, covering only the upper
features, must leave the mouth free consequently, ;

it does not transform the wearer, and such blunders as

the King's or Biron's require an audience convention-

ally to accept a disguise which really is none. Con-
fusion of identity, however, thus found effective even
when not was repeated and elaborately
plausible,
developed in the Comedy of Errors. Here, again,
though, it lacked plausibility the audience was asked
;

,to accept a degree of personal likeness attainable on

[the stage only by means of such masks as were worn

[by the Roman actors for whom the plot was originally

I
made. To hasten on, we remarked, among other
effective traits in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the
love-inspired treason of Proteus, and his instanta-
fneous shifts of affection ; though effective, however,
j
these were neither plausible nor sympathetic. To
go no further, here are a number of stage devices,
already used experimentally by Shakspere with proba-
[ble success, but never in a way which could give
1 See pp. 86, 91. 90.
 108 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
either writer, spectator, or reader serious artistic
satisfaction.
In the Midsummer NigMs Bream all these are
reproduced, but none experimentally. Each has its

place in a composition so complete that at sensitive

moments one shrinks from dissecting it and all are ;

plausible. The scene is laid in a mythical world far

enough from reality to make the wood-notes seem that
of its inevitable atmosphere. The situation of the
burlesque play is reproduced with a firmer hand ; and
this time the burlesque interlude has a plot, of which
we shall soe more later.^ The love treason is trans-
ferred from a tolerably cool man to an emotionally
overwrought girl ; thereby, while retaining all its the-

atrical effect, it becomes at once far less deliberate and

far more sympathetic.^ While Proteus tells Valen-
tine's secret to the Duke, too, Helena tells Hermia's
only to her lover. Finally, both confusion of identity
and protean changes of affection ^ are made plausible,
like very dreams themselves, by bodily transference to
a dream-world, where the fairies of English folk-lore
play endless tricks with mortals and with one another,
making their fellow-beings fantastically their sport.
These instances are enough to show why we may
reasonably call this play, in Shakspere's development,
a first declaration of artistic consciousness. A con-
fusion of pleasant motives, already used in unsatis-
1 Seep. 116.
2 Cf. T. G. III. i. 1-50 with M. N. D. I i. 226 seq.
8 Cf. T. G. II. iv. 192 seq. with M. N. D. IL ii. 103 seq. ; IIL i
132 seq., etc.
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DKE^V^NI 109

factory form, may be guessed to have gathered in his

mind. Whoever has had a gleam of artistic experi-
ence — such as the haunting line, for example, which
belongs inevitably in some unwritten sonnet — knows
that such spirits as these can be laid only by expres-
sion. There need be no didactic purpose here ; in one
sense there need hardly be purpose at all. If we
imagine that the Shakspere we have already defined
was thus possessed by creative impulse, we imagine
enough to account for the Midsummer NighVs Dream.
So much for the artistic motive of the play. Turn-
ing to the technical art by which this is made mani-
fest, we may conveniently consider it in the three
aspects which we have earlier seen to be essential to
I any narrative or dramatic composition : plot, charac-
ter, and atmosphere, or background.
To a modern reader, the plot of the Midsummer
Night's Dream seems to concern itself chiefly with the
doings of the fairies, who are so constantly charming,
and of the clowns, who are so constantly amusing.
Even to-day, however, a sight of the play on the stage
\
reveals at once that, so far as plot is concerned, these
matters are accessory ; that the real centre of the plot
is the love-story of the four Athenians. The artis-
j
tic purpose of all the rest is simply to make this
'

plausible. With this purpose, the play begins with

a statement of the condition of affairs in the romantic
Athens of Theseus, — not a real world, but a world no
further removed from reality than plenty of others
which we are accustomed conventionally to accept on
no WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
the stage. Thence, and not from the actuality of real
life, we proceed through the extravagant huli'oonery
of the clowns — the most grotesque human beings, of
but grotesquely human
still — the dreamland the
to of
fairies. This dreamland, after all, is little further
removed from the romantic introductory Athens of
Theseus than that Athens itself was from the world
where it found us. Once in dreamland, the fantastic ex-
travagances of the main plot — in their earlier forms
so far from credibility — are kept constantly plausible
by the superhuman agencies which direct them ; and
these in turn are kept plausible by the incessant inter-
mingling and contrast with the fairies of the equally
extravagant, but still fundamentally human clowns.
Then, after some three acts of this, the morning
horns of Theseus break the dream ; the fairies vanish
we come back own world through the romantic
to our
Athens of Theseus, with which we began. The fifth
act recapitulates, almost musically ; the final scene of
the fairies is not a part of the action, but an epilogue,
a convention frequent in the Elizabethan theatre.
The fairy scenes, then, — the accessories by means
of which the main plot is made artistically plausible,
— are themselves made plausible first by deliberate
removal from real life; and secondly by deliberate
contrast with a phase of real life hardly less extrava-
gant than they. The constructive art here shown is

admirable.
At first, too, this constructive art seems original.

On consideration, however, it proves to be only an

 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DKKAM 111

adaptation of a convention common on tlio ElizabctliMn

stage. Though among Shakspere's works an Induction
is found only in the Taminr/ of the Shreiu, Inductions —
which made the main action a play within a play —
were very frequent throughout the early drama. We
shall have more to say of them when we come to the
Taming of the Shrew} Here it is enough to point out
that the first act of the Midsummer Night's Dream is,

essentially, a very skilful development of the conven-

tional Induction.
The plot of the Midsummer Nighfs Dream^ then, is
far superior to anything we have met before. When
we come to the characters we find a state of things
less favorable to our notion that the play should
be placed here in Shakspere's artistic develop-
ment. Certainly less individual than those of the
Two Gentlemen of Verona, these characters seem
almost less so than those of Lovers Labour's
Lost, Taken by themselves, for example, the Athe-
nians of the court of Theseus seem hardly more
individual than the Ephesians of the Comedy of
Errors. Considered not by themselves, however, but
rather as one of three clearly defined groups, their
aspect changes ; they stand in marked and strongly
dramatic contrast to two other groups, as distinct
from one another as from the Athenian courtiers, —
the clowns and the fairies. In answer, then, to those
critics who, largely on the score of individualized char-
acter, would \>\aice the 3Iidsunimer Night' s Bream earlier
than the Ttvo Gentlemen of Verona, we may say that,
1 See p. ,159.
112 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
like the other plays considered in the last chapter, the
latter is intrinsically experimental, while the former is

intrinsically artistic and that three broadly general-

;

ized groups of character, whose mutual relations are

skilfully adjusted, fit the general artistic motive of the
Midsummer Night'' s Bream far better than could more
individual characters whose individuality should make
them a bit unmanageable. In the Two Grentlemen
of Verona, furthermore, the individual touches were
rather matters of experimental detail than of creative
imagination. The contrast defines a general truth :

Because a writer can individualize character, it does

not follow that he can master and manage his own in-

dividual creatures. In the perfectly manageable vague-

ness of character here, then, we have fresh evidence of
how careful Shakspere's art may have been. As we
have seen, if our chronology be not all wrong, his
power developed slowly. Here, then, we may at least
guess that the state of things shows him in a truly
artistic mood, too wise even to attempt things at all
beyond his certain power.
In one scene, though, the juvenility of character
seems too great for any such explanation this is in ;

the child-like squabble between Hermia and Helena.^

On the stage, to be sure, it is still funny ; but the
fun is crude : grown girls, we feel, never squabble
quite in this way. Properly to appreciate the scene,
we must remember the circumstances for which it

was written there were no female actors,

: a fact —
which goes far to atone for the coarseness of female
1 III. ii. 282-344.
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DRKAM 113

character common throughout the lesser Elizabethan

drama ; Helena was written to be played by a big boy,
ircrmia by a small one.
If we be inclined to wander in our delight with

the atmosphere of the Midsummer NujJlCh Dream^ a

fact like this should recall us to ourselves. Dainty
as its atmosphere is, specific too as distinguished from
any other in literature, the play itself could never
have seemed to its writer only the beautiful poem
which it chiefly seems to us. He made it for
living actors, — men and boys. The fairy atmos-
phere was to be conveyed to his audience not
only by the lovely lines which remain as fresh
as ever, but by the bodily presence of child-actors,
whose actual forms should revive among the specta-
tors the familiar old fancies of the little people.
Such fancies, far from what arise nowadays as we
contemplate in the Midsummer Night^s Dream the
stout legs of a middle-aged ballet, could bemore than
suggested on the stage of Shakspere's time. It was
a stage whose conventions allowed Macbeth and Ban-
quo, fifteen years later, to make their entrance on
wicker hobby-horses, with dangling false legs ^ whose ;

conventions permitted Cleopatra to wear laced stays,

which she orders cut in a moment of agitation.^ On
such a stage, the pink limbs of chubby children —
and the who serve Bottom have no
lesser fairies lines
which might not be taught a child three or four^ — of

^ See p. 309. 2 Antony and Cleopatra, I. iii. 71.

' 111. i. IGG seq. ; IV. i.

8^
114 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
might have seemed almost actually the fairy fancies
which remain the folk-lore of Northern Europe.
Here and there, among modern peasantry, such folk-
lore still survives, much as it was when Shakspere
wTote. The contrast between his way of dealing with
it and ours is typical of the change in the times.

He asked himself, as an artist, how it might serve

his artistic purpose; and using it accordingly, he
made it the lasting type of cultivated romantic tra-
dition. If Spenser's fairies never quite lived, and
Drayton's have long been forgotten, Shakspere's will
always remain the lasting little people of the English
ages. Men of our time treat the old stories differ-
ently, asking not what may be done with them, but
what they mean. In the legends of the little people,
some wise contemporaries of ours fancy that they
can trace lingering race-memories of the dwarfish
aborigines of Europe. When our own ancestors
drove them back toward the northern snows, these
scholars guess, some may have lingered in caves and
burrows, emerging at night, brutishly grateful to who-
ever was kind, mischievous to whoever plagued them.
So, perhaps, there are modern minds who may get
from the Midsummer Night'' s Dream more satisfaction
in pointing out that the name of Oberon is a version of
that of the dwarf king Alberich — himself doubtless
some prehistoric Eskimo — than in giving themselves
over to the delights of Oberon' s dreamy realm.
As students not of science, but of literature, how-
ever, we should never lose sight of these delights.
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 115

Our study has compelled us to analyze in this play

s )mething besides its beauty. If we would under-

stand Shakspere, however, its beauty, not its anat-

omy, what we must think of first, last, and always.
is

Its beauty is what Shakspere must have cared for

and thought of. As a true creative artist, indeed,
he was probably less conscious of its mechanism
than our study has made us. An artist who has
real creative impulse generally works by an unwit-
ting instinct, with a truth which makes his work
both significant and organic ; sometimes it seems
as if a critically conscious artist could never create
like one who believes himself to work untrammelled,
to say things as he says them, because, without
troubling himself as to why, he feels sure that
just thus they should be said. Some mood like this
seems to underlie the famous criticism of Theseus
on this very fairy story. By appreciating that, after
all, we may best appreciate the Midsummer Night's
Dream :
^ —
'*I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet '

Are of imagination jiU compact: |

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, i

That is, the madman the lover, all as frantic,

:
j

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt

1 V. i. 2-17.
116 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

The poet's eye, in a 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 nothing
A local habitation and a name,"

III. Romeo and Juliet.

[An imperfect and probably unauthorized quarto of Romeo and Juliet

was published anonymously in 1597. A tolerably complete quarto,
also anonymous, appeared in 1599; there was a third quarto in 1609.
The play is attributed to Shakspere by Meres; and the Centurie oj
Prayse cites an allusion to it as Shakspere's in 1595.
The story, a very old one, occurs in various forms
and languages.
The immediate sources two English versions of a
of the play are
French version of a novel by Bandello Romeus and Juliet, a long
:

poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562; and Paynter's Palace of

Pleasure.
Conjectures as to date range from 1591 to the second quarto. The
general opinion seems to be that there was an early play, perhaps
collaborative, which Shakspere slowly rewrote at intervals. The play,
in its present form, may be reasonably placed near the Midsummer
Night's Dream, about 1594 or 1595.]

One reason for grouping together the Midsummer

NigMs Dream and Romeo and Juliet lies in the fact
that the story of the latter is virtually the same as
that of Pyramus and Tliishe. As in Love's Labour 's
Lost, Shakspere at once practised and burlesqued the
absurdities of fashionable style, so here he seems a bit
later to treat this tragic tale in two distinct moods
in one, he makes of it a play which, whatever
 ROMEO AND JULIET 117

its date, is generally admitted to be his first great

tragedy ; in the other he turns it into a burlesque
which emphasizes every point of the tragedy where
the sublime verges on the ridiculous. Another thing
which groups the plays together is Mercutio's lyric
interlude about Queen Mab,^ — a passage so fatal to
modern actors, who try to make it a part of the
action. Romeo and
Clearly, however, the relation of
Juliet to the Midsummer Nighfs Dream is even more
debatable than we found the relation between that
play and the preceding comedies.
The relation of Romeo and Juliet to its sources, on
the other hand, — to matter distinctly not Shaks-
perean, — is very close indeed. Most of us know the
play so well, and think of it so constantly as Shaks-
pere's from beginning to end, that a direct comparison
of some familiar passages and their sources is worth
while. It will show more palpably than any similar

comparison of less familiar matters how completely

an Elizabethan dramatist looked upon his task as
mere translation.^ Two examples will serve our pur-
pose : the first is that which Shakspere translated
into the familiar character of the Nurse, so often
talked about as peculiarly his own ; the second is that
which he translated into the soliloquy of Juliet when
she drinks the sleeping-draught. These are broadly
typical not only of Romeo and Juliet throughout, but
also of Shaksperc's plays in general, and indeed of
the whole Elizabethan drama.
1 I. iv. .53-9.5. 2 See p. 76.
118 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

In Paynter's version of the story ^ there is nothing

more than mention that Juliet's governess, an old
woman, was the go-between and this
for the lovers ;

is said to be all that exists in either the French ver-

sion or the Italian. Brooke, on the other hand, intro-

duces the following passage :
^ —
" To Romeus she goes of him she doth desyre,
To know the mean of mariage by councell of the fryre.
On Saterday, quod he, if Juliet come to shrift,
She shall be shrived and maried, how lyke you noorse this drift ?
Now by my truth (quod she) gods blessing have your hart
For yet in all my life 1 have not heard of such a part.
Lord, how you yong men can such crafty wiles devise,
If that you love the daughter well to bleare the mothers eyes.

Now for the rest let me and Juliet alone :

To get her leave, some feate excuse I will devise an one

For that her golden locks by sloth have been unkempt
Or for unwares some wanton dreame the youthfull damsell
drempt,
Or for in thoughts of love her ydel time she spent
Or otherwise within her hart deserved to be shent. ,

I know her mother will no case say her nay:

in
I warrant you she shall not fayle to come on Saterday.
And then she sweares to him, the mother loves her well
And how she gave her suck in youth she leaveth not to tell.
A pretty babe (quod she) it was when it was yong :

Lord, how it could full pretely have prated with it tong.

A thousand time and more I Laid her on my lappe.
And clapt her on the buttocke soft and kist where I did clappe.

1 Both Paynter's version and Brooke's were published by the New

Shakspere Society, ed. P. A. Daniel, in 1875. They occur also in
Hazlitt's Shakspere's Library.
^
Romeus and Juliet, 631 seq.
 ROMEO AND JULIET 119

And gladder then was I of such a kisse forsooth

Then I had been to have a kisse of some olde lechers mouth.
And thus of Juliets youth began this prating noorse,
And of her present state to make a tedious long discoorse.
For when these Beldams sit at ease upon theyr tayle
. . :

The day and eke the candle light before tlieyr talke shall fayle.
And part they say and part they do devise
is true,

Yet boldly do they chat of both when no man checkes theyr

lyes."

That marvellously Shaksperean creation, the Nurse,

it turns out, was conceived and brought forth, thirty

years before Shakspere's time, by Arthur Brooke.

Now for that marvellously Shaksperean piece of
psychology, when Juliet drinks the potion. Here is
Paynter's version :
^ —
^' lulietta beinge within hir Chambre having an eawer
ful of Water standing uppon the Table filled the viole
which the Frier gave her: and after she had made the
mixture, she set it by hir bed side, and went to Bed.
And being layde, new Thoughtes began to assaile her, with
a concept of grievous Death, which brought hir into such
case as she could not tell what to doe, but playning inces-
santly sayd, ^Am not I the most unhappy and desperat
creature, that ever was borne of Woman? . . my distresse
hath brought me to sutch extremity, as to save mine honor
and conscience, I am forced to devoure the dr^^nke whereof
I know not the vertue : but what know I (sayd she)
whether the Operatyon of thys Pouder will be to soone or
to late, or not correspondent to the due time ? What . .

know I moreover, if the Serpents and other venomous and

crauling Wormes, whych commonly frequent the Graves
1 Dauiel, p. 130; Huzlitt, p. 244.
120 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
and pittes of the Earth wyll hurt me, thynkyng that I am
deade? But howe shall I indure the stynche of so many
carious and Bones of myne auncestors which rest in the
Grave, yf by Fortune I do awake before Rhomeo and Fryer
Laurence doe come to help me?'^'^

All directly from the French, this is substantially

repeated by Brooke. At this point, then, we may
turn to his version, which goes on a little more fluently

than Paynter's :
—
''
And whilst she in these thoughts doth dwell somewhat to long,
The force of her ymagining anon dyd waxe so strong,
That she armysde she saw, out of the hollow vaulte,
s

(A upon) the carkas of Tybalt

griesly thing to looke
Right in the selfe same sort that she few dayes before
Had seene him in his blood embrewde, to death eke wounded
sore
And then when she agayne within her selfe had wayde
That quicke she should be buried there, and by his side be
layde,
All comfortles, for she shall living feere have none,
But many a rotten carkas, and full many a naked bone ;

Her dainty tender partes gan shever all for dred.

Her golden heares did stand upright upon her chillish head.
Then pressed with the feare that she there Uved in,
A sweat as colde as mountaine yse pearst through her tender
skin,
That with the moysture hath wet every part of hers :

And more besides, she vainely thinkes, whilst vainely thus she
feares,
A thousand bodies dead have compast her about.
And lest they will dismember her she greatly stands in dout.**^

1 Cf. Romeo and Juliet, IV. iii. 14 seq.

2 Rotneus and Juliet, 2377 seq.
 KOMEO AXD JULIET 121

Payntcr's conclusion of the translation is perhaps

the more memorable :
—
" And feelyng that hir forces diminyshed by lyttle and
lyttle, fearing that through to great debilyty she was not
able to do hir enterpryse, like a furious and insensate
Woman, with out further care, gulped up the Water wythin
tlie Voyal, then crossing hir armes upon hir stomacke, she

lost at that instante all the powers of hir Body, restyng

in a Traunce."

In Juliet's soliloquy, Shakspere introduces two

touches not in these original versions: her business
with the dagger, and her doubt of the Friar's honesty.
Apart from these, he merely condenses and translates
these grotesque old narratives into permanent form
for example :
^ —
" O,if I wake, shall I not be distraught,

Environed with all these hideous fears ?

And madly play with my forefathers' joints ?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud ?
And, in with some great kinsman's bone,
this rage
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains ?
O, look I methinks I see my cousin's ghost,
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point : stay, Tybalt, stay
Romeo, I come ! this do I drink to thee."

With less citation, it would have been hard to em-

phasize the two facts which these typical passages
should make clear : in the first place, they show
how Elizabethan dramatists generally dealt with the

^ IV. iii. 49 seq.

122 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
original sources of their plays, — tragic, comic, and
historic alike ; in the second place, they prove the
remoteness of Romeo and Juliet, even in psychologic
detail, from what it is commonly thought to be, —a
pure creation of Shakspere's brain.
Turning now from substance to style, we may find
in the style of Royneo and Juliet many traits by
no means peculiar to Shakspere among Elizabethan
writers. A glance at Romeo's speeches anywhere in the
first act,^ or at any of Mercutio's,^ will reveal plenty
of such quips, and cranks, and puns as we found in
Lovers Labour 's Lost. Throughout the play, too, we
continually come on lyric passages, as distinguished
from dramatic. For one thing, rhymes are frequent.
Again, such a speech as Mercutio's about Queen Mab^
can be understood only when we compare it to inter-
polated songs in modern comedies ; it is simply a
charming, independent piece of lyric declamation. So,
when Romeo accosts Juliet* we have a formal sonnet
nor can blank verse disguise the essentially lyric
quality of the Epithalamium ;
^ or of the Morning
Song ; ^ or of the fugue-like quartette of lament over
the unconscious Juliet.'^ The more one studies the
play, in short, the more curiously archaic the style
often seems ; it is really an example of the Euphuistic
fantasy prevalent in early Elizabethan literature.
1 E. g. I. i. 177 seq,
2 His dying pun is familiar; III. i. 102.
3 I. iv. 53 seq.
* L V. 95-108. « IIL V. 1-36.
» III. ii. 1-33. 7 IV. V. 43-64.
 ROMEO AND JULIET 123

While this literature is obsolete, however, Romeo

and Juliet, in spite of its fidelity to obsolete sources,
survives among the most popular plays on the modern
stage. The reason why is not far to seek. Shaks-
pere has infused the whole play with creative imagi-
nation. On the numberless beauties of detail, which
make us half forget its eccentricities, we need not
dwell ; the great lyric charm of Romeo and Juliet is
not its chief merit. As a composition, as a complete
conception, the play is masterly.
Fundamentally the plot is that of a conventional
tragedy of blood. Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, and
Juliet, — not to speak of Lady Montague, — come to
violent deaths ; and the last scene takes place in a
charnel-house, which, in the stage setting of the time,
might well have been strewn with heaps of bones. On
horror's head horrors accumulate as much as any-
where but whereas in the old tragedies of blood the
;

horrors came from nowhere, in this case they are the

legitimate effects of uncontrollable causes. For ex-
ample, the play opens after a manner still conven-
tional, with a scene between servants, the object of
which apparently is only to occupy the first few
minutes. But watch what these servants do One :

bites his thumb. A fight ensues. Tybalt enters and

takes part. Before blood-letting on either side has
given his temper a chance to cool, the fight is offi-
cially stopped. While his passion, thus aroused, still
runs high, he discovers Romeo at the Capulet feast,
where Romeo's presence seems to him a studied in-
124 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
snlt. Restrained by old Capulet, he grows more angry
still. As soon as he meets Romeo in public, he openly
insults him. Mercutio steps in, and is killed. Romeo
avenges him. So the tragedy proceeds ; were it not for
that first thoughtless thumb-biting of the servants, we
see, nothing could have fallen out in quite this way.
The thumb-biting is one of the direct causes which by
a growing series of effects lead straight to the final
catastrophe. Few plots anywhere are so carefully
composed.
The individuality of the characters, meanwhile,
constant and consistent throughout, is not so em-
phasized as to distract attention from the plot.

Rather the very coherence of plot on which we

have just touched is secured by the fact that the
temperaments of the separate characters interact
as they would in life. It is because Tybalt and

Mercutio, for example, are the kind of men they

are, that they come to their ends in a way which
involves the fate of Romeo and Juliet. Throughout
the play one feels instinctively that here, at last,
the creative imagination of Shakspere had begun to
make his own fictions as real as human beings.
We can hardly conclude, however, that this matter
presented itself to him as seriously as we are disposed
to think of it. After all, what a writer feels, in the
position we here suppose to have been Shakspere's, is
not so much profound psychologic wisdom as intuitive
knowledge that the people he is describing must be
what they are, and must act or think as they do. So far
 ROMEO AND JULIET 125

as his conscious intervention with them goes, indeed,

it may rather impair than improve their vitality.
In Romeo and Juliet^ for example, there is one state-
ment which, perhaps fantastically, might be taken for
evidence — as far as it goes — that Shakspere was
not consciously treating his characters so seriously
as posterity has supposed. This concerns Juliet's
age. In Brooke she is sixteen years old. Why Shaks-
pere should make her two years younger has given rise

to much speculation, about the prematurity of Italian

youth and the like. Perhaps this speculation is very
wise. More probably, liowever, at least to some of us,
the reason* why Shakspere's Juliet is fourteen seems
to lie in a single pun, at the time of Juliet's fii'st

appearance :
^ —
" Lady Capulet : She 's not fourteen.
Nurse: 1 'II lay fourteen of my teeth, —
And yet, to my teen be it spoken I have hut four, —
She is not fourteen."

Clearly no other numeral in the teens could make

that slight joke at once so sonorous, so precise, and so
funny. Fifteen makes a bad pun with Jive ; sixteen
sounds short and sibilant ; seven, eight, or nine teeth
are enough to make a decent showing. Right or
wrong, too, this simple reason for Juliet's age — so
very remote from modern artistic seriousness — is

exactly the sort of reason which would generally

have affected a writer of the period to which we
have attributed Romeo and Juliet,

1 I. iii. 12 seq.
126 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
A similar state of things pervades the atmosphere
of the play. In actual detail, much of it is English.
In total effect, it is so Italian that one may read Romeo
and Juliet with increasing surprise and delight in
Verona itself. Such an effect comes generally by no
deliberate process of study, but rather from a spon-
taneous feeling in the artist that thus things ought
to be.
In spite, then, of its closeness to its origins, in spite,
too, of so many contemporaneous vices of style, Romeo
and Juliet seems as original as it seems vital. In
Brooke and Paynter there is no plausibility ; in Shaks-
pere's play there is such veracity of conception that a
thousand trivialities of style inno way impair its
place in world-literature. Romeo and Juliet is a great
work of art; and first among Shakspere's works it

expresses a great emotional truth, —a lasting, tragic

fact of human experience.
A creative artist is not so apt to comprehend the
moral significance of what he creates as are his
critics, particularly after the lapse of two or three cen-
turies. It is more than likely that a writer in Shaks-
pere's position may not actually have realized even
what we have already touched most unlikely
on. It is

that he should have realized what makes Romeo and

Juliet so permanently human. The tragedy it deals
with, the tragedy of youthful love, is inevitable.
Such love must pass ; in real life, if fate do not cut it

short in all its purity, it must lapse into some matur-

ity far different from itself —
calm domesticity, per-
 KOMEO AND JULIET 127

haps, or adulterous passion. The very fate of Romeo

and Juliet, then, a real fate, full of that sense of the
inevitable which must pervade true tragedy, proves,
on consideration, not only broadly typical, but, for all
its sadness, inherently happy. It preserves heroically
permanent an emotional purity which in prolonged
life could not have survived.

Our sympathy with this is all the warmer because

the superficial poignancy of the tragedy has a pathos
which anybody can feel, without a bit of analysis.
Despite all these merits, though, — its tragic pathos
which appeals to everybody ; its veracity of concep-
tion, its sentiment, its poetry which appeal to the
ripest culture, — Romeo and seems
Juliet, as a play,
in the end only a story told for its own sake by an
artist whose creative imagination was at last astir.

One finds in it no fundamental sense of mystery,

no cloud-piercing vision leading upward the eyes of
the elect, no self -revealing impulse. What Shaks-
pere actually did, in short, reduces itself to this:
With laboriously mastered art, and with a creative
impulse not traceable in his earlier work, he gave
permanent vitality to matters which in other hands
had shown only possibilities of life. From what
seemed the material for a tragedy of blood, he
made a great tragic poem, —
not philosophic in its
motive, like the tragedies of Marlowe, but more last-
ing even than they in its human truth. This he did,
too, after a manner which we shall learn to recog-
nize as his own. With the least possible departm'o
 128 AVILLTAM SHAKSPERE

from his sources, with the utmost economy of invention,

and despite endless affectations of style wliich have
been fatal to the work of his contemporaries, he trans-
lated Brooke and Paynter into this great tragedy which
we all know. To himself it very probably seemed
only a play in which he somehow felt more hearty
interest than of old. To us, however, it seems rather
a play throughout which we feel the spontaneous im-
pulse of his creative imagination. From beginning to
end, we can see now, the tragedy is permeated with
that deep, lasting sense of fact which makes us so
often think of Shakspere not as an author but as a
creator.

ly. Richard TIL

[Richard III. was entered in the Stationers' Register on October

20th, 1597. It was published anonymously in quarto during the same
year; the next year came a second quarto with Shakspere 's name;
there were three other quartos during his lifetime. The popularity
thus evinced is confirmed by the fact that, besides Meres's allusion,
the Centurie of Prai/se cites eight others during Shakspere 's life, t^^ o of
which refer it directly to Shakspere, and four of which mention, as
familiar, Eichard's last line, " horseA horse ! A
My kingdom for !

!
a horse
Its source is Holinshed, and perhaps an earlier play, now lost.

In spite of its long connection with Shakspere, its authorship has

been disputed on internal grounds. On internal evidence it is com-
monly assigned to 1593 or 1594 ]

Wlioever wrote Richard III.^ the play so clearly

belongs to the same series of chronicle-histories with
Henry VI. that, as we have seen, the modern version
 RICHARD III 129

of it which still holds the stage contains actual scenes,

as well as speeches, from the latter play. Were it not
still popular on the stage, indeed, one would be dis-
posed to group it rather with the experimental plays
of the last chapter than with the more masterly plays
of this. Its vitality, however, so far as it goes, is not
accidental. While, as a whole, the play follows the
conventions of the old chronicle-history so closely
that, in its original form, it cannot hold the attention
of a modern audience, it contains, in its central figure,
a character as vitally human, if not as complex, as
any that Shakspcrc created.
On the archaism of so much of the play is based
part of the doubt as to its authorship. The poet who
could make the Midsummer Night'' s Dream, it is felt,
or Romeo and Juliet, could not have perpetrated the
absurdities which half impair the dramatic power of
the scene where Gloster stops a royal funeral in the
street, to make perfidious love to the widowed chief
mourner ; ^ nor could he have made three royal
widows sit on the ground, lamenting through a
hundred lines like Irish keeners.^ Again, some
critics feel, the simplicity of villainy embodied in
the character of Richard is too inhuman, after all,

for such a master of psychology as Shakspere had

already proved himself. More likely, to such a state
of mind as theirs, this whole play is really Marlowe's,
or perhaps collaborative.
The force of these criticisms is evident. To avoid

1 I. ii. 2 IV. iv.

130 WILLIAM SHAKSPEllE
them — to give Richard III. a definite place in our
notion of Shakspere's development — we must remind
ourselves in the first place of the state of dramatic
and in the second place of vrhat we
literature in 1593,
have assumed Shakspere to have done since that year.
As we saw when we studied Henry VI., chronicle-
history, the most typically Elizabethan kind of drama,
remained archaic in form and in purpose at a time
when at least in purpose tragedy had become modernly
comprehensible, and comedy had become so in both
purpose and form. To a modern mind, the obsolete,
rather operatic than dramatic, methods which have
made Shakspere's Richard III. give place on the stage
to Colley Gibber's vulgar version, are plain marks of
weakness. To one familiar with the older chronicle-
histories, they are simply a continuation, with added
artistic purpose, of the conventions which the theatre
of their time accepted.
To analyze in detail the art of Richard III. would
for our purposes involve too long a delay. The result
of it any one can feel. The character of Richard, for
all the simplicity of his villainy, is as human as any
in fiction ; again and again, as you read his lines,
you find yourself accepting them as if they were
actual human utterances. The world in which this
human being moves, on the other hand, is almost as
unreal, in its archaic conventionality, as that of the
Moralities and the Interludes ;and so are many of
his own speeches.^ It is as if a modern, realistic

» E.g. I. i. 30, 145-154.

 RICHARD III 131

portrait were painted on such a golden background

as one finds among thirteenth-century Italians. De-
spite this incongruity, however, so palpable on the
modern stage as to be dramatically impossible, a mere
reader of the play is hardly aware that anything is

wrong. Like an Elizabethan theatre-goer, he accepts

the half-lyric old conventions, and finds his attention
centred on the vivid vitality of the central figure.

Here he finds completed the tendency which, in

the Third Part of Henry VI., he had already per-
ceived.^ In Gloster is finally concentrated all the evil,
all the disorder which had been desolating England
from the moment when discord rose over the coffin
of Henry V. In Gloster, when all this evil is finally
ripe, it meets end with the victory of the first
its just
Tudor sovereign, whose granddaughter still reigned
when Richard was written.
III. Readers, even
to-day, accept Richard HI. as a great tragic poem
actors as a superb one-part play.
What seemed its lack of art, then, proves rather
to have been its lack of complete emergence from
archaic convention. Even this, however, does not
explain its place in the work of Shakspere. Richard
III., as a character, we have seen, certainly has such

vitality as can come only from creative imagination

in its maker but, compared with the plays we have
;

assigned to about the same period, Richard III. —

for all its mere theatrical effectiveness is extremely —
crude.
» See p. 81.
132 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
In this very fact, sometimes used as an argument
against its genuineness, or at least against our con-
jectural we may find a strong argu-
chronology,
ment in our favor. The Midsummer NigMs Bream
carried English comedy to a point as yet unap-
proached ; so, at least in the matter of human plausi-
bility, Romeo and Juliet carried English tragedy ; and
we saw reason for believing that these two plays
belong to the same period. Whatever any writer's
genius, such effort as is involved in either of these
plays is exhausting, — still more exhausting is such
effort as is involved in both. Given this fact, and
given the comparative lack of development in chron-
icle-history,we could not rationally expect a chron-
icle-history from the same hand to show anything
like a ripeness parallel to that of the ripening comedy
and tragedy. At most, we could expect it to show
growing signs of imaginative vitality ; and these are
just what we find in Richard HI.
The state of things thus suggested — that when
Shakespere was doing one kind of work with excep-
tional vigor his work of other kinds shows far less
departure from conventions — we shall find through-
out his career. For our purposes, it is the chief thing
to note concerning Richard III,
 EICllAKD II lo'6

V. Richard II.

[Richard II. was entered in the Stationers' Register on August

29th, 1597. It was published anonymously during the same year;

and again the next year, with Shakspere's name. In these quartos
the deposition scene — IV. i. 153-318 —
is omitted. It appears first

ii! a quarto of 1608; and remains in the fourth quarto, of 1615. Ap-
parently it belongs to the original play, and was suppressed as politi-
cally objectionable. Richard If. was mentioned by Meres. There
seems to have been another play on this subject which was perhaps
the one played on the eve of Essex's rebellion in 1600-1.
The source of Richard II. is Holinshed, which is closely followed.
On internal evidence, the play is commonly assigned to about the
same period as Richard III. Probably it is the later of the two.J

Like Richard III., Richard II, must for our pur-

poses be regarded as a chronicle-history written at a
moment when Shakspere's best energies were concen-
trated on comedy and tragedy. As we should expect,
its method is essentially conventional, nothing is —
done or said exactly as it would have been in real
life. The story, in short, is translated from Holin-
shed into a dramatic form plainly influenced by
Marlowe's, whose Edward II. this play closely resem-
bles. For all this, Richard II. differs from Shaks-
pere's earlier chronicle-histories in two respects
it has distinct unity of purpose, —
its scenes and

incidents are carefully selected, and organically com-

posed and it is so complete in finish that its nu-
;

merous beauties of detail are not salient. In other

words, while Shakspere's earlier chronicle-histories
maybe regarded as experiments, Richard 11, ^iihoni
134 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
palpable originality, uses a mastered archaic method
for the expression of a definite artistic purpose.
Of course, Shakspere was not inventing. Unless we
constantly discard the notion of invention, we cannot
understand chronicle-history. . Actual historical facts,
however, impress historians who are also artists in
specifically emotional ways ; and such emotions even
modern writers of history, if they be artists, try to
express. what Shakspere has done in Richard
This is

11. ; and if Richard HI. remind one of some modern

figure painted on a thirteenth-century background,
Richard II.., consistent throughout, reminds one
more vividly still of the quaintly life-like portrait of
Richard himself enthroned in golden glory, still to
be seen in the choir of Westminster Abbey.
In many places, Shakspere follows Holinshed's
actual words with a closeness which makes the superb
sound of Shakspere's language amazing this is not- ;

able, for example, in the heralds' speeches, at the lists

at Coventry.^ When Shakspere invents his speeches,

too, as in the scenewhere for eleven consecutive
lines the dying Gaunt puns on his own name,^ or in
the scene where Richard, just deposed, goes through
sixteen lines of sentimental euphuism with a mirror ,3
Shakspere's method is as archaically conventional as
ever. This conventionality, however, is no more sali-
ent than the actual beauties which surround it such ;

for example, as Gaunt's noble speech about England,*

1 I. iii. 104-116. 2 Hi, 73_83.

« IV. i. 276-291. * II. i. 40-66.
 RICHARD II 135

or as Carlisle's wonderful narrative of the death of

Norfolk:! —
/' Many a time bath banish'd Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens ;

And toil'd with works of war, retired himself

To Italy ; and there at Venice gave
His body to that pleasant country's earth.

And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,

Under whose colours he had fought so long.**

Conventionalities and beauties alike, each seems ex-

actly in place. What is more, while none even of
the beauties are inevitably human utterances, each
generally helps to define the character who utters
it ; for while the conventionality of phrase in
Richard II. prevents the characters from seeming
exactly human, they have distinct individuality. Car-
lisle, brave, loyal, simple, is an ideal English gen-
tleman ; York, always honest, is weak and dull
Bolingbroke, supple, intriguing, yet somehow royal,
reminds one curiously of Louis Napoleon; Richard
himself, in his feeble, delicate complexity, is the most
individual of Amiable, almost fascinating, he is
all.

fundamentally unable to keep fact in view with ;

graceful sentimentality he is always wandering from

plain matters of fact to fantastic dreams and phrases.
Euphuism, so niapt when .we stop to criticise it in
Gaunt or Bolingbroke, becomes in Richard strongly
1 IV. i. 92-100.
136 WILLIAM SHAKSPEKE
characteristic. Winning in the irresponsibility ol
private life, such a character when clothed with the
dignity becomes a public danger.
of royalty The
fatal incompatibility of the character and the duties
of Richard II. involves the tragedy which pervades
this play.
For besides being a chronicle-history, and a master-
piece of its archaic kind, Richard II. is a really tragic
prologue to the series of chronicle-histories which it

opens. Thus we generally think of it, neglecting its

position in the literature of its time. To define this,

we should compare it with its obvious model, the
Edward 11. of Marlowe. In this tragedy so — pro-
foundly tragic that one inclines to forget its real char-
acter as chronicle-history — there are passages more
human than anything in Shakspere's play. Shaks-
no lines which touch one like
pere, for instance, has
Edward's speech amid the squalid horrors of his
dungeon :
—
" Tell Isabel the queen, I look*d not thus,
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhors*d the Duke of Cleremont."

The entire death-scene of Edward is finer than that

of Richard. As a whole, however, Edward II., while
at times more vitally imaginative than Richard 11.^

shows far less mastery of art. If more imagi-

native, it is much less evenly sustained. The trait of
Richard II. in the development of Shakspere begins
to define itself. At a moment when he was making
 KING JOHN 137

j)crmanent tragedies and comedies, which occupied

liis best energy, he was also making the old conven-
tions of chronicle-history serve to express, in a thor-
oughly mastered archaic form, his growing sense of
fact.

VI. King John.

[King John is the ouly oue of Shakspere's plays never entered in

the Stationers* Register. Apart from its mention hy Meres, there is

no definite trace of it until its publication in the folio of 1623.

Unlike Shakspere's other chronicle-histories, it is founded, not on
the chronicles themselves, but on an earlier play, The Troublesome
Rnirjne of John Kimj of England, etc., published in 1591. This was
reprinted in 1611, with the name " W. Sh." on the titlepage. In all
probability, however, the attributing of this earlier play to Shakspere
is merely the trick of a dishonest publisher.
From internal evidence Kinp John has been conjecturally assigned
to 1595 or 1596. Critics generally agree in placing it somewhere

between Richard II. and Henry /F.]

Less careful, less constantly sustained than Richard

IL^ King John often impresses one as queerer, more
archaic, more puzzling than any other of Shakspere's
chronicle-histories. This impression, of course, may
be chiefly due to the accident that in most editions
of the series it is printed first, and so that one is

apt to read it with no preparation for its conven-

tions. As we shall see, however, there are reasons
enough in the play as it stands tomake it seem at
first sight more strange than what we have already
considered, and yet, on inspection, to prove it* a dis-
138 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE
tinct step forward in the development of chronicle-
history.
One cause for its oddity of effect lies in its origin.
Instead of translating directly from the chronicles,
Shakspere clearly did not trouble himself about them
at all ; but only adapted a clumsy old play to the im-
proving conditions of the stage. At the time, the
subject of this play was accidentally popular. Though
tradition generally confirms history in declaring John
to have been the worst king England ever had, tradi-
tion and history equally agree in preserving a sus-
picion that he came to his end by poison, adminis-
tered by an ecclesiastic who had been enraged beyond
measure by John's attacks on the vested property of
the Church. When England broke away from the
church of Rome, then, John, by an obvious distor-
tion of tradition, became something like a Protestant

hero. In the early editions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs

there is a full page of illustrations, showing how the
wicked monk, duly absolved to begin with, took the
poison from a toad, put it in the king's wine-cup,
tasted the liquor to disarm suspicion, died at the
same time with the king, and had masses regularly
said for his traitorous, murderous soul. This view of
things was presented, among others, in the Trouble-
some Raigne.
The old play, thus for the moment popular, was in
two parts. In adapting it, Shakspere reduced it to
the limits of a single performance. However he
may have improved it in many ways, he managed in
 KING JOHN 139

one way to make it decidedly less intelligible than

before. In the Troublesome Raigne there are a num-
ber of ribald scenes where the Bastard sacks religious
houses, and incidentally discovers there a state of
morals agreeable at once to the principles of Eliza-
bethan Protestants and to the taste of Elizabethan
audiences. This proceeding so excites the clergy
that they compass the king's death. In Shakspere's
play, this whole matter is compressed into two short
passages :
—
1.* "iiT. John. Cousin, away for England! haste before :

And, ere our coming, see thou shake the bags

Of hoarding abbots imprisoned angels ;

Set at liberty : the fat ribs of peace

Must by the hungry now be fed upon :

Use our commission in his utmost force.

Bast. Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on."
2.' " Bast. How I have sped among the clergymen,
The sums I have collected shall express."

The poisoning of the king, then, comes without very

obvious cause. In this respect, the old play is the
better.
Nor is this the only instance in which Shakspere did
not improve things. Shakspere's Constance, in gen-
eral, however her rhetoric may be admired, certainly
rants ; like so many passages in the earlier chronicle-
histories, her long speeches belong rather to grand
opera than to tragedy proper. The Constance of the

1 III. ill. 6-13. 2 IV. ii. 141-142.

140 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Troublesome Raigne^ on the other hand, though less
eloquent, is more human.
Compare, for example, the
last appearance of Constance in the two plays it is :

when her heart has been broken by the capture of

Arthur. Here is her last speech in the Troublesome
Raigne : —
" Lewes. Have patience, Madame, this is chaunce of warre ;

He may be ransomde, we revenge his wrong.

Constance. Be it ner so soone, I shall not live so long."

In King John this pathetic utterance is expanded

into five speeches, which comprise above fifty lines of

tremendous declamation, beginning :

^ —
*'
No, no, I will not, having breath to cry:
O, that my tongue were in th-e thunder's mouth t

Then with a passion would I shake the world

And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy
Which cannot hear a lady's feeble voice," etc.

Whatever Shakspere's Constance may be at heart,

she is not always so human in expression as the
Constance of the Troublesome Raigne,
In general, however, Shakspere's play is by far
the better. To find such instances as we have
just glanced at, Taking the two
one must seek.
plays as a spectator or a hasty reader would take
them, they differ in effect much as Romeo and
Juliet differs from Titus Andronicus. The old play
has so little vitality of imagination that it is hardly
ever plausible; King John^ on the other hand, is

1 IIL iv. 37 seq.

 KING JOHN 141

full of touches which, when we once accept the

old conventions, waken characters and scenes alike
into something far nearer real life than we have
yet found in chronicle-history. Character after char-
acter emerges into consistent individuality. Best
of all, of course, is the Bastard, who from a rather
lifeless comic personage becomes one of Shakspere's

own living men. Arthur, whose situation and fate

recall those of the young princes in Richard IIL,
is at once so human and so pathetic that many mod-

ern critics are set to wondering whether the ten-

der sense of boyish charm and parental bereavement
hereby revealed may not have been awakened by
the illness and death in 1596 of Shakspere's only son.
Elinor is thoroughly alive, too ; ^ so is the intriguing
Cardinal Pandulph ;2 so is Hubert, whose scenes
with the King and with Arthur remain dramatically
effective;^ so is King John himself; and so often, in
spite of her rant, is Constance. In no earlier chronicle-
history, for example, is there anything like so human
a touch as in the scene where Elinor tries to entice
Arthur from Constance :
* —
" Eli. Come to thy grandam, child.
Const. it grandam, child
Do, child, go to ;

Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will

Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig ;

There 's a good grandam.*'

In the Troublesome Raigne there is no hint of these

speeches. They are all Shakspere's.
1 See I. i. 2 See III. iv. 112 seq.
» III. iii. 19 seq. ; IV. i. * II. i. 159 seq.
l-i2 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
As concrete an example as any of what Shakspere
has done in King John may be found in the very open-
ing line. The Troublesome Raigne opens with a for-
mal speech by Elinor :
—
'*
Barons of England, and my noble Lords ;

Though God and fortune have bereft from us

Victorious Richard scourge of infidels," etc.

In general manner, this is very much like the opening

of Richard II. : —
** Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster," etc.

Shakspere's King John., on the other hand, opens

with an improved version of the forty-first line of the
Troublesome Raigne., the line with which the action
begins :
—
"
" Now say, Chatillon, what would France with us ?

By the eighth line, the passionate temperaments of

John and of Elinor have been revealed by two charac-
teristic outbursts which the Troublesome Raigne
^ for
affords no suggestion. The example is sufficient
what has happened in King John is what happened
in Romeo and Juliet. Creative imagination, to all

appearances spontaneous, has made real, living peo-

ple out of what had previously been stage types.
In this very fact lies the reason why King John
generallj^ impresses one as more archaic, or at least
as more queer, than Richard II, Such a phrase as
Richard's
" Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster,"

1 1. 1 5, 6.
 KIX(i JOHN 143

could never have been uttered by any real man

such a phrase as John's
" Now say, Ohatillon, what would France with us ?"

might be uttered by anybody stilL In Richard II.,

then, the consistent conventionality of everythiiii^

makes us accept the whole play if we accept any

part of it. In King John the continual confusion of
real, human vitality with the old quasi-operatic con-
ventions combines with the general carelessness of
construction to make each kind seem moreof thing
out of place than it would seem by itself. Like any
other transitional incongruity. King John is often
harder to accept than the consistent conventions
from which it departs. Its very excellences empha-
size its faults and its oddities.

In King John, then, we find Shakspere's creative

energy awake, much as we found it in Romeo and
Juliet and somewhat as
; we found it in the Midsum-
mer NigMs Dream, in Richard III., and in Richard II.
From the fact that King John, while in some respects
as vital as any of these, is less careful, we may infer
that this creative energy was growing more spontane-
ously strong. Clearly, though, it has not here pro-
duced a work which for ripeness of development can
compare with the comedy or the tragedy already
before us. To understand this slowness in the devel-
opment of chronicle-history, we may conveniently
turn to the next play in our study. If our chro-
nology be right, Ki^ig John belongs to the same period
as the Merchant of Venice.
144 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

VII. The Merchant of Venice.

[The Merchant of Venice was entered in the Stationers' Register in

July, 1598. was twice published in quarto during 1600. It was
It
mentioned by Meres, and one passage was perhaps paraphrased in a
play called the W'dij Beguiled, written in 1596 or 1597.
The actual sources of the Merchant of Venice remain doubtful. The
weight of opinion seems to hold that Shakspere rewrote an older play,
now lost, which was probably founded on the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni
Fiorentino. In any event, the stories here combined are very old, and
might have come to Shakspere's attention in various ways.
While the date of the play cannot be fixed with certainty, we may
be fairly sure that it was written later than the plays we have consid-
ered hitherto, and certainly before 1598. The weight of opinion seems
to favor 1596]

If theMerchant of Venice be nearly contemporary

with King JoJtn^ we can readily see why the advance
made in the latter play is less marked than we might
have expected ; for like the comedy and the tragedy
which we guessed to have absorbed the energy which
might have developed chronicle -history into some-
thing riper than Richard III. or Richard 11.^ the
Merchant of Venice must have demanded, in the writ-
ing, the better part of its maker's attention. The
reason why King John remains archaic, then, we may
guess to be that at the time of its writing Shak-
spere's chief energies were directed elsewhere.
For, whatever its origin, the Merchant of Venice is

a permanently good play, still effective on the stage.

A modern audience accepts it and enjoys it as heartily

as ever. When we stop to consider the plot, to be sure,
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 145

we discover a which to say the least is

state of things
surprising. We have been asked to believe that in
ducal Venice, where business was doing on the Rialto,
a respectable merchant, whom Tintoretto might have
painted, made a serious contract with a Jewish neigh-
bor, by the terms of which the Jew might legally
murder him and that meanwhile a spendthrift Vene-
;

tian gentleman borrowed from this same merchant a

considerable sum
good Venetian coin, for the pur-
in
pose of pressing his suit to an heiress, whose hand
was to be given, as a matter of course, to whoever
should select among three locked boxes the one which
contained her portrait. Thus stated, the plot of the
Merchant of Venice appears as childishly absurd as
any in all nursery tradition. Thus stated, however, —
though the statement is literally true, — it startles one
a bit ; whether we see or read the play, we have
for,

not only been asked to accept this nonsense we have ;

unhesitatingly accepted it. Shakspere's art has made

it plausible.
The technical construction of the plot has of late been
greatly admired. Without more accurate knowledge
of the sources, to be sure, we cannot assert just what
Shakspere did, and what was done by other hands.
It seems probable, however, that to Shakspere's in-
stinctive tact we owe the variation from the original
plot, to which, so far as plot goes, the plausibility of
the Merchant of Venice is chiefly due. In the older
story, the lady of Belmont is a piratical and widowed
siren, who persuades passing merchants to stake their
10 w^'
146 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
vessels against her hand that they will possess her
person, and then drugs them at supper. The substi-
tution for this crude incident of the delicately fan-
tastic story of the caskets is distinctly characteristic
of Shakspere, among Elizabethan dramatists. Most
of his contemporaries would greatly have relished
the original situation. Shakspere, on the other hand,
while never prudish and always willing to make licen-
tious jokes, seems to have been remarkably free from
a taste for unmixed obscenity. Compared with other
men of his time, he shows decided purity of mind.
Whether he actually made it or not, then, the change
from the old plot is such as he would have been apt
to make.
It is this change, more than anything else, which
makes the Merchant of Venice plausible. As an art-
ist, of course, Shakspere's task was to distract atten-
tion from the absurdity of his plot. This, we have
seen, he accomplished. He did so largely by con-
stantly keeping before his audience two separate
though closely intermingled atmospheres : first, that
of a romantic Venice such as Paul Veronese might
have painted ; secondly, that of the morestill ro-
mantic, actually Utopian, Belmont, such as was in-

volved in the story of the caskets. His composition

here somewhat resembles that of the Midsummer
Nighfs Dream. He adapts and develops for his
purposes the conventional devices of an induction.
Belmont is as unreal, though not so fantastic, as the
fairy wood of Athens yet the unreality of Belmont is
;
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 147

nocessary to make plausible the romantic extravagan-

ces of Venice. Shakspere begins, then, by a scene in
Venice where everything might conceivably be true.
Though a suggestion of Portia occurs in the first scene,
there no allusion to the caskets. Then the scene
is

shifts to Belmont, where Portia and Nerissa talk long

enough to be readily accepted by any audience before
the caskets are mentioned at all. With that mention
begins the Utopian atmosphere. When we have ac-
cepted that, the bond of the pound of flesh seems far
more in the order of things than if we had come to it

straight from real life ;

yet even then it is reserved
until the one hundred and fiftieth line of the following
scene. From that time on, romantic Venice and
Utopian Belmont are more and more intermingled,
until in the last two acts one hardly knows which is
which. The last act —a lyric epilogue which removes
us from the excessive improbability of the trial scene
— leaves us in a realm of Utopian fancy. Different as
the effect of this romantic play is from that of the
fairy comedy, the device by which it is secured is

clearly the old induction-like device of leading us

gradually from credible things to incredible.
Nor is this the only instance of Shakspeare's charac-
teristiceconomy of invention. In the Two Gentlemen
of Verona we remember among other effective things
^

the catalogue of lovers discussed between mistress

and maid ; the disguise of the heroine as a man, with
consequent confusion of identity ; and the robust low
1
See p. 94.
148 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
comedy of Launce and Speed. In the Merchant of
Venice all these are reproduced and developed. The
change in the catalogue of lovers is a distinct improve-
ment. In the first instance the mistress proposed the
names and the maid commented on them, which was
amusing but rude here the maid proposes the names
;

and the mistress comments, which is both amusing

and — at least according to Elizabethan notions —
consistent with good manners.^ Launce and Speed
are reproduced in Launcelot Gibbo and his father, —a
much better contrasted or at least more varied pair.

