William Shakespeare

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UNIVERSITY OF
TORONTO PRESS

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OME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
'F MODERN KNOWLEDGE

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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

By JOHN MASEFIELD

London
WILLIAMS & NORGATE

HENRY HOLT & Co., New York
Canada : WM. BRIGGS, Toronto

HOME

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

OF

MODERN KNOWLEDGE

Editors s
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.

Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, DXlTT.,
LL.D., F.B.A.

PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

,^^

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE

BY

JOHN MASEFIELD

AUTHOR OF '(JtHE TRAGEDY OP
POMPEY THE GREAT," "MULTI-
TUDE AND SOLITUDE," " LOST
ENDEAVOUR," " CAPTAIN MAR-
GARET," "the TRAGEDY OF
NAN," ETC

LONDON

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

PKINTED BY

BA.ZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD,,

LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

PR

MH

This book is written partly for the use of
people who are reading Shakespeare, and
partly to encourage the study of the plays.
Though the plays are the greatest things
ever made by the English mind it cannot
be said that the English reverence their
poet. There is no theatre in London set
apart for the performance of Shakespeare.
There is no theatre in London built for the
right production of Shakespeare. There are
not in the empire enough lovers of Shake-
speare, or of the poetical drama, or of poetry,
to take the British stage from the hands of
ground landlords, and make it again glorious
with the vision of the pageant of man. These
are sad things; for art is the life. Art is the
thought of men with vision. When art is
scorned it is a sign that the men without

vision are in power. " Where there is no
vision the people perish."

Worldly Empire has always been gluttonous
and foolish. It has always been a monstrous
sentimental bubble blown out of something
dead that was once grand. Man's true empire
is not in continents nor over the sea, but
within himself, in his own soul. Here in
London, where a worldly empire is con-
trolled, there exists no theatre in which the
millions can see that other empire. They
pass from one grey street to another grey
street, to add up figures, or to swallow
patent medicines, with no thought that life
has been lived nobly, and burningly and
knightly, for great ends, and in great passions,
as the vision of our great mind declares.

CONTENTS

I The Life of Shakespeare

III

The Elizabethan Theatres

,

18

The Plays .

23

Love's Labour's Lost

24

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

34

The Comedy of Errors .

43

Titus Andronicus .

49

King Henry VI, Part I .

51

M U >> )> ^*- •

54

„ „ „ n HI

60

A Midsummer Night's Dream

63

Romeo and Juliet .

67

King John .

75

King Richard II .

86

King Richard III .

93

The Merchant of Venice .

102

The Taming of the Shrew

105

King Henry IV, Part I .

109

n n n n H-

114

King Henry V

120

The Merry Wives of Windsor

123

As You Like It .

1

128

VUl

CONTENTS

The Plays (continued) —
Much Ado About Nothing
Twelfth Night
AU's WeU that Ends Well
Julius Caesar .
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Troilus and Cressida
Measure for Measure
Othello, the Moor of Venice
King Lear .
Macbeth

Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus ,
Timon of Athens .
Pericles, Prince of Tyre .
Cymbeline .
The Winter's Tale .
The Tempest
King Henry VIII .

Work Attributed to Shakespeare

The Poems:

Venus and Adonis . . ,

The Rape of Lucrece

The Passionate Pilgnm .

The Sonnets

The Phoenix and the Turtle

Author's Note

Index ....

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

CHAPTER I

THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE

Stratford-on-Avon is cleaner, better paved,
and perhaps more populous than it was in
Shakespeare's time. Several streets of mean
red-brick houses have been built during the
last half century. Hotels, tea rooms, re-
freshment rooms, and the shops where the
tripper may buy things to remind him that
he has been where greatness lived, give the
place an air at once prosperous and parasitic.
The town contains a few comely old build-
ings. The Shakespeare house, a detached
double dwelling, once the home of the poet's
father, stands on the north side of Henley
Street. A room on the first floor, at the
western end, is shown to visitors as the room

10 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

in which the poet was born. There is not
the slightest evidence to show that he was
born there. One scanty scrap of fact exists
to suggest that he was born at the eastern
end. The two dwelhngs have now been
converted into one, which serves as a museum.
New Place, the house where Shakespeare
died, was pulled down in the middle of the
eighteenth century. For one museum the
less let us be duly thankful.

The church in which Shakespeare, his wife,
and little son are buried stands near the
river. It is a beautiful building of a type com-
mon in the Cotswold country. It is rather
larger and rather more profusely carved than
most. Damp, or some mildness in the stone,
has given much of the ornament a weathered
look. Shakespeare is buried seventeen feet
down near the north wall of the chancel.
His wife is buried in another grave a few
feet from him.

The country about Stratford is uninterest-
ing, pretty, and well watered. A few miles
away the Cotswold hills rise. They have a

LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE U

bold beauty, very pleasant after the flatness
of the plain. The wolds towards Stratford
grow many oaks and beeches. Farther east,
they are wilder and barer. Little brooks
spring up among the hills. The nooks and
valleys are planted with orchards. Old, grey
Cotswold farmhouses, and little, grey, lovely
Cotswold villages show that in Shakespeare's
time the country was prosperous and alive.
It was sheep country then. The wolds were
sheep walks. Life took thought for Shake-
speare. She bred him, mind and bone, in
a two-fold district of hill and valley, where
country life was at its best and the beauty
of England at its bravest. Afterwards she
placed him where there was the most and the
best life of his time. Work so calm as his
can only have come from a happy nature,
happily fated. Life made a golden day for
her golden soul. The English blessed by that
soul have raised no theatre for the playing
of the soul's thanksgiving.

Legends about Shakes.peare began to spring
up in Stratford as soon as there was a demand

12 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

for them. Legends are a stupid man's ex-
cuse for his want of understanding. They
are not evidence. Setting aside the legends,
the lies, the surmises and the imputations,
several uninteresting things are certainly
known about him.

We know that he was the first son and
third child of John Shakespeare, a country
trader settled at Stratford, and of Mary his
wife ; that he was baptised on the 26th
April, 1564; and that in 1582 he got with
child a woman named Anne or Agnes Hatha-
way, eight years older than himself. Her
relatives saw to it that he married her. A
daughter (Susanna) was born to him in May
1583, less than six months after the marriage.
In January 1585 twins were born to him,
a son (Hamnet, who died in 1596) and a
daughter (Judith).

At this point he disappears. Legend, writ-
ten down from a hundred to a hundred and
sixty years after the event, says that he was
driven out of the county for poaching, that
he was a country school-master, that he made

LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE 13

a *' very bitter " ballad upon a landlord,
that he tramped to London, that he held
horses outside the theatre doors, and that at
last he was received into a theatrical com-
pany " in a very mean rank." This is all
legend, not evidence. That he was a lawyer's
clerk, a soldier in the Low Countries, a sea-
man, or a printer, as some have written
books to attempt to show, is not evidence,
nor legend, but wild surmise. It might be
urged, with as great likelihood, that he be-
came a king, an ancient Roman, a tapster or
a brothel keeper.

It is fairly certain that the company which
first received him was the Earl of Leicester's
company, then performing at The Theatre in
Shoreditch. The company changed its patron
and its theatre several times, but Shake-
speare, having been admitted to it, stayed
with it throughout his theatrical career.
He acted with it at The Theatre, at the Rose
and Globe Theatres, at the Court, at the
Inns of Court, and possibly on many stages
in the provinces. For many years he pro-

14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

fessed the quality of actor. Legend says
that he acted well in what are called " char-
acter parts." Soon after his entrance into
the profession he began to show a talent for
improving the plays of others.

Nothing interesting is known of his sub-
sequent life, except that he wrote great
poetry and made money by it. It is plain
that he was a shrewd, careful, and capable
man of affairs, and that he cared, as all wise
men care, for rank and an honourable state.
He strove with a noble industry to obtain
these and succeeded. He prospered, he
bought New Place at Stratford, he invested
in land, in theatre shares and in houses.
During the last few years of his life he retired
to New Place, where he led the life of a country
gentleman. He died there on the 28rd April,
1616, aged fifty- two years. The cause of his
death is not known. His wife and daughters
survived him.

Little is known of his human relationships.
He is described as " gentle." Had he been
not gentle we should know more of him.

LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE 15

Ben Jonson " loved the man," and says that
" he was, indeed, honest and of an open and
free nature." John Webster speaks of his
" right happy and copious industry." An
actor who wrote more than thirty plays
during twenty years of rehearsing, acting,
and theatre management, can have had little
time for mixing with the world.

That we know little of his human relation-
ships is one of the blessed facts about him.
That we conjecture much is the penalty a
nation pays for failing to know her genius
when he appears.

Three portraits — a bust, an engraving, and
a painting — have some claim to be considered
as genuine portraits of Shakespeare. The
first of these is the coloured half-length
bust on the chancel wall in Stratford Church.
This was made by one Gerard Janssen, a
stonemason of some repute. It was placed
in the church within seven years of the poet's
death. It is a crude work of art ; but it
shows plainly that the artist had before him
(in vision or in the flesh) a man of unusual

16 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

vivacity of mind. The face is that of an
aloof and sunny spirit, full of energy and
effectiveness. Another portrait is that en-
graved for the title page of the first folio,
published in 1623. The engraving is by
Martin Droeshout, who was fifteen years old
when Shakespeare died, and (perhaps) about
twenty-two when he made the engraving. It
is a crude work of art, but it shows plainly
that the artist had before him the repre-
sentation of an unusual man.

It is possible that the representation from
which he engraved his plate was a painting
on panel, now at Stratford. This painting
(discovered in 1840) is now called " the
Droeshout portrait." It is supposed to re-
present the Shakespeare of the year 1609.
In the absence of proof, all that can be said
of it is that it is certainly a work of the
early seventeenth century, and that it looks as
though it were the original of the engraving.
No other " portrait of Shakespeare " has any
claim to be considered as even a doubtful
likeness.

LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE 17

There are, unfortunately, many graven
images of Shakespeare. They are perhaps
passable portraits of the languid, half-witted,
hydrocephalic creatures who made them. As
representations of a bustling, brilliant, pro-
found, vivacious being, alive to the finger
tips, and quick with an energy never since
granted to man, they are as false as water.

CHAPTER II

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRES

The Elizabethan theatres were square,
circular, or octagonal structures, built of
wood, lath and plaster, on stone or brick
foundations. They stood about forty or
forty-five feet high. They were built with
three storeys, tiers, or galleries of seats
which ran round three sides of the stage and
part of the fourth. On the fourth side, at
the back of the stage, was a tiring house in
which the actors robed. The upper storeys
of the tiring house could be used in the action,
for a balcony, the upper storeys of a house,
etc., according to the needs of the scene.
It is possible, but not certain, that the tiring
house itself was used in some plays to repre-
sent an inner chamber. The three storeys
of seats were divided by partitions into

18

THE THEATRES 19

" gentlemen's roomes " and " Twoe pennie
roomes." The top storey was roofed in, either
with thatch or tiles. The stage was roofed
over in the same way. The space or yard
between the stage and the galleries which
surrounded it, was open to the sky. It
contained no seats, but it held many spec-
tators who stood. " Standing room " cost
a penny. Those who stood could press right
up to the stage, which was a platform four
or five feet high projecting well out from
the back of the house " to the middle of the
yarde." It was possible to see the actors
" in the round,*' instead of, as at present,
like people in a picture. The audience got
their emotions from the thing done and the
thing said; not, as with us, from the situation.
It was the custom of gallant gentlemen to
hire stools placed on the stage itself. They
sat and took tobacco there during the per-
formance. Rank had then a greater privilege
of impertinence than it has to-day. The
performances took place by daylight. They
were announced by the blowing of a trumpet.

20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

During a performance, a banner was hung
from the theatre roof. The plays were played
straight through, without waits. The only
waits necessary in a theatre are (a) those
which rest the actors and (b) those which give
variety to the moods of the spectators. The
double construction of Shakespeare's plays
provided a sub-plot which held or amused the
audience while the actors of the main plot
rested. It is possible, but not certain, that
the scenes were played on alternate halves of
the stage, and that when one half of the stage
was being cleared of its properties, or fitted
with them, the play continued on the other
half. It is not possible to speak of the
general quality of the acting. Acting, like
other dependent art, can only be good when
it has good art to interpret. The acting was
probably as good and as bad as the plays.
Careful and impressive speaking and thought-
ful, restrained gesture were qualities which
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson praised. It is
likely that the acting of the time was much
quicker than modern acting. The plays were

THE THEATRES 21

played very swiftly, without hesitation or
dawdling over " business."

There was little or no scenery to most
plays. The properties, Le. chairs, beds, etc.,
were simple and few. The play was the
thing. The aim of the play was to give
not a picture of life, but a glorified vision of
life. The object was not realism but illusion.
The costumes were of great splendour. In
some productions (as in Henry VIII) they
were of an excessive splendour. Music and
singing added much to the beauty of many
scenes.

Women were not then allowed upon the
stage. Women's parts were played by boys.
Some have thought that this must have taken
from the excellence of the performances.
It is highly likely that it added much to
it. Nearly all boys can act extremely well.
Very few men and women can.

The playing of women's parts by boys
may have limited Shakespeare's art. His
women are kept within the range of thought
and emotion likely to be understood by boys.

22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

This may account for their wholesome,
animal robustness. There is no trace of the
modern heroine, the common woman over-
strained, or the idle woman in her megrims,
in any Shakespearean play. The people of
the plays are alive and hearty. They lead
a vigorous life and go to bed tired. They
never forget that they are animals. They
never let any one else forget that they are
also divine.

CHAPTER III

THE PLAYS

Three plays belong to Shakespeare's first
period of original creative writing. It is
fair to suppose that the least dramatically
sound of the three was the one first written.
We therefore take Love's Labour^ s Lost as his
first play. It is commonly said by critics
that Love's Labour* s Lost is " the work of a
young man." It might more justly be said
of it that it is the work of a new kind of young
man. The young man knows all the trick
of the theatre and uses it, as a master always
uses technique, for the statement of some-
thing new to the human soul. The play no
longer speaks to the human soul ; for though
it is the work of a master, it is the work of
a master not yet alive to the depths and still
doubtful among the temptations to which

23

24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

intellect is subject. It is one of those works
of art which remind us of Blake's saying, that
" the best water is the newest." When it
came out, with all the glitter of newness on
it, the mind of man was flattered by a new
possession. To us, the persons of the play
are not much more than Time's toys, who
never really lived, but only glittered a little.

Love's Labour^s Lost.

Written. Between 1589 and 1592.

Published, after correction and augmentation, from a
badly corrected copy, 1598.

Source of the Plot. It is thought that Shakespeare
created the plot. The names of some of the characters were
taken from people then living. The incident in Act V,
scene ii (the entrance of the King of Navarre and his
men, in Russian habits), was perhaps suggested by the
visit of some Russians to Queen Elizabeth in 1584.

TJte Fable. The King of Navarre and his three courtiers,
Biron, Dumaine and Longaville, have sworn to study
for three years under the usual collegiate conditions of
watching, fasting, and keeping from the sight and speech
of women. They are forced to break this vow. The
Princess of France comes with her Court to discuss State
afiairs.

At the discussion, the King falls in love with the
Princess, his three courtiers fall in love with the ladies
of her train.

The lovers send vows of love to their ladies. They

THE PLAYS 25

plot to visit them in disguises of masks and Russian
clothes. The ladies, hearing of this plot in time, mask
themselves. The men fail to recognise them. Each
disguised lover makes love-vows to the wrong woman.

The ladies twit the men with a double perjury: that
they have broken their vow to study, and their love vows.

The play is kept within the bounds of fantastic comedy
by the members of the sub-plot, who intrude with their
fim whenever the action tends to become real. They
intrude here, to impersonate the Nine Worthies before
the two Courts. The farce of their performance is height-
ened by ragging from the courtiers. When it ia at its
height, two of the members of the sub-plot begin to
quarrel. One blow would ruin the play by making it
real. At the crisis the violence is avoided j the reality
is brought unexpectedly, by beauty. A messenger enters
to tell the Princess that her father is dead.

The ladies bid the men test their love by waiting for
twelve months. The trifling of the earlier acts is shown at
its moral value against a background of tragic happening.
Accomplishments are compared with life.

The members of the sub-plot enter. They end the play
with the singing of a lyric.

The play gives the reader the uncanny
feeUng that something real inside the piece
is trying to get out of the fantasy. The lip-
love rattles like a skeleton's bones. The love
of Biron for Rosaline is real passion. The
conflict throughout is the conflict of the unreal
with the real.

26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The play seems to have been written in a
literary or sentimental mood, and revised
in a real mood. There is little in the early
version that is not fantastic. The situation
is fantastic, the people are fantastic, the
language is fantastic with all a brilliant
young master's delight in the play and glitter
of cunning writing. The later version was
written during the passionate years of Shake-
speare's growth, after something had altered
the world to him. The two versions are
carelessly stuck together, with the effect of
a rose-bush growing out of bones.

The Biron scenes, as we have them, seem
to be the fruit of the mood that caused the
sonnets. We do not know what caused that
mood. The sonnets, like the plays, are as
likely to be symbol as confession. The
sonnets suggest that he loved an unworthy
woman who robbed him of a beloved friend.
Love's Labour*s Lost and several other early
plays suggest that he knew too well how love
for the unworthy woman smirches honour,
wakens, but holds captive, the reason, and

THE PLAYS 27

wastes the spiritual gift in the praise of a
form of death.

The dramatic method is dual. He presents
in the plot something eternal in human life, and
in the sub-plot something temporal in human
fashion. In the plot of this play, his inten-
tion seems to have been this — to show intellect
turned from a high resolve, from a consecration
to mental labour, by the coming of women, who
represent, perhaps, untutored, natural intelli-
gence. Later in the play the high resolve of
intellect is betrayed again, indirectly by
women; but more by the sexual emotions
which distort the vision till even the
falsest, loosest woman appears beautiful and
" celestial," and worth the sacrifice of in-
tellect. The end of the play is not so much
an end as a clearing of the road of life.

It often happens that the setting down of
a doubt in careful words resolves it. This
play seems to free Shakespeare's mind from
doubts as to the right use and preparation
of intellect. He presents with extreme care
the different types of literary intellect : the

28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

man who shuts himself up to study, the man
who sparkles in society, the man whom books
have made stupid and the man whom style
has made mad.

The play is full of the problem of what to
do with the mind. Shall it be filled with
study, or spent in society, or burnt in a
passion, or tortured by strivings for style, or
left as it is ? Intellect is a problem to itself.
Something of the problem seems (it would
be wrong to be more certain) to have made
this play not quite impersonal, as good art
should be.

The problems are settled wisely, though
not without a feeling of sacrifice. The
beauty and the worth of learning are baits
by which many intellects are lured from
wisdom. The knowledge that life is the book
to study, life at its liveHest, in the wits of
women

" Keen
Above the sense of sense,"

and that style is a poor thing beside the

THE PLAYS 29

" honest plain words " which pierce, only
comes with a sense of loss. Youth desires
all the powers. A man with great gifts
desires all the mental gifts. Youth with
nothing but great gifts is never sure that the
gifts will be sufficient. When this play was
written, the stage was supplied with plays
by men of trained intellects, who set more
store upon the training than upon the intel-
lect itself. The society of well-taught men,
who know and quote and criticise, always
makes the untaught uncertain and ill at ease.
Shakespeare seems to have risen from the
writing of this play, certain that poetry is
not given to the trained mind, nor to the
untrained mind, but to the quick and noble
nature, earnest with the passion which stands
the touchstone of death. " Subtlety," so
Cromwell wrote, " may deceive you, integrity
never will." The mind is her own armour.
She will not fail for the want of a little learning
or a little grace.

In the sub-plot, among much low comedy,
this truth is emphasised by the triumph of

80 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Costard, a natural mind, in an encounter
with Armado, an artificial mind. At the end
of the play the " learned men " are made to
compile a dialogue " in praise of the owl and
the cuckoo." The dialogue is of a kind not
usual among learned men, but the choice of
the birds is significant. The last speech of
the play : *' The words of Mercury are harsh
after the songs of Apollo," seems to refer to
Marlowe, as though Shakespeare found it
hard to justify an art so unlike his master's.
Marlowe climbs the peaks in the sun, his bow
never off his shoulders. I walk the roads of
the earth among men.

There is little character drawing in the
piece. The Princess is a gracious figure;
but hardly real to us till the last scene of
the play, when she speaks wisely. Biron is
more of a person. He presents his point of
view in a moment of pleasant poetry —

" For where is any author in the world,
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye ? "

He shows a prejudice against Boyet, the

THE PLAYS 81

courtier in attendance on the Princess. This
prejudice is expressed bitterly —

" This is the flower that smiles on every one,"

with the bitterness usual in Shakespeare
when treating of the flunkey mind. The
ladies of the Princess's train all talk exactly
alike, with sharp feminine wit, infinitely
swift in thrust. None of them has per-
sonality; but Rosaline is described for us,
body and disposition. The members of the
sub-plot are mental fashions well observed.
Costard alone has life. Shakespeare came
from the country. In the country a thinking
man is reminded daily of the shrewdness of
unspoiled minds. Armado, Costard's opponent,
lives for us by one phrase —

" The sweet war-man is dead and rotten :
sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the
buried : when he breathed, he was a man."

It is interesting to see Shakespeare's mind
trying for vividness. In his maturity he had
supremely the power of giving life. In this
early play one can see his first conscious

32 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

literary efforts towards the obtaining of the
power. Longaville (in Act II, so. i) makes the
scene alive by the question —

'' I beseech you a word. What is she in
the white ? "

(Who is the woman in the white dress ?) The
simple but telling means of giving reality is
repeated a few lines later in Biron's question —

" What's her name in the cap ? "

In Act V, sc. ii, the vividness is given in a
strangely pathetic passage, that haunts, after
the play is laid down. Two of the ladies
are talking of Cupid —

Rosaline. You'll ne'er be friends with him :

he killed your sister.
Katharine, He made her melancholy, sad,
and heavy;
And so she died : had she been light, like you,
Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,
She might have been a granddam ere she died.

The power of giving life in a line is seen in
the remark of Dumaine (Act IV, sc. iii) —

"To look like her, are chimney-sweepers black."

THE PLAYS 88

The play is full of experiments. Some of
it is written in a loose, swinging couplet,
some in quatrains, some in blank verse,
some' in the choice, picked prose made the
fashion by Lyly. It contains more lyrics
than any other Shakespearean play. One
of the lyrics, a sonnet in Alexandrines, is the
fruit of a real human passion. The lyric
at the end of the play is the loveliest thing
ever said about England. If this play and
most of the other plays were modern works,
the Censor would not allow them to be per-
formed publicly. The men and women con-
verse with a frankness and suggestiveness
not now usual, except among the young.
Shakespeare is blamed for not conforming
to standards unknown to his generation.

He is blamed for not being delicate- minded
like the great Greek tragic poets. The Greek
tragic poets wrote about the heroic life of
legend. Shakespeare wrote about life. A man
who writes about life must accept life for
what it is, as largely an animal thing. Those
who pretend that life is only lived in boudoirs,

34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

are in peril, and the world is in peril through
them.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona,

Written. Before 1592.

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. The story of a woman who follows
her lover in the disguise of a page-boy, hears him serenade
another woman, and acts as a go-between in his suit
to this other woman, is to be found in the second book
of La Diana Enamorada, a pastoral romance, in prose,
freely sprinkled with lyrics, by Jorge de Montemayor,
a Portuguese who wrote in Spanish about the middle of
the sixteenth century. De Montemayor' s story is not
complicated by a Valentine. He calls the girl Felismena,
her lover Felix, and the second woman Celia. His tale
ends with Celia dying for love of the supposed page-boy.

A play based on this story was acted in England in
1584. It is now lost. The gist of the story was pub-
lished in lame English verses, by Bamabe Googe, in 1563.

The Fable. Valentine and Proteus, the two gentlemen,
are friends. Valentine is about to travel. Proteus, in
love with Julia, will not go with him. Antonio, Proteus'
father, sends Proteus after Valentine. Julia resolves to
follow him in boy's clothes. Valentine at Milan falls in
love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia, whom the Duke
plans to marry to one Thurio. Proteus, arriving at Milan,
also falls in love with Silvia. He becomes jealous of
Valentine.

