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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of William Shakespeare, by John Masefield
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: William Shakespeare
+
+Author: John Masefield
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2008 [EBook #27264]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Carla Foust and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. Obvious
+printer errors have been corrected, and are listed at the end.
+
+For the chapter heading, "The Second Part of King Henry IV", the Table
+of Contents lists it as "King Henry IV, Part II"; this was not changed.
+In addition other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.
+
+
+
+
+    HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
+    OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
+
+    BY JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+    LONDON
+
+    WILLIAMS & NORGATE
+
+    HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YORK
+    CANADA: WM. BRIGGS, TORONTO
+    INDIA: R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.
+
+
+
+
+    UNIVERSITY
+
+    LIBRARY
+
+    OF
+
+    MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+    _Editors:_
+
+    HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+
+    PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT.,
+        LL.D., F.B.A.
+
+    PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+
+    PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+        (Columbia University, U.S.A.)
+
+
+    NEW YORK
+
+    HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+    WILLIAM
+    SHAKESPEARE
+
+    BY
+
+    JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE TRAGEDY OF POMPEY THE GREAT," "MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE,"
+"LOST ENDEAVOUR," "CAPTAIN MARGARET," "THE TRAGEDY OF NAN," ETC.
+
+    NEW AND REVISED EDITION
+
+    LONDON
+
+    WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+    CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAP.                                       PAGE
+
+      I THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE                    9
+
+     II THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRES                  18
+
+    III 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
+
+           "     "    "    "  II                  54
+
+           "     "    "    "  III                 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
+
+           "     "    "   "   II                 114
+
+          King Henry V                           120
+
+          The Merry Wives of Windsor             123
+
+          As You Like It                         128
+
+          Much Ado About Nothing                 133
+
+          Twelfth Night                          138
+
+          All's Well that Ends Well              144
+
+          Julius Cæsar                           149
+
+          Hamlet, Prince of Denmark              157
+
+          Troilus and Cressida                   168
+
+          Measure for Measure                    174
+
+          Othello, the Moor of Venice            180
+
+          King Lear                              186
+
+          Macbeth                                195
+
+          Antony and Cleopatra                   202
+
+          Coriolanus                             208
+
+          Timon of Athens                        214
+
+          Pericles, Prince of Tyre               218
+
+          Cymbeline                              223
+
+          The Winter's Tale                      226
+
+          The Tempest                            231
+
+          King Henry VIII                        235
+
+        WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE           238
+
+        THE POEMS:
+
+          Venus and Adonis                       241
+
+          The Rape of Lucrece                    242
+
+          The Passionate Pilgrim                 244
+
+          The Sonnets                            244
+
+          The Phoenix and the Turtle             249
+
+        AUTHOR'S NOTE                            250
+
+        INDEX                                    253
+
+
+
+
+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,
+refreshment 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
+buildings. 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 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 dwellings 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 common 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 uninteresting, pretty, and well watered.
+A few miles away the Cotswold hills rise. They have a 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 Shakespeare. 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 Shakespeare began to spring up in Stratford as soon as
+there was a demand for them. Legends are a stupid man's excuse 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 Hathaway, 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, written 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 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 company "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 seaman, 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 became 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 Shakespeare, 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 professed
+the quality of actor. Legend says that he acted well in what are called
+"character 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 subsequent 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 23rd
+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. 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 relationships 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 vivacity of
+mind. The face is that of an aloof and sunny spirit, full of energy and
+effectiveness. Another portrait is that engraved 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
+representation 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
+represent 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.
+
+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,
+profound, 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 represent an inner chamber. The three storeys of seats
+were divided by partitions into "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 spectators 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 performance. 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.
+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 thoughtful, 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 played very swiftly, without hesitation or dawdling over
+"business."
+
+There was little or no scenery to most plays. The properties, _i.e._
+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. This may account for their wholesome, animal
+robustness. There is no trace of the modern heroine, the common woman
+overstrained, 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 something 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 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.
+
+     _The 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
+     affairs.
+
+     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 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 fun 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 heightened by ragging from the courtiers. When it is 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; 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 feeling 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.
+
+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 Shakespeare'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 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 intention 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 intelligence. 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 intellect. 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 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 liveliest, in the wits of women
+
+                       "Keen
+    Above the sense of sense,"
+
+and that style is a poor thing beside the "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
+intellect 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 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 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
+personality; 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 literary efforts towards the obtaining
+of the power. Longaville (in Act II, sc. 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 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 performed publicly. The men and women converse 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, 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 published in lame English verses,
+     by Barnabe 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.
+
+     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 enters 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 _Love's 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 characters 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 obsession 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.
+
+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 death 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 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 yarn, 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 exposed in an act of treachery to his benefactor. The scenes
+in which the disguised Julia witnesses her lover's falseness, and the
+scene in which the play is brought to an end, are deeply and nobly
+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 falseness
+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,
+     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 Shakespeare'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! '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."
+
+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 appeased."
+
+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, 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, sc. 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.
+
+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, according
+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 _Menæchmi_ 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 _Amphitruo_ of Plautus.
+
+     The play is brought on to the plane of human feeling by the
+     character of Ægeon. 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 in which either the Antipholus
+     and the Dromio of Ephesus 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 Ægeon to his long-lost
+     wife.