The disguised heroine, on the other hand, is not only

repeated but trebled. There are but three women in
the Merchant of Venice; and all three assume male
costume —
as complete a concession to the taste of
audiences as you shall find in all dramatic literature.
What really makes the Merchant of Venice so per-
manently effective, however, is not so much these well-
tried devices, which after all prove chiefly that the
play is constructed with careful theatrical intelligence.
It is rather that along with this care appears the trait
which we have clearly seen growing in Romeo and
Juliet^ in Richard III.^ and in King John. From be-
ginning to end, the characters of the Merchant of
Venice are so individual and so human that one*s
attention centres wholly on them. As readers or as
spectatorswe become convinced that these people are
real in consequence we accept everything else as a
;

matter of course. Appreciating who and what the

* Cf. Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. ii. with Merchant of Venice, I. ii
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 149

characters are, we never stop to remark what absurd

tilings they do.
Of course, this profoundly human conception is pre-

sented by conventional means as remote as possible

from modern realism. More than two-thirds of the
play is in verse, and much of the prose might as fairly
])e termed poetry. What this poetry expresses, how-
ever, are simple human emotions. Take the very
opening scene. In beautifully fluent verse, growing
free from the affectations and the aggressive ingenuity
of Shakspere's earlier work, we are reminded of the
familiar fact that a man of affairs, rather deeply in-
volved, gets very anxious without knowing quite why.
The vigorous verse —
a conventional means of expres-
sion as remote as music from actual human utterance
— we enjoy and forget. What we remember is that
we have been put agreeably in possession of a state of
things as true in Nineveh or in Wall Street as in com-
mercial Venice, — a state of things incessant wherever
men do Readers of Shakspere are apt to
business.
neglect, in discussing him, the obsolete conventionalism
of his intrinsically noble and beautiful methods. Try
to locate a blank-verse dialogue, with interspersed
lyrics, in a modern stock-exchange, though, and you
will find how differently Shakspere would have had
to express himself had he written now. It is well
for literature that he was free to use the grand con-
ventions of Elizabethan style in setting forth his per-
manently human conceptions of character.
Just how these characters were conceived, of course,
150 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
no one can assert. What one knows of the way in
which grows nowadays, however, would warrant
fiction

at least a confident guess that they were conceived by

no conscious process of psychologic analysis. Writer
after writer, whose actual works are of the most vary-
ing merit, agree that when they were writing the
passages where their characters seem most alive, the
characters generally got beyond their control, — doing
and saying things which the writers never intended.
The plays we have lately considered, and many still
to come, agree in suggesting that some such process
of spontaneously creative imagination was more prob-
ably at work in Shakspere's mind, than was any such
consciously constructive method as people of small
artistic experience are apt to infer from his results.
Whatever his method, there can be no doubt that
it resulted in a presentation of character which may
fairly be called sympathetic. In this play we instinc-
tively sympathize with everybody. Baldly stated,
Bassanio's purpose of borrowing money to make
love to an heiress whose fortune shall pay his debts,
is by no means that of a romantic hero; no more
is Antonio's expectoratory method of manifesting
distaste for the Hebrew race. As Shakspere puts
these things, however, we accept thenras unreservedly
as we accept the graces of Portia. This heroine re-
mains among the most charming in Shakspere, —
an exquisite type of that unhappily rare kind of
human being who is produced only by the union
of high thinking and high living. She is so dis«
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 151

tinctly a person of quality that certain critics have

surmised her to indicate a definite improvement in
Shakspere's social position. What is perhaps more
notable is that the conception of such a character in-
volves in its creator a trait not needful to the concep-
tion of the characters we have met hitherto, — at least
a sympathetic understanding of the fascination which
a charming woman, with whose faults and errors you
are unacquainted, can exercise. Whether anybody
was ever in fact quite so altogether delightful as Portia
remains in fiction, may perhaps That be questioned.
many a worthy, and unworthy, woman has seemed so
to adoring men is beyond doubt. About the only
fault which one can fairly find with her is the fault
she shares with all the other delightful people in the
play. One and all, with whom our sympathy is clearly
expected to go, treat Shylock, wlio nowadays is made
almost equally sympathetic, in a manner which any
modern temper must deem cruelly inhuman,
Shylock, like everybody else in the play, is pre-
sented as a human being. Distorted though hie
nature be by y^ars of individual contempt and cen-
turies of racial persecution, he remains a man. With
the exception of his first " aside " in the presence of
Antonio,^ there is nothing to prevent us from taking
his proposal of the monstrous bond as something
like a jest on his own usurious practices ; and for
all his racial hatred, he seems, like many modern
Hebrews, anxious for decent and familiar treatment
1 I. iii. 42-53.
152 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
by the people among whom he lives. The treatment
he receives from the very Christians he has obliged,
who apparently decoy him to supper that his daughter
may have a chance for her thievish escapade, natu-
rally arouses all the evil in him. His revenge, if not
admirable, is most comprehensible. Not so, to mod-
ern feeling, is the contemptuously brutal treatment
which he receives from the charming people with
whom we are expected to sympathize fully.
To understand was meant, we
this, at least as it

must forget the Nineteenth Century, and revive at

least two dead sentiments which in the time of Eliza-
beth still survived the abhorrence of usury, and the
:

abhorrence of the Jewish race which for centuries

had been fostered by the Church. Usury, of course,
remained in our own time, if indeed it be not
still, a technical crime ; but except in some pal-
pably monstrous form it has never impressed any
sane living man as intrinsically evil. The only peo-
ple nowadays who object to the practice of lending
money at interest are such envious, hateful, and
malicious folk as happen to have none to lend
and generally even the taking of illegally high
interest is regarded not as an essentially wicked
act, but as a technically ; as a malum prohibitum^
like smuggling, rather than as a malum in se, like
robbery or murder. In Shakspere's time, this feeling
was quite reversed; people had been taught, by a
thousand years of bad ecclesiastical economy, that
whoever took interest on money was essentially as
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 15:3

vile as a woman who should sell herself. To such

a state of mind, Shylock's frank avowal that he takes
interest ^ amounts to such a cynical profession of ras-
cality as might now once for all repel sympathy from
a vicious female character. Again, to the mcdiajval
mind — and in many respects the Elizabethan mind
remained mediaeval — the Jew had been represented
by centuries of churchly teaching as the living type
of a race who had deliberately murdered an incar-
nate God. Nothing less than a tremendous decay
of dogmatic Christianity could possibly have permitted
the growth of such humane sentiments toward Jews
as generally prevail to-day.
An imaginative effort to revive these old senti-
ments, and thus to place ourselves in the position of
an Elizabethan audience, helps us in some degree to
understand the treatment of Shylock. As Shylock is
now presented on' the stage, however, his fate re-
mains repellent — by no means the sort of thing we
expect in a romantic comedy where virtue and vice
get only their deserts. We can hardly help feeling
that, despite his and his faults, the
misfortunes
grandly Hebraic Jew of the modern stage is treated
outrageously yet we cannot feel that any such sen*
;

timent could probably have been intended by an

Elizabethan dramatist. To get at the bottom of the
trouble, we must consider the stage history of " the
Jew that Shakspere drew."
No records of any performance of the Merchant oj
1 I. iii. 70-103
154 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Venice have been discovered earlier than 1701. In
that year a much altered version of it, made by the
Marquis Lansdowne, was produced in London.
of
The Shylock of this version was a broadly comic
personage, with the huge nose and red wig of the
traditional Judas. Forty years later, in 1741, Mack-
lin revived Shakspere's play, and played Shylock
in something resembling the modern manner. From
that time to this, for above a century and a half,
Shylock has looked not like a Jew, but like a Hebrew.
Very clearly, the Lansdowne tradition of broad, low
comedy does not fit Shakspere's lines. Shylock, as
a character, is a great, serious Shaksperean creation,
which may be psychologically studied almost like a
real human being. In this psychologically sympa-
thetic age, we are given to this sort of study; in
literature, at all events, we consider rather what
people actually are than what they look like. We
neglect the various bodily forms in which character
may manifest itself more popular than
; no cant is

that which disdains appearances. Such cant was as

foreign to Shakspere's time as any other form of
sentimental philanthropy ; to an Elizabethan audi-
ence, what looked mean was for that very reason
essentially contemptible. Though no actual records
support the conclusion, then, it seems more than
probable that the real Shylock of Shakspere's stage
combined the old traditions with the new, that in —
make-up, in appearance, in manner, he was meanly
;
" Jewy " while the tremendous creative imagina-
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. 155

tion of the dramatist made him at heart sympatheti-

cally human. Only under such circumstances could
the fate of Shy lock be artistically tolerable.
At all events, we have certain side-lights on the
matter. Elizabethan England was childishly brutal
to-day, indeed, England sometimes seems more
robustly unsympathetic than America. In actual
lunacy, as the Changeling of Middletou will show,
the England of Elizabeth saw not something horrible,
but rather something conventionally comic — much
as drunkenness is still held comic on the stage.
In })hysical suffering it often saw mere grotesque
contortion : witness the frequency of thrashing in
old comedy. And even to-day,we are less sin-
cerelybeyond these things than we sometimes
ad-
mit. After all, what repels our sympathy in the
Merchant of Venice is, not so much the actual treat-
ment which Shylock receives as the grandly He-
braic aspect of the personage whom we see receive
it. Substitute for meanly cringing
this figure a
one, like the pimps and pawnbrokers who still com-
pose the Jewish rabble, and, for all Shakspere's
sympathetic psychology, Shylock will seem to get
little else than his deserts. If this be true now-
adays, it would be vastly more true in an age so
foreign to our fine philanthropy as the brutally
childish England of Elizabeth and some such child-
;

ishly unfeeling conception was probably the real

conception of Shakspere. As an artistic playwright,

he could not have meant our sympathy to go with

156 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Shylock; yet no rendering of Shylock which makes
the man look noble enough to be seriously sympa-
thetic could ever have failed to command sympathy.
There are few facts in the Elizabethan drama which
more strongly emphasize the remoteness from our-
selves not only of Elizabethan England, but also of
Shakspere, the Elizabethan playwright.
This view of Shakspere we must always keep in
mind. As we come to these more lasting of his works,
we are prone to forget it. In the Mei-chant of Venice^
for example, we cannot but find, a^'yng with what we
have already glanced at, a constantly growing beauty,
gravity, significance of mere poetry ; everywhere, in
short, we feel Shakspere's grasp of life growing
firmer, his wisdom deeper. We are tempted to guess
that all this is not merely temperamental, but pro-
foundly, philosophically conscious. We may generally
be preserved from this temptation, however, by such
constant consideration of fact as in this chapter we
have insisted upon. Among the hypotheses about
this play, the simplest is this : A stage playwright
of that olden time set himself the regular task of
translating into effective dramatic form an archai-
cally trivial old story. In the course of some nine
years of practice he had so mastered his technical art,
theatrical and literary alike, and had so awakened
his own faculty of spontaneously creative imagina-
tion, that he made his version of the story perma-
nently plausible. He did more like any masterly
;

artist, he introduced into his work touch after touch of

 THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 157

the kind which makes works of art endlessly sugges-

tive to ages more and more foreign, in thought and in

feeling, to the age which produced them. The Mer-

chant of Venice, then, is full of implicit wisdom, and
beauty, and significance. That Shakspere realized all
this, however, does not follow. Critics who declare a
great artist fully conscious of whatever his work
implies are generally those who least know how
works of art are made.

VIII. The Taming op the Shrew.

[The Taming of the Shrew, in its present form, appeared first in the
There is no certain allusion to it at any earlier date.
folio of 1623.
On May 2nd, 1594, however, "A
pleasant conceited history called
the Tai/ming of a Shrowe " was entered in the Stationers' Register.
This, which was published in quarto during; the same year, is evidently
the source, if not the original version, of the comedy finally ascribed to
Shakspere. Who wrote the earlier play, how much of the final
play may be pronounced Shakspere's, and to what period we may
assign his work on it, have been much discussed with no certain result.

It seems probable that the play as we have it is the work of several

hands, revised by Shakspere somewhere about 1597.]

If the Taming of a Shrew be Shakspere's, and such,

at least to a considerable degree, we may assume it until
further adverse evidence appears, it is in various ways
different from any of his work which we have as yet
considered. In the plays discussed in the last chap-
ter, Shakspere seemed plainly to be trying his hand,
with marked versatility, at various experiments. In
the plays hitherto discussed in this chapter, he has
158 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
seemed the master of bis vehicle, which with more or
less artistic seriousness he has used to express the
various moods into which his various subjects have
thrown him. In this play one finds far less definite
artistic motive than in those which we have lately
read ;
yet at the same time one finds such easy mastery
of dramatic technique that the Taming of the Shreiv
remains among the most popular light comedies on
the English stage. The play is a rollicking farce, so
full of fun that, whether we read or see it, we accept

its assumptions. When we stop to consider, we are

surprised to find these involving that archaic view of
conjugal relations which permits the husband, provided
his stick be not too big, to enforce domestic discipline
by whipping. All of which is at once less serious
than the artistic plays we have dealt with, and more
skilful than the experimental.
One reason for this peculiar effect may lie in
the fact that while most of the plays we have lately
considered are almost certainly Shakspere's through-
out, a large part of theTaming of the Shrew is thought
to be by others. The old Taming of a Shreiv was in
all probability by somebody else, though by whom we

cannot be sure. The passages about Bianca and most

of the other minor characters are very likely by some
intervening hand. This leaves to Shakspere him-
self little more than the characters of Sly, Katharine,
and Petruchio, with occasional touches throughout, —
a state of things quite in accordance with the habitual
collaboration of the Elizabethan theatre.
 THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 159

Collaborative or not, however, the play has a dis-

tinct effect of its own, which is by no means one of
palpable patchwork. Its plot, to begin with, is swift

and constant in action, and quite firm enough still

to hold the attention of any audience. Even if the
play were not by Shakspere at all, too, it contains
one feature, unique in the work ascribed to Shaks-
pere, but common in the drama of Ins time, which
would be w^ell worth our attention. This is the In-
duction, which makes the main action a play within a
play. Probably intended to be follow^ed by improvised
remarks between scenes, it was almost certainly in-
tended to be balanced by a formal epilogue, or conclu
sion, in which Sly should fall asleep as lord, and wake
up as tinker. Eccentric as such a device seems nowa-
days, it is very suggestive of the conditions of the
Elizabethan theatre ; it clearly exemplifies, too, the old
convention which Shakspere developed into the artis-
tic removal from real life of whatever in the Midsum-
mer Night's Bream or in the Mercliant of Venice was
at first blush incredible.
Inductions, interpolated comments by the person-
ages thereof, and final conclusions, were common on
the Elizabethan stage. A glance at the works of
Greene or Beaumont and Fletcher's
of Peele, or at
Knight of the Burning Pestle, will show how general
this sort of thing was. Impracticable on our own stage,
itwas exactly fitted to the conditions of the stage by
which all of Shakspere's plays were produced. On
either side of that stage, we remember, in the place now
160 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
occupied by proscenium boxes, were seats where the
more fashionable part of the audience sat, themselves
|
a brilliant feature of the spectacle afforded to the more
vulgar company in the pit or the gallery. Among these
people of quality, the actors in the Induction could
seat themselves while the main play went on, forming
a natural system of intermediates between audience
and play —
actually part of both. When the audience
was banished from the stage, such a proceeding
became impracticable. Finally the whole system
merged into the rhymed prologue, which has dis-
appeared in turn. It is interesting to us chiefly as
a fresh reminder that the stage for which Shakspere
made his plays was a totally different thing from
the stage to which we are accustomed.
In itself, to be sure, the Induction of the Taming
of the Shrew is comical. So is the real play. Neither,
however, possesses very individual traits ; both deal,
after the manner of their day, with such incidents
as compose the stock plots of Italian novels, at that
time generally popular.
To pass to the characters of the Taming of the
Shrew, we find them, with three exceptions, merely
conventional stage figures, of the sort which figured in
Shakspere's earlier experimental work. These ex-
ceptions are those on which we have already touched,
— Sly in the Induction, and in the play Katharine
and Petruchio. At least contrasted with the other
characters, these seem almost Shaksperean in vitality.
Certainly the queerly matched pair, for all their extrav-
 THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 161

agance of humour, — in the Elizabethan sense of the

word as well as in ours, — have a vitality which
blinds us to the outrageously archaic state of their
matrimonial relations, much as the vitality of the
characters in the Merchant of Venice blinds us to the
absurd conditions which surround them. It is idle to

pretend, however, that even the most human charac-

ters in the Taming of Shrew come anywhere near
the
the full vitality frequent in the better plays which
have preceded.
To a great extent, one may say the same of the at-
mosphere. This is conventionally Italian, and plaus-
ible enough for its purpose. Certainly, though, it is

little more. Conceivably one might imagine in this

environment the personages of the Two Gentlemen of
Verona; by a stretch of imagination, one might possibly
imagine here some stray personages from Romeo and
Juliet orfrom the Merchant of Venice. Even these,
however, would seem out of place while the person- ;

ages of the Italian plays to come could no more appear

in the Italy of Petruchio than Petruchio himself could
appear unaltered in real life.

Altogether, the more one considers this perennially

amusing play, the less substantial one finds it ; after
all, it proves to be only a hack-made farce. It is

a good farce, however ; though fun is the most evan-

escent trait of any literary period, it is lastingly funny;
and, considering that in all likelihood it proceeds from
at least three distinct hands, it has surprising unity of
diverting effect. Such unity of effect can hardly be acci-
11
1G2 AVILLlAxM SHAKSPERE
dental. no reason for not attributing it to
There is

the practised and skilful hand of Shakspere, revising

and completing the cruder work of others.
Pleasant as we may find all this, there is no deny-
ing that the Taming of the Shrew, far from carrying
comedy to a point beyond that which it had already
reached in Shakspere's hands, is probably less effec-

tive, — or at least less artistically serious, — than

anything, of any kind, which we have considered
since the Two Gentlemen of Verona. At first glance,
this seems to count strongly against our chronol-
ogy. To understand it, as a little while ago to
understand King John, we must consider along with
this rollicking farce the other work which modern
chronology assumes to be contemporary with it.

Here the contemporary play is Henry IV.

IX. Henry IV.

[For our purposes the two parts of Henry IV. may be considered
together.
The First Part was entered in the Stationers' Register on February
25th, 1598. It was published during the same year, and was four times
republished during Shakspere's lifetime.
The Second Part was entered in the Stationers' Register on August
23rd, 1600. was published during the same year. No other quarto
It

of it is known. There is reason to believe, however, that it was writ-

ten before the publication of the First Part. In the quarto of 1600, for
one thing, the name Old is prefixed to one of Falstaff's speeches, while
throughout the First Part Falstaff's name is substituted for that of
Oldcastle from which we may fairly infer that the Second Part was
;

written before the change of name from Oldcastle to Falstaff occurred.

 IIKXRY IV 16:^

The sources of both parts, as well as of Henry V., are Holinshed and
an old play, published in 1598, called the Famous Victories of Henry
the Fifth, etc.
Meres mentioned Henry IV. as one of Sliakspere's plays. Vari-
ous other allusions to the play during Sliakspere's lifetime indicate
tliat the characters of Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence were generally
familiar.
Modern critics agree in conjecturally assigning the whole play to
1597 or 1598.]

Henry IV. may be assigned, more confidently than

usual, to the years immediately following that to
which we assigned the Merchant of Venice. To the
earlier of these years we assigned the Taming of the
Shreiv, which thus appears to be, like Richard III.
or King John., the off-hand work of a moment when
Shakspere's chief energies were absorbed by another
kind of writing. Taken together, too, the years 1597
and 1598 were undoubtedlv those in which Shaks-
pere's dramatic work began to be published, the years
when arms were granted to his father, the years
when he began to buy land, the years when Meres's
allusion proves him to have become a recognized man
of letters, and the years when the correspondence
of Sturley and of Quiney shows that his fellow-towns-
men thought him a person of consequence in London.
We may fairly conclude, then, that Henry IV. was at
least among the plays which he was making when,
after ten years of professional work, his power was
beginning to bring him both fortune and reputation.
It becomes interesting, then, to inquire what, if any,
is Henry IV., the play which
the leading trait of this
more than any other marks the emergence of Shaks-
164 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
pere into full contemporary recognition. This trait is

plain. More than any of the plays we have considered

hitherto, Henry IV. is completely plausible. When-
ever or wherever one read it, one puts it down with a
sense that one has been in contact with actual life.

This total impression absorbs all memory of the me-

dium by which this actual life has been brought to us.
We forget details, of construction, of style, even of
character ; we are conscious only of a profound im-
pression that we have seen real people, who have
done real things.
Surprising as this effect is, a little closer inspection
of the text makes it more so still. On the titlepage
of the earliest quarto, as well as in the Stationers'
Register, the name of Falstaff is quite as conspicuous
as that of the King. " With
humorous conceits the
of Sir John Falstalffe," reads the titlepage and the ;

line is purposely so removed from the preceding ones

as instantly to attract any eye. Clearly, Henry IV.
has two parts, throughout the first deals with such
:

actually historical matter as became familiar in the

earlier chronicle-histories ; the second is an independ-
ent comedy of manners, with no historical basis at
all. These two parts are united by little more than
the figure of the Prince — to say the character of the
Prince were almost misleading, for his conduct and
speeches in the historical scenes differ completely from
his conduct and speeches in the comic. What is more,
the two parts differ similarly throughout : the histori-
cal preserves with little change the long declamatory
 HENRY IV 163

speeches, and the highly conventionalized incident, of

(he old chronicle-history; the comic part is almost
literal in its humorous presentation of low London
life. Such incongruity, to be sure, was no new thing;
we find something like it in the Famous Victories^
something like it, too, in the Troublesome Raigne ; and
the old miracle-plays are full of it. The surprising
thing about Henry IV. is that its incongruity, unlike
that of these older plays, troubles us no more than the
constant incongruity of real life. When not disposed
to be very critical, we accept it without question.
As we begin to study the play, one reason for this
plausibility transpires. Marked as the incongruity of
the two parts at first appears, it proves, on inspection,
to be a matter of little more than diction. Inimi-
tably human as Falstaff's scenes seem to a reader,
they are not composed in a manner which could be
effectively presented on a modern stage. Like the
scenes where the King figures, they are rather a series
of long speeches, not interwoven but strung together,
than a strictly dramatic composition. In our time
they lend themselves more readily to reading than to
acting. The infrequency of Falstaff on the modern
stage is probably due not so much to the fact that few
can act him, as to the fact that in order to be act-
able under our present dramatic conditions, his lines
would have to be rewritten. From end to end, in
short, Henry IV. is composed not as a modern play,
but as a typical old chronicle-history.
What makes it so plausible, then, is not tliat it
166 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE ,

discards old conventions. Nobody anywhere, for ex-

ample, is more frankly rhetorical than the King ;
^

Hotspur dies 2 as blatantly as John of Gaunt died ;^

even Fal staff himself and the Prince declaim with a

disregard of action as complete as Mercutio's when he
introduces his lyric description of Queen Mab. In
mere form, Henry IV. is as conventional as it can be.
What makes it seem otherwise is that here, as in the
Merchant of Venice, these obsolete conventions are
used, with the confidence of full technical mastery,
to express conceptions of human character which
throughout are consistently vital. In our sense of
this great feat of creative imagination, we never stop
to consider the means by which it is accomplished
we forget the vehicle, we are aware only of the con-
ceptions it conveys. Ultimately, then, the lasting dif-

ference of effect between the Merchant of Venice and

Henry IV resolves itself into the accidental differ-
ence between their subjects. What the living people
in the Merchant of Venice do proves on consideration
childishly incredible ; what the living people do in
Henry IV is substantially historical. It is the fun-

damental truth of chronicle-history combining with

Shakspere's intense power of creative imagination,
already declared in fantastic comedy, which makes
Henry IV a new thing in literature.

A new thing in literature it undoubtedly is, though ;

1 E. g. 1 Hen. IV. 1. I; 2 ffen. IV. III. i. 1-31.

2 I Hen. IV. V. iv. 77-86.
» R. II. II. i.
 HENRY IV 167

and a thing not destined to be fully developed until

our own century. Its deliberate intermingling of
vigorous fiction with the general outline of acknowl-
edged history, reawakens into actual life a long-
past world. The archaism of its form and manner
allies it to the older work of Greene, of Peele, of Mar-

lowe it remains chronicle-history. The full vitality

;

of its conception allies it rather to the novels of Walter

Scott ; chronicle-history though it be, it is at thesame
time our first, and by no means our least, example of
historical fiction.
In the presence of so great a feat of creative imagi-
— a feat which gives us a kind of art
nation as this,
hitherto unknown, — we naturally ourselves eager feel

to seek, if we may, for some glimpse of how the feat

presented itself to the man who performed it. On
this point there is something resembling evidence.
Certainly the most notable character in Henry IV.
is FalstafP, and there remain indications of how
Falstaff grew.
The original name of this character is known to
have been Oldcastle. The change of name is thought
to have been made in deference to members of the
Oldcastle family ,i who naturally did not relish the
revival of their ancestor in precisely this form.
Though Falstaff as we have him, then, be a pure fic-
tion, at least his name —
and in some slight degree
the tradition it stood for —
had historic
originally
basis. Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, was a gen-
1 See the epilogue to 2 llen<ii IV.
168 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
tleman of the time of Henry V., whose liberal prin-
him into trouble with the Church the King
ciples got ;

abandoned him to the mercy of the Church, which

burned him at the stake for such heresy as later
would have been called Protestantism. In Elizabeth's
was a Protestant, or rather
time, accordingly, Oldcastle
a Puritan, hero, duly commemorated at great length in
Foxe's Booh of Martyrs. A passage from this narra-
tive tells how when he was bidden to confess himself
to the Church, before going to trial and execution, he
refused to make any other confession than a public
one to God :
^ —
^^And with that he kneeled down on the pavement,
holding up his hands towards heaven, and said: * I shrive

Lord Cobham
myself
''
here unto thee, mv eternal livine
.
ixi-i- i-ii
confesseth him- God, that in mv frail youth I offended thee,
self unto God. ^^' .,
, ,
O Lord! most grievously
.

m
.

pride, wrath,
,
and
,

gluttony, and in lechery.

in covetousness, Many men
have I hurt in mine anger, and done 'many other horrible
sins; good Lord, I ask thy mercy.' And therewith weep-
ingly he stood up again, and said with a mighty voice:
*Lo, good people lo for the breaking of God's law and
! ;

his great commandments, they never yet cursed me, but,

for their own laws and traditions, most cruelly do they
handle both me and other men and therefore, both they ;

and their laws, by the promise of God, shall be utterly

?>
destroyed.' (Jer. ii.).'

From his own words, then, we may believe that

the Puritan hero, in his unregenerate state, had been

* Foxe; Acts and Monuments : Loudon, 1841: iii. 330.

 HENRY IV 169

guilty of pride,wrath and gluttony, covetousness and

lechery, hard fighting, and many other horrible sins. To
speak very generally, so had the Falstaff of Henry IV.
In Shakspere's time Oldcastle was a familiar figure
on the stage. There still exists an old play bearing
his name, which was once ascribed to Shakspere.
This play, to be sure, commonly presents him as a
Protestant hero; now and then, however, he disguises
himself, to escape persecution, in a manner which
must have been comic. There are various traces
elsewhere of a broadly comic Oldcastle in some old
play, — for example, an allusion to " the rich rubies
and incomparable carbuncles of Sir John Oldcas tie's
nose." In the Famous Victories^ too, Oldcastle appears
among the boon companions of the riotous Prince,
and makes one speech which suggests Falstaff's
^
temper :

" If the old king my father was dead,"

says the Prince,

" We would all be kings."

" Hee is a good olde man,"

answers Sir John Oldcastle.

" God take him to his mercy the sooner.**

What reminds one of Falstaff in that speech is not

only its temper, but the religious allusion. In hia
second speech, for example, Falstaff says,

1 Facsimile of Qu. 1598, p. 17.

170 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
" God save thy grace, — majesty I should say, for grace thou wilt
^
have none."

In the same scene ^ is this more familiar speech,

" Now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of
the wicked,"

Later in the play ^ comes his well-known utterance,

•'
Thou knowest in the state of innocency Adam fell and what ;

should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villany ? "

And in the wonderful tale of his death * the Hostess

says,
" He was rheumatic, and talked of the whore of Babylon;'*

to which the Boy adds that

" a' saw a flea stick upon Bardolph's nose, and a* said it was a
black soul burning in hell-fire."

Shakspere's Falstaff, in short, talks a great deal of

Puritan cant.
From these facts, and from the well-known ten-
dency of artistic folk to satirize lax or erratic godli-
ness, there is reason to infer that the traditional
Oldcastle of the stage, and so the original conception
of Falstaff, was such a satire on Puritanism as one
finds in Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in
Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, in Hudibras, or in
the Reverend Mr. Stiggins of the Pickwick Papers.
Clearly, however, the Falstaff of Henry IV. is no
such personage as this. How the change came, we
can never quite know ; but whoever is familiar with

1 1 H. IV. I. ii. 18. « Line 105.

» III. iii. 185. * Eenry V. II. iii. 40-43.
 HENRY IV 171

the way in which good fiction grows, can make a

pretty sure guess. In a little play lately written for
private acting there was a character so consistent as
to excite the admiration of the actor who played it.

A certain subtle slowness of mind underlay every

speech ; and when the personage grew warm
at last,
with wine, his drunkenness was of a kind which in-
volved this mental habit. The actor thereupon com-
plimented the author on his skilful psychology when ;

presently it appeared that the author had not even

been aware that his personage got drunk at all —
he had only felt sure that of course when the fellow
in question spoke he must perforce speak the words
written down. This whole process of remarkably
consistent creation, in short, had been completely un-
conscious. The case is typical. Imagine it to be as
true of Falstaff as it is of the smaller creatures whose
growth we may still watch in deta?l. Intended for a
burlesque Puritan, the fat knight begins to speak and
move of his own accord. By an inevitable process of
spontaneous growth, he gathers about himself a new,
fictitious world, more real if anything than the histor-
ical world amid which it is placed. As must constantly
be the case, in short, with the work of artists whose
creative imagination is fully alive, the conception out-
grows its origin ; it develops not into a conventional
type, but into an individual character of unique vitality.

Long before Falstaff was himself, Oldcastle and Puri-

tanism must have been forgotten until, at last, with ;

complete truth as well as manners, Shakspere could

172 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
write that " Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not
the man."^
Whatever his process of growth, Falstaff is cer-
tainly among the most human figures in English liter-
ature. What is more, the world surrounding him,
and particularly the Eastcheap tavern, are more like
actual every-day life than almost anything else in
Shakspere. What Shakspere generally expresses is
profound knowledge of human nature here we have ;

also a vivid picture of Elizabethan manners. In this

aspect, the Falstaff scenes of Henry 1 V. have an added
interest, historicaland biographical alike. As has been
said before, there was no Bohemia in Shakspere's Eng-
land whoever was not regular in life had to be hand
:

and glove with thieves and cut-throats and, to go no ;

further, the known history of Greene and of Marlowe

is enough to prove that the environment so vividly set

forth in the tavern scenes of Henri/ IV. is that from

which proceeded the early masterpieces of the Eliza-
bethan drama. In Shakspere's own life, too, we have
seen that Henry IV. marks the moment of emergence
from Bohemian obscurity into permanent personal
respectability. The inference is fair, then, that this
great spontaneous picture of the cradle of our stage
marks the time when Shakspere himself had grown
beyond it, yet was still near enough to realize all its
features. Only at such moments, perhaps, are com-
plete conceptions of actual experience possible .^
Falstaff and his world, however, by no means ex-
1 2H.1V. Epilogue. ^ See p. 43.
 HENRY IV 173

haust the creative energy of Henry IV. In another

way, the same trait so pervades all the historical pas-
sages that, to a degree rare anywhere, we can con-
stantly feel the great movement of historical forces.
For one thing, mark how this play and Richard II
are bound together by the lines :
—
" Northumberland, thou ladder by the which
My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne."*

The example typifies how all the evil which broke

loose in Richard's time is in the air. Men here are
in the hands of fate, working itself out on a scale far
beyond any human lifetime. In private affairs, too,

as well as in public, one feels forces beyond human

control ; a student of heredity, for example, might
note with approval how clearly the sons of Boling-
broke display, each in his own way, the lax sense
of honor which marked the youth of their father.
It is the Bolingbroke blood which makes Prince John

of Lancaster equivocally entrap his enemies,^ and

which makes the Prince of Wales, for all his ultimate
heroism, so cruelly untrue to his boon companions.^
Henry IV., in short, can properly give rise to endlessly
grave, and perhaps pregnant, philosophizing.
So may actual life. What conclusions may be drawn
concerning the ultimate meaning of actual life may
hardly be discussed here. One thing, however, is cer-
tain. The nearer any great work of art approaches

» R. II. V. i. 55 ; 2 Hen. IV. III. i. 70.

« 2 H. IV, IV. ii. 3 iH.IVA. it. 219 seq.
174 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
not the details, but the proportions of actual life,

the nearer the imagination of its maker approaches

in its scheme the divine imagination which has
made our infinitely mysterious world, the more end-
lessly suggestive that work of art must always be.
To the artist, however, all this meaning is often as
strange as to one who meets for the first time tho
work in which it lies implied. What the artist knows
is often no more than a blind conviction that thus,
and not otherwise, the mood which possesses him
must be expressed. Those who find in the great
artists consciously dogmatic philosophers are gener-
ally those, who are least artists themselves.
In Henry IV. we have sought out traits which, more
than probably, Shakspere himself never realized.
What he must surely have realized need have been no
more than this: Setting to work at a stage-play, of
the old chronicle-history school, he found his power of
creative imagination so spontaneously alert that by the
mere process of letting his characters do and say what
they inevitably would, he made the most successful
chronicle-history which had as yet appeared on the
English stage. That he had done more, that he had —
changed chronicle-history into historical fiction, and
that he had created characters which should become
the household words of the world, he need never —
have guessed. A cool study of the play as it stands
makes this opinion the most probable. The Second
Part seems more hasty than the first; it was very
likely hastily made to meet a popular demand whicli
 THE MEKliY WIVES OF WINDSOR 17".

the First had excited. Nowadays, too, as we have seen,

both parts so abound with the obsolete conventions of
chronicle-history that they would surely act ill. As
stage-plays, then, — and for stage-plays Shakspere
surely meant them, — they are things of the past. So
constantly vital is the imagination w^hich pervades
them, however, that as readers we of later days never
think of the dead conventions at all. We accept them
for just what they are, — only means of expression ;

by their means we come face to face with the imagi-

native conceptions of a master's mind. In our sense
of the ultimate human plausibility of these conceptions,
the fruit of a union between creative imagination and
a solid basis of historical fact, we properly lose all
sense of the means by which this end is wrought

X. The Merry Wives op Windsor.

[The Merrif Wives of Windsor was entered in the Stationers' Regis-

ter on January 18th, 1602. It was published, in a very imperfect
quarto, during the same year. The relation of this quarto to the final
version of the play has been much discussed; probably, though it

professes to be a work of Shakspere as itwas performed " before her

Majestie," it is pirated and incomplete. There was another quarto in
1619. The tradition that the play was written in a fortnight at the
express command of the Queen, who desired to see Falstaff in love,
cannot be traced beyond 1702. Nor can the comparative chronology
of this play and Henry V. be definitely settled. Mr. Fleay believes the
Merry Wives to be a revision of an old play called the Jealous Comedy.
The plot appears to be based on certain novels translated from the
Italian, to be found in Hazlitt's ^Shakespeare's Library.
A conjectural date, commonly accepted, is 1598 or 1599.]
176 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Whatever the origin of the Merry Wives of Wind-
8or, and whatever the history of its final text, the play

is clearly related to both Henri/ IV. and Henry V.

On the titlepage of the quarto this fact appears at a

glance :
—
" A
Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Syr
John and the merrie Wives of Windsor. Entermixed
Falstaffe,
with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of Justice Shal- . .

loWf With
. the
. swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll, and
Corporall Nym."

Fal staff, of course, appears in both parts of Henry

IV. ; Shallow and Pistol in the Second Part ; Pistol
again, and Nym,
Henry V. The conclusion that
in
the Merry Wives must therefore be subsequent to
Henry V., however, is not necessary for as Henry V. ;

was certainly published in 1600, two years before

the quarto of the Merry Wives, the mention of Nym
on this titlepage may merely be a reference to the
general popularity of the character. Which version
of Nym was first written, nobody can tell. The one
thing of which we may feel sure is that all these
characters were popular.
Accordingly there has now and again been effort
seriously to identify the personages in the Merry
Wives of Windsor with those who bear the same
names in the chronicle-histories. This effort has
met with small While Falstaff, and Bar-
success.
dolph, and the Hostess, and Pistol, and the rest re-
main the same people in scene after scene of Henry
IV. and Henry V, they seem somehow different
 THK MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 177

'11 the Merry Wives. The truth is probably that, as

they appear in this jolly comedy, they are identical
with their other selves only in a very general way,
which freshly emphasizes the archaism of Shakspere's
theatre. Nowadays, when Thackeray, or Balzac, or
Anthony Trollope introduces in one book a character
which has appeared in another, we expect to find the
various aspects of the character consistent each ;

imaginary individual is assumed to have the same

sort of identity which real people have. In liter-

ature of an older kind, on the other hand, there are

what we may call generic pei'sonages the Harlequin :

and the Pantaloon of pantomime, for example the ;

Sganarelle of Molifere the Lisette and Frontin of

;

Eighteenth Century comedy ; the Vice of the old

English Moralities. Wherever these personages ap-
pear, their make-up is the same, and so are their
general traits. Over and over again, however, they
appear, under incompatible circumstances and all ;

one ever expects is that in any given play, or what

else, the personage shall be for the moment consist-
ent. It is in this old, conventional way, rather than in
the modern, literal sense, that the personages of the
Merry Wives of Windsor are identical with those of the
chronicle-histories. Their identity is one of type, of
aspect, of name, not of history ; it is an identity which
belongs to a far earlier period of serious literature than
our own. Nowadays one finds such types chiefly in the
detectives and the desperadoes of penny dreadfuls.
This generic quality of the characters in the Merry
12
178 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Wives of Windsor is somewhat obscured by their
decided individuality, by the vigorous humor of their
conception, and by the thoroughly English quality of
their environment. To take a single example, the
school-boy who makes a mess of his Latin grammar ^
is a perennially funny sketch of adolescent English-
speaking flightiness :whoever has had pupils must
always relish it. The way in which the oddities of
foreign speech are burlesqued, too, in Sir Hugh Evans
and Doctor Caius,^ makes the other personages
seem the more English by contrast. This solitary
comedy in which Shakspere lays his scene in England,
seems as thoroughly national as any of the chronicle-
histories. True to English life in so many details,
then, and with characters as vital and as jolly in con-
ception — for all their extravagance — as anything we
have met in comedy, the Merry Wives always seems
peculiarly English.
Very clearly, however, when we stop to consider
the swift, intricate, amusing plot, we find there several
traits which are not English at all. In the first place,
the general scheme of the plot is conventionally Italian,
and the underlying assumption —
that an attempt at
seduction is capital fun —
is far more congenial to

Continental than to plain English ways of thought.

In the second place, the whole action tends toward the
masque of the fairies in the fifth act, itself at once a
revival of the device which had already proved effec-
tive in Love's Labour 's Lost and in the Midsummer

1 IV. i. 2 E.g. IIL L

 THE MERllY WIVES OF WINDSOR 179

NigMs Dream, an admirable little type of what the

Elizabethan masque was, and a dramatic convention
ISremote from real English life as is the ballet of the
modern stage. The Merry Wives of Windsor, in short,
is not really English at all ; it is rather a vigorous
translation into English terms of an essentially for-
eign conception, accomplished with a skill rivalled
only Box and Cox,
in —
perhaps the one modern
adaptation from the French which does not betray
its foreign origin.
As a broadly humorous presentation of convention-
alized characters, conducting themselves — for all the
English flavor of their environment — in a manner
substantially agreeable rather to Continental than to
English ideas, the Merry Wives of Windsor seems a far
less serious work than either Henry IV. or the riper
comedies and tragedy which have preceded. It may be
taken, to be sure, a little more seriously than we have
as yet taken it. For one thing, in spite of considerable
disguise and confusion of identity, the stock devices of
the older comedy, the fun here turns chiefly on an
equally lasting and far more human device, on the —
self-deception of the fatuous Falstaff, and of the jealous
Ford. Self-deception, as funny a thing as mistaken
identity, has its roots not in the accidents but in the
essential weakness of human nature ; we shall find it

later the chief comic motive of Shakspere, and later

still a tragic one, too. In the second place, the main
situation of the plot here — the effort of a man of

rank to seduce the wives of plain citizens — was used

180 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
by other Elizabethan dramatists ; but almost always
to the discredit of the citizens. Middleton's Chaste
Maid in Oheapside will serve to illustrate the regular
treatment of the situation. In the Merry Wives of
Windsor, as distinctly as in the Marriage of Figaro^
the gentleman gets the worst of it. One can hardly
believe, however, that this jolly, off-hand play is funda-
mentally, like that of Beaumarchais, a serious satire.
The most reasonable view of the Merry Wives of
Windsor, perhaps, is that which groups it with the
Taming of the Shrew, In substance not artistically
serious, not instinct — like the Midsummer NighVs
Dream or the Merchant of Venice with definite —
artistic motive, it differs from the earliest comedies by
being in treatment not experimental but masterly.
The man who wrote it thoroughly knew his trade.
To all appearances, it belongs, in Shakspere's work,
to the period when, by an unparalleled feat of creative
imagination, he developed the old chronicle-history
into permanently plausible historical fiction. If we
regard it as the comparatively thoughtless side-work
of a moment when his full energy was busy elsewhere,
we shall understand it best.

XL Henry V.

[Henry F., together with three other plays, was entered in the
Stationers' Register on August 4th, 1600, with a note that all four were
"to be staied." Quite what this note means nobody has settled.
Henry V. appeared in a very imperfect form in 1600. There were
 HENRY V 181

other imperfect quartos in 1602 and 1608. The full text, as we have it,

first appeared in the folio of 1623.

The sources of the play are identical with those of Henry IV.
From the fact that Meres, who meutiuued llennj IV. in 1598, did
not mention Henri/ V., it has been inferred that Henri/ V. is subse-
quent to 1598. As it was published in 1600, a reasonable date for it
seems 1599. This is confirmed by lines 29-34 of the Prologue to Act V.,
which apparently refer to the expedition of Essex to Ireland, —
15 April-28 September, 1599.]

Identical in origin with Henry IV., and so far as

the actually historical scenes go with Richard II,
too, Henry from both. It certainly lacks
V. differs
the poetic completeness of Richard II., and just as
certainly the inevitable plausibility of Henry IV.
This may be partly due to the accident that this play
deals particularly with the battle of Agincourt, which
in Elizabeth's time preserved such pre-eminence of
patriotic tradition as in the last century surrounded
the name of Blenheim, and in our own time still sur-
rounds the names of Trafalgar and of Waterloo.^
Whoever should deal with Agincourt in 1599 could
not help trying to produce a patriotic effect.

A mere effort to produce a patriotic effect, dramati-

cally conceived, however, would not necessarily have
resulted in just such an effect as that of He7iry V.
Somehow, whether one see the play or read it, one is

conscious of a strongly hortatory vein throughout. To

infer from this that the writer was a deliberate and
* See particularly Drayton^s ballad :
—
" Fair stood the wind for France," etc.

This wa« the model for Tennyson's " Charge of the Six Hundred.**
182 WILLIAM SHAKSPEKE
sincere preacher is not necessary ; one can hardly
avoid the inference, however, that, as an artist, the
writer of Henry F". had chiefly in mind some other pur-
pose than a purely dramatic. From beginning to end
he seems trying not merely to translate historical mate-
rial into effective dramatic terms, but also to present
that material in such a manner that his audience shall
leave the theatre more enthusiastically English than
they entered it. As a man he need not therefore have
been particularly patriotic ; as an artist he seems cer-
tainly to have been sensitive to the hortatory nature
of his subject.
In that case, we may see at once why the effect of
Henry V. is often less satisfactory than that of the
earlier chronicle-histories. Hortatory purpose is as
legitimate for an artist as any other. The most fit-

ting vehicle for such a purpose, however, is certainly

the vehicle which involves the least possible suggestion
of artificiality or insincerity. Sermons in prose, pas-
sionate lyrics in verse, are the normal forms of horta-
tory literature. The stage, on the other hand, can
never free from an aspect of artificiality. When
itself

you see a play, however much it move you, there is

no avoiding knowledge that the actors are pretend-
ing to be somebody else than themselves. All this,
though perfectly legitimate in their art, is fatal to
any lasting personal faith in their hortatory utter-
ances. If the stage be a teacher, it may teach only
by parable.
An indication that the trouble with Henry V. lies
 HENRY V 183

in this incompatibility of artistic purpose and artistic

Tehicle may be found in the Chorus :

^ —
" Pardon, gentles all,

The flat unraised spirits that have dared

On this unworthy scaflFold to bring forth
So great an object can this cockpit hold
:

The vasty fields of France ? or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt ?
O, pardon ! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million ;

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work."

Such lines as these, which fairly typify the senti-

ment of all six utterances of the Chorus, really

show as acute a sense of the material limitations
surrounding an Elizabethan play as shown by Ben
is

Jonson's well-known prologue to Every Man in His

Humour? In this Jonson declares that as a dramatic
writer he disdains to

" purchase your delight at such a rate

As, for it, he himself must justly hate :

To make a child, now swadled, to proceede

Man, and then shoote up, in one beard, and weede,
Past threescore years : or with three rustie swords,
And helpe of some few foot-and-halfe-foote words,
Fight over and Lancaster^ long jarres
Yorlce^ :

And in the tyring-house bring wounds, to scarres.

^ Prologue to A(.'t I. 8 seq.

^ This play was acted in 1598. The earliest publication of the pro
logne, however, was in 1616. Cf. p. 14.
184 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
He rather prayes, you will be pleas'd to see
One such, today as other playes should be
When neither Chorus wafts you ore the seas
Nor creaking throne comes downe, the boys to please."

The difference between these two comments on

stage-conditions — comments which if the prologue
to Every Man in His Humour be as old as the play
are almost exactly contemporary — lies in the fact
that while Jonson condemns the limitations of his
theatre, Shakspere laments them. Generally, with
purely dramatic purpose, Shakspere appears frankly to
accept the conditions under which he must work. In
Henry V., he professes throughout that they bother
him. So far as it goes, this very fact tends to show
that his artistic purpose was not merely dramatic.
The general impression made by the play confirms
this opinion. From beginning to end, Henry himself
is always kept heroically in view ; he is presented in
the exasperating way which makes so ineffectual the
efforts of moralizing scribblers, dear to Sunday-school
librarians. Of course he is not such an emasculate,
repulsive ideal as you find in the group headed by Mr.
Barlow, and by Jonas, the hired man of the Hollidays.
Changing what terms must be changed, however, he is
not so foreign to them as hcseems he is rather a moral ;

hero than a dramatic. For all his humanity, you feel

him rather an ideal than a man and an ideal, in virtues
;

and vices alike, rather British than human. He has

sown conventional wild oats he has reformed lie is
; ;

bluff, simple-hearted, not keenly intellectual, coura^

 HENRY V 185

geous, above man more of action than of words.

all a
The Shakspere who propounds such an ideal, then,
is limited more profoundly than by mere stage con-
ditions ; throughout his conception he reveals the
peculiar limitation of sympathy which marks a still

typical Englishman. In the honestly canting moods

which we of America inherit with our British blood
we gravely admire Henry V. because we feel sure
that we ought to. In more normally human moods,
most of us would be forced to confess that, at least
as a play, Henry V. is tiresome.
If it be a dull play, however, it is just as surely the
dull play of a great artist ; it is full of excellent detail.
In the distinctly historical parts, the excellent detail
is chiefly rhetorical ; as such, it is almost beyond
praise. The eloquence of Henry's great speeches ^

everybody recognizes. Perhaps an even more notable

example of Shakspere's now consummate mastery of
style may be found in the Archbishop of Canterbury's
The passage
exposition of the Salic law .2 one of —
the kind which sometimes makes superficial readers
marvel at the learning of Shakspere actually states —
the law in question, along with many historical details,
about as compactly as any lawyer could have stated it
under Queen Elizabeth. Besides this, the passage is an
admirable example of that very difficult kind of sono-
rous declamation which depends for its effect on the

1 I. ii. 259 seq. ; II. ii. 79 seq.; III. i. ; IV. i. 247 seq., 306 i«eq.

IV. iii. 20 seq. ; etc.

2 I. ii. 33 seq.
186 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
skilful use of proper names. A glance at Holinshed ^

will show where all the learning came from, and all

the proper names. Compare, for example, these two

versions of the historical statement made in lines
69-71. Holinshed writes :
—
* ^ Hugh Capet, who usurped the crowne upon Charles
duke of Loraine, the sole heir male of the line and stock of
"
Charles the great ;

and here is Shakspere's rendering of the words :

—
** Hugh Capet also, who usurp'd the crown
Of Charles the duke of Lorraine, sole heir male
Of thf true line and stock of Charles the Great."

The art by which a dull legal statement is converted

into a piece of vigorously sounding rhetoric is all

that Shakspere has added. The changes of phrase are

incredibly slight, incalculably effective. They mark
as any single passage in Shakspere the
clearly as
moment when his command of style was perhaps most
easily masterly ; for they translate the original prose
into a blank verse which is free alike from the monot-
ony and the excessive ingenuity of his earlier days,
and from the condensation, the lax freedom, and the
overwhelming thought of his later.
The excellence of detail in the comic scenes of
Henry V. is perhaps more notable still. While in
substance all the comic characters are what an Eliza-
bethan w(^ld have called " humourous," and what we

1 The passage in question is conveniently accessible in Rolfe's edition

of Henry V.
 HENRY V 187

should now call " eccentric comedy," they are almost

all human, too. Comic dialect, to be sure, already

proved effective in the Merry Wives of Windsor, is

repeated in the speeches of Jamy, Macmorris, and
Fluellen ; ^ repeated, too, is the broad burlesque on
the excesses of Elizabethan ranting which pervades
the speech of Pistol everywhere. For all this conven-
tional humor, however, one grows to feel of the comic
characters in Henry F"., as of all the characters in
Henry IV., that these are real people.
Perhaps the most subtly artistic touches of all are
the repeated ones, each in itself slight, by which the
crew of Falstaff are completely removed from any
relation with the King himself. To appreciate this
we must revert for a moment to Henry IV. Com-
monly one thinks of Falstaff, Prince Hal, and the
rowdies of the Ea^^itcheap Tavern, as a constantly inter-
mingled company. A little scrutiny shows that the
Prince is actually familiar with only two, — Poins and
Falstaff himself. highwayman,
Gadshill, the regular
appears only in the First Part of Henry IV. ; Poins
disappears with the second scene of the Second Part,
— the scene in which we first see Pistol Pistol and ;

the Prince never meet at all in Henry IV. ; and Bar-

dolph is throughout a person of lower rank, Falstaff's
attendant, The only character with whom a violent
break is necessary proves to be Falstaff. However he
may morally deserve his fate, one cannot help feeling
that the King cruelly kills his heart. Clearly, then,

^ See III. ii. 79 seq.

188 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
to have introduced Falstaff in a play whose artistic
object is the apotheosis of Henry would have been a
blunder ; and to have put
on the stage, how-
his death
ever agreeable to the theatrical custom of the time,
could not have been less than shocking. To tell the
story of his last hours as Shakspere has told it is to

do a thing which no writer ever surpassed. If one

were asked to name a single scene where Shakspere
shows himself supreme, one would often be disposed to
name the third scene of the second act of Henry V.
Falstaff once removed, the fate of the others comes
with no disturbing sense of the King's breach of friend-
ship. How Shakspere managed it, a single example
will suggest. In Holinshed we are told that
**
a souldiour tooke a pix out of a church, for which he was appre-
hended, & the king not once remooved till the box was restored,
and the ofFendor strangled."

This incident Shakspere has developed into our last

glimpse of Bardolph, involving the quarrel between
Pistoland Fluellen,^ on which turns so much of the
comic action towards the end of Henry V. And so,
by touch after touch, none of which we feel at the
moment, the King at last is left alone in his glory.
In the wonderful third scene of the second act there
is a famous phrase which illustrates the condition in
which Shakspere's text has come down to us.^

" For after I saw

him fumble with the sheets," says the Hostess,
" and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew
there was but one way ; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and
a' babbled of green fields.'*

1 III. vi. 21-62. * Lines 14-18

 HEXRY V 189

In the folio this last phrase appears in a form which for

above a century was unintelligible, — "a Table of green
fields." Theobald suggested " a' babbled " instead of
" a Table." The suggestion was in such harmony
with the spirit of the scene that it has been unani-
mously accepted. Whether Shakspere actually wrote
it, however, no one can ever be sure.
What one can be sure of, on the other hand, is that
Shakspere never saw a published copy of Henry V.
which compared either in fulness or in accuracy with
the folio of 1623. Such serious discussion of his art
and his purposes as we have just emerged from is apt
to mislead. To think of Shakspere's plays except as
literature is a bit hard ; yet nothing is more certain
than that even so serious a work as Henry V. could
never have appeared to him as anything but a play
made for the actual stage. In our study of his artis-

tic development, then, we must finally regard it as a

stage play.
Thus it takes its place as chronologically the last
of the chronicle-histories,and in the whole scheme of
chronicle-history as the link between the series which
begins with Richard II. and that which ends with
Richard III In some details of style superior to any
of the others — for nowhere is Shakspere's declama-
tory verse more simply, fluently sonorous ; and no-
where are his comic scenes more skilfully touched, or
much better phrased in terms both of speech and of
action — it somehow lacks both the completeness of
Richard II. and the pervasive plausibility of Henry
190 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
IV. In other words, while Henry IV. showed a de-

velopment of chronicle-history analogous to that of

comedy in the Midsummer NigMs Dream^ or that of
tragedy in Romeo and Juliet, Henry V. shows rather
a stagnation than an advance of creative energy.
Compared with the plays we have lately considered
it lacks spontaneity, it grows conscious. If it stood
by itself, we might almost infer that the artistic im-
pulse which has underlain Shakspere's work ever
since theMidsummer Nighfs Bream was beginning
to flag. To correct this inference we must look at
other work attributed to the same time. As more
than once before, a comparative weakness in one kind
of writing will prove to indicate no more than that
Shakspere's best energies were devoted to another.

XII. Much Ado About Nothing.

[Much Ado About Nothing was another of the plays entered " to be
staled " in the Stationers' Register, on August 4th, 1600. It was again
entered, unconditionally, on August 23rd, 1600 and was published in
;

a very complete quarto during the same year.