Valentine tells him that he has planned to escape with
Silvia that night. Proteus betrays this plot to the Duke.
The Duke banishes Valentine and sends Proteus to Silvia
to press the suit of Thurio,

THE PLAYS 85

Valentine joins a gang of outlaws.

Proteus woos Silvia for himself, and is rejected by her.

Julia, who has come in boy's dress from Verona to look
for Proteus, finds him still unsuccessfully courting Silvia.
She jenters his service as a page. He sends her on a
message to Silvia.

On her way to deliver the message, Julia meets Silvia
flying from home in search of Valentine.

In her search for Valentine, Silvia is caught by the gang
of outlaws.

Proteus rescues her, and threatens to resume his suit
with violence.

Valentine, entering, stops this.

Proteus sues for pardon to Valentine and Julia. He is
received to mercy. The Duke after dismissing Thurio,
pardons Valentine, and grants him Silvia's hand in
marriage.

Love's Labour^s Lost is fantasy. The
Two Gentlemen of Verona deals with real
human relationships. It is a better play than
the fantasy, though the fantasy has moments
of better poetry. It carries on one of the
problems raised in Love's Labour^ s Lost. It is
the work of a troubled mind. It comes from
the mood in which the sonnets were written.

Twice in Lovers Labour^s Lost the act of
oath-breaking, of being forsworn, is important
to the play's structure. Though the vows
broken in that play are fantastic, the char-

B 2

36 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

acters feel real dishonour at the breaking of
them. The play shows that though the
idea of vow-breaking was in Shakespeare's
mind, he had not then the power, or the human
experience, or the mental peace, to grapple with
it fairly, or see it truly. The idea, that the
person for whom the vows are broken brings
with her the punishment of the sin of vow-
breaking, haunts the mind of Biron (in Act
IV, sc. iii) —

" Sow'd cockle reap'd no corn :
And justice always whirls in equal measure :
Light wenches may prove plagues to men
forsworn."

In the Two Gentlemen of Verona, this
idea, the idea that treachery caused by some
obession is at the root of most tragedy, was
treated by him at length, perhaps for the
first time.

That it haunted him then, and remained
all through his life as the pole-star of dramatic
action is evident to all who read his works as
poetry should be read. It is the law of his
imagination.

THE PLAYS 87

Passion, not weakness of will, but strength
of will blinded, is the commonest cause of
treachery among us. The great poets have
agreed that anything that distorts the mental
vision, anything thought of too much, is a
danger to us. Passion that with the glimmer
of a new drunkenness blinds the mature to
the life and de^!;h memories of marriage, and
kills in the immature the memory of love,
friendship, and past benefits, is a form of
destruction. In its action as a destroyer, it
is the subject of Shakespeare's greatest plays.
In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he is interested
less in the destruction than in the moral
blindness that leads to it.

Shakespeare's method is simple. He shows
us two charming young men becoming morally
blind with passion, in a company not so
blinded. The only other ''inconstant" person
in the play (Sir Thurio) is inconstant from that
water-like quality in the mind that floods
with the full moon, and ebbs like a neap soon
after. Even the members of the sub-plot, the
two servants, are constant, the one to his

38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

master, who beats him, the other to the dog
that gets him beaten. A lesser mind would sit
in judgment in such a play. The task of
genius is not to sit in judgment.

" Our life is of a mingled yam, good and ill
together."

Shakespeare neither praises nor blames.
His task is to see justly. It is we who conclude
that treachery looks ugly beside its opposite.

Of the fine scenes in the play, sc. iv in
Act II, where Valentine and Sir Thurio walk
with Silvia, with whom they are both in love,
is the liveliest. The two men bicker across
the lady, as though the next word would bring
blows. The demure pleasure of Silvia in
being quarrelled for, is indicated most masterly
in less than thirty words. Act III, sc. i,
where the Duke discovers Valentine's plot
to escape with Silvia, is a passage of noble
dramatic power, doubly interesting because
it shows the justice of Shakespeare's vision.
Valentine, the constant friend and lover, is ex-
posed in an act of treachery to his benefactor.

THE PLAYS 89

The scenes in which the disguised JuUa wit-
nesses her lover's falseness, and the scene in
which the play is brought to an end, are deeply
and hobly affecting. Theatre managers play
Shakespeare as though he were an old fashion
of the mind instead of the seer of the eternal
in life. They should play this play as a vision
of something that is eternally treacherous,
bringing misery to the faithful, the noble, and
the feeling. One of the noblest things in the
play is the forgiveness at the end. Passion
has taken Proteus into strange byways of
treachery. He has been false to Julia, to
Valentine, to the Duke, to Thurio, one false-
ness leading to another, till he is in a wood of
the soul, tangled in sin. It only wants that
he be false to Silvia, too. Passion makes his
eyes a little blinder for an instant. He adds
that treachery to the others. Power to see
clearly is the only cure for passion. Discovery
gives that power. Valentine's words —

"Who should be trusted now, when one's
right hand
Is perjured to the bosom ? Proteus,

40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest. . ."

followed so soon by Julia's words —

" Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,
And entertained them deeply in her heart :
How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the

root. . . .
It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes, than men

their minds " —

rouse Proteus to the confounding instant of
self-recognition. His answer is like a voice
from one of the later plays. It is in Shake-
speare's grand manner. It does not read like
a piece of revision done in the poet's maturity;
but as though Shakespeare suddenly found his
utterance in a moment of vision —

" Than men their minds I 'tis true. O

heaven ! Were man
But constant, he were perfect : that one error
Fills him with faults ; makes him run through

all the sins :
Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins."

THE PLAYS 41

A word of excuse would brand him as base.
He is ashamed and guilty; but not base. He
cannot say more than that he is sorry, and this
only to Valentine. Valentine accepts sorrow
with the utterance of one of the religious
ideas which seem to have been constantly in
Shakespeare's mind.

*' By penitence the Eternal's wrath's ap-
peased."

His conduct towards Proteus after this
forgiveness is so wise with delicate tact that
the reader is reminded of Shelley's treatment
of Hogg, in a similar case.

The suggestion of the character of Silvia
has an austere beauty. The two gentlemen
are limited by the play's needs. The figure
of Valentine is the more complete of the two.
He is an interesting study of one of those
grave young men who, when tested by life, show
themselves wise beyond their years. Among
the minor characters, that of Eglamour, an
image of constancy to a dead woman, is the
most beautiful. He is one of the strange,

42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

many-sorrowed souls, vowed to an idea, to
whom Shakespeare's characters so often turn
when the world bears hard. The low comedy
of Launce could hardly be lower; but his
phrase " the other squirrel '* (in Act IV, sc. iv)
is a good stroke. The great mind is full of
vitality on all the planes.

There is little superb verse in the play. The
lyric, " Who is Silvia ? " shows a marvellous
lyrical art, working without emotion to
imitate an effect of music. The proverb,
" make a virtue of necessity," occurs in Act
IV, so. ii. The fine lines —

" O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day '* —

and the pretty speech of Julia in Act II, sc.
vii —

'' I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,
And make a pastime of each weary step,
Till the last step have brought me to my love ;
And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil,
A blessed soul doth in Elysium" —

are memorable.

THE PLAYS 43

Man is so eager to know about Shakespeare
that he is tempted to find personal confession
in the plays. It is true that the art of a young
man is too immature to be impersonal. In
an achieved style we see the man; in all
striving for style we see what hurts him. But
in poetry, human experience is wrought to
symbol, and symbol is many virtued, accord-
ing to the imaginative energy that broods
upon it. It is said that Shakespeare holds a
mirror up to life. He who looks into a mirror
closely generally sees nothing but himself.

The Comedy of Errors,

Written. Before 1594.

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. The plot was taken from the Men-
cBchmi of Plautus. Whether Shakespeare read the play
in Latin, or in a translation, or heard it from a friend, or
saw it acted, is not known. All four are possible.

The sub -plot, in this case a duplication of the plot,
was suggested by a part of the Am'phitruo of Plautus.

The play is brought on to the plane of human feeling
by the character of ^geon. This character was suggested
by a story in Gli Suppositi (The Supposes) of Ariosto.

The Fable, Like all comedies of mistake, the Comedy
of Errors has an extremely complicated plot. The play
consists of a number of ingeniously contrived situations

44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

in which either the Antipholus and the Dromio of Eph(
are mistaken for the Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse,
or those of Syracuse are mistaken for those of Ephesus.
The comedy of mistake is touched with beauty by the
romantic addition of the restoration of old ^geon to his
long-lost wife.

Poets are great or little according to the
nobleness of their endeavour to build a man-
sion for the soul. Shakespeare, like other
poets, grew by continual, very difficult mental
labour, by the deliberate and prolonged exer-
cise of every mental weapon, and by the resolve
to do not " the nearest thing," precious to
human sheep, but the difficult, new and noble
thing, glimmering beyond his mind, and
brought to glow there by toil. We do not
know when the play was written, nor why it
was written. If it were not written by special
request, for reward, it must have been chosen
either for the rest given by a subject external
to the mind, or as a self-set exercise in the
difficult mental labour of comic dramatic
construction. Every playwright sees the comic
opportunity of the Mencechmi fable. A play-
wright not yet sure of his art sees and admires

THE PLAYS 45

behind the comedy the firm, intricate mental
outline that has kept the play alive for more
than two thousand years.

The MencBchmi of Plautus is a piece of very
skilful theatrical craft. It is almost heartless.
In bringing it out of the Satanic kingdom of
comedy into the charities of a larger system
Shakespeare shows for the first time a real
largeness of dramatic instinct. In his hand-
ling of the tricky ingenious plot he achieves
(what, perhaps, he wrote the play to get) a
dexterous, certain play of mind. He strikes
the ringing note, time after time. It cannot
be said that the verse, or the sense of character,
or the invention is better than in the other
early plays. It is not. The play is on a lower
plane than any of his other works. It is the
only Shakespearean play without a deep
philosophical idea. If it be not a special
commission, or an exercise in art, it is
perhaps another instance of the price great
men pay for being happy. It is certainly the
fruit of a happier mood than that which bore
the other early plays. It is also the first play

46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

that shows a fine, sustained power of dramatic
construction.

It is so well constructed (for the simple
Elizabethan theatre and the bustle of the
Elizabethan speech) that any unspoiled mind
is held by it, when it is acted as Shakespeare
meant it to be acted. The closeness and
firmness of the dramatic texture is the work
of an acutely clear mind driven at white
heat and mercilessly judged at each step.
Those who do not understand the nature of
dramatic art should read the ninety odd verses
in which iEgeon tells his story (in Act I, so.
i). They would do well to consider the power
of mind that has told so much in so few words.
They will find an instance of Shakespeare's
happy use of stage trick, in the final scene,
where, after the general recognition, Dromio
of Syracuse again mistakes Antipholus of
Ephesus for his master.

Rare poetical power is shown in the making
of the play. Little beauty adorns the action.
The speech of Adriana (in Act II, sc. ii)
against the obsession of passion that leads

THE PLAYS 47

to treachery in marriage, is passionate and
profound. It is the most deeply felt speech
in the early plays. Adriana's husband is
frequenting another woman who, having the
charm that so often goes with worthlessness,
has a power of attracting that is sometimes
refused to the noble. Adriana beseeches him
not to break the tie that binds them. Two
souls that have been each other's are not to
be torn apart without death to one of them.
With that sympathy for the suffering mind
which gives Shakespeare all his power-
ed My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow
hits ")

he gives to her speech an unendurable reality.
Reality, however obtained, is the only cure
for an obsession. As far as words can teach in
such a case Adriana's words teach the reality
of her husband's sin.

" How dearly it would touch thee to the quick,
Shouldst thou but hear I were licentious,
And that this body, consecrate to thee,
By ruffian lust should be contaminate !

48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Wouldst thou not spit at me and spurn at

me,
And hurl the name of husband in my face,
And tear the stain'd skin off my harlot

brow,
And from my false hand cut the wedding-
ring. . . ?
My blood is mingled with the crime of lust :
For, if we two be one, and thou play false,
I do digest the poison of thy flesh."

There is no other poetry of this intensity in
the play.

It is interesting to compare Shakespeare's
mind with Plautus's in the description of
Epidamnum. Plautus says —

" This is the home of the greatest lechers
and drunkards.

" Very many tricksters and cheaters live in
this city.

•* Nowhere are wheedling whores more cun-
ning at bilking people."

Shakespeare gives the horror a spiritual turn
that adds much to the intensity of the farce.

*' They say, this town is full of cozenage :
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,

\ THE PLAYS 49

Dark-working sorcerers that change the

mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such like liberties of sin."

The play is amusing. The plot is intricate.
The interest of the piece is in the plot. When
a plot engrosses the vitality of a dramatist's
mind, his character-drawing dies; so here.
It is sufficient to say that the character of
^geon is the best in the play

Titus Andronicus,

Written. (?)

Published. (?)

Source of the Plot. (?)

The Fable. Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose first-
bom son is sacrificed by Titus Andronicus, determines to
be revenged. She succeeds in her determination. Titus
and his daughter are mutilated. Two of the Andronici,
his sons, are beheaded.

Titus determines to be revenged. He bakes the heads
of two of Tamora's sons in a pasty, and serves them up
for her to eat. He then stabs her, after stabbing his
daughter. He is himself stabbed on the instant; but
his surviving son stabs his murderer. Tamora's paramour
is then sentenced to be buried alive, and the survivors
(about half the original cast) move off (as they say)
'• to order well the State."

50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

This play shows an instinct for the stage
and a knowledge of the theatre. It seems to
have been a popular piece. A knowledge of
the theatre will often make something foolish
theatrically effective. So here.

The piece is nearly worthless. The turning
of the tide of revenge, from Tamora against
Andronicus, and then from Andronicus against
Tamora, is the theme. It is a simple theme.
Man cannot have simplicity without hard
thought, and hard thought is never worthless,
though it may be applied unworthily.

There can be no doubt that Shakespeare
wrote a little of this tragedy; it is not known
when; nor why. Poets do not sin against
their art unless they are in desperate want.
Shakespeare certainly never touched this job
for love. There is only one brief trace of his
great, rejoicing triumphant manner. It is
possible that the play was brought to him by
his theatre-manager, with some such words as
these : " This piece is very bad, but it will
succeed, and I mean to produce it, if I can
start rehearsals at once. Will you revise it

THE PLAYS 51

for me ? Please do what you can with it, and
write in lines and passages where you think it
is wanting. And whatever happens please
let me have it by Monday."

The only poetry in the play comes in the
three lines —

'* You sad-fac'd men, people and sons of Rome,
By uproar sever'd, like a flight of fowl
Scatter'd by winds and high tempestuous
gusts."

King Henry VI, Part 1,

Written. 1689-91.

Produced. 1501.

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles.

The Fable. The play begins shortly after the death of
King Henry V. Henry VI is too young to rule. There
is a feud between Gloucester, the Lord Protector, and
Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. In France,
where Talbot is besieging Orleans, the English have had
many losses. Joan of Arc begins her conquering pro-
gress by causing Talbot to raise the siege.

A feud between the Duke of York (the white rose
faction) and the Earl of Somerset (the red rose faction)
becomes acute, in spite of King Henry's personal
intercession. It intensifies the feud between the Lord
Protector and the Cardinal. In France, Talbot is killed
in battle. The English are beaten from their possessions.
Joan of Arc is taken, tried, and burned.

52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The menace of civil trouble hangs over King Henry's
court. The feud between the factions of the roses threatens
to break into war. The Earl of Suffolk (one of the red
rose faction) schemes to marry King Henry to Margaret
of Anjou. It is made plain that he means to become
Margaret's lover so that he may rule England through
her. A disgraceful peace is concluded with France.
The play ends with Suffolk's departure to arrange the
King*s marriage with Margaret.

It is plain that this play is not the work of
one mind. Part of it is the work of a man who
saw a big tragic purpose in events. The rest
is the work of at least two mechanical (some-
times muddy) minds, who neither criticised
nor understood, but had some sense of the
pageant. There are bright marks in the play
where Shakespeare's mind touched it.

" Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to
nought."

" If underneath the standard of the French
She carry armour."

" Now thou art come unto a feast of death."

"Thus, while the vulture of sedition
Feeds in the bosom of such great commanders,

THE PLAYS 53

Sleeping negleetion doth betray to loss
The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror,
That ever-living man of memory,
Henry the Fifth."

The work as a whole is one of the old formless
chronicle plays, which inspired the remark that
if an English dramatist were to make a play
of St. George he would begin with the birth of
the Dragon. In Act II Shakespeare's mind
both directs and explains the welter. The
scene in the Temple Gardens, where the men
of the two factions pluck the red and white
roses, is like music after discord. The play is
lifted into poetry. The big tragic purpose
broods ; something fateful quickens. The
next scene, where Mortimer dies in prison, is
another instance of the power of great intellect
to give life. The dying Mortimer is carried
in, to show how the inaminent tragedy has
been for long years preparing, in countless
passionate men, each of whom has shaped it,
little by little, out of lust and hate, till the
spiritual measure tips towards justice.

The only other scenes that bear marks of

54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare's mind are those in Act IV, in
which Talbot meets his death. The verse
of these scenes is often careless, but it has a
bright variety, pleasant to the mind after the
strutting verse (wearily reiterating one prosodic
effect, like choppy water) of the other authors.
Some people claim that Shakespeare wrote
the whole of this play. The intellect changes
much in life; but never in kind, only in degree.
Shakespeare's mind could play with dirt and
relish dirt, but it was never base and never
blunt. The base mind is betrayed by its
conceptions, not by its amusements. Shake-
speare's mind could never, at any stage of his
career, have sunk to conceive the disgusting
scene in which Joan of Arc pleads. Nor
could he at any time have planned a play in
which the moral idea is a trapping to physical
action.

King Henry VI, Part II.

Written. 1591-2.

Prodticed. 1592.

Published, in the crude original form, 1593. When
first published, the play was called " The First part of
the Contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke

THE PLAYS 55

and Lancaster." This version seems to have been written
by Greene and Peele. It contains passages (improving
additions) that resemble Shakespeare's work; but the
work is very crude. The version as a whole reads like
a long scenario.

After the first production of this version, Shakespeare
and some other writer, possibly Marlowe, revised, im-
proved and enlarged it. This revised version, the Second
Part of King Henry VI, as we now have it, was first
published in the first folio in 1623.

Source of the Plot. Edward Hall's Chronicle.

The Fable. The play begins with the arrival of Margaret
of Anjou at the Court of King Henry VI. An altercation
among the Lords in scene i. explains the political situa-
tion to those who have not seen the first part of the trilogy.
The subject is the gradual ascent to power of Richard
Plantagenet, Duke of York. The play is turbulent with
passions. The subject is obscured and made grander
by the war of interests and lusts among the nobles of
the Court. The Queen's party, the Duke Humphrey's
party, and Cardinal Beaufort's party, make a welter of
hate and greed, against which the Duke of York's cool
purpose stands out, as Augustus stands out against the
wreck of old Rome. The action is interrupted and light-
ened by the cheat of Simpcox and by the rebellion of
Jack Cade. In modem theatres the passage of time is
indicated by the di'opping of a curtain and by a few words
printed on a programme. The Elizabethan theatre had
neither curtain nor programme. The passage of time
was suggested by some action on the stage as here. The
play advances the tragedy of the King by removing the
figures of Duke Humphrey, the Cardinal, and the Earl
of Suffolk. It ends with the first triumph of the white
rose faction, under the Duke of York, at the battle of
St. Albans.

56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

It is plain that Shakespeare worked upon
the revision of this play with a big tragic
conception. The first half of the piece is very
fine. He makes the crude, muddy, silly welter
of the Contention significant and complete.
He reduces it to a simple, passionate order,
deeply impressive. The poet who worked with
him, worked in sympathy with his dramatic
intention. If this poet were Marlowe, as
some believe (and the clearness of the man's
brain seems to point to this), it is another proof
that the two great poets were friends during
the last months of Marlowe's life. It is plain
that something stopped the revision before it
was finished. The latter half of the play is
only half written. It has flesh and blood but
no life. It reads like work that has been
wrought to a pitch by two or three re- writings,
and then left without the final writing that
turns imagination into vision. It would be
interesting to know why Shakespeare left the
play in this state. Perhaps there was no
time to make it perfect before the rehearsals
began. Perhaps the murder of Marlowe

THE PLAYS 57

upset the plans of the capitaHst who was
speculating in the play. If it had been
finished in the spirit of the first two and a half
acts it would have been one of the grandest
of the historical plays.

The poetry of the two completed acts is
often noble. The long speech of York, in
Act I, coming, as it does, after a clash of
minds turbid with passion, is most noble.
It gives a terror to what follows. The calm
mind makes no mistake. The judgment of
a man without heart seems as infallible as
fate, as beautiful, and as ghastly. All happens
as he foresees. All the cruelty and bloodiness
of the latter half of the play come from that
man's beautifully clear, cool brain. He stands
detached. One little glimmer of heart in him
would alter everything. The glimmer never
comes. Humphrey is poisoned, Suffolk is
beheaded, the Cardinal dies. Cade, in that
most awful scene of the mob in power, looks
at two heads on pikes with the remark —

" Is not this braver ? Let them kiss one

58 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

another, for they loved well when they were
alive. . . .

Now part them again."

These are some of the results of the working
of a fine intellect in which —

" Faster than spring-time showers comes
thought on thought,
And not a thought but thinks on dignity."

There is a terrible scene at the Cardinal's
death-bed. The Cardinal is discovered in bed
" raving and staring as if he were madde."
He has poisoned his old enemy, the Duke
Humphrey. Now he is dying; the murder is
on his soul, and nothing has been gained by it.
The path is made clearer for his enemies
perhaps. That is the only result. Now he
is dying, the waste of mind is at an end, and
the figure of the victim is at the foot of the
bed.

*' Bring me unto my trial when you will.
Died he not in his bed ? where should he

die?
Can I make men live, whe'r they will or no ?
O, torture me no more, I will confess.

THE PLAYS 59

Alive again ? then show me where he is :
I'll give a thousand pound to look upon him.
He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them.
Comb down his hair : Look ! look ! it stands

upright.
Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul.
Give me some drink."

Some people find humour in the Simpcox
and Cade scenes. There is more sadness and
horror of heart than humour. The minds of
the two great poets were brooding together on
life. They saw man working with intellect
to bring ruin, and working without intellect
to bring something beastlier than man should
know. In its unfinished state the play is
without the exaltation of great tragedy. It
would be one of the hopeless plays, were it
not for the passionate energy of mind with
which the nobles alter life. There is little
human feeling in the play. Warwick by
Gloucester's corpse shows the sense of recti-
tude of a police inspector. At the death-bed
of the Cardinal, he makes the remark of a
fiend —

60 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" See how the pangs of death do make him
grin."

The one himian, tender figure is that of the
King, who betrays his friend, his only true
friend —

" With sad unhelpful tears; and with dimm'd
eyes
Looks after him, and cannot do him good."

This gentle, bewildered soul makes the only
human remarks in the play. In Shakespeare's
vision it is from such souls, planted, to their
own misery, among spikes and thorns, that
the flower of human goodness blossoms.

King Henry VI, Part 111,

Written. (?)

Published, in the crude original form, 1595. When
first published, the play was called " The True Tragedie
of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death of good King
Henrie the Siit, with the whole contention betweene the
two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke." This version
seems to have been by Greene, Peele, Marlowe, or by
some combination among the three. There are some
marks of Shakespeare's hand upon it; but not many.
Afterwards the piece was revised and enlarged to its
present form by some unknown hand. Shakespeare
added a few touches to this revision. It was printed
in the first folio as his original work.

THE PLAYS 61

Source of the Plot. Edward Hall's Chronicle. Raphael
Holinshed'3 Chronicle.