The sources of the serious plot —
the loves of Hero and Claudio —
are to be found in Ariosto and in Bandello. In the Fourth Canto of
the Second Book of the Faerie Queene, Spenser tells the story senti-
mentally, Tlie comic parts of the play, including Benedick, Beatrice,
and Dogberry, appear to be of Shakspere's invention.
As the play was not mentioned by Meres in 1598, and existed in 1600,
it may, with some confidence, be assigned to 1599. Mr. Fleay, however,
eagerly believes it to be a revision of the Lore's Labour's Won, men
tioned by Meres. This view is not generally accepted.]
 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 191

In the sense that it is a permanently significant

work of whose maker seems thoroughly to have
art,

known both what he wished to do and how to do it,

Much Ado About Nothing is a masterpiece. Its total
effect is as plausible as that of Henry IV. ; forgetting
the means by which characters and incidents are pre-
sented, one instinctively thinks of them as real. The
plot has definite unity ; the characters, all of first-rate

individuality, live in a world which seems actual, and

constantly express themselves in a style unsurpassed
for firmness and decision. All this technical power,
too, is used here for a more definite artistic purpose
than has generally been perceptible in the earlier
work of Shakspere; the mood which underlies Much
Ado About Nothing, we shall see by and by to be
more profound than the moods we have met hitherto.
Finally, whether you see the play or read it, you can
hardly avoid feeling that it has the inevitable ease of
mastery.
Off-hand, such ease and completeness in any work
of art seem inborn. Nothing is further from one's
instinctive impression than the real truth, that they
can be attained only by years of preliminary practice.
We have already followed Shakspere's career long
enough, however, to assure ourselves that Much Ado
About Nothing was produced, at least in its final form,
only after above ten years of patient stage-craft. Dur-
ing these years he had thoroughly learned two things :

first, how to translate into effective dramatic terms

the crude material which he found iu his narrative
192 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
sources; and secondly, how to repeat, with just enough
variation to make the repetition welcome, characters,
scenes, situations, what not, which in previous plays
had proved dramatically effective. In Much Ado
About Nothing he shows both of these traits the :

story of Hero and Claudio, which is really the core of

the play, he presents far more vividly than anybody
else; and by way of contrast and amplification he adds
to it, from his own previous stage-work, the story and
the characters of Benedick, Beatrice, and Dogberry.
The greater vitality of these has perhaps resulted, after
all, in a distortion of the effect he first intended, anal-
ogous to the possible distortion of Romeo and Juliet
from the tale of feud promised in the prologue to the
tragedy of youthful love known to us all. In each
play, your attention ultimately concentrates elsewhere
than at first seemed probable. Each alike, however, is

masterly, just as each is notable for the firmness

with which it sets forth the parts of itself which are
peculiarly Shakspere's. In this case, as we have seen
the parts in question Include the characters of Bene-
dick, and Dogberry. Under the names of
Beatrice,
Biron, Rosaline, and Dull, Shakspere had already
sketched these in Lovers Labour 's Lost. There have
been glimpses of them meanwhile, too ; but this fact
is enough. If our chronology be anywhere near right,
the interval between the first conception of these char-
actersand their final presentation in Much Ado About
Nothing was something like ten years.
Of course we must remember that Lovers Labour 's
 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 19.S

Lost, aa we have it, is not the original play of 1589 or

so, but a revision of it for performance at court in
1597. Whatever alteration of phrase and finish may
then have been made, however, we felt that we might
fairly assume the main outline and the chief traits
of style in Love's Labour ^s Lost to belong to the
beginning of Shakspere's career. A comparison of
Biron and Rosaline with Benedick and Beatrice will
strengthen that conclusion. The former pair seem set
forth with no deeper consciousness of their value than
would come from a sense of the undoubted effect their
clever tit for tat must make on an audience. Bene-
dick and Beatrice, on the other hand, are not inde-
pendent stage characters ; for all their wit and sparkle,
they have their places in a great, coherent comedy
which, in its entirety, expresses a definite view of
human nature.
human nature there are two ele-
In this view of
ments. The artist who conceived such a work as
Much Ado About Nothing must in the first place have
been keenly sensitive to the inexhaustible power of
deceiving themselves possessed by human beings.
Benedick, Beatrice, Claudio, Dogberry alike are be-
guiled by intrinsic weaknesses of nature into states of
mind and lines of conduct whose admirable dramatic
effect depends on their incompatibility with obvious
facts in possession of and the audi-
omniscience
ence. This fundamental understanding of a human
weakness, however, is not the whole story. With the
help of a little deliberate rascality, the weakness in
13
194 WILLIAM SHAKSPKHE
question beguiles the wisest and the wittiest of people
into a situation which no unaided acts of theirs could
prevent from resulting tragically. What does prevent
this result is that, by mere chance, the dullest, stupid-
est creatures imaginable happen to stumble on the
real facts. In thus presenting the keenest wit as
saved from destruction only by the blundering of
boors, Shakspere displays a sense of irony lastingly
true to human experience.
Self-deception, the first of these traits, we met in
the Merry Wives of Windsor. By itself it would dis-
tinguish these two comedies from the earlier ones,
whose fun is based on the far less plausible and not
deeply significant, though perennially amusing, device
of mistaken identity. The older comedies are chiefly
theatrical ; these become human. When to self-decep-
tion is added the sense of irony which pervades Much
Ado About Nothing we are face to face with another
kind of literature than the old. The old was inspired
chiefly by observation of the whims of audiences, and
by skilful observance of literary and theatrical tradi-
tion ; this, for all its technical skill, seems inspired
rather by knowledge of human nature.
Technically, at the same time. Much Ado About
Nothing displays the traits to which we are already ac-
customed. The vitality of creative imagination which
enlivened and even veiled the absurdities of the Mid-
summer NighVs Dream and the Merchant of Venice, and
which brought Henry IV. out of chronicle-history into
historical fiction, pervades this more profound play.
 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHUS'G 195

The constant economy of needless invention, too,

which is so marked a trait of Shakspere, appears in
various ways. We have already touched on some of
the obvious relations of this play to Lovers Labour's
Lost and on the fact that its motive of self-deception
was the motive also of the Merry Wives of Windsor.
Those who know Shakspere well must already have
remarked that self-deception is the motive of much
work still to come, —
of the misadventures of Mal-
volio, for example, of the jealousy of Othello and of

Leontes, of the infatuation of Lear. They must have

noticed, too, that Don John comes midway between
the Aaron of Titus Andronicus and lago. Not quite
so clearly, perhaps, they may have observed that the
loss and recovery of Hero have much in common with
the situation of Emilia in the Comedy of Errors as
well as with that of Juliet ; while clearly all these are
by and by to be revived in Thaisa and in Hermione.
One might thus go on long.
It is better worth our while, however, to consider
the trait in which Much Ado About Nothing is su-
preme, — the wit of the chief personages. Of course
the humor of Dogberry and Verges, despite its

breadth, is lastingly funny ; but certainly it is not

unique. Elsewhere in Shakspere, and — to go no
further — in Mrs. Malaprop, one finds plenty like it.

The equally lasting wit of Benedick and Beatrice, on

the other hand, is unsurpassed, and one may almost
say unrivalled, in English Literature. For this amaz-
ing development of wit, a trait which at first thought
196 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
seems perhaps the most spontaneous in allhuman
expression, we have already seen causes. From the
beginning of Elizabethan whoever had
Literature
written had been constantly playing on words and
with them. Fantastically extravagant as such verbal
quibbles generally were, they resulted in unsurpassed
mastery of vocabulary. Combine such mastery of vo-
cabulary with an instinctive sense that words are only
the symbols of actual thoughts, and your quibbler or
punster becomes a wit of the first quality. We have
seen that such a sense of the identity of word and
thought characterized Shakspere from the beginning.
The lasting vitality of his wit, then, as well as of his
wisdom, is perhaps traceable to the insatiable appe-
tite for novelty of phrase which pervaded his public.
As Much Ado About
in his earlier work, so even in
Nothing one may fairly doubt whether the man him-
self, accepting his temperament among the normal

conditions of would generally have distinguished

life,

between his own efforts, which resulted in lasting lit-

erature, and those of his fellows, which resulted chiefly
in ingenious collocations of words. Like the rest, he
probably strove merely to put words together in a
fresh way. As the years passed, however, he grew
less and less able to conceive a word as distinct from
a concept by 1600, then, his peculiar trait had so
;

developed that, by merely trying to make his phrases

as fresh as possible, he might unwittingly have set
forth the ultimate wit, and the profoundly human
characters of Benedick and Beatrice.
 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 197

For, ^itty as they are, Benedick and Beatrice are

human too. One thinks
them generally together,of

as an inseparable pair, equally human, equally delight-

ful. To attempt in any way to distinguish between
them, then, is perhaps fantastic. On the whole, how-
ever, there are touches in the character of Beatrice
which seem to mark her as the more sympathetically
conceived. When Hero is accused, for example, her
conduct is the very ideal of feminine intensity. Her
first outbreak,^ —
" Why, how now, cousin ! wherefore sink you down ?

may best be read as an exclamation not of

terror but of indignant remonstrance. Her " Kill
Claudio
!
" 2 go much admired by Mr. Swinburne,
is more in keeping with that conception. Although
these speeches have no gleam of wit, they are better
than witty ; they express just such impulsive purity of
nature as an ideal woman should possess. This heroic
trait of Beatrice arouses Benedick to a line of action
which in turn makes him heroic. Ultimatel}^ one
grows to think of Much Ado About Nothing as group-
ing its whole story about the heroine Beatrice.
To guess that such vitality of conception was in-
spired by a living model on an endless
is to start
round of conjecture. One may safely say, however,
that, even more than Juliet or Portia, Beatrice is a
real, living figure. Coming after them, then, she re-
veals in Shakspere a growing sense of what a fascinat-

lIV. i. HI. MV. i. 291.

198 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
ingwoman really is, or rather of how a fascinating
woman presents herself to a worshipping man. Such
a man, enthralled by the outward spell, of look, of
action, of speech, instinctively surrounds it with imagi-
nary graces of nature, which make his mistress for the
moment divine. What Beatrice expresses is such an
ideal of womanhood as this, —
womanhood as seen by a
man who feels all its charm, who is not yet practised
enough to know its vices, who has not yet dreamed of
the disenchantment and the satiety of possession.
Whatever the origin of Beatrice, we have fair
ground for believing that in 1599 Shakspere was dis-
posed to idealize character. This inclination showed
itself in his heroic treatment of Henry V. In that
play he failed to produce a satisfactory effect, partly
because there his ideal was a bit didactic, and partly
because, for all its vigor, seem so
the play did not
alive with creative imagination as those which had
just preceded. Much Ado About Nothing, almost cer-
tainly of the same year, shows us why. In 1599
Shakspere's creative imagination, diverted once more,
left chronicle-history where he found it ; but turning
afresh to comedy, carried comedy to its highest
possible point.
 AS YOU LIKE IT 199

XIII. As You Like It.

[As You Like It was entered, along with the two preceding plajB,
•' to be staied " in the Stationers' Register, on Angust 4th, 1600. It
was not printed till the folio of 1623.
Its source is a novel by Thomas Lodge, called Rosalynde, Euphues
Golden Legacie, etc., published in 1590.
From the circumstances of its entry, together with internal evi-
dence, such as the quotation of a line from Marlowe's Hero and Lean-
der} published in 1598, its date has generally been con jecturally placed
in 1599 or 1600.]

As You Likebeyond question among the most

It,

popular of Shakspere's plays, differs from Much

Ado About Nothing rather in substance than in man-
ner. Just as masterly, just as far from experimental,
it is distinctly less significant. Much Ado About
Nothing^ as we have seen, expresses a mood which, at
any period of history, must sometimes possess any
thoughtful observer of actual life ; As You Like It,

for all its delicate, half-melancholy sentiment, is in

substance purely fantastic.
Its completely fantastic character, to be sure, is

somewhat concealed by the which the play isart with

composed. Like the Midsummer Night's Dream and
the Merchant of Venice, it begins with the device —
very probably suggested by the conventional old in-

ductions — of presenting a scene and a state of things

i III. V. 83', and see p. 60.

200 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
about mid-way between real life and the impossible
fantasies into which it must lead us. In this case the
device has proved so generally successful that no
comment on As You Like It is more frequent than
ardent admiration for the open-air quality of the
forest-scenes.
To declare so general an opinion mistaken would be
stupid ; whoever fails to share it might better lament
his own lack of perception. Unquestionably, how-
ever, there are moods in which the rhapsodic delight
conventionally felt in the forest breezes of Arden sets
one to doubting whether those who feel it have ever
been much nearer nature than the foot-lights. In
such moods, Arden seems as fantastically artificial as

the background of any pseudo-classic eclogue or oper-

atic ballet ; and wonderful chiefly because everybody
does not instantly perceive its trees and stones and
running brooks to be paint and pasteboard. What
Shakspere has really done in As You Like It is to
adapt for the stage a kind of story essentially differ-

ent either from the statements of fact which gave

him material for his chronicle-histories, or from the
rather bald plots of old Italian novels which generally
provided his material for comedy or tragedy. Lodge's
Rosalynde is a commonplace example of the more
elaborate novel of early Elizabethan Literature, the
kind of fiction represented in prose by Sidney's
Arcadia and Lyly's Uuphues, and by the in poetry
aimlessly bewildering plot of the Faerie Queene. Such
fiction still delights imaginative children ; but to
 AS YOU LIKE IT 201

grown folks of our day, who become critical, it gen-

erally seems tediously trivial. From this original
come the fantastic plot of As You Like It, the general
atmosphere, and the great tendency to incidental mor-
alizing. Beautifully phrased, this moralizing, even
in As You Like It, is really almost as conmionplace
as that of JEuphues itself. The Duke, and Jaques,
and Touchstone alike spout line after line of such
graceful platitude as Elizabethans loved, and people
of our time generally find tiresome. After all, there
is who should say that the open air and the
a case for
wisdom of As You Like It differ less than their ad-
mirers would admit from the same traits in the novel
of Lodge, where they are palpably make-believe.
This is not to say that As You Like remains no
It

better than the lifeless old story from which it is

taken. The fact that, while Lodge's Rosalynde is

dead and gone these three centuries, Shakspere's

Rosalind survives among the lasting figures of Eng-
lish Literature, would instantly prove the error of any
such pert statement as that. What makes the differ-
ence, however, is not that Shakspere suddenly becomes
a poet of Nature ; it is rather the same trait which
made the difference between Romeo and Juliet and
the poem of Arthur Brooke, between the Merchant of
Venice and the fantastic nursery stories on which it is

based, between Henry IV. and the lifeless pages of

Holinshed. By this time, Shakspere's creative imagi-
nation was so easily alert that he could hardly present
a character in any play without making it seem hu-
202 WILLIAM SHAKSPEKE
man. In As You Like It, from beginning to end,
and despite an amount of operatic convention which
finally brings us unremonstrating to the little Masque
of Hymen,^ the people are real. They are people, too,
of a specific romantic kind, who need to keep them
alive not the actual breezes of any earthly forest, but
an atmosphere where every breath of air feeds a
gentle sentiment of romantic love, with melancholy
and gayety alike close at hand. When people live
and Celia, and Orlando, and
for us as Rosalind lives,
the Duke, and Jaques, and Touchstone, and Audrey,
we accept them as facts; and with them we accept
whatever else their existence involves. What makes As
You Like It live, then, is the spontaneous ease with
which Shakspere's creative imagination translated
conventional types into living individuals.
There are plenty same time, of the
of traces, at the
conventional conditions from which and amid which
these individuals emerged into the full vitality we
recognize. After all, the very open-air atmosphere is

only a fresh whiff of what had proved theatrically

effective in Lovers Labour *s Lost and the Midsummer
Nighfs Dream. The disguise of Rosalind is a fresh
and far more elaborate use of the stage device which
had proved popular in the Two Gentlemen of Verona
and the Merchant of Venice. The clown. Touch-
stone, is a curiously individual development from a
very old stage type. In the Moralities and the In-
terludes, the most popular character was the Vice,

1 V. iv. 114 seq.

 AS YOU LIKE IT 20o

a personage in many respects analogous to the

Clown pantomime or of the modern circus. In
of
Shakspere's comedies, from Dull, and the Dromios,
and Launce, to Dogberry and Verges, there has been
a steady line of conventional buffoons. Here, and
later, tliese two conventions seem for a while to merge

with the historical tradition of court-jesters — in

Shakspere's time still actual facts — in a new con-
vention, different enough from all its sources to seem,
for centuries, a thing apart. Touchstone and his
fellow-clowns, too, are reallymore conventional than
even this view of them would at first suggest. They
are not an essential part of the plays where they ap-
pear; without them everything might fall out as it
falls. What they provide is only a comic chorus,
whose essentially amusing character makes it prob-
ably the best theatrical vehicle for such incidental
moralizing as is always relished by an English public.
Among the characters in As You Like It, if any
one emerges from the group as notably sympathetic,
it is certainly Rosalind ; if any two, certainly Rosa-
lind and Perhaps this may be only because
Celia.
they were meant to be charming, and have generally
proved so. If we consider, however, that in Much
Ado About Nothing seemed heroine more
Beatrice
distinctly than Benedick seemed hero, and if we con-
sider, too, that as far back as the Merchant of Venice

Portia stood out more conspicuously ideal than any-

body else, we have in this constant prominence of
idealized women a suggestion that, when these come-
204 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
dies were making, Shakspere was sensitive to femi-
nine fascination, and showed no traces of sensitiveness
to the mischiefwhich such fascination involves. To
draw from this suggestion any inference as to the cir-
cumstances of his private life would certainly be un-
warrantable. As a fact in his artistic development,
however, as an evidence of the phases of human emo-
tion to which for the moment he was most disposed,
the suggestion is worth remembering. For the whole
charm of As You Like It is based on a sentiment
involved in this very prominence of bewitching wo-
men. No one could have made such a comedy who
was not keenly alive to the delights of virginal, roman-
tic love. Rosalind, in short, is the heroine of such
comedy as expresses the lighter
delicately sentimental
phase of the mood whose tragedy is phrased in Borneo
and Juliet. The charm of such impressions in real life
lies in their half-apprehended evanescence.^ These
are not real women ; they are such women as a ro-

mantic lover dreams his mistress to be. From all

dreams men must wake. From such as these, the

wakening is terribly painful. There are men, though,
who feel that the memory of the dream is worth all
the pain of the waking.
Such romantic sentiments as this, however, perhaps
tend to mislead us in our study. As You Like It is

no impassioned, reckless outburst of romantic enthusi-

asm. Such an outburst would have been foreign to
Shakspere at any time. Over and over again, his work
1 See p. 126.
 TWELFTH NIGHT 205

expresses moods none but a passionate nature

wliich
could feel. In his expression of such moods, how-
ever, he was always a cool, sane artist. All that we
have touched on is As You Like It. To complete
in
our impression, though, we must remember that in
As You Like It^ too, is the well-known expression of
a temper which underlies much of Shakspere's art at
this period :
^ —
" All the world *s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages/' —

which need not be detailed.

XIY. Twelfth Night.

[In the diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, Barrister-

at-Ljiw, for February 2nd, 1602, occurs this passage: "At our feast
wee had a play called Twelve Night, or what you will, much like the
comniedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like aud neere
to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the
steward beleeve his lady widdowe was in love with him, by couuter-
fayting a letter as from his lady, in generall termes, telling him what
shee liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his ap-
paraile, &c., and then when he came to practise making him beleeve
they tooke him to be mad."
The source of the main plot may have been some Italian comedies,
and very probably Barnaby Riche's Apolonius and Silla, published in

1 II. vii. 139 seq.

206 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

1581. The episode of Malvolio, Sir Toby, etc., seems to be original

with Shakspere.
As Twelfth Night was not mentioned by Meres, it is confidently
assumed to belong somewhere between September, 1598, and Feb-
ruary, 1602.]

To many of us nowadays, no play of Shakspere's

is more constantly delightful than Twelfth Night.
Whether you read it or see it, you find it thoroughly
amusing; and you are hardly ever bothered by the
lurking* consciousness, so often fatal to the enjoyment
of anything, that you really ought to take this matter
more seriously. Rather, if you let yourself go, you
feel comfortably assured that here, at any rate, is

something which was made only to be wholesomely

enjoyed. you enjoy it, then, you have not only had
If

a good time you have the added, more subtle satis-

;

faction of having done your duty.

To dwell on Twelfth Night in detail, then, would be
unusually pleasant. For our purposes, however, which
are merely to fix its place, if we can, in the artistic
development of Shakspere, we need only glance at it

and in a study which perforce grows so long as this, it

were unwise to dwell on anything longer than we need.
The one fact for us to observe, and to keep in mind,
is the surprising contrast between the free, rollicking,

graceful, poetic Twelfth Night which any theatre-goer

and any reader of Shakspere knows almost by heart,
and the Twelfth Night which reveals itself to whoever
pursues such a course of study as ours. Taken by
itself, the play seems not only admirably complete,
 twp:lfth night 207

but distinctly fresh and new, — spontaneous, vivid, full

of fun, of romantic sentiment, and of human nature,

and above all individually different from anything
else. This lllyria, for example, is a world by itself,

whither one might from the Messina of Benedick

sail

and Beatrice, or perhaps travel from the Verona of

Romeo and Juliet, to find it different from these, much
as regions in real life differ one from another. For
all the romance and the fun of Twelfth Night, its

plausibility is excellent ; and so its individuality seems

complete.
As everybody can feel, all this is lastingly true.
What is also lastingly true, yet can be appreciated
only by those of us who have begun to study Shaks-
pere chronologically, is that, to a degree hitherto un-
approached, what is distinct and new in Twelfth Nu/ht
is only the way in which the play is put together.
From beginning to end, as we scrutinize it, we find it

a tissue of incidents, of characters, of situations which

have been proved effective by previous stage experi-
ence. Confusion of identity, for example, almost as
Comedy of Errors, reappears
impossible as that of the
in Sebastian and Viola. Viola lierself, once more the
boy-actor playing the heroine unhampered by skirts,
and Portia, and Nerissa, and Jessica,
revives Julia,
and Rosalind —
with them foreshadowing Imogen.
Like Julia in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, A'iola,
disguised as a page, carries to her rival the messages
of her own chosen lover.^ The tale of shipwreck,
ngain, revives the similar narrative in the Comedy of
1 I. V. 178. Cf. Two Gentlemen of Verona, TV. iv. 113.
208 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Errors ; ^ the friendship of Antonio for Sebastian less
certainly revives the analogous friendship of the other
Antonio for Bassanio in the Merchant of Venice^ while
from the Comedy of Errors^ once more, comes the
business of the purse.^ In Malvolio, as we have seen
before,^ self-deception appears as distinctly as ever;
while, at least on the stage, the plot of Sir Toby, Sir
Andrew, and Maria against Malvolio seems simply a
reversal of the plots by which Benedick and Beatrice
are united.* Sir Toby and Sir Andrew themselves
are of the race of Falstaff and Slender, differing from
these much any art, idealized figures grow to
as, in

differ from figures which are taken more directly

from life. The Clown is similarly of the race of
Touchstone. And so on ; the more one looks for
familiar things new guise, in the more one finds.
What conceals them at first is only that Twelfth
Night resembles As You Like It in being full of a
romantic sentiment peculiarly its own, with a less
palpable but still sufficient undercurrent of delicate
melancholy. Throughout, too, the infusion of this
new spirit into these old bodies is made with the
quiet ease which we have begun to recognize as the
mark of Shakspere's handiwork.
Together with As You Like It, then, we may call

Twelfth Night light, joyous, fantastic, fleeting, —a

thing to be enjoyed, to be loved, to be dreamed about
^ I. ii. Cf. Comedy of Errors, Li. 62 seq.
2 III. iii. 38 seq. iv. 368 seq.
; Cf. Comedy of Errors, IV. i 100 seq.
ii. 29 seq. ; iv. 1 seq.
3 Seep. 195.
* Tf. IT. V with Much Ado About Nothinrj, H. ill. ; III. i.
 TWELFTH NIGHT 209

f)iit never, if one would understand, to be taken with

philosophic seriousness. Plays in purpose, poems in
two comedies alike are best appreciated by
fact, these

those who find in them only lasting expressions and

sources of unthinking pleasure.
While As You Like It^ however, differs from Shaks-
pere's other work by translating into permanent dra-
matic form a dull novel of a kind not before found
among the sources of his plays, Twelfth Nighty far
from being essentially different from his former plays,
is perhaps the most completely characteristic we have

yet considered. Again and again we have already re-

marked in Shakspere a trait which will appear through-
out. For what reason we cannot say —
indolence we
might guess in one mood, prudence in another he —
was exceptionally economical of invention, except in
mere language. Scenes, characters, situations, devices
which had once proved themselves effective he would
constantly prefer to any bold experiment. This very
economy of invention, perhaps, contained an element
of strength it left his full energy free for the mas-
;

terly phrasing,and the spontaneous creation of char-

acter, which has made his work lasting. Strong or
weak, however, the trait is clearly becoming almost
as characteristic as the constant concreteness of his
style;and nowhere does it appear more distinctly or
to more advantage than when we recognize in Twelfth
Night —
with all its perennial delights —
a master-
piece not of invention but of recapitulation.
14
210 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

XV. Shakspere prom 1593 to 1600.

In the year 1600, we may remember, more works of

Shakspere were published than in any other. This alone

might have warranted us in considering 1600 as an
epoch in his career. The fact that by 1600, however,
all the plays considered in this chapter were probably
finished gives us a better warrant still ; for clearly we
have reached a point where we may conveniently pause
to consider the growth and the change in his work since
1593.
To begin with, we may well remind ourselves of at
least two inevitable uncertainties. Our chronology,
in the first place, is at best conjectural ; in the second
place, our texts are almost invariably some years
later than the dates to which we have assigned them.
In view of the incessant alteration made in dramatic
works which hold the stage anywhere, it would be
folly to assume the complete integrity of any text in

the whole series of Shakspere's plays.

The latter consideration, to be sure, need trouble us
less than at firstseems probable. While it must
surely be of weight in any system of verbal criticism,
it does not so seriously affect a study concerned
with broad effects. In considering any of the plays
before us, however, we must beware of the temptation
to assume rigidly that it was finished, just as we have
it, at the time to which we conjecturally assign it.
 SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 '2U

All we can fairly assert in most cases is that on the

whole we believe the work, in conception and in gen-
eral motive, to belong to the period we name.
In the matter of actual chronology, we are more un-
certain still. Except in one or two cases — the most
definite of which is Henry Y. — we are quite unable
to specify anything like an indubitable date. What is

more, an indubitable date in might be mislead-

itself

ing. Any single year embraces twelve months two ;

works properly assigned to it, then, may often be

nearer to works of contiguous years than to each
other. All we may fairly assert of our chronology,
then, is that to a number of critics the order in which
we have considered the plays discussed in this chap-
ter has seemed approximately probable; while, with
more certainty than is usual in our study, we may feel
sure that, in some order or other, and in a condition
more or less approaching that in which we possess
them, all the plays we have as yet considered existed
by 1600.
In 1597 there were quartos of Borneo and Juliet,
Richard II., and Richard III. In 1598, Meres's list

mentioned the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy

of Errors, Love's Labour^ s Lost, the 3Iid summer NiyhV s
Bream, the Merchant of Venice, Richard II., Richard
III, Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and
Romeo and Juliet ; in 1598, too, there were quartos of
Lovers Labour 's Lost, and the First Part of Henry IV.
In 1600 came quartos of Titus Andronicus, the Mid-
summer NighVs Dream, the Merchant of Venice, the
212 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

Second Part of Henry IV., Henry V,, and Much Ado

About Nothing ; while As You Like It was entered in
the Stationers' Register. There can be no reasonable
doubt that Henry VI. is on the whole earlier than any
other of the chronicle-histories, nor yet that the Merry
Wives of Windsor belongs to the period of Henry IV.
and Henry V. This leaves us in doubt only concern-
ing the Taming of the Shrew, which is of little weight
in our general consideration of Shakspere, and Twelfth
Night, which was certainly in existence by February,
1602, and with equal certainty contains little which
should alter an opinion based on the other plays
before us.
Whatever our errors in chronological detail, then,
our chronology now warrants the conclusions we may
draw about the comparative traits of Shakspere in
1593 and in 1600.
In 1593, we remember, when Marlowe's work was
finished, Shakspere, though had he accomplished
nothing great, had displayed three marked charac-
teristics, —
a natural habit of thought, by means of
which he found words and concepts more nearly iden-
tical than most men ever find them restless versa-
;

tility in trying his hand at every kind of contemporary

writing and finally a touch of originality, in enliven-

;

ing the characters of romantic comedy by the results

of every-day observation.^ At the age of twenty-nine,
after six years of professional life, this seemed the sum
of his accomplishment.
1 See pp. 65, 100-102.
 SHAKSPERE FROM 1093 TO IGOO 213

During the seven jears which followed, the years

which brought him from twenty-nine to thirty-six, and
in the last of which he had been professionally work
at
for thirteen years, all these traits persisted and de-
veloped. While, in view of the intense craving for
verbal novelty which remained so marked a trait of
his public, would be unsafe to assert that he was
it

steadily changing his habit of thought from a con-

sideration of mere phrases to one of the concepts for
which in his mind the most trivial phrase would nor-
mally stand, it is certain that his style, always preg-
nant, kept growing more so
and that by 1600 he
;

was perhaps more perfectly master of concept and

word alike than the growing intensity of his later
thought allowed him to remain. As for his versatil-
ity, we need only remember that when this period

began tragedy remained in the condition of Titus An-

dronicus, comedy at best in that of the Two Gentle-
men of Verona, chronicle-history in that of Henri/ VI. ;
and that by 1600 he had surely produced, to go no
further, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing,
and Henry IV. As for his observation of life, the first
clear trace of which we found in the Two Gentlemen of
Verona, it was the necessary foundation of his char-
acteristic creative imagination, which revealed itself

perhaps most plainly in the development from Old-

castle of Falstaff.
This power of creating character — of making his
personages not only theatrically effective, but so hu-
man that posterity has discussed them as gravel}'
214 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
as if they had actually lived — is the most marked
traitwhich appeared in Shakspere during the seven
years we are now considering. In 1593 not one of
the great Shaksperean characters is known to have
existed by 1600 he had surely created Romeo, and
;

Juliet, and Mercutio, and Richard TIL, and Shy-

lock, and Portia, and and Hotspur, and
Falstaff,
Prince Hal, and Benedick, and Beatrice, and Dog-
berry, and Rosalind, and Jaques, and Touchstone —
one might go on for a page or two. A normal result,
perhaps, of the traits which he had earlier shown, this
creative power had now declared itself with a vigor
which makes the result of his work, even had he never
done more, sufficient to place him at the head of

imaginative English Literature.

A little shows that, in spite of
scrutiny, however,
its scope and achievement, this power worked and de-
veloped very normally. Off-hand one is disposed to
think of Shakspere as at any moment able, if he
chose, to do anything. Unless our chronology be
utterly wrong, however, it proves pretty clearly that
when he was busy with one kind of writing he was
by no means in condition to do equally well with
another. Compare the Midsuminer NigMs Dream
with Richard III.^ for example Romeo and Juliet
;

with Richard 11. ; the Merchant of Venice with King

John ; Henry IV. with the Taming of the Shrew and
theMerry Wives of Windsor ; Much Ado About Nothing
with Henry V. Roughly speaking, we may assume
each of these groups to be contemporary. Pretty
 SHAKISPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 215

clearly, for all his was human

power, Shakspcre
enough to slight one thing when he was giving his
best energies to something else. Along with the old
versatility of effort, then, we find a new trait, or per-
haps rather a new development, which we may call

versatility of concentration.
Besides all this, we must emphasize the trait by
which, in the beginning of this chapter, we justified
the separation of the plays here discussed from those
discussed before.^ Throughout these later plays, some-
times pervading them, sometimes apparent rather in
detail, we are constantly aware of the impulse which

we called artistic. In distinction from the Shakspere

of the old experimental work, the Shakspere who made
the plays now must have been so constantly,
before us
spontaneously, profoundly aware of how what he was
dealing with made him feel that he would instinctively
try to express his feeling by every possible means.
In the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, where we consid-
ered this trait most carefully, it appeared at once first

and perhaps most purely. Ever since it has appeared

*
again and again, in constantly varying form.
At the risk of tedious repetition, it is prudent to
warn whoever has not carefully watched the work of
artists that no valid conclusion concerning their actual
lives and characters can be drawn from even their
most sincere artistic achievements. Without other
evidence than is as yet before us, we cannot assert
that Shakspere thought, or believed, or cared for this

1 See p. 103.
216 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
ideal or that ; nor yet that to have known in imagina-
tionwhat he has expressed he must personally have
experienced certain circumstances, good or evil. We
can assert, however, that he could hardly have ex-
pressed these things without at least three qualifica-
tions : first, a sympathetic understanding of such
great movement as is finally phrased in
historic
Henry IV. and Henry V. ; secondly, a sympathetic
sharing of such romantic feeling as underlies both the
single tragedy of this period and all the comedies
and thirdly, a sympathetic understanding of how a
charming, idealized woman can fascinate and enchain
an adoring, romantic lover. All of which, while last-

ingly true, is not spiritually profound.

W^e come, then, to what we may call his limitations.

In the first place, the only play of this period which

involves any profound sense of the evils lurking in
human and human nature, is Much Ado About
life

Nothing^ where the undercurrent of irony tends

slightly toward deeper things. In the second place,
as we saw most concretely in Twelfth Nighty Shakspere
throughout this period, though a skilful stage-play-
wright and easily master of his technical art, was very
chary of invention. His mastery is shown not only
by his mere verbal style, but by constructive skill.
This we saw in Romeo and Juliet ; and, better still, in
the Midsummer NigMs Bream^ and the Merchant of
Venice^ and As You Like It^ where he subtly adapted
the conventional old Induction, as it appears in the
Taming of the Shrew, to the form in which, as part of
 SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 217

the main action, it removes incredible incidents to

plausible distance. His economy, or poverty, of in-
vention, on the other hand, shows itself in his inces-
sant repetition of whatever device — of character, of
incident, of situation — had once proved theatrically
effective.
In the presence of such work as we have been con-
sidering, however, one has small patience with talk
of limitations. One's impulse is rather to question
whether in seven years any merely human being could
possibly have contributed to a stage and a nation
which up to that moment had had little permanent
literature at all, so wonderful a body of permanent
literature as is actually before us. To correct this
impression, — to see Shakspere's work in its true re-
lation to its time, — we must glance hastily at the
other productions ^ of these seven years.
In 1594 were published, together with Lucrece, the
firstworks of Chapman, Hooker, and Southwell,
Daniers Rosamund^ Drayton's Ideals Mirror^ and
plays by Greene, Lodge, Marlowe, Nash, and Peele.
Hooker's work was the most lasting — the first four
books of his Ecclesiastical Polity. In 1595 came
Daniel's Civil Wars, Sidney's Apology for Poetry, and
the Colin Clout, the Astrophel, the Ainoretti, and the
Epithalamium of Spenser. In 1596 came Davies's
Orchestra, Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana, and the last
three books of the Faerie Queene. In 1597, together
with the three first (]nartos of Shakspere's plays, came
^ Rylaiul ; Chronological Outlines, etc.
218 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
the first ten of Bacon's Ussays, another book of Hook-
er's Ecclesiastical Polity, and the first published works
of Dekker and of Middleton. In 1598, together with
two new quartos of Shakspere, came the first instal-
ment of Chapman's Horner^ Drayton's Heroical Epis-
tles, Marlowe and Chapman's Hero and Leander, and

the first published work of Thomas Heywood. In

1599, the year when Spenser died, came Davies's Nosce
Teipsum, and among other plays Jonson's Every Man
out of his Humour. In 1600, together with six new
quartos of Shakspere, came Dekker's Fortunatus and
Shoemaker^ s Holiday, Fairfax's Tasso, the last volume
of Hakluyt's Voyages, and Jonson's Cynthia's Revels.
This list, a mere hasty culling from Ryland's book,
is enough for our purposes. Without pretending to
be exact or exhaustive, it shows clearly two facts at :

the time when Shakspere was making the plays con-

sidered in this chapter, the intellectual life about him
was active to a degree unprecedented in English Litera-
ture and the works contributed to English Literature
;

during this period differed from what had come be-

fore almost as distinctly as this second group of
Shakspere's plays differs from the first. What came
before was archaic ; at least by comparison, what comes
now seems modern.
A glance at the mere names of the playwrights will
confirm this impression. In Mr. Fleay's Chronicle
History of the London Stage, he gives in one chapter
a list of the authors who wrote between 158G and 1593 J
1 Pages 89-91.
 SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 219

and in the next a list who wrote between

of those
1594 and 1603.^ Shakspere's name appears in both
lists. In the first his fellow-playwrights are Peele,
Marlowe, Greene, Lodge, Kyd, Nash, and Lyly ; in the
second thej are Jonson, Dekker, Chapman, Marston,
Middleton, and Heywood. The only name besides
Shakspere's which the lists contain in common is that
of Lyly, an old play of whose was revived after 1597
by the Chapel children of Blackfriars.
These facts are enough. Great as Shakspere's de-
velopment was during these seven years, was only it

a part of the contemporary development which finally

modernized both English Literature and the English
stage. As was the case with his versatile, experi-
mental beginning, what he accomplished was less
extraordinary than it would have been during almost
any other equal period of English history. We can
hardly wonder that at a moment of such supreme
general vigor and activity, he was not remarked as
supreme.
For, after all, if one ask how his work and his
achievement so far must have presented itself to his

own mind, there is no more plausible answer than

this With: all command of mere language, and
his old
with consummate command of theatrical technique, he
had been possessed by an amazing power of creative
imagination, and by sustained though variable artistic
impulse. To these facts the permanence of his achieve-
ment during this period is due. In the course of time,
1 Pages 154-156.
220 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
this permanence has obscured the equally true facts
that when his energy was concentrated anywhere it
weakened somewhere else, and that, in spite of his
great power of creating characters and phrases, he was
weaker than many of his contemporaries in such in-
genious, fresh invention of stage situations as always
commands contemporary applause. At the same time,
too, he had never used his mastered powers for the
serious expression of a profound or solemn purpose.
His temper, so far as we may judge it from the work
we have considered, was romantic, buoyant, wholesome.
To himself, if we had no other evidence, we might
guess that he seemed a vigorous, successful playwright,
who accomplished tolerable results in spite of obvious
limitations and infirmities which he did not allow to
bother him. Before completing our notion of him
now, however, we must turn to the Sonnets,
 VIII

SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS

[In 1598, Mere8, praising Shakspere, mentioned " his sugred Sonnets
among his private friends." In the Passionate Pilgrim, ascribed to
Shakspere though probably in large part spurious, and published in
1599, appeared Sonnets 138 and 144,

"When my love swears that she is made of truth," etc.,

and
*'
Two loves I have of comfort and despair," etc.

On May 20th, 1609, "a Booke calles Shakespeares sonnettes"

was entered in the Stationers' Register. In 1609, " Shake-Speares
Sonnets. Never before Imprinted" were published, substantially as we
have them. The book was dedicated by Thomas Thorpe, the pub-
lisher, " To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets, Mr. W. H."
What the term " begetter " means, and who " Mr. W. H." was, have
never been quite settled.
Concerning the dates of the sonnets we can assert only that some
of them were probablyin existence before 1598, that two of the second
series were certainly in existence, substantially as we have them,
iu 1599, and that all were finished by 1609. In what order they were
actually written we have no means For our purposes,
of determining.
however, we are justified in assuming that, as a whole, the sonnets in-
clude work probably done before Henry I V., and also work done dur-
ing the period covered by the next chapter.]

During the last century or so, a considerable litera-

ture of comment and interpretation^ has gathered
about the Sonnets. Some of this is instructive, some

^ Conveniently summarized by Tyler : Shakespeare's Sonnets ; Lon-

don, 1890, pp. 145-149.
222 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
suggestive ; much is ingeniously absurd. In general,
however, all this criticism alike deals chiefly with the
question of whether the Sonnets are authentic state-
ments of autobiographic fact, or literary exercises, or
perhaps rather allegorical fantasies. A similar un-
answerable question exists concerning the first great
series of Elizabethan sonnets, — Sidney's Astrophel
and Stella. About the two other best-known series,
there is less doubt : Spenser's Amoretti are almost
certainly authentic addresses to the lady who became
his wife ; while Drayton's sonnets to Idea are prob-
ably mere ^'hetorical exercises.
If to these names we add that of Daniel,who wrote
somewhat analogous verses to one Delia, we have
completed the list of familiar series of Elizabethan
sonnets, as distinguished from stray, independent
ones. The names of Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, and
Daniel, with whom we here group Shakspere, in-

stantly define one fact about the Sonnets which marks

them apart from most of Shakspere's work. Sidney
and Spenser never wrote for the actual stage and, ;

though Drayton seems to have collaborated in a num-

ber of plays, and Daniel to have written one or two,
both Drayton and Daniel are generally remembered
not as dramatists but as poets, the body of whose
purely literary work remains considerable. In other
words, we group Shakspere now with the masters not
of popular, but of polite literature. The Sonnets, like
almost all the extant work of these other poets, were
addressed not to the general taste of their time, but to
 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 223

the most sensitively critical.Whatever else, they are

painstaking, conscientious works of art.
Throughout them, too, appears a mood perhaps most
fully expressed in Sonnet 81 :
—
*'
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead
You still shall live — such virtue hath my pen —
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men."

The writer of these sonnets, in short, avows his belief

that they shall be lasting literature. Not an infallible

sign of serious artistic purpose, this is at least a fre-

quent. It appears in Spenser's Amoretti, and in many
passages of Chapman and of Ben Jonson, like that

superb boast about poetry in the Poetaster : —

'*
She can so mould Rome and her monuments
Within the liquid marble of her lines.
That they shall live, fresh and miraculous,
Even in the midst of innovating dust."

In small men. pathetically comic, such confidence

becomes in great men nobly admirable. Of Shaks-
pere's Sonnets, then, we may fairly assert that they
224 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
must have seemed to the writer more important and
valuable than his plaj^s.

Such being the case, whoever attempts to define an

impression of Shakspere's individuality must take
special interest in these most conscientiously artistic of
his works. If one could make sure of what they mean,
one might confidently feel intimate knowledge of their
author. Such confidence, though, has betrayed too
many honest critics into absurdity, to prove, nowadays,
however tempting, a serious danger. The only im-
pregnable answer to the question of what the Sonnets
signify is the one lately made by some German writer :

" Ignoramus, ignorabimus" (" We do not know, and

we never shall").
Keeping carefully in mind, however, the necessary
uncertainty of any conclusion, we may fairly incline to

one or another of the unproved, unprovable conjectures

as to what the Sonnets actually mean. The conjecture
of Mr. Thomas Tyler, while by no means impregnable,
seems perhaps the most plausible.^ In brief, he be-
lieves that the first series of the Sonnets from 1 to —
126 — were addressed to William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, a very fascinating and somewhat erratic
young nobleman, whose age fits the known dates and ;

that the second series —

from 127 to 152 were ad- —
dressed to a certain Mrs. Mary Fitton, at one time a

* T. Tyler: Shakespeare's Sonnets: London; David Nutt: 1890.

Mr. Fleay puts no faith in this Tyler story and sets forth many reasons
;

for believing the Sonnets to have been addressed to Southampton;

Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama: 208-232.
 SHAKSPERE'S SOXXETS 225

maid of honor Queen Elizabeth, and demonstra-

to
bly a person of considerable fascination and of loose
morals. Shakspere, it is assumed, became her lover
and Pembroke, by whom she certainly had a child,
is assumed to have taken her from him. The improb-
ability that a woman of her rank should have had to

do with theatrical people is met by the fact that in

1600 Will Kempe, the clown of Shakspere's company,
dedicated a book to this very lady. The probability
that Mrs. Fitton was the woman in question was curi-
ously strengthened by the fact, discovered after Tyler's
work was written, that a colored effigy on her family
monument shows her to have been of very dark com-
plexion. And so on. The tale is plausible ; after all,
however, it is only a tissue of past gossip and modern
conjecture. The most one can say of it is this The
:

first series of Sonnets expresses a noble fascination

the second, a base one, of which the baseness grows
with contemplation. The former is certainly in har-
mony with what is known of Pembroke, the latter
with what is known of Mary Fitton. Had Shakspere
actually undergone such an experience of folly and
shame as Tyler conjectures, these poems would fitly

express it.

Off-hand, of course, one would declare the very

frankness of self-revelation thus suggested to be in-
credible. Sensitiveness, one would say, is essentially
reticent ; and whoever wrote the Sonnets proved there-
by the possession of rare sensitiveness. A little con-
sideration, however, proves this objection mistaken.
15
226 WILLIAM SHAKSPERK
To go no further, Alfred de Musset was sensitive, and
George Sand, and Tennyson, and Mrs. Browning ;
yet
almost in our own time all four have poured forth
their souls on paper with almost Byronic profusion.
Not long since, an admiring reader of Mrs. Browning
expressed, together with his admiration, deep satis-
faction that he never knew her. Had he known her,
he said, he could not have borne the thought that she
had taken the whole world which she
into a confidence
could hardly have spoken to her nearest and dearest.
All of which meant that, despite his appreciation, the
reader was not at heart an artist, while Mrs. Brown-
ing was. So, very surely, was Shakspere.
Even if the Sonnets be self-revealing, however, their
self-revelation takes a very deliberate shape. Nothing
could be much further from a spontaneous outburst
than these Shaksperean stanzas, whose form is among
the most highly studied in our literature. During
the Elizabethan period there were at least three well-
defined varieties of sonnet : the legitimate Italian, or
Petrarchan, generally imitated by Wyatt, Surrey, and
Sidney ; the Spenserian, in which the system of rhymes
resembled that of the Faerie Queene ; and that now
before us, whose most familiar example is in the work
of Shakspere. If not so intricately melodious as the
Spenserian sonnet, nor jet so sonorously sustained
as the Petrarchan, this Shaksperean sonnet is con-
stantly fresh, varied, dignified, and above all idio-
matic. Why certain metrical forms seem specially at
home in certain languages, it is hard to say but as ;
 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 227

surely as the hexameter is idiomatically classic, or the

terza rima Italian, or the Alexandrine French, so the
blank verse line of Elizabethan traji^edv and the melo-
diously fluent quatrains of the Shaksperean sonnet are
idiomatically English. If one would appreciate at once
their idiomatic quality and the exquisite skill of their

})hrasing, one cannot do better than try to alter a

word or a syllable anywhere. In one place Mr. Tyler
has tried. The second line of the 146th sonnet is

corrupt, reading thus :

—
" Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
My sinful earth these rebel powers that thee array."

Clearly my sinful earth in the second line is a printer's

error. Trying to correct it, Mr. Tyler has suggested
two words which apparently fit the meaning, and has
made the line read

" [Why feed'st] these rebel powers that thee array ?

Though one cannot suggest an improvement on this

emendation, one cannot resist a conviction that the
man who wrote the rest of the sonnet could never
have written these two syllables. The example, if

extreme, is typical of the style throughout. No-

where is Shakspere's art more constantly and elabo-
rately fine.
Whatever else the Sonnets reveal, then, thev surelv
reveal the temperament of an artist, a temperament, —
as we have seen, which is not only exquisitely sensi-
tive to emotional impressions, but is bound to find
the best relief from the suffering of such sensitive-
228 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
ness in deliberate, studied expression of it. Who-
ever, at moments of intense feeling, has felt compelled
to scribble doggerel, and consequently —
however piti-
ful his verse — has felt better, must have at least an
inkling of what such a temperament is.

Not the least peculiar trait of it is one which, though

not generally appreciated, goes far to explain the great
emotional relief afforded by even comically inadequate
expression. To phrase an emotional mood an artist
must, as it were, cut his nature in two. With part of
himself he must cling to the mood in question, or at
least revive it at will. With another part of himself he
must deliberately withdraw from the mood, observe it,
criticise and carefully seek the vehicle of expression
it,

which shall best serve to convey it to other minds

than his own. The self who speaks, in short, is not
quite the self whom
he would discuss. To put the
matter otherwise, an artist must sometimes be almost
conscious of what modern psychologists would call
double personality. To put it differently still, every
art of expression involves a fundamental use of the
art which is in least repute, — the histrionic. The
lyric poet must first experience his emotion, must then
abstract himself from it, — thereby relieving himself
considerably, — and must imaginatively and
finally
critically revive it at will. Undoubtedly this process
is not always conscious. Beyond question, remark-
able artistic effects are sometimes produced by methods
which seem to tlie artist spontaneous. Such effects,
however, wonderful though they be, are in a sense
 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 229

rather accidental than masterly ; and whatever else

the art of Shakspere's Sonnets may be called, it is

beyond doubt masterly, not accidental.

Granting all this, however, we may still be sure that
even deliberate, conscious, fundamentally histrionic art
can express nothing beyond what the artist has known.
His knowledge may come from his own experience ; or
from the experience of others whom he has watched
or from experiences recorded in history or in litera-
ture or even from the vividly imagined experiences
;

of creatures whom he himself has invented. Actually

or sympathetically, however, he must somehow have
known the moods which he expresses. In the sense,
then, that what any artist expresses must somehow
have formed a part of his mental life, all art may be
called self-revealing, autobiographic.
Shakspere's Sonnets, then, may teach us truth
about Shakspere ; for what they express, in terms of
emotional moods, cannot be much questioned. The
real doubt, after all, concerns only what caused these
moods ; and that is a question rather of gossip and of
scandal, of impertinent curiosity, than of criticism.
What the Somiets surely express — what no criticism
can take from us — is the eagerness, the restlessness,
the eternally sweet suffering of a lover whose love is

of this world. Love, sacred or profane, idealizes its

object. If this object be earthly or human, experience

must finally shatter the ideal. Religion is a certainty
only because the object of its love is a pure ideal,
which nothing but change of faith can alter. So long
230 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
as any human being cares passionately for anything
not purely ideal, so long will he surely find life tragic.

The lasting tragedy of earthly love, then, is what

the Sonnets phrase ; and this they phrase in no imper-
sonal terms, but rather in the language of one whose
temperament, as you grow year by year to know it
better, stands out as individual as any in literature.
To temperament thus known, however, is no
define a
easy matter. At best one may hope, by specifying a
few typical phases and expressions of it, to suggest
some inkling of the lasting, strengthening impression
of Shakspere's individuality which grows on whoever
knows the Sonnets well.
Recall, if you will, the 111th Sonnet,^
" 0, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,"

and compare with it the 29th and the 30th : —

XXIX.
" When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me more rich in hope,

like to one
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
1 See p. 46.
 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 231

XXX.
*'
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe.
And moan the expense of many a vanish 'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone.
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end."

These are more tlian enough to express a nature of

great natural delicacy, passionately sensitive at once
to the charm and to the
of a personal fascination,
inexhaustible pain which must come from surround-
ings essentially base.^
Other sonnets show a temperament equally sensitive
to the spiritual miseries which chasten a passionate
animal nature :
—
cxxix.
*' The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action and till action, lust
;

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner, but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

^ See pp. 40-44.

232 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Mad and in possession so
in pursuit ;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe ;

Before, a joy proposed ; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows ; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

cxxx.

** My mistress* eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head,
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks ;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare."

The bitter irony of that sonnet is not, perhaps,

always appreciated.
With all this sensitiveness to actual fact, the man
remained profoundly metaphysical. At least he was
constantly and instinctively, if not quite consciously,
aware of the evanescence of all earthlyphenomena,
and of the real certainty of analytic idealism. For a
plain expression of the first of these traits, the follow-
ing sonnets will serve :
—
 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 233

LXIV.

**
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay ;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

LXV.

**
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power.
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower ?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days.
When rocks impregnable are not so stout.
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays ?

O, fearful meditation ! where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid ?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back ?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid ?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright." *

1 Cf. Sonnet 81, p. 2«5.

234 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
That all the while he knew the consolations of
analytic idealism we may be sure from such sonnets
as these :
—
LXXIII.

" That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death- bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

LXXIV.

" But be contented : when that fell arrest

Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which memorial still with thee shall stay.
for
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee
The earth can have but earth, which is his due j

My spirit is thine, the better part of me :

So then thou hast but lo?t the dregs of life,

The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretch's knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
The worth of that is that which it contain!,
And that is this, and this with thee remains."
 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 236

All his metaphysics, however, could not make

actual life momentarily unreal

LXVI.

**
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trinim'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted.
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority.
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone."

xc.

" Then hate me when thou wilt ; if ever, now

Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss :

Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow,

Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe ;

Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,

To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,

When other petty griefs have done their spite,

But in the onset come ; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might.
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so."
236 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
With less direct quotation would hardly have
it

been possible to define the generalities which attempted

to name some of the leading personal traits of Shaks-
pere, as they appear in the Sonnets, Nor without
much quotation could another of his characteristic
traits have been made clear. The deep depression, the
acute suffering, the fierce passion which should nor-
mally result from what we have seen, Shakspere seems
fully to have known. Instead of expressing it, how-
ever, in such wild outbursts as one might naturally
expect, he displays throughout a power of self-mas-
tery, which gives his every utterance, no matter how
passionate, the beauty of restrained and mastered
artistic form. A form not in itself beautiful, one
grows to feel, must, for its very want of beauty, have
been inadequate to phrase the full emotion which such
a nature felt.

The Sonnets^ then, alter any conception of Shaks-

pere's individuality which might spring from the plays
we have read. Even though they tell nothing of the
facts of his life, the Sonnets imply very much concern-
ing the inner truth of it. No one, surely, could have
written these poems without a temperament in every
sense artistic, and a consciously mastered art. Nor
could any one have expressed such emotion and such
passion as underlie the Sonnets without a knowledge
of suffering which no sane poise could lighten, like
that of the chronicle-histories nor any such cheerful
;

sanity, or such robust irony as the comedies express ;

nor anv such sentimental sense of tragedy as makes

 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 237

Romeo and Juliet perennially lovely. Whoever wrote

the Sonnets must have known the depths of spiritual
suffering; nor yet have known how to emerge from
them. Such a Shakspere, unlike what we have known
hitherto, is not unlike th.^ Shakspere who will reveal
himself in the plays to come.
 IX
THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM JULIUS C-^SAR
TO CORIOLANUS

I.

The plays to be discussed in this chapter differ from

what have preceded somewhat as the plays from the
Midsummer NigMs Dream to Twelfth Night differed
from the plays discussed before them. This first
group, —
from Titus Andronicus to the Two Gentle-
men of Verona^ —
which probably occupied the first
six years of Shakspere's professional life, were chiefly
experimental. The second group, which probably oc-
cupied the next seven years of his professional life,

were all more or less alive with the surging forces of

artistic impulse and creative imagination ; none of
them, however, necessarily implied profound spiritual
experience. The group to which we now come, which
probably occupied tlie years between 1600 and 1608,
mark a distinct development in Shakspere's artistic
character.
That the development which we are trying to follow
is rather artistic than personal, however, we cannot too
strenuously keep in mind. The details of Shakspere's
private life, quite undiscoverable nowadays, are, after
 JULIUS C.KSAR 2:50

all,no one's business. For the rest, nobody faniilinr

with the literature and the stage of his time can vavy
seriously believe that in writing his [)lays he generally
meant to be philosophic, ethical, didactic. Like any
other playwright, he made plays for audiences, lie

differed from other playwrights chiefly in, the fervid

depth of his artistic nature. The circumstances of his

life, meanwhile, made the stage his normal vehicle of

artistic expression, — the vent for such emotional dis-
turbance as unexpressed would have become intoler-
able. The subjects which he chose, or which were
given him, in short, connecting themselves with the
fruit of his actual experience, were bound to throw
him into specific enaotional moods. These moods he
was forced, by the laws of his nature, to infuse into
the plays which he was writing, just as Marlowe had
more simply and more instantly infused imaginative
feeling into his tragedies ten years before. What
marks the personal development of Shakspere as an
artist, then, is that his emotional motives suggest a
deepening knowledge of life. A writer who had never
dreamed of such sentiments as underlie the Sonnets,
might conceivably have written all the plays we have
considered hitherto ; he could not have written the
plays which are to come.
A study of Julius Ccesar will serve to define these
generalizations.
240 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

IL Julius Caesar.

[Julius Ccesar was neither entered in the Stationers' Register nor

published until the folio of 1623.
Its source is certainly North's Plutarch, which was published in
1579; the general substance of the speech of Antony over Caesar's
body may have been suggested by a translation of Appian's Chronicle
of the Roman Wars, published in 1578.
Not mentioned by Meres in 1598, Julius Ccesar is distinctly alluded
to in the following stanza from Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, published
in 1601: —
" The many-headed multitude were drawne
By Brutus speech, that Ccesar was ambitious,
When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne
His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious ?
Man's memorie, with new, forgets the old.
One tale is good, untill another's told."

As Mr. Fleay suggests,^ thereby as usual throwing light ^on the essen-
tially theatrical nature of even Shakspere's most masterly work, the
speech of Polonius,^ :
—
" I did enact Julius Caesar : I was killed i' the Capitol ; Brutus killed me,"

probably indicates that Julius Ccesar had been acted shortly before
Hamlet, and that the audience would recognize in Polonius the actor
who had played Csesar.
The conjectural date generally assigned to Julius Ccesar is from
1600 to 1601.]

At first sight Julius Ccesar impresses you as a

chronicle-history, differing from what have preceded
chiefly in the fact that its subject is not English, but
Roman. Even though when the conspirators appear,^
" Their hats are pluck'd about their ears,
And half their faces buried in their cloaks,'*

1 Life, p. 214.
2 Hamlet, III. ii. 108-9.
3 IL i. 73.
 JULIUS C^SAR -241

and though in the midst of the ensuing scene the

clock strike three,^ one never thinks of anything in this
play as modern. With complete disregard of archaeo-
logical detail, Shakspere conceived his characters
throughout in a manner so true to the spirit of
Plutarch that one might almost select Julius Coesar
as a model exposition of the temper which tradition
assigns to Roman antiquity.
Almost immediately, however, any one familiar with
the Elizabethan stage finds in Julius Coesar a marked
likeness to another kind of play than chronicle-history.
As Mr. Fleay points out,^ many of the tragedies of
blood were in two parts: Marston's Antonio and MeU
lida, Chapman's Bussy d^Ambois, Kyd's Jeronymo, are
familiar examples. In the first part, the hero meets
his fate ; in the second, he is revenged, with the approv-
ing consent of his visible ghost.^ This is just what
happens in Julius Ccesar. The first three acts consti-
tute Coesar* s Tragedy^ the last two, Coesar' s Revenge,
So marked is this that Mr. Fleay finds reason to believe
the play as we have it to be a condensed version of
what were originally two.
Without accepting this opinion, we may at least de-
clare it plausible ; for surely the effect of Julius Coesar
is radically unlike anything else we have met. An,
interesting view of it is stated in a note by Mr.
Young:*

1 Ibid. 192. 2 life^ p. 215. « See p. 252.

* Whose kindness is acknowledged in the introductory Note to thii
book.
]«
242 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
'^It is a piece of transitional art, a hybrid between the
chronicle-histories and the great tragedies. It has neither
the lack of artistic or ethical significance characteristic of
the former, nor is it, like the latter, dominated by a single
great character only. While it has all the unity of interest
distinguishing the tragedies, it gets it, not by means of a
single informing idea of artistic or ethical significance, but
by employing a masterly technique in the service of a
chronicle-history motive, to tell just what had happened."

Suggestive as this opinion must be, it does not quite

emphasize the full divergence of Julius Ccesar from
the English chronicle-histories. These are generally
obvious dramatic versions of the narratives which they
represent. Even though all the substance of t/wZms
Ccesar, however, and all its essential unity be trace-
able to Plutarch, no treatment of Plutarch's material
could be much less obvious than Shakspere's. From
Plutarch, to be sure, he selects his incidents with the
skill in choice of what is dramatically effective, which
he has learned by thirteen years of writing for the
stage. This is not all, though ; he selects not incidents
which should tell the recorded story of Caesar, but inci-
dents which give that story a new and very significant
character. To understand Julius Ccesar, in short, we
must appreciate that when Shakspere read Plutarch,
the narrative awakened in him a definite state of feel-
ing ; this state of feeling, as well as the facts which
awakened it, he was bound as an artist to express.
Easy to appreciate, this feeling is not easy to define.
One can point out the technical devices, or situations,
 JULIUS CESAR 243

or motives which help to compose or to express it. One

«
an show how the motive of self-deception, already so
'flectively used in comedy, really underlies the con-
ception of Caesar and of Brutus alike. One can show
how more seriously treated than the mob
the mob, far
in Henry VL^ develops and emphasizes the distrust
of the rampant, headless, brainless populace to which,
at least as an artist, Shakspere was surely sensitive.
One can compare the ghost of Caesar with the bogies
of Richard III.^ and show how these are little better
than nursery goblins, while the spirit of Caesar has
a touch of such actuality as in one mood makes one
I'c member the tales of Nemesis, and in another recalls
tlie proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research.
Yet all this does not help us far. Unsatisfactory
though the phrase be, there is perhaps no more exact
term for the underlying mood of Julius Ccesar than
unpassionately ironical.
In Julius Ccesar human affairs have broken loose
from human control. Caesar himself, though to his
own mind almost divinely supreme, is only a passing
incarnation of the political force everywhere surely,
miserably inherent in the folly-stricken populace.
The extinction of his person does not so much as
trouble this force. Other Caesars shall come, and
others still all, like the great Caesar, to be the sport
I ;

of fate. Yet those who wish for better things and

nobler are just as powerless. Brutus, let him think
1 Compare III. ii. with 2 Henry VI., IV. ii.-viii.

« IV. iii. 275 scq. ; cf. Rich. III. V. iii. 118 seq.
244 WILLIAM SHAKSPEKE
as he will that he acts freely, is rather passively
swept on to the end which now, as then and ever,
must await those fervent idealists, born after their
moment, who passionately love the traditional virtues
of an olden time. What is best in human nature is

as powerless as the puppets who deem themselves

potent, except, perhaps, that it redeems and ennobles
character. Men may still be great; but great or
small, they can actually do nothing. Nowhere is the
world-old cry of the stricken idealist against the un-
conquerable progress of vile, overwhelming fact more
despairingly uttered than by Brutus:^

" 0, JuHus Caesar, thou art mighty yet

Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords -

In our own proper entrails."

Such effort as this to expound an artist's mood must

always run a double risk of misleading. You may
seem, on the one hand, to be stating personal con-
victions, or, on the other, to assert that the artist criti-

cised was preaching. One cannot repeat too often,

then, that a critic's chief business is not to air his
own views, but to define those of the artist he dis-
cusses and that so far as the artist is concerned, he
;

need never have abstractly formulated his views at all.

The artist, indeed, has done his work if he have but
felt his mood and expressed it. From all the fore-
going attempt to analyze the mood of Julius Ccesarf
then, nobody need infer anything more than that

1 V. ill. 94.
 JULIUS C^SAR 245

Shakspere's subject made him feel in a specific way.

Such analysis of that feeling as we have attempted
would probably have been quite foreign to him. For
all that, such analysis is helpful to those who nowa-
days would try to share his feeling.
The mood which underlies Julius Ccesar is analo-
gous to the lighter but still serious mood which we
Much Ado About Nothing} Deeper
found to underlie
though the mood of Julius Ccesar be, however, it
never becomes passionate, overmastering. No trait
of Julius Ccesar^ in short, is more characteristic than
what, in the broadest sense of the word, may be
called its style. This is never overburdened with
such a rush of thought and emotion, such a bewil-
dering range of perception, as should overwhelm or
confuse it. Nowhere is Shakspere's power more
surely poised than here nowhere is ; his touch more
firm and masterly; nowhere do vivid incidents, indi-
vidual characters, marvellously plausible background
or atmosphere, blend in a verbal style at once stronger
and more limpid.
The sense of fate displayed in Julius Ccesar war-
rants, for want of a better word, the term ironical
the cool mastery of style throughout warrants the
term unpassionate. Unpassionately ironical, then,
we may call the play. As unpassionate, it has much
in common with the plays which we have read before.
In none of these, for all their beauty, their energy,
their power, has there been a surge of thought or feel-

1 See p. 191.
246 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
ing wliich has overwhelmed, overburdened the style.
Rather, Shakspere's style has been constantly freeing
itselffrom the excessive ingenuity of the older days
and with all the flexibility which only such ingenuity
could fully have developed, it has been growing more
and more nearly identical with the thought it would
phrase. Here, at last, with full mastery, Shakspere
uses his superb, unpassionate style to express a mood
which allies Julius Coesar to what is coming as surely
as that style allies it to what is past. For, far beyond
any other play we have as yet considered, Julius Ccesar
involves a sense of the lasting irony of history, — an
understanding of the blind fate which must always
seem to make men its sport.

III. All's Well That Ends Well.

[Like Julius Ccesar, All 's Well That Ends Well was first entered in
1623, and first published in the folio.

Its source is clearly the story of Giletta of Narbona in Paynter's

Palace of Pleasure.
As to its origin and general date there has been much discussion.
From the clearly early character of some passages, as well as from the
general character of the story, many critics have been disposed to think
this play a comparatively late revision of the Love's Labour's Won
mentioned by Meres. Mr Fleay, while admitting the obviously early
passages to be old, is of opinion that if any play is to be recognized a^
Love's Labour 's Won, it is probably not this one, but rather Much Ado
About Nothing} The question can never be definitely settled. From
the general character of the style in the later parts of All 's Well That
Ends Well, however* critics substantially agree in assigning the play
in its present form to about 1601.]

1 Life, pp. 204, 216.

 ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 247

A short extract from All's Well That Endi Well

will illustrate the incongruity of its style. In the
scene where Helena is presented to the King, the dia-
logue proceeds as follows :
^ —
*'
Kiiig. I say we must not
So stain our jiklgment, or corrupt our hope,
To prostitute our past-cure malady
To empirics, or to dissever so
Our great self and our credit, to esteem
A senseless help when help past sense we deem.
Hel. My duty then shall pay me for my pains:
I will no more enforce mine office on you;
Humbly entreating from your royal thoughts
A modest one, to bear me back again.
King. I cannot give thee less, to be call'd grateful:
Thou thought *st to help me ; and such thanks I give
As one near death to those that wish him live :
But what at full I knowy thou know'st no part,
I knowing all my perils thou no art.
Hel. What I can do can do no hurt to try^

Since you set up your rest 'gainst remedy.

He that of greatest works is finisher
Oft does them by the weakest minister ^^ etc.

The lines italicized in this passage are clearly in a

manner quite as early as that of Love's Labour'* s Lost^
which we assigned to 1589. The other lines are in
a manner common with Shakspere twelve years later.
Though the latter predominate in AlVs Well That
Ends Well, there is enough of the former to give the
play unmistakable oddity of effect, and to make its
style in detail a favorite matter of study to those who
love linguistics.
I
II. i. 12l*-U0.
248 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Distinct in effect from any of the other comedies,
on account of this palpable incongruity of style, All '5
Well That Ends Well resembles them in its general
economy of invention. The main situation — of a
woman making love to a man occurs both — in the
relations of Phoebe to Rosalind in As You Like It,
and in those of Olivia to Viola in Twelfth Night. The
device by which Helena finally secures her husband is

clearly repeated in Measure foi^ Measure, while the

business of the ring is repeated from the last act of
the Merchant of Venice. Parolles is a curious combi-
nation of Pistol and Falstaff ; his relations to Bertram
being almost a repetition of Falstaff 's to the Prince.
Helena's original scheme involves considerable self-

deception ; her final stratagem involves mistaken iden-

tity. The further we look, in short, the more familiar
matter we find.
Whether All 's Well That Ends Well be a revision
of Love's Labour 's Won^ or not, then, it is clearly a
play of which part was made early, and part late ;

a play, too, where the later part has many traces of

Shakspere's general manner about 1601. We may
fairly guess, accordingly, that if the play were ever
finished in its older form, it may probably have
expressed no more serious view of life than the
Two Gentlemen of Verona, whose motive is remotely
similar. The passages which give it more signifi-
cance are almost all in the later style.
While its incongruity and consequent lack of finish
make AlVs Well That Ends Well a clearly less serious
 ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 249

work of art than the plays near which we place it,

the mood which it expresses deserves our full atten-

tion. Up to this point when Shakspere has dealt
with love, he has always been romantic. He has
shown us some rather worthless lovers, to be sure •

Proteus is highly unsympathetic ; Romeo, for all his

charm, is neither vigorous nor constant; and Bassa-
nio, when we analyze his conduct, is anything but
heroic. Throughout Shakspere's love-scenes, in fact,
we have trace after trace of some such fascinating,
volatile youth as seems to have inspired the first series
of sonnets. Of all the lot, however, none is more vola-
tile and less fascinating, none more pitifully free

from romantic heroism, than Bertram. What makes

All '« Well That Ends Well notable for us, in short,
is that its love passages plainl}* reveal a sense of the
mysterious mischiefs which must flourish in this world
as long as men aremen and women are women. So
remote is this mood from the old one of romantic
sentiment or romantic happiness that for all the
romantic Helena to her worthless husband,
fidelity of

one feels Shakspere to be treating the fact of love

with a cynical irony almost worthy of a modern
Frenchman.
Even though All '« Well That Ends Well be perhaps,
then, like the Richards and the Merry Wives of Wind-
sor, the careless work of a moment or of moments

when Shakspere's chief energy was busy elsewhere,

it is significant because it definitely expresses a mood
not hitherto found in his plays. Restless one feels
250 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
this mood, unsettled, unserene, unbeautiful. There
is no other work of Shakspere's which in conception
and in temper seems quite so corrupt as this, where
we are asked to give our full sj'mpathy to Bertram.
There are other works of Shakspere which are more
painful there are none less pleasing, none on which
;

one cares less to dwell. No other, however, more

clearly reveals a sense which, as distinctly as the
sense of irony which we found in Julius Coesar^ char-
acterizes the coming work of Shakspere. This sense,
abundantly evident in the Sonnets, but not shown
in the plays we have read before, is a sense of the
deplorable, fascinating, distracting mystery which
throughout human history is involved in the fact of
sexual passion.
The irony of fate underlies the mood of Julius
Ccesar ; under the mood of All '5 Well That Ends
Well lies the miserable mystery of earthly love.
These motives we shall find henceforth again and
again.

IV. Hamlet.

[The Revenge of Hamlett Prince of Denmark was entered in th*

Stationers' Register on July 26th, 1602. In 1603 the Tragicall Histo-
rie of Hamlet Prince of Denmark hif William Shakespeare was pub-

lished in quarto. This obviously imperfect quarto was probably

pirated. Whether it represents an earlier version of the play or is
a mutilated version of the whole, remains uncertain. In 1604 appeared
a second quarto, which shows the play in substantially its final form.
There were subsequent quartos in 1605 and in 1611. Above twenty
allusions to Hamlet between 1604 and 1616 have been discovered.
 HAMLET 251

There is evidence that a play on this subject, which Mr. Fleay be^

lieves to have been by Kyd, existed as early as 1589. What relation

this old play bore to Shakspere's, and whether he had a hand in it,
remain matters of dispute.
The story, originally told by Saxo Grammaticus, a thirteenth-centurj
chronicle, was told inFrench by Belleforest, of whose version an Eng-
lish translation was published in 1608. This translation very probablj
existed earlier.
Conjectures as to the date of the finished play range from 1601 t<v

1603.]

By common verdict — a different thing from fact —

Hamlet is held to be Shakspere's masterpiece. While
thus positively to grade any work of art is uncritical,
we may safely say that Hamlet has given more
rise to

speculation, to a wider range of thought and com-

ment, than any other single work in English litera-

ture. In all modern literature, indeed, its only rival

in this respect is Goethe's Faust, a poem not yet old
enough for us to be sure of its permanent character.
Hamlet, then, stands by itself.
In spite of all this comment, Hamlet remains a
puzzle, always unsolved, constantly suggestive. Critic
after critic asks what
means and each has a new
it ;

answer. There are endless minor questions, too was :

Hamlet mad, for example ? was Ophelia chaste ? The

mass of comment grows bewildering, benumbing. In
despair, one puts it aside, turning straight to the text
for, after all, the chief thing is not that we should de-
fine the play, but that we should know it ; and Ham-
let is a play which everybody ought to know. It is
surely the work in English Literature to which allu-
sions are most constant and most widely intelligible.
252 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Reading it again and again, you begin to find that you
may know it none the less because, for all your read-
ing, it remains inscrutable.
Inscrutable though Hamlet remain, however, certain
facts about it transpire for whoever considers it coolly.
To begin with, in origin and in plot it is clearly a
conventional tragedy of blood : the old king has been
murdered; Polonius, the Queen, the King, Laertes,
and Hamlet, are killed on the stage and Ophelia, ;

though she dies out of sight, is buried in the presence

of the audience. Again, if we did not detect the fact
for ourselves, the very title of the entry in the Station-
ers' Register — the Revenge of Hamlet^ etc. — would
remind us that the play belongs to that class of trage-
dies of blood, such as we glanced at in discussing
Julius Ccesar, where a crime is revenged by the in-

tervention of a murdered ghost. Considered as an

Elizabethan play, then, Hamlet is substantially con-
ventional.
Its effect, on the other hand, is as far from con-
ventional as possible. While retaining traces enough
of its origin to remain full of dramatic action, it carries
on this action not like the old tragedies of blood and
revenge by means of ranting lay figures, but by means
of characters as individual as any in literature. The
individuality of these characters, however, is always
subordinated to the main dramatic motive ; one reason
why things happen as they do is that these people are
temperamentally just what they are. Nor does the
subordination of detail to purpose cease here. Sur-
 HAMLET 253

prisingly few speeches in Hamlet lack dramatic fitness

whatever is said generally helps either to advance the
action or to define some character by means of which
the action is advanced. The speeches, then, each
having its proper place in an artistic scheme, are not
essentially salient. Despite their dramatic fitness,
though, these speeches contain so many final phrases,

and such a wealth of aphorism, that the stale joke

is justified which declares the text of Hamlet to con-
sist wholly of familiar quotations. This wonderfully
finished detail of style, an infallible symptom of
thoroughly studied art, is what chiefly gives Ham-
let the suggestive, mysterious quality which we all

recognize.
How carefully artistic Hamlet is, and at the same
time how full of indications that it is only a develop-
ment from an archaic original of which palpable traces
remain, has been best pointed out, perhaps, in a study
still unpublished, — the Sohier Prize Essay, on the
Elizabethan Hamlet^ written in 1893, by Mr. John
Corbin, of Harvard University. How the original
Ghost was wildly ranting; how some of the scenes
which puzzle people most, such as the great scene
between Hamlet and Ophelia,^ may best be under-
stood when we realize them once to have been con-
ventionally comic how Hamlet's very madness was
;

probably intended to make the audience laugh, and so

on, Mr. Corbin has made clear in a way which must
Burely be recognized when his essay finally appears.

1 III. i. 90-157.
254 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Something of the process by which the final form of
Hamlet grew may be guessed by comparing the per-
manent version with Belleforest and with the quarto
of 1603.
•In Belleforest, for example, the lady who at times
answers to Ophelia is a person of easy morals, em-
ployed to ferret out Hamlet's secret in a manner which
reminds one of the gossip concerning the relations of
Fanny Ellsler and the Due de Reichstadt. In Hamlet^
by a refinement of taste peculiar to Shakspere among
Elizabethan dramatists, much of this situation is trans-
ferred to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, while Ophelia
retains hardly any trace of her origin. In the quarto
of 1603, again, Hamlet's soliloquy, and his great scene
with Ophelia occur in what we now call the second act,
before his first interview with Rosencrantz and Guil-
denstern,^ instead of in, the third act, where their
dramatic effect is probably greater. Such transposi-
tion, however and whenever made, is just the sort of
thing which occurs when any novelist or dramatist is
trying to improve his work. The difference between
the opening speeches in the two versions is more nota-
ble still. Here is the version of 1603 :
—
*'
Enter two Centinels.

1. Stand : who is that ?

2. *TisL
1. O you come most carefully upon your watch,
2. And if you meet Marcellus and Horatio,
The partners of my watch, bid them make haste.^
i Between II. ii. 167, and II. ii. 172.
 HAMLET 255

Similar as this seems to the final version, it is com-

paratively lifeless. The sentinel on watch, seeing
some one approach, challenges him, who declares
himself to be the relief-guard. Clearly nothing
could be more commonplace. Now turn to the final
version :
—
*'
Francisco at his post^ Enter to him Bernardo.
Ber. Who *s there ?

Fran, Nay, answer me : stand, and unfold yourself.

Ber. Long Hve the king I

Fran. Bernardo ?

Ber. He.
Fran. You come most carefully upon your hour.
Ber. 'T is now struck twelve get thee to bed, Francisco.
;

Fran. For this relief much thanks: 't is bitter cold,

And I am sick at heart.
Ber. Have you had quiet guard ?
Fran. Not a mouse stirring.
Ber. Well, good night.
Ifyou do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.**

At first this scene looks like the other. On scrutiny,

however, you see that the opening challenge is trans-
posed from the mouth of the sentinel on watch, who
ought to give it, to that of the relieving sentinel, who
ought not to. In a moment, you see why. Bernardo,
the relieving sentinel, knows that the ghost is astir;
and seeing a figure in the dark gives the challenge, in
a fright which pervades all his speeches. Francisco,
the sentinel on watch, knowing nothing of the ghost,
only feels cold. Such a change as this, however and
2dQ WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
whenever made, is the kind of change by which a
skilful artist, with a mere touch of the pen, dispels
commonplace.
Such evidence as this tends to confirm the opinion
that the quarto of 1603 is a mutilated version of
Shakspere's own earlier work, and that the final

Hamlet represents his last revision of it. The differ-

ences between the two are generally such as a great

imaginative artist, more and more imbued with the
artistic significance of his subject, would introduce by
way of refinement, finish, adaptation.
Canting as artistic significance may sound, the
phrase probably contains the clew to Hamlet. Every
one knows the tragedy to be full of endless, fascinat-

ing, suggestive mystery. Critic after critic has tried

to solve this mystery, to demonstrate what it signi-
fies. Abandon this effort, and you will see the whole
subject in a new and a clearer light. Once for all,
there is no need for any solution of Hamlet; as it
stands, the tragedy finally expresses the mood of an
artist who has no answer for the problems which rise
before him.
Hamlet, indeed, we may believe to have developed
in some such manner as we detected when we consid-
ered the character of Falstaff.^ In him we could
faintly trace a conventional old satire on the Puritan
hero, Oldcastle. This, we conceived, Shakspere meant
to reproduce, much as in King John he had repro-
duced from an old play the Bastard Faulconbridge.
1 Seep. 167-171.
 HAMLET 2o7

The change from this traditional Oldcastle we conceived

to be spontaneous. The conventionally burlesqued
Puritan we conceived, of its own accord, to grow into
something so remote from its origin that the epilogue
could truly say, " Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is

not the man." ^ Imagine the same process here. The

old tragedy of blood possesses the imagination of the
poet, perhaps for years. What it means, what it sig-

nifies, he, as an artist, neither knows nor cares. To

an artist, thus possessed, the vital question is not what
his conceptions mean, but what they They grow are.
within him, they will not let him rest he must speak ;

them out, must tell what they are. That very process
for the moment exhausts him it is all he cares about
;

for himself it is enough.

For critical students, like us, however, the case is

otherwise. Not knowing the artistic mood sponta-

neously, we must perforce ask ourselves not only what
it is but what it means. Without such guidance as
should come from answers to this question, which very
probably involves matters of which the artist never
was aware, we may fail to understand him.
In Hamlet, then, one notable trait appears for the
first time. Whatever else we find in the tragedy,
we surely find an activity of intellect which at first
seems superhuman. Putting wonder aside, however,
and asking whether, we have met anything
in real life,
like it, we discover a startling answer close at hand.
Any of us must have known people whose tremendous
1 See p. 172.
2:)8 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
mental makes them, in comparison with every-
activity
day mortals, seem divinely gifted and most of us ;

must have become aware that such a trait indicates,

in the stock which breeds it, a marked tendency to
insanity. In other words, there are always people
about us whose minds have the diseased activity,
without the aberration, of mania. Such a mind wrote
Hamlet.
At the same time, as distinguished from men who
display the vagaries of genius, Shakspere was always
exceptionally sane. The trait which balanced his
abnormal activity of intellectual perception was an
equally active and pervasive power of reflection.
Whatever he perceived, he could consider, could com-
ment on. Besides, as we have seen before, he was by
this time a consummate artist and artistic expression,
;

involving a deliberate severance of personality within

the artist himself,^ is often what saves men of genius
from Bedlam. With one part of their being they
may yield to all the ecstasy of divine madness; with
another, they must contemplate and phrase the mad-
dening thoughts and feelings which surge within them,
preserving, in spite of all, the cool cunning which mas-
ters technical obstructions.
Such tremendous activity, mastered and controlled
by equally tremendous power, infuses every line of
Hamlet; yet in Hamlet it always subserves a constant
emotional purpose. The resulting state of the poet's
mind is best indicated perhaps by the words of a critio
1 See p. 228.
 HAMLET 259

who, having known the tragedy for thirty years, and

having loved it passionately, declared that from the
beginning he had never once been able to think of it

without a faint, lurking consciousness of some un-

phrased musical cadence beneath it all. Beneath it,

then, he for one could perceive some fundamental

emotion which no language can express, — something
so ethereally beyond the range of what all men realize
that it cannot be couched in any vehicle so definite as
words. Words, he found, could help him no farther
than when he called this emotion a quivering sense of
the eternal mystery of tragic fate.
A sense of tragic fate, then, in all its horror —
not the balanced, judicial fate of the Greeks, but the
passionate, stormy, Christianized Romantic
fate of
Europe — undci'lics the mood which Hamlet would
express. Men are the sport of such fate : thought,
emotion, conduct, life in all its aspects, are alike at
the mercy of this unspeakable, inexorable force.
Yet, all the while, these very men, whirled onward
though they be toward and through the portals of
eternity, must think, must feel, must act, must live ;

to others and even to themselves they must seem,

even though they may never truly be, the responsible
masters of themselves. This is the fact which the
maker Hamlet contemplated. The reaction which
of
stirred within him from this contemplation was a pas-
sionate, restless acknowledgment of endless, unfathom-
able mystery. No words can quite phrase it perhaps ;

none can phrase it better than some fragmentary lines

260 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
from Hamlet's great soliloquy, all the truer — to our
elusive meaning if we leave them subjectless : —
" Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of." ^

The ills we have, all the while, we know with an

intensity of suffering hardly to be borne. Chief
among them are those which spring from the fact
that men are men and women women. It is no are
intentional evil-doing which has led the King and the
Queen to their grim career of incest and murder it ;

is rather that, being the mortals they are, they have

lived and done their deeds in a world where damning
sin held them in its toils. And Ophelia is a woman,
and Hamlet is a man, and therein lies the seed of
the ills we have, and the ills to come. A knowl-
edge of these ills, perceived with the keenness of an
intellect alive to the very utmost limits of human ken,
underlies the mood of Hamlet. Were not the master-
mind, too, artistically alert to the utmost limits of
human power, it could not have phrased, with an art
at once ultimately dramatic and ultimately poetic, and
with a philosophic insight which seems illimitable, this
mood whose depth of mystery is best proved by the
truth that throughout the centuries it remains mys-
terious. Fateful, passionate, inscrutable, — such is

the life which Hamlet sets forth.

Was Hamlet mad ? critic after critic has asked.
In all human probability, Shakspere himself could
1 III. i. 80.
 HAMLET 261

have answered the question no better than we.

Artists know less of what they do not tell us than
inartistic critics give them credit for ; Thackeray,
they say, was never quite sure how Becky Sharp
far
had gone with Lord Steyne. How Hamlet may have
presented himself to Shakspere, is aptly suggested in
a note by Mr. Greene ^ :
—
^^ Perhaps Shakspere hardly recognized that Hamlet vf 2.9

essentially not a chronicle-history. He applied his realistic,

his method persistently; and with his own
'objective'
pessimistic temper at the time he produced what had been
only hinted at in Julius Ccesar, — a psychologic tragedy.
There is little formal analysis; only aspects are depicted;
but our interest centres op. the mental states which cause
those aspects. The fact that Shakespere has kept to the
* method accounts for the puzzling character of
objective '

the work. A real man lives in Shakspere's brain, and

speaks, and acts. Why he so speaks and acts we can only
guess —
and Shakspere can only guess. Therefore the
question as to the true nature of Hamlet's character is
essentially insoluble/'

Of only one thing concerning Hamlet, indeed, may we

feel sure. So unfathomable is his range of thought and
emotion that actor after actor can play the part with
masterly intelligence, and each can be different from
any other Poetic Booth, for example, sad Lawrence
Barrett, demoniacally witty Henry Irving, romantic
Mounet-Sully are as unlike as any four human beings

^ Whose kindness is acknowledged in the introductory Note to this

book.
262 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

can be ;
jet in none can you find a trait unauthorized
by the text. Fateful, passionate, inscrutable, — such
seems Hamlet to himself, such to his impersonators ;
and such, we may believe, he seemed to his creator.
Slight as this treatment of Hamlet is, and surely
neglectful though it be of endless facts and theories
which even superficial students of the subject are
bound to know and to consider, it should serve our
purpose. Our business, after all, is not to fathom the
depths of Hamlet^ but only to assure ourselves of
Hamlet's relation to Shakspere's development as an
artist. In it we have found many traces of his old
methods of thought and work. In it, too, we have
found again both the profound sense of irony so^unpas-
sionately set forth in Julius Ccesar^ and the knowledge
of what evil comes from the fact of sex so cynically
set forth in All 's Well that Ends Well, In it, further-
more, we have found a terrible activity of roused in-

tellect which in a less balanced nature might have led

to madness. In it, finally, we have found a Shakspere
different, in his whole artistic nature, from the Shaks-
pere whom we have known hitherto ; for here at last
we find him, in the full ripeness of his power, passion-
ately facing the everlasting mysteries, and, for all his
greatness, as little able as the least of us to phrase an
answer to their eternal enigma.
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 263

V. Measure for Measure.

[Measure for Measure was first entered in 1623, and first published
in the folio but according to Mr. Fleay,^ it was acted at court in
;

December, 1604.
The main outline of the .story — without the epi.'^ode of Mariana,
whom Shakspere substitutes at a crucial moment for the original
heroine, —exists in Whetstone's Promus and Cassandra, published in
1578, and in his Pentameron, published in 1582. It is based on the
Italian of Cinthio's Hecatommithi.
From internal evidence — allusions and style combined, — Measure
for Measure has been conjecturally assigned to 1603 or 1604.]

At first sight, Measure for Measure^ like so many

other of Shakspere's plays, seems strongly individ-
ual. Its general effect, certainly, — the mood into
which it throws you, — is unique : a little considera-
tion, however, reveals, in both its motive and its

method, the economy of invention so characteristic of

Shakspere.
In Julius CcBsar, as we have seen, he expressed very
plainly the sense of irony which now for a while so
pervades his artistic feeling. In All 's Well that Ends
Well, he expressed his equally persistent sense that
while men remain men and women remain women,
there will surely be trouble. In Hamlet he expressed
a fiercely passionate sense of the mystery which hangs
over life, wherein the two preceding motives remain
constant. In Measure for Measure all these motives

1 Life, 235.
264 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
reappear : the slightest consideration of the story of
Angelo will reveal the two first ; the prison scene,^
particularly when Claudio shudders in the face of
death,2 ^[\\ reveal something of the last. So, too,
more subtly but just as surely, we find in Measure for
Measure the motives which underlie both series of the
Sonnets : Claudio is another example of such fasci-
nating youth and weakness as may have inspired the
first series and, though in the serious parts we have no
;

actively evil woman, the stories of Isabella, of Mariana,

and of Juliet, constantly suggest the evils which arise
from the fascinating fact of sex. What makes Measure
for Measure seem individual, then, is not that its mo-
tives are new, but that they are newly combined they ;

differ from the old not in kind, but in proportion.

Here, for example, the irony, while far more passionate
than that of Julius Ccesar, lacks the overwhelming in-
tensity which marks it in Hamlet. Here, too, the sense
of sexual evil is at once more profound than that of
All 's Well that Ends
and so firmly set forth that
Well,
you feel its greater depth to imply more certain in-
sight. Here, finally, while there is no direct self-
revelation, the frequent analogies to the moods
expressed in the Sonnets go far to make you feel that
the mood of Measure for Measure is unstudied, spon-
taneous, sincere.
In the matter of dramatic detail, even to many of
the speeches, Measure for Measure is almost re-

capitulatory. The old stage situations and devices of

1 IIL i. 2 118 seq.
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 265

the comedies — mistaken identity and self-deception —

are persistently used. Their effect, however, is no
longer comic. The disguised Duke is a very different
figure from a girlish heroine in a page's hose and
doublet. Still more, Angelo is a very different figure
from Malvolio, or Benedick, or Falstaff. By almost
any other Elizabethan dramatist, indeed, he might
have been made ribaldly amusing. Imagine him, and
his situation on the modern French stage, and you will
see for yourself what a chance for loose fun they afford.
That this chance is neglected, that Angelo is rather a
tragic figure than a comic, is deeply characteristic both
of Shakspere and of this moment in his career.
Recapitulation, with due variation, however, does
not end with such general matters as these. The
career and the fate of Lucio are closely akin to those
of Parolles and of Falstaff, just as his ribald chat has
something in common with Mercutio's. Clearly, too,
Mariana simply revives the Diana of AlVs Well that
Ends Well ; and Claudio, at least in his weakness, has
much in common with Bertram. The last acts of
these two plays, furthermore, are so much alike that
this portion of All 's Well that Ends Well might almost
be regarded as a study for this portion of Measure for
Measure.
Even more notable, however, is the reminiscent, if

not exactly recapitulatory, flavor of many actual

speeches. This marked that
is so we may to advan-
tage compare two passages from Measure for Measure
with similar ones from earlier works.
266 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
The first of these passages is that where Isabella
pleads for mercy on Claudio ; it instantl}/ suggests
Portia's more familiar plea for mercy with Shj^lock.
Here is Portia's :
^ —
"The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath : it is twice blest :

It blesseth him and him that takes

that gives :

'T is mightiest in the mightiest it becomes :

The throned monarch better than his crown ;

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings ;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway ;

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings.

It i« an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God*8
When mercy seasons justice."

Here is Isabella's plea with Angelo :

^ —
" No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,
The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,
Become them with one half so good a grace
As mercy does.
If he had been as you and you as he,
You would have slipt like him ; but he, like you,
Would not have been so stern.

Alas, alas
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,

1 Merchant of Venice, IV. i. 184 seq.

2 II. ii. 59 seq.
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 267

If He, which is the top of judgement, should

But judge you as you are ? 0, think on that ;

And mercy then will breathe within your lips,

Like man new made."

The second passage from Measure for Measure

which here deserves attention is Claudio's speech on
death, which resembles Hamlet's great soliloquy,^ —
" To be or not to be," etc.

A few lines should serve to remind every one of

that :

" To die : to sleep ;

No more by a sleep to say we end

; and.
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 't is a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep

To sleep : perchance to dream ay, there 's the rub

:
;

For in. that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause there 's the respect

:

That makes calamity of so long life.

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life.
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of."

Compare with this Claudio's speech :

^ —
** Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot

1 Hamlet, III. i. 56 seq. ^ m. i. jig seq.

268 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice *
;

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world or to be worse than worst
;

Of those that lawless and in certain thought,

Imagine howling: ^ 't is too horrible !

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."

With would have heen hard

less direct quotation, it
to make clear a distinct difference, in something more
tangible than mood or temper, between Measure for
Measure and the plays we have considered before.
The passages we have just read are enough alike to
demonstrate that the very style of Measure for Measure
has a certain heaviness which we have not met hither-
to. The comparison also suggests that the change is
due to increased activity of thought. Unimpulsively,
but intensely and constantly, reflective, the mind which
wrote Measure for Measure was actually overburdened
with things to say. Here, then, we have a fresh
symptom of the abnormal mental activity which per-
vades Hamlet, It reveals itself now in a compactness
of style hitherto strange to Shakspere. The passages

1 Compare these five lines, too, with the Ghost's speech, — Hamlet.
I. V. 9-20.
2 Cf. Hamlet, V. i. 265.
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 260

just quoted are by no means the most compact of

Measure for Measure^ which often becomes positively
obscure. One feels at last as if Shakspere's abnormal
activity of mind, prevented by his lack of inventive
power from dashing' into regions foreign to his older
experience, were writhing about every concept he had,
striving with the linear vehicle of language to enwrap
elusive solidity of thought. While not constant here-
after, this trait is henceforth characteristic of Shaks-
pere's style.
Taking all these considerations together, we find in
the mood Measure for Measure a normal reaction
of
from the passionate sense of mystery so wonderfully
phrased in Hamlet. Tacitly assuming, as usual, the
conventional ideals of virtue and of life still instinctive
to the normal English mind, Shakspere faces the fact
of sexual passion. Like the fate which Hamlet faces,
the thing is at once mysterious and evil. In Hamlet
Shakspere expressed his sense of the mystery ; in
Measure for Measure he expresses his sense of the
evil. Here his dominant mood is grimly contempla-
tive, almost consciously philosophic. No more than
in Hamlet can he offer any solution of the dreadful
mystery ; but he can state fact, and can comment on it

inexhaustibly. The mood is a mood of reaction, — of

slumbering passion, but of enormous, sombre latent
feeling.
Strangely enough, this mood has much in common
with a potent contemporary mood which has left a
widely different record, — the Calvinistic philosophy
270 AVILLIAM SHAKSPEKP:

of the Puritans. As with them, life is a positively

evil thing, made up of sin, of weakness, of whatever
else should deserve damnation. Fate is overpower-
ing ;
pure ideals are bent and broken in conflict with
fact ; and, above all, sexual love is a vast, evil mystery.
Even though, here and there, a gleam of persist-
ent purity suggest the possibility of rare, capricious
election, most men are bound by the very law of
their being to whirl headlong toward merited damna-
tion. In Measure for Measure so strangely named —
a comedy —^one may constantly find this unwitting
exposition of Calvinism, with no gleam of hopeful
solution. This evil fact is the real world; see it, hate
it, grimly laugh at it if you can and will God knows
;

what it means all we know is that it

; can surely mean
no good. Meanwhile, however, it can afford us end-
less material for comment and comment is essentially
;

anaesthetic.
So this mood, after all not peculiar to Shakspere,
but a mood very potent throughout his time, takes its

place between the moods which his work has already

expressed and the moods which are to come. Deeper
and deeper insight they show into the depths of human
experience ; but not a spiritual insight which pierces
higher and higher.
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 271

VT. Troilus and Cresstda.

[On February 7th, 1603, Troilus and Cressida, " as it is acted by my

Lord Chamberlain's men," was entered in the Stationers' Register, to
be published by one James Roberts, " when he hath gotten sufficient
authority for it." This authority seems never to have been gotten, for
no further mention of Troilus and Cressida occurs until January 28th,
1609, when it was again entered in the Stationers' Register. During
the same year it was twice published in quarto, as " Written bi/ William
Shakespeare " in the first of these quartos is an apparently mendacious
;

preface, suppressed in the second, stating that the play was never **

stal'd with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palmes of the
vulger." In the folio of 1623, Troilus and Cressida is printed between
the histories and the tragedies, and it does not appear at all iu the
general list of plays. Apparently the editors could not decide how to
classify it.

Its sources are evidently the mediaeval versions of the story of Troy,
of which the most notable in English is Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide.
Possibly it may have some connection with Chapman's Homer.
Conjectures as to the date of the play vary widely. From the evi-
dence stated, as well as on other grounds, many are now disposed to
think that the plan of the play is very early, that an acting version of

it, similar to the final one, was produced about 1602, and that the
whole thing was revived about 1609. In the squabbles of the Grecian
heroes Mr. Fleay ^ believes that we may detect allusions to theatrical
squabbles prevalent in London about 1602.]

Just when, or how, or why and Cressida was

Troilus
written nobody knows ;
yet clearly, we must put it
somewhere. For one thing, then, the very fact that
in so many aspects it is puzzling might incline us

fantastically to group it with plays whose chief trait

1 Life, 220-224.
272 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
is that they express a puzzled, indeterminate mood.
Besides, whatever doubts may exist about Troilus and
Cressida, there can be no doubt that it deals with both
of the motives just now so palpable in Shakspere's
work, — the irony of fate and the mischief which
women make. Again, while it displays nothing which
may fairly be called exhaustion, it has throughout
such a quality of creative inertia as we have seen to
characterize work done by Shakspere when his best
energy was concentrated elsewhere. Finally, while
the character of Cressida has an obvious likeness to
that of Cleopatra, which might warrant us in placing
this play near that of which Cleopatra is heroine, it

has an equal and less generally recognized likeness to

the character of Desdemona. Taken together, these
considerations — none of them very cogent — perhaps
warrant us in considering Troilus and Cressida before
Othello.

Palpable in the very construction of Troilus and

Cressida, the least dramatic of Shakspere's plays, the
puzzling quality pervades it everywhere. Of late cer-
tain critics have wondered whether it be not deliber-
ately satirical ; certainly, they say, Shakspere, dealing
with a heroic subject, carefully refrains from making
anybody in the least heroic. However agreeable to
modern ways of thinking, such a view is hardly con-
sonant with Elizabethan temper. It were more rational
to say that in this case Shakspere has really done afresh
what he has done all along he has translated into
;

dramatic form material which he found in narrative ;

 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 273

and so doing he has, as usual, made his characters

considerably more human than he found them. By
the very process of humanizing them, however, he has
permeated them with the view of human nature which
possessed him at about the time to which we venture
to assign the play. Essentially, then, these personages
become bad and inexplicable, — such figures as in
actual life furnished the data of Calvinism. Human
beings, thus regarded, are puzzling facts ; hence the
puzzle of Troilus and Cressida.
The persistence in Troilus and Cressida of the two
motives so characteristic of this period goes far to
confirm this impression. Clearly neither the Greeks
nor the Trojans here are really free agents. As
Cassius played on Brutus, to be sure, so Ulysses plays
on whoever comes near him, and so to a certain degree
Pandarus plays on the lovers. Beneath them all,
however, an overmastering, blind fate —
in this case
by no means passionately recognized —
drives every
one together nowhither. The means it takes to drive
them, too, is more palpable than before what breeds;

the trouble is the wantonness of woman. Though we

see little of Helen, we rarely lose the sense of her
damning presence ; and in Cressida we have a full-
length portrait of a fascinating wanton, all the more
fatal because of her momentary, volatile sincerity.
The more one studies the character of Cressida, the
more one feels its truth. Of Cressida, however, we
shall see more a little later.
With all its puzzling humanity, and all its persist-
18-
274 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
ence of motive, Troilus and C7'essida must always have
been a dull play. This is partly a question of actual
construction. The real action here is very slight; the
background, against which it is played, is very heavy.
When Troilus, or Cressida, or Pandarus are on the
scene, to be sure, something happens; but they are
not on the scene often enough or long enough to dis-
tract our attentionfrom the endless harangues and the
pointless squabbles of Greeks and Trojans. Of course
these Greeks and Trojans live compared with any
;

of the sources from which Shakspere may have drawn

them, thev are remarkable for vitality. In no case,
however, do they live nobly or heroically nor yet do ;

they display themselves in phases of life or conduct

which even Elizabethans could have found dramati-
cally interesting. Elizabethan audiences could relish
things which nowadays would put audiences to sleep
in sonorous rant and prolonged soliloquy they could
find such delight as modern audiences seek in the
music of grand opera ; in fantastic plays on words and
turns of phrase they could find such pleasure as nowa-
days audiences feel in catching tunes ; and if a text
were really comic they could enjoy it heartily without
the aid of action. Even an Elizabethan audience,
however, could hardly have stomached the prolonged
philosophizing which fills pages of Troilus and Cres-
sida. In the first scene at the Grecian camp,^ for
example, no human being could ever have spouted the
lines of Agamemnon, and Nestor, and Ulysses, so that
1 I. iii.
 TROILUS AND CRKSSIDA 275

any considerable body of human listeners, wishing to

be amused, could patiently have borne them. A good
deal of this philosophizing, to be sure, is admirable ;

for a reader with a taste for aphorism, Trollus and

Cressida is an agreeably pregnant piece of literature.
No appetite for aphorism, however, could stand sucli
philosophizing at the theatre. Few ardent church-
goers even would relish quite such compactly serious
matter in sermons. Yet tlie philosophizing, commen-
tative mood expressed in these long speeches and
pregnant phrases is the mood which seems uppermost
in Troilus and Cressida; and Troilus and Cressida was
meant for acting. The creative inertia thus indicated
goes far to justify our placing of the play between
Hamlet and Othello.
We had another reason, however, for placing it near
Othello. At first thought, no two personages seem
much less similar than the gentle Desdemona and the
wanton heroine who emerges as the most vividly indi-
vidualized character in Troilus and Cressida. Now-
adays we know them both chiefly from the printed
page, a vehicle which defines all their divergence. To
the dramatic writer, however, who conceived them as
they should present themselves to an audience, they
were not disembodied personalities ; they were rather
visible women, who acted and looked in a definite
way. Now compare the first scene between Troilus
and Cressida ^ with Othello's familiar account of the
wooing of Desdemona,^ —
1 III. ii. 41-220. !»
OtheUo, I. iii. 158 se<i.
276 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
**
My story being done,
She gave rae for my pains a world of sighs :

She swore, in faith, 't was strange, 't was passing strange,
'T was pitiful, 't was wondrous pitiful
She wished she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man she thank'd me, :

And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,

I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her."

This simple, conscious, girlish coquetry, in Desdemona

compatible with such exquisite delicacy of nature as
she finally shows,^ must have looked almost exactly
like the behavior of Cressida in the orchard of
Pandarus. Again, compare the civilities which pass
between Desdemona and Cassio on their first landing
in Cyprus,^ with the proceedings of Cressida on her
arrival in the Grecian camp.^ The actual conduct in
each case is agreeable to polite Elizabethan manners
but while in Desdemona it means no more than a
waltz means to-day, in Cressida it means, at best, a

fatal The more one considers

weakness of nature.
these two characters together, in short, the more plaus-
iblebecomes the surmise that they might have been
studied from the same model. The wide divergence
of view which they express concerning the same visible
lines of conduct is certainly characteristic of Shaks-
pere. In Lovers Labour we remember, he ^s Lost,
constantly burlesqued the very affectations he was
perpetrating. In Pyramus and Thishe, he gave a

1 Othello, IV. iii. » Othello, IL i. 97-103, 168-179.

« IV. V. 17-63.
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 277

comic version of his own first tragedy. We have

lately seen such variations on the same theme as the
speeches of Portia and of Isabella on mercy, or, better
still, the speeches on death of Hamlet and of Claudio.
Another similar variation on a given theme we may
reasonably guess to occur in the characters of Cressida
and of Desdemona.
For all this, we must never forget that Troilus and
Cressida is a play concerning which, in such a study as
ours, we may never speak with certainty. All we may
surely say is that, wherever it belong, it is a reflective,
and so a bad play, which expresses very definitely
Shakspere's artistic sense both of the irony of fate,
and of the evil inherent in the fact that women are
women. Here, for the first time, indeed, — apart from
such figures as Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Overdone,
— we find bad women. In all this there are analogies
to the plays which certainly belong hereabouts. Troilus
and Cressida, too, reveals the sort of inertia which
generally marks the minor work of a period when
Shakspere's greater work was doing. A puzzle we
found Troilus and Cressida, though, and a puzzle we
must leave it; our best comment must be guess-work.
278 WlLLIzUl SHAKSrERE

VII. Othello.

was entered in the Stationers' Register on October 6th,

[Othello
1621 and
; appeared in an abridged quarto in 1622. It is the only play

of Shakspere's first published between 1609 and the folio of 1623. In

the diary of the Secretary to Prince Louis Frederick of Wiirtemberg,
itwas thus mentioned on April 30th, 1610; " Lundi . S. E. alia au
. .

Globe, lieu ordinaire au Ton joue les Commedies, y fut represente'

I'histoire du More de Venise." It is also recorded among fourteen

plays given at court shortly before May 20th, 1613. According to

Mr. Fleay,^ it was acted at court on November 1st, 1604.
Its source is evidently a novel in Cinthio's Hecatommithi, of which

no early English translation is known.

Critics are generally agreed in conjecturally assigning it to 1604.]

If Troilus and Cressida be a puzzle, nothing in

Shakspere is less like it than Othello, which is per-
haps the most modern of Shakspere's plays. On our
own stage no other is so absorbing, so free from traces
of archaic origin, which we must overcome before we
can surrender ourselves to the performance.
A suggestive reason for this peculiar effect of

Othello has been proposed by Mr. Greene :

—
*^The most obvious characteristic of Othello seems to be
an attempted return to convention. Shakspere has here
taken a tale of blood, and has set to work to produce a
sensational play. His almost involuntary truth turns
Othello from its possibilities of mere blood-tragedy to what
it is, — a broadly handled tragedy of character."

1 Life, p. 255.
 OTHELLO 279

Such Othello certainly is just as surely it is also

;

what commonplaces call it, —

the supreme tragedy of
jealousy. Everything in the play tends to set forth
this lasting fact of human nature. There is no under
plot; hardly any scenes do not bear directly on the
story ; there is less discursive matter than we find
almost anywhere else. Naturally, then, we think of
this broadly handled tragedy of character, dealing so
consummately with an absorbing human passion, as a
thing apart in the work of Shakspere or at least as ;

related to his other work by little else than its pas-

sionate conception and its masterly handling.
Only after we are free from the spell which, whether
we read or see Othello^ the play must cast upon us,
can we trace its relations to other works. After a
while, the similarity of its general motive to the story
of Claudio and Hero and Don John, in Much Ado
About Nothing^ begins to appear ; and we find Shaks-
pere once more presenting old matter in a new light.

The new light, however, makes the matter seem new.

What this light is has been suggestively stated by
Mr. Young :
—
**The mood [of Othello'] seems to me something more
than jealousy and the agony of it, — it seems a sense of
the power of sexual love as a motive force in life. The
subject-matter of many of the preceding plays, it may be
recalled,was chiefly concerned witli this passion in its
darker aspects. Shakspere's mind, it may be said safely
enough, had dwelt on this subject. The result was a pretty
clear perception of the nature of this passion, of its differ-
280 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
ent manifestations in persons of different character, and of
its influence upon personal conduct and upon the general
surface aspect of life. The perception of these facts Shaks-
pere seems to have recorded in the artistic terms of the
plot, the characterization, and the atmosphere or back-
ground of Othello. . . . The
shows first that the
plot
fortuitous meeting of Othello and Desdemona, and the
existence of sexual love in its purer, nobler form between
them, warped the life of each from that normal line of de-
velopment which their environment would naturally have
determined. These lives were brought to a tragic end by
the machinations of a villain actuated, to be sure, not essen-
tially by lust, but by ambition ; the special direction of
which, however, was given by a desire to revenge himself
upon two men — Cassio and Othello — whom he sus-
pected of intrigue with his wife. . . . The characteriza-
tion even more significant than the plot of Shakspere's
is

perception of the power of sexual love as a motive force in

life. Not a character of any importance but is subject to
this passion in some form. In Desdemona it was of
course beautifully pure and ideal in Othello not so much ;

of the beast had been worked out; ... in lago there was
just enough of this passion to keep him from being a mere
flame of villany —
in which respect he is singularly like
Goneril and Regan; inRoderigo was the mere gross sensu-
ality, of which [a comparison of Othello with its sources
shows that] Shakspere deliberately relieved lago; in
Emilia, the vulgar half- virtue could become, for reason
enough, something worse; in Cassio and Bianca the pas-
sion . . was manifest in its mercenary aspect. In no
.

case, except that of Bianca, did this passion operate, as a

motive force, in the form of mere jealousy."
 OTHELLO 281

Mere jealousy, however, without subtle analysis,

would have been enough finally to remind us that the
concentrated passion and power of Othello only inten-
sify the old motive of the mystery inherent in the fact
that men are men and women are women. Jealousy,
after all, is but a new phase of this, and a more ab-
sorbing. Again, the fact that Otliello's jealousy is

really groundless revives the old motive of self-decep-

tion, now become fiercely tragic. The way, further-
more, in which every one is juggled with by lago, to
an end ultimately abortive, is a fresh, more limited
expression of the ironical motive. Here, indeed, we
have such a tragedy as but for the blundering of clowns
might have happened in Leonato's city of Messina.
Considering Othello as a technical work of art, one
first notices the surprising theatrical skill of its

construction. One thinks of it generally as a series

of sustained, crescent scenes and situations, still ad-
mirable on the stage, which lead the story straight
from its romantic beginning to its tragic end. So
constantly are the characters subordinated to their
dramatic purpose — saying, doing, thinking, being
little else than what the plot demands — that only
when we consider them apart do we begin to appre-
ciate how thoroughly each, from greatest to smallest,
is individual.
Most individual of all, perhaps, is lago. Concerning
lago, Mr. Greene's notes are suggestive. Referring
to his belief that in Othello Shakspcre meant to re-
turn to convention, he declares lago to be
282 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
*' the most striking illustration of this attempted reaction,
lago is undoubtedly built up from the conventional villain.
The traces of the original are still evident in his essential
devilishness. Crime is pleasant to him. T will not assert
that such a man cannot exist; but I know that he is im-
probable. Shakspere, however, started out with him, and
having done so imagined him so really . that he is plau- . .

sible. Shakspere gives him motives not strong enough for

a healthy mind ; they are not enough to make him real.