The Fable. The play describes the rise to power of
Edward, Duke of York, afterwards Edward IV. It carries
on th§ story of the reign of Henry VI from the time of
his deposition by Richard, Duke of York, to the time of
his murder by Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Various
other tragedies are developed by the plot. Richard,
Duke of York, is defeated and put to death. The Earl
of Warwick rises to power, makes Edward, Duke of York,
King, revolts from him, restores Henry VI, is attacked,
defeated, and killed in battle. Richard, Duke of Glou-
cester, begins to cherish ambition, and sets bloodily to
work to gratify it. Edward, Duke of York, after one
deposition, due to his own treachery, obtains the supreme
power, and rules as King.

Shakespeare had little hand in this ruthless
chronicle. The idea of the piece seems to be
this, that —

" It is war's prize to take all vantages,'*

that mercy has no place in war, that an act
of mercy in war is more fatal than defeat, and
that the parfit gentle knight, if he wish to
prosper, must greet his father after battle
with some such remark as —

" I cleft his beaver with a downright blow ;
That this is true, father, behold his blood."

h

62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

There are three scenes that rouse human
emotion : that m Act I, sc. iv, where Margaret
of Anjou taunts the captured York before
putting him to death; that in Act II, sc. v,
where King Henry wishes himself either dead,
or called to some gentler trade than kingship;
and that at the end, after the battle of
Tewkesbury, where the Prince of Wales is
murdered in his mother's presence. The
second of these, the lamentation of King
Henry, is an enlargement, done in leisure, from
a suggestion in the early version. It is a
very beautiful example of the quiet, limpid
running rhetoric that marks Shakespeare's
best moments in the days before he attained
to power.

" So minutes, hours, days, moneths and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created.
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah, what a life were this. How sweet. How

lovely.
Gives not the hawthorn-bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich-embroidered canopy
To kings that fear their subjects* treachery."

THE PLAYS 68

A Midsummer Night's Bream,

Written, 1695 (?)

Published. 1600.

Source of the Plot. The fantasy is of Shakespeare's
making. Some of it was perhaps current in popular
belief. Names and lesser incidents were suggested by
various books. He took little bits from various sources,
added them to the vision, and turned upon the whole
the light of his mind. If any author laid under contribu-
tion were to recognise his bantling, he could only cry to
it, " Bless thee. Bottom, thou art translated." Shake-
speare did never this particular kind of wrong but with
just cause.

The Fable. Theseus, Duke of Athens, is about to marry
Hippolyta. Bottom, the weaver, and his friends, plan to
play the tragedy of Pj^ramus and Thisbe before the
Duke after the wedding.

Hermia and Lysander, two lovers, whose match is
opposed, plan to escape from Athens to a state where
they can marry.

Demetrius, in love with Hermia, is loved by Helena.

Oberon, King of the fairies, planning to punish his
Queen Titania, orders Puck to procure a juice that will
make her dote upon the next thing seen by her.

Helena pursues Demetrius into the wood of the fairies.
Titania, anointed with the juice, falls in love with Bottom.
Lysander, anointed with the juice, falls in love with
Helena. The confusion caused by these enchantments
(accidentally) makes the main action of the play. When
the purpose of Oberon is satisfied, the enchantments are
removed. The cross purposes of the lovers cease. Theseus
causes Hermia to wed Lysander, and Helena to wed
Demetrius. Bottom and his company perform their
tragedy, and all ends happily.

64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

It is a strange and sad thing that the
English poets have cared Httle for England;
or, caring for England, have had little sense
of the spirit of the English. Many of our
poets have written botanical verses, and
braggart verses, many more have described
faithfully the appearance of parts of the land
at different seasons. Only two or three show
the mettle of their pasture in such a way
that he who reads them can be sure that
the indefinable soul of England has given
their words something sacred and of the
land.

Shakespeare attained to all the spiritual
powers of the English. He made a map of the
English character. We have not yet passed
the frontiers of it. It is one of his humanities
that the English country, which made him,
always meant much to him, so that, now,
wherever his works go, something of the soul
of that country goes too, to comfort exiles
over the sea. Man roams the world, wander-
ing and working; but he is not enough
removed from the beasts to escape the prick

THE PLAYS 65

in the heart that turns the tired horse home-
ward, and sets the old fox padding through
the woods to die near the earth where he was
whelped. Shakespeare's heart always turned
for quiet happiness to the country where he
lived as a boy. In this play, he turned not
to the squires and farm-folk, but to the
country itself, and to those genii of the
country, the fairies, believed in, and often
seen by country people, and reverenced by
them as the cause of mishaps. Imagination
in a work of art is a transmuting of the known
by understanding. For some reason, perhaps
home-sickness, perhaps weariness of the city-
jostle, that those who have lived the country
life cannot call life, or it may be, perhaps,
from an exultation in the bounty of the world
to give pleasure to the mind, the country
meant very much to Shakespeare in the months
during which he wrote the last of the English
plays. In writing this play, his imagination
conceived Athens as an English town, possibly
Stratford, or some other more pleasant place,
with a wood, haunted by fairies, only a league

0

66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

away, where the mind could be happy listening
to the voice of the beloved —

"More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds
appear."

There was a memory of happiness about the
wood. It was

** the wood, where often you and I
Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie,
Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet."

In this wood, where Theseus goes a-hunting,
Shakespeare, in his fantasy, allows the fairies
to vex the life of mortals. For a little while
he fancied, or tried to fancy, that those who
are made mad an(i blind by the obsessions of
passion are made so at the whim of powers
outside life, and that the accidents of life, bad
seasons, personal deformities, etc., are due to
something unhappy in a capricious immortal
world, careless of this world, but easily offended
and appeased by mortal action.

All the earth of England is consecrated
by the intense memories of the English. In

THE PLAYS 67

this play Shakespeare set himself free to tell
his love for the earth of England that had
ministered to his mind with beauty through
the years of youth. Walking in the Cotswold
country, when

" russet-pated choughs, many in sort
Rising and cawing at the gun's report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,"

gives to the passenger a sense of the enduring-
ness of the pageant upon which those seeing
eyes looked more than three centuries ago.

Romeo and Juliet.

Written. 1591-96.

Published^ in a mutilated form, 1697.

Source of the Plot. The story existed in many forms,
mostly Italian. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke's
metrical version (Rometis and Juliet) , and possibly con-
sulted the prose version in William Painter's Palace of
Pleasure. The tale had been dramatised and performed
before Arthur Broke published his poem in 1562. The
play (if it existed a generation later) may have helped
Shakespeare. It is now lost.

The Fable. The houses of Montague and Capulet are
at feud in Verona.

Romeo, of the house of Montague, falls in love with
Juliet, of the house of Capulet, She returns his love.
A friar marries them.

C 2

68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

In a street brawl, which Romeo does his best to stop,
Mercutio, Romeo's friend, is killed by Tybalt, Juliet*s
cousin. Carried away by passion, Romeo kills Tybalt.
He is banished from Verona.

The Capulets plan to marry Juliet to the Count Paris.

Juliet, in great distress, consults the Friar who married
her to Romeo. He gives her a potion to create an ap-
parent death in her, to the end that she may be buried
in the family vault, taken thence and restored to life
by himself, and then conveyed to Romeo. He writes to
Romeo, telling him of the plan; but the letter miscarries.
Juliet takes the potion, and is laid in the tomb as dead.

The Count Paris comes by night to the tomb, to mourn
her there. Romeo, who has heard only that his love is
dead, also comes to the tomb. The two lovers fight,
and Romeo kills Paris. He then takes poison and dies
at Juliet's side.

The Friar enters to restore Juliet to life. Juliet awakens
to find her lover dead. The Friar, being alarmed, leaves
the tomb. Juliet stabs herself with Romeo's dagger
and dies.

The feud of the Montagues and Capulets is brought to
an end. The leaders of the two houses are reconciled
over the bodies of the lovers.

This play is one of the early plays, written,
perhaps, before Shakespeare was thirty years
old. It was much revised during the next
few years; but a good deal of the early work
remains. Much of the early work is in rhymed
couplets. Much is in picked prose full of
quibbles and mistakings of the word. Another

THE PLAYS 69

sign of early work is the mention of the dark
lady, the Rosaline of the Comedy of Errors,
here called by the same name, and described
in similar terms : viz. a high forehead, a hard
heart, a white face, big black eyes and red lips.
Perhaps she appeared as one of the characters
in the early drafts of the play. In the play
as we have it she is only talked of as a love
of Romeo's who is easily thrown aside when
Juliet enters.

The play differs slightly from the other
plays, which deal, as we have said, with the
treacheries caused by obsessions. The subject
of this play is not so much the treachery as
the obsession that causes it. The obsession
is the blind and raging one of sudden, gratified
youthful love. That storm in the blood has
never been so finely described. It takes
sudden hold upon two young passionate
natures, who have hardly met each other. It
drives out instantly from Romeo a sentimental
love that had made him mopish and wan. It
brings to an end in two hearts, filial affection
and that perhaps stronger thing, attachment

70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

to family. It makes the charming young man
a frantic madman, careless of everything but
his love. It makes the sweet-natured girl a
deceitful, scheming liar, less frantic, but not
less devoted than her lover. It results almost
at once in five violent deaths, and a legacy of
broken-heartedness not easily told. The only
apparent good of the disease is that it destroys
its victims swiftly. It may also be said of it
that it teaches the old that there is something
in life, some power not dreamed of in their
philosophy.

Shakespeare saw the working of the fever.
He also saw behind it the working of fate to
avenge an obsession that had blinded the eyes
of men too long. The feud of the two houses
had long vexed Verona. The blood of those
killed in the feud was crying out for the folly
to stop, so that life might be lived. What
business had sparks like Mercutio, and rebels
like Tybalt, with Death ? Both are life's
bright fire : they ought to live. Fate seemed
to plot to end the folly by letting Romeo fall
in love with Juliet. Let the two houses be

THE PLAYS 71

united by marriage, as at the end of Richard
III, But love is a storm, sudden love a
madness, and the fire of youth a disturber of
the balances. Hate and hot blood put an
end to all chance of marriage. There is
nothing left but the desperate way, which is
yet the wise way, recommended by the one
wise man in the cast. With a little patience,
this way would lead the couple to happiness.
Impatience, the fever in the blood that began
these coils, makes the way lead them to death.
Accident, or rather the possession by others
of that prudence wanting in himself, keeps
Romeo from the knowledge of the friar's
plans. A too hasty servant tells him that
Juliet is dead. He too hastily believes the
news. He takes horse at once in a state of
frenzy, hardly heeding what his man says.
He comes to the tomb in Verona, and finds
there a lover as desperate as himself. They
fight there, madly. The less mad of the two is
killed, the more frantic (Romeo) kills himself.
The friar, coming to this death-scene, comes
a moment too late. Juliet wakes from her

72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

trance a moment too late. Theirs are the
only delays in this drama of fever, in which
everybody hurries so that he stumbles.
Their delays are atoned for an instant later,
his, by his too great haste to be gone, she by
her thirst for death. The men of the watch
come too late to save her. The parents learn
too late that they have been blind. They
have to clasp hands over dead bodies, that
have missed of life through their hurry to
seize it.

The play tells the story of a feud greater
than that of the Verona houses. There
is always feud where there is not under-
standing. There is eternal feud between
those two camps of misunderstanding, age
and youth. This play, written by a young
man, shows the feud from the point of view of
youth. The play of King Lear shows it from
the point of view of age. This play of youth
is as lovely and as feverish as love itself.
Youth is bright and beautiful, like the
animals. Age is too tired to care for bright-
ness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright,

THE PLAYS 73

beautiful creatures dash themselves to pieces
against the bars of age's forging, against law,
custom, duty, and those inventions of cold
blood which youth thinks cold and age knows
to be wise.

Man cannot quote a minute from some
hour of passion when the moon shone and
many nightingales were singing. He can hold
out some flower that blossomed then, saying,
" this scent will tell you." The beauty of
this play is of that kind. The lines —

** Come, civil night.
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black" —

and the most exquisite, unmatchable lines —

" Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy

breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty :
Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks.
And death's pale flag is not advanced

there "—

show with what a tender beauty the great mind
feels when touched

74 WILLIAIVI SHAKESPEARE

The Nurse gives an animal comedy to some
of the scenes. She is a tragical figure. She
is the person to whom Juliet has to turn for
help at dangerous moments. There are few
things sadder than the sight of the fine soul
turning to the vulgar soul in moments of
need. One of the few things sadder is the
sight of wisdom failing to stop tragedy, as it
fails here, through hotness of the blood and
unhappy chance. Some have felt that the
spark, Mercutio, is drawn from Shakespeare's
self. Every character in the play is drawn
from Shakespeare's self. Shakespeare found
Goneril and Juliet in his mind, just as he
found Mercutio and Friar Laurence. If he
may be identified with any of his characters,
it must be with those whose wisdom is like
the many-coloured wisdom that gives the
plays their unity. He is in calm, wise, gentle
people who speak largely, from a vision
detached from the world, as Friar Laurence
speaks —

** For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;

THE PLAYS 75

Nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that

fair use.
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometimes by action dignified."

King John,

Written. (?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. Shakespeare's tragedy is founded
on a play called The Troublesome Raigne of King John
(author not known), which was printed (after stage per-
formance) in 1691. Some people think that Shakespeare
wrote The Troublesome Raigne. There are some glimmer-
ings of his mind here and there in it; but not many.
Whether he wrote it or not he certainly made free use of
it in writing King John. He took from it with a bold
hand, whenever he wished to spare himself mechanical
labour. His other sources were the historians, Raphael
Holinshed, Edward Hall, and Fabian.

The Fable. King John has made himself King of
England. Prince Arthur, who claims to be the rightful
king (he is the son of King John's elder brother), causes
the French King to support his claim. King John
declares war against the French King.

After some fighting in France the two kings patch up
a peace. Arthur's claim is set aside. King John's niece
is to marry the French King's son.

At this point the Pope's legate causes the French
King to break off the negotiations. The war begins
again. King John captures Prince Arthur, and gives
order that secretly he be put to death. England is in

76 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

a disturbed condition. The French resolve to attempt
the conquest of England.

The report that Arthur has been murdered by the King's
order seta England in turmoil. The French land in Kent.
The lorda find Arthur's dead body outside Northampton
castle. They are convinced that King John has caused
him to be murdered.

Kmg John finds that he cannot fight longer. He
makes his submission to the Pope's legate, trusting that
the legate may make the French King come to terms.
Th© French King cannot be moved to peace. John
summons up his forces, and gives successful battle to him.
The English lords, who have allied themselves to the
French King, break off and make their submission to
King John. Without their help, the army is too weak.
The French invasion comes to nothing. The Pope's
legate makes peace. King John dies of poison given to
him by a monk.

Like the best Shakespearean tragedies,
King John is an intellectual form in which a
number of people with obsessions illustrate
the idea of treachery. The illustrations are
very various. Perhaps the most interesting
of them are those subtle ones that illustrate
treachery to type, or want of conformity to a
standard imagined or established.

In the historical plays, Shakespeare's mind
broods on the idea that our tragical kings
failed because they did not conform to a type

THE PLAYS 77

lower than themselves. Henry V conforms to
type. He has the quahties that impress the
bourgeoisie. He is a success. Henry VI
does not conform to type. He has the
qualities of the Christian mystic. He is
stabbed in the Tower. Edward IV conforms
to type. He has the quahties that impress
the rabble. He is a success. Richard II
does not conform to type. He is a man of
ideas. He is done to death at Pomfret. King
John does not conform to type. His intellect
is bigger than his capacity for affairs. He is
poisoned by a monk at Swinstead.

King John presents that most subtle of all
the images of treachery, a man who cannot
conform to the standard of his own ideas.
He fails as a king because his intellect
prompts him to attempt what is really beyond
the powers of his nature to perform. By his
side, with an irony that is seldom praised,
Shakespeare places the figure of the Bastard,
the man who ought to have been king, the
man fitted by nature to rule the English, the
man without intellect but with a rough

78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

capacity, the man whom we meet again, as a
successful king, in the play of Henry V.

King John is placed throughout the play
in treacherous relations with life. He is a
traitor to his brother's son, to his own ideas,
to the English idea, and to his oath of king-
ship. He has a bigger intellect than any one
about him. His brain is full of gusts and
flaws that blow him beyond his age, and then
let him sink below it. Persistence in any one
course of treachery would give him the great-
ness of all well-defined things. He remains
a chaos shooting out occasional fire.

The play opens with a scene that displays
some of the human results of treachery.
John's mother, Elinor, has been treacherous
to one of her sons. John has usurped his
brother's right, and, in following his own
counsel, has been treacherous to his mother.
These acts of treachery have betrayed England
into a bloody and unjust war. The picture
is turned suddenly. Another of the results
of human treachery appears in the person of
the Bastard, whose mother confesses that she

THE PLAYS 79

was seduced by the " long and vehement
suit " of Coeur de Lion. The Bastard's half-
brother, another domestic traitor, does not
scruple to accuse his mother of adultery in
the' hope that, by doing so, he may obtain the
Bastaid's heritage.

The same breaking of faith for advantage
gives points to the second act, where the
French and English Kings turn from their
pledged intention to effect a base alliance.
They arrange to marry the Dauphin to Elinor's
niece, Blanch of Castile. In the third act,
before the fury of the constant has died down
upon this treachery, the French King adds
another falseness. He breaks away from the
newly-made alliance at the bidding of the
Pope's legate. The newly-married Dauphin
treacherously breaks with his wife's party.
In the welter of war that follows, the constant,
human and beautiful figures come to heart-
break and death. The common people of
England begin to betray their genius for
obedience by preparing to rise against the
man in power.

80 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The fourth act begins with the famous scene
in which Hubert fails to blind Prince Arthur.
Even in the act of mercy he is treacherou5^
He breaks faith with King John, to whom he
has vowed to kill the Prince. Later in the
act, King John, thinking that the murder
has been done, breaks faith with Hubert, by-
driving him from his presence. In the last act,
the English nobles, who have been treacher-
ous to John, betray their new master, the
French King. King John is a broken man,
unable to make head against misfortune. He
betrays his great kingly idea, that the Pope
shall not rule here, by begging the Legate to
make peace. At this point death sets a term
to treachery. A monk treacherously poisons
John at a moment when his affairs look
brighter. The play ends with the Bastard's
well-known brag about England —

" Naught shall make us rue
If England to itself do rest but true."

This thought is one among many thoughts
taken by Shakespeare from the play of The

THE PLAYS 81

Troublesome Baigne, and taken by the author
of that play direct from Holinshed's Chronicles,

Comedy deals with character and accident;
tragedy with passionate moods of the soul in
conflict with fate. In this play, as in nearly
all poetical plays, the characters that are
most minutely articulated are those commoner,
more earthy characters, perceived by the daily
mind, not uplifted, by brooding, into the rare
state of passionate intellectual vision. These
characters are triumphant creations; but
they come from the commoner qualities in
Shakespeare's mind. He did them easily, with
his daily nature. What he did on his knees,
with contest and bloody sweat, are his great
things. The great scheme of the play is the
great achievement, not the buxom boor who
flouts the Duke of Austria, and takes the
national view of his mother's dishonour.

Shakespeare, like other sensitive, intelligent
men, saw that our distinctive products, the
characters that we set most store by, are very
strange. That beautiful kindness, high cour-
age, and devoted service should go so often

82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

with real animal boorishness and the incapa-
city to see more than one thing at a time
(mistaken for stupidity by stupid people)
puzzled him, as it puzzles the un-English mind
to-day. A reader feels that in the figure of
the Bastard he set down what he found most
significant in the common English character.
With the exceptions of Sir Toby Belch and
Justice Shallow, the Bastard is the most
English figure in the plays. He is the English-
man neither at his best nor at his worst,
but at his commonest. The Englishman was
never so seen before, nor since. An entirely
honest, robust, hearty person, contemptuous
of the weak, glad to be a king's bastard,
making friends with women (his own mother
one of them) with a trusty, good-humoured
frankness, fond of fighting, extremely able
when told what to do, fond of plain measures
— the plainer the better, an honest servant,
easily impressed by intellect when found in
high place on his own side, but utterly incapable
of perceiving intellect in a foreigner, fond of
those sorts of humour which generally lead

THE PLAYS 83

to blows, extremely just, very kind when not
fighting, fond of the words " fair play," and
nobly and exquisitely moved to deep, true
poetical feeling by a cruel act done to some-
thing helpless and little. The completeness of
the portrait is best seen in the suggestion of
the man's wisdom in affairs. The Bastard is
trying to find out whether Hubert killed
Arthur, whose little body lies close beside
them. He says that he suspects Hubert
" very grievously." Hubert protests. The
Bastard tests the protest with one sentence :
" Go bear him in thine arms." He utters
the commonplace lines —

" I am amaz'd, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of the
world "—

while he watches Hubert's face. Hubert
stands the test (the emotional test that none
but an Englishman would apply), he picks up
the body. Instantly the Bastard is touched
to a tenderness that lifts Hubert to a spiritual
comradeship with him —

84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" How easy dost thou take all England up."

This tragedy of the death of a child causes
nearly all that is nobly poetical in the play.

All the passionately-felt scenes are about
Arthur or his mother. Some have thought
that Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596,
shortly after the death of his little son Hamnet,
aged eleven. The supposition accuses Shake-
speare of a want of heart, of a want of imagina-
tion, or of both wants together. He wrote like
every other writer, from his sense of what was
fitting in an imagined situation. It was no more
necessary for him to delay the writing of Prince
Arthur till his son had died than it was for
Dickens to wait till he had killed a real Little
Dorrit by slow poison.

There is a great change in the manner of
the poetical passages. The poetry of the
Henry VI plays is mostly in bright, sweetly
running groups of rhetorical lines. In King
John it is either built up elaborately into an
effect of harmony several lines long, or it is
put into a single line or couplet.

THE PLAYS 85

The rhetoric is compressed —

" That shakes the rotten carcase of old Death,"

and

" O death, made proud with pure and princely
beauty,"

and

" Old Time the clock-setter, that bald sexton
Time."

The finest poetry is intensely compressed —

" I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,
For grief is proud,"

and

" I have heard you say,
That we shall see and know our friends in

heaven.
If that be true, I shall see my boy again,"

and

" When I shall meet him in the court of
heaven
I shall not know him."

The characters in this truly noble play daunt
the reader with a sense of their creator's

86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

power. It is difficult to know intimately any
human soul, even with love as a lamp. Shake-
speare's mind goes nobly into these souls,
bearing his great light. It is very wonderful
that the mind who saw man clearest should
see him with such exaltation.

King Richard II.

Written. (?)

Published. 1597.

Source of the Plot. The lives of King Richard II and
King Henry IV in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles.

The Fable. I. The Duke of Gloucester, uncle of King
Richard, has died under suspicious circumstances at
Calais, after an accusation of treachery. Henry Boling-
broke, Duke of Hereford, the King's cousin, accuses
Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, of treachery to the
King and of the murder of the Duke of Gloucester. The
King appoints a day on which the two disputants may
try their cause by combat. On their arrival at the
lists he banishes them both, Bolingbroke for six years,
Mowbray for ever. After they have gone to fulfil their
sentence, the King plans to subdue the rebels in Ireland.
He prays that the death of his uncle, John of Gaunt,
the wisest man about him, may occur, so that he may
take his money to equip soldiers.

II. Gaunt dies. Richard seizes his estate (lawfully
the property of Bolingbroke) and proceeds upon his Irish
war, Bolingbroke lands from exile to claim his father's
estate and title. Richard's Welsh forces grow weary
of waiting for their king. They disband themselves.

THE PLAYS 87

III. Bolingbroke's party prospers. Richard is taken
and deposed.

IV. Bolingbroke makes himself king.

V. Richard, after sorrowing alone, and inspiring a
hopeless attempt at restoration, is killed, desperately
fighting, at Pomfret.

Treachery in some form is at the root of all
Shakespearean tragedy. In this play it takes
many forms, among which two are principal,
the treachery of a king to his duty as a king,
and the treachery of a subject to his duty as
a subject. As usual in Shakespearean tragedy,
the play is filled full by the abundant mind of
the author with illustrations of his idea. The
apricocks at Langley are like King Richard,
the sprays of the trees like Bolingbroke, the
weeds like the King's friends. Everybody in
the play (even the horse in the last act) is in
passionate relation to the central idea.

King Richard is of a type very interesting
to Shakespeare. He is wilful, complex, pas-
sionate, with a beauty almost childish and a
love of pleasure that makes him greedy of
all gay, light, glittering things. He loves the
music that does not trouble with passion

88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

and the thought not touched with the world.
He loves that kind of false, delicate beauty
which is made in societies where life is too
easy. There is much that is beautiful in
him. He has all the charm of those whom
the world calls the worthless. His love is a
woman, as beautiful and unreal as himself.
He fails because, like other rare things, he
is not common. The world cares little for the
rare and the interesting. The world calls for
the rough and common virtue that guides
a plough in a furrow, and sergeantly chaffs by
the camp fires. The soul that suffers more
than other souls is little regarded here. The
tragedy of the sensitive soul, always acute,
becomes terrible when that soul is made king
here by one of the accidents of life. As a
king, Richard neglects his duties with that
kind of wilfulness which the world never fails
to punish. The wilfulness takes the form of
a shutting of the eyes to all that is truly
kingly. He rebukes devotion to duty by
banishing Bolingbroke, who tries to rid him
of a traitor. He rebukes old age and wisdom

THE PLAYS 89

in the truly great person of old John of Gaunt.
Worst, and most unkingly of all, he is incapable
of seeing and rewarding the large generosity
of mind that makes sacrifices for an idea.
Richard, who likes beautiful things, cannot
see the beauty of old, rough, dying Gaunt,
who condemns his own son to exile rather than
betray his idea of justice. Bolingbroke, who
cares intensely for nothing but justice (and
could not give even that caring a name, il
questioned), is deeply and nobly generous to
York, who would condenm his own son, and
to the Bishop of Carlisle, who would die rather
than not speak his mind. Men who sacrifice
themselves are a king's only props. Richard
allies himself with men who prefer to sacrifice
the country.

It is a proof of the greatness of Shake-
speare's vision, that Richard is presented to
us both as the traitor and the betrayed. He
is the anointed king false to his coronation
oaths; he is the anointed king deposed by
traitors. He is not fitted for kingship, but
life has made him a king. Life, quite as much

90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

as temperament, is to blame for his tragedy.
When Hfe and temperament have thrust him
from kingship, this wilful, passionate man,
so greedy and heady in his hurry to be unjust,
is unlike the monster that office made him.
He is no monster then, but a man, not even
a man like ourselves, but a man of singular
delicacy of mind, sensitive, strangely winning,
who wrings our hearts with pity by his sense
of his tragedy —

"And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.'*

Part of his tragedy is due to his being too
late. Had he landed from Ireland one day
earlier he would have found a force of Welsh-
men ready to fight for him. At the end of the
play he discovers, too late, that he is weary
of patience. He strikes out like a man, when
he has no longer a friend to strike with him.
He is killed by a man who finds, too late, that
the murder was not Bolingbroke's intention.

THE PLAYS 01

As in all the tragedies, there is much noble
poetry. John of Gaunt's speech about Eng-
land is often quoted. Shakespeare's mind
is our triumph, not a dozen lines of rhetoric.
Less' well known are the couplets —

** My inch of taper will be burnt and done,
And blindfold death not let me see my son."

and

" . . . let him not come there,
To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere."

Those scenes in the last acts which display
the mind of the deposed king are all exquisite,
though their beauty is not obvious to the many.
There is a kind of intensity of the soul, so
intense that it is obscure to the many till it
is interpreted. Writers of plays know well
how tamely words intensely felt may read.
They know, too, how like fire upon many souls
those words will be when the voice and
the action give them their interpretation.
Richard II, like other plays of spiritual
tragedy, needs interpretation. When he wrote
it, Shakespeare had not wholly the power that

92 WILLIAIVI SHAKESPEARE

afterwards he achieved, of himself interpreting
his vision by many-coloured images. It is
not one of the beloved plays.

Bolingbroke has been praised as a manly
Englishman, who is not " weak " like Richard,
but " strong " and a man of deeds. In Act
IV he shows his English kindness of mind
and love of justice by a temperate wisdom in
the trying of a cause and by saying that he
will call back from exile his old enemy Norfolk.
The Bishop of Carlisle tells him that that
cannot be. Norfolk having worn himself out
in the wars in Palestine has retired himself to
Italy, and there, at Venice, given

" His body to that pleasant country's earth.
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long."

It is instructive to note how Bolmgbroke
takes the news —

Bol. Why, bishop, is Norfolk dead ?
Carl. As surely as I live, my lord.
Bol. Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul
to the bosom

4

THE PLAYS 98

Of good old Abraham. Lords appellants.
Your differences, etc.

The feeling that the poet's mind saw the clash
as the clash between the common and the un-
common man is strengthened by the Queen's
speech to Richard as he is led to prison —

"thou most beauteous inn,
Why should hard-favour' d grief be lodged

in thee,
When triumph is become an alehouse guest ? "

King Richard III,

. Written. 1594 (?) ^ ^^^ V

Published. 1597.

Source of the Plot. The play is founded on the lives of
Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III, as given (on
the authorities of Edward Hall and Sir Thomas More)
in Holinshed's Chronicles. Shakespeare may have seen a
worthless play {The True Tragedy of Richard III) which
was published in 1594, by an unknown author.

The Fable. Act I. The play begins in the last days of
King Edward IV, when the Icing's two brothers, Clarence
and Gloucester, are debating who shall succeed to the
throne when the King dies. In the first scene Clarence
is led to the Tower under suspicion of plotting to succeed.
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the cause of the com-
mittal, pretends to grieve for him, but hastens to compass
his death. In the next scene Richard woos the Lady
Anne (widow of the dead son of Henry VI, and daughter

94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of the Earl of Warwick), who is likely to be useful to him
for the moment as an ally (she being of the house of
Lancaster). The third scene displays the passionate
quarrelling of the CJourt factions. The Queen, her brothers
and Richard's party, are cursed by Margaret of Anjou.
In the fourth scene Clarence is murdered in the Tower.

Act II. King Edward IV dies, having patched up a
seeming truce between the factions. His son is to
succeed him. Before this can happen, Richard strikes
down the leaders of the Queen's party, and lays a deep
scheme to secure the crown for himself.

Act III. There is a deeply tragical scene in which the
unsuspecting Hastings, who is faithful to Edward's
memory, is hurried out of life. Afterwards, through the
management of Buckingham, Richard is proclaimed King.

Act IV. Richard makes himself sure by casting off
Buckingham and causing the murder of Edward's sons
in the Tower. He plots to marry Edward's daughter.
But by this time the land is in upheaval against him.
Buckingham and Richmond lead forces against him.

Act V. Buckingham is taken and put to death; but
Richmond's forces gather head. Richard leads his army
to oppose them. The armies front each other at Bos-
worth Field near Leicester. The night before the battle
the ghosts of the many slain during the progress of the
Wars of the Roses menace Richard and promise victory
to Richmond. In the battle that follows Richard is
slain. Richmond takes oath to end the Wars of the
Roses by marrying Edward's daughter, so that the two
royal houses may at last be joined.

Richard III is the last of the great historical

play about the Wars of the Roses. The

subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare's

r

THE PLAYS 96

mind for many months. He had traced
them from their beginning in the long ago
to their end among the dead at Bosworth.
All that bloodiness of misery was due to a
forgotten marriage and the chance that
Edward III had seven sons, the eldest of
whom died before his father. In this great
tragic vision Shakespeare saw the wheel come
full circle, with that giving of justice which
life renders at last, though it may be to the
dead, or the mad, or the broken.

Largely, this play deals with the coming
of that justice. Much that is most wonderful
in the play comes from the faith that blood
cruelly or unjustly spilt cries from the ground,
and that the human soul, wrought to an
ecstasy, has power, as the blood has power,
to draw God's hand upon the guilty. But
Shakespeare's mind was also occupied with
the knowledge that self-confident intellect is
terrible and tragical. One of the truths of the
play is the very sad one that being certain is
in itself a kind of sin, sure to be avenged by
life. The obsession of self-confidence betrays

96 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

person after person, to misery or death. All
the heads that lift themselves proudly go
bloody to the dust or bow in anguish.
Only one man moves by other light than his
own. He is the only one who achieves quiet
triumph. Nothing in the play is more impres-
sive than the speech in which the intellect that
has ended the bloodshed prays humbly that
God may bless and help England with peace.
It was said of Napoleon that he was as
great as a man can be without virtue. The
intellect of Richard III is like that of Napoleon.
It is restless, swift, and sure of its power. It
is sure, too, that the world stays as it is from
something stupid in the milky human feelings.
Richard is a " bloody dog " let loose in a sheep-
fold. It is a part of the tragedy that he is
nobler than the sheep that he destroys. His
is the one great intellect in the play. Intellect
is always rare. In kings it is very rare.
When a great intellect is made bitter by being
cased in deformity one has the tragedy of
intellect turned upon itself. Had Richard
been born without his deformed shoulder he

THE PLAYS 97

could have known human sympathy, and
human intercourse. Without human inter-
course he goes gloating, clutching himself,
biting his lip, muttering at the twist in his
shadow. This warped, starved mind knows
himself stronger than the minds near him.
It is tragical to be deformed, it is tragical
to have an intellect too great for people to
understand. But the deformed and bitter
intellect would suffer tragedy indeed if he,
the one constant Yorkist, were to be ruled by
a gentle, half-witted Lancastrian saint like
Henry VI, or by Clarence the perjurer, or
by the upstart Woodville, a commoner made
noble because his sister took the King's fancy,
or by the Queen herself, the housewife who
caused great Warwick's death, or by one of
her sons, who are pert to the man who had
spilt his blood to make their father king.
The snarling intellect bites rather than suffer
that. It is very terrible, but how if he had
not bitten ? The vision of all this bloodiness
is less terrible than that vision of the sheep
triumphing, so dear to us moderns —

98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" Strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority.
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill."

As in all Shakespeare's greater plays, a justice
brings evil upon the vow breaker. Curses
called down in the solemn moment come home
to roost when the solemnity is forgotten or
thrust aside. Clarence, who broke his oath
to the House of Lancaster, is done to death
by his brother. Anne, cursing the killer of
her husband, curses the woman who shall
marry him, is, herself, that woman, and dies
wretchedly. Grey, Rivers, Dorset, Bucking-
ham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call
down curses on him that breaks them, them-
selves break them, and die wretchedly.
Richard, too wise to make oaths, too strong
to curse, dies, as his mother foretells, " by
God's just ordinance," when the measure of
the blood of his victims becomes too great,
and when his victims' curses, after wandering
from heart to heart, get them into human
bodies and walk the world, executing justice.
All through the play there are warnings

THE PLAYS 99

against human certainty. Of all the danger-
■ ous pronouncements of man that to the
fountain, "Fountain, of thy water I will
never drink," is one of the most dangerous.
There are terrible examples of certainty
betrayed. Richard is certain as only fine
intellect can be that he will triumph. It
is a part of his tragedy that it is not intellect
that triumphs in this world, but a stupid,
though a righteous something, incapable of
understanding intellect. Rivers and Grey
are certain that Richard is friendly to theni.
They are hurried to Pomfret and put to death,
Hastings " Knows his state secure," and
" goes triumphant." He is rushed out of
life at a moment's notice, one hour a lord,
giving his opinion at a council, the next a
corpse in its grave. Buckingham thinks
himself secure. A moment's nicety of con-
science sends him flying to death. The little
Princes lay down to sleep —

" girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms.

D 2

100 WILLIAIVI SHAKESPEARE

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk
Which in their summer beauty kissed each
other"—

when their waking time came they were
stamped down under the stones at the stair
foot.

The poetry of this play is that of great and
high spiritual invention. There is much that
stays in the mind as exquisitely said and
beautifully felt. But the wonder of the
work is in the greatness of the conception.
That is truly great, both as poetry and as
drama. The big and burning imaginings do
not please, they haunt.

The dream of Clarence, the wooing of the
Lady Anne, the scene in Baynard's Castle,
and the ghost scene in the tents at Bosworth,
have been praised and re-praised. They are
in Shakespeare's normal mood, neither greater
nor less than twenty other scenes in the mature
plays. The really grand scene of the calling
down of the curses (Act I, sc. iii), when
the man's mind, after brooding on this
event for months, sees it all, for a glowing

THE PLAYS 101

hour, as the just God sees it, is the wonderful
achievement. Think of this scene, and think
of the scenes played nightly now in the
English theatres, and ask whether all is well
with the nation's soul.

There are many superb Shakespearean
openings. No poet in history opens a play
with a more magnificent certainty. The open-
ing of this play —

** Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York,"

is one of the most splendid of all. There is
no need to pick out fragments from the rest
of the play, but the march of the line —

" Your fire-new stamp of honour is scarce
current " —

the lines —

*' then came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood; and he squeaked out aloud,
' Clarence is come ; false, fleeting, perjured

Clarence,
That stabbed me in the field by Tewkes-
bury ' "—

102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the exquisitely tender lines —

" And there the little souls of Edward's
children
Whisper the spirits " —

and the orders of Richard in the last act,
for white Surrey to be saddled, ink and paper
to be brought, and a bowl of wine to be
filled, show that the poet's great confident
manner was formed, on all the four sides of
its perfection. The years only brought it to a
deeper glow.

The Merchant of Venice,

Written. (?)

Published. 1600.

Source of the Plot. The ancient story of the merciless
Jew is told in the Gesta Romajwrum, and re-told, with
delicate grace, by Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-
century Italian writer, in his II Pecorone (the simpleton),
a collection of novels, or, as we should call them, short
stories. The story of the three caskets is also told in the
Qesia Romunorum. Other incidents in the play are taken
from other sources, possibly from other plays. It is
thought by some that the character of Shylock was sug-
gested by the case of the Spanish Jew, Lopez, who was
hanged, perhaps unjustly, for plotting to poison Queen
Elizabeth, in 1594. The main source of the dramatic
fable is Fiorentino' s story.

The Fable. Portia, the lady of Belmont, has three
caskets, one of gold, one of silver, one of lead. She is

THE PLAYS ^ 103

vowed to marry the man who, on viewing the caskets,
guesses which of them contains her portrait. Various
attempting suitors fail to guess rightly.

Bassanio, eager to try the hazard, obtains money from
his friend Antonio, to equip him. Antonio borrows
the money from the Jew, Shylock, on condition that,
should he fail to repay the debt by a fixed day, a pound
of his flesh shall be forfeit to the Jew.

Bassanio guesses rightly and weds Portia.

Antonio fails to repay the debt, and is lodged in prison.
Bassanio hears of his friend's disaster. Portia bids him
fly to Antonio with money enough to pay the debt three-
fold. Shylock refuses the offer. He clamours for his
pound of flesh. The case comes to trial.

At the hearing of the case in the Duke's court, Portia,
disguised as a judge, gives sentence, that Shylock may
have his pound of flesh; but that if he shed Christian
blood in the taking of it, his life will be forfeit. Shylock
is confounded further by a charge of endangering a Chris-
tian's life. He is fined and humbled. Portia, still in
disguise, asks as her fee a ring that she has given to
Bassanio. Bassanio, hesitating, at last gives the ring,
and returns home without it. Portia's pretended indigna-
tion at the loss of the ring ends the last act with comedy.

The play resolves itself into a simple form.
It illustrates the clash between the emotional
and the intellectual characters, the man of
heart and the man of brain. The man of
heart, Antonio, is obsessed by a tenderness
for his friend. The man of brain is obsessed
by a lust to uphold intellect in a thoughtless

104 WILLIMI SHAKESPEARE

world that makes intellect bitter in every
age. Shylock is a man of intellect, born into
a despised race. It is his tragedy that the
generous Gentiles about him can be generous
to everything except to intellect and Jewish
blood. Intellect and Jewish blood are too
proud to attempt to understand the Gentiles
who cannot understand.

Shylock is a proud man. The Gentiles,
who are neither proud nor intellectual, spit
upon him and flout him. One of them
beguiles his daughter and teaches her to rob
him. Another of them signs a mad bond to
help an extravagant friend to live in idleness.
Bitter, lonely brooding upon these things
strengthen the Jew's obsession, till the words,
" I can cut out the heart of my enemy,"
become the message of his entire nature. Half
the evils in life come from the partial vision
of people in states of obsession Shylock's
obsession grows till he is in the Duke's court,
whetting his knife upon his shoe, before what
Pistol calls " incision."

Portia has been much praised during two

THE PLAYS 105

centuries of criticism. She is one of the
smiHng things created in the large and gentle
mood that moved Shakespeare to comedy.
The scene in the fifth act, where the two
women, coming home from Venice by night,
see the candle burning in the hall, as they
draw near, is full of a naturalness that makes
beauty quick in the heart. Shakespeare
enjoyed the writing of this play. The
construction of the last two acts shows that
his great happy mind was at its happiest in
the saving of these creatures of the sun from
something real.

The Taming of the Shrew,

Written. (?)

Published. 1623.

Source of the Plot. The induction and that part of the
play which treats of Petruchio and Katharina is based
upon a play, published in 1594, under the title The Taming
of A Shrew, author not known. The other part is based
on The Supposes of George Gascoigne, a comedy adapted
from Ariosto's / Supposiii.

The Fable. Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by
a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes liim to be put
to bed and treated, on waking, as a nobleman newly
cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the perform-
ance of this play before him.

The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio

106 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

woos and tames the shrew Katharma; in the other,
Katharina's sister Bianca is wooed by lovers in disguise.
The two plots have little connection with each other.
That which relates to Petmchio and Katharina is certainly
by Shakespeare. The other seems to be by a dull man
who did not know his craft as a dramatist.

In the Induction, and in the speech of
Biondello (in Act III) Shakespeare enters a
mood of memory of the country. In the
song at the end of Love*8 Labour^s Lost he
showed a matchless sense of country hfe.
That sense, at once robust and sweet, now
gives life to a few scenes in the plays. These
scenes are mostly in prose; but they have the
Tightness of poetry. In writing them, he
wrought with his daily nature, from some-
thing intimately known, or inbred in him,
during childhood. Man can only write hap-
pily from a perfect understanding. All men
can describe with point and colour what they
knew as children. These country scenes in
Shakespeare are happier than anything else
in the plays because they come, not from
anything read or heard, but from the large,
genial nature made by years of life among

THE PLAYS 107

the farms and sheep-walks at the western
end of the Cotswolds.

Sly. Y' are a baggage : the Slys are no
rogues; look in the chronicles; we came in
with Richard Conqueror. Therefore paucas
paUabris ; let the world slide : Sessa !

Hostess. You will not pay for the glasses
you have burst ?

Sly. No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy :
go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.

In the third act, Biondello's description of
the appearance of Petruchio*s horse has the
abundance of the great mind.

"... possessed with the glanders and like
to mose in the chine; troubled with the
lampass, infected with the fashions, full of
wind-galls, sped with spavins, rayed with
the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark
spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the
bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-
shotten; near legged before and with a half-
cheeked bit and a headstall of sheep's
leather."

It is something no longer possible in a city
theatre. Neither the dramatist nor the audi-

108 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

ence of to-day knows a horse as the Eliza-
bethan had to know him. The speech sets
one wondering at the art of the unknown
Ehzabethan actor who first spoke hurriedly
this speech of strange words full of sibilants.
Shakespeare's share in the play (the scenes
in which the shrew and her tamer appear)
is farce with ironic philosophical intention.
He indicates the tragedy that occurs when
a manly spirit is born into a woman's body.
Katharina is vexed and plagued by forced
submission to a father who cannot see her
merit, and by jealousy of a gentle, useless
sister. She, who is entirely honest, sees the
brainless Bianca, whom no amount of school-
ing will make even passably honest, pre-
ferred before her. Lastly, she is humbled
into the state of submissive wifely falsehood
by a boor w^ho cares only for his own will,
her flesh, and her money. In a page and a
half of melancholy claptrap broken Katharina
endeavours to persuade us that

** Such duty as the subject owes the prince.
Even such a woman oweth to her husband."

THE PLAYS 109

Perhaps it is the way of the world. Women
betray womanhood as much by mildness as
by wiles. Meanwhile, what duty does a man
owe to a fine, free, fearless spirit dragged
down to his by commercial bargain with a
father who is also a fool ?

King Henry IV, Fart /.

Written. (?)

Published. 1598.

Source of the Plot. Most of the comic scenes are the
fruit of Shakespeare's invention. A very popular play.
The Famous Victories of Henry V, by an unknown hand,
gave him the suggestion for an effective comic scene.
In the historical scenes he follows closely the Chronicles
of Holinshed.

The Fahle. The play treats of the rising of Henry
Hotspur, Lord Percy, against Henry IV of England,
and of the turning of the mind of Henry, Prince of Wales,
from low things to things more worthy his birth. It
ends with the killing of Hotspur, by the Prince of Wales,
on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. Hotspur is an un-
common man, whose \mcommonness is unsupported d^
his father at a critical moment. Henry, Prince of Wales,
is a common man, whose commonness props his father,
and helps him to conquer. The play is about a son too
brilliant to be understood, and a son too common to
understand.

The play treats of a period some four years
after the killing of King Richard II. It

110 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

opens at a time when the oaths of Henry
BoHng broke, to do justice, have been broken
on all sides, lest the injustice of his assump-
tion of kingship should be recognised and
punished by those over whom he usurps
power. The King is no longer the just,
rather kind, man of affairs who takes power
in the earlier, much finer play. He is a
swollen, soured, bullying man, with all the
ingratitude of a king and all the baseness of
one who knows his cause to be wrong. Op-
posed to him is a passionate, quick-tempered
man, ready to speak his mind, on the instant,
to any whom he believes to be unjust or false.

This quick-tempered man. Lord Percy, has
done the King a signal service. Instead of
asking for reward he tries to persuade the
King to be just to a man who has suffered
wounds and defeat for him. The King calls
him a liar for his pains.

Percy, stung to the quick, rebels. Others
rebel with him, among them some who are
too wise to be profitable on a council of war.
War does not call for wisdom, but for swift-

THE PLAYS 111

ness in striking. Percy, who is framed for
swiftness in striking, loses half of his slender
chance because his friends are too wise to
advise desperate measures. Nevertheless, his
troops shake the King's troops. The desper-
ate battle of Shrewsbury is very nearly a
triumph for him. Then the Prince meets
him and kills him. He learns too late that
a passionate longing to right the wrong goes
down before the rough and stupid something
that makes up the bulk of the world. He
learns that

" Thought's the slave of life, and life, time's
fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world.
Must have a stop " —

and dies. The man who kills him says a
few trite Hnes over his body, and leaves the
stage talking of Falstaff's bowels.

Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V, has been
famous for many years as " Shakespeare's
only hero." Shakespeare was too wise to
count any man a hero. The ways of fate
moved him to vision, not heroism. If we can

112 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

be sure of anything in that great, simple,
gentle, elusive brain, we can be sure that it
was quickened by the thought of the sun
shining on the just and on the unjust, and
shining none the less golden though the soul
like clay triumph over the soul like flame.
Prince Henry is not a hero, he is not a thinker,
he is not even a friend; he is a common man
whose incapacity for feeling enables him to
change his habits whenever interest bids
him. Throughout the first acts he is care-
less and callous though he is breaking his
father's heart and endangering his father's
throne. He chooses to live in society as com-
mon as himself. He talks continually of
guts as though a belly were a kind of wit.
Even in the society of his choice his attitude
is remote and cold-blooded. There is no
good-fellowship in him, no sincerity, no
whole-heartedness. He makes a mock of
the drawer who gives him his whole little
pennyworth of sugar. His jokes upon Fal-
staff are so little good-natured that he stands
upon his princehood whenever the old man

THE PLAYS 118

would retort upon him. He impresses one
as quite common, quite selfish, quite without
feeling. When he learns that his behaviour
may have lost him his prospective crown
he passes a sponge over his past, and fights
like a wild cat for the right of not having to
work for a living.