His cynical worldly wisdom, though, added to his appa-

rent blunt honesty, makes him alive as a thinker, in spite
of his conventional origin . . . and of the frequently con-
ventional method by which Shakspere treats him. lago
is made to go into direct self-revelation by monologue to
an exaggerated extent ; and yet lago is alive. This
. . .

life comes from the things which lago says and does that

astound you by the absolute certainty that he, not Shaks-

pere, did or said them. For instance, when the fiend
kneels with Othello ^ we are astonished, while we know
that he did it. Shakspere's insight is what saves the
play, and, indeed, keeps the careless reader from guessing
}}
how nearly it is a conventional gore-piece.'

This criticism touches on a phase of lago which is

not generally noticed. His motives, it says, are not

strong enough for a healthy mind. As Mr. Young's
criticism suggested, indeed, the lago of Shakspere
has distinctly less motive than the character in Cin-
thio's novel from which he is developed; that per-
sonage was possessed by the passion for his general's
wife which Shakspere has transferred to the witless

1 m. iii. 461.
 OTHELLO 283

Roderigo. Yet in this drama of which the chief

trait is concentration, lago, for all his lack of mo-
tive, seems concentration personified. Diabolical, one
feels like calling him, —
diabolical both in the inhu-
man activity of his intelligence and in the inhuman
concentration of his almost motiveless evil purpose.
Yet lago is not a devil; though horribly abnormal,
he remains comprehensibly human. Not diabolical,
then, but abnormal, we find him. It is only a step
further to feel that his abnormal activity and abnor-
mal concentration of mind are almost maniacal.
Then look at his last speech :
^ —
'* Demand me nothing what you know, you know
:

From this time forth I never will speak word."

Without being an expert in lunacy, one knows of the

silent, glaring madmen. It is with figures like these
that lago ranges himself at last.
The notion that lago was mad would probably
have been new to Shakspere. To Shakspere, lago
would probably have seemed, like Hamlet and Fal-
staff and all the rest before him, onlv one of those
mysterious creatures of imagination who somehow
grow into independent Hamlet, to be
existence.
sure, might seem mad to some, who were welcome
to think him so if they chose even Othello might ;

seem swept by self-deluding passion beyond the verge

of reason; but lago — cool, cunning, shrewd — could
never seem anything but an incarnation of diabolical

» V. ii. 303.
284 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
intelligence. This very fact tlirovrs startling light
on the state of Shakspere's mind. The Shakspere of
Othello is quite as saneand as masterly as the Shaks-
pere of Hamlet ; but, like the Shakspere who created
Hamlet, the Shakspere who created lago sympatheti-
cally understood, while at the same time he utterly
controlled, a specific phase of madness.
an analogy, both to Hamlet and to
Here, then, is

King Lear, which has not been generally remarked.

Throughout the period of his great tragedies, Shaks-
pere gave evidence, partly unwitting, that he under-
stood madness. Such an analogy as this is probably
too subtle to have been known to the man whose
mental state it illustrates. An analogy of which, on
the other hand, he might probably have been aware
is that which has already been pointed out between
Cressida and Desdemona.^ In character, as well as
aspect, Desdemona and Cressida have one common
trait : both are untruthful. In Cressida the fact is

constantly palpable ; in Desdemona one feels it less.

Look at the indirectness of her coquetry, though, in
half wooing Othello ^ look at Brabantio's last speech
;

to her,3 true enough to contain the seed of final evil

look at her prevarication about the handkerchief.*
For all her tenderness and purity, Desdemona's word
is not always to be trusted. There is something in
her nature, as well as in her aspect, which groups her
v\^ith the Trojan wanton, giving color to the slanders

1 Seep. 275. 2 i. in. 145-170.

3 Ibid. 293. * III. iv. 23-29, 52-102.
 OTHELLO 285

of lago. The more one studies these characters to-

gether, the more alike they seem.

Desdemona, however, is in no sense a repetition of
Cressida. Like every other character in Othello she
is completely individual. This thorough individuali-
zation of character gives Othello its specific atmos-
phere. The presence of so many real people involves
a real world for them to live and move in. One asks
no questions as to what or where this world is one ;

accepts it ; and finally one grows aware that it is not

only real, but actually foreign to England. Here we
touch on one of the most marked traits of Othello.
Exactly how one cannot say, the play is consummately
Italian, —a more veracious piece of creative fiction
than was ever made by all the scribblers of pedanti-
cally accurate detail. In origin, of course, the plot is

Italian ; the characters fit the plot so perfectly, that

they and their background alike become Italian, too.
See Othello played by an Italian company, and you
will feel this more and more. For all that you lose the
wonderful poetry of the lines, you often seem nearer
the truth than any English actors can bring you.
To lose the poetry of Othello, however, to lose any
much. This style is very
detail of its style, is to lose
difTerent from that of Measure for Measure, of Trollus
and Cressida, and of other plays, still to come, where
the lines are overcharged with meaning. Almost
every line of Othello is so adapted to its purpose that
we accept speech after speech as actual utterances.
On consideration, how^ever, we find that nobody has
286 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
been speaking the plain dialect of daily life ; one
and all the personages have sustained throughout
the lasting elevation of poetry. The delight the style
has given us, then, proves different from what we first

thought it — or, better,more profound. Not only is

every word in character, but every word also adds to

the beauty of a noble tragic poem. No style could be
theoretically better.
The superficial simplicity of Othello strengthens
the general impression which the play makes. By
this timewe have seen enough of Shakspere to un-
derstand that some of his works seem more con-
sciously self -revealing than others. In some, at
least, one feels that he must have been aware of
the underlying motive : as an artist, for example,
whatever his private convictions, Shakspere must
have realized the beauty of the Midsummer NigMs
Dream^ the patriotic didacticism of Henry F!, the
passionate art of the Sonnets^ the irony of Julius
Ccesar, the mystery of Hamlet, the grim philosophy
of Measure for Measure. In other works, one feels
that to Shakspere himself the effects detected by
modern criticism would have been surprises; his
effort, one feels, was simply, with full control of
his power, to express a mood or a fact which seemed
wholly foreign to himself: such, for example, would
be the sentimental tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, the
romantic comedy of the Merchant of Venice, the un-
controllable vitality of Falstaff. It is among these
works, which to the artist we may suppose to have
 KIXG LEAR 287

seemed thoroughly objective, that we may most rea-

sonably class Othello.
Objective and concentrated, then, we may believe
Shakspere to have deemed this tremendous study of
an isolated passion ;
purely artistic in motive, beyond
the plays lately considered. Modern analysis, how-
e7er, can discover in Othello unsuspected analogies
to the work about it. One of these is its irony ; its

constant dwelling on the mysteries of sex is another

others still are the maniacal activity and concentra-
tion of lago, the Cressid-like surface of Desdemona,
the fatal self-deception of Othello. Whatever be the
truth of our chronology, in short, Othello is surely
such a work as one might expect after Hamlet and
Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.

VIII. — King Lear.

[" Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was

played before the Kinges Majestie at Whitehall uppon Sainct Stephens
night at Christmas last " was entered in the Stationers' Register on
November 26th, 1607. The play thus entered was twice published in
quarto during 1608. In each case the titlepage is peculiar, reading aa
follows :
—
" M. William Shake-speare,
HIS
True Chronicle History of the life

and death of King Lear, and his

three Daughters
With the unfortunate life o/'Edgar
Sonne and heire to the Earle of Glocester, and
his sullen and assumed hujnour of Tom
of Bedlam.
288 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
At the head of the text is a similarly peculiar title :
—
" M. William Shake-speare
HIS
History, of King Lear."

This unique emphasis ou the name of Shakspere is probably due to the

publication in 1605 of an old play, entered in the Stationers' Register
on May 8, 1605, as "The Tragical History of King Leir and his three
;
daughters, as it was lately acted " but really rather a comic than a
tragic chronicle-history. This publication is believed to have been an
attempt to avail of the popularity of Shakspere's play.
The probable sources of Shakspere 's King Lear are this old play
and the chronicle of Holinshed ; and, for the story of Gloster, the tale
of the blind king of Paphlagonia in Sidney's Arcadia. The story of
Lear, however, was familiar, existing in many early versions, of which
the most familiar is Spenser's.^
From various internal evidence, together with the publication of the
rival play. King Lear is generally assigned to 1605.]

One is apt to forget that a play which seems so

modern as Othello was made for the Elizabethan
theatre. After Othello^ then, we need some sharp
reminder that this Shakspere whom we are study-
ing could never have dreamt of such a stage or
such a world as ours. We could have none sharper
than we find in King Lear.
Whether you read this great tragedy, or see it on
the stage, the effect produced by any single and swift
consideration of must nowadays be one of murky,
it

passionate, despairing confusion. The common an-

swer to any consequent complaint, is that to appreciate
King Lear you should study it. This is perfectly
true. Equally true, however, is a fact not so often
1 Faerie Queene, XL x. 27-32.
 KING LEAR 289

emphasized King Lear was certainly meant to be

:

acted; and when a play is acting neither players nor

audience are at liberty to stop for reflective comment.
Far more than a novel, or a poem, or any piece of
pure literature, a play, which is made to be played
straight through, must be conceived by both its maker
and its audiences as a unit. In criticising any stage-
play, this fact should never be forgotten. Whoever
remembers it will probably continue to find King
Lear, read or seen at a single sitting, magnificently
confused.
For this there are several obvious reasons. In the
first place, the style of the play is overpacked with
meaning; in the second place, the situations are so
often rather intellectually than visibly dramatic that
to see them helps little toward their interpretation ;

in the third place, the technical traits which probably

made King Lear popular with Elizabethan audiences
belong, far more than is usual in Shakspere's later
work, to the obsolete conditions of Shakspere's time.
Two may serve to emphasize the
or three examples
excessive compactness of King Lear. Perhaps none
are more to our purpose than may be found in the
trial by battle.^ This clearly revives a situation pre-
viously used with effect, — perhaps in the combat be-
tween Hector and Ajax,^ and certainly in the trial at

arms between Hamlet and Laertes, and in the final

struggle between Richard III. and Richmond. Dis-

1 V. iii. 107-150.
« Trollus and Cressida, IV. v. 65-117.
19
290 WILLIA:M SHAKSPEPxE

liuctly themost elaborate previous use of it, however,

and the use most similar to what we find here, occurred
in Richard 11. There the first 122 lines of the third
scene are given to the trial by battle between Boling-
broke and Norfolk. Every one of these lines is a
sonorous piece of half-operatic verse ; though they do
not mean much, they sound splendidly and no mat- ;

ter how fast the actors should rattle them off, there is
no serious danger of obscurity. The first challenge ^
is a fair example of the whole scene :
—
'*
Mar, In God's name and the king's, say who thou art
And why thou comest thus knightly clad in arms,
Against what man thou comest, and what thy quarrel
Speak on thy knighthood and thy oath
truly,
As so defend thee heaven and thy valour !

Mow. My name is Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk;

Who hither come engaged by my oath —
Which God defend a knight should violate 1 —
Both to defend my loyalty and truth
To God, my king and my succeeding issue,
Against the Duke of Hereford that appeals me;
And, by the grace of God and this mine arm,
To prove him, in defending of myself,
A traitor to my God, my king, and me:
^
And as I truly fight, defend me heaven !
i

Compare with this the challenge in King Lear : ^ — '

*' Her. What are you ?

Your name, your quality ? and why you answer
This present summons ?
Edg. Know, my name is lost;

By treason's tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit

Yet am I noble as the adversary
I come to cope."

1 Rich. TT I. iii. 11-25. 2 y. iii. 119-124.

 KING LEAR 291

A little later in the scene Edmund thus returns the

lie to Edgar :
^ —
"Back do I toss these treasons to thy head;
With the hell-hated lie o'ervvhelm thy heart;
Which, for tliey yet glance by and scarcely bruise,
This sword of mine shall give them instant way,
Where they shall rest for ever. Trumpets, speak " !

Read these last two speeches as fast as an actor,

duly counterfeiting the excitement of the moment,
must give them, and you will find that they puzzle

any hearer who does not know them by heart. The

contrast shown by these quotations persists through-
out the scenes in question. In Richard IL the trial

by battle fills 122 lines, and even then only begins ;

in 44 lines of King Lear, which involve vastly more

dramatic expression of character than is found in the
older scene, the trial by battle is carried to an end.
Actual compactness, then, is one reason why the
style of King Lear is at first glance obscure. Philoso-
phizing thrown in with no dramatic purpose often
deepens the obscurity. In the first scene of the
fourth act, for example, Edgar enters and soliloquizes
thus :
—
" Yet better thus, and known to be contemn'd,
Than still contenmVl and flatter'd. To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune.
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear
The lamentable change is from the best;

1 Ibid. U6-1jO.
292 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
'*
Owes nothing to thy blasts. But who comes here ?

In response to this cue, Gloster enters, blind, and

led by an old man, to whom within a few lines he
remarks :
^ —
•*
I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw : full oft 't is seen,
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities."

Though an}' one can study out what these generali-

zationsmean, no human being could ever have guessed
from a single hasty hearing yet, apart from their ;

actual meaning, they have no dramatic use. The

truth is that such detailed illustration of the obscurity
which pervades King Lear was probably needless.
Open the play anywhere, read a dozen lines, and you
will find yourself either amazed by their concentrated
significance, or puzzled by their excessive compact-
ness. On the stage such a style could never have
been effective.

Ineffective on the stage, too, for all the intellec-

tually dramatic strength of their conception, are
many notable situations in King Lear. A single
example will serve our purpose : take the great
sixth scene of the third act, where mad King Lear,
and his mournful Fool, and Edgar, who feigns mad-
ness, sit together, like a court in bank, to judge

1 Lines 20-23.
 KING LEAK 293

an imaginary Goneril and Regan. However skilfully

this be played, the grotesqueness of the three mad
figures is bound to distract any modern mind from
the tragic significance of the situation Yet, to any
modern mind, the thought of regarding such a scene
as grotesque is repellent.
So we come to the third reason why King Lear is

nowadays puzzling. The superficial grotesqueness of

that very scene clearly suggests this reason.
Glance at the titlepage of the quarto. King Lear
was evidently set forth as a chronicle-history ; and
indeed it from what we still recognize as
differs
chronicle-history more in substance than in manner.
Nowadays we make a sharp distinction between Plan-
tagenets and the legendary sovereigns of prehistoric
Britain. Holinshed makes little no Elizabethan au-
;

dience would have made much and King Lear ;

is translated straight from Holinshed to the Eliza-

bethan stage. A playwright who should make a

popular chronicle-history, however, was bound to
translate his material into popular terms. In the
case of King Lear^ the rival quarto of 1605 and the
emphasis on Shakspere's name in the two quartos of
1608 go far to prove that, at least when new, Shaks-
pere's chronicle-history of King Lear was popular.
Clearly this must have been in spite of the undue
compactness of style which gives us fresh evidence
of Shakspere's abnormal mental activity. At first
sight, too, this popularity would seem to have existed
in spite of the essentially unactable quality of such
scenes as that where the mad court sits.
294 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Glance again, though, at the titlepage. Remember
that on the titlepage of the quarto of Henry IV.
Falstaff had as much room as the King and that on ;

the titlepage of the quarto of Henry V. there was al-

most as much space given to Ancient Pistol. Clearly
enough, these were the brands of comic sauce which
added relish to the serious portions of the older
chronicle-histories. On the titlepage of King Lear
we find the same prominence given to ""
Edgar, sonne
and heire to the Earle of Glocester, and his sullen
and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam." Startling
as the obvious conclusion may seem, it is unavoid-
able : the character of Edgar, at least so far as his
feigned madness went, was intended to be broadly
comic. In this respect, too, it was not peculiar but
conventional. To go no further, consider the comic
scenes of Middleton's Changeling and that dance of ;

madmen in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, which nowa-

days seems so inexplicable. Once for all, the ravings
of actualmadness were conventionally accepted as
comic by an Elizabethan audience, just as drunken-
ness is so accepted to-day.
Grasp and you will find the strangest of
this fact,
transformations in Kihg Lear himself. Shakspere
never conceived a character with deeper sympathetic
insight. Nowadays, that is what we think of, just
as nowadays we think of Shylock's profound human
nature.^ To go no further than the scene of the mad
court, however, Lear is shown to us as a raving mad-
man, and as such still looks grotesque. When Shaks-
1 See p. 151 seq.
 KING LEAR 295

pere wrote, this grotesqueness, to-day so repellent,

was a thing in which audiences were accustomed to
delight. Only when we understand that King Lear,
for all his marvellous pathos, was meant, in scene
after scene, to impress an audience as comic, can
we begin to understand the theatrical intention of
Shakspere's tragedy.
Conventionally comic in this aspect, the part of
King Lear appealed also to another Elizabethan taste
of which little trace remains. As any of the old
tragedies of blood or chronicle-histories will show,
Elizabethan audiences delighted in sonorous rant. If
no traces of the older plays were left, Hamlet's ad-
vice to the players would suggest this, as well as
^

the existence of a ripening taste which deprecated

undue bombast. At the same time, this ripening
taste, according to Ben Jonson,^ had not prevailed even
in 1614, when there were still men left to " sweare
Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best playes." How
to gratify this taste for rant without violating pro-
priety, then, was a fine artistic problem. Shakspere
solved it in the tremendously ranting speeches which
fitly express the madness of Lear. At once ranting
and grotesque, the madness of Lear, to-day so su-
premely and solely tragic, was probably the trait which
chiefly made the P]lizabcthan public relish this play.
To dwell on these obsolete, archaic traits of King
Lear has been doubly worth our while. They should
1 Hamlet, ITT. ii.

^ Induction to Barihohmew Fair. 6ee p. 66.

296 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
serve, in the first place, to remind us of what we have
lately inclined to forget, — that, with all their lasting
greatness, Shakspere's tragedies were made for con-
ditions so remote from ours that any student who
should neglect their history runs constant risk of mis-
understanding. In the second place, more notably
still, such obsolete Elizabethan traits as probably
secured the early popularity of King Lear are traits
which the author must deliberately have introduced.
Without meaning to, an artist may imply endless
truth ; when work to a popular
his art adapts his
demand, however, he can hardly be unaware of it.
The traits which make King Lear permanently
great, on the other hand, are very different from
what we have considered. No popular audience could
ever much have relished them. They are the traits
of thought, of imagination, of diction alike, which are
generally characteristic of Shakspere. Nowhere do
they appear, on study, more distinctly. No play of
Shakspere's more surely rewards elaborate considera-
tion. A single example will suffice us, — the excel-
lent reasons which Goneril and Regan have to justify
what is commonly held to be their gross ingratitude.
In the first place, these women have inherited from
their father an impetuous, overbearing temper, of the
kind which is especially sensitive to the exhibition of
its own weaknesses by other people. Constitutionally,
then, they would be specially liable to provocation by
a man so like them as their father. In the second
place, their elaborate professions of filial devotion are
 KING LEAR 297

not essentially insincere ; they are simply elaborate

manifestations of such formal etiquette as still appears
in the formula} of correspondence. Cordelia's sincerity
is an excess of not too mannerly virtue ; Goneril's and
Regan's protestations of love are only what court
manners conventionally require. Lear, quartered with
Goneril, behaves outrageously,^ and she is justifiably
angry ; her anger manifests itself, characteristically,

not by a direct outburst, but by orders, quite in

accordance with court etiquette, that Lear and his
rowdies be treated with abruptness. Just at this
moment, Lear engages as a servant the disguised
Earl of Kent, a very loyal, but a very hot-tempered
nobleman.2 When Goneril's steward is rude to Lear,
Kent — believed to be an ordinary serving man —
trips the steward up, thereby giving full color to
the worst tales of Lear's rowdyism. Goneril there-
upon, in fierce temper, remonstrates. Whereupon,
amid the noisy chatter of his Fool, Lear, instead of
listening to reason, proceeds to curse her, to rave, and
to rush off to Regan. Naturally incensed, Goneril
sends to Regan an unvarnished statement of what
has occurred. Her messenger is the very steward
whom Kent has thrashed. Kent meets him at Glos-
ter's castle ^ and addresses him in a way which,
;

while perhaps tolerable from a nobleman to a ser-

vant, is quite intolerable between men of equal rank,
which the disguise of Kent makes them appear. An-
other quarrel ensues. Regan and her husband come
1 I. iii. 2 I. iv. 8 n. ii.
298 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
on the scene, to receive from Kent, Lear's messenger,
no more explanation of his violent behavior than that
he does not like the countenance of Goneril's steward.
Cornwall, Regan's husband, suggests that his own
personal appearance, or Regan's, might perhaps be
equally distasteful. To which Kent answers,^ —
*' Sir, 't is my occupation to be plain :

I have seen better faces in my time

Than stands on any shoulder that I see
Before me at this instant.'*

Such conduct in a man whom nobody dreams to be

anything out a common servant, merits the stocks.
The worst stories of Goneril are confirmed, before
Regan hears them, by this scandalous conduct of
Lear's insolent follower. When Lear arrives,^ Regan,
once for all, will no more harbor rowdyism than will
Goneril. Lear's behavior is in no way conciliatory.
Finally, before he plunges off into the storm, both of
his daughters have been worked up into such a rage
that if they had acted as modern moralists command
they would certainly have been too good for human
nature. Given their temperaments, the conduct of
Lear, and the misunderstanding involved in the clash
between the character and the disguise of Kent, and
nothing could be more humanly justifiable than their
behavior. Yet so carefully is the intention of the
plot preserved that to this day these passionate, hu-
man women are considered to be what Lear and the
1 Lines 98-101. ^ u. \y.
 KING LEAR 299

audience were expected to find them, — monsters of

ingratitude.
To a student such not obvious but clearly discover-
able traits as this, make any work of art fascinating
and King Lear constantly rewards minute criticism.
Some have made a pathologic study of Lear's madness ;

others have delighted in aisthetic study of the means

by which so painful a tragedy has been made to pro-
duce an effect of lasting beauty. Any study of King
Lear reaps rich The intensity, the concen-
results.
tration of the play makes many critics speak of it
as Shakspere's masterpiece.
This criticism is surely not final. Vastly though
King Lear reward study, it surely demands study
and a masterpiece should possess not only the com-
plexity but also the simplicity of greatness. Sim-
plicity King Lear lacks, from the constant intensity
of its concentration. Almost every other trait of
greatness, however, it possesses; among them the
trait that, whether we understand it or not, it pro-
duces an emotional effect peculiarly its own. The
mood which underlies it is hard to phrase; murky,
one may call it, passionate, despairing, terrible, tran-
sitory —
and never be much nearer the truth than
one began.
In this mood, however, there is clearly irony. Men
are the sport of fate, as surely as were lago and Ham-
let and Brutus. The irony of King Lear^ however,
differs from the irony we have known before it is ;

accompanied by a rush of emotion which at first seems

300 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
to overpower thought. What need of thought ? seems
the impulse here : thought cannot help us any whither.
To the winds with it ! Yet yield to emotion — as
Lear yields — and fate is just as pitiless ; fate is even
more horrible still, for that way lies madness. Clearly
enough, in this conscious presentation of madness
there is trace of the overwrought state of mind which
revealed itself in the insane concentration of lago, in
the maniacal intellectual activity of Hamlet.
Again, in the villainy of Goneril and of Regan, in
the story of Edmund, in the bitter obscenities of Lear's
ravings and of the Fool, we have fresh evidence of the
sexual mystery so constantly touched on in Othello,
in Troilusand Cressida, in Measure for Measure, in
Hamlet, in AlVs Well that Ends Well, and in the
Sonnets,
Throughout King Lear, too, passionate emotion
sweeps on with a surge hitherto unfelt. It tran-

scends all human power. It must needs be set in

the most passionate of natural backgrounds, — the

fiercest of Such critics as might
actual tempests.
feel beneath the mood of Hamlet a lurking musical

cadence could find no hidden music here, but rather

would dream of the roll of thunder in the night.
In King Lear, however, there is something even
more profound than this storm of passion. Othello
contained wonderful touches of concentrated pathos
every one must find them, for example, in the last
hours of Desdemona.^ In King Lear one feels pathos
1 Othello, IV. iii.
 KING LEAR 301

throughout. Fate-ridden, passionate man is pitiful,

pitiful. Finally comes a deeper emotion still. The

storm lulls ; death reveals itself, no longer a mys-
tery, but a despairing solution of the problem of human
agony. Such timid dreams as Hamlet's and Clau-
dio's have no place in such misery as Lear's. There
is no need to vex ourselves with fancies of what may

lie beyond. No world, no life could be more evil than

this of ours. Kent's farewell to the old King ^ speaks
the final word of King Lear : —
"Vex not his ghost : 0, let him pass ! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer."

This overpowering mood which underlies King Lear

seems, like the mood of Hamlet^ emotionally sincere
— self-revealing— to a degree unusual with Shakspere.
To know such a mood, one grows to believe, he must
have penetrated, really or sympathetically, deeper than
we have yet guessed into the depths of spiritual suf-
fering. For whoever wrote King Lear must have
been intellectually alert to the verge of madness
passionately sensitive the while to all the misery
he perceived ; ironical yet pitiful ; kept within the
bounds of sanity mostly by the blessed accident that
he had mastered and controlled a great art of ex-
pression and yet despite his art, able to find no bet-
;

ter comfort for all this misery thaa the certainty that,
at all events as we know life, life mercifully ends.

1 V. iii. 313.
302 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

IX. Macbeth.

[The first record of Macbeth is in the note-book of one Dr. Simon

Forman, who saw it at the Globe on April 20th, 1610. His note
which is too long for quotation here, begins thus " There was to be
observed, first how Macbeth and Banquo, two noblemen of Scotland,
riding through a wood, there stood before them three women Fairies,
or Nymphs, and saluted Macbeth, saying three times unto him. Hail,
King of Coder, for thou shalt be a King, but shalt beget no Kings,
etc." No other indubitable mention of Macbeth has been discovered
until its entry in 1623, and its publication in the folio.

Its source, like that of King Lear and the chronicle-histories, is

Holinshed. There seems to have been an earlier play on the subject.

Macbeth, in its present condition, is evidently incomplete, — either an
unfinished sketch, or an abridgment of a finished play.- There has
been much discussion as to whether muchwasof the witch-scenes
not probably added by Middleton. On various internal grounds, how-
ever, including the fact that so-called light and weak endings to lines
here first appear to any considerable degree, Macbeth has generally
been assigned to about 1606.]

At a glance one can see that Macbeth differs

conspicuously from any other play of Shakspere's.
It is comparatively very short,^ very monotonous,
and very firm. There is hardly any underplot, hardly
any comic matter. One scene, to he sure, that of —
the bleeding sergeant,^ — is so archaic as to suggest
that it may possibly be a fragment of some older play
1 In the Globe Shakespeare it occupies 22 pages, while Hamlet
occupies 35, and King Lear and Othello each occupy about 32. The
Leopold Shakspere, p. cxxiii., gives Hamlet 3931 lines, King Leat
3332, Othello 3317, and Macbeth 2108.
^ I. ii.
 :macbktii 30:>

another, — that wliere Macduff and Ross meet Malcolm

in England,^ — while taken straight from Ilolinshed,
is so liighly finished as to suggest either that it is the
single remaining fragment of a more elaborate play
than now remains, or else that it was either written in
a momentary lapse of mood, or inserted later, when
the emotional impulse which pervades Macbeth had
subsided. Apart from these scenes, hardly anything
but the Witches and the Porter interrupts the swift,
steady progress of the action.
Similar concentration of purpose we found in Othello,
While every detail of Othello^ however, is developed
with masterly care, Macbeth is only blocked out with
masterly firmness of hand; nowhere elaborated.
it is*

Not long ago, an Elizabethan play the Maid's Trag- —

edy^ oi Beaumont and Fletcher —
was adapted for a
private performance by the simple process of striking
out the underplot, and whatever else did not concern
the principal story. The result was a short, admi-
rably dramatic play, remarkable for swift firmness of
action and development, but somehow — while essen-
tially complete — subtly unfinished. In other words,
afterdue allowance for the difference between Sliaks-
pere and Beaumont and Fletcher, the effect produced
by thus isolating the main plot of the Maid's Tragedy
was closely analogous to the effect of Macbeth.
Macbeth, in short, what we should expect
is just
from a collaborator who had agreed to furnish the
serious part of a chronicle-history, or a tragedy, to be

1 IV. iii.
304 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
completed by comic scenes from somebody else. Bet-
ter still, perhaps,what we should expect from
it is

an Elizabethan playwright who, carried away by one

aspect of his subject, had finished one part independ-
ently, leaving the rest for some future moment which
never came. Equally, of course, it is what you may
make of any complete Elizabethan tragedy by cutting
out everything but the main action. If it were ever
finished, this is probably what has happened to it ; if
not, the play gives two or three indications of why
further finish may have seemed needless. One of
these is its dramatic effectiveness ; it still acts admi-
rably. Another is that, while too long to admit a
fully developed underplot within the limits of a single
performance, it is too compact to be abridged without
injury.
As to whether Machethhe a sketch or an abridgment
there is no direct evidence. Mr. Fleay ^ and many
other competent critics believean abridgment. The
it

analogies between the witch-scenes and Middleton's

Witch 2 might be held to point the other way. Con-
ceivably they might indicate that the witch-scenes in
the original play were so slight as to need augmenta-
tion ; if would be a little reason
so, there to believe
Macbeth not an abridgment but a sketch. The gen-
eral effect of the style, too, points slightly towards the
same conclusion ; throughout the play there is such

> Life, 238-242.

2 Discussed in Furness, Variorum Shakespeare .• Macbeth, pp. 388-
405.
 MACBETH 305

swift precision of touch as one would expect in a

hasty, consecutive piece of master-work. What Mac-
beth lacks, too, apart from comic passages and under-
plot, is chiefly that elaboration of minor characters

and of subtle phrase which careful finish would supply,

and which a sketch would probably lack.
To say that Macbeth lacks anything, however, seems
stupid it lacks nothing essential in total effect no
; ;

play could be more definitely complete. Until one

count the lines, indeed, it is hard to realize how few
the strokes are by which this effect is produced.
Elaboration could add nothing but detail and occa-
sional relief.
In certain moods, one may fairly feel that Macbeth
needs relief. Its temper is certainly monotonous, with
a terrible monotony of despair. Macbeth himself is

a wonderful study of fate-ridden, irresponsible, yet

damning crime. Meaningless in one aspect such a
figure seems; yet its appalling, unmeaning mystery
is everlastingly true. This view of human nature is

again like that formulated by Calvinism.^ Forced to

sin by an incarnate power beyond himself, man, eter-
nally unregenerate, is nevertheless held to account for
every act of a will perverted by the sin and the curse
of ancestral humanity. He is the sport of external
powers; and so far as these powers deal with him
they are all evil, malicious, wreaking ill without end.
Life, then, is a horrible mystery ; it is a" fitful fever,'* ^

after which perhaps the chosen few may sleep well ; it

1 See pp. 261), 273. 2 ni. ii. 23.

2r
306 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
is " a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signi-
fying nothing." ^ Consciousness, indeed, is a delirium,
a raving imbecility ; yet when the end comes he who
first cries " Hold, enough " ^ jg damned for the deeds
!

of his delirious The hackneyed rhyme of

raving.
Macbeth's last speech makes us forget, for an instant,
the full horror of its triumphantly Calvinistic mean-
ing. As we ponder, the horror grows; there are
moods in which we cry out a protest.
In other moods, more subtly aesthetic, we may find
in Macbeth as it stands all the relief we need. Its

amazing precision of style is so stimulating that one

may constantly delight in the lines, quite apart from
their significance.^ In King Lear^ as we sa\^, a tre-
mendous access of thought deprives the style of sim-
plicity. In Macbeth the superficial simplicity of style
is remarkable ; one is rarely puzzled by overpacked
meaning. Somehow, though, for all its superhuman
power, the style of Macbeth has not the final quality
which marks the difference between a masterly sketch
and a finished work of art. Yet no one would alter it.
Quite apart from style, too, the ultimate truth to
life of both characters and situations throughout gives
one a pleasure which goes far to obviate the horror
of the motive. nowhere more
This truth to life is

remarkable than in the supernatural passages. Fan-

tastically weird as these seem, they actually fall in

with some of the results approached by modern inves-

1 V. V. 26. 2 V. viii. 34.

* A random example will illustrate this; e. g. II. ii. 9-21.
 MACBETH 307

who are scientifically observing occult phe-

tigators
nomena. The Witches stand for such introducers to
the hidden realms as in our unromantic world are
called mediums. Macbeth's fancy once enthralled by
these, he becomes something of a medium himself :

he sees a phantom dagger, he hears warning voices, he

is visited by the spectre of Banquo, he witnesses the
mysteries of the Witches' cavern. Meanwhile, from
beginning to end, he is undergoing that subtle, intan-
gible, inevitable process of intellectual and moral deg-
radation which is bound to ruin whoever, without
holiest motive, ventures into occult mysteries.^ The
truth of these supernatural scenes, indeed, seems to
indicate that Shakspere's knowledge of occult phe-
nomena was growing. In Richard III.^ his ghosts
were mere nursery goblins ; in Julius Ocesar, the spirit
of the murdered Caesar had become a sort of incarnate
fate ; in ffamlef, the ghost was the individual disem-
bodied spirit of tradition ; in Macbeth^ the dagger, the
weird voices, and the ghastly shape of Banquo are such
visions, or delusions, as throughout human history
constantly occur to unhappy men.
In connection with this matter, a note by Mr.
Greene is suggestive :
—
** Semi-insanity begins to seem almost subjective in
Shakspere, especially in this case where it takes an aspect
not uncommon in literary men. The beings whom they
create first begin to act independently of the writer's
^ Cf. a paper on the Salem Witches, in Stelligeri and Other Essays
Concerning America.
308 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

volition, then to appear as hallucinationsunsummoned.

Very likely this happened to Shakspere not merely when
he dreamt, but when he was awake; and this is just what
happens to Macbeth: First he sees a dagger which he
recognizes as unreal but cannot dismiss. Then a voice
says to him Sleep no more/ Finally he thinks the
^

ghost real whom only he sees. Perhaps this is complete

insanity; but probably Shakspere did not think so."

The means by which the characters of Macbeth

and his Lady are expressed, indeed, would suggest
doubt as to whether Shakspere could have deliberately
thought of them at all, except as concepts which he
was bound to embody in phrase. The amazing com-
pactness of their lines surprises whoever counts the
words. In the first act, where both of these great
psychological conceptions are thoroughly set forth,
Lady Macbeth has fourteen speeches, comprising 864
words, and Macbeth has twenty-six speeches, compris-
ing 878 words. In all, the speeches of Lady Macbeth
number less than 60, many of them very short and ;

those of Macbeth, some of them equally short, num-

ber less than 150. The which in so little
art with
space Shakspere has created and defined two of the
most vital characters of all literature is a matter for
constant admiration.
So constant is one's admiration for Macbeth that
one is apt to forget the archaism which really pervades
all the work of Shakspere. In this case, Dr. Forman's
note of the play should bring us to ourselves. Qn
April 20, 1610, " there was to be observed," he writes,
 MACBETH 309

" how Macbeth and Banquo, two noblemen of Scot-

land, riding through a wood^ there stood before them
three women, The fact that these personages
etc."
were riding through a wood was presented to the eyes
of Dr. Forman by the stage arrangements of the Globe
Theatre. The methods by which it was probably
presented would now seem incredible. Instead of a
painted scene illuminated by green foot-lights, the
wood probably consisted either of one or two Christ-
mas trees, lugged in by attendants, or else of a placard
posted at the back of the stage, at the sides of which
Dr. Forman and his friends would sit, chatting and
eating fruit, in plain sight of the audience. As to the
riding, Macbeth and Banquo probably made their
first entry with wicker-work hobby-horses about their
waists, with false human legs, of half the natural
length, dangling from the saddles, and with sweeping
skirts to hide the actors' feet. Monstrous as such a
proceeding seems, it might still occur in serious trag-
edy on the Chinese stage ; and the Chinese stage is
very like the Elizabethan. A fact in Macbeth which
slightly tends to prove this conjecture is that just
before Banquo is killed he dismisses his horses behind
the scenes,^ and enters on foot. To die with a hobby-
horse about one's waist would have been too much for
even Elizabethan conventions.
The peculiar effect of Macbeth, Wiqh^ we have traced
to the facts that while its stage conventions arc ulti-
mately archaic and its general treatment is remarkably
1 III. iii. 8-14.
310 WILLI AJM SHAKSPERE

sketchy, its conception and style are profoundly true

to human nature. In a subtle way, too, Macbeth^ as
one grows to know it, impresses one like Othello as
strongly objective.The moods which underlie Hamlet
and King Lear seem moods of which the poet might
sometimes have been conscious as his own. The
moods of Othello and Macbeth seem rather moods
which the poet, if conscious of them at all, would
probably have thought that he was inventing by sheer
force of sympathetic imagination.
As we have seen before, however, even work which
is not primarily s^lf-revealing can never express any-
thing but what in some form or other maker has
its

known.^ Macbeth, accordingly, once more displays

the traits which pervade the other tragedies. To be-
gin with, as Mr. Greene's note suggested, it shows
fresh traces of an overwrought state of mind. The
restless activity of Hamlet, the concentration of lago,

the passion of Othello, the raving of Lear, the ghost-

seeing of Macbeth, the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth,
all show the same morbid tendency. It is not for a

moment to be guessed that Shakspere was insane

his constant judgment, his artistic sanity were enough
to preserve him from any such fate. Beyond reason-
able doubt, however, his mind was at this period
abnormally active ; and, perhaps in consequence, his
imagination centred on morbid mental conditions.
Again, in Macbeth, woman plays the devil's part. Com-
pare the second series of the Sonnets, the relation of
^ See p. 229.
 MACBETH 311

the Queen and Ophelia Hamlet to the men whom

in
they half-innocently destroy, the wantonness of Cres-
sida, the effect on Othello of the self-destructive gentle-
jicss of Desdemona, the cruelty and lust of Goneril and

Regan, the active mischief of the Witches and of Lady

Macbeth. All alike reveal a mind keenly alive to
the manifold harm, wittingly or unwittingly, done by
women. Finally, in Macbeth^ the mood which we
have called Calvinistic expresses, with unprecedented
abandonment to artistic passion, an ultimately ironical
view of human life. At least to human beings, life is

an unrelieved misery —a tale told by an idiot, full of

sound and fury, signifying nothing. Taken for all

in all, Macbeth reveals deeper knowledge of spiritual
misery than we have fathomed before.
To appreciate this, we may best glance back at the
four serious tragedies which have preceded. In each
there are a few lines broadly suggestive of the tem-
per which pervades it. Take Juliet's last speech to
her nurse : ^ —
" Farewell ! God knows when we shall meet again ;

or Romeo's final words :

^ —
" Here 's to my love ! true apothecary
Thy drugs are quick. Thus, with a kiss I die."

Somehow these lines recall the sentimental pathos of

Romeo and Juliet, that romantic poem which beside
the great tragedies seems hardly tragic at all.

1 Romeo and Juliel, IV. ill. 14. - Ibid. V. iii. 119.

312 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Take Hamlet's dying speech to Horatio :^ —
" If thou didst ever hold me in thine heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story ;

and Horatio's farewell words :

^ —
" Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince,
!"
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

These words somehow imply the mood of one who

should dream of death as after all an end to the
bewilderment of human existence.
Take Othello's savagely conscious death-cry ; ^ —
** Set you down this
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

"
And smote him, thus !

Somehow death comes as a splendid climax of passion.

In Othello^ as in Hamlet^ life is a mystery ; death is a
mystery, too but there ; maybe dreams of compensation.
Then take Kent's speech of farewell to the dying
Lear :
* —
**
Vex not his ghost •
0, let him pass ! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.*'

Life here unmixed agony.

is Only in death can there
be even a dream of peace.

1 Hamlet, V. ii. 357. « Ibid. 370.

8 O'hello, V. ii. 351. * King Lear, V. iii. 313.

 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 313

Theu take the words we have already cited from

Macbeth :
—
" Duncan is in his grave ;

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well."'

^' Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more : it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
^
Signifying nothing."

Finally, take Macbeth's last shout :

^ —
" Lay on, Macduflf,
And damn'd be he that first cries '
Hold, enough !
*
"

One feels in Macbeth the climax of all, — a knowledge

of the last word of soul- sick despair.

X. Antony and Cleopatra.

[Antony and Cleopatra was entered in the Stationers' Register on

May 20th, 1608. It was not published until the folio of 1623.
Its source is North's Plutarch.
On internal evidence, it is generally assigned conjecturally to 1
607,

Composed throughout according to the conven-

tions of chronicle-history, Antony and Cleopatra is at
first sight bewildering. Whoever would appreciate it
must deliberately revive the mood of an Elizabethan
public, abandon himself mood, accept as normal
to this
what is really archaic. The effort is worth all the
i III. ii. 22. 2 V. V. 24. » V. vii. 33.
314 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
pains it may cost ; for while very close to its narra*
tive source, Antony and Cleopatra displays at once
masterly discretion in the selection of dramatic mate-
rial, masterly power of creating both character and
atmosphere, and unsurpassed mastery of language.
The old conventions once accepted, indeed, the play
may without extravagance be called the masterpiece
of the kind of literature which began with Henry IK,
— of historical fiction.

To appreciate its full power, we may best compare

passages from it with other treatments of the same
or similar subjects. As a matter of mere description,
for example, take the account in North's Plutarch of
how Antony first sees Cleopatra, and compai-e with it

the version of the story in Dry den's All for Love, and
finally Shakspere's.
Here is North's version :
^ —
** She disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her
barge in the river of Cydnus ; the poop whereof was of gold,
the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept
stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes,
howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as
they upon in the barge. And now for the person
pla3'^ed

of her self, she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of

tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, com-
monly drawn in picture: and hard hy her, on either hand
of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth
god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which
they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen
also, the fairest of them, were apparelled like the nymphs

^ Rolfe : Antony and Cleopatra, 151.

 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 315

Nereids (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like

the Graces; some steering the helm, others tending the
tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there' came
a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that per-
fumed the wharf's side, pestered with innumerable multi-
tudes of people.''

Dryden's All for Love, published in 1678, as a

matter of avowed rivalry with Shakspere, puts this
passage into the mouth of Antony, who rehearses it

to Dolabella,^ as follows :
—
" Her galley do^vn the silver Cydnos rowed.
The tackling silk, the streamers waved with gold;
The gentle winds were lodged in purple sails
Her nymphs, like Nereids, round her couch were placed ;

Where she, another sea-born Venus, lay.

She lay, and leant her cheek upon her hand ;

And cast a look so languishingly sweet.

As if, secure of all beholders' hearts,
Neglecting, she could take them boys, like Cupids, :

Stood fanning, with their painted wings, the winds

That played about her face but if she smiled,
:

A darting glory seemed to blaze abroad,

That men's desiring eyes were never wearied,
But hung upon the object to soft flutes :

The silver oars kept time and while they played,

;

The hearing gave new pleasure to the sight ;

And both to thought. 'T was heaven or somewhat more

For she so charmed all hearts, that gazing crowds
Stood panting on the shore, and wanted breath
To give their welcome voice."

Compare with these the version which Shakspere

puts into the mouth of cool, shrewd Enobarbus :
* —
1 in. i. 2 n. ii. 196-223.
316 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
The barge she sat in, like a burnisli'd throne,
Burned on the water the poop was beaten gold ;
:

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them the oars were ; silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description : she did lie

In her pavilion — cloth-of-gold of tissue

O'erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature : on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, s

And made their bends adornings : at the helm

A seeming mermaid steers : the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense

Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast

Her people out upon her and Antony, ;

Enthron'd i' the market-place, did sit alone,

Whistling to the air ; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature."
At once far closer to the original than Dryden, and
less ingeniously laborious in his variations, Shakspere
is at the same time more poetic and more plausible.
Now for the character of Cleopatra. In All for
Love, Dryden brings her face to face with Octavia,^
and here is what passes: —
1 III. i.
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 317
" Octav. I need not ask if you are Cleopatra;
Your haughty carriage —
Cleo. Shows I am a queen:
Nor need I ask you, who you are.
Octav. A Roman;
A name that makes and can unmake a queen.
Cleo. Your lord, the man who serves me, is a Roman.
Octav. He was a Roman, till he lost that name,
To be a slave in Egypt; but I come
To free him thence.
Cleo. Peace, peace, my lover's Juno.
When he grew weary of that household clog,
He chose my easier bonds."
Admirably theatrical though that dialogue be, com-
pare it with the passage from Shakspere, where Cleo-
patra believes that Antony has received a stirring
message from his wife ^ :

" Cleo. I am sick and sullen.

Ant. I am sorry to give breathing to my purpose, —
Cleo. Help me away, dear Charmian; I shall fall:
It cannot be thus long, the sides of nature
Will not sustain it.

Ant. Now, my dearest queen, —

Cleo. Pray from me.
you, stand farther
Ant. What's the matter ?
Cleo. I know, by that same eye, there 's some good news.

What says the married woman 1 " etc.

Just as theatrical, and far more colloquial, Shak-

spere's scene seems comparatively like a fragment of
real life. So any treatment of Cleopatra by Shak-
spere seems when we put it beside any of Corneille's,
— as, for example, when she declares to Caesar :

* I. iii. 13. 2 Corneille, Pomp^e, IV. iii.

318 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
**
Je scais ce que je dois au souverain bonheur
Dont me comble et m'accable un tel exces d'honneur.
Je ne vous tiendray plus mes passions secrettes ;
Je scais ce que je suis, je scais ce que vous etes;
Vous daignastes m'aimer des mes plus jeunes ans;
Le sceptre que je porte est un de vos presens;
Vous m'avez par deux fois rendu le diademe:
J'avoue apres cela. Seigneur, que je vous aime,** etc.

John Fletcher, too, treated the loves of Cleopatra

and Julius Caesar ; and here is how he made her
coquet with the great Roman :^

" Cleo. (giving a jewel). Take this.

And carry it to that lordly Caesar sent thee ;

There's a new handsome one, a rich one,

love, a
One that will hug his mind: bid him make love to it;
Tell the ambitious broker, this will suffer— -
ApoL He enters.
Enter Caesar.
Cleo. How!
Gees. do not use to wait, lady;
I
Where I am, all the doors are free and open.
"
Cleo. I guess so by your rudeness;

And so on.
The very end of Antony and Cleopatra, however, is
perhaps more typical than any other passage. Here
is North's version of Cleopatra's death :
^ —
" When they had opened the doors, they found Cleo-
patra stark-dead, laid upon a bed of gold, attired and
arrayed in her royal robes, and one of her two women,
which was called Iras, dead at her feet: and the other
woman (called Charmion) half dead, and trembling, trim-
ming the diadem which Cleopatra wore upon her head.
1 The False One, IV. ii. « Rolfe, 167.
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 319

One of the soldiers seeing lier, angrily said unto her: 'Is
that well done, Charmion ? ' *
Very well,' she said again,
'and meet for a princess descended from the race of so
many noble kings: *
she said no more, but fell down dead
hard by the bed."

In All for Love, Dryden makes Cleopatra greet the

asp thus :

Welcome, thou kind deceiver

*'

Thou who with an easy key

best of thieves ;

Dost open life, and, uuperceived by us,

Even steal us from ourselves," and so on.

The guard at that moment clamor for admission ;

whereupon, in the presence of both Iras and Char-

mian, Cleopatra thus applies the asp
** Haste, bare my arm, and rouse the serpent^s fury.
Coward flesh,
Wouldst thou conspire with Caesar to betray me
As thou wert none of mine ? I '11 force thee to it,
And not be sent by him,
But bring myself, my soul, to Antony.
Take hence; the work is done."

The women then apply asps to themselves. Iras in-

stantly dies. The guard break in, and one exclaims
" 'T was what I feared, —
Charmion, is this well done ?

Char. Yes, 't is well done, and like a queen, the last
Of her great race: I follow her. [^Dies.y

In Antony and Cleopatra, Iras dies before Cleo-

patra applies the asp. Then come these marvellous
speeches :

1 V. ii. 303 seq.

320 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
" Cleo. This proves me base ;

If she meet the curled Antony,

first

He '11 make demand of her, and spend that kiss

Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch.
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie poor venomous fool,
:

Be angry, and dispatch. 0, couldst thou speak,

That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass
Unpolicied !

Char. O eastern star I

Cleo. Peace, peace

Dost thou not seemy baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep ? "

Finally, when the queen is dead, and the guard break

in, a soldier speaks :
—
'*
What work is here ! Charmian, is this well d6ne ?

Char. It is well done, and fitting for a princess

Descended of so many royal kings.
"
Ah, soldier [Dies.]

This prolonged quotation was probably the shortest

as well as the most definite means of showing how,
amid a considerable group of skilful historical fictions,
Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra emerges as a mas-
terpiece of history. While the other treatments of
Cleopatra are theatrically effective, Shakspere's not
only creates a miraculously human woman, but actu-
ally revives the death throes of the ancient world.
Of course Antony and Cleopatra is a great poem.
For all its light and weak endings, all the grow-
ing freedom of style which marks the beginning of
metrical decay, its phrasing throughout is far above
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 321

the indignity of actual life.No human being, for ex-

ample, would ever have uttered many of tlie phrases
we have considered already nor yet such words ; as
the more famous ones with which the play teems
" Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; " ^
" She looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace " * ;

and more. All its veracity of detail does not make

Antony and Cleopatra realistic in style. The differ-

ence between this great poem, however, and the most

literally phrased of modern histories is only a differ-
ence of method. Essentially each brings us face to
face with an actual historic past ; each leaves us in a
mood which we might have felt, had we known that
past in the flesh.
In the flesh whoever must have known it
knew it

best. The life here brought back from the dust was
nowise spiritual. The world which Antony and Cleo-
patra revives was dying. What had made Rome
Roman, Greece Greek, Egypt Egyptian, was passing.
Ruin was everywhere impending, not instant, but none
the less fatal. The old ideals were gone nor was ;

there yet any gleam of the new ideals to come. This

falling world, though, once great and noble, retained
even in its fall the aspect of its past grandeur and ;

like all great moments of decadence it afforded to

whoever would plunge into its vortex such splendor of
1 II. ii. 240. a V. ii. 349.
21
322 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

sensuous, earthly delight that in certain moods one

still envies the animal ecstasies of those who fell, dis-

daining all nobler sense. Nor is such sympathy with

the intoxication of evil a thing in which even the
purest of heart need feel shame. No one can know
the real grandeur of moral conquest who does not also
realize the alluring delights of moral degradation over
which such conquest must triumph.
We wander from Shakespere, however. Such mat-
ters as we have on are not specifically set
just touched
forth in Antony and Cleopatra. What Shakspere there
does, as we have seen, is simply to present the facts of
Plutarch's narrative in a grandly objective way. In
these facts themselves were inherent all this sympa-
thetic knowledge of fleshly delight, and all these
splendid gleams of what made noble classic antiquity.
In the facts, too, was inherent the great solemnity
of world ruin. All this the very facts make us
feel. Nowhere in literature is the atmosphere of
an historic past more marvellously or more faithfully
revived.
In this atmosphere live men and women whose in-
dividuality, like that of men and women in the flesh,
while complete, is not instantly salient. What one
first feels in Antony and Cleopatra is the world-
movement which whirls all these people on, the local
and temporal atmosphere which enshrouds them. By
and by, however, as one grows to know them better,
each personage begins to stand out as distinct as any
living individual whom one grows really to know.
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 32,*)

Take, for example, the scene on Pompey's galley.^ In

^
Plutarch there is the merest hint for this scene :

" So he cast anchors enow into the sea, to make his galley
fast, from the head of Mount Misena: and there he wel-
comed them, and made them great cheer. Now in the
midst of the when they fell
feast, to he merry with Anto-
nius' love unto Cleopatra, Menas the pirate came t6 Pom-
pey, and whispering in his ear, said unto him :
* Shall I
cut the cables of the anchors, and make thee lord not only
of Sicily and Sardinia, but of the whole empire of Rome
besides ? Pompey, having paused awhile upon it, at
'

length answered him: ^Thou shouldest have done it, and

never have told it me but now we must content us with
;

that we have as for myself, I was never taught to break

;

my faith, nor to be counted a traitor " !

'

From this plain statement of fact Shakspere devel-

oped one of the most consummately dramatic scenes in

literature. The triple head of imperial Rome is drunk,

each in his own way Antony boisterous, Octavius
:

gravely silent, Lepidus silly. All are utterly in the

power of an unscrupulous enemy all are saved from ;

a fate which might have altered the course of history

by the single surviving scruple of a man who usually
had none. Then the drunken Lepidus is bundled over
the side ; and the empire is safe. This whole story is

which not only set forth the

told in seventy-five lines,
intensely dramatic situation, but preserve meanwhile a
constant sense of how funny men are when the worse
for drink. Every syllable of this astonishing scene
has a specific office.