There is little great poetry in the play.
The magnificent image —

" Baited like eagles having lately bathed " —

the speech of Worcester (in Act V, sc. i)
when he comes with a trumpet to speak with
the King, and the call of Hotspur to set on
battle —

" Sound all the lofty instruments of war,
And by that music let us all embrace " —

are all noble.

To many, the play is remarkable because
it introduces Sir John Falstaff, the most
notable figure in English comedy. Falstaff
is that deeply interesting thing, a man who
is base because he is wise. Our justest,
wisest brain dwelt upon Falstaff longer than

114 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

upon any other character because he is the
world and the flesh, able to endure while
Hotspur flames to his death, and the enemies
of the devil are betrayed that the devil may
have power to betray others.

The Second Part of King Henry IV,

Written. 1597 (?)

Published. 1600.

Source of the Plot. The play of TTie Famous Victories
of Henry V. Holinshed's Chronicles.

The Fable. Northumberland and the other conspirators
agamst the King leam that Hotspur, their associate,
whom they failed to support, has been defeated and
killed. The King's forces are now free to act against
themselves. Northumberland retires to Scotland. The
others under a divided command, make head against
the King's troops under John of Lancaster. They are
betrayed, taken and put to death. Northumberland,
venturing out from Scotland, is defeated. King Henry's
position is assured.

His safety comes too late to be pleasant to him. He
is dying, and the conduct of his son gives him anxiety.
He sees no chance of permanent peace. He counsels
his son to begin a war abroad, to distract the attention
of his subjects. Having done this, he dies.

Prince Henry begins his reign as Henry V by casting
off all his old associates.

The second part of the play of King
Henry IV is Shakespeare's ending of the

THE PLAYS 115

tragedy of Richard II The deposition of
Richard was an act of violence, unjust, as
violence must be, and offensive, as injustice
is, to the power behind life. The blood of
the dead king, and of all those killed in fight-
ing for him, calls upon that power, and asks
justice of it. Slowly, in many secret ways,
the tide sets against the slayer, till he is a
worn, old, heart-broken, haunted man, dying
with the knowledge that all the bloodshed
has been useless, because the power so hardly
won will be tossed away by his successor,
the youth with " a weak mind and an able
body,'* the " good, shallow young fellow,"
who " would have made a good pantler,"
who comes in noisily to his father's death-bed
with news of the beastliest of all the treach-
eries of the reign. Just as the play of Richard
III completes the action of the Wars of the
Roses, this play completes the action of the
killing of the Duke of Gloucester at Calais.
The wheel comes full circle, crushing many
that looked to be brought high, making friends
enemies and enemies friends. Life was never

116 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

so brooded on since man learned to think, as
in this cycle of tragedies. In this fragment
of the whole we are shown the two classes in
human life, the people of instinct and the
people of intellect, being preyed on by two
men, one of them greedy for present ease,
the other for temporal power. Both men
obtain their will. Those who give up every-
thing for one thing often obtain that thing.
But it is a law of life that nothing must be
paid for with too great a share of the imagina-
tive energy. All excess of the kind is unjust,
as violence must be, and offensive, as injustice
is, to the power behind life. King Henry IV
fails in the hour of his triumph from his mani-
fold failures in life during the struggle for
triumph. Falstaff fails in the same way.
The prize of life falls to the careless and callous
man who has struggled only in two minutes
of his life, once, when he played a practical
joke upon some thieves, and a second time
when he killed Hotspur, the brilliant intellect,
the " miracle of men."

Many scenes in this play are great.

THE PLAYS 117

Shakespeare's instinctive power was as large
and as happy as his intellectual power. In
this play he indulged it to the full. The
Falstaff scenes are all wonderful. That in
which the drunken Pistol is driven down-
stairs is the finest tavern scene ever written.
Those placed in Gloucestershire are the per-
fect poetry of English country life. The
talk of old dead Double, who could clap
**i' the clout at twelvescore," and is now
dead, as we shall all be soon; the casting back
of memory to Jane Night work, still alive,
though she belongs to a time fifty-five years
past, when a man, now old, heard the chimes
at midnight; the order to sow the headland,
Cotswold fashion, with red Lammas wheat;
the kindness and charm of the country
servants, so beautiful after the drunken
townsmen, are like the English country
speaking. The earth of England is a good
earth and bears good fruit, even the apple
of man. These scenes are like an apple-
loft in some old barn, where the apples of
last year lie sweet in the straw.

118 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

All of those scenes seem to have been
written easily, out of the fulness of an in-
stinctive power. In the other scenes Shake-
speare wrote with intense mental effort after
brooding intensely on human destiny —

"how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors,"

and on the truth that —

"There is a history in all men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased;
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of

things
As not yet come to life."

There are two scenes of deep tragedy in
the play, both awful. Shakespeare never
wrote anything more terrible. They are the
scene in the fourth act, where John of Lan-
caster tricks and betrays the rebels, and the
scene at the end where the young King cuts
his old friends, with a word to the Lord
Justice to have them into banishment. The
words of Scripture, " Put not your trust in

THE PLAYS 119

princes," must have rung in Shakespeare's
head as he wrote these scenes.

Richard II flung down his warder at
Coventry rather than let his friend venture
in battle for him. From that act of mercy
came his loss of the crown, his death, Mow-
bray's death. Hotspur's death, the murder
of the leaders at Gaultree and the countless
killings up and down England. At the end
of this play the slaughter stops for a while
so that a callous young animal may bring
his country into a foreign war to divert men's
minds from injustice at home.

At the end of the play there is an epilogue
in prose, touching for this reason, that it is
one of the few personal addresses that Shake-
speare has left to us. In the plays the char-
acters speak with a detachment never relaxed.
They belong to the kingdom of vision, not to
the mind through which they came. In this
epilogue Shakespeare speaks for all time
directly to his hearers, whoever they may
be.

Who are his hearers ? Not the English.

120 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Our prophet is not honoured here. This
series of historical plays is one of the most
marvellous things ever done by man. The
plays of which it is composed have not been
played in London, in their great processional
pageant of tragedy, within the memory of
man.

King Henry V,

Written. 1598 (?)

Published f imperfectly, 1600 ; as we nov have it,
1623.

Source of the Plot. The play of The Famous Victories
of Henry V. Holinshed's Chronicles. (Possibly) an
earlier play, now lost.

The Fable. The play describes the determination of
Henry V to fight with France, his progress in France,
the battle of Agincourt, the articles of peace between
the French and English, and the courtship of the King
with Katharine, daughter of the French King. It is
a chronicle of the coming, seeing, and conquering of the
*' fellow " " whose face was not worth sun-buming."

The play bears every mark of having been
hastily written. Though it belongs to the
great period of Shakespeare's creative life,
it contains little either of clash of character,
or of that much tamer thing, comparison of
character. It is a chronicle or procession.

THE PLAYS 121

eked out with soldiers' squabbles. It seems
to have been written to fill a gap in the series
of the historical plays. Perhaps the manage-
ment of the Globe Theatre, where the play-
was performed, wished to play the series
through, from Richard II to Richard III,
and persuaded Shakespeare to write this
play to link Henry IV to Henry VI, The
lines of the epilogue show that Shakespeare
meant the play to give an image of worldly
success between the images of failure in the
other plays.

The play ought to be seen and judged as
a part of the magnificent tragic series. De-
tached from its place, as it has been, it loses
all its value. It is not greatly poetical in itself.
It is popular. It is about a popular hero
who is as common as those who love him.
But in its place it is tremendous. Henry V
is the one commonplace man in the eight
plays. He alone enjoys success and worldly
happiness. He enters Shakespeare's vision
to reap what his broken-hearted father
sowed. He passes out of Shakespeare's vision

122 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

to beget the son who dies broken-hearted
after bringing all to waste again.

"Hear him but reason in divinitv."

cries the admiring archbishop. Yet this
searcher of the spirit woos his bride like a
butcher, and jokes among his men like a
groom. He has the knack of life that fits
human beings for whatever is animal in
human affairs.

His best friend, Scroop, plots to kill him,
but is detected and put to death. Henry
accuses Scroop of cruelty and ingratitude.
He forgets those friends whom his own cruelty
has betrayed to death and dishonour. Fal-
staff dies broken-hearted. Bardolph, whose
faithfulness redeems his sins, is hanged.
Pistol becomes a cutpurse. They were the
prince's associates a few months before. He
puts them from his life with as little feeling
as he shows at Agincourt, when he orders all
the prisoners to be killed.

He has a liking for knocks. Courage
tempered by stupidity (as in the persons of

^

THE PLAYS 123

Fluellen, etc.) is what he loves in a man. He,
himself, has plenty of his favourite quality. His
love of plainness and bluntness makes him con-
demn sentiment in his one profound speech —

All other devils that suggest by treasons

Do botch and bungle up damnation

With patches, colours, and with forms being

fetch'd
From glistering semblances of piety.'*

The scenes between Nym and Pistol, and

/ the account of Falstaff's death, are the last

^ of the great English scenes. This (or the next)

was Shakespeare's last English play, for Lear

and Cymbeline are British, not English. When

he laid down his pen after writing the epilogue

to this play he had done more than any

English writer to make England sacred in

i the imaginations of her sons.

1 The Merry Wives of Windsor,

Written. 1599 (?)

Publishedy in a mutilated form, 1602; in a complete
fonn, 1623.

Source of the Plot. A tale in Straparola*s NotU (iv. 4).

Tarleton's Ncirs out of Purgatorie. Giovanni Fiorentino's

J II Pecorone. Kinde Kit of Kingston's Westward for Smelts,

♦ "

i

124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Fable. Falstaff makes love to Mistress Ford, the
wife of a Windsor man. Mistress Ford, despising Falstaff,
plots with her friend, Mrs. Page, to make him a mock.
News of Falstaff s passion is brought to Ford, who, need-
lessly jealous, resolves to search the house for him.

Falstaff woos Mrs. Ford. She holds him in play till
she hears that her husband is coming. Falstaff, alarmed
at his approach, bundles into a clothes basket, is carried
past the unsuspecting husband, and soused in the river.

He is gulled into the belief that Mrs. Ford expects him
again. He goes, is nearly caught by Ford, but escapes,
disguised as an old woman, at the cost of a cudgelling.

Still believing in Mrs. Ford's love for him, he keeps a
third assignation, this time in Windsor Forest, in the
disguise of Heme the hunter. On this occasion he is
pinched and scorched by little children disguised as
fairies. He learns that Mrs. Ford has tricked him, is
mocked by all, and then forgiven.

The play is eked out by other actions. Chief of these is
the wooing of Anne Page, Mrs. Page's daughter, by three
men — a foreigner. Dr. Caius; an idiot. Master Slender; and
the man of her h.eart, Fenton. There are also scenes
between Falstaff, Nym, Bardolph and Pistol, and between
Dr. Caius, Sir Hugh Evans, Shallow, Slender, the Host and
Mrs. Quickly.

An old tradition says that this play was
written in a fortnight by command of Queen
Elizabeth. There can be no doubt {a) that
it was written hurriedly, {h) that it nicely
suited the Tudor sense of humour. It is
the least interesting of the genuine plays.

THE PLAYS 125

It is almost wholly the work of the abundant
instinctive self working in the high spirits
that so often come with the excitement of
hurry. None of the characters has time
for thought. The play is full of external
energy. The people bustle and hurry with
all their animal natures.

It is the only Shakespearean play which
treats exclusively of English country society.
As a picture of that society it is true and
telling. Country society alters very little. It
is the enduring stem on which the cities graft
fashions. It is given to few to see English
country society so much excited as it is in
this play, but drama deals with excessive
life. Shakespeare's people are always in-
tensely excited or interested or passionate.
Each play tells of the great moments in half-
a-dozen lives. The method of this play is
the same, though the lives chosen are lower
and the interests stupider. Falstaff is in-
terested in cuckoldry, Mrs. Ford in mockery,
Ford, Evans and Caius in jealousy and
rivalry, Bardolph is going to be a tapster, the

126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

others are plying their suits. Even in this
his most trivial play, Shakespeare's idea
that punishment follows oath-breaking is
expressed (whimsically enough) by Fal staff —

" I never prospered since I forswore myself
at primero."

His other idea, that obsession is a danger
to life, is expressed later in the words —

" See now, how wit may be made a Jack-a-
Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment."

There is little poetry in the play. The
most poetical passage is the account of
Heme the hunter —

*' There is an old tale goes, that Heme the

Hunter,
Some time a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd

horns ;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the

cattle;
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes

a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.'*

THE PLAYS 127

Modern poets would describe Heme's dress
and appearance. The creative poet describes
his actions.

It is possible that when this play was
written Shakespeare had thoughts of con-
secrating himself to the writing of purely-
English plays. There are signs that he had
reached a point of achievement that is always
a critical point to imaginative men. He
had reached the point at which the personality
is exhausted. He had worked out his natural
instincts, the life known to him, his predilec-
tions, his reading. He had found a channel
in which his thoughts could express them-
selves. Writing was no longer so pleasant
to him as it had been. He had done an in-
credible amount of work in a few years. The
personality was worn to a husk. It may be
that a very little would have kept him on
this side of the line, writing imitations of what
he had already done. He was at the critical
moment which separates the contemplative
from the visionary, the good from the excel-
lent, the great from the supreme. All writers.

128 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

according to their power, come to this point.
Very few have the fortune to get beyond it.
Shakespeare's mind stood still for a moment,
in this play and in the play that followed,
before it went on triumphant to the supreme
plays.

As You Like It

Written. (?)

Published. 1600 (?)

Source of the Plot. Thomas Lodge's novel of Rosalynde,
Euphues* Golden Legacie (published in 1590) supply the
fable. The tale is that tale of Gamelyn, wrongly attri-
buted to Chaucer. The Practise (Saviolo*s "Practise") of
Vincentio Saviolo, an Italian master of arms, gave hints
for Touchstone's account of the lie. The rest of the play
seems to have been the fruit of Shakespeare's invention.

The Fable. Orlando, basely used by his elder brother
Oliver, leaves home, annoys the usurping Duke Frederick,
and is advised to leave the country.

Rosalind, child of the rightful Duke, and Celia, the child
of Duke Frederick, fly from home together in search of the
rightful Duke, who has taken to the wild wood. Rosalind,
dressed as a man, gives out that Celia is her sister. They
set up as shepherds in Arden,

Orlando joins the rightful Duke in Arden. He is in
love with Rosalind. He meets her in the forest, but does
not recognise her in her disguise. Oliver, cast out by
Frederick, comes to Arden, is reconciled to Orlando, and
falls in love with Celia. There are a few passages of the
comedy of mistake, due to Rosalind's disguise. In the

THE PLAYS 129

end, the rightful Duke and Oliver are restored to their
possessions. Orlando marries Rosalind ; the minor
characters are married as their hearts desire, and all
ends happily.

The play treats of the gifts of Nature and
the ways of Fortune. Orlando, given little,
is brought to much. Rosalind and Celia,
born to much, are brought to little. The
Duke, born to all things, is brought to nothing.
The usurping Duke, born to nothing, climbs
to much, desires all, and at last renounces
all. Oliver, born to much, aims at a little
more, loses all, and at last regains all. Touch-
stone, the worldly wise, marries a fool.
Audrey, born a clown, marries a courtier.
Phebe, scorning a man, falls in love with a.
woman. i

Jaques, the only wise one, is the only on6^
not moved by Fortune. Life does not interest
him; his interest is in his thoughts about
life. His vision of life feasts him whatever
life does. Passages in the second act, in the
subtle seventh scene, corrupt in a most im-
portant line, show that in the character of
Jaques Shakespeare was expounding a philo-

130 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

sophy of art. The philosophy may not have
been that by which he, himself, wrought; but
it is one set down by him with an extreme
subtlety of care, and opposed, as all opinions
advanced in drama must be, by an extreme
earnestness of opposition.

The wisest of Shakespeare's characters are
often detached from the action of the play
in which they appear. Jaques holds aloof
from the action of this play, though he is
perhaps the best -known character in the cast.
His thought is the thought of all wise men,
that wisdom, being always a little beyond
the world, has no worldly machinery by
which it can express itself. In this world
the place of chorus, interpreter or com-
mentator is not given to the wise man, but
to the fool who has degraded the office to a
profession. Jaques, the wise man, finds the
place occupied by one whose comment is
platitude. Wisdom has no place in the
social scheme. The fool, he finds, has both
office and uniform.

Seeing this, Jaques wishes, as all wise men

THE PLAYS 131

wish, not to be counted wise but to have
as great liberty as the fool to express his
thought —

" weed j^our better judgments
Of all opinion that grows rank in them
That I am wise. I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please ; for so fools

have.

. . . give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and

through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world.
If they will patiently receive my medicine."

He is answered that, having learned of
the world's evil by libidinous living, he can
only do evil by exposing his knowledge. He
replies, finely expressing Shakespeare's invari-
able artistic practice, that his aim will be at
sin, not at particular sinners.

In the middle of his speech Orlando enters,
raging for food. It is interesting to see how
closely Shakespeare follows Jaques' mind in
the presence of the fierce animal want of
hunger. He is too much interested to be

£ 2

132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of help. The Duke ministers to Orlando.
Jaques wants to know " of what kind this
cock should come of." He speaks banter-
ingly, the Duke speaks kindly. The impres-
sion given is that Jaques is heartless. The
Duke's thought is " here is one even more
wretched than ourselves." Jaques' thought,
always more for humanity than for the
individual, is a profound vision of the world.

The play is a little picture of the world.
The contemplative man who is not of the
world, is yet a part of the picture. We are
shown a company of delightful people, just
escaped from disaster, smilingly taking the
biggest of hazards. The wise man, dis-
missing them to their fates with all the
authority of wisdom, gives up his share in
the game to listen to a man who has given up
his share of the world. Renunciation of the
world is attractive to all upon whom the
world presses very heavily, or very lightly.

Rosalind and Phebe are of the two kinds
of woman who come much into Shakespeare's
early and middle plays. Rosalind, like Portia,

THE PLAYS 133

is a golden woman, a daughter of the sun,
smiHng-natured, but limited. Phebe, Uke
Rosalind, is black-haired, black-eyed, black-
ey^browed, with the dead-white face that so
often goes with cruelty. Shortly after this
play was written he began to create types less
external and less limited.

Miich Ado about Nothing,

Written. (?)

Published. 1600.

Source of the Plot. The greater part of the fable seems
to have been invented by Shakespeare. The Hero and
Claudio story is found in the twenty-second novel of
Bandello, and in at least three other books (one of them
Spenser's Faerie Queene). It was also known to the
Elizabethans in a play now lost.

The Fable. Benedick, a lord of Padua, pledges himself
to bachelorhood. Beatrice, a disdainful lady, is scornful
of men.

Claudio plans to marry Hero.

Don John, enemy of Claudio, plans to thwart the
marriage by letting it appear that Hero is unchaste.

Don Pedro and Claudio make Benedick believe that
Beatrice is dying of love for him.

Ursula and Hero make Beatrice believe that Benedick
is dying of love for her.

The disdainful couple make friends. Don John thwarts
the marriage of Claudio by his tale of Hero*s unchastity.
Claudio casts off Hero at the altar. Hero swoons, and
is conveyed away as dead. Beatrice and Benedick are

134 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

brought into close alliance by their upholding of Hero's
cause.

Proof is obtained that Hero has been falsely accused.
She is recovered from her swoon. Claudio marries her.
Benedick and Beatrice plight troth.

In this play Shakespeare writes of the
power of report, of the thing overheard, to
alter human destiny. Antonio's man, listen-
ing behind a hedge, overhears Don Pedro
telling Claudio that he will woo Hero. The
report of his eavesdropping conveys no
notion of the truth, and leads, no doubt, to
a bitter moment for Hero. Borachio, hiding
behind the arras, overhears the truth of the
matter. The report of his eavesdropping
leads to the casting off of Hero at the altar.
Don John and Borachio vow to Claudio
that they overheard Don Pedro making
love to Hero. The report gives Claudio
a bitter moment. Benedick, reporting to
the same tune, intensifies his misery.

Benedick, overhearing the report of
Beatrice's love for him, changes his mind
about marriage. Beatrice, hearing of Bene-
dick's love for her, changes her mind about

THE PLAYS 185

men. Claudio, hearing Don John's report of
Hero, changes his mind about his love. The
watch, overhearing Borachio's report of his
villainy, are able to change the tragedy to
comedy. Leonato, hearing Claudio's report
of Hero, is ready to cast off his child. Report
is shown to be stronger than any human
affection and any acquired quality, except the
love of one unmarried woman for another,
and that strongest of all earthly things, the
fool in authority. The wisdom of Shake-
speare is greater and more various than the
brains of little men can imagine. It is one
of the tragical things, that this great man,
who interpreted the ways of fate in glorious,
many-coloured vision, should be set aside in
our theatres for the mockers and the accusers,
whose vision scatters dust upon the brain
and sand upon the empty heart.

Though the play is not one of the most
passionate of the plays, it belongs to Shake-
speare's greatest creative period. It is full
of great and wonderful things. The character-
drawing is so abundant and precise that

186 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

those who know how hard it is to convey
the illusion of character can only bow down,
thankful that such work may be, but ashamed
that it no longer is. Every person in the
play is passionately alive about something.
The energy of the creative mood in Shake-
speare filled all these images with a vitality
that interests and compels. The wit and
point of the dialogue —

Don Pedro. I think this is your daughter.

Leo7iato. Her mother hath many times told
me so.

Benedick. Were you in doubt, sir, that you
asked her ?

Leonato, Signior Benedick, no ; for then
you were a child ;

or (as in the later passage) —

Beatrice. I may sit in a corner and cry heigh
ho for a husband.

Don Pedro. Lady Beatrice, I will get you
one.

Beatrice. I would rather have one of your
father's getting. Hath your Grace ne'er a
brother like you ? Your father got excellent
husbands, if a maid could come by them.

THE PLAYS 137

Don Pedro, Will you have me, lady ?

Beatrice. No, my lord, unless I might have
another for working days : your Grace is too
costly to wear every day —

is plain to all ; but it is given to few to
see with what admirable, close, constructive
art this dialogue is written for the theatre.
Of poetry, of understanding passionately put,
there is comparatively little. The one great
poetical scene is that at the opening of the
fifth act. The worst lines of this scene have
become proverbial ; the best are

" 'tis all men's office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man's virtue nor sufficiency.
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself.^

There is little in the play written thus,
but there are many scenes throbbingly alive.
The scene in the church shows what power to
understand the awakened imagination has.
The scene is a quivering eight minutes in as
many lives. Shakespeare passes from thrilling

138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

soul to thrilling soul with a touch as delicate
as it is certain.

Shakespeare's fun is liberally given in the
comic scenes. In the last act there is a
beautiful example of the effect of lyric to
heighten a solemn occasion.

Twelfth Night

Written. 1600 (?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot. The story of Orsino, Viola, Olivia
and Sebastian is to be found in the '* Historic of Apolonius
and Silla** as told by Barnabe Riche in the book Riche
his FareweU to Miliiarie Profession. Riche took the tale
from Bandello's Italian, or from de Belleforest's French
translation from it. Three sixteenth-century Italian plays
are based on this fable. All of these sources may have
been known to Shakespeare.

The sub -plot, and the characters contained in it, seem
to be original creations.

The FMe. Viola, who thinks that she has lost her
brother Sebastian by shipwreck, disguises herselt" as a
boy, and calls herself Cesario. She takes service with the
Duke Orsino, who is in love with the lady Olivia. She
carries love messages from the Duke to Olivia.

Olivia, who is in mourning for her brother, refuses the
Duke's suit, but falls in love with Cesario.

In her house is Malvolio, the steward, who reproves her
uncle, Sir Toby Belch, for rioting at night with trivial
companions. The trivial companions forge a letter,
which causes Malvolio to think that his mistress is in love

THE PLAYS 139

with him. The thought makes his behaviour so strange
that he is locked up as a madman.

Sir Toby Belch finds further solace for life in making
his gull, Sir Andrew, challenge Cesario to a duel. The
duel is made dangerous by the sudden appearance of
Sebastian, who is mistaken for Cesario. He beats Sir
Andrew and Sir Toby, and encounters the lady Olivia.
Olivia woos him as she has wooed Cesario, but with better
fortune.

They are married. The Duke marries Viola. Malvolio
is released from prison. Sir Toby marries Maria, Olivia's
waiting- worn an. Sir Andrew is driven out like a plucked
pigeon. Malvolio, unappeased by his release, vows to be
revenged for the mock put upon him.

This is the happiest and one of the lovehest
of all the Shakespearean plays. It is the best
English comedy. The great mind that mixed
a tragedy of intellect with a tragedy of stupid-
ity, here mixes mirth with romantic beauty.
The play is so mixed with beauty that one can
see it played night after night, week after
week, without weariness, even in a London
theatre.

The play presents images of self-deception,
or delusional sentimentality, by means of
a romantic fable and a vigorous fable. It
shows us three souls suffering from the kind
of sickly vanity that feeds on day-dreams.

140 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Orsino is in an unreal mood of emotion. Love
is an active passion. Orsino is in the clutch
of its dangerous passive enemy called senti-
mentality. He lolls upon a couch to music
when he ought to be carrying her glove to
battle. Olivia is in an unreal mood of mourn-
ing for her brother. Grief is a destroying
passion. Olivia makes it a form of self-
indulgence, or one sweet the more to attract
flies to her. Malvolio is in an unreal mood
of self-importance. Long posing at the head
of ceremony has given him the faith that
ceremony, of which he is the head, is the whole
of life. This faith deludes him into a life of
day-di'cams, common enough among inactive
clever people, but dangerous to the indulger,
as all things are that distort the mental vision.
At the point at which the play begins the
day-dream has brought him to the pitch of
blindness necessary for effective impact on
the wall.

The only cure for the sickly in the mind
is reality. Something real has to be felt or
experienced. Life that is over-delicate and

THE PLAYS 141

remote through something unbalanced in
the mind is not life but decay. The knife,
the bludgeon, the practical joke, and the
many-weaponed figure of Sorrow are life's
remedies for those who fail to live. We are
the earth's children; we have no business in
limbo. Living in limbo is like living in the
smoke from a crater : highly picturesque, but
too near death for safety.

Orsino is cured of sentiment by the sight
of Sebastian making love like a man. He
rouses to do the like by Viola. Olivia is
piqued out of sentiment by coming to know
some one who despises her. She falls in love
with that person. Malvolio is mocked out of
sentiment by the knowledge that other minds
have seen his mind. He has not the happiness
to be rewarded with love at the end of the
play ; but he has the alternative of hate, which
is as active a passion and as real. All three
are roused to activity by the coming of some-
thing real into their lives; and all three, in
coming to the active state, cease to be inter-
esting and beautiful and pathetic.

142 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare's abundant power created
beings who look before and after, even while
they keep vigorous a passionate present. It
is difficult to praise that power. Even those
who know how difficult art is find it hard
to praise perfect art. Art is not to be praised
or blamed, but understood. This play will
stand as an example of perfect art till a greater
than Shakespeare set a better example further
on. It is

" All beauty and without a spot."

The scene of the roisterers, rousing the night-
owl in a catch, rouses the heart, as all real
creation does, with the thought that life is
too wonderful to end. The next, most lovely
scene, where the Duke and Viola talk of love
that keeps life from ending, and so often
brings life down into the dust, assures the
heart that even if life ends for us it will go
on in others.

" the song we had last night.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun

THE PLAYS 148

And the free maids that weave their thread

with bones
Do use to chant it : it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age."

In his best plays Shakespeare used a double
construction to express by turn the twofold
energy of man, the energy of the animal and
of the spirit. The mind that brooded sadly
in

** For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once display'd, doth fall that very
hour,"

and in

** She never told her love.
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek : she pined in
thought,''

belonged to earth, and got a gladness from
earth. Within two minutes of the talk of the
woman who died of love he showed Contem-
plation making a rare turkey-cock of the one
wise man in his play.

144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

AWs Well that Ends Well

Written. (?)

Published. 1623.

Source of the Plot. The story of Helena's love for
Bertram is found in the Decamerone of Boccaccio (giorn. 3,
nov. 9). Shakespeare may have read it in the Palace of
Pleasure.

The Fable. Helena, orphan daughter of a physician,
has been brought up, as a dependant, in the house of the
Countess of Rousillon. She falls in love with Bertram,
tlie son of the Countess and the King's ward.

Bertram goes to the French Court, on his way to the
wars. He finds the King dangerously ill. Helena,
hearing of the King's illness, comes to the Court as a
physician. She offers to cure the King with one of her
father's remedies, on condition that, when cured, he will
give her in marriage the man of her choice. The King
accepts these conditions; she cures him; she chooses for
her husband Bertram.

Bertram, the King's ward, has to do the King's bidding.
He grudgingly accepts her; they are married. He leaves
her, and goes to the wars in the service of the Duke of
Florence, designing to see her no more. Helena with-
draws from the Countess's house, and comes to Florence
disguised.

Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena
impersonates her, receives her unsusj)ecting husband at
night, takes from him a ring, and gives, in exchange, a
ring given to her by the King of France. At the end of t!ie
war, Bertram, hearing that Helena is dead, returns to
France, wearing the ring. The King sees it and challenges
it. Bertram can give no just account of how he got it.
Helena, quick with child by him, confronts him, with the
ring that he left with her at Florence. Diana, the Floren-

I

THE PLAYS 145

tine maid, gives evidence that Helena impersonated her
on the night of Bertram's visit at Florence. Bertram
accepts Helena as his wife, and the play ends happily.

This play (whenever written) was exten-
sively revised during the ruthless mood that
gave birth to Measure for Measure. The
alterations were made in a mood so much
deeper than the mood of its first composition
that they make the play uneven. Something,
perhaps some trick of health, that made the
mind clearer than the imagination, gave to
Shakespeare for a short time another (and
pitiless) view of human obsessions.

It was a part of his belief that treachery
is generally caused by blindness, blindness
generally by some obsession of passion. In
this play he treats of the removal of an ob-
session by making plain to the obsessed,
by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the
treachery it causes,

Bertram is a young man fresh from home.
He does not want to marry. He is eager to see
the world and to win honour. He has been
accustomed to look down on Helena as a poor

146 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

dependant. He does not like her, and he
does not Hke being ordered. He is suddenly
ordered to marry her. He has been trapped
by a woman's underhand trick. He sees
himself brought into bondage with all the
plumes of his youth clipped close. There is
no way of escape; he has to marry her; but
the King's order cannot quench his rage
against the woman who has so snared him.
His rage burns inward into a brooding, rankling
ill-humour that becomes an obsession. It is
one of the tragedies of life that an evil obses-
sion blinds the judgment on more sides than
one. The obsessed are always without criti-
cism. A way of destruction may be as narrow
as a way of virtue; but all the other ways of
destruction run into it. Bertram in blinkers
to the good in Helena is blind to the faults
in himself and in Parolles his friend. Wilfully,
as the sullen do, he thinks himself justified in
doing evil because evil has been done to him.
Hot blood is running in him. Temptation,
never far from youth, is always near the un-
balanced. He takes an unworthy confidant,

THE PLAYS 147

as the obsessed do, and goes in over the ears.
His sin is the giving of salutation to sportive
blood, it is love, it is "natural rebellion,"
it js young man's pastime. But looked
at coldly and judicially, with the nature of
the confidant laid bare, and the lies of the
sinner made plain, it is an ugly thing. Passion
is sweet enough to seem truth, the only truth.
Let the eyes be opened a little, and it will
blast the heart with horror. What man
thought true is then seen to be this, this thing,
this devil of falseness who gives man this kind
of friend, makes him tell this kind of lie, and
brands him with this kind of shame.

Shakespeare is just to Bertram. The
treachery of a woman is often the cause of
a man's treachery to womanhood. Helena's
obsession of love makes her blind to the results
of her actions. She twice puts the man whom
she loves into an intolerable position, which
nothing but a king can end. The fantasy is
not made so real that we can believe in the pos-
sibility of happiness between two so married.
Helena has been praised as one of the noblest

148 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of Shakespeare's women. Shakespeare saw
her more clearly than any man who has ever
lived. He saw her as a woman who practises
a borrowed art, not for art's sake, nor for
charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end.
He saw her put a man into a position of ig-
nominy quite unbearable, and then plot with
other women to keep him in that position.
Lastly, he saw her beloved all the time by the
conventionally minded of both sexes.

The play is full of effective theatrical
situations. It contains much fine poetry.
Besides the poetry there are startling moments
of insight —

** My mother told me just how he would woo
As if she sat in 's heart. . . ."

" Now, God delay our rebellion ! as we are
ourselves,
What things are we ! Merely our own
traitors.''

** I would gladly have him see his company
anatomised.
That he might take a measure of his own
judgments."

THE PLAYS 149

" The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together."'

"Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave :
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their
dust;'

i Julius CoBsar,

Written. 1601 (?J^

Produced. (?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.
r Source of the Plot. The Lives of Antonius^ Brutus and
Julius Caesar in Sir Thomas North's Plutarcj\^^^

A tragedy of Julius Caesar, now lost, was performed by
Shakespeare's company in 1594. Shakespeare must have
known this play.

; The Fable. Cassius, fearing that Julius Caesar is about
to extinguish all trace of RepubUcan rule in Rome,
persuades Brutus and others to plot a change. They
decide to murder Caesar.

On the morning chosen for the murder, Csesar is warned
by many omens not to stir abroad. He is persuaded to
ignore the omens. He goes to the Senate House, and is
there killed. Mark Antony, his friend, obtains leave from
the murderers to make a public oration over the corpse.

In his speech he so inflames the populace against the
murderers that they are compelled to leave Rome.

Joining himself to Octavius, he takes the field against
Brutus and Cassius, and helps to defeat them at Philippi.

150 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Cassius is killed by his servant when he sees that all la
lost. Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills
himselfj^

The modern play climbs to its culmination
by a series of interruptions or crises. The
modern playwright tries to end his acts at an
arresting or splendid moment, artfully delayed,
and carefully prepared. He tries to end his
play by a gradual knitting together of all the
energies of his characters into a situation,
happier or more haunting, than any that has
preceded it in the course of the action. The
art by which this is done, when it is done,
is called dramatic construction. There are
many kind of dramatic construction. Each
age tends to form a new one. Each writer uses
many. In art a subject can only be expressed
in the form most fitting to it. In the art of
the theatre a mistake in the choice of the
form, or in the right handling of it when chosen
leads infallibly to the irritation of the audience
and the failure of the play. When a play
is badly constructed the actors cannot so
interpret the author's emotion that it will

THE PLAYS 151

dominate the collective emotion in the
audience.

It is often said, by those who ought to know
better (it was said to Racine by Frenchmen)^
that dramatic construction cannot matter, if
the passion or spirit with which the author
writes, be abundant and sincere. The powder
in a cartridge may be abundant and the bullet
at the end may be sincerely meant, yet neither
will do execution till they are put properly
into the proper weapon, rightly aimed, and
judgingly fired. So with passion in the arts.
Without art, inspiration is breath and a feed-
ing of the wind. In the theatre, inspiration
without art is as a sounding brass and as a
tinkling cymbal.

It is sometimes maintained in print, by those
saddened or maddened by bad modern per-
formances of the plays, that Shakespeare
'* could not construct," that he is constantly
" rambling," " chaotic," or " intolerable,"
and that he is only played to-day because
of his " poetry." Those who maintain these
things forget that an Elizabethan play was

152 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

constructed for a theatre much unlike the
modern theatre, and performed in a manner
suited to that theatre, but less well suited to
the theatre of our times. Shakespeare's plays
were constructed closely and carefully to be
effective on the Elizabethan stage. On that
stage they were highly and nobly effective.
On the modern stage, produced in the modern
manner, they are less effective. There are
many reasons why they should be less effective
on the modern stage. During the last thirty
years there has been a tendency towards
naturalism in the theatre. Modern audiences
have learned not to care for poetry on the
stage unless it is made " natural " by realistic
scenery. Modern audiences are accustomed
to the modern forms of dramatic construction,
which are unlike the Elizabethan forms. They
know that modern playwrights put a strong
scene at the end of an act and a great
scene at the end of the play. They have
learned to expect a play to be arranged in
that manner, and to count as ill constructed
the play not so arranged. As it is frequently

THE PLAYS 153

said that the last acts of Julius Ccesar make
anti-cHmax and spoil the play, it is necessary
to consider Shakespeare's constructive practice
in this and in some other plays.

The Greek tragic poets ended the action
of their plays in the modern manner, at the
great scene, but, unlike us, they delayed the
departure of the audience for some minutes
more, generally by a chorus of men and
women who expounded the moral value of
the action in noble verse. The audience
came away calmed, uf a Greek had con-

VSW^MTaSK

structed Julius Ccesar, he would have ended
the action at the murder. A chorus of
senators would then have chanted something
noble about the results of pride, the vanity of
human glory, and the strangeness of the ways
of the gods. A modern writer would have
caused the curtain to fall at the murder, for
to-day, when the brains are out the play dies
and there an end. Shakespeare carries on
his play for two acts after Caesar is dead.N In
Macbeth he constructs the last half of his
play in much the same manner.

154 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

^

n Jieth j^lays he is considering the con-
ception, the doing, and the results of a violent
actj In both playsfthis act is the murder of
the head of a State!) In neither case i^ he
^^v>ftV^deeply interested in the victinM Duncan, in
Macbeth, is a generous gentleman ;)Caesar, in
this play, is a touchy man of affairs whose
head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination
broods on the fact that the killer/ vver^
deluded into murderj Macbeth by an envious
wife and the belief that Fate meant him to
be king, fBrutus by an envious friend and the
belief that he was saving RorneJ In both
cases the killenf shows base personal ingrati-
tude "^hd treacher^ In both pi ays, j^^
avenging justice makes even t^e scales. The
mind of the poet follows jiem f rom the
moment when the guilty thought is prompted,
through the agony and exultation of dreadful
acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the treacher-
ous, till Fate's just sword falls in vengeance.
His imagination is most keenly stirred just
as ours is, by the great event, the murder of
the victim : but his subject is not the murder.

THE PLAYS 155

noryet the tragical end of a rulerT/His sub-
jemin both plays ps the working of Fate who
prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and
I then destroys himJ We are interested in crisis
^ and in topic. The Elizabethans, with a wider
vision, could not detach an act from its place
in the pageant of history. In a modern play
the heroine is put into an unpleasant position,
or an evil is exposed, or our faults are made
visible and laughable. The point of view
is that of the sympathiser, reformer, and
moralist looking on from the window near by.
The field of vision is restricted and the object
brought near. In this great play, as in
Macbeth, Shakespeare strove to present a
violent act and its consequences from the point
of view of a great just spirit outside life.

The play is generally considered to be the
earliest of the supreme plays. Little more
can be said of it at this time than that it is
supreme. There is a majesty in the concep-
tion that makes it like gathering and breaking
. storm. The cause of the murder is a ^gi^eat-
personal treachery inspired by an unselfish

156 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

idea. Though it seems inevitable, it is a very
Httle thing that makes it possible. | Both
Caesar's murder and Brutus' downfall are
almost prevented. A hand stretches out
to save both of them. A little domestic
treachery inspired by a selfish idea puts aside
the interposing hand in both instances.
Caesar will not listen to his wife because he
is sure of himself. Brutus will not answer
his wife for the same reason. They go on to
the magnificent hour which makes the one
fine soul in the play a haunted and unhappy
soul till he snatches at Death at Philiggi^

The verse is calm, like the noble art that
shapes the scenes. It is full of majesty.
Lines occur in which single unusual words are
charged with an incalculable power of meaning.

"Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glazed upon me and went surly by."

*' It is the bright day that brings forth the
adder."

Shakespeare's intensest and most solemn
thought, the Law that directed the creation of
some of his greatest work, is spoken by Brutus —

THE PLAYS 157

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream :
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Written. 1601-2.

Published^ in an imperfect form, 1603; more perfectly,
1604.

Source of the Plot. A play upon the subject of Hamlet,
now lost, seems to have been popular in London during
the last decades of the sixteenth century. Some think
that it was an early work of Shakespeare's. No evidence
supports this theory. He probably knew the play, and
may have acted in it.

The story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his Hisioria
Danica. Francis de Belief ores t printed a version of it in
his Eistoires Tragiques. An English translation from
de Belleforest, called the Hystorie of Hamblet, was pub-
lished (or perhaps reprinted) in London in 1608. Shake-
speare seems to have known both de Belleforest and the
Hystorie.

The Fable. Claudius, brother to the King of Denmark,
conniving with Gertrude the Queen, poisons his brother,
and seizes the throne. Soon afterwards he marries
Gertrude. At this point the play begins.

Hamlet, son of the murdered king, sick at heart at his
mother's hasty re-marriage, and troubled by his love for
Ophelia, returns to Denmark. The ghost of his father

158 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

reveals the manner of the murder to him, and makes him
Bwear to be revenged. The revelation so affects him that
the murderers begin to fear him. He cannot bring himseU
to kill Claudius. In a play he shows them that he knows
their guilt.

While speaking with his mother, he discovers and kills a
spy hidden behind the arras. The spy is Polonius, father
of Laertes and of Ophelia.

Claudius causes Hamlet to sail for England, on the
pretext that the killing of Polonius has brought him into
danger with the populace. He plans that Hamlet shall
be killed on his arrival. Hamlet discovers the treacherous
purpose and returns unhurt to Denmark.

During Hamlet's absence at sea, Laertes learns how
Polonius was killed and swears to be revenged on Hamlet.
Hamlet's return gives him his opportunity.

Claudius suggests that the tevenge be taken at a fencing-
bout. Laertes shall fence with Hamlet, using a poisoned
foil. If this fails, Hamlet shall be given poisoned wine.

In a scuffle during the fencing-bout the fencers change
foils. Gertrude, by mistake, drinks the poisoned wine
and dies. Laertes, hurt by the poisoned foil, dies.
Hamlet, also hurt by the poisoned foil, kills Claudius and
dies too.

Hamlet is the most baffling of the great
plays. It is the tragedy of a man and an
action continually baffled by wisdom. The
man is too wise. The dual action, pressing
in both cases to complete an event, cannot
get past his wisdom into the world. The
action in one case is a bad one. It is simply

THE PLAYS 159

murder. In the other, and more important
case, it is, according to our scheme, also a
bad one. It is revenge, or, at best, the
taking of blood for blood. In the Shake-
spearean scheme it is not revenge, it is justice,
and therefore neither good nor bad but neces-
sary. The situation which causes the tragedy
is one very common in Shakespeare's system.
Life has been wrenched from her course.
Wrenching is necessary to bring her back
to her course or to keep her where she is.
Hamlet is a man who understands too
humanly to wish to wrench either this way
or that, and too shrewdly to be himself
wrenched by grosser instruments of Fate.

The action consists in the baffling of action.
Mostly, it consists in the baffling of life's
effort to get back to her course. All through
the play there is the uneasiness of something
trying to get done, something from outside
life trying to get into life, but baffled always
because the instrument chosen is, himself,
a little outside life, as the wise must be.
This baffling of the purpose of the dead

160 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

leads to a baffling of the living, and, at last,
to something like an arrest of life, a dead-
lock, in which each act, however violent,
makes the obscuring of life's purpose greater.

The powers outside life send a poor ghost
to Hamlet to prompt him to an act of justice.
After baffled hours, often interrupted by
cock-crow, he gives his message. Hamlet is
charged with the double task of executing
judgment and showing mercy. It is a charge
given to many people (generally common
people) in the system of the plays. It is
given to two other men in this play. It is
nothing more than the fulfilling of the kingly
office, so bloodily seized by Claudius before
the opening of the play. At this point, it
may be well to consider the society in which
the kingly office is to be exercised.

The society is created with Shakespeare's
fullest power. It is not an image of the
world in little, like the world of the late
historical plays. It is an image of the world
as intellect is made to feel it. It is a society
governed by the enemies of intellect, by the

THE PLAYS 161

sensual and the worldly, by deadly sinners
and the philosophers of bread and cheese.
The King is a drunken, incestuous murderer,
who fears intellect. The Queen is a false
woman, who cannot understand intellect.
Polonius is a counsellor who suspects intellect.
Ophelia is a doll without intellect. Laertes is
a boor who destroys intellect. The courtiers
are parasites who flourish on the decay of
intellect. Fortinbras, bright and noble,
marching to the drum to win a dunghill,
gives a colour to the folly. The only friends
of the wise man are Horatio, the school-
fellow, and the leader of a cry of players.

The task set by the dead is a simple one.
All tasks are simple to the simple-minded.
To the delicate and complex mind so much
of life is bound up with every act that any
violent act involves not only a large personal
sacrifice of ideal, but a tearing-up by the
roots of half the order of the world. Wisdom
is founded upon justice; but justice, to the
wise man, is more a scrupulous quality in the
mind than the doing of expedient acts upon

162 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

sinners. Hamlet is neither " weak " nor
" unpractical," as so many call him. What
he hesitates to do may be necessary, or even
just, as the world goes, but it is a defilement
of personal ideals, difficult for a wise mind
to justify. It is so great a defilement, and a
world so composed is so great a defilement,
that death seems preferable to action and
existence alike.

The play at this point presents a double
image of action baffled by wisdom. Hamlet
baffles the dealing of the justice of Fate,
and also the death plotted for him by his
uncle. His weapon, in both cases, is his
justice, his precise scrupulousness of mind,
the niceness of mental balance which gives
to all that he says the double-edge of wisdom.
It is the faculty, translated into the finer
terms of thought, which the ghost seeks to
make real with bloodshed. Justice, in her
grosser as in her finer form, is concerned
with the finding of the truth. The fii'st half
of the play, though it exposes and develops
the fable, is a dual image of a search for truth,

THE PLAYS 168

of a seeking for a certainty that would justify
a violent act. The King is probing Hamlet's
mind with gross human probes, to find out
if he is mad. Hamlet is searching the King's
mind with the finest of intellectual probes,
to find out if he is guilty. The probe used
by him, the fragment of a play within a
play, is the work of a man with a knowledge
of the impotence of intellect —

" Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown" —

and a faith in the omnipotence of intellect —

" Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of
our own."

To this man, five minutes after the lines
have exposed the guilty man, comes a chance
to kill his uncle. Hamlet " might do it
pat " while he is at prayers. The knowledge
that the sword will not reach the real man,
since damnation comes from within, not
from without, arrests liis hand. Fate offers
an instant for the doing of her purpose.
Hamlet puts the instant by, with his baffling

F 2

164 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

slowness, made up of mercy and wisdom.
Fate, or the something outside life which
demands the King's blood, so that life may-
go back to her channel, is foiled. The action
cannot bring itself to be. A wise human
purpose is, for the moment, stronger than
the eternal purpose of Nature, the roughly
just.

It is a part of this play's ironic teaching
that life must not be baffled; but that, when
she has been wrenched from her course, she
must either be wrenched back to it or kept
violently in the channel to which she has
been forced.

In Macbeth, a not dissimilar play, the life
violently altered is kept in the strange channel
by a succession of violent acts. In Hamlety
when Hamlet's merciful wisdom has decided
that the life violently altered shall not be
wrenched back, his destroying wisdom decides
that she shall not be kept in the strange
channel. The King, just in his way, seeks
to find out if Hamlet be sane. If Hamlet
be sane, he must die. His death will secure

THE PLAYS 165

the King's position. By his death hfe will
be kept in the strange channel. Polonius,
the King's agent, learns that Hamlet is sane
and something more. Fate demands violence
this way if she may not have it in the other.
She offers an instant for the doing of her pur-
pose. Hamlet puts the instant by with his
baffling swiftness, which strikes on the in-
stant, when the Queen's honour and his own
life depend on it. The first bout in this play
of the baffling of action falls to Hamlet.
The second bout, in which the King's purpose
is again baffled, by the sending of the two
courtiers to their death in England, also falls
to Hamlet. The bloody purpose from outside
life and the bloody purpose from within life
are both baffled and kept from being by the
two extremes so perfectly balanced in the
wise nature.