1 II. vii. 2 Rolfe,n54.

324 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
This scene, then, clearly displays the trait which
distinguishes Antony and Cleopatra from the plays
which precede. As we have already seen again and
again, Shakspere's power of creating individual char-
acter, and thereby of creating an atmosphere, re-
mains unsurpassed. The tremendous activity of mind
which has been palpable from Hamlet onward re-
mains constant, too every syllable is packed with
;

meaning. On the other hand, however, the profound

emotional impulse which has surged beneath the
great tragedies seems here to slacken. Antony and
Cleopatra has passion enough and to spare ; but it is

passion presented in a coolly dramatic, dispassionate

way. The effect is perhaps of more supreme mastery
than any we have met before. More than before, how-
ever, the sense that this is mastery obtrudes itself.
What makes Antony and Cleopatra so peculiarly great,
indeed, is probably a slight relaxation of that intense
artistic impulse which made so great in a different way
Hamlet, and Othello, and King Lear, and Macbeth.
Creative power, however, even though it lack a little

of the spontaneous intensity which one felt in Hamlet,

in lago, in Lear, in Macbeth, is as great as ever. To
pass from the lesser characters, each of whom is

thoroughly individual, there are in all literature no

two personages more consummately alive than Antony
and Cleopatra themselves. So living do they seem,
indeed, that to analyze them is as grave a task as to
analyze real human beings. Each is not only true to
fact, but more. Antony is not only the Antony, and
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 325

Cleopatra the Cleopatra of recorded history ; each

broadly typifies eternal phases of human nature.
Antony is the lasting type of that profound infatua-
tion which is the most insidious snare of passionate
middle-life ; Cleopatra is the supreme type of all that
in womanhood is fatal.

In this view of woman as fatal to man, whoever has

pursued our course of study must find the culmination
of a series of moods concerning sexual relations, for
whose origin we must look far back. From the Rosa-
line of Love's Labour 's Lost through Portia to Bea-
trice, and Rosalind, and Viola, we had a series of

figures which expressed the mood of innocent, adoring

fascination. In All 's Well that Ends Well, in Hamlet,
in Measure for Measure, we had expressions, in vary-
ing terms, of the troubles which spring from such be-
ginnings, when without relaxing its hold fascination is

invaded by doubt. In Troilus and Cressida and in

Othello we had doubt more definitely and more passion-
ately stated, with all its bewildering uncertainty. In
King Lear we had cruelty incarnate in woman ; in
Macbeth woman embodied all the evil influences and
the evil counsel which may ruin man. Here in Cleo-
patra we have the whole story summed up, in a mas-
terly psychologic recapitulation, which reminds one of
the masterly dramatic recapitulation so characteristic
of Shakspere, and most evident in Ttvelfth Night. It

is idle to deny, too, that the moods thus recapitulated

are very like what we may befieve to underlie the
second series of Sonnets.
326 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
The unanswerable question which that last sugges-
tion raises, however, — as to whether Beatrice and
Cleopatra be different portraits of the same living
woman who inspired the Sonnets^ — is impertinent.
The Shakspere with whom we may legitimately deal
is not the man, who has left no record of his actual

life, but the artist, who has left the fullest record of

his emotional experience. To search for the actual

man is at once unbecoming and futile. What we can
fairly assert of this great Antony and Cleopatra is
enough for our purpose If we once accept the con-
:

ventions of chronicle-history, this play reveals an artist,

temper and consummate master of his art,
objective in
who has told a historic story with supreme artistic
truth and the story, impregnated at once with the
;

sense of irony which we have learned to know and with

a more profound sense than ever of the evil which wo-
man may wreak, is a story which supremely, dispas-
sionately expresses the tragedy of world-decadence.

XI. CORIOLANUS.

[ Coriolanus was entered in 1 623 and published in the folio. No

first

earlier allusion to known.

it is

Its source, like that of Antony and Cleopatra, is North's Plutarch.

Verse-tests ^ place it near Antony and Cleopatra. For examples of
" light " endings, see II. i. 238, 241, 243, 245 ; for " weak " endings, see
V. vi. 75, 76. The number of weak endings in Coriolanus is exceeded
only in Cymbeline. Shakspere's verse is clearly breaking down. On
this ground chiefly, common conjecture now assigns Coriolanus to
about 1608.]

1 See Dowden's Primer, 39-44, and Mr. Ingram's paper in the Ne^
Shakspere Society's Transactions for 1874, p. 442.
 CORIOLANUS 327

Like Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Ccesar^

Coriolanus at first appears to be a chronicle-history
based on Plutarch instead of on Holinshed, not Eng-
lish but Roman. Whatever its relations to Julius
Ccesar, however, it proves in total effect very unlike
Antony and Cleopatra. That masterpiece of historical
fiction impresses whoever will accept its conventions

as actual history. Coriolanus, on the other hand, im-

presses one neither as actual history nor yet exactly
as historical fiction. It seems rather a presentation,
in dramatic form, of a historical story the conception
of which is affected throughout by a definite philo-
sophical bias.
This does not mean, of course, that Coriolanus any
more than Henry V, may rationally be deemed a
philosophical treatise. Throughout this study we
cannot too often remind ourselves that Shakspere was
an artist, — a man who finding that experience, actual
or recorded, excited in him specific moods, gave his
conscious energy to the expression of those moods
with little care for their ultimate meaning. What
moods mean is a question for philosophers and critics,

not for artists ; even in Genesis, the Creator does not

pronounce his work good until it is finished. An
artist'smoods, however, may be very various now ;

and again their relation to actual life and conduct may

be far closer than usual. That seemed the case witli
Henry V, ; in a different way it seems again the case
with Coriolanus.
The technical factor of Coriolanus in which this
328 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
change of mood most distinctly appears is the char-
acterization. The personages remain individual, of
course ; by this time Shakspere's hand was too prac-
tised to leave any figure indefinite. Compared with
the personages in the plays we have considered from
Romeo and Juliet forward, however, those in Coriolanus
seem not so conspicuously individual, as typical.
Volumnia, for example, is not only the mother of
Coriolanus ; she is the sort of figure which moralizers
have in mind when they expound the virtues of " the
Roman mother " in general. So Virgilia is the de-
voted wife ; so Menenius Agrippa is the wise old
friend ; so, more notably still, the tribunes, Sicinius
and Brutus, are twin types of the demagogue. This
typical quality of the characters in Coriolanus is so
marked, indeed, that in the Elizabethan sense of the
word we may almost call the characterization through-
out this play '* humourous." Such " humourous
treatment of character prevails throughout didactic
fiction. So Coriolanus seems didactic.
The trait is most palpable in the twin demagogues.
We have seen forerunners of them in Jack Cade and
in the tribune whose incendiary eloquence during the
first scene of Julius Coesar is so hackneyed at school.^
Neither of these, however, is anything like so strongly
emphasized or so fully developed as Sicinius and
Brutus. Nor in Henry VI. or Julius Ccesar is there
anything like so fully developed a presentation of the
populace whom tribunes or demagogues lead.
1 See pp. 80, 243.
 CORIOLANUS 329

The people, in fact, —

that great underlying mass of

humanity in which must reside the physical power of

any nation, — is presented in Coriolanus with ultimate

precision. In Henry VI. the vivid sketch of Jack
Cade's rebellion shows a turbulently unreasonable
mob which quickly comes to grief. In Julius Ccesar,
the mob is actually the seat of power, which it trans-
fers, at unreasoning impulse, from one great leader
to another ; but the great leaders, no unequal rivals,
stand ready each in turn to personify imperial sover-
eignty. In Coriolanus, the mob, unreasoning, tur-
bulent, capricious as ever, becomes a devouring
monster. It no longer contents itself with transfer-
ring power ; it seizes power for itself, and once pos-
sessed of power behaves with suicidal unreason. The
climax from Henri/ VI., the experimental chronicle-
history, through Julius Ccesar, the last play in which
we feel serene artistic poise, to Coriolanus, which con-
cludes the period of fiercest passion, may be described
as from comic, through dramatic, to tragic.
For what the mob attacks throughout, and in Corio-
lanus what the mob devours, is literally aristocracy,

the rule of those who are best. This, with instinctive

democratic distrust of excellence or superiority, the
mob bound to overthrow. In Shakspere's earlier
is

work we have had pictures of aristocracy, strong and

weak. In Henry V., like Coriolanus a play whose
mood is didactic, we saw aristocracy wholesomely,
sympathetically, worthily dominant. In Antony and
Cleopatra, a play which, with all its chances for an
330 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

Alexandrian mob, is notable for neglect of the com-

mon people, we saw aristocracy toppling on the verge
of ruin, decadent through the inherent corruption of
human nature. we have aris-
In Coriolanus himself
tocracy as nobly worthy of dominance as in Henry V.,
and yet as inexorably doomed as in Antony. The
fate of Coriolanus, more cruelly tragic than Antony's,
comes from no decadence, no corruption, no vicious
weakness, but rather from a passionate excess of in-
herently noble traits, whose very nobility unfits them
for survival in the ignoble world about them.
These t^-aits are palpable in the scene of Coriolanus'
candidacy.^ There, too, palpably appears the pride
which commonplaces declare to be his fatal vice.
Perhaps it is. Clearly, however, he takes pride in
nothing but worthily conscious merit ; nor does he
despise anything not essentially contemptible; his
mood is phrased in the lines,^ —
" Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve."

In the whole play Coriolanus only once despises any-

thing not really mean ; this is when, in a moment of
victory, he begs that a poor man shall be spared, and
then does not take the trouble to remember his name.^
The hastiness thus indicated is of course a second
fault of Coriolanus, whose temper is passionately in-
firm. Much as he rages, however, his indignation is
almost always righteous, excited chiefly by what is

1 II. iii. 2 120-12L « I. ix. 79-92.

 CORIOLANUS 331

really ignoble in humanity. The weakness of his

temperament is not that his anger is unreasonably
aroused, but that, once aroused, it is excessive.
In view of this, the manner in which the character
of Coriolanus is set forth becomes extraordinary.
Passionate as the man is, the presentation of his story,
at least compared with that of all the stories we have
lately considered, seems cold. Like the other charac-
ters in this play, Coriolanus himself seems, by com-
parison, almost " humourous." Certainly the temper
in which Shakspere presents him is almost unsympa-
thetic ; it is surprisingly free from such suggestion of
deep personal feeling as has now and again seemed
like self-revelation.

The plays we have lately considered contain three

phases of such self-revelation. From Much Ado
About Nothing forward there has been a palpable
sense of irony, at first comic, later becoming a deep
tragic recognition of destiny. From even earlier —
from the Merchant of Venice itself to Antony and —
Cleopatra^ there was a constant, crescent sense of what
and mischiefs come from the loves of men
delights
and women. From Hamlet to Macbeth^ there were
traces of such over-excitement of mind as frequently
suggested madness. This last trait disappeared with
Macbeth^ unless we detect some relic of it in the tre-
mendously pregnant style both of Antony and Cleo-
patra and of Coriolanus itself. With Antony and
Cleopatra disappeared tlie second trait, — the haunt-
ing sense of what mischief women can work. In
332 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Coriolanus, then, we have left of this unwitting self-

revelation only an intensified irony, strangely divorced

from passionate feeling. Here, in short, we have a
cold abstract contrast between ideally noble traits
and ideally vile. They clash and vileness conquers. ;

So far does vileness conquer, indeed, that the real

climax of Coriolanus, obviously intended for a tri-

umph seems comparatively weak.

of virtue, When
Volumnia appeals to the magnanimity of her son,
stirring it to conquer his revengeful pride,^ her
speeches hardly justify her success. Instead of
such supreme eloquence as the moment demands,
we find admirable rhetoric, versifying and giving
sonorous dignity to the harangues of Plutarch; but
not wakening them into the inevitable vitality which
isthe master-sign of Shakspere's great work. To thp
end Volumnia remains " the Roman mother."
To weakness of climax, which apparently comes
this
from weakness of emotional sympathy with a situation
intellectually understood, may be traced part of the
artistic dissatisfaction sometimes caused by Coriolanus.
The play, however, has other tiresome traits. While
by no means short, it is very monotonous ; it lacks
the relief of such underplot and comedy as enliven the
great English chronicle-histories. It lacks, too, the

beauty of style which might make delightful a less

significant story. As verse-tests indicate,^ the style
of Coriolanus has neither the lucidity nor the grace of
Shakspere's best writing; it is pregnant, even over-
1 V. iii. 131-182. 2 See p. 326.
 CORIOLANUS 333

packed with meaning, but it suggests no underlying

music. Shakspere is nowhere less lyrical, nowhere
the writer of words which, as distinguished from the
terms of poetry, produce an effect more like that of
masterly prose.
The prose of Coriolanus, to be sure, is masterly;
the play remains Shakspereanly great. Its greatness,

however, is not ultimate ; its style lacks simplicity

and beauty, its conception lacks poise, sympathetic
serenity, artistic purity. For Shakspere, indeed, as
we have seen, the mood which underlies it is strangely
akin to one of political or social philosophy and a ;

philosophy, too, of a grim, repellent kind. Nowhere

can we feel more distinctly why to some modern phil-
anthropic dreamers Shakspere, for all his art, presents
enemy, as a tradition which
himself as a colossal
advancing Humanity ought ruthlessly to overthrow.
For, very surely, no work in literature more truly
and unflinchingly expounds the inherent danger and
evil of democracy nor does any show less recog-
;

nition of the numerous benefits which our century

believes to counterbalance them.
When we remember that verse-tests, and little else,

place Coriolanus where we consider it, the relation of

its mood to those which precede becomes very strik-
ing. -Esthetic conviction confirms a classification
which at seems blindly inappreciative.
first From
the unpassionate irony of Julius Ccesar we have fol-
lowed Shakspere through the series of plays which
remain emotionally his greatest. These, we found,
334 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

artistically expressed a mental activity and an in-

tensity of passion which uncontrolled might have

threatened reason itself. These, too, we found, con-
stantly expressed, in varied terms, a sense of the
troubles involved in the relations of the sexes. From
this storm of passion we emerged through the sternly
objective study of decadent virtue so ultimately made
in Antony and Cleopatra. Here, in Coriolanus, we
finally find Shakspere, with almost cynical coldness,
artistically expounding the inherent weakness of

moral nobility, the inherent strength and power of

all that is intellectually and morally vile.

This mood of cold depression involves a funda-

mental lack of enthusiasm, unlike anything we have
met before. The tremendous creative impulse which
has pervaded everything since the Midsummer Night's
Dream seems somehow weakened. The same impres-
sion results finally humourous " treatment
from the '*

of character in Coriolanus ; the same from the philo-

sophical, as distinguished from dramatic, temper
which pervades it the same, too, from the inade-
;

quacy of Volumnia's appeal, which ought properly

to stir one to the depths. Coriolanus is a great trag-
edy ; but, for all its greatness, one finds in it symp-
tom after symptom of weakening creative energy.
 SHAKSPERE FROM IfiOO TO lOOd 335

XII. Shakspere from 1600 to 1608.

In this chapter we have considered the work of

Shakspere between 1600 and 1608. These years took
him from the age of thirty-six to that of forty-four,
and from the thirteenth year of his professional life to
the twenty-first. They were years, too, when various
records show him to have been pretty steadily im-
proving in worldly fortune.^ It is worth while now to
pause for a moment, and review our impression of
this period.
Once for all, again, we must admit our chronology
to be uncertain. With the exception of All 's Well
that EndB Well, however, — which may be the Love's
Labour '« Won mentioned by Meres in 1598, — none
of the plays considered in this chapter are known to
have been alluded to before 1600. The inference is

that none of them existed earlier. In 1601 there was

a distinct allusion to Julius Ccesar ; in 1603 and 1604
there were quarto editions oi Hamlet ; in 1608, Antony
and Cleopatra was entered in the Stationers' Regis-
ter, and King Lear was published in 1609, Troilus ;

and Cressida was published; in 1610, Othello and

Macbeth were acted. Within two years of 1608, then,
we have evidence that all but three of the plays con-
sidered in this chapter existed. These three are All 's

Well that Ends Well, which after all makes little dif-

1 See p. 18.
336 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
ference in our total impression; Measure for Measure
and Coriolanus. For the dates of the last two we
must rely wholly on internal evidence, allusions —
and verse-tests. This evidence, however, places them
near other plays so like them in mood that we are
warranted in accepting the result with considerable
confidence. On the whole, then, we may fairly assume
that, with the exception of a few stray passages, none
of thework considered in this chapter existed in
1600 and that all of it was
; substantially finished by
1608. Our business now is to define afresh our im-

pression of Shakspere.
Already we have similarly defined our impression
of him three times. First, we found that in 1593, at

the age of twenty-nine, and after six years of profes-

sional he had displayed a habit of mind by which
life,

words and concepts seemed almost identical he had ;

shown unusual versatility in trying his hand at all

kinds of contemporary writing; and, finally, by en-

livening characters with the results of actual obser-
vation, he had made some of his personages more
human than any others on the English stage. Apart
from this, the work of these six experimental years
amounted to little.
Our next summary revealed a very different state of
things. In 1600, at the age of thirty-six, and after thir-
teen years of professional life, Shakspere had produced
not only his best comedies and histories, but Romeo
and Juliet^ and a constant series of characters which,
in themselves, suffice to place him at the head of imagi-
 SHAKSPEllE FROM 1600 TO 1608 337

native English Literature. After his prolonged period

of experiment his creative imagination had at last be-

gun work spontaneously, with generally increasing

to
precision and power. Pretty clearly, however, it did
not always work with equal strength in every direction;
and the old trait of versatility displayed itself under the
new aspect of versatile concentration. His imagina-
tion, too, revealed its creative strength, not by invent-
ing new things, but by developing old ones. His
characters certainly began to live like actual people.
His phrases began so to simplify and to strengthen
that one instinctively tended to believe him more and
more conscious of thought, as distinguished from word.
At least in the matter of stage-business, however, and
a little less palpably in other matters too, he showed
so marked a disposition to repeat, with subtle varia-
tion, whatever he had once found effective, that we
saw reason to wonder whether he might not have felt
hampered by a conscious sluggishness of invention.
No depressing sense, though, of limitation or of any-
thing else, affected his work, which was animated
throughout by a robust, buoyant vigor of artistic

imagination. In the chronicle-histories, too, there

was a grand sense of historic movement in Romeo ;

and Juliet, and in all the comedies, there was a de-

lightful romantic feeling ; in the substitution of self-
deception for mistaken identity as the chief device
of comedy, there was at least increasing maturity
and in the idealized heroines, from Portia to Viola,
there was clear understanding of how a charming
r)0
38 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
woman can Apart from
fascinate a romantic lover.
the touch of irony in Much Ado About Nothing,
however, we could detect hardly any deep knowledge
of spiritual experience.
The Sonnets, which we considered next, indicated
something more. Whatever their origin and their
history, they not only expressed, in distinctly per-
sonal terms, the profoundly artistic temperament
and the consciously mastered literary art already
impersonally evident in the plays. They revealed,
besides, a sympathetic understanding of spiritual
suffering and the terms by which they revealed it
;

involved equal knowledge of the tragic misery which

comes from passionate human love.
Through the Sonnets we approached the plays con-
sidered in this chapter. In these we have found deeper
traits still. While, like all the plays of Shakspere, even
the great tragedies are distinctly intended for the stage,
— and, what is more, despite thoroughly changed con-
ditions, are still theatrically effective, — they involve
on the part of their writer something deeper than mere
mastery of his art, and vigorous, spontaneous creative
imagination. Unlike the earlier work, these later
plays reveal an unswerving artistic impulse. Versa
tility of experiment and of concentration gives place
to sustained intensity of feeling. Over and over again,
in endless variety of substance and of detail, of con-
ception and of phrase alike, these plays show them-
selves the work of one who at least sympathetically
has sounded the depths of human suff'ering and has ;
 SHAKSPEUE FROM Vm TO 1608 839

sounded tliem, too, in a manner like that already sug-

gested by the Sonnets, The temperament revealed
by these plays, meanwhile, confirming our impression
from the Sonnets^ is distinctly individual. Individual,
too, is the mood vrliich, taken together, the plays
reveal. Throughout is a profound, fatalistic sense of
the impotence of man in the midst of his environ-
ment ; now dispassionate, now fierce with passion,
this sense — which we called a sense of irony — per-
vades every play from Julius Ccesar to Coriolanus.
In the second place, from All 's Well that Ends Well
to Antony and Cleopatra^ there is a sense of something
in the relations between men and women at once
widely different from the ideal, romantic fascination
expressed by the comedies, and yet just what should
normally follow from such a beginning. Trouble first,
then vacillating doubt, then the certainty that woman
may be damningly evil, succeed one another in the
growth of this mood which so inextricably mingles
with the ironical. Finally, from Hamlet to Macbeth,
along with the constant irony and the constant trouble
which surrounds the fact of woman, we found equally
constant traces of deep sympathy with such abnormal,
overwrought states of mind as, uncontrolled by tre-
mendous power both of will and of artistic expression,
might easily have lapsed into madness.
These three traits together reached their climax in
Macbeth, In Macbeth, too, persisted that increasing
precision and compactness of style which leads one
constantly to feel that Shakspore, who surely began
340 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
his conscious artistic career as a maker of phrases,
tended almost steadily to consider phrases less, and
concepts more. The trait of style which first appears
in Macbeth — the weak ending — points to this conclu-
sion. Conceivably, of course, only a fresh metrical
experiment by a writer who had always been eager
for verbal novelty, this undoubted symptom of a
weakening verse seems rather evidence that at last
the writer cared less for how his verse sounded than
for what it meant. From the very beginning, Shaks-
pere's lines have tended to mean more and more;
and this tendency —
involving his tremendous activity
of thought —
never weakens to the very end.
With Macbeth^ however, disappeared the essentially
overwrought mood which appeared with Hamlet ; An-
tony and Cleopatra, in some respects the most masterly
of Shakspere's plays, contained no suggestion of this
fiercest tendency of the great tragedies — the tendency
toward something like madness. With consummate
command of conception and of style alike, it presented
the greatest picture in English Literature of decadent
virtue ; and in Cleopatra herself it presented such a
summary womanhood as we have found Shaks-
of evil
pere prone to make of matters from which he was
passing. In the Falstaff scenes of Henry 7F!, for ex-
ample, he gave a final picture of the actual condition

from which he had emerged. In Twelfth Night,

of life
he recapitulated the whole joyous mood of his early
comedy. So in Cleopatra he finally summed up, with
retrospective completeness, his sense of all the harm
 SHAKSPERE FROM 1600 TO 1608 341

which woman can do ; and with Cleopatra damning

fascination disappeared.
Not so the irony, however. In Coriolanus, irony —
unrelieved, dully passionate — was more savage,
fiercer,

than ever. Somehow, though, it had become the in-

spiring force no longer of emotion, but of solid thought.
The contrast between good and evil had become so
abstract that it phrased itself, for the first time in
Shakspere's serious work, rather deliberately than
imaofinativelv. For the first time since the Midsum-
mer NighVs Dream, if not indeed for the first time
of all, the characters set forth by Shakspere seemed
rather " humourous " than human after the tradi-
;

tional English fashion, they seemed made to embody

traits ; they were not, like the great creations of
Shakspere, beings which had grown of themselves into
all the inevitable complexity of human individuality.
In Coriolanus, for the first time since the experimental
work of so many years before, we missed the sponta-
neity of imagination which had pervaded both the
merely artistic work of Shakspere's second period,
and this passionate work of his third.
Exhaustion seems a strange word to use about
Coriolanus ; yet this weakening of creative energy is
surely a symptom of such exhaustion as should nor-
mally follow the unprecedented, unequalled activity
of creative power which had gone before. If exhaus-
tion it be, however, which this cold, bitter tragedy
reveals, it is surely an exhaustion which the artist to
whom it came would hardly recognize as such. For
342 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
eight years, we have seen, — from thirty-six to forty-

four, — he had been constantly producing great tragic

poems, unsurpassed for range and power, and at
their height full of overwrought spontaneous intensity.
All along this intensity had been accompanied by a
growing power both of philosophic thought and of
verbal expression. Intellectually, Shakspere had never
been more powerfully active than he shows himself
in Coriolanus. As the intensity of emotional im-
pulse weakened, then, while the full power of vig-
orous thought remained, we may imagine Shakspere
himself to have felt conscious rather of increasing
self-mastery than of any loss. Coriolanus, indeed, is

such work as an artist, with what seems perversity,

is apt to deem his best. The very weakening of spon-

taneous power which puts an end to merits of which

an artist is normally unconscious, emphasizes the
more deliberate merits of which, above any spectator
or reader, an artist is aware.
In these eight years, from 1600 to 1608, then, the
yearswhen Shakspere surely did the work which
makes him supremely great, we may believe him at
last to have been actuated by a really profound series
of emotional impulses which forced him to express
them with every engine of his art. At the height of
this tremendous artistic experience came an over-
wrought intensity of mind which carried the inherent
misery of tragic conception almost to the verge of
madness. Then, slowly, came growing self-control,
increasing vigor of concentrated thought, finally
 SHAKSPERE FROM 1600 TO 1608 343

what should seem fresh certainty of mastery. Unwit-

tingly to the master, however, this very self-mastery
meant that his great power of spontaneous imagina-
tion,which for thirteen years, from the Midsummer
Night's Dream to Antony and Cleopatra, had been
constant, was at last deserting him.
In view of this, we may now well turn to the other
records of English Literature during these eight years.^
In 1601 were published Bacon's account of the Trea-
9ons of theEarl of Essex, and Jonson's Poetaster ; in
1602 came Campion's Art of English Poetry, David-
son's Poetical Rhapsody, Dekker's Satiromastix, Mars-
ton's Antonio and Mellida and Antonio^s Revenge,
and Middleton's Randall^ Earl of Chester, and Blurt,
Master Constable; in 1603 came Bacon's Apology
concerning the late Earl of Essex, Florio's Montaigne,
Heywood's Woman Killed with Kindness, and Jonson's
Sejanus. This, we remember, was the year when Queen
Elizabeth died and King James came to the throne.
In 1604 were published King James's Counterblast
to Tobacco, and Marston's Malcontent ; in 1605, came

Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Camden's Remains,

Chapman's All Fools, and plays by Jonson and Mar-
ston, —
Jonson's VolponCy too, was acted in 1606 were ;

published plays by Chapman and by Marston, and

Stowe's Chronicle; in 1607, the Woman Hater — the
first Beaumont and Fletcher
play of was acted, and —
among the publications were Chapman's Bussy d^Am-
1 As before, we may conveniently rely on Ryland s Chronologicai

Outlines, which suggests enough for our purpose

344 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
hois,Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho, Marston's
What You Will, and Tourneur's Revenger^s Tragedy.
In 1608 — the year when Clarendon, Fuller, and Mil-
ton were born — Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster
was perhaps acted and among the publications were
;

Hall's Characters of Virtues and Vices, and plays by

Chapman and by Middleton.
Hasty and incomplete though the list be, it is
enough for our purpose. A mere glance at it will
show that, in comparison with either of the earlier
periods of publication which we considered,^ the pre-
ponderance of dramatic work is marked and what is
;

more, that this work includes not such archaic plays

as those which Shakspere found on the stage in 1587,
but the ripest work of Dekker, Heywood, Jonson,
Marston, and Middleton and good work by Beau-
;

mont and Fletcher, Tourneur, and Webster. It was

during the period of Shakspere's great tragic plays, in
short, thatwhat we now think of as the Elizabethan
drama came into existence and in 1608, when at last
;

Shakspere's creative energy showed symptoms of

exhaustion, he was surrounded on every side by rival
dramatists, of great inventive as well as poetic power,
whose work was so good that no contemporary crit-
icism could surely have ranked it below his own,

1 See pp. 97, 210.

 X
TIMON OF ATHENS, AND PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE

[Timon of Athens was first entered in 1623 and published in the

folio.

Its sources are Paynter's Palace of Pleasure and a passage from the
Life of Antony in North's Plutarch.
On internal evidence it has been conjecturally assigned to the period
we have now reached, about 1 607.

Pericles was published in quarto, with Shakspere's name, in 1609.

It was republished in 1611 and in 1619, but was not included in the
folio of 1623. It was not added to Shakspere's collected works until

the third folio, — 1 663-4. Among the seven plays then added to the
old collection this is the only one not generally thought spurious
Its sources are Lawrence Twine's Patteme of Painefull Adventures,
and Gower's Confessio Amantis, Parts of the story may be traced back
to the fifth or sixth century.
On internal evidence, Pericles has been conjecturally assigned to
1 608 or thereabouts.

In both Timon and Pericles there is much matter believed not to be

by Shakspere. In the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society for
1874^ appear conjectural selections of wliat passages in these plays are
believed to be genuine. Just what part Shakspere had in these plays,
— whether he planned, or retouched, or collaborated, nobody has —
determined.]

Before we have seen work by Shakspere which

this
is comparatively weak. Even after his experimental
period, at the time when his imagination was begin-
ning to display its ntmost vigor, we found that when

1 Pages 130, 253.

346 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
his attention was concentrated on anything, something
else was apt to suffer. Since Titus Andronicus itself,
though, we have found nothing so palpably weak as
the two plays which we here consider together. In
total effect, neither of them seems anywhere near
worthy of Shakspere,
This weakness, of course, is partly due to the gen-
erally admitted fact that considerable portions of these
plays are by other hands. This does not cover the
matter, however. The Taming of
Shrew is said the
to be largely by other hands yet the Taming of the ;

Shrew nevor seems, like Timon and Pericles, essen-

tially unworthy of a place in Shakspere's work. To
appreciate why these plays are given such a place, we
must for the moment abandon our habit of considering
plays as complete works, and attend only to details.
Take, for example, Timon's speech to Apemantus :
^ —
**
Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm
With favour never clasp'd but bred a dog.
;

Hadst thou, like us from our first swath, proceeded

The sweet degrees that this brief world affords
To such as may the passive drugs of it
Freely command, thou wouldst have plunged thyself
In general riot," etc.

Or again, take Timon's better-known last speech :

^

" 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."

1 IV. iii. 250. 2 V. i. 217.

 TIMON AND PERICLES 347

Without knowing why, any one who knows Shaks-

pere's style, must feel sure that Shakspere wrote these
lines. They are typical of many in Timon of Athens ;
weak though the play must remain as a whole, it con-
tains passages good enough for any one.
With Pericles the case is similar. Here, to be
sure, Shakspere's work is supposed to begin only
with the third act, where the shipwreck scene has
such obvious likeness to the better shipwreck scene
of the Tempest. From thence on we may find many
traces of Shakspere. The scene between Marina and
Leonine, in the fourth act,^ for example, while none
too powerful, is distinctly in his manner. So is the
last scene, where Pericles and Marina
particularly
meet the situation, which in any other hands than
; ^

Shakspere's might have become intolerably monstrous,

is treated with a delicacy distinctly his own.
These occasional passages, amid so much that is

worthless, give these plays their place among those

generally ascribed to Shakspere ; and so far as verse-
tests can guide us under such uncertain conditions,
both plays seem to belong nearly where we place
them, —a conclusion which in the case of Pericles
is supported by the fact of its publication in 1609.
Thus placed, these plays, so uninteresting in them-
selves, become unexpectedly notable.
They belong, we assume, at the end of the passion-
ate period which produced the great tragedies f they
precede, as we shall see, three plays, Cymheline, the

1 IV. i. 51-91. 2 V. i. 64 seti-

348 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Tempest^ and the Winter^ s Tale, of which the temper
is not gloomy or passionate, but serenely romantic.
Between this group and the tragic group there is a
very marked contrast the groups express totally
;

different artistic moods.

Such sudden contrasts are common in artistic

careers. From time to time an artist will find him-

self possessed of an imaginative impulse which seems
final. In the mood which that impulse involves —
grand or petty, solemn or gay — the whole truth of
life, so far as he can express it, will seem compressed.
He will gj on, expressing himself in phrase after
phrase concerning this elusive, inspiring impulse.
All of a sudden his power will lapse. He can do
no more; he can only caricature his old self, or
blunder vaguely in search of some new, equally or
freshly potent motive. The experience is as fre-
quent in tyros and scribblers as in the great artists
whose manners change. At one moment, for ex-
ample, a youth can write sentimental verse ; the
vein runs dry ; he flutters about searching for rhymes
and melodies that will not come ; and by and by
proves to have a vein of light satire, instead, or of
serious critical thought, and so on. Between these
two periods of production there will almost always
come an interval of transitional stagnation, comi-
cally or painfully like the calm between two adverse
breezes.
Between the general mood Timon and that of
of
Pericles there is just such a contrast as marks an
 TIMON OF ATHENS 349

artistic transition from one dominating mood to an-

other ; and throughout both plays, even in the parts
which seem genuinely Shakspere's, there is just such
weakness of imaginative impulse as normally belongs
to such transition. All this matter, of course, is

hypothetical. How much of these plays is Shaks-

pere's,and when he wrote his part of them, can
never be determined. That modern verse-tests place
these plays here, though, quite apart from their
substance, becomes notable when we consider their
artistic character ; for, if our chronology be true,
we have met hardly any fact which goes further
than the weakness of these transitional plays to prove
that, vast as Shakspere's genius was, it worked by
the same laws which govern the aesthetic experience
of any honest modern artist.

To consider these plays in more detail, Timon is

the last work of Shakspere's where the predominating

mood is gloomy. Broadly, if monotonously planned,
it is throughout exasperatingly undramatic. The plot
is not only capable of dramatic treatment, but essen-
tially probable. What happens might happen any-
where : a man, born rich, wastes his substance, and
when he is poor finds his swans all geese — wherefore
misanthropy. Yet, for all this inherent plausibility,
Shakspere is never less plausible. The first scene,
to be sure, is broad, firm, and not without action;
even here, however, the characters are presented so
externally, so " humourously," that the scene seems
more like Ben Jonson's work than Shakspere's. At
350 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
times, indeed, reminds one rather of the classic
it

French comedy than of English. After this first

scene, one never feels as if anything in Timon were
so. Except very faintly in Timon himself there is

never a trace of real, as distinguished from conven-

tionally "humourous," character; there is nowhere
a whiff of real atmosphere, either, what happens, —
takes place only on the stage. In this respect Timon
is at the opposite pole from the Merchant of Venice

there the vigor of Shakspere's creative imagination

made characters and atmosphere so real that we
never stop to think what absurd things are going
on ^ Timon there is such weakness of creative
; in
imagination that we can hardly realize hpw what
goes on might really occur anywhere. The merit
of Timon, in short, so far as it has any, lies wholly
in isolated passages, notable for firmness of phrase.
It is just such merit as we should expect to
survive, no matter how fully imaginative impulse
should desert a poet like Shakspere. After above
twenty years of faithful work, his masterly style
was bound become a fixed habit of expres-
to have
sion. Had he failed now and again to phrase single
thoughts with ultimate felicity, he would almost have
been writing in a new language. Apart from this mere
survival of style, Timon throughout indicates exhaus-
"
tion of creative energy. Its impotently " humourous
treatment of character reminds one, rather painfully,
of the first symptoms of creative weakness in Coruh
1 See p. 148.
 PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE 351

laniis. Its general mood, too, is colder, more cynical,

darker even than that. The misanthropy which un-
derlies Timon, indeed, is savage enough to suggest
the more masterly misanthropy of Swift. If Timon
be the darkest of all the plays, though, it is likewise
the most impotent as yet.
In impotence, however, Pericles perhaps outstrips
it. Pericles, too, has other symptoms of decline.
Among Shakspere's plays it is unique for monstrosity
of motive ; and even though itsmost monstrous pas-
sages occur in the first act, which is thought to be by
another hand, Shakspere probably accepted them as
part of the scheme into which his own work should fit.
Such monstrosity of motive is a frequent symptom of
artistic transition. Aware that creative energy is ex-
hausted, an artist is apt to grow reckless ; and, if he
be addressing a popular audience, he is tempted to
supply his lack of imagination by shocking or mon-
strous devices. Some such phenomenon marks the
decay of many and of none more
schools of art,

distinctly than the Elizabethan drama. In motive,

then, even more than in impotence, Pericles is a play
of the Elizabethan decadence.
The impotence shown in Pericles, however, differs
essentially from that of Timon. Here the weakness
is not so much of exhaustion as of experiment. The
word "experiment," to be sure, recalls Shakspere's
earliest plays, which are very unlike this. There is
nothing in Pericles to remind one of Titus Atidronicus,
or of Henri/ VI., or of Love's Labour '« Lost, or of the
352 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Comedy of Errors^ or of the Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Like them, however, Pericles may fairly be regarded
as preliminary to what shall follow. The difference
between this experiment and the old ones is that while
those were formal, this, which now and again reveals
disdainful mastery of mere form, tries to express a kind
of motive whose substance is new to Shakspere.
Unlike Timon, and all the plays we have consid-
ered since Twelfth Night, Pericles is in no sense
a tragedy it is a romance^ which carries its story
;

through a period of dismay and confusion to a serene

close. In chis respect, to be sure, we might group it
with many of the earlier plays, —
with the Merchant
of Venice, for example, and Much Ado Ah out -Nothing,
and As You Like It, and Twelfth Night ; or even in
some degree with AlVs Well that Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure, From all of these, however,
it may be distinguished by at least two traits which

group it with the three great romances still to come,

— Cymheline, the Tempest, and the Winter's Tale :. in
the first place, it attempts within the limits of a single
performance to deal with the events of a whole lifetime,
in much such manner as Sidney's Defence of Poesy
ridiculed. In the second place, the ultimate serenity
comes not after a short, concentrated period of dis-
aster, but only after a longand seemingly tragic
experience of the rudest buffets of life. Underlying
such, a conception as this is a new artistic mood : the
world still seems evil, to be sure ; but wait long enough,
and even in this world the evil shall pass.
 TIMON AND PERICLES 353

In this aspect, which some critics, deeming Shaks-

pere more moralist than artist, take to involve a
deliberate preaching of reconciliation, Pericles fore-
shadows the three romances to come. In more than
one detail, too, it suggests them. The shipwreck, for
example, reminds one a little of Twelfth Night and
the Comedy of Errors, but far more of the Tempest.^
The story of Marina has something in common with
that of Miranda, and more with that of Perdita. The
recovery of the priestess Thaisa, recalling that of
Emilia Comedy of Errors, is still more like
in the
that of Hermione in the Winter'^s Tale. Clearly
enough, Pericles bears to the coming romances a
relation very like that borne to the great comedies
by the experimental. Just as this second period of
experiment is shorter, and its fruit less ripe than
was the case before, however, so the foreshadowing of
what is to come is less complete. In reviving, after
eight years of passionate gloom, a fresh gleam of
romantic feeling, Pericles is perhaps most noteworthy.
In Timon, then, we have the definite close of the
period of passionate gloom, —a mood of which in
Coriolanus we observed traces of exhaustion. In
Tlmon, too, we have such paralysis of creative power
as normally belongs to a period of artistic transition.
In Pericles, we have the feeble, experimental begin-
ning "of Shakspere's final period. During this period,
though it is short and its production less ideally fin-

ished than that of either the artistic period or the

i
Cf. C. o/E. I. i. 63 seq. ; T. N. I. ii. ; Per III. i. ; Temp. I. i.

23
".54 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
passionate, we shall find something like a fusion, in
lifelong romances, of all the moods which have pre-
ceded, — of the darkness of tragedy, the gayety of
comedy, the serenity of romance. Though of little
intrinsic worth, then, Timon and Pericles, considered
in relation to Shakspere's development, may be
regarded as deeply significant.
 Xi

THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE FROM CYMBELINE

TO HENRY VIII

I.

While by common consent, Cymhellne^ the Tempest^

and the Winter s Tale are thought to have been writ-
ten after the plays we have ah'eady considered, and
before Henry VIII.^ there is nothing but verse-tests to
fix their order. The order in wliich we shall consider
them, then, is little better than arbitrary. Any line
of development which we may be tempted to trace
within the series must be even more conjectural than
usual. Keeping this in mind, however, we may sug-
gestively compare these plays with each other and, ;

with fair confidence in our chronology, we may com-

pare them with anything which we have considered
hitherto.

II. Cymbeline.

[CymheUne is first mentioned in the note-book of Dr. Forman His

note about it is undated, but as his note of Macbeth is dated April 20th,
1610, and that of the Winter's Tale is dated May 15th, 161 1, it probably
belongs to about the same period. As Forman died in September,
1611, that year is the latest possible for his note. Cymbeline was
entered in 1623, and published in the folio
The historical parts of Cymbeline are based on Holinshed the story ;

of Imogen, including both the truuk-sceue and the disguise, is bathed on

356 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
a story iu the Decameron, of which no English version is known to have
existed before 1620; the death-like sleep of Imogen, so obviously like
Juliet's, is also like a familiar German story In general, perhaps, the
resemblance of incidents in Cymbzu .e to incidents in Shakspere's ear-
lier plays is more noteworthy than the relation of either to their actual
sources.
By between Coriolanus and the Tem-
verse-tests Cymbeline is placed
pest. It is but Mr. Eleay thinks
generally assigned to 1609 or 1610 i

that certain parts of it were written as early as 1606, when Shakspere

was engaged in extracting from Holinshed material for King Lear and
Macbeth.]

A hasty critic lately said that Cymheline sounds as

if Browning had written it. Though crude, the re-
mark is suggestive. The style of Cymbeline has at
least two traits really like Browning's : the rhythm of
the lines is often hard to catch ; and the thought often
becomes so intricate that, without real obscurity, it is
hard to follow. Take, for example, the opening of the
third scene of the first act, a conversation between
Imogen and Pisanio :
—
*'
Imo. I would thou grew'st unto the shores o' the haven,
And question'dst every sail : if he should write
And I not have it, 't were a paper lost

As offer'd mercy is. What was the last

That he spake to thee ?

Pis. It was his queen, his queen

Imo. Then waved his handkerchief?
Pis. And kiss'd it, madam.
Imo. Senseless linen! happier therein than II ,

And that was all ?

Pis. No, madam; for so long

As he could make me with this eye or ear
Distinguish him from others, he did keep
The deck, with glove, or hat, or handkerchief,
 CYAIBELINE 357

Still waving, as the fits and stirs of 's mind

Could best express how slow his soul sail'd on.

How swift his ship.
Imo. Thou shouldst have made him
As little as a crow, or less, ere left
To after-eye him.
Pis. Madam, so I did."

This passage is enough to illustrate the peculiar

metrical structure of Endstopped lines
Cymheline,
are so deliberately avoided that one feels a sense of
relief when a speech and a line end together. Such a
phrase as
" How slow his soul sail'd on, how swift his ship
"

is deliberately made, not a single line, but two half-

lines. Several times, in the broken dialogue, one has
literally to count the syllables before the metrical
regularity of the verse appears. The meaning, too,
is often so compactly expressed that to catch it one
must pause and study. Clearly this puzzling style is

decadent ; the distinction between verse and prose is

breaking down. Again, take this passage from the

scene when Imogen receives the letter of Posthumus
bidding her meet him at Milford :
^ —
" Then, true Pisanio, —
Who longest, like me, to see thy lord ; who longest, —
O, let me — but not like me — yet
bate, long'st,
But in a fainter kind:— O, not like me;
For mine 's beyond beyond — say, and speak thick;
Love's counsellor should the bores of hearing
fdl

To the smothering of the sense — how far it is

To this same blessed Milford."

1 in. ii. 53-61.
358 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Fere the actual sentence is only " Pisanio . . . say
. . . how far it is to . . . Milford." Nothing but the
most skilful elocution, however, could possibly make
clear to a casual hearer the broken, parenthetic style.
The speeches of lachimo in the last act^ show the
same trait more extravagantly still. Altogether, the
style of Cymheline probably demands closer attention
than that of any other work of Shakspere.
This almost perverse complexity of Cymheline is

not confined to details of style. To understand the

structure of the play you must give it preposterous
attention. Until the very last scene, the remarkably
involved story tangles itself in a way which is utterly
bewildering. At any given point, overwhelnjed with
a mass of facts presented pell-mell, you are apt to find
that you have quite forgotten something important.
Coming after such confusion, the last scene of Cymhe-
line is among the most notable bits of dramatic con-

struction anywhere. The more one studies it, the

more one is astonished at the ingenuity with which
denouement follows denouement. Nowhere else in
Shakspere, certainly, is there anything like so elabo-
rate an untying of knots which seem purposely made
intricate to prepare for this final situation. Situa-
tion, however, is an inadequate word. Into 485 lines
Shakspere has crowded some two dozen situations any
one of which would probably have been strong enough
to carry a whole act.

An analysis of these is perhaps worth while. The

1 V. V. 153 seq.
 CYMBELINE 359

flcene opens with the triumphal entrance of Cymbc-

line,^ who proceeds to knight his heroic sons ^ —
neither side suspecting the relation. Ilis triumph is

interrupted by news of the queen's death, and of her -^

villainy.* Before this can much upset Cymbeline,

however, the captives are brought in,^ and the dt^noue-
merits are fully prepared what they
for. To realize
are, we may remind ourselves that we now have on
the stage not only the mutually unknown father and
sons, but also the following personages whose identity
is more or less confused Imogen, disguised as a
:

youth, is known to be herself only by Pisanio, but is

known to her brothers — whom she does not suspect

to be her brothers — as the boy Fidele, whom they
believe dead. Belarius and Posthumus, each in dis-
guise, are known to nobody. lachimo is present
undisguised ; but his villainy is known only to Imo-
and not wholly to her. Meanwhile, nobody but
[gen,
the sons of Cymbeline knows that Cloten has been
killed. One's brain faidy swims. The action begins
by Lucius, the Roman general, begging the life of
Imogen, whom he believes to be a boy in his service.^
This boon granted, Imogen, instead of showing grati-
tude to Lucius, turns away from him, with apparent
heartlessness.^ Her real object, however, is to expose
the villain lachimo,^ — a matter which so fills her mind
that she has no eyes for her brothers, who half recog-

1 L. 1. « L. 20. « L. 27.
* L. 37. * L. 69. • L. 83.
' L. 102. • L. 130.
360 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
nize her as Fidele.^ lachimo, caught with the ring
of Posthumus on his finger, now confesses his villainy .^
Thereupon Posthumus, at last enlightened, and believ-
ing that Imogen has been killed by his command,
reveals himself in an agony of rage.^ Imogen inter-
rupts him, and he, believing her an officious boy,
strikes her down.* Pisanio then reveals her iden-
tity and in telling her story reveals also circum-
;
^

stances which prove her identity with the boy Fidele.^

Thus the interest of disguised Belarius, Arviragus,
and Guiderius is thoroughly aroused and when ;

Pisanio goes on to expose the wicked purposes of

Cloten, who is missing, Guiderius declares himself
Cloten's slayerJ Thereupon Cymbeline, who has just
knighted him, feels bound to condemn him to death.^
The execution of this sentence is interrupted by
Belarius, who is presently condemned too.^ He
thereupon reveals the identity of the sons of Cymbe-
line 1^ and his own ; and his statements are confirmed
by conventional stage birth-marks.^^ In the general
thanksgiving which follows, Posthumus reveals him-
self as the missing hero of the battle. ^^ lachimo con-
firms and is thereupon pardoned.^* Then the
him ;
^^

soothsayer expounds how all this solves the mysteri-

ous riddle,^^ peace is proclaimed, ^^ and, in some savor
of anticlimax, everybod}' is happy.

1 L. 120. -^
L. 153. « L. 209. L. 229.
* L. 231. 6 L. 260. 7 L. 287. » L. 299.
• L. 310. 10 L. 330. 11 L. 363. 12 l. 407.
13 L. 412. i*L. 4)7. 15 L. 435. i« L. 459.
 CYMBELIXE 361

In tliis denouement^ we have specified twenty-four

distinct stage situations. Over-elaborate as this is, —
and tautologous, too, for the audience already knows
[> pretty much all that is revealed, — it is such a feat of
technical stage-craft as can be appreciated only by
those who have tried to manage even a single situation
as strong as the average of these. This last scene of
Cymheline, then, which demonstrates the deliberate
nature of all the preceding confusion, is very remark-
ible. Without yielding to fantastic temptation, we
^may assert that, whatever the actual history of its
composition, it is just sucli a deliberate feat of tech-
nical skill as on general principles we might expect
,from a great artist, stirred to tremendous effort by the
[stinging consciousness of creative lethargy ; and crea-
tive lethargy seemed the only explanation of Timon
and Pericles.
In this respect, the last scene of Gymheline proves
[typical of the whole play. From beginning to end,
[whatever its actual history, the play is certainly such
as we might expect from an artist who, in spite of

declining power, was determined to assert that he

could still do better than ever. Thus viewed, if hardly
otherwise, all its perversities become normal.
Not the least normal thing about the play, too, is the
material of which its bewildering plot is composed.
Very slight examination will show that Cymhellne is

a tissue of motives, situations, and characters which

in the earlier work of Shaksperc })roved theatrically
effective. Tl^ere is enough confusion of identity for
362 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
a dozen of the early comedies and the disguised
;

characters are headed, as of old, by the familiar heroine

in hose and doublet. Posthumus, lachimo, and Cloten
revive the second comic motive —
later a tragic one
— of self-deception. At least in the matter of jeal-
ousy and villainy, too, Posthumus and lachimo recall
Othello and lago. In the potion and the death-like
sleep of Imogen, we have again the death-like sleep of
Juliet. In the villainous queen, we have another
woman, faintly recalling both Lady Macbeth and the
daughters of King Lear. In the balancing of this figure
by the pure one of Imogen, we have a suggestion of
Cordelia's dramatic value. And so on. If, in some
fantasticmoment, we could imagine that Shakspere,
like Wagner, had written music-dramas, giving to
each character, each situation, each mood, its own
musical motive, we should find in Cymbeline hardly
any new strain.
The symphonic harmonies in which the old strains
combined, however, would themselves seem new for ;

the mood of Cymbeline has a quality which, except in

feebly tentative Pericles^ we have not found before.
Cymbeline leads its characters through experiences
which have all the gloom of tragedy ; but the inexo-
rable fate of tragedy is here no longer, and ultimately
all emerge into a region of romantic serenity. In
Cy7nbeline, men wait and ; in spite of their errors and
their follies, all at last goes well.
Looking back at the plays we have considered, only
one appears to have been so completely recapitulatory
 CYMBELINE 363

as Cymheline ; this is Twelfth Night. In almost every

other respect, however, the effects of these two plays
differ. Among their many differences none perhaps
is more marked than their comparative relations to
the older works which they recapitulate. In Twelfth
Nighty the old material is almost always presented
more effectively than before ; in Cymheline, it is almost
always less satisfactorily handled. To a reader, and
still more an enthusiastic student, Cymbeline has
to
the fascinating trait of at once demanding and reward-
ing study. On the stage, however, compared with the
best of Shakspere's earlier plays, it is tiresome. For
this there are two reasons : it contains too much, —
its complexity of both substance and style overcrowds
it throughout; and, with all its power, it lacks not
only the simplicity of greatness, but also the ease of
spontaneous imagination. It has amazing cunningness
of plot ; its characters are individually constructed ;

its atmosphere is varied and sometimes — particularly

in the mountain scenes — plausible ; its style abounds
in final phrases. Throughout, however, it is laborious.
Just as in Twelfth Night, for all its recapitulation, one
feels constant spontaneity, so in every line of Cymheline
one is somehow aware of Titanic effort.
In brief, then, Cymheline seems the work of a
consciously older man than the Shakspere whom we
have known. As such, it takes a distinct place in
our study. In thus placing it, to be sure, we must
guard against certainty. At best, our results must be
conjectural ; and we have no external evidence to con-
364 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

firm us. Always remembering that we may not assert

our notions true, however, we are free to state and to
believe them.
In Timon and in Pericles we saw reason to believe
that Shakspere's creative power had lapsed. Any
courageous artist, thus placed, would be stirred by
consciousness of this lapse to an effort hitherto un-
approached. We may imagine Shakspere, then, with
disdainful technical mastery of stage-craft and of
style, sweeping together all manner of old material
which had proved itself effective. We may imagine
him combiiiing this in a new form, — more compre-
hensive, more varied, more and in
intricately skilful,
the ultimate sweetness of its romantic harmony more
significant than any form in which he had previously
used its components. The result we may imagine to
be Cymbeline. Though in Cymheline, however, Shaks-
pere's power, compared with any other man's, remain
supreme, it does not, for all his pains, rise to its own
highest level. Vast though it be, it cannot conceal the
effort at last involved in its exertion. In this effort,

one feels the absence of his old spontaneity. Here,

if nowb.ere else, Cymbeline reveals unmistakable symp-
toms of creative decadence.
 THE TEMPEST 365

III. The Tempest.

[The Tempest was amoug the plays paid for, as having been played
at court, on May 20th, 1613. It was entered in 1623, and puhlished
in the folio. In that volume it is the opening play, a fact which has —
given rise to a comically general impression that it was the first which
Shakspere wrote.
No unmistakable source has been discovered. Apparently, however,
the Tempest was in some degree affected by A
Discovery of the Bermu-
Isle of Devils ;
das, otherwise called the by Sir Thomas Gates, Sir
George Somers, and Captain Newport, with divers others, which was
published in the autumn of 1610. The Utopian scheme of Gonzalu —
II. i. 147, seq. — seems to be taken from Florio's Montaigne.
Verse-tests place the Tempest between Cymbeline and the Winter's
Tale. It is generally assigned conjecturally to 1610.]