Extremes in the Shakespearean system are
tragical things. In Shakespeare, the path-
way of excess leads, not as with Blake, to
the palace of wisdom, but to destruction.
The two extremes in Hamlet, of slowness

166 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

and swiftness, set up in life the counter
forces which destroy extremes, so that Hfe,
the common thing, may continue to be
common. The mercy of Hamlet leaves the
King free to plot his death. The swiftness
of Hamlet gives to the King a hand and sword
to work his will

In other plays, the working of extremes to
the punishment dealt by life to all excess
is simple and direct. In this play, nothing
is simple and direct. Fate's direct workings
are baffled by a mind too complex to be
active on the common planes. The baffling
of Fate's purpose leads to a condition in
life like the " slack water " between tides.
Laertes, when his father is killed, raises the
town and comes raving to the presence to
stab the killer. He is baffled by the King's
wisdom. Ophelia, " incapable of her own
distress," goes mad and drowns herself.
The play seems to hesitate and stand still
while the energies spilled in the baffling of
Fate work and simmer and grow strong, till
they combine with Fate in the preparation

THE PLAYS 167

of an end that shall not be baffled. Even
so, " the end men looked for cometh not."
The end comes to both actions at once in the
squalor of a chance-medley. Fate has her
will at last. Life, who was so long baffled,
only hesitated. She destroys the man who
wrenched her from her course, and the man
who would neither wrench her back nor let
her stay, and the women who loved these
men, and the men who loved them. Re-
venge and chance together restore life to her
course, by a destruction of the lives too
beastly, and of the lives too hasty, and of
the lives too foolish, and of the life too wise,
to be all together on earth at the same time.

It is difficult to praise the poetry of Hamlet,
Nearly all the play is as familiar by often
quotation as the New Testament. The great,
wise, and wonderful beauty of the plav is
a part of the English mind for ever. It is
difficult to live for a day anywhere in England
(except in a theatre) without hearing or
reading a part of Hamlet. Lines that are
little- quoted are the lines to quote here —

168 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" this fell sergeant, death*,
Is strict in his arrest."

" O proud death !
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes, at a shot,
So bloodily hast struck ? "

The last speech, great as the speech at the
end of Timon, and noble, like that, with a
music beyond the art of voices, is con-
structed on a similar metrical basis.

"Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on.
To have proved most royally : and, for his

passage,
The soldier's music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.

Take up the bodies : such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.''

Troilus and Cressida,

Written. (?)

Produced. A'ter publication.
Published. 1609.
• Source of the Plot. Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of Troilus

THE PLAYS 169

and Creseide. John Lydgate's Troy BoTce. William
Caxton's translation of the French book of the Recuyels of
Troy. George Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliad,

Among many other possible sources may be mentioned
a now lost play of Troilus and Cressida (produced in 1599)
by'the poets Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle.

The Fable. The scene is Troy. Cressida is a Trojan
woman, whose father, Calchas, has gone over to the Greeks.
She is beloved by the youth Troilus. Her uncle, Pandarus,
seeks to bring her to accept Troilus. Hector, brother to
Troilus, challenges a Greek champion to single combat.

In the Greek camp there is much disaffection. Achilles,
the chief Greek champion^ conceiving himself wronged,
makes a mock of the other leaders. To teach him his
place the leaders plan that Ajax shall be chosen in his
stead to take up Hector's challenge.

Pandarus succeeds in bringing Cressida to love Troilus.

Calchas, in the Greek camp, sends to Troy for Cressida.
She is delivered over to the Greeks. Forgetting Troilus,
she entangles one of the Greeks with her wiles.

Ajax takes up Hector's challenge. They fight a friendly
bout and then go to feast, where the moody Achilles insults
Hector.

The next day. Hector and Troilus come to the field, the
one to avenge Achilles' insults, the other to kill the man
who has won Cressida. Hector is cruelly and cowardly
killed by Achilles. Troilus is left unhurt, cursmg.

Troilus and Cressida is the dialogue scenario
of a play that was never finished. It seems
to have been written before 1603, then laid
aside, incomplete, until the mood that
inspired it had died. Conflicting evidence

170 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

makes it doubtful whether it was acted
during Shakespeare's life. It was published,
under mysterious circumstances, a year or
two before he retired to Stratford.

Two or three scenes are finished. The
rest is indicated in the crudest dialogue,
written so hastily that it is often undramatic
and nearly always without wit or beauty.
The finished scenes are among the grandest
ever conceived by Shakespeare, but the
grandeur is that of thought, not of action.
They make it plain to us why the play was
never completed. The subject is this : a
light woman throwing over a boy. The
setting, the Trojan war : a light woman
overthrowing a city, is so much bigger than
the subject that it overshadows it. Another
subject arises in the circumstance of the
Trojan war. Achilles, the man of action,
without honour or imagination, sulks. The
wise man, Ulysses, suggests that he be brought
from his sulks by mockery. The result of
this wise counsel is that Hector, the one
bright and noble soul in the play, is killed

THE PLAYS 171

cruelly and sullenly, by the boor thus
mocked.

The two subjects and the setting are not
and cannot be brought into unity. Shake-
speare's mind wandered from his real subject
to brood upon the obsession of Helen that
betrayed Troy to the fire, and upon the
tragical working of wisdom that brought
about an end so foul. Other, and bigger,
subjects for plays tempted him from the
work. He put it aside before it was half
alive. As it stands, it has neither life nor
meaning. It oppresses the mind into making
gloomy interpretation. Tragedy in its im-
perfect form cannot but be gloomy. It is
nothing but the record of a fatal event.
But Shakespearean tragedy is tragedy in its
perfect form. It is an exultation of the
soul over the husks of life and the winds that
blow them. This play, had it ever been
finished, would have been like the other
tragedies of the great years. That it is not
finished is our misfortune.

The finished scenes are full of wisdom —

172 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitude :
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are

devour' d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done : perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright : to have done, is to

hang
Quite out of fashion."

" O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was.""

"Those wounds heal ill that men do give
themselves.^

** And sometimes we are devils to ourselves.''

Some have thought that this play was
written by Shakespeare to ridicule the two
poets, Ben Jonson (in the person of Ajax)
and John Marston (in the person of Thersites).
Those two poets were engaged, with others,
in the years 1601-2, in what is called the War
of the Theatres, that is they wrote plays to
criticise and mock each other. These plays
are often scurrilous and seldom amusing.

THE PLAYS 173

During the course of the war the two chief
combatants came to blows.

It is sad that Shakespeare should be
credited with the paltriness of lesser men.
His view of his task is expressed in Timon
of Athens with the perfect golden clearness
of supreme power —

"my free drift
Halts not particularly, but moves itself
In a wide sea of wax : no levell'd malice
Infects one comma in the course I hold;
But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on.
Leaving no tract behind.''

He held that view throughout his creative
life, as a great poet must. At the time during
which this play was written his thought was
more rigidly kept to the just survey of life
than at any other period. Creative art has
been so long inglorious that the practice and
ideas of supreme poets have become incom-
prehensible to the many. This play is a
great hint of something never, now, to be
made clear. Those who count it a mark of
Shakespeare's littleness expose their own.

174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Measure for Measure,

Written, 1603-4 (?)

Produced. (?)

Published. 1623.

Source of the Plot. The story is founded on an event
that is said to have taken place in Ferrara, during the
Middle Ages. Shakespeare took it from a collection of
novels, the Hecatomithi, by Giraldi Cinthio; from the play,
The rare Historic of Promos and Cassandra, founded on
Cinthio's novel, by one George Whetstone, and from
Whetstone's prose rendering of the story in his book
The Heptameron of Civil Discourses.

The Fable. The Duke of Vienna, going on a secret
mission, leaves his power in the hands of Angelo, a man of
strict life.

Angelo enforces old laws against incontinence. He
arrests Claudio and sentences him to be beheaded.
Claudio's sister, Isabella, pleads with Angelo for her
brother's life. Being moved to lust, Angelo tempts
Isabella. He offers to spare Claudio if she will submit to
him. Claudio begs her to save him thus. She refuses.

The Duke returns to Vienna disguised, hears Isabella's
story, and resolves to entrap Angelo. He causes her to
make an appointment to that end. He causes Mariana, a
maid who has been jilted by Angelo, to personate Isabella,
and keep the appointment. Mariana does so.

He contrives to check Angelo's treachery, that would
have caused Claudio's death in spite of the submission.

Lastly he reveals himself, exposes Angelo's sin, compels
him to marry Mariana, pardons Claudio, and makes Isabella
his Duchess.

This play is now seldom performed. It

THE PLAYS 175

is one of the greatest works of the greatest
English mind. It deals justly with the case
of the man who sets up a lifeless sentimentality
as a defence against a living natural impulse.
The spirit of Angelo has avenged itself on
Shakespeare by becoming the guardian spirit
of the British theatre.

In this play Shakespeare seems to have
brooded on the fact that the common pru-
dential virtues are sometimes due, not to
virtue, but to some starvation of the nature.
Chastity may proceed from a meanness in
the mind, from coldness of the emotions,
or from cowardice, at least as often as from
manly and cleanly thinking. Two kinds
of chastity are set at clash here. The one
springs from a fire in the personality that
causes Isabella to think death better than
contamination, and gives her that whiteness
of generosity which fills nunneries with
living sacrifice; the other comes from the
niggardliness that makes Angelo jilt Mariana
rather than take her without a dower. Both
are obsessions ; both exalt a part of life

176 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

above life itself. Like other obsessions, they
come to grief in the presence of something
real.

These two characters make the action.
The play is concerned with he difficulty of
doing justice in a world of animals swayed
by rumour. The subject is one that occupied
Shakespeare's mind throughout his creative
life. Wisdom begins in justice. But how
can man be just without the understanding
of God ? Who is so faultless that he can
sit in judgment on another ? Who so wise
that he can see into the heart, weigh the
act with the temptation and strike the
balance ?

Sexual sin is the least of the sins in
Dante. It is allied to love. It is an image
of regeneration. No sin is so common, none
is more glibly blamed. It is so easy to cry
" treacherous," " base," and " immoral."
But who, while the heart beats, can call
himself safe from the temptation to this sin ?
It is mixed up with every generosity. It is
a flood in the heart and a blinding wave over

THE PLAYS 177

the eyes. It is the thorn in the side under
the cloak of the beauty of youth. In Shake-
speare's vision it is a natural force incident
to youth, as April is incident to the year.
The young men live as though life were
oil, and youth a bonfire to be burnt. Life is
always wasteful. Youth is life's test for man-
hood. The clown finds in the prison a great
company of the tested and rejected, calling
through the bars for alms. In spite of all this
choice, another victim is picked by tragical
chance. Lucio, a butterfly of the brothel, a
dirtier soul than Claudio, is spared. Claudio
is taken and condemned. The beautiful, vain,
high-blooded youth, so quick with life and
glad of the sun, is to lie in earth, at the
bidding of one less full of April.

Angelo, the man whose want of sympathy
condemns Claudio, is in the state of security
that precedes so much Shakespearean tragedy.
He has received the name of being more than
human because (unlike his admirers) he has
not shown himself to be considerably less.
He has come through youth unsinged. He

178 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

has not been betrayed by his *' gross body's
treason." Both he and those about him
think that he is proof against temptation
to sexual sin. Suddenly his security is
swept away. He is betrayed by the subtler
temptatipn that would mean nothing to a
grosser man. He is moved by the sight of
the beauty of a distressed woman's mind.
The sight means nothing to Claudio, and
less than nothing to Lucio. The happy
animal nature of youthful man has a way
of avoiding distressed women. The cleverer
man, who has shut himself up in the half
life of sentiment, cannot so escape. He is
attacked suddenly by the unknown im-
prisoned side of him as well as by temptation,
He falls, and, like all who fall, he falls not to
one sin, but to a degradation of the entire
man The sins come linked. " Treason and
murder ever kept together." When he is
once involved with lust, treachery and murder
follow. He is swiftly so stained that when
the wise Duke shows him as he is, he shrinks
from the picture, with a cry that he may be

THE PLAYS 179

put out of the way by some swift merciful
death so that the horror of the knowledge of
himself may end, too.

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

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

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

180 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

knowledge with dearer love." The music of
the great manner rings —

*' Merciful Heaven !
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous

bolt
Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape.
Plays such fantastic tricks before high

heaven,
As make the angels weep."

The prose accompaniment to what is unre-
strained in youth provides a cruel comedy.

Othello, the Moor of Venice.

Written. 1604 (?)

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

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

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

Othello marries Desdemona, and sails with her to the

THE PLAYS 181.

war8 m Cyprus. lago resolves to make use of Desdemona-
to cause Cassio's downfall.

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

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

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

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

182 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

generous mind. The varying quality of its
working makes the action of the play.

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

He succeeds in this, through his natural
adroitness, the working of chance, and the
generosity of Othello, who has too much
passion to be anything but blind under
passionate influence like love or jealousy.
The mean man's want of emotion keeps always

THE PLAYS 183

the conduct of the vengeance precise and clear.
Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been
fooled to the top of his bent, is killed. Des-
demona is smothered. Othello is ruined.

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

The influence and importance of the little
thing in the great event is marked in this
scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the
greater tragedies. We are all or may at any
time become immensely important to the play

184 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of the world. Had Emilia come a minute
sooner or a minute later the end of the play
would have been very different. Desdemona
would have lived to repent her marriage at
leisure, or she would have gone to her grave
branded. '

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

THE PLAYS 185

see by his aid. He found in lago an image
like life itself, a power and an activity,
prompted by something secret and silent.

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

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

186 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

have violent ends and bring violent ends to
others.

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

" It is the very error of the moon.
She comes more near the earth than she was

wont
And drives men mad,"

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

King Lear,

Written. 1605-6.

Published. 1608.

Source of the Plot. The story of Lear is told in Holin-
shed's Chronicles, in a play by an unknown hand, The
True Chronicle History of King Leir, and in a few
stanzas of the tenth canto of the second Book of Spenser' 3
Faerie Queene.

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

THE PLAYS 187

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

Gloucester, deceived by his bastai'd Edmund, casts oft
Edgar his son.

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

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

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

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

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

The play of King Lear is based upon a
fable and a fairy story. It illustrates the

188 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

most terrible forms of treachery, that of
child against father, and father against child.
It is the most affecting and the grandest of
the plays.

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

The blindness in the one case is sentimental,
in the other wilful. Being established, fate
makes use of it. One of the chief lessons of
the plays is that man is only safe when his
mind is perfectly just and calm. Any in-

THE PLAYS 189

justice, trouble or hunger in the mind delivers
man to powers who restore calmness and
justice by means violent or gentle according
to the strength of the disturbing obsession.
This play begins at the moment when an estab-
lished blindness in two men is about to become
an instrument of fate for the violent opening
of their eyes. The blindness in both cases is
against the course of nature. It is unnatural
that Lear should give his kingship to women,
and that he should curse his youngest child^
It is unnatural that Gloucester should make
much of a bastard son whom he has hardly
seen for nine years. It is deeply unnatural
that both Lear and Gloucester should believe
evil suddenly of the youngest, best beloved,
and most faithful spirits in the play. As the
blindness that causes the injustice is great
and unnatural, so the working of fate to purge
the eyes and restore the balance is violent and
unnatural. Every person important to the
action is thrust into an unnatural way of life.
Goneril and Regan rule their father, commit
the most ghast\y and beastly cruelty, lust

190 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

after the same man, and die unnaturally
(having betrayed each other), the one by her
sister's hand, the other by her own. Lear is
driven mad. The King of France is forced to
war with his wife's sisters. Edmund betrays
his half-brother to ruin and his father to blind-
ness. Cornwall is stabbed by his servant,
Edgar kills his half-brother. Gloucester,
thrust out blind, dies when he finds that his
wronged son loves him. Cordelia, fighting
against her own blood, is betrayed to death
by one who claims to love her sisters. The
honest mild man, Albany, and the honest blunt
man, Kent, survive the general ruin. Had
Kent been a little milder and Albany a little
blunter in the first act, before the fates were
given strength, the ruin would not have been.
All the unnatural treacherous evil comes to
pass, because for a few fatal moments they
were true to their natures.

The play is an excessive image of all that
was most constant in Shakespeare's mind.
Being an excessive image, it contains matter
nowhere else given. It is all schemed and

THE PLAYS 191

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

No image in the world is so fierce with
imaginative energy. The stormy soul runs
out storming in a night of the soul as mad as
the elements. With him goes the invention

192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool, like
conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him
mad with ironic comment and bitter song.

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

** You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunder-
bolts,"

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

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

THE PLAYS 198

He has been stricken down. " The wheel has
come full circle." He has learned too late that

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

He can hardly hope to live for more than a few
minutes. The death of his last two victims
cannot benefit him. A word from him would
save them. No one else can save them. Yet
at the last minute, his one little glimmer of
faithfulness keeps the word unspoken. He is
silent for GoneriFs sake. If he ever cared for
any one in the world, except himself, he may
have cared a little for Goneril. He thinks of
her now. She has gone from him. But she
is on his side, and he trusts to her, and acts
for her. He waits for some word or token
from her. He waits to see her save him or
avenge him. The death of Lear will benefit
her. It will be to her something saved from
the general wreck, something to the good, in
the losing bout. An impulse stirs him to
speak, but he puts it by. He keeps silent
about Lear, till one comes saying that Goneril

194 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

has killed herself. Still he does not speak.
The news pricks the vanity in him. He strokes
his plumes with a tender thought for the
brightness of the life that made two princesses
die for love of him. When he speaks of Lear, it
is too late, the little, little instant which alters
destiny has passed. Cordelia is dead. No mist
stains the stone. She will come no more —

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

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

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

THE PLAYS 195

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

Macbeth,

Written. 1605-6 (?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

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

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

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

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

The witches warn Macbeth to beware of MacduS.

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

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

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

Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shake-

O 2

196 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

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

THE PLAYS 197

the dangerous things because their attack is
made in the guise of great things. Tears look
Hke grief, sentiment looks like love; love feels
like nobility ; spiritualism seems like revelation.
Among these things few are stronger than
the words spoken in unworldly states, in
trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by
soothsayers, by the wholly excited people who
are also half sane, by whoever obtains a half
knowledge of the spirit by destruction of
intellectual process.

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

Coming weary and excited from battle, on a
day so strange that it adds to the strangeness
of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him
with prophecy. The promise rankles in him.
The seed scattered in us by the beings outside
life comes to good or evil according to the
sun in us. Macbeth, looking on the letter of
the prophecy, thinks only of the letter of its
fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with

198 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

him. Partial fulfilment of the prophecy
convinces him that all will be fulfilled. The
belief that the veil over the future has been
lifted for him gives him the recklessness of one
bound in the knots of fate. So often, the
thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out
something planned of old, makes man take the
frantic way, when the smallest belief in life
would lead to peace. This thought passes
through his mind. Then fear that it is all a
contriving of the devils makes him put it
manfully from his mind. The talk about the
Cawdor whose place he holds is a thrust to
him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has
been put to death for treachery. The king
had an " absolute trust " in him; but there
is no judging by appearances. This glimpse
of the ugliness of treachery makes Macbeth
for an instant free of all temptation to it.
Then a word stabs him again to the knowledge
that if he take no step the king's young son will
be king after Duncan. Why should the boy
rule ? From this point he goes forward, full of
all the devils of indecision, but inclining towards

THE PLAYS 199

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

200 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

"And you all know security
Is mortal's chief est enemy.*'

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

*' the equivocation of the fiend
That lies hke truth."

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

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

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

THE PLAYS 201

" And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin,

horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air."

" Our chinmeys were blown down, and, as they

say,
Lamentings heard i' the air, strange

screams of death.
And prophesying with accents terrible."

*' In the great hand of God I stand."

" A falcon towering in her pride of place
Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.
And Duncan's horses — a thing most strange

and certain —
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their

race,
Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls,

flung out.
Contending 'gainst obedience, as they

would make
War with mankind.

'Tis said they eat each other."

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

202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

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

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

Antony and Cleopatra,

Written. 1607-8 (?)

Published, in the folio, 1623.

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

The Fable. Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra,
shakes himself free so that he may attend to the oonduot
of the world. He makes a pact with the young Caesar,
by marrying Caesar's sister Ootavia. Soon afterwards,
being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra, he falls into

THE PLAYS 203

wars with CsBsar. Being unhappy in his fortune and
deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having
lost her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Csesar,
also kills herself.

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

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

It cannot be said that the play is greater than
the other plays of this period. It can be
said that it is on a greater scale than any
other play. The scene is the Roman world.
The men engaged are struggling for the
control of all the power of the world. The
private action is played out before a grand
public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of
the poetry answer the greatness of the subject.
Shakespeare's later tragedies, King Lear,
Coriolanus, Othello, and this play differ from
some of the early tragedies in that the subject
is not the man of intellect, hounded down by

204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the man of affairs, as in Richard Ily Richard
III, and Henry IV, but the man of large and
generous nature hounded down by the man
of intellect. In all four plays the destruction
of the principal character is brought about
partly by a blindness in a noble nature, but
very largely by a cool, resolute, astute soul
who can and does take advantage of the
blindness. Edmund, the tribunes, lago, and
(in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls.
All of them profit by the soul they help to
destroy. They leave upon the mind the
impression that they have a tact for the
gaining of profit from human frailty. All
of them show the basest ingratitude under a
colourable cloak of human excuse.

The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-
a-dozen of Shakespeare's plays ; but in
none of them so fully as here. The results
of that obsession in treachery and tragedy
brim the great play. Antony is drunken
to destruction with a woman like a raging
thirst. A fine stroke in the creation of the
play sweeps him clear of her and offers him

THE PLAYS 205

a way of life. He uses the moment to get
so far from her that his return to her is a
deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar,
and to his country. His intoxication with
the woman degrades him to the condition
of blindness in which the woman-drunken
staggers. It is a part of all drunkenness
that the drunkard thinks himself a king,
though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's
marvellous illustration of this blindness (in
the third act) is seldom praised as it should
be. Antony, crushingly defeated, owing to
the treachery of all debauched natures, calls
upon Octavius to meet him in single combat.

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

" when we in our viciousness grow hard,
O misery on't — the wise gods seel our eyes;
In our own filth drop our clear judgments;

make us
Adore our errors ; laugh at 's while we strut
To our confusion."

206 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

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

'* The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"

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

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

"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave,
what's noble.
Let's do it after the hiorh Roman fashion.

THE PLAYS 207

And make Death proud to take us . .

.... we have no friend
But resolution and the briefest end,"

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

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

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

** 0 eastern star I

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

are among the most beautiful things ever
written by man

208 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Coriolanus,

Written. 1608 (?)

Published. 1623.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I

THE PLAYS 209

be infinitesimal, must be a progress of the
whole mass, not a sudden darting out of one
quality or one member.

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

" Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,
And let me use my sword, I'ld make a quarry
With thousands of these quartered slaves, as

high
As I could pick my lance."

210 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

** It will in time
Win power upon and throw forth greater

themes
For insurrection's arguing."

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

Much of the pride of Coriolanus springs
from a sense of his superiority to others in
the gifts of fortune. Much of it comes from
the knowledge that he is superior in himself.

THE PLAYS 211

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

He fails as a traitor, because he is too noble
to be fiercely revengeful. A lesser man, a
Richard III, or an lago, would have exacted

212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

a bloody toll from Rome. Coriolanus cannot
bring himself to be stern, in the presence of
his old mother and his wife. Something
generous and truly aristocratic in him makes
him a second time a traitor, this time to his
hosts the Volscians. He spares Rome by the
sacrifice of those who have given him a
shelter and a welcome. Treachery (even from
a noble motive) is never forgiven in these
plays. It is always avenged, seldom merci-
fully. The Volscians avenge themselves on
Coriolanus by an act of treachery that brings
the noble heart under the foot of the traitor.
Coriolanus is one of the greatest of Shake-
speare's creations. Much of the glory of
the creation is due to Plutarch. There can
be no great art without great fable. Great
art can only exist where great men brood
intensely on something upon which all men
brood a little. Without a popular body of
fable there can be no unselfish art in any
country. Shakespeare's art was selfish till
he turned to the great tales in the four most
popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's

THE PLAYS 213

Plutarch, Cinthio, and De Belief orest. Since
the newspaper became powerful, topic has
supplanted fable, and subject comes to the
artist untrimmed and unlit by the vitality
of many minds. In reading Coriolanics and
the other plays of the great period a man feels
that Shakespeare fed his fire with all that
was passionate in the thought about him.
He appears to be his age focussed. The great
man now stands outside his age, like Timon.