In total effect, the Tempest is unique. A comparison

of its incidents with the records of EHzabethan voyages
will show one reason why. These voyages — of which
Sir Walter Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana is a good
example —
reveal a state of things unprecedented in
human experience, and never to be repeated. The
general outline of the earth was at last known to every-
body ; the limits of the physical world had finally been
ascertained. At the same time, this world was ahuost
totally unexplored what it might contain nobody
;

knew ; behind every newly discovered coast might

actually lurk Utopia or the fountain of eternal youth
for the moment such aii isle as Prosperous was cred-
ible. The only place where it could possibly be, how-
ever, was in the Western Seas. The Mediterranean
was as well known as it is to-dav ; and Tunis was what
366 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
it remained until our own century, —
a notorious nest
of Barbary pirates. While the magic isle, then,\7hich
now seems the most palpable impossibility of the Tem-
pest, was not so in the days of Elizabeth, what now
seem the credible parts of the play — the allusions to

Milan, Naples, and Tunis — really put the action be-

yond the bounds of possibility. In laying his magic
scene between two such familiar regions as Tunis
and Naples, in making the distance between them
oceanic, and in serenely disregarding the notorious
character of Tunis, Shakspere seems deliberately to
have idealized such facts as the records of the voyages

gave him. His real topic was human life, in the

broadest sense ; but just as he idealized the records of
the voyages, he idealized everything. In the Tempest,
more than anywhere else, his work seems deliberately
removed from reality.
In the matters here idealized, there ismuch trace of
such formerly effective material as we found more
palpably in Cymbeline. The tit-for-tat of the ship-
wrecked courtiers ^ revives in some degree the ingen-
ious verbal pleasantry which began in the plays of Lyly
and reached its highest point in Much Ado About
Nothing. Stephano and Trinculo, the drunken comic
personages, similarly revive Sir Toby Belch and Fal-
staff and the Fools, mingling with all these a sugges-
tion of the old distrust of democracy. The story of
Prospero and his brother issomewhat akin to situa-
tions in As You Like It, and still more to situations
1 II. i.
 THE TEMPEST 367

in Hamlet. The idyllic and the magic scciios recall^

the mood of As You Like It^ and more still that of

the Midsummer NlghCs Bream. Ariel revives the
child-actors, who must have been effective not only in
the fairy poem, but in Richard III. and in King John
and in Coriolanus} The wreck reminds one of Peri-
eles^oi Tivelfth Night., and of the Comedy of Errors ;'^
the abandoned child is akin to Marina. And so on.
In the Tempest, however, these old motives are all

idealized, refined, subtly varied ; they do not, as in

Cgmheline, reveal themselves at once.
Another cause of the unique individuality of the
Tempest, however, is very palpable. This is a tech-
nical trait which seems wholly new. In the Comedy
of Errors, to be sure, Shakspcre did somethini^ like
what he has done here ; when translating his classic
motive into the terms of the Elizabethan theatre, he
so far adhered to the classic model as to preserve unity
of time and action, and not to stray far from unity of
place.^ In the Tempest, however, there is no suirges-
tion of a classic motive ; no work in English Literature
is more romantic ;
yet, at the same time, something
very like the pseudo-classical unities is maintained
throughout. between two and
The play would act in
three hours and between two and three hours would
;

probably include everything which happens the time of ;

the Tempest, then, is actual. The action, too, is almost

continuous ; and while the scene shifts a little, from
^ See pp. 113, 141 and ; cf. Coriolanus, V. iii. 127.
2 See pp. 207, 347. » See p. 91.
368 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE

one part of the island to another, it remains virtually

unchanged, practically observing also the unity of
place. As a technical feat, we have found nothing
comparable to this, unless it be the last scene of Cym-
heline. There Shakspere packed into less than five
hundred lines a denouement of unparalleled, deliberate
complexity, involving some two dozen distinct stage
situations. In the Tempest, on the other hand, he
expands his denouement into a whole five-act play.
This feat involves a degree of pains escaped by
whoever should write in free romantic form. Before
the unities can be observed, the material in hand must
be not only thoroughly collected, but thoroughly
digested. Plot, character, atmosphere, and style, ac-

cordingly, must be pretty thoroughly fused ; as is the

case with the Tempest, however, they need not be fused
indistinguishably. The plot, in substance such a life-

long romance as the plots of Cymheline and of Pericles,

is put together with great firmness. The opening
scene of shipwreck is just such an adaptation of the
old induction as we found in As You Like It, in the
Merchant of Venice, and in the Midsummer Night's
Dream} Alone of the scenes in the Tempest, it is

minutely true to life. What happens is just what

might have happened to any company of Elizabethan
seamen whom you had seen sail from Plymouth or
Bristol. For all any Elizabethan could tell, too, these
very seamen, bound no one knew quite whither in the
Western Seas, might actually split on unknown magic
i
See pp. no, 146, 159.
 THE TEMPEST 309

islands. No introduction was

to such matter as
coming in theTemiie%t^ then, could have been more
skilfully plausible and from the moment when the
;

castaways set foot on the magic island, all moves

straight forward, dominated by the deliberately provi-
dential spirit of Prospero. This deliberately provi-
dential spirit typifies the treatment of character
throughout the Tempest. Individual though almost
every personage be, all are broadly typical, too. In
this respect the Tempest again recalls the Midsummer
NighVs Dream. There, however, the characters were
hardly individual at all, but were rather collected in
three distinctly typical groups ;
^ here, on the other
.hand, individualization is probably carried as far as
ps consistent with the delicately idealized atmosphere.
'his atmosphere, as remote from actuality as that of
the Midsummer NighVs Dream ^ is distinct ; its sus-
tained, exquisite dreaminess never becomes palpable
unreality. We are in another world than our own,
but a world which is only just beyond the limits of
the world we all know. On the old coins of Spain
were stamped the pillars of Hercules, with the legend
Plus ultra, —3Iore is beyond. The mood into which
the Plus idtra of old Spain leads one is such as per-
vades the Tempest. After all, these strange events
and mere mist of fantasv thev are
beinprs are not a ;

rather a vision of something only just beyond our

ken. Even though their place be nowhere on earth,
they might well be somewhere within our reach and ;

1 See p. 111.
21
370 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
if they were, very surely the language there spoken
would be the lovely poetry of the Tempest.
At first reading, this style seems very differ-
ent from that of Cymbeline ; but a very little com-
parison will show that the difference is really less
marked than the similarity. Take Prospero's most
familiar speech :
^ —
" Our revels now are ended. 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."

Compare with those last three lines the lines from

Cymheline at which we first glanced :2 —
" He did keep
The deck, with glove, or hat, or handkerchief,
Still waving, as the fits and stirs of 's mind
Could but express how slow his soul sail'd on,
How swift his ship."

For all the finer music of the Tempest, the metrical

structure of the two passages is the same. Again,
compare with Imogen's elaborately parenthesized in-

quiry, — "Pisanio . . . say . . . how far it is to . . .

Milf ord," ^ — Prosperous story of Antonio's treachery :

*

1 IV. i. 148. 2 I. iii. 10.

« See p. 357. * I. ii. 66.

 THE TEMPEST 371

"Pros. My brother and tliy uncle, call'd Antonio

I pray thee mark me — that a brother should
Be 80 perfidious ! —
he whom next thyself
Of all the world I loved and to him put
The manage of niy state as at that time
;

Through all the signories it was the first

And Prosper© the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
4 Without a parallel those being all my study,
;

The government I cast upon my brother

And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle —
Dost thou attend me ?
Mir. Sir, most heedfully.
Pros. Being once perfected how to grant suits.
How to deny them, who to advance and who
To trash for over-topping, new created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed 'em.
Or else new form'd *em," etc.

Leaving to those who love grammar the task of

parsing these parenthetic excursions, we may content
ourselves with remarking that the simple sentence
which underlies this whole structure is no more than
this " My brother
: Antonio
. . new-created the
. . . .

creatures that were mine." If more grammatically

bewildering than the over-excited speech of Imogen,

this speech of Prospcro, to be sure, more agreeable
Is

to the ear. In structure, however, the two are almost

identical. These examples typify the style of both
plays throughout. Fundamentally similar, they differ
remarkably in effect; for in general, while the style
of Cymheline is harsh, cramped, obscure, the style of
the Tempest is sustained, lucid, and easy. In tlie
372 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Tempest, we may say, the style is not only mastered,
but it is so simplified as really to possess the simplicity
of greatness.
The Tempest, then, is a very great, very beautiful
poem. As a poem one can hardly love it or admire it
too much. As a play, on the other hand, it is neither
great nor effective. The reason is not far to seek :

its motive is not primarily dramatic the mood it ;

would express is not that of a playwright, but rather

that of an allegorist or a philosopher.
The providential character of Prospero, for exam-
ple, is a commonplace ; nothing could more distinctly
mark the divergence of the Tempest from the fate-
ridden tragedies than his serene mastery, both of
emotion and of superhuman things, by mere force of
intellect. A
commonplace, too, is the fresh assertion
in the Tempest of that ideal of family reunion and
reconciliation ^ of which there are traces in Coriolanus,
in Pericles, and in Cymbeline, A commonplace, as
well, is the ideal solution of the troubles which actual
life involves. In the Tempest there are no such doubts
as Hamlet's or Claudio's, nor any such despair as
Lear's or Macbeth's :
—
" We are such etuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

Not quite so familiar, perhaps, but still often remarked,

is the comprehensive, prophetic view of social fact,
typically set forth in Stephano and Trinculo, and above
1 See pp. 332, 353, 362.
 THE TEMPEST 373

all in Caliban. The two former sum up the old dis-

trust of the lower classes. They are not a mob,
to be sure ; on the magic island there was no chance
for a mob to breed ; in Stephano and Trinculo, how-
ever, all the folly and the impotence of a mob are
incarnate. With Caliban the case is different; in

him there is a perception of something not hinted

at before.
The single, unique figure of Caliban, in short, typifies
the whole history of such world-wide social evolution,
such permanent race-conflict, as was only beginning
in Shakspere's day, and as is not ended in our own.
Civilization, exploring and advancing, comes face
to face with barbarism and savagery. Savage and
barbarian alike absorb, not the blessings of civiliza-
amid which their own simple virtues
tion, but its vices,
are lost. Ruin follows. To-day European civiliza-
tion has almost extirpated Maoris and Hawaiians and
Australian blacks. At this moment it is face to face
with the hordes of barbarian Asia and savage Africa.
Humanity forbids the massacre of lower races
the equally noble instinct of race-supremacy forbids
any but a suicidally philanthropic man of European
blood to contemplate without almost equal horror the
thought of miscegenation. When Caliban would pos-
sess Miranda, we torment Caliban, but still we feel
bound to preserve him, — which is not good for the
morals or the temper of Caliban. That savage figure,
then, shows a vision so prophetic that at least one
modern scholar has chosen to studv in Calibnn the
374 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
psychology of Darwin's missing link. Marvellously
prophetic suggestiveness, however, is not exactly a
condition of theatrical effect.
The very complexity, indeed, and the essential
abstractness of the endlessly suggestive, philosophic
motive of the Tempest is reason enough why, for all

its power and beauty, the play should theatrically

fail. Like Cymheline, though far less obtrusi ely, it
contains too much. Like Cymheline it reveals itself
at last as a colossal experiment, an attempt to
achieve an effect which, this time at least, is hope-
lessly beyond human power. Less palpably than
Cymheline, then, but just as surely, the Tempest
finally seems laborious
It distinguishes itself from Cymheline, of course, by
the fact that its construction and its style alike are
grandly simple. Li this simplicity, quite as much as
in its pervading atmosphere of enchantment, and in
its general purpose of pure beauty, it rather resembles
As You Like It, and still more the Midsummer Nighfs
Dream. In final effect, however, it is as far from
either of them as from Cymheline itself. To a great
degree the motive of As You Like It, and without
qualification the motive of the Midsummer Nighfs
Dream is purely to give pleasure ; whatever else
than pleasure one may find in either of them is^inci-

dental. The motive of the Tempest, on the other

hand, we have seen to be philosophic, or allegorical,
or at least something other than purely artistic. The
three most familiar quotations from the three plays
 THE TEMPEST 375

will clearly define them. Take Theseus* great speech

in the Midsummer Night'' 8 Dream : ^ —
**
The poet's eye, in a 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 nothing
A local habitation and a name."

Take Jaques' " Seven ages of Man," in As You

Like It:^ —
" All the world 's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances ;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages
I ;

and so on. Compare with these the wonderful speech

of Prospero :
^ —
" 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 unsubstantial 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."

The three passages will show what one means

who should call the Midsummer Night's Dream spon-
taneously fantastic, and the Tempest deliberately
imaginative.
This quality of deliberation, perhaps, typifies the

fatal trouble. Creatively and technically powerful as

1 V. i. 12. 2 n. vii. 139. » lY. I 151.

376 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
the Tempest IS, — sustained, too, and simplified, and
beautiful, — it has throughout a relation to real life

which we cannot feel unintentional. In a spontaneous

work of art, one feels that the relation of its truth to
the truth of life is not intended, but is rather the result
of the essential veracity of the artist's observation and
expression. 1 In such an effect as that of the Tempest,
then, one grows more and more to feel that, for all its
power, for all its mastery, for all its beauty, the play
is really a tremendous effort.

As such, the Tempest groups itself where verse-tests

place it. In something more than mere form it is

akin to Cy^nheline and to Pericles. In these we saw

indications that Shakspere's power was waning ; here
we find them again. In Cymbeline we found what
seemed a deliberate attempt to assert artistic power at
a moment when that power was past the spontaneous
vigor of maturity. Here we find another such effort,
more potent still. Shakspere not only recalls old
material, and re-composes it he digests his material
;

afresh, until at first glance it seems new. He adds

material that is really new, — drawing inspiration from
the voyages which at the moment were opening a
world of new, unfathomable possibility. All this, old
and new, he suffuses with a single motive of serene,
dominant beauty. In every detail he composes his
work with unsurpassed skill. His motive, however,
is not really dramatic, nor even purely artistic ; it is

philosophic, allegorical, consciously and deliberately

1 See pp. 103, 171, 397,399.

 THE WINTER'S TALE 377

imaginative. His faculty of creating character, as dis-

tinguished from constructing it, is gone. All his power
fails to make his great poem spontaneous, easy, inevi-
table. Like Cymheltne, it remains a Titanic effort
and, in an artist like Shakspere, effort implies creative
decadence, — the fatal approach of growing age.

IV. The Winter's Tale.

[The Winter's Tale was seen by Dr. Forman at the Globe Theatre,
on May 15th, 1611. In an official memorandum made in 1623, it is

ilescribed as " formerly allowed of by Sir George Riche." Though

Kiche undoubtedly licensed plays before August, 1610, this was the
date of his official appointment as Master of the Revels. The play
was entered in 1623, and published in the folio.
The source of the plot is a novel by Robert Greene, originally pub-
lished in 1588 under the title of Pandosto, and later republished as the
Historie ofDorastvs and Fawnia.
Verse-tests place the and the
Winter's Tale later than Cymheline
Tempest. Taking these in connection with the records mentioned
above, most critics conjecturally assign it to the end of 1610 or the
beginning of 1611. Mr. Fleay is disposed to place it a little earlier;
probably before the Tempest.]

The marked individuality of effect which we ob-

served in both CymheHne and the Tempest proved on
scrutiny chiefly due to the fact that the dramatic
structure of each involves a new and bohl technical
experiment. In each the experiment consists chiefly
of a deliberately skilful handling of denouement, lu
Cymbelme^ after four and a half acts of confusion,

comes the last scene, coolly disentangling the confu-

378 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

sion by means and twenty cumulative stage

of four
situations in the Tempest^ with due adherence to the
;

unities of time, of place, and of action, the denouement

is expanded into five whole acts. In the Winter's
Tale we find an analogous individuality of effect, due
to a similar cause. Structurally the Winter's Tale is

perhaps the most boldly experimental of all. The play

is frankly double. The first three acts make a com-
plete independent tragedy, involving the deaths of
Mamillius and of Antigonus, and, so far as you can
tell for the moment, the still more tragic end of Her-
mione. The last two acts make a complete independent
comedy, which, taking up the story at its most tragic
point, leads it to a final denouement of reconciliation
and romantic serenity.
Alike complete, the tragedy and the comedy are
quite as independent as the separate plays in a classic
trilogy or in an Elizabethan series of chronicle-histo-
ries. As we saw when discussing Julius Ccesar, too,
the Elizabethan practice of making consecutive plays
on the same subject was not confined to chronicle-
history. Such after-plays of revenge as Chapman's
Revenge of Bussy d'Amhois and Marston's Antonio's
Revenge we saw to throw light on the structure of
Julius Coesar itself. Nor was such prolonged treat-
ment of a subject confined to tragedy ; in Dekker's
Honest Whore and Heywood's Fair Maid of the West^
to go no further, we have elaborate romantic comedies
in two parts. By its prolongation of popular stories
into more than one performance, indeed, the Eliza-
 THE WINTER'S TALE. 379

betlian theatre proves, as in other aspects, queerly like

the modern Chinese stage. What Shakspere has done
in the Winter^s Tale^ then, is to take the plan of a
double play — peculiar in itself for being half-tragic

and half-comic — and to compress what would nor-

mally have occupied two full performances into the
limits of one. With little alteration of the conven-
tional proportions of a double play, he completely
alters its dimensions. With the slightest possible
departure from his models, with characteristic econ-
omy of invention, he produces by mere compression a
remarkably novel effect.

The very fact of compression, however, naturally

produces a trait which, for theatrical purposes, is

unfortunate. In both substance and style, the Winter s

Tale is overcrowded. Take, for example, the passage

where Hermione has persuaded Polixenes to prolong
his visit and Leontes thereupon becomes jealous ^ :
—
^^Her. What ! have I twice said well ? when was *t before ?

I prithee tell me cram; 's with praise, and make 's

As fat as tame things: one good deed dying tongueless

Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.
Our praises are our wages you may ride 's :

With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere

With spur we heat an acre. But to the goal
My last good deed w^as to entreat his stay :

What was my first ? it has an elder sister,

Or I mistake you O, would her name were Grace

: !

But once before I spoke to the purpose when ? :

Nay, let me have 't ; I long.

1 I. ii. 90-120.
o80 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Leo7i. Why, that was when
Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand
And clap thyself Iny love : then didst thou utter
'I am yours for ever.'
Her. 'T is grace indeed.
Why, lo you now, I have spoke to the purpose twice
The one for ever earn'd a royal husband
The other for some while a friend.
Leon. (Aside) Too hot, too hot 1

To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

I have tremor cordis on me my : heart dances ;

But not for joy ; not joy. This entertainment

May n free face put on, derive a liberty
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,
And well become the agent 't may, I grant ;

But to be paddlingpalms and pinching fingers,^

As now they are, and making practised smiles
As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as 't were
The mort o' the deer ; 0, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows ! Mamillius,
Art thou my boy ?

In more ways than one the passage is typical of the

Winter's Tale. During less than twenty lines, to be-

gin with, Leontes is carried through an emotional ex-

perience which in the case of Othello had been prepared
for by above two acts, and when it came occupied
nearly two hundred and fifty lines.^ Again, while in
Othello every one of these lines is clear and fluent,

this passage from the Winter's Tale is both obscure

and crabbed. The verse is more licentiously free than
ever before, and at the same time over packed with

» Cf. Hamlet, III. iv. 185. ^ Othello, III. iii. 35-279.

 THE WINTER'S TALE rJ81

meaning. After Shakspere's regular fashion, too, this

scene from the Winter s Tale proves both in substance,
and to a less degree in phrase, reminiscent. In all

these traits, which pervade the Winter'' 8 Tale^ihc play

resembles Cymbeline and the Tempest as clearly as it

resembles them in its boldly experimental structure

and its serenely romantic motive.
The overcrowding what most distin-
of the style is

guishes these three last plays from what precede. In

Shakspere's earlier work, almost to the end of the
tragic period, one generally felt that, when composing
plays, he always endeavored to present his material,
however form as should be acceptable
serious, in such
to an audience. In these last plays, one is aware of a
radically different mood. The playwright, despite his
vigorous technical experiment, has at last become a
conscious poet. He cares about substance rather than
style. Thoughts crowd upon him. He actually has
too much to say. In his effort to say it, he disdain-
fully neglects both the amenity of regular form, and
the capacity of human audiences. The only vehicle
of expression at his disposal, meanwhile, was the pub-
lic stage; and this vehicle his artistic purposes — now
rather intellectual than emotional — had finally out-

grown. In the Winter^s Tale this trait is more pal-

pable than anywhere else ; Shakspere's style is surely

more decadent than ever before.
In the Winter's Tale, too, the old trait of recapitula-
tion is quite as palpable as in Cymheline. Shakspere,
to be sure, keeps fairly close to Greene's novel ; but
382 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Greene's novel itself deals chiefly with matters which
Shakspere's earlier plays had proved effective ; and
what Shakspere adds — Paulina, for example, and
Autolycus, and the Clown — almost always directly is

taken from his old repertory. How recapitulatory the

Winter's Tale is, any one can see. In the tragic part,
the jealousy of Leontes, clearly akin to that of Posthu-
mus, revives also the jealousy of Othello ; and at the
same time dispassionately revives a distinct phase
of such overwrought self-deception and unbalance of
mind as pervaded the great tragedies. Hermione, in
her undeserved fate, resembles Imogen, and Desde-
mona, and Hero at her trial she is like Queen
;

Katharine. Paulina, a character introduced by Shaks-

pere, has obvious analogies to Emilia in Othello^ and
to Beatrice, so far as Beatrice is concerned with the
troubles of Hero. Mamillius, like Ariel a child-actor,
is like the Duke of York in Richard III. and Prince
Arthur in King John} To pass to the comedy of
the last two acts, the very entry of Autolycus is

reminiscent :
^ —
*^I have served Prince Florizel and in my time wore
three-pile ; but now I am out of service : . . . My trafiSc is

sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen. My

father named me Autolycus; who being, as I am, littered
under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered
trifles. With die and drab I purchased this caparison, and
my revenue is the silly cheat. Gallows and knock are too
powerful on the highway beating and hanging are terrors
:

to me: for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it."
1 See p. 367. ^ iv. iii. 13-32.
 THE WINTER'S TALE 383

Here, in the cramped dialect of this period, is a

plain statement of such a situation as FalstafTs
when the Prince had discarded him. Tlie relations
of Polixenes to Florizel are another clear reminis-
cence of Henry IV. Again, the Shepherd and the
Clown revive not only the conventional hoors of the
early comedy,^ but the relations between Falstaff and
Shallow,^ a bit of the absurdity of Sir Andrew Ague-
cheek, and incidentally the old distrust of democracy.
The recovery of Hermione resembles those of Emilia
in the Comedy of Errors, of Hero in Much Ado About
Nothing, and of Thaisa in Pericles.^ In the great pas-
toral scene* there is not only abundant confusion of
identity — the chief trait of all the early comedies —
but an atmosphere which recalls the open-air scenes of
Love's Labour 's Lost, of the Midsummer Nighfs Dream,
of the last act of the Merry Wives of Windsor, and of
As Vou Like It.

All but the last of these reminiscences call to mind

passages which, at least in vitality, are better than
those in the Winter's Tale. Compare, for example,
the characters of Falstaff and of Autolycus : Falstaff,
though presented in a more archaic manner, is drawn
from the life ; Autolycus, though sympathetic and
amusing, is so compressed and idealized, that he is

like one of those finished pictures whose every detail

somehow reveals that they are drawn from memory
or from sketches. Better still, compare the final en-
1 IV. iii. 702 seq. « Ibid, and V. ii. 134 seq.
» See pp. 91, 195, 353. < IV. i-i.
384 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

lightenment of Othello^ with the similar enlightenment

of Leontes.2 This is generallj^ typical of the Winter^
Tale. Tolerably effective in conception, it is at once
too compressed for full effect, and perceptibly less
spontaneous, less simple, less plausible, less masterly,
than the greater work which it instantly recalls.
This is not unduly to dispraise the Winter's Tale.
In many traits — in composition of plot, in firm grasp
and contrast and precision of
of character, in variety
atmosphere, in freedom and pregnancy of phrase —
the Winter's Tale is constantly above any power but
Shakspere'i. Compared with his own work elsewhere,
however, the Winter^s Tale rarely shows him at his
best. The only passage, indeed, which m^y fairly
be deemed better than similar passages which have
come before is the pastoral scene. Here for once, '"^

amid all the added ripeness of feeling wliich per-

vades this romantic period, we find something like
Shakspere's full, spontaneous creative power. With
it comes such a whiff of pure country air as calls
to mind the actual harvest homes of rural England,
"
and as sets critics who seek Shakspere's "• inner life
to saying wise things about the effect on the man's
morals of his return to Stratford. Such guesses as
this are unprovable vagaries ; all that one can safely
say is that, unlike any scene which we have con-
sidered since Antony and Cleopatra, this pastoral
scene, though full of romantic unreality, is plausible.

1 Othello, \. ii. 102-282.

2 III. ii. 132-173. » \Y. iii.
 THE WINTER'S TALE 385

With all its lack of realism, all its cunning stage-

craft, all its lovely poetry both of conception and of
expression, the scene seems so spontaneous, so racy,
so inevitable, that the old mood of the best time steals
on you unawares. Again and again you yield to the
illusion, feeling as if once again all this were true.

In the Wmter^s Tale, however, there is at least one

touch which tends to show that Shakspere would de-
liberately guard against any such impression of reality.
Greene's novel makes Bohemians sail to sea-bound
Sicily ; Shakspere deliberately makes Sicilians sail

to sea-bound Bohemia. At this period, as we have

seen again and again, the decay of spontaneous im-
pulse gives good reason for believing Shakspere to
liave been constantly deliberate. If, then, his wan-
ton departure from geographic fact be deliberate, its

reason should seem to be that Shakspere meant to

place romance in no real world, but rather
all this

in such a world just beyond the limits of reality as

he created in the Tempest,^ —a world where Tunis
was no longer the lair of Barbary pirates, but a
chivalrously romantic kingdom, a world where the
Mediterranean expanded into an ocean as limitless as
the Western Seas, a world where close to the spot in
which from earliest times geographers have rightly
placed Sicily, a King of Naples might be cast away
on the magic isle of Prospero, there to find — in full
agony of race-conflict —
the savage Caliban. Such
romances as we are now dealing with, this deliberate
1 See p. .369.
25
386 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
fantasy seems to say, are never real. They are the
dreams, the ideals which, fancied in a world alien to
ours, make tolerable the inexorable facts of our own.
Inexorable fact, despairing sense of fate, expired with
Coriolanus, or at latest with Timon, The plays which
follow breathe instead an atmosphere of idealism,
wherein the troubles of actuality may all merge in
the delights of free fancy.
^
Free, at any rate, beyond Cymheline or the Tem-
pest^ we may fairly call this Winter's Tale. Less
complicated in plot than the one, it is less elaborately
artificial than the other. More varied in character
than either, it is at once more firmly individual than
the Tempest^ and less laboriously so than Cy[mheline.
Its atmosphere is all its own. Its style has the care-
lessness of disdainful mastery. For all this freedom,
however, one can hardly feel that theatrically the
Winter's Tale could ever have been much more satis-

factory than the unsatisfactory Cymheline or Tempest.

The structural experiment of deliberate duality is per-
haps the boldest of the three. In every technical
detail the work shows complete, disdainful mastery
of power. Again and again, however, except in the
great pastoral scene, this mastery lacks the final
grace of unconscious spontaneity, just as the style
lacks final simplicity. Throughout the play, in short,
one is aware of a self-consciousness, of a deliberation
which makes one hesitate before guessing the full in-

tention of this touch or that. This conscious delib-

eration reveals just such trace of growing age as
 HEXRY VIII 387

we found in Cymheline and in the Tempest. Con-

scious deliberation means effort ; effort means crea-
tive exhaustion. Here, perhaps, the effort is more
masterly, less palpable, than before ; here still, how-
ever, the effort cannot conceal itself ; and the effort
tells the final story, — Shakspere's old spontaneous
power was fatally gone.

V. Henry VIH.

[Henry VIIT., asyfe have it, was first entered in 1623 and published
in the folio. Various records prove, however, that a play on this sub-
ject was given at the Globe Theatre on June 29th, 1613. Carelessness
in the discharge of a gun set fire to the theatre, which was totally
destroyed. Quite what relation this play of 1613 bore to the Henry
VIIL we possess is uncertain.
The sources of the present play are Ilolinshed, Hall, and Foxe's
Martyrs.
The famous criticism of Mr. Spedding — summarized in the intro-
duction to the Leopold Shakspere and in the Henry Irving edition —
virtually demonstrated that a considerable part of this play is by John

Fletcher. Mr. Fleay^ believes that much is also by Massinger; and

that the only scenes really by Shakspere are I. ii. II. iii. and II. iv. ; ;

Certain critics go so far as to question whether any of the play is

genuine.
If Shakspere's at all, this play is probably later than any other. It

may be conjecturally assigned to 1612 or 1613.]

In most editions of Shakspere, Henry VIIL is

printed immediately after Richard III. Thus placed,
its maturity of detail makes it seem thoroughly ad-

1 L{fe, 250-252.

\
388 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

mirable. Here, one exclaims, is no tissue of impos-

sible villainy and operatic convention here, rather, ;

is real life. How any one could for a moment deem

such work not Shakspere's own is hard to see.
Coming to Henry VIII., on the other hand, as we
come to it now, where modern chronology places it,
one finds its effect strangely different. When one
lias considered all the masterpieces of comedy, of
history, and of tragedy, when one has considered,
too, the tremendous efforts made in the three great
romances which we have just put aside, Henri/ VIII.
seems comparatively thin, uncertain, aimless. In-
stinctively one's sympathies take a different turn.
Instead of wondering how work like this can be as-
cribed to anybody but Shakspere, one finds one's self
at a loss to see how work like this can rationally be
ascribed to Shakspere at all. Of course there are
masterly touches in Henry VIII. ; of course, too, at
least Queen Katharine and Cardinal Wolsey are
very notable characters. After all, however, is there
anything in either the style or the characterization
of Henry VIII. which should make one surely affirm
any part of this undoubtedly collaborative work to be
by Shakspere's hand ? May not one rationally doubt
whether this is anything more than what John Webster
stated his White Devil to be,^ — a play to be judged by
the standards of the masters ?

For our purposes such questions need no answer.

The very fact of their existence is more instructive
1 Seep. 20.
 HENRY VIII 389

than the most definite of answers could possibly be

for it proves that, whoever wrote or collaborated in
Henry VIII., the play is broadly typical of what the
English stage was producing when Shakspere's writing
ended.
At we met a simi-
the very beginning of our study,
lar state of things. Like Henry VIIL the two plays
to which we first gave attention — Titus Andronicus
and Henry VL —
were ascribed to Shakspere in 1623,
and have recently been doubted. For our purposes,
however, we found the doubt more instructive than
any certainty could have been. Whoever wrote Titus
Andronicus or Henry VI., we found, the plays were
admirably typical of the theatrical environment amid
which Shakspere's work began.
What this environment was we may remind
like
ourselves by a glance at the opening scene of Henry
VL In Westminster Abbey are assembled the funeral
train of King Henry V. and this is how his brothers
;

and uncles begin to discourse :

—
" Bed. Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night 1

Comets importing change of times and states,

Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death I

King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long I

England ne'er lost a king of so much worth.
Glou. England ne'er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command
**
His brandished sword did blind men with his beams ;

and so on, for six lines more.

i
390 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
Exe. We mourn in black
**
why mourn we not
: in blood ?

Henry is dead and never shall revive:

Upon a wooden cofl&n we attend,
And death's dishonourable victory
We with our stately presence glorify j " —
there are six more lines of this.
" Win. He was a king bless'd of the King of kings.
Unto the French the dreadful judgment-day
So dreadful will not be as was his sight.
The battles of the Lord of hosts he fought:
The church's prayers made him so prosperous."

So far goes the opening quartette of lament, which

nowadays would take the form of grand opera. Glou-
cester now breaks in, beginning the strain of discord
which is to be silenced only with the other Gloster —
Richard III.

" Glou. The church where is

1 it? Had not churchmen pray'd,
His thread of life had not so soon decay'd
None do you like but an effeminate prince,
Whom, like a school-boy, you may over-awe."

This is more than enough

remind us of all the to
archaic, operatic conventions which beset the stage
when Shakspere began writing. Whether his or
not, these lines are such as in the beginning he
might have written.
Turn now to the opening scene of Henry VIII, :

the Dukes of Norfolk and of Buckingham meet in an

antechamber of the palace, and the following talk
ensues :

" Bv^k. Good morrow, and well met. How have ye done
Since last we saw in France ?
 HENRY VIII 391

Nor, I thank your grace,

Healthful; and ever since a fresh admirer
Of what I saw there.
Buck. An untimely ague
Stay'd me a prisoner in my
chamber when
Those suns of glory, those two lights of men
Met in the vale of Andren.
JVor. 'Twixt Guynes and Arde :

I was then present, saw them salute on horseback;

Beheld them, when they lighted, how they clung
In their embracement, as they grew together;
Which had they, what four throned ones could have
weigh'd
Such a compounded one ?

Buck, All the whole time

I was my chamber's prisoner.
Nor. Then you lost
The view of earthly glory men might say,
:

Till this time pomp was single, but now married

To one above itself ;
—"
and so on to a brilliant description of the Field of the
Cloth of Gold. The calm rationality of this dialogue,
its almost prosaic modernity, its profound acknowledg-
ment of the actual conditions of fact combined with a
free, breaking use of blank-verse and of not too extra-
vagant metaphor, are more than enough to remind us,
ifwe needed reminding, of the conventions which beset
the stage when Shaksperc's work ended. Whether his
or not, these lines are such as in the end he might
have written.
From the doubtful Henri/ VI. we have proceeded
through a long series of indubitably genuine works
to the equally doubtful Henry VIII. Nowhere on the
o92 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
way has any work seemed very unlike those about it.
The contrast between the first doubt and the last,
then, is startling; nothing could more clearly demon-
strate how Shakspere marks the progress of English
Literature from a state which seems wholly of the past
to one which seems almost like the present. For our
purposes, we need look no longer at Henry VIIL

VI. Shakspere about 1612.

For our purposes, too, we need pause very little to

summarize our impression of the last works of Shaks-
pere, as they have appeared in this chapter. Details
of their dates can never be decisively settled. There
is every reason to believe, however, that, in some order
or other, the plays we have here considered were all
written after those which we considered before, and
that they virtually complete Shakspere's work.
Allowing them the widest chronological range ad-
mitted by any consenting criticism, we find them to
belong to the years of Shakspere 's lifewhich carried
him from forty-five to forty-eight, and from the
twenty-second year of his professional work to the
twenty-fifth and last. In all three of the unques-
tioned plays, and quite as much in the doubtful Henry
VIII., we found constant traces of declining creative
power, which even the tremendous technical efforts of
Cymbeline and the Tempest and the Winter's Tale
 SIIAKSPEKE ABOUT 1612 393

wore powerless to conceal. What impulse was left

ihc man, after the complete break of his spontaneous

})ower in Timon and was an impulse rather
Pericles^
of philosophic thouglit than of artistic emotion. For
such a purpose there are few worse vehicles than
the public stage.
Compare with these plays, now, the general records
of publication during the years in question.^ In 1600,
the year to which we conjecturally assigned Cymle-
Une, Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Trarjedtj is said to
have been acted, and among the publications were not
only the Sonnets, Tro'dus and Cressida, and Pericles,
— the last three works of Shakspere which originally
appeared during his lifetime, — but the final version
of Daniel's Civil Wars, Dekker's GulVs Hornbook,
Drayton's Lord Cromwell, Jonson's Epicoene and The
Case is Altered, and the Douay translation of the
Bible. In 1610, the year to which we conjecturally as-
signed the Tempest, Beaumont and Fletcher's Knijht
of the Burning Pestle and Jonson's Alchemist are said
to have been acted and among the publications were
;

Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients, twelve books of

Chapman's Iliad, Donne's Pseudo-Martyr, Fletcher's
Faithful Shepherdess, and the final edition of the
Mirror for Magistrates. In 1611, the year to which
we conjecturally assigned the Winter'' s Tale, Beaumont
and Fletcher's King and No King, and Jonson's Cati-
line were acted and among the publications were
;

twelve more books of Chapman's Iliad, Coryat's Cm-

^ Roland: Chronological Outlines of English Literature.
394 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
dlties, Dekker and Middleton's Roaring Glrl^ Donne's
Anatomy of the World, Speed's History of Great Brit-
ain, Tourneur's Atheisms Tragedy, and the Authorized
Version of the Bible. In 1612, the year to which —
more conjecturally still —
we assigned Henry VIII.,
came the second edition of Bacon's Essays, two plays
by Beaumont and Fletcher, Hall's Contemplations, and
John Webster's White Devil, whose preface, as we have
seen, mentioned Shakspere as an honored tradition.^
The hasty list is enough for our purpose. At this
time, when Shakspere's power showed plain signs of
weakening;;, English Literature was at once more mod-
ern and more fertile than ever. Of the riper dram-
atists, whose work is full of effective invention, all

but the distinctly decadent Ford and Massinger were

in their prime. There is small wonder, then, that
Shakspere wrote no more. Competition was stronger
than ever ; and, at the same time, his purposes had
outgrown his vehicle, and his spontaneous impulse
had ceased. Both as an artist and as a man he had
more to lose than to gain.

1 See pp. 20, 408.

 XII

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

We have now reached the last stage of our study.

We have glanced at the facts of Shakspere's life we ;

have briefly considered the condition of English Litera-

ture when his work began ; and, with what detail has
proved possible, we have considered, in conjecturally
chronological order, all the works commonly ascribed
to him. The few remaining works which are probably
more or less his —Edward III., the Two Noble Kins<-
men, and a few lyrics — are not generally included in
the standard editions. Less accessible, then, than
what we have considered, they are also less interest-
ing; nor do they contain anything which should alter
our conclusions. Our conclusions, however, may well
be affected by another matter at which we have
glanced, — the English literature, in general, which
came into existence between 1587 and 1612, during
which interval, in some order or other, the works of
Shakspere were certainly produced. We are ready,
then, finally to review our impressions.
In looking back over our course, perhaps nothing is

more notable than its limits. We are so far from

having covered the whole subject of Shakspere, that
396 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
we have neglected parts of it important enough to
make our neglect seem almost a confession of igno-
rance. Not to speak of endless details, we have
hardly touched on the range or the quality of his
genius ; we have thought little about the subtleties
of his art; we have hardly glanced at the scope
and the character of his philosophy ; nor yet have we
discussed at all the surprising range of his learning.
And so on. The truth is that the subject of Shaks-
pere is inexhaustible. Whoever would deal with it,
must perforce neglect much of it. At any moment,
then, those phases may best be neglected which happen
at that moment to have been best discussed elsewhere.
Such a phase, clearly, is Shakspere's genius. In
the fine arts, we remember, a man of genius is he
who in perception and in expression alike, in thought
and in phrase, instinctively so does his work that his
work remains significant after the conditions which
actually produced it are past. The work of any man
of genius, then, is susceptible of endless comment and
interpretation, varying as the generations of posterity
vary from his and from one another. Such interpre-
tative comment is always suggestive. The most nota-
ble example of it concerning Shakspere may perhaps
be found in the writings of Coleridge. Foreign alike
to Shakspere's time and to our own, the mood of
Coleridge was not long ago vitally contemporary.
While to-day what Coleridge says about Shakspere
often seems queerly erratic, it must always be inter-
esting, both as an important phase of human thought,
 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE .''>97

and as lasting evidence of how Shakspere's genius

presented itself to one who came near being a man of
genius himself. In some such manner the genius of
Shakspere, like any other, must present itself, with
ever fresh significance, to men of our own time and of
times to come. Like Nature herself, the work of the
great artistsmust always possess a fresh significance
for every generation which comes to it with fresh eyes.
As we have seen, however, this significance is gener-
ally implicit. It is there because, by the very laws of
his nature, the artist worked with instinctive fidelity
to the greater laws which govern actual life. In a
course of study like ours, then, whose object is chiefly
to see the artist as he may have seen himself, we
may well neglect those aspects of his work which are
visible only after the lapse of centuries. On these,
as the centuries pass, there will always be emphasis
enough. The danger is not that Shakspere's genius
will be forgotten ; but that, in admiration for the
aspects in which, from time to time, that genius
defines itself, people may fatally forget the truth
that Shakspere's work really emanated from a living
man.
Again, there is a great deal of criticism about the
art of Shakspere, — discussion as to how conscious
it was, how deliberate, how essentially fine. One still
hears much debate as to whether the free, romantic
form dramas be a nobler thing or a meaner
of his
than the more rigid form of the classics, and of their
modern imitations. Such discussion is interesting
398 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
and so far as it deals with the precise artistic methods
of Shakspere might well have found place in our
study. Here and there, indeed, as space permitted,
we have touched on it, — most notably, perhaps, in
showing liow the finished form of the Midsummer
Niglifs Dream grew at once from old motives and
from old and crude conventions.^ So far, however,
as such discussion deals with general matters, — ques-
tioning, for example, whether classic art or romantic
be the finer, — it is foreign to our purpose, and in
some aspects akin famous discussion as to
to the less
whether shad or custard be the arreater delicacv. For
our purposes, we may be content with knowing that
Shakspere, an Elizabethan playwright, was as much
bound by the conditions of his time to write in the
Elizabethan manner as was Sophocles of Athens to
compose his tragedies after the manner of the Greeks.
Whoever, then, would finally or intelligently criticise
the art of Shakspere must first master, as hardl}' any-
body has yet mastered, the conditions of Shakspere's
theatre. Much of the extant criticism of Shakspere's
art resembles that of Gothic cathedrals which pre-
vailed when pseudo-classic architecture was all the
fashion much of what remains resembles that criti-
;

cism of the same Gothic churches which refers the

origin of their aisles and arches to the trunks and
boughs of forest alleys. Partly for want of space,
then, partly for want of sufficient knowledge as yet,
we have studied Shakspere's art only so far as was
1 See pp. 107, 110.
 WlLLIAiM S11AK8PERE :;i>9

necessary to make clear the general conditions of

his time.
Concerning Shakspere's philosophy, — his deliberate
teaching, — the state of affairs is much like that con-
cerning his genius. Earnest students innumerable
have read between his lines endless lessons, some of
wliich are doubtless very wise and valuable. Just
how far he meant to put them there, however, is

another question. We have seen enough of Eliza-

bethan Literature to recognize that much of its ai)hor-
ism is nothing intentionally more serious than a fresh
combination of language. In the very prevalence of
its aphorism, however, we must have recognized a
symptom at once of a general appetite for proverbial
philosophy, and of that generally ripe state of prac-
tical experience which at intervals in history gives
more or less final expression to a state of life about
to pass away. The aphoristic wisdom of Elizabethan
Literature, so far as it is more than verbal, broadly
expresses the experience of mediaeval England. To
this aphorism Shakspere added much. Very proba-
bly, though, what he added was no system of phi-
losophy was rather a series
; it of superbly linal

phrases, now and again combining to produce a com-

plete artistic impression, — sucli as the pessimism of
Macbeth^ or the profound idealism of the Tevipest^ —
which to him would have seemed rather emotioiuil
than dogmatic. Li one sense every artist is a philoso-
pher; but as philosophy is commonly understood,
artists are apt to be unconscious philosophers, — phi-
400 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
losophers rather by the inevitable law of their nature
than by any deliberate intention ; and, whatever else we
have done, we have never allowed ourselves to forget
that from beginning to end Shakspere was an artist.
Another matter, much discussed nowadays, we have
hardly glanced at. Nothing more surprises such
readers of Shakspere as are not practical men of
letters than the man's apparent learning. To one
used to writing, the phenomenon is less surprising.
To translate technical matters from a book merely
glanced at, into such finished terms as the unini-
tiated suppose to imply years of study and research,
is within anybody's power. Whoever will take a few
Elizabethan books, — North's Plutarch^ for example,
Paynter's Palace of Pleasure^ Foxe's Martyrs^ Hol-
inshed, and Coke on Littleton, — and, with the help of
stray passages from all, translate some narrative from
one of them into blank-verse dialogue, will produce
an effect of erudition which shall profoundly impress
Whoever has a few
not only his readers but himself.
compendious works at hand and knows how to use
them, in fact, can make himself seem a miracle of
learning to whoever does not know his secret. In
Elizabethan England almost all books were compen-
dious ; was the common talk of all intelligent men,
so
— for learning was not yet specialized. Given these
facts, and given the exceptionally concrete habit of
thought and phrase native to Shakspere, and Shaks-
pere's learning is no longer a marvel, except to those
who insist on finding it so.
 WILLIAM STIAKSPERE 401

To pass from matters neglected to a matter pur-

posely reserved, nothing is more notable to a student
of Elizabethan Literature than the fact that Elizabethan
Literature presents a remarkably typical example of
artistic evolution. Art, of any kind, in nations, in
schools, even in individuals, progresses by a rhyth-
mical law of its own. At certain epochs the arts of
expression are lifelessly conventional. Born to these
conventions, often feeble and impotent, the nation,
the school, or the individual destined to be great, will
begin, like those who preceded, by simple imitation,
differing from the older conventions only in a certain
added vigor. By and by, the force which we have
called creative imagination will develop, with a strange,
mysterious strength of its own, seemingly almost in-
spired. Throbbing with this imaginative impulse, the
nation, the school, or the individual artist will begin
no longer to imitate, but instead, to innovate, with an
enthusiasm for the moment as unconscious of limits
to come as it is disdainful of the old, conventional
limits which it has transcended. After a while, the
limits to come will slowly define themselves. No cre-
ative or imaginative impulse can stray too far. The
power of words, of lines and colors, of melody and
harmony, is never infinite. If slavish fidelity to con-
ventions be lifeless, utter disregard of conventions
tends to the still more fatal end of chaotic, inarticulate
confusion. One may break fetter after fetter ; but one's
feet must still be planted on the earth. One may move
with all the freedom which the laws of nature allow
2t> .
402 WILLIAM SIlAKSrERE
but if one try to soar into air or ether, one is more lost
even than if one count one's footsteps. So to nations,
to schools, to individuals alike a growing sense of
limitation must come. There are things which may
be achieved ; there are vastly more things and greater
which remain fatally beyond human power. Experi-
ence, then, begins to check the wilder impulses of
creative innovation. Imagination is controlled by a
growing sense of fact. Finally, this sense of fact,

this consciousness of environment, grows stronger

and stronger, until at length all innovating impulse
is repressed and strangled. Again art lapses into a
convention not to be disturbed until, perhaps after
generations, fresh creative impulse shall burst its

bonds again.
As elsewhere in nature, so in art, creative impulse
is a strange, unruly thing, tending constantly to vari-
ation from the older types, but not necessarily to
improvement. While the general principles just stated
are constantly true everywhere, their result is often
abortive, often, too, eccentric or decadent. At rare
moments, however, creative impulse surges for a while
in a direction which carries art irresistibly onward to
greater and better expressions than men have known
before. Such impulses as this the centuries find mar-
vellous. When a great creative impulse has come,
when the shackles of old convention are broken, when
the sense of the new limits is developed at once so far
as to tell instinctively what may be accomplished, and
not so overwhelmingly as to crush imagination with
 WILLIAM SirAKSPERE 40.3

the fatal knowledge of all which is beyond human

power, then, for a little while, any art is great. The
moment of ultimate greatness comes when a true cre-
ative impulse is firmly controlled, but not yet checked,
by a rational sense of fact.

These general phenomena are nowhere more con-

cretely shown than in the growth, development, and
decay of English Literature during the period which
we call Elizabethan. Really beginning before the reign
of Elizabeth, this literary evolution really survived her,
lasting indeed until the unhappy times of Charles I.

The central figure of the period during which it took

place, however, was undoubtedly the great queen, who,
above any other English sovereign, was once the central
fact of national life. The literature, then, which we
may assume to have begun with Wyatt and to have
ended with Shirley, may safely enough be named Eliza-
bethan. In this literature the earlier work such as —
that of Wyatt, of Surrey, of Roger Ascham, of Foxe, of
Paynter —
was chiefly notable for its eager breaking
away from old conventions. In substance and in form
alike its chief motive was to present to English readers
other and better things than English readers had
known before. Its method was to imitate the thought
or the manner of greater or more polished peoples
or times. Then came a fresh group of writers,
Sidney, Lyly, Spenser, Hooker, and the earlier drama-
tists. All alike, these bold, spirited linguistic inno-
vators were busy chiefly in proving, with constantly
freshening impulse, what the newly found English
404 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
language might do. Then came Marlowe and Shaks-
pere, and the great Elizabethan drama, the one —
thing which at that moment the language and the race
might best accomplish. Then, very swiftly, came the
decline,when such men as Bacon and Drayton, and
Davies, and Chapman, and lesser ones, —
actually con-
temporary with the greatest, but tending rather toward
limitation than toward innovation, — began to use the
tamed language for purposes more and more special.
The old impulse was a thing of the past.
Such generalizations must seem nebulous. A glance
at a half-forgotten, but still great work of the period,
may perhaps define them. During the reign of
Queen Elizabeth no Englishman lived a more com-
plete life than Sir Walter Ralegh. Country gentle-
man, student, soldier, sailor, adventurer, courtier,
favorite and spoilsman, colonizer, fighter, landlord,
agriculturist, poet, patron of letters, state prisoner,
explorer, conqueror, politician, statesman, conspirator,
chemist, scholar, historian, self-seeker, and ultimately
a martyr to patriotism, he acquired through the latter
half of Elizabeth's reign themost comprehensive ex-
perience ever known to an Englishman. Almost with
the accession of King James his prosperity came to
an end. He was imprisoned in the Tower, where for
above ten years he busied himself with writing his
great History of the World. To this task he brought
a rare equipment ; for not only did he nobly conceive
history as the visible record of God's dealing with
mankind, but he had actually experienced more wide
 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE 405

variety of such matters as make history than lias any

other Englishman before or since. With above ten
years of enforced leisure and concentration, with the
best scholarship of the time to help him collect ma-
terial, with a very beautiful stately English style of
his own, he set about his task. In 1614, as much
of his work as he ever finished was published. The
History of the World has so long been obsolete that
except for its name it is almost forgotten. It is tra-
ditionally supposed to be queer and fantastic, with
occasional fine bits of rhetoric. Really, it is among
the most nobly planned books in the world. History,
as we have seen, Ralegh conceived to be the visible
record of God's dealing with men. Its value, then,
lay chiefly in the fact that to whoever should study
it seriously and reverently, it taught truths not else-
where accessible concerning the nature and the will
of God. In the language of his time this meant what
to-day would be meant by a philosophic historian,
[who should find in his subject not merely stirring
narrative or plain record of fact, but the visible teach-
ings of human experience, which, properly understood,
should govern future conduct. Not only was Ralegh's
effort a grandly philosophic one, too, but, as we have
seen, he brought to its accomplishment an almost
unique equipment. Besides all this, the man had
a wonderfully cool, clear, rational head ; his mind
was among the most prudently and judiciously criti-
cal in all historical literature. Yet, as we have seen,
his great History has proved of so little value that
i06 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
people nowadays mostly suppose it to be merely
quaint.
The reason for this failure clearly defines just what
the chief limit of Elizabethan Literature was bound to
be. Human nature has always open to it a wealth of
experience which may indefinitely deyelop individuals ;

and in the time of Elizabeth the possible range of

individual experience was probably wider than at any
other period of history. Whoever would write, like
Ralegh, however, in a profoundly philosophic spirit,

needs more experience to work with than can ever

come to any individual. No individual can master the
material world, even of his own day still less can he
;

extend his experience beyond the limits of his own life.

To deal with history, then, on such a scale as Ralegh

planned, a man must have recourse to endless rec-
ords which, to avail him, must have been subjected
to generations of patient scientific criticism ; and in
Ralegh's time — in Elizabethan England — there were
no records which he could safely trust. In history,
in science, in all things alike, the gathering of valid
material was still to make. All that was ready for
anything like was on the one
final expression, then,

hand the actual experience of individuals, and on the

other a plain assertion of some method by which, in
generations to come, serious study might safely be
guided.
In the ripeness of Elizabethan Literature, both of
these things were finally expressed. Whatever its
error of detail, the philosophical writing of Bacon has
 WILLIAM SHAKSPKRE 407

done more than any other work of modern times to

guide in the road which they have travelled the
thought and the scholarship of the future. More
notably still, the Elizabethan Drama — whatever its

artistic peculiarities, or faults, or vagaries — expressed

with a power and a range never surpassed the infi-

nitely varied possibility and intensity of individual

experience. Of these two final achievements the
drama, if not the more lasting in its effects, was for
the moment the more complete. Nothing less than
the lapse of centuries could have demonstrated the
value of Bacon's philosophy. By the very nature of
things, on the other hand, the power of a great dra-
matic literature must be evident to the public which
first welcomes it. With an approach to truth, then,
we may say that Elizabethan Literature reduces itself
finally to the Elizabethan Drama.
In the work of Shakspere we have studied this drama
somewhat minutely. Incidentally, too, we glanced
at the state in which Shakspere found the stage,
and
also at the work of his greatest predecessor and
early contemporary, Marlowe. —
Before Shakspere
had really begun to show what power was in him,
Marlowe was dead. Since Marlowe's time, we have
considered the drama only as it appears in Shakspere.
More clearly to define his position, we may now to
advantage glance at another dramatist who seems, like
Marlowe, greater than most of his contemporaries.
This is John Webster. While Mr. Fleay shows ^

1 Chronicle of the English Drama, II. 268.

408 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
reason to Webster collaborated with
believe that
Drayton and Middleton and others as earl}^ as 1602,
there seems no doubt that his first independent work
was the White Devil, —
the play, published in 1612,
which he expressly hopes shall be read in the light of
Chapman's work, and Jonson's, and Beaumont and
Fletcher's, and Shakspere's, and Dekker's, and Hey-
wood's.^ Just as the work of Marlowe typifies what
the stage was like when Shakspere's writing began,
then, the WTiite Devil, —a fair type of Webster's power,
— coming after Shakspere's work was done, may be
taken as an example of what the stage was like when
Shakspere's writing ceased.
The story of the White Devil is virtually^ histori-

cal ; what is more, it was almost contemporary. The

events therein detailed occurred, about 1585, in that
Italywhich to Elizabethans was much what the Second
Empire in France was to the Americans of thirty years
ago —
at once their model of civilization, the chief
source of their culture, and at the same time the sink
wherein they learned, along with much polite accom-
plishment, to what depths of depravity human nature
may fall. The story, in short, bore to Webster's audi-
ence such relation as might be borne to a modern
audience by a play which should deal with the career
of Louis Philippe's Due de Choiseul-Praslin, or with
that of Louis Napoleon's Countess Castiglionc. Web-
ster, to be sure, took his artist's privilege, and altered
certain characters for dramatic effect : Camillo, the

1 See p. 20.
 AVILI.IAM 811AKSPEKK 4UU

injured husband, for example, lie made a wittol, and

Isabella, the murdered wife, a highly rcspeetable per-
son, — which was far from the actual case. On tlic

whole, however, he preserved enough fact to claim

the protection of historical authority.
As he tells the story, Vittoria Corombona, the
daughter of a poor Venetian family, is married to
Camillo, a Roman numskull. Her brother, Flaminco,
an utterly corrupt soldier of fortune, induces her not
unwillingly to become the mistress of the Duke of
Brachiano. This infatuated voluptuary finally deter-
mines to marry her ; whereupon he has his faithful
wife, Isabella, poisoned, and meanwhile Flamineo
manages to make Camillo break his neck. Francisco
de Medicis, brother of the murdered Isabella, and
the Cardinal Monticelso suspect foul play, and have
Vittoria arrested on a charge of murdering her hus-
band, Camillo. Although the crime cannot be proved,
sufficient evidence is adduced to send Vittoria to a
Roman Bridewell. Francisco, meanwhile, has pri-
vately convinced himself that the real murderer of
Isabella was Brachiano. In pursuance of revenge,
then, he takes advantage of the confusion attending
the election of Monticelso to the papacy,^ and enables
Brachiano to steal Vittoria from prison, and to carry
her, with all her family, to Padua. For this impious

^ Historically the man whom Webster calls Monticels»o was named

Montalto, and was made pope bv the name of Sixtu.s V. Wel>ster
makes him take the name of Paul IV. — historically that of a CarafTa.
This liceiitious treatment of histuric fact is typically Elizabethan.
410 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
escapade, the fugitives are excommunicated. Fran-
cisco, still bent on vengeance, follows them in disguise,
accompanied, among other ruffians, by a certain Count
Lodovico, who had hopelessly loved the murdered
Duchess. At a tournament, they managed to poison
Brachiano's helmet. As he lies dying in agony,
Lodovico, disguised as a priest, pours into his ears,
under color of extreme unction, all the curses his
revengeful brain can devise. Then, while Flamineo
and Vittoria are quarrelling over what Brachiano has
left, Lodovico breaks in and kills them —
only to be
killed in turn by Francisco, who would cover his
tracks.
The first thing which impresses one in the treat-
ment of this morbidly horrible story is that, within
the now established traditions of dramatic form, it is

studiously realistic. The characters throughout are

considered as living human beings. The atmosphere
is so veracious that the play can teach us, almost
historically, what Sixteenth Century Italy was like.
This Italy — the country which produced Machiavelli
— was remarkable for such bewildering complexity
as always pervades an over-ripe period of society. Of
this complexity, Webster, with his realistic purpose,

was so profoundly aware that throughout the play,

despite all his power ot imagination, you feel him
constantly hampered by a sense of how much lie
had to tell. Great as he was, in short, his subject
and his vehicle combined almost to master him.
Every scene, every character, every speech, every
 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE 411

])lirase, seems deliberately studied ; every line shows

})ainful thought; yet for all these pains the play
remains in total effect rather a tremendous sketch
than a finished work of art. At first sight, with all
its complexity of detail, it is puzzling. As you study
it, you begin power more and more, until,
to feel its
compared with any other power except Shakspere's
own, it seems almost supreme. Constantly, however,
you feel that at an earlier period in the drama such
power might have exerted itself not with painful
effort, but with spontaneous ease. As matters stand,
though the construction of scenes and the develop-
ment of character prove Webster a great dramatist,
and though phrase after phrase prove him a great
poet, you feel him paralyzed by a crushing sense of
his limitations. A wonderful stroke of character
stands by itself, then comes a startling situation, then
an aphorism, then a simile, then some admirable
interjected anecdote ; and so on. Nothing is finally

fused, however ;
you feel none of that glowing heat of
spontaneous imagination which, unchecked by ade-
quate sense of fact, kept still half-inarticulate the
aspiring poetry of Marlowe. If one would know what
the force of creative imagination is like whicli awakens
a great school of art, one cannot do hotter than turn
to Marlowe if one would realize the sense of limita-
;

tion in which a great school of art finally declines,

one cannot do better than turn to Webster.
Between them stands Shakspere, actually con-
temporary with both, mid througb.out his best period,
412 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
fusing the chief merits of each. Between them, too,
in artistic evolution, if not always in actual dates,
comes the great group of ripe dramatists with whom,
during the most vigorous period of his work as well
as during its laborious decline, Shakspere competed
for public favor. We can glance at them only very
hastily but a hasty glance is worth our while.
; Ben
Jonson was the greatest master of eccentric " hu-
mour" —a trait always dear to the English — who
ever wrote for the English stage ;
probably, too, he
was the most consummate master of mere stage-
business. Marston, though coarse, was an admirable
writer of sensational tragedy. Dekker was unique
for a joyous, off-hand spontaneity of feeling and of
phrase. Middleton, but for a fatal coldness of per-
sonal temper, might almost have rivalled Shakspere
in the handling of character, tragic and comic alike.
Hey wood, untroubled by such traditions of courtly
grandeur as made Shakspere, to the end, habitually
head his dramatis personce by the figure of a sover-
eign, was thorough master of romantic sentiment.
Chapman, if inarticulate, was a constantly impres-
sive and weighty moralizer. Tourneur was almost
modern in his impious recklessness. Beaumont and
Fletcher, though palpably were superb
decadent,
masters of fascinatingly sentimental, always melliflu-
ous, constantly interesting romance. Nowadays, of
course, any one can see that neither these nor any of
their fellows can compare, for range or power, with
Shakspere. None of them, nor indeed any Eliza-
 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE 413

bethan but Shaksperc, was contemporary at once

with Marlowe and with Webster. One and all,
however, have merits which, by any contemporary
standards, might well have been confused with
his. Generally spontaneous, their work has con-
tinual flashes of insight ; it is often very beauti-
fully phrased ; and it is rarely overburdened with
anything which should fatigue or repel a popular
audience. In the full flush of their power, these
men had popular merits, as well as merits which
have proved lasting. From the outset, too, their
merits were patent.
In several ways, however, these later men differed
both from the earlier group which preceded Shakspere,
and less palpably from Shakspere himself. As we
saw in the beginning, the first Elizabethan play-
wrights were closely connected with the actual stage,
at a time when the stage was socially disreputable.
They were men and of tolerable
of fine poetic gifts
education but they were the Bohemians of a society
;

which admitted no distinction between reputable life

and such professional crime as is lastingly pictured
in the tavern scenes of Henry IV. The later play-
wrights, on the other hand, were men of higher
rank and of far more reputable habit. Beaumont,
for example, was the son of a judge ; Fletcher was
the son of a bishop ; Webster's father was a Lon-
don citizen of the better sort ; and so on. In their
own private life the traditional Mermaid Tavern,
which foreshadowed the clubs and the coffee-houses
414 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
of the Eighteenth Century, took the place of such
squalid surroundings assaw the end of Marlowe
and of Greene. Many of these men, too, were
merely poets or dramatic authors ; they were not
actors. The was growing into such
stage, in short,
better repute as was bound to come with the in-
creasingly definite organization of society. A true
Bohemia was coming into existence.
The work of these more reputable men, at the same
time, was less reputable than that of their predeces-
sors. As the stage grew established, it grew more
and more licentious. The work of Marlowe needs
little expurgation that of Beaumont and Fletcher,
;

for all its grace and beauty, is full of abominations.

As will often be the case with any school of art, the

beginnings of the Elizabethan drama had a simple,

spontaneous purity which vanished when the develop-
ment of the school made over-refinement of effort,
take the place of such broadly general motives as
underlay the work of Greene and Peele and Marlowe.
Another distinction has been admirably defined by
Mr. Fie ay :
^ —
"I may perhaps at this point note how greatly the
playwrights who were also actors excelled the gentle-
men authors . . . We ha^e first on the actor-poet list

Shakspere, more than enough to counterpoise all the

rest; then Jonson, the second greatest name in our annals;
then Heywood, Field, Rowley, Armin, Monday. On the
other side are great names also: Beaumont, Fletcher, Web-
^ Chronicle History of the London Stage, p. 167.
 WILLIAM SlIAKSPERE 415

ster, Massinger, Sliirloy, Chai)man, and many others, all

great as poets, but none (except Massinger perhaps) equal
to even the lesser men in tlie other list in that undefinable
drama for
quality which separates the acting play from the
closet reading; the quality which makes Goldsmith and
Sheridan successful, but the want of which condemns
Henry Taylor, Browning, and Shelley to remain the de-
light, not of the crowd, but of the solitary student. My
opinion in this matter is no doubt o[)en to much qualifica-
tion, but there is in connexion with beyond
it one fact
dispute, viz., all actor-poets of any great note began their
theatrical careers before the accession of James."

These brief notes must suffice to define the histori-

cal position of Shakspere as the central figure, and the

most broadly typical, in the evolution of perhaps the
most broadly typical school of art in modern litera-
ture. Quite apart from its lasting literary value,
apart, too, from its unique personal (juality, the work
of Shakspere has new interest to modern students as
a complete individual example of how fine art emerges
from an archaic convention, fuses imagination with
growing sense of fact, and declines into a more ma-
ture convention where the sense of fact represses and
finally stifles the force of creative imagination.

To repeat in detail the summaries of his work al-

ready made were enough merely to
tedious. It is

glance at the four periods into which we divided his

career. The first —
from 1587 to 1593 or thereabouts
— we called experimental. He contented himself
with widely versatile imitation, revealing two personal
416 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
qualities : a habit of mind by which, to a degree
unique in English Literature, words and concepts
were identical ; and later, a power of enlivening the
conventional figures of his original sources by no
end of little touches derived from observation of
life. Throughout this first period, however, his work
never so differed from that of his contemporaries as
to be free from the palpable archaism amid which
a great school of art begins.
During the second period of his career from 1593 —
to 1600 —
the force of his imagination, first revealing
itself in the artistic completeness of the Midsummer
Night's Dream and almost simultaneously in the vivid
characterization of Romeo and Juliet^ pervaded and
altered whatever he touched. His command of lan-
guage almost constantly strengthened, until — as
throughout his career — one felt half insensibly that
while his native habit of mind, fusing phrases and
concepts, never altered, he tended constantly to con-
sider thoughts more and words less. Meanwhile his
power of enlivening character by the results of obser-
vation so persisted and strengthened that at last —
as in the case of Falstaff — his characters began to
have almost independent existence. same At the
time, with all this power of creating character and
of uttering ultimate phrases, he displayed more and
more palpably a sluggishness, if not an actual weak-
ness, of invention. He repeated, to a degree unap-
proached by any other writer of his time, whatever
device had proved theatrically effective, — confusion
 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE 417

of idontity, for example, and later self-deception.

Apart from these traits, this second, purely artistic
period revealed little. He created a small army of
living individuals, he displayed a constant artistic
impulse, but he revealed no profound personal sense
of fact. During this period, then, his own peculiar
power of imagination and of artistic impulse was at
work almost unchecked. The most marked peculiar-
ity of his power, however, — that it was confined to
such matters of detail as character, phrase, or atmos-
phere, — meant that his natural sense of fact was
strong. The growing vitality of his personages in-

dicated meanwhile a superb fusion of imagination

with this sense of fact.

During the third period of his artistic career from —

1600 to 1608 —
we found again this superb fusion of
his own peculiar creative power and his own strong
sense of fact. During this period, however, we found
something far more significant than the merely artis-
tic impulse which had preceded. Up to this time his
plays had expressed nothing deeper than the touch of
irony which underlies Much Ado About Nothing. Now,
in place of the old versatility first of experiment and
then of concentration, we found a constant, crescent
expression of such emotion as should come only from
profound spiritual experience. lie began to use his
thoroughly mastered vehicle for the dramatic expres-
sion of such motives as we had seen to underly his
wonderfully finished Sonnets. In these motives we
observed first a profound and increasing sense of
27
418 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
irony, of fate, of the helplessness of human beings in
the midst of their crushing environment. Then came,
with endless variations, a profound sense of the evil
which must always spring from the mysterious fact of
sex. Finally, perhaps as a result of these two causes,
came a state of mind so over-wrought that, had it not
been balanced by his supreme artistic sanity, it might
almost have lapsed into madness. At the height of
this period, when he produced his four great tragedies,
his imagination was working with its fiercest power,
and his sense of fact meanwhile controlled it with
ultimate firmness.
One by one, the profound traits of this period began
to disappear. With Macbeth we saw the end of the
morbid excitement of mind with Antony and Cleo-
;

patra we bade farewell to the evil of woman with ;

''
Coriolanus, where at length eccentricity or " humour
began to replace inevitable character, came the last
complete expression of despairing irony. In other
words, the power of his imagination, perhaps ex-
hausted by the very intensity of its exercise, began
to weaken under the pressure of a crushing sense
of fact.
In Timon and Pericles we found a moment of ar-

tistic transition. The spontaneous power was gone.

All that remained of the old Shakspere was the mar-
vellous command of language, palpable even in his
earliest work, and crescent with him to the end.
Finally, in the fourth and last period of his career
— which extended at most from 1609 to 1612 we —
 WILLIAM .SIIAKSPERE 419

found a colossal series of technical experiments, where,

with all his unequalled mastery of art, and with a
serenely ideal philosopliy, he was struggling, in vain,
to enliven with something like the old spontaneous
imaginative power, the crushing sense of fact which
was fatally closing in not only on liim, but on the
school of literature to which he belongs. The more
one studies Shakspere's work as a whole, the more
complete becomes its typical historic significance.

This typical quality, however, is not the trait which

has made it survive. Just now the study of literary
evolution happens to be the fashion, or at least to ap-
peal to the temper of the day. The temper in ques-

tion is new and probably transient. Shakspere was a

supreme figure long before it existed ; he will remain
such long after it has taken its place among the curiosi-

ties of the past. What makes him perennial is that,

above any other modern poet, he was a man of genius,
— one who in perception and in expression alike, in
thought and in phrase, instinctively so did his work
that it remains significant long after the conditions
which actually produced it have vanished. In our
admiration for this genius, for this constantly fresh
significance, we are apt to forget all else, and in our
forgctfulncss to be lost instammering wonder.
Nowadays the form which this wonder most aptly
takes is, perhaps, first amazement, then incredulity,
then frank doubt as to whether all this wonderful
poetry could conceivably have been produced by a
middle-class Englishman, the record of whose life is
420 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
SO calmly commonplace. Such doubt can no more
be dispelled by any process of argument than can
religious scepticism. Like religious scepticism, too,
such doubt has small effect on anything but the
temper of people who are not disposed to share it.

To tlie doubters, such views as have been set forth

in this study may perhaps seem pathetically erro-
neous. To on the other hand, certain
believers,
obvious coincidences between these views and the
recorded facts may perhaps seem fortifying if not
convincing.
In the first place, ofwe must assume that
course,
William Shakspere happened to be what many another
man of humble and siace,
origin has been before a —
man of genius. In the second place, as we saw perhaps
most clearly when we studied the Sonnets^ the man's
temperament, for all his genius, was strongly indivi-
dual, —
different from that of any contemporary, or
indeed of anybody else at all. In the third place, as
our whole course of study has shown us, his artistic

development from beginning to end was perfectly nor-

mal. In the fourth place, his two most marked traits
as an artist are both unmistakable and persistent
from beginning to end he displayed a habit of mind
which made less distinction than is generally con-
ceivable between words and the concepts for which
words stand and his imaginative power, in many
;

aspects unlimited, always exerted itself chiefly in

matters of detail, — most of all in the creation of
uniquely individual characters. In mere invention,
 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE 421

in what is vulgarly called originality and what really

means instinctive straying from fact, he was weaker
than hundreds of lesser men.
Given these facts, there is a marked correspondence
between the conjectural chronology of his work and
the recorded facts of his life. What little is known
of him up to the time of Greene's allusion in 1592
indicates that, in country and in city alike, he had
during the first twenty-eight years of his life rather
unusual opportunities for varied experience ; and a
distinct motive for making the most of his chances
to better his condition. The experience of these ex-
perimental years began to bear fruit with the Mid'
summer NighVs Dream. At the time to which we
assigned the Merchant of Venice and Henry IV. ^ the
process of fruition had gone far enough to establish
him as for the moment the ablest dramatic writer
in England. Here, on the one hand, the records show
him beginning to re-establish his family at Stratford
and a little later Meres's allusion proves, what any
one might have inferred, that he had actually won
professional recognition. With the exceptional pub-
lication of1600 came the climax of his career. Later
we found him no longer merely an artist, but a poet
deeply stirred by such emotions as should normally
have come to him had the conjectural story of the
Sonnets been substantially true. Meanwhile he pro-
duced the great tragedies ; and all the time, with the
growing prosperity which such work should have in-

volved, he kept strengthening the position of his family

422 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
in their country home. About 1609 came the break
in his creative power, at a moment when professional
competition was stronger than had ever been be-
it

fore. After that, the actual records show him no

longer connected with professional life, but retiring
more and more into the comfortable ease of a country
gentleman. And so came the end.
At first glance, of course, the two records still look
incompatible. They have in common, however, a trait
which to many minds may well seem the most pro-
foundly characteristic of all. Throughout Shakspere's
career his imagination, for all its power, was concen-
trated on matters of detail. He created a greater
number and variety of living characters than any other
writer in modern literature. He made innumerable
final phrases. Ever and again, by patient and re-
peated experiment with familiar motives, he com-
bined old materials in constantly fresh and lastingly
beautiful artistic effects. To a degree hardly paral-
leled, however, he was free from vagaries. Through-
out his career, one may almost say, what he really
and constantly did was this ; instead of soaring into
the clouds or the ether, he looked calmly about him,
took account of what material was at hand, and with
the utmost possible economy of invention decided what
might be done with it and disposed of It accordingly.
Among imaginative artists he is unique for practical
prudence.
In the conduct of his life, as the records reveal it,

precisely the same trait is manifest. The problem

 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE 42.T

before him, as a man, in 1587, was one which most

men find insoluble. The son of a ruined country
tradesman, and saddled with a wife and three chil-
dren, his business at twenty -three was so to conduct
his life that he might end it not as a laborer but as
a gentleman. After five-and-twenty years of steady
work this end had been accomplished.
Grossly material it is the fashion to call such aspi-
ration and such success as this. No doubt there is

much to warrant such a contemptuous slur on self-

made men. Personally such people are often unlovely,
scarred and seamed by the struggles of a contest for
which their more than often too feeble-
critics are

Even though the self-made man of petty commerce

seem a prosaic fact, however, the real trait which
has raised him above his fellows is a trait which his
critics as a rule so lack that they honestly fail to

appreciate its existence. What the successful trades-

man has really done is to perform a feat of construc-
tive imagination every whit as marvellous, if not so
beautiful, as the work of any artist or poet. Facing
the actual world as he sees it, all against him, he
has made in his mind, perhaps unwittingly, an image
of some state of things not yet in existence: a popu-
lar demand for some new commodity, it may be, or a
sudden shift of values. Acting on this perception,
to which less imaginative people are blind, he has
outstripped others in the race for fortune. To put
the matter perhaps extravagantly, what vulgar criti-

cism would call grossly material success really In-

424 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
volves a feat of creative imagination in certain aspects
more wonderful than any other known to human ex-
perience ; for while the creative artist is bound only
to imitate the divine imagination which controls the
universe, the man who achieves practical success is

bound so to share that divine imagination as for

a while even to share, too, the prophetic foresight
of divinity.
Such a material achievement as Shakspere's, then,
involves an imaginative feat quite as wonderful, if not
so rare, as the imaginative feat involved in the crea-
tion of Shakspere's works. Granting this, as all who
honestly appreciate it surely must, we may see in the
peculiar concreteness of Shakspere's artistic imagina-
tion a trait which instead of contradicting the record of
his life goes as far as any one fact can go to confirm
it. Applied to the stage by which he was forced to
make power pro-
his way, his peculiar imaginative
duced the marvellous characters and phrases which
make his work almost a part and parcel of the divine
creation. Applied to the material facts of life, this

same concrete imagination so controlled and grouped

and composed and mastered them that a life-time
of honest work resulted in just such achievement
as throughout English history has been the general
ideal of honest, simple-hearted Englishmen.
Life and work alike, then, if we will but look at

them same story.

together, tell the Both begin
simply, carelessly, trivially. Both pass through a
period of growing impulse and aspiration. To both
 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE 425

alike — if for a moment we may pass from records

and take for granted whatever the actual story
that,

of the Sonnets^ the Sonnets arc spiritually true —

come fierce buffets. Both alike, after years of
struggle and of conquest, fade into peace.

I
 AUTHORITIES, ETC.

1'he standard text is that of the Cambridge Shakespeare. This

is virtually reproduced in the single-volume Globe Shakespeare,
to which all the references in this book are made. The type of the
Globe edition, however, is too small for general reading.
For such purposes as are considered in this book purposes —
not concerned with textual criticism —
any well-printed edition
will serve.
The photographic reproductions of the quartos are convenient.
Furness's Variorum Shakespeare is beyond criticism, as far as
it has gone.
Rolfe's notes are convenient and compendious ; so are those of
the Henry Irving Shakespeare.
Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon is the standard dictionary.
Mr. John Bartlett's forthcoming Concordance will doubtless
supplant all others.

The commentaries directly used in composing this book are

referred to in the notes.
To present anything like an adequate bibliography of Shaks-
pere would require a large volume. Whoever wishes to study
the subject in detail will find an admirable guide in the printed
catalogues of the Barton Collection in the Boston Public Library.
These may conveniently be supplemented by the exhaustive bib-
liographies published from time to time in the Shakspere Jahrbuch.
Taken together, these authorities will direct attention to almost all
books on Shakspere and his times which are accessible to the gen-
eral public.
 INDEX.

In Index no attempt has been made to analyze the regular discusslonji

this
of the separate works of Shakspere, to which any one desirmg knowledge
of them would naturally turn. All mentions of these works, and of charac-
ters therein, which do not occur in the regular discussions, have been
noted.
The works of Shakspere are entered alphabetically under the head ot
Shakspere ; and the characters are entered alphabetically under the heads

of the plays in which they occur.

When works of other authors are mentioned, they are similarly entered
alphabetically under the heads of their writers.
The term seq. is used to indicate that the matter in question is mentioned
on more than two consecutive pages.

Activity of intellect, abnormal in Armada, 75.

Shakspere, 257, 262, 268, 269, 283, Armiii, 414.
293, 301, 310, 324, 331, 334, 339, Art, Shakspere's mastery of. 106.
340, 342, 418. Cf. Insanity. 112, 187, 236, 253 seq., 299, 308,
Actors in Shakspere's time, 33, 35, 338, 396, 397.
AOseq., 113, 367, 382, 413. Artistic impulse, chiefly as revealed
uEneid, Surrey's translation of, 26, by Shakspere, 104, 109, 115. 190,
53. 215, 219, 303, 324, 334, 338, 341,
Alliteration in Elizabethan litera- 342, 349. 416, 417.
ture, 55, 68. Cj. Euphuism; Ver- Artistic individuality, 4S.
bal ingenuity. .\rtistic purpose, growth of Shaks-
Aphorism Elizabethan literature,
in pere's, 100, 103, 191, 220, 256.
28, 55, 201, 203, 399. -See Phi- Artistic significance of Hamlet, 256
losophy. Ascham, Roger, 26, 27, 403.
Archaism evident in Shakspere's Atmosphere in plays, 86, 90, 94, 107
plays, 77, 122, 129, 134, 136, 137, seq., 113, 126, 146, 181, 200. 202,
142, 156, 165, 167, 295, 308, 416. 207, 235, 322. 350, 363, 369, 383,
Anosto, 190. 386 See Dt-scription.
Aristocracy set forth by Shakspere, Audien.'es in Shakspere's time, S3,
329 $eq. 154, 274, 295, 309.
430 INDEX.
Bacon, Francis, 98, 218, 343, 393, Chronology of Shakspere's works,
394, 404, 406. 4 101, 175, 210 seq., 335,
seq., 97,
Bandello, 116, 190. 349, 355, 388, 392. 421-
Beaumarchais, 180. Cinthio's Hecatommithi, 263, 278.
Beaumont, Francis, 20. 413, 414. Clarendon, 344.
Beaumont and Fletcher, 72, 159, 343, Clowns in Shakspere's plays, 85, 87,
344, 393, 394, 408, 412. 94, 107, 109, 111, 148, 203, 383.
Knight of the Burning Pestle, Coke on Littleton, 400.
159, 393. Coleridge, 396.
Maid's Tragedy, 303, 393. Collaboration in play-writing, 71
Belleforest, 251, 254. seq., 82, 88, 129, 158, 159, 161, 303,
Bible, 27, 393, 394. 388.
Blank verse, 26, 35, 76, 122, 186, 320, Comedy, 45, 75, 88, 143, 144, 153,
357, 380, 391. 162, 164, 190, 213, 216, 236, 270,
B'»hemians in Shakspere's time, 34, 305, 336, 354.
41,172,413,414. -See Actors. Comic dialect, 178, 187.
Bolingbroke, 173, 290. Competitors, Shakspere's profes-
Box and Cox, 179. sional, 394. See Environment.
Brooke, Arthur, 116, 118, 119, 120, Concreteness of Shakspere's imagi-
126, 128, 201. nation, 424. See Character; Econ-
Brooke, Stopford, Primer of Eng- omy of invention; Words and
lish Literature, 23. ideas.
Burbage, 46. Confusion of identity, as a dramatic
motive, 86, 90, 95, 107, 108, 147,
Calvinism, 269, 273, 305, 311. 148, 179, 207, 248, 265, 337, 361,
Camden, 343. 383, 416, 417.
Campion, 343. Constable, 98.
Centurie of Pray se, 21. Contemporaries of Shakspere. See
Chapman, George, 20, 56, 217 seq., Environment.
223, 271, 343, 393, 404, 408, 412, Contention betwixt the two famous
415. Houses of Yorke and Lancaster,
Bussy d'Amhois, 241, 378. First Part of the, 70, 79, 80.
Character, development of, in Shaks- Corneille, 317.
pere's plays, 90, 93, 94, 96, 107, Coryat, 393.
109, 111, 124, 129, 130, 135, 141, Creative imagination, chiefly as
148, 149, 160, 177, 186, 193, 201, revealed by Shakspere, 103, 115,
212, 213, 252, 281, 296 seq., 305, 123, 127, 128, 131, 142, 150, 156.
306, 308, 323, 324, 328, 331, 336, 166, 167, 171, 174, 175, 180, 194,
337, 341, 349, 350, 363, 369, 383, 201, 202, 213, 219, 257, 324, 334,
386, 388, 416, 422. 337, 338, 341, 343, 349, 350, 364,
Chaucer, 24, 105, 271. 375, 392, 416, 423. See Artistic
Chettle, Henry, 10. impulse.
Chronicle-history, 45, 71, 74 seq., Criticism, a general scheme of, 90.
81, 82, 88, 93, 129, 130, 133, 134, See Atmosphere; Character; Plot
136, 143, 144, 164 seq., 175. 180,
189, 194, 213, 236, 240, 242, 293, Daniel, Samuel, 98, 217, 222, 393.
295, 303, 313, 326, 327, 336, 337, Delia, Sonnets to, 98, 222.
37&. Davidson, 343.
 INDEX. 4.S1

Davies, Sir John, 217, 404. I

FJwnrff in., 75, .395.
Death set forth by Shakspere, 126, Effort palpable m Shakspere's later
267, 301, 306, 311, 312. plays, 361, 363, 364, 374, 376, 377,
Decadence of power, symptoms of, 387, 388, 392.
in Shakspere, 321, 351, 357, 361, Elizabeth, 17, 343.
364, 377, 381, 392, 418. See Ex- Elizabethan Hamlet, 253.
haustion; Relaxation; Weakness. Elizabethan narrative, 53.
Decameron, 93, 356. Elizabethan voyages, 365, 368.
Dekker, Thomas. 20, 218, 219, 343, Environment, Shakspere's literary,
344, 393, 394, 408, 412. 40 seq., 45, 82, 97, 217, 343, 3&3,
Honest Whore, 378. 412.
Democracy set forth bv Shakspere, Euphuism, 28, 29. 38, 44, 55, 85, 122,
81, 243, 328, 329, 333, 366, 373, 134, 135.
383. Evolution of art, 2, 401 seq. (see
Denouement studied in Shakspere's Imagination: Fact); of English
later works, 358, 361, 368, 377, literature, 218. 219, 415.
378. Exhaustion Shakspere's power,
of
Depression set forth by Shakspere, 341, 344, 353.
351, See Deca-
334. See Spiritual suffering. dence; Relaxation; Weakness.
Description, 90. See Atmosphere. Experiment, linguistic, in early Eliz-
Despair expressed in Macbeth, 305, abethan literature, 26 palpable
;

313. in Shakspere's work, 87, 88, 92,

Disguised heroine, 38, 95, 147 seq., 96, 100, 101, 107, 129. 157, 336 ie^.,
202, 207. 265, 362. 341, 345, 351„353, 378, 419.
Donne, John, 393, 394.
Double, or consecutive, plays, 138,
241, 378, 379. See Chronicle His- Fact, sense a factor in literary
of:
tory; Tragedies of Revenge. evolution, 402,
411 palpable in
;

Doubtful plays, perhaps not genuine, Shakspere, 236, 391, 417 seq. See
50,66, 70,'l28, 157, 345, 387, 389, Concreteness; Imagination.
395. Fairfax's Tasso, 218.
Doubts as togenuineness of Shaks-. Fairies, 114.
pere's works, 419. Famous V^ictories of Henry V., 163,
Dowden, Edward, Primer of Shaks- 165, 169.
pere, 7. Fancy, 375. See Imagination.
Drama, the Elizabethan, 2, 3, 113, Fashion, literary, about 1587, M,
130, 407. See Environment. 52.
Drayton, Michael, 98, 114, 181, 217 Fate, sense of, in Shakspere's plays,
seq., 222, 393, 404, 408. 243, 250, 259, 269, 270, 272 seq.
Idea's Mirror, 217, 222, 277, 300, 301, 305, 331, 330, 33a,
Dryden's All for Love, 314, 315, 386, 418.
316, 319. Field, 414.
Fitton, Mrs. Mary, 224 seq.
Economy of invention, Shakspere's, Fleay, F. (t.. Biographical Chronicls

87, 95, 147, 192, 194, 202, 207, 209, of the Kntjlish Drama, and Chnm-
216, 217, 220, 248, 263 seq., 279, icleHistory of EngUsh Dramatic
287, 337, 353, 356. 361. 366, 379, Literature, 23; Life and Work oj
416, 422. See Recapitulation. Shake tpearCf 7.
432 INDEX.
Fletcher, John, 20, 318, 387, 413, 414. Heywood, Thomas, 20, 218, 219, 343.
Florio, 343, 365. 344, 408, 412, 414.
Folio of 1623, 4, 17. Fair Maid of the West, 378.
Folk-lore, 105, 114. Historic fact, carelessness of, in Eliz-
Fools, 203, 366. abethan plays, 409 n.
Ford, John, 394. Historical fiction, 167, 180, 194, 314,
Forman, Dr. Simon, 302, 308, 355, 320, 327.
377. Historical forces, Shakspere's sense
Foxe, John, 27, 138, 168, 387, 400, of, 78, 173, 216, 243, 321, 337. See
403. Fate.
Fuller, 344. Historical literature in Shakspere's
Furnivall's Leopold Skahspere, 7. time, 75. See Chronicles; Holin-
shed; Ralegh.
Gammer Gurtori^s Needle, 32. Historical position of Shakspere in
Generic personages, 177. See Char- English literature, 2, 415 seq.
acter. Holiushed, 28, 71, 76, 128, 133, 163,
Genius, 2, 396, 419, 420. 186, 188, 201, 288, 293, 302, 327,
Ghosts inShakspere's plays, 241, 355, 387, 400.
243, 252, 307. See Supernatural. Hooker, 217, 218, 403.
Globe Theatre, 17, 19, 302, 309, 377, Hortatory purpose, 181, 182.
387. Hudihras, 170.
Golding's Ovid, 27, 51, 105. Humour in the Elizabethan sense,
Gorboduc, 32. 161, 186, 328, 331, 332, 334, 341,
Gosson, Stephen, 41 seq. 349, 350.
Gower's Confessio Amantis, 345.
Greene, Robert, 9, 10. 20, 23, 34, 40, Idealism expressed in Shakspere's
43, 71, 74, 98, 159, 167, 172, 217, works, 232, 234, 366, 372, 386.
219, 381, 385, 414, 421. Idiomatic metrical forms, 226.
Greenes Groatswortk of Wit, 9, Imagination a factor in literary evo-
37, 73. lution, 402, 411 palpable in Shak-
;

Pandosto, 377. spere. 375, 417, 418, 422, 424. Cf

Groups of Shakspere's plays, 50. 97 Creative imagination.
seq., 103 seq., 210 seq., 238, 335 Imitation, the earliest form of art,
seq., 355. 401 in Shakspere's early work, 70.
;

See Economy of invention.

Hakluyt's Voyages, 28, 98, 218. Inductions on the Elizabethan stage,
Hall, Edward, 71, 76, 387. 111, 146, 159, 160, 199, 216, 368.
Hall, Joseph, 344, 394. Insanity, Elizabethan view of, 155,
Hall, Dr. John (m. Susanna Shaks- 294; set forth by Shakspere, 253,
pere), 18. 260, 283, 294, 295, 307, 382 ; symp-
Halliwell-Phillips's Outlines cf the toms of, in Shakspere, 258, 283. 307,
Life of Shakespeare, 7. 310, 339, 340, 418. See Activity
Harvey, Gabriel, 29, 98. of intellect.
Hathaway, Anne (m. Wm. Shaks- Interludes, 31, 33, 35, 130, 202.
pere), 8. Ironv set forth by Shakspere, 194.

Heroic ideals of character in Shaks- 216, 243, 245, 246, 250, 262, 263,
pere, 184 seq., 197 seq., 203, 272, 269, 277. 281, 299, 301, 311, 331,
274. See Character. 333, 338 seq., 417, 418.
 INDEX. 433

James I., 17, 343. Machiavelli, 410.

Jesters, 203. Madness. See Insanity.
Jews, Elizabethan view of, 152, 153. Manners, Elizabethan, 276.
Jonson, Ben, 14, 20, 106, 218, 219, Manningham, John, diary of, 46,
223, 295, 343, 344, 349, 393, 408, 205.
412, 414. Marlowe, Christopher, 56-62, 98-100
Bartholomew Fail', 66, 170. mentioned, 11, 20, 23, 34, 40, 43,
Every Man in his Humour, 14, 44, 69 seq.. 76, 88, 129, 136, 167,
183, 184. 172, 212, 217 seq., 239, 407, 411,
Poetaster^ 223, 343. 413, 414.
Edward II., 75, 99, 100, 133,
136.
Kempe, Will, 225. Dr. Faustus, 99.
King's Players, 17. Hero and Leander, 56 seq., 99
Kyd, Thomas, 71, 88, 219, 251. 199, 218.
Jeronimo, 66, 241, 295. Jew of Malta, 69, 70, 99.
Tamburlaine, 35, 36, 39, 70, 98,
99.
Learnino of Shakspere, 185, 396, Marston, John, 219, 343, 344, 412.
400. Antonio and Mellida, 241.
Leicester, Earl of, his players, 23. Antonio^s Revenge, 378.
Licentiousness, of later drama, 414; Martin Marprelate, 98.
Shakspere's freedom from, 89, 146, Mary Stuart, 75.
265, 347. Masques, 178, 202.
Light endings to verses, 320, 326. Massinger, Philip, 387, 394, 415.
Limitations, of Elizabethan literature, Men of letters, 40, 222.
406; of Shakspere, 216, 337, 411, Meres, Francis, important allusion to
417, 420. Shakspere, 14, 137, 211, 421.
Literature, English, in the time of Mermaid Tavern, 413.
Shakspere, 23-30, 392, 403, 406. Middletou, Thomas, 180, 218, 219,
5ee Environment. 302, 343, 344, 394, 408, 412.
Lodge, Thomas, 217, 219. Changeling, 155, 294.
Rosalynde, 1^9, 200,201. Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 170,
Love, sacred and profane, 229; set 180.
forth bv Shakspere, 57 seq., 126, Witch, 304.
151, 198, 202, 204, 216, 229, 249, Milton, John, 105, 344.
325, 338. See Women. Miracle Plays, 31, 33, 75, 165.
Lovers set forth by Shakspere, 249, Mirror for Magistrates, 393.
264. Monday, 414.
Lyly. John, 37, 40, 44, 83, 84, 88, 98, Montemayor, Diana of, 92.

219, 366, 403. Moralities, 31, 33, 35, 130, 202.

Cupid and Campaspe, 24, 39. Mvstery, sense of, set forth by Shaks-
Euphues, 28, 29, 30, 37, 40, 200, pere,'l27, 256, 259, 260, 262, 263,
201. 269, 301, 305.
Lyric verse inElizabethan litera-
ture, 36, 39 se^., 44, 122. See
Operatic traits of Elizabethan Nash, Thomas, 98, 217, 219.
plays. Now Place, 13, 43.
434 INDEX.
Nicholson, 74. Phrase-making, 55, 56, 64. Set
Normality of Shakspere's develop- Verbal ingenuity.
ment, 6, 349, 420. Pickwick Papers, 170.
North, Sir Thomas, his translation of Plausibility, development of, in
Plutarch's Lives, 27, 105, 240, Shakspere's plays, 96, 110, 126,
242, 313, 314, 318, 322, 323, 326, 132, 145, 156, 164, 175, 189, 191,
327, 345, 400. 349, 384.
Novels, Italian, 93. Plautus, 89, 90, 91.
Novelty, crr.ving for, in Shaks- Amphitryon, 88.
pere's time, 26, 27, 29, 30, 38, 39, Menechmi, 12, 88, 205.
44, 45, 55, 84, 85, 213. See Verbal Playwrights in Shakspere's time.
ingenuity. See Environment.
Play-writing, 49, 72, 125, 189. Set
Collaboration.
Plots of plays, 90, 93, 109, 123, 138,
Observation, Shakspere's power of,
145, 159, 178, 281, 296 aeq., 349»
94, 101, 102, 212, 213, 416.
358 seq.. 361, 368, 386.
Operatic traits of Elizabethg, n play s,
Plutarch, 241. See North.
78, 84, 130, 142, 202, 388, 390.
Pseudo-classic plays, and popular,
Originality, developed by Shakspere,
32, 33, 35.
77, 82, 95, 101.
Publication unfashionable in 1587,
Cvid, 53, 89. See Golding.
26.
Puritanism burlesqued, 170.

Passion, set forth by Shakspere, 231,

236, 243, 245, 263, 300, 301, 311, QuiNEY, Richard, correspondence
326, 334, 341. about Shakspere, 13, 14, 163.
Passionate Pilgrim, 16, 221. Quiney, Thomas, married Judith
Pathos, Shakspere's sense of, 300. Shakspere, 20.
Patriotism in Shakspere's time, 75.
See Henry V.
Paynter's Palace of Pleasure^ 27, Race-conflict symbolized in Cali-
51, 116, 118 seq., 126, 128, 246, ban, 373.
345, 400, 403. Ralegh, Sir Walter, 404-406; men-
Pecorone of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, tioned, 98, 217.
144. Discovery of Guiana, 217, 365.
Peele, George, 20, 23, 34, 40, 43, 71, History of the World, 404 seq.
159, 167, 217, 219, 414. Ralph Roister Doister, 32.
David and Bethsabe, 35. Rant in Elizabethan plavs, 35, 39,
Edward L, 75. 68, 74, 78, 79, 139, 187, 274, 295.
Pembroke, Earl of, 224 seq. Recapitulation in Shakspere's works,
Periods of Shakspere's career, 415. 43, 172. 209. 264, 265, 325, 340, 362,
See Groups of Shakspere's plays. 366, 376, 381, 422. See Economy
Petrarch, 25, 226. of invention.
Philosophy, chiefly as set forth by Reconciliation, Shakspere's alleged
Shakspere, 232, 269, 274, 291, 327, preaching of, 352, 353, 372.
333, 372, 374, 393, 396, 399, 419. Relaxation of Shakspere's power,
See Atibonsm. 324, 334, 340, 342, 343, 384. Set
 INDEX. 4:35

Decadence ; Exhaustion ; Weak- Shakspere (rnntinueff).

ness. Antony and Cleopatra, 313-326}
Renaissance in England, 53, 83, 89, mentioned, 16, 327, 329, 331,
Repartee, 86. See Wit; Verbal 334, 335, 339, 340, 343, 384,
ingenuity. 418.
Rhyme Shakspere's plays, 83,
in Cleopatra, 113, 340.
122, 247. See Verse tests. As You Like It, 199-205; men-
Riche, Barnaby Apolonius and Silla,
: tioned, 16, 208, 209, 212, 216,
205. 352, .366 xeq.. ;j74, 383.
Romance, 348, 352, 354, 368, 385, Jaques, 214.
388. Phoeb«, 248.
Romantic feeling, 208, 216, 236, 337, Rosalind, 207, 214. 248, 325.
362. See Romance; Women. Toijchstoue, 208, 214.
Rowlej', 414. Comedy of Errors, 88-92; men-
Ryland, F., Chronological Outlines oj tioned, 12, 15, 94, 105, 107,
English Literature, 23. 111, 205, 207, 208, 211, 352,
353. 367.
Sanity of artistic temperament, 236, Emilia, 195. 353, 383.
258, 301. Dromios, 203.
Scott, Sir Walter, 167. Coriolnnus, 326-334; mentioned,
Self-confidence of poets, 223. 50, 67, 81. 336, 339, 341, 342,
Self-deception, a frequent dramatic 353, 367, 418.
motive of Shakspere. 179, 193 seq., Cymbeiine, 355-364; mentioned,
208, 248, 265, 281, 337, 362, 382, 19. 50, 347, 352, 366 seq., 370,
417. Cf. Confusion of identity. 371,374, 376, 377, 381, 392.
Self-made men, 423. Imogen, 207, 370, 382.
Self-revelation, in works of art, 229 Posthumus, 382.
in Shakspere's works, 225, 226, 264, /Tam/cf, 250-262; mentioned. 16,
286, 301, 310, 326, 331 seq. 69, 240, 263, 264, 268, 269,
Sensitiveness Shakspere's tem-
of 275, 284, 286. 300, 302, 307,
perament, 225, 230 seq. 310, 312, 324, 325, 331, 335.
Sbakspere, Hamnet, 8, 12, 141. 339, 340.
Shakspere, John, 7. 12, 18, 43. Hamlet, 267, 283, 295, 301,
Shakspere, Judith (m. T. Quincy), 310, 312, 372.
8, 20. Horatio, 312.
Shakspere, Susanna (m. John Hall), Ophelia, 311.
8, 18. Polonius, 240.
Shakspere, William, life, 7-22; Queen, 311.
about 1593, 97-102; from 1593 to Henry IV., 162-175 ; men-
1600, 210-220; from 1600 to 1608, tioned. 13, 15, 16. 49, 176. 179.
335-344; about 1612, 392-394; in 181, 187, 190, 191. 194, 201,
general, 1-6, 395-425. 211 seq., 216, 221, 314, 383,
All's Well That Ends Well, 413, 421.
246-2.50; mentioned. 262 5«j., Bardolph, 44.
300, 325, 335, 339, 352. Doll Tearsheet. 277.
Bertram, 265. Falstaff. 43, 44. 208. 213, 21-w
Diana, 265. 248, 256. 265, 283. 286,
Parolles, 265. 294, 340, 366, 383, 416.
436 INDEX.
Shakspere (continued). Shakspere (continued).
Gadshill, 44, 187. Biron, 192, 193.
Hotspur, 76, 214. Dull, 192, 203.
Pete, 44. Rosaline, 192, 193, 325.
Pistol, 248, 294. Love's Labour *s Won, 15, 246,
Poins, 187. 248, 335.
Prince Hal, 187, 214 (see Lucrece, the Rape of, 51-65,
Henry V.), mentioned, 11, 217.
Quickly, Mrs., 44. Macbeth, 302-313; mentioned^ 19,
Shallow, 383. 69, 324, 325, 331, 335, 339,
Slender, 208. 340, 355, 356, 399, 418.
Heniy V., 180-190; mentioned, Banquo, 113.
4, 16, 77, 163, 175, 176, 198, Macbeth, 113, 372.
211, 212, 214, 216, 286, 327, Lady Macbeth, 362.
329. Measure for Measure, 263-270;
Henrj' V., 78. mentioned, 248, 285 seq., 300,
Henry VI., 70-82; mentioned, 325, 336, 352.
4, 9, 16, 34 49, 83, 84, 87, Overdone, Mrs. 277.
99, 128, 130, 131, 212, 213, Merchant of Venice, 144-157 ;

243, 328, 329, 351, 389. mentioned, 13, 15, 16, 94, 143,
Cade, Jack, 328, 329. 159, 161, 163, 166, 180, 194,
Henry VIH., 387-392 ; men- 199, 201 seq., 211, ^14, 216,
tioned, 4, 19, 50, 355, 394. 248, 286, 331, 350, 352, 368, 421.
Katharine, Queen, 382. Antonio, 208.
King John, 137-143; mentioned, Bassanio, 208.
144, 148,162, 163, 211, 214,367. Jessica, 207.
Arthur, Prince, 382. Nerissa, 207.
Faulconbridge, Bastard, Portia, 207, 214, 266, 325,
256. 337.
Julius Ccesar, 240-246; men- Shylock, 214, 266, 294.
tioned, 50, 81, 250, 252, 262 Merry Wives of Windsor, 175-
seq., 286, 307, 327 seq., 333, 335, 180 ; mentioned, 16, 187, 194,
339, 378. 195, 212, 214, 249, 383.
Brutus, 273. Midsummer NighVs Dream, 105-
Cassius, 273. 116 ; mentioned, 15, 16, 50,
King Lear, 287-301; mentioned, 117, 129, 132, 143, 146, 159,
16, 69, 284, 302, 306, 310, 324, 178, 180, 190, 194, 199, 202,
325, 335, 356. 211, 214 seq., 238. 286, 334, 341,
Cordelia, 362. 343, 367 seq., 374, 383, 416,
Goneril, 280, 311. 421.
Rents, 312. Pyramus and Thisbe, 116,
Lear, 195, 310, 312, 372. 276.
Recfan, 280, 311. Much Ado About Nothing, 190-
Lovers Labour's Lost, 82-87; 198; mentioned, 16, 38, 199,
mentioned, 13, 15, 16, 90, 93, 203, 212 seq., 216, 245, 246,
107, 111, 116, 122, 178, 193, 331, 338, 352, 366, 417.
195, 202, 211, 247, 276, 325, Beatrice, 86, 203, 207,208,
35i, 383. 214, 325.
 INDEX. 437

Shakspcre (continued). Shakspere {continued).

Benedick, 86, 203, 207, 208, 310, 325, 326, 338, 339, 393,

214, 265. 417, 421, 425, cf. 122.

Claudio,279, 301, 372. Taming of the Shrew, 157-162;

Dogberry, 203, 214. mentioned, 111, 163, 180, 212,

Hero, 279, 382, 383. 214, 216, 346.

Don John, 279. Tempest, 365-377; mentionea,

Verges, 203. 4, 19, 347, 348, 352, 353, 355,

Othello, 278-287 mentioned, 17,

;
381, 385, 386, 392, 393, 399.

288, 300, 302, 303, Ariel, 382.

69, 272,
Caliban, 385.
310, 312, 324, 325, 335, 380.
Cassio, 276. Prospero, 385.
Desdemona, 272, 275, 276, Timon of Athens, 345-354 ; men-
300,311, 382. tioned, 50, 361, 393, 418.

Emilia, 382. Titus Andronicus, 66-70; men-

tioned, 11, 15, 16, 50, 71, 81
lago, 195, 310, 362.
Othello, 195, 275, 283, 310 seq., 87, 140, 211, 213, 238,

seq., 362, 382, 384. 295, 345, 351, 389.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 345- Aaron, 195.
354; mentioned, 16, 17, 50, Troilus and Cressida, 271-277;
361,362, 367, 368, 376, 393, 418. mentioned, 16, 278, 285, 286,

Marina, 367. 300, 325, 335, 393.

Thaisa, 195, 353, 383. Cressida, 284, 285, 311.
Richard 11. , 133-137: men- Twelfth Night, 205-209; men-
tioned, 13, 15, 17, 34, 75, 142 tioned, 16, 50, 94, 212, 216,
seq., 173, 181,189,211,214,291. 238, 325, 340, 352, 353, 363,
John of Gaunt, 166. 367.
Norfolk, 290. Sir Andrew Aguecheek, 383.
Richard III., 128-132; men- Sir Toby Belch, 366.
tioned, 13, 15, 34, 46, 81, 99, Malvoli'o, 195, 265.
133, 134, 141, 143, 144, 148, Olivia, 248.
163, 189, 211, 214, 243, 307, Viola, 248, 325, 337.
367, 387. Two Gentlemen of Verona, 92-
York, Duke of, 382. 96; mentioned, 4, 15. 50. 88.
Richard III., 76, 214. 101, 105, 107, 111, 112, 147,
Romeo and Juliet, 1 16-128 ; men- 161, 162, 202, 211, 213, 238,
tioned, 13, 15, 16, 67, 129, 132. 248, 352.
140, 142, 143, 148, 161, 190, Julia, 207.
192, 201, 204, 207, 211, 213, Launce, 148, 203.
214, 216, 237, 286, 328, 336, Proteus, 107, 108.
337, 416. Speed, 148.
Juliet, 195, 214, 311, 356, Venus and Adonis, 51-65; men-
362. tioned. 11, 23, 97.
Mercutio, 166, 214, 265. Winter's Tale, 377-387; men-
Romeo, 214, 311. tioned, 19, 348, 352, 355, 392,
5onn€<« (Shakspere's), 221-237; 393.
mentioned, 15 aeq., 26, 46, 49, Hennione, 195, 353.
50, 220, 239, 250, 264, 286, 300, Shirley, 415.
438 INDEX.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 26, 35, 40, 98, 217, Taverns in Shakspere's time, 43,
222^ 226, 403. 172. See Bohemia.
Arcadia, 26, 98, 200, 288. Tayming of a Shrowe, 157, 158.
Astrophel and Stella, 98, 222. Temperament, the artistic, 3, 108, 126,
Defence of Poesy, otherwise 157, 174, 215, 226 seq., 236, 239,
Apology for Poetry, 32, 41, 244, 257, 258, 261, 327, 338. See
217, 352. Artistic impulse; Creative imagi-
Simplicity of great art, 299, 363. nation.
Sonnets, varieties of, 226. Text, corruption of, 188, 210.
Sources, relation of Shakspere's Theatre, the English, in Shakspere's
works to, 53, seq., 76, 89, 93, 106 time, 31-44, 123, 160, 183, 309, 413
seq., 117 seq., 138, 145, 186, 188, seq. See Actors; Audiences; In-
242, 254, 314 seq., 318 seq., 323, ductions; Operatic; Kant.
367. Theatre, social status of, 40 seq. See
Southampton, Earl of 11, 51. Bohemians.
Southwell, 217. Thought, Shakspere's increasing in-

Speed, John, 394. tensity of, 268, 342, 355. Set

Spenser, Edmund, 29, 98, 114, 217, Activity of intellect.
218, 222, 226, 288, 403. Titus and Vespasian, 66.
Amoretti, 217, 222, 223. Tottel's Miscellany, 25.
Faerie Queene, 98, 190, 200, 217, Tourneur, Cyril, 344, 394, 412.
226. Tragedy, 45* 127, 136, 143, 144, 190,
Shepherd's Calendar, 29. 213, 216, 236, 242, 278, 296, 304,
Spiritual suffering set forth by 338, 342, 347, 352,354.
Shakspere, 236, 260, 269, 301, 311, Tragedv of blood, 68 seq., 75, 88, 123,

338, 417. 127, 252, 295.

Spontaneity, development of, in Tragedies of revenge, 241, 252.
Shakspere, 143, 172, 174, 264, 337, Transition between artistic moods,
338, 363, 376, 384, 386, 393. See 242, 348, 351, 353, 418.
Creative imagination. Translation the actual task of Eliza-
Stationers' Register, 5. bethan dramatists, 76, 82, 89, 93,
Stowe, 28, 71, 76, 343. 117, 133, 138, 191. 209, 272, 293.
Sturley, Abraham, 13, 163. Translations from foreign languages
Style, development of Shakspere's, in Shakspere's time, 27.
58 seq., 67, 80, 83, 116, 122, 125, Troublesome Raigne of John King
126, 134, 140, 149, 156, 185, 186, of England, 137 seq., 165.
213, 227, 245, 247, 253, 266 seq., True Tragedie of Richard Duke of
274, 285, 289 seq., 293, 304 seq., 308, Yorke, etc., 70, 74.

320, 323, 326, 331 seq., 337, 339, Two Noble Kinsmen, 395.
347, 350, 356, 370, 371, 374, 379, Typical character of Shakspere as
381, 386, 418, 422; early Eliza- an artist, 2, 415, 419.
bethan, 55. iSee Euphuism; Nov-
elty Verbal ingenuity.
; Unities, the pseudo-classic, 91, 367,
Supernatural matters in Macbeth, 306 368.
seq. See Ghosts. Usury, Elizabethan view of, 152, 153.
Surrey, Earl of, 24, 25, 53, 83, 226, 403.
Symonds. J. A., Shakspere"" s Pre- Variations, Shakspere's fondness
decessors, 23. for, when a theme possessed his
 INDEX. 439

imagination, 85, 87, 108, 116, 276, 'M^ seq. 5ee Decadence; Exhaus*
277. See Cressida; Desdemona. tion; Relaxation.
Verbal ingenuity, extravagance of, Webster, John, 407-411; mentioned,
in Elizabethan style, 2^, 30, 40, 20, 344, 413, 414.
44, 56, 64, 84, 122, 196, 213, 366, Duchess oj Malfi, 294.
399. White Devil, 408-410; men-
Versatility, Shakspere's, of experi- tioned, 19, 388, 394.
ment, 101, 102, 157, 212, 213; of Wit, development of, in Much Ado
concentration, 132, 136, 144, 163, About Nothing, 195.
190, 198, 215, 220, 249, 272, 275, Women, as set forth by Shakspere.
277, 338. 151, 197, 203, 216, 250, 260, 262
Verse-tests, 5, 83, 247, 326, 332, 333, seq., 270, 272, 273, 277, 279 seq.,
336, 347, 349, 355. 356, 376, 377. 300, 310 seq., 325, 326, 331, 334,
Cf. Light Endings ; Rhyme ; Weak 338 seq., 362, 418.
Endings; Blank verse. Words and ideas, general relations
Vice, chief character in Moralities, of, 56; in Shakspere's mind almost
31, 177, 202. identical, 63, 65, 101. 102, 196, 212,
213, 246, 381, 416, 420, 424.
World, as known in Shakspere's
Ward, A. W., History of English time, 365, 368.
Dramatic Literature, 23. Wvatt, Sir Thomas, 24, 25, 40, 53,
Weak endings to verses, 320, 326, 83, 226, 403.
340. Forget Not Yet, 24, 39.
Weakness, s3'mptoms of growing, in Sonnets, 25, 53.
Shakspere's later work, 332, 345,
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