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

Greatness is sometimes shown in very little

214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

things. Few things in Shakespeare show
better the fulness of his happy power than
the following —

(Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils,)
1st Roman, This will I carry to Rome.
2nd Roman. And I this.
Brd Roman, A murrain on't. I took this
for silver.

Timon of Athens.

Written. 1606-8 (?)

Published. 1623.

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

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

Timon of Athens is a play of mixed author-
ship. Shakespeare's share in it is large and
unmistakable; but much of it was WTitten
by an unknown poet of whom we can de-
cipher this, that he was a man of genius, a
skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked

THE PLAYS 215

personality. It cannot now be known how
the collaboration was arranged. Either the
unknown collaborated with Shakespeare, or
the unknown wrote the play and Shakespeare
revised it.

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

Apemantus is currish, because others are
not. He has wit without charity. Alcibiades
makes war on his city because others have not
the rough-and-ready large practical justice of
men used to knocks. He has a large good
humour without idealism. Timon, the great-
natured, truly generous man, whose mind is
as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish,
nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding

216 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

men base, he removes himself from them, and
ministers with bitter contempt to the base-
ness that infects them. The flaming out of
his anger against whatever is parasitic in
life makes the action of the last two acts.
The exhibition of the baseness of parasites
and of the wrath of a noble mind embittered,
is contrived, varied and heightened with
intense dramatic energy. The character of
Flavins, Timon's steward, his only friend,
shows again, as in so many of the plays,
Shakespeare's deep sense of the noble gener-
osity in faithful service.

Some think the play gloomy, others that it
is autobiography. Shakespeare's completed
work is never gloomy. A great mind work-
ing with such a glory of energy cannot be
gloomy. This generation is gloomy and un-
imaginative in its conception of art. Shake-
speare, reading the story of Timon, saw in
him an image of tragic destiny that would
flood the heart of even an ingrate with pity.
Great poets have something more difficult
and more noble to do than to pin their hearts

THE PLAYS 217

on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Shake-
speare wrought the figure of Timon with as
grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He
wrought both from something feeling within
himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Mac-
beth, and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much
autobiographical, and as little, as the hundred
other passionate moods that built up the
system of his soul.

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

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

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

The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades
after he has read the epitaph, with which
Timon goes down to death, like some hurt
thing shrinking even from the thought of

218 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

passers, is one of the most lovely examples
of the power and variety of blank verse as a
form of dramatic speech.

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

These well express in thee thy latter spirits :
Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human

griefs,
Scorned' st our brain's flow and those our

droplets which
From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for

aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead
Is noble Timon ; of whose memory
Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive with my sword,
Make war breed peace, make peace stint war,

make each
Prescribe to other as each other's leech.
Let our drums strike.

PericleSy Prince of Tyre.

Written. 1607-8 (?)

Published. 1608.

Source of the Plot. The plot is taken from an English

THE PLAYS 219

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

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

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

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

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

Act V, Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great

220 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

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

The construction of the last three acts
makes it likely that the play (in its original
state) was by the constructor of the first two
acts. It is not known how it came to pass
that Shakespeare took the play in hand.
From the comparative feebleness of his work
upon it, it may be judged that it was not a

THE PLAYS 221

labour of love. The impression given is that
nothing in the piece is wrought with more
than the mechanical power of the great mind,
that Shakespeare was not deeply interested
in the play, but that he re- wrote the last three
acts so that his company might play the
piece and make money by it. The play has
often succeeded on the stage, and the know-
ledge that it would succeed may have weighed
with the manager of a theatre on which many
depended for bread.

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

Bawd. . . they are so pitifully sodden.
Pandar. . . The poor Transylvanian is dead,

that lay with the little baggage.
Boult. Ay . . . she made him roast-meat

for worms —

222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

" My father, as nurse said, did never fear.
But cried ' Good seamen I ' to the sailors,

galling
His kingly hands, haling ropes;
And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea
That almost burst the deck. . . .
Never was waves nor wind more violent :
And from the ladder-tackle washes off
A canvas-climber. *Ha,' says one, *wilt

out?'
And with a dropping industry they skip
From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles,

and
The master calls and trebles their con-
fusion " —

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

THE PLAYS 223

Cymbeline*

Written. (?)

Published, in the folio, 1623.

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

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

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

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

It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun
as a tragedy during the great mood of tragical
creation, then laid aside unfinished, from

224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

some failure in the vision, or change in the
creative mood, and brought to an end later
in a new spirit, perhaps in another place, in
the country, away from the life which makes
writing alive. It is the least perfect of the
later plays. The least soft of Shakespeare's
critics calls it " unresisting imbecility." It is
perhaps the first composed of the romantic
plays with which Shakespeare ended his life's
work.

Though the writing is so careless and the
construction so loose that no one can think of
it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes,
one faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty.
It deals with the Shakespearean subject of
craft working upon a want of faith for personal
ends, and being defeated, when almost success-
ful, by something simple and instinctive in
himian nature. It is thus not unlike Othello ;
but in Othello the subject is simple, and the
treatment purely tragic. In Cymbeline the
subject is only partly extricated, and the treat-
ment is coloured with romance, with that
strange, touching, very Shakespearean romance,

THE PLAYS 225

of the thing long lost beautifully recovered
before the end, so that the last years of the
chief man in the play may be happy and
complete. The end of life would be as
happy as the beginning if the dead might
be given back to us. Shakespeare had lost a
child.

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

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

226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

Noble instants are marked in the lines —

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

and in the symbol of the eagle —

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

The Winter's Tale.

Written, 1610-11.

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

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

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

The oracle of Apollo declares to him that Hermione is
innocent, that he himself is a jealous tyrant, and that he

THE PLAYS 227

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

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

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

The moral lesson is still of value to the world,
and it is most certainly one which Shakespeare
strove to impress. Shakespeare's mind was
always brooding on the working of fate. He
was always watching the results of some obses-
sion upon an individual and the people con-

H 2

228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

nected with him. He saw that a blindness
falling upon a person suddenly, for no apparent
reason, except that something strikes the some-
thing not quite sound in the nature, has the
power to alter life violently. It was his belief
that life must not be altered violently. Life is
a thing of infinitely gradual growth, that would
perfect itself if the blindness could be kept
away. Any deceiving thing, like a passion or
a feigned beggar, is a cause of the putting back
of life, indefmitely.

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

It may be called the gentlest of Shakespeare's
plays. It is done with a tenderer hand than

THE PLAYS 229

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

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

is haunting and heart-breaking. All his

280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

longing of remorse gives to the last great
scene, before the supposed statue, an intensity
of beauty hardly endurable.

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

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

" daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

THE PLAYS 281

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength."

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

The Tempest

Written. 1610-11.

Published, in the folio, 1623.

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

1st. From a little collection of novels by Antonio de
Eslava, a Spanish writer, whose book, Noches de Invierno,
was published in Barcelona in 1609. Three tales in this
collection seem to have given hints for the play. The
fourth chapter, about " The Art Magic of King Dardano,"
helped him more than the others. Whether the title of

232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the book suggested the title of A Winter's Tale is not
known.

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

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

Several other books may have suggested lines and

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

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

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

THE PLAYS 233

" Though with their high wrongs I am struck

to the quick,
Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance : they being

penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further."

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

It is easy to interpret the play as allegory.
Youth in this country has reason to regard
allegory as a climisy man's way of introducing
Sunday on a week day It is so seldom
successful that it may be called the literary
method of creative minds below the first rank,
Shakespeare's method was never allegorical.
The Tempest is perhaps no more allegorical

234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

than any other good romance. But the
thought of it is so clear that the first impres-
sion given is that it is thin. It is the study of
a man of intellect, who has been forced from
power by a treacherous brother. Living
alone with his bright, unspoiled daughter, he
attains, by intellectual labour, to a power over
destiny. Like the wise man of the proverb,
he learns to master his stars. He uses this
power nobly to put an end to ancient hatred
and old injustice.

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

THE PLAYS 235

strength than the base Sebastian and the
treacherous Antonio.

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

King Henry Vlll, or All is True,

Written, 1611-13 (?)

Produced. (?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

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

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

Act II. In this act, Buckingham is beheaded, the King

286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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

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

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

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

Little of this play is by Shakespeare. The
greater part of it is by John Fletcher. Some
scenes bear the marks of a third hand, like
that of Philip Massinger. The play reads as
though the two lesser poets had worked from
a scenario of Shakespeare's less complete than
the draft of Troilus and Cressida. It is
certain that they received no hint of the lines
on which Shakespeare meant to proceed after
the end of Act III. Not knowing what to do,
they patched up a piece without any central
tragical idea, and hid their want of thought
with much effective theatrical invention,

i

THE PLAYS 237

pageants, a trial, a coronation, a christening,
etc., and with bright, facile, vinous dialogue,
of the kind that will hold an uncritical
audience. The play, when done, was mounted
with extreme splendour at the Globe Theatre.
Wadding from the cannons discharged in the
first act set fire to the theatre, and burned it
to the ground, June 29, 1613.

Shakespeare's dramatic intention is indi-
cated in the scenes written by him. Knowing
his practice, and having before us Holinshed,
his authority, it is easy to sketch out the kind
of play that he would have written by himself.
Wolsey, eaten up by his obsession for worldly
power, betraying Buckingham to his fall,
breaking the power of the Queen, and ruling
England, would have filled the first two acts.
The third act would have told (much more
subtly than Fletcher has told) of his downfall.
Fletcher attributes the downfall to the chance
discovery of his attempt to thwart the king's
marriage with Anne Bullen. That discovery
would have been put to full dramatic use by
Shakespeare; but it would have been repre-

238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

sented as something working from beyond the
grave, the result of many unjust acts that
have cried to God for justice till God hears.
The last acts would have exposed other sides
of Wolsey's character. The play would have
been a fuller, nobler work than Richard II,
and of an ampler canvas than Timon. Shake-
speare's share in the play as we have it is all
noble work. Wolsey, Katharine and the King
are drawn with the great, sharp, ample line of
a master. The difference between genius and
supreme genius is shown very clearly in the
first act, where a great work, greatly begun,
with the masterly power of exposition that
makes Shakespeare's first acts like day-
breaks, is ended by another spirit, without
vision, but with a tremendous sense of Vanity
Fair.

WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE

A play called Cardenno, or Cardenna, was
acted at Court by Shakespeare's company in
1618. It is thought that this play was the

THE PLAYS 239

History of Cardenio, described as " by Fletcher
and Shakespeare," which was licensed for
publication in 1653 but never published.
The play is now lost. It was attributed to
Fletcher and Shakespeare on very poor
authority.

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

Edward III is an historical chronicle play
by at least two unknown hands. It was
published anonymously in 1596. Some think
that part of Act I and the whole of Act II
(dealing with the King's obsession of passion
for the Countess of Salisbury) were by Shake-
speare, on the grounds that the writing is

240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

too good to be by anybody else then living,
and that the unknown author makes use of
a line and a phrase which occur in the genuine
sonnets of Shakespeare. The scenes attri-
buted to Shakespeare contain several beauti-
ful lines in something of the Shakespearean
manner. The construction of the scenes,
and their relation to the rest of the play
is un-Shakespearean. It is unlikely that
Shakespeare wrote them.

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

The Two Noble Kinsmen, a romantic
tragedy on the subject of Chaucer's Knighfs
Tale, was first published in 1634. It was
described on the title-page as the joint work
of Fletcher and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's

THE POEMS 241

hand is plainly marked upon the play; but
it seems likely that most of the scenes usually
credited to him are by Massinger. Few can
have ears dull enough to credit Shakespeare
with all the scenes that are plainly not by
Fletcher.

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

THE POEMS

Venus and Adonis. — This poem was pub-
lished in 1593 with a dedication to the
Earl of Southampton, then a youth. In the
dedication Shakespeare speaks of the poem
as *' the first heire of my invention," from

242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

which some conclude that it was the first
poem ever made public by him.

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

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

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

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

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

The Rape of Lucrece. — This poem was
published in 1594, with a dedication to the

THE POEMS 243

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

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

It is strange that both Lucrece and Hamlet,
in their moments of distraction, turn to the

244 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

image of Troy blazing with the punishment
of treachery.

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

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

These personal poems have puzzled many
readers. Many writers have tried to interpret

THE POEMS 245

them. Although their first editor tells us
that they are " serene, cleare, and elegantlie
plaine (with) no intricate and cloudie stuff e
to trouble and perplex the intellect," much
good and bad brain work has been spent on
them. Some have held that they are poetical
exercises. Others find that they are con-
fessions. Others wrest from dark lines dark
meanings, till they have laid bare a story
from them. Others interpret spiritually.
Others find evidence in them that Shake-
speare was guilty of an abnormal form of
passion. The facts about them may be
stated —

1. They are personal poems. Some of
them are of great beauty; others are un-
successful.

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

3. They were written to more than one
person. Many were written to an attractive.

246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

handsome, young, unmarried man, Shake-
speare's dear friend. Men with imagination
enjoy sweeter and closer friendships than the
many know. The many, mulish as ever,
therefore imagine evil.

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

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

No one knows who the friend, the lady
and the rival poet were. The discovery of
letters and manuscripts may some day re-
move the mystery. " Against that time,

THE POEMS 247

if ever that time come," men of intellect
would do well to accept the sonnets as
beautiful poems, and try to write as good
ones to their wives.

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

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

"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
( ) these rebel powers that thee array,

248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Why dost thou pine within and suffer

dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay ?
Why so large cost, having so short a

lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend ?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess.
Eat up thy charge ? is this thy body's

end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's

loss.
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine with selling hours of

dross ;
Within be fed, without be rich no more :
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on

men.
And Death once dead, there's no more

dying then."

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

THE POEMS 249

felicitous as youth's work often is, and very
nearly as empty.

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

Poetry moves in many ways. It may
glorify and make spiritual some action of
man, or it may give to thoughts such life as
thoughts can have, an intenser and stranger
life than man knows, with forms that are

250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

not human and a speech unintelligible to
normal human moods. This poem gives to
a flock of thoughts about the passing of
truth and beauty the mystery and vitality
of birds, who come from a far country, to
fill the mind with their crying.

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

Many English minds have paid tribute to
Shakespeare. Few of them deserve more

AUTHOR'S NOTE 251

praise than the Cambridge Editors, whose
six years of labour cleared the text of count-
less errors and corruptions. The correction
of a corrupt text by collation and conjecture,
is one of the most difficult and least amusing
tasks that a fine mind can have. The Cam-
bridge Shakespeare, the work of William
George Clark and Dr. William Aldis Wright,
gives a text not likely to be improved
until the poet's corrected manuscripts are
found.

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

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

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

Our knowledge of Shakespeare is imperfect.
It can only be increased by minute and
patient study, by the rejection of surmise

252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

about him, and by the constant public play-
ing of his plays, in the Shakespearean manner,
by actors who will neither mutilate nor
distort what the great mind strove to make
just.

INDEX OF CHARACTERS

Achilles, 169, 170
Adonis, 241, 242
Adriana, 46, 47
Mgon, 44, 46, 49
Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, 139
Ajax, 169, 172
Albany, Duke of, 187, 190
Alcibiades, 214, 215, 217, 218
Angelo, 174, 175, 177, 196
Anne Bullen, 236, 237
Anne, Lady, 93, 100
Antipholus of Ephesus, 44, 46
Antipholus of Syracuse, 44
Antonio {MercharU of Venice),

103
Antonio {Tempest), 232, 236
Antonio {Two Gentlernen of

Verona), 34
Apemantus, 215
Armado, 30, 31
Arthur, Prince, 75, 80, 83, 84
Audrey, 129
Austria, Lymoges, Duke of,

81
Autolycus, 228

Banquo, 195, 200
Bardolph, 122, 124, 126
Bassanio, 103

Beatrice, 133, 134, 136, 137
Beaufort, Cardinal, 61, 65, 67,

68,59
Belarius, 223
Belch, Sir Toby, 82, 138, 139,

217
Benedick, 133, 134, 136
Bertram, 144, 145, 146

Bianca, 105, 108

Biondello, 107

Biron, 24, 25, 32, 36

Blanch of Spain, 75, 79

Borachio, 134, 135

Bottom, 63

Boyet, 30

Brutus, 149, 150, 154, 156

Buckingham, Duke of {Rich-
ard III), 94, 98, 99

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

Cade, Jack, 55, 57

Caius, Dr., 124, 126

Calchas, 169

Carlisle, Bishop of, 89, 92

Cassio, 180, 181, 183

Cassius, 149

Cawdor, 198

Celia, 128, 129

Cerimon, 222

Clarence, George, Duke of, 93,

94, 98, 100
Claudio {Measure/or Measure),

174, 177, 178
Claudio {Mwh Ado), 133, 134,

135
Claudius {Hamlet), 157, 158,

160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166
Cleopatra, 202, 203, 207, 217
Cloten, 223

Cordelia, 187, 188, 190, 192
Coriolanus, 196, 208, 209, 210,

211, 212
Cornwall, Duke of, 190
Costard, 30, 31

253

254 INDEX OF CHARACTERS

Cranmer, 236
Cressida, 169
Cymbeline, 223, 226

Demetrius, 63

Deademona, 180, 181; 183,

184, 185
Diana {AlVs WeU), U4
Di&na {Pericles), 219, 220
Don John, 133, 134, 135
Don Pedro, 133, 134, 136
Dorset, Marquess of, 98
Dromio of Ephesus, 44
Dromio of Syracuse, 44, 46
Dumaine, 24, 32
Duncan, King, 154, 195, 198,

201

Edgar, 187, 190

Edmund, 187, 188, 189, 190,

192, 204
Edward III, 239
Edward IV, 93, 94
Edward, Prince of Wales

{Eenry VI\ 62
Edward, Prince of Wales

{Richard III), 99
Eglamour, 41
EHnor, Queen, 78
Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV,

94
Elizabeth, Princess, 236
Emilia, 183, 184
Evans, Sir Hugh, 124, 125

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

Flavins, 216

Florizel, 227

Fluellen, 123

Fool {Lear), 192

Ford, Mistress, 124, 126

Fortinbras, 161

Frederick, Duke, 128, 129,

132
Friar Laurence, Q%, 71, 74

Gertrude, Queen, 157, 168,

161, 165
Ghost {Hamlet), 158
Gloucester, Earl of, 187, 188,

189, 190
Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke

of, 51, 66, 57, 58, 69
Gloucester, Richard, Duke of,

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

{Richard III), 93, 115
Goneril, 187, 189, 193
Grey, Lord, 98, 99

Hamlet, 158, 160, 162, 163,

164, 165, 166, 191, 196, 243
Hastings, Lord, 99
Hector, 169, 170
Helen, 171
Helena {Midsummer Night's

Dream), 63
Helena {AlVs JFell), 144, 146,

147
Henry IV, 109, 110, 111, 113,

114, 116
Henry V, 120, 121
Henry VI, 51, 52, 60, 61, 62
Henry VIII, 235, 236, 237,

238
Henry, Prince of Wales, 109,

111, 112, 114, 118
Henry Bolingbroke, 86, 87.

88, 89, 90, 92
Hermia, 63

Hermione, 226, 227, 229
Hero, 133, 134, 135
Hippolyta, 63
Hotspur, Henry Percy, sur-

named, 109, 110, 111, 113,

114, 116, 119

INDEX OF CHARACTERS 255

Hubert de Burgh, 80, 83

lachimo, 223, 225

lago, 181, 182, 184, 185, 204,

211
Imogen, 223
Isabella, 174, 176

Jaques, 129, 131, 132

Joan of Arc, 51, 54

John, King of England, 76, 76,

77, 78, 80
John of Gaunt, 86, 89, 91
John of Lancaster, 114, 118
Julia, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42
Juliet, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71
►Julius Caesar, 149, 153, 154,

156, 196

Katharina, 106, 108
Katharine, 32
Katharine of France, 120
Katharine, Queen, 235, 236,

237, 238
Kent, 187, 190

Laertes, 158, 161

Launce, 42

Lear, King, 187, 188, 189,

190, 191, 193, 194
Lennox, 202
Leonato, 135, 136
Leontes, King of Sicilia, 226,

227, 228, 229
Lewis the Dauphin, 75, 79
Longaville, 24, 32
Lucio, 177, 178
Lucrece, 243
Lysander, 63

Macbeth, 191, 195, 196, 197,

198, 199, 200, 202, 217
Macbeth, Lady, 195, 199, 200
Macduff, 195, 202

Malcolm, 195

MalvoUo, 138, 139, 140, 141

Mamillius, 227, 229

Marcius, 208

Margaret of Anjou, 52, 55, 62,

94
Maria, 139
Mariana, 174, 175
Marina, 219, 220, 222
Mark Antony, 149, 191, 196,

202, 204, 206
Mercutio, 68, 70
Milan, Duke of, 34, 35, 38, 89
Miranda, 232
Mortimer, 53

Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray,

Duke of, 86, 119
Northumberland, Henry

Percy, Earl of, 114
Nurse to Juliet, 74
Nym, 123, 124

Oberon, 63

Octavia, 202

Octavius C?esar, 149, 202, 203,

205
Olivia, 138, 140, 141
Oliver, 128, 129
OpheUa, 157, 158, 166
Orlando, 128, 129, 131
Orsino, 138, 139, 140, 141,

142
Othello, 180, 181, 182, 183,

186, 191, 196

Page, Anne, 124

Page, Mistress, 124

Pandarus, 169

Pandulph, Cardinal, 76

Paris, 68

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 218,

219 220
Petruchio, 105. 107

256 INDEX OF CHARACTERS

Phebe, 129, 132, 133

Philip the Bastard, 77, 78,

80, 82, 83
Philip of France, 75, 80
Pistol. 117, 122, 123, 124
Polixenes, King of Bohemia,

226, 227, 228
Polonius, 158, 161
Portia, 102, 103, 104, 132
Posthumua, 223, 225
Prosporo, Duke of Milan, 232,

235
Proteus, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41
Puck, 63
Pyramus, 63

Queen (Cymbeline), 223, 225
Quickly, Mrs., 124

Regan, 187, 18»

Richard II, 86, 87, 88, 89,

90, 92, 115, 119
Richard III, 93, 94, 96, 98,

99, 102, 211
Richard, Duke of York, 99
Rivers, Earl, 98, 99
Roderigo, 183
Romeo, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71
Rosalind, 128, 129, 132
Rosaline, 25, 31, 32, 69, 133

Salisbury, Countess of, 239
Scroop, Lord, 122
Sebastian (Tempest), 236
Sebastian ( Twelfth NigfU),

138
Shallow, Justice, 82, 124
Shylock, 103, 104
Silvia, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41
Simpcox, 65, 69

Slender, Master, 124
Sly, Christopher, 105, 107
Somerset, Earl of, 61
Stephano, 234
Suffolk, Earl of, 52, 66, 67

Talbot, 51, 54
Tamora, 49, 50
Tarquin, 196, 243
Thaisa, 219, 220, 222
Thersites, 172
Theseus, 63, 66
Thisbe, 63

Thurio, 34, 35, 37, 38
Timon of Athens, 196, 209,
213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218
Titania, 63

Titus Andronicus, 49, 50
Touchstone, 129
Trinculo, 234
Troilus, 169
Tybalt, 68, 70

Ulysses, 170
Ursula, 133

Valentine, 34. 36, 38, 39, 41
Venus, 241, 242
Vienna, Duke of, 174, 178
Viola, 138, 139, 141, 142

Warwick, Earl of, 59, 61
Wolsey, Cardinal, 196, 236,
236, 237, 238 '^

York, Edmund of Langley,

Duke of, 89, 92
York, Edward, Duke of, 61
York, Richard, Duke of. 51.

55, 57, 62

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