+
+Poets are great or little according to the nobleness of their endeavour
+to build a mansion for the soul. Shakespeare, like other poets, grew by
+continual, very difficult mental labour, by the deliberate and prolonged
+exercise 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
+_Menæchmi_ fable. A playwright not yet sure of his art sees and admires
+behind the comedy the firm, intricate mental outline that has kept the
+play alive for more than two thousand years.
+
+The _Menæchmi_ 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 handling 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 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 Ægeon tells his story (in Act I, sc. 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 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--
+
+    ("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!
+     Wouldst them 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 cunning 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,
+     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 Ægeon is the best in the play
+
+
+_Titus Andronicus._
+
+     _Written._ (?)
+
+     _Published._ (?)
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ (?)
+
+     _The Fable._ Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose firstborn 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."
+
+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 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 I._
+
+     _Written._ 1589-91.
+
+     _Produced._ 1591.
+
+     _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
+     progress 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.
+
+     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 (sometimes 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,
+     Sleeping neglection 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 imminent 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 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. Shakespeare'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.
+
+     _Produced._ 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 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, improved 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 situation 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
+     lightened by the cheat of Simpcox and by the rebellion of Jack
+     Cade. In modern theatres the passage of time is indicated by the
+     dropping 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.
+
+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 upset the plans of the capitalist 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 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.
+     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 rectitude of a police
+inspector. At the death-bed of the Cardinal, he makes the remark of a
+fiend--
+
+    "See how the pangs of death do make him grin."
+
+The one human, 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 III._
+
+     _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 Sixt, 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.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Edward Hall's _Chronicle_. Raphael
+     Holinshed's _Chronicle_.
+
+     _The Fable._ The play describes the rise to power of Edward, Duke
+     of York, afterwards Edward IV. It carries on the 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 Gloucester, 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."
+
+There are three scenes that rouse human emotion: that in 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."
+
+
+_A Midsummer Night's Dream._
+
+     _Written._ 1595 (?)
+
+     _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 contribution
+     were to recognise his bantling, he could only cry to it, "Bless
+     thee, Bottom, thou art translated." Shakespeare 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
+     Pyramus 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.
+
+It is a strange and sad thing that the English poets have cared little
+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, wandering and working; but he is not
+enough removed from the beasts to escape the prick in the heart that
+turns the tired horse homeward, 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
+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 and 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 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 enduringness 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, 1597.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The story existed in many forms, mostly
+     Italian. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke's metrical version
+     (_Romeus and Juliet_), and possibly consulted 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.
+
+     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 apparent 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 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 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 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 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 understanding. 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
+brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright, 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 advancèd there"--
+
+show with what a tender beauty the great mind feels when touched.
+
+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;
+     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 performance) in 1591. Some people
+     think that Shakespeare wrote _The Troublesome Raigne_. There are
+     some glimmerings 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 a disturbed condition. The French resolve to attempt the
+     conquest of England.
+
+     The report that Arthur has been murdered by the King's order sets
+     England in turmoil. The French land in Kent. The lords find
+     Arthur's dead body outside Northampton castle. They are convinced
+     that King John has caused him to be murdered.
+
+     King 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. The 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 lower than
+themselves. Henry V conforms to type. He has the qualities 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 qualities 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 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 kingship. 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 greatness 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 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
+Bastard'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 heartbreak and death. The common people of
+England begin to betray their genius for obedience by preparing to rise
+against the man in power.
+
+The fourth act begins with the famous scene in which Hubert fails to
+blind Prince Arthur. Even in the act of mercy he is treacherous. 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 treacherous 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 Troublesome Raigne_, 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 courage, and devoted service
+should go so often with real animal boorishness and the incapacity 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 Englishman 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 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 something
+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--
+
+    "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
+Shakespeare of a want of heart, of a want of imagination, 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 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 power. It is difficult to know intimately any human
+soul, even with love as a lamp. Shakespeare'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 Bolingbroke, 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.
+
+     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, passionate, 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 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 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, if
+questioned), is deeply and nobly generous to York, who would condemn 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 Shakespeare'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 as temperament, is to blame for his tragedy. When
+life 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 disorder'd 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 Welshmen 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.
+
+As in all the tragedies, there is much noble poetry. John of Gaunt's
+speech about England 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 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 Bolingbroke 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
+           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 uncommon 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 (?)
+
+     _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 King'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
+     committal, 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 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 Court 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 Bosworth 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 plays about the Wars
+of the Roses. The subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare's 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 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 impressive
+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 could have known
+human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse 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--
+
+    "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,
+Buckingham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call down curses on him
+that breaks them, themselves 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 against human certainty. Of all
+the dangerous 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 them. 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 conscience sends
+him flying to death. The little Princes lay down to sleep--
+
+                   "girdling one another
+    Within their innocent alabaster arms.
+    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 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 opening 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 Tewkesbury'"--
+
+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 Romanorum_, and re-told, with delicate grace, by
+     Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-century Italian writer, in his
+     _Il 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 _Gesta Romanorum_. 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 suggested 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 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 threefold. 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 Christian'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 indignation 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 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 centuries of criticism. She is
+one of the smiling 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 _I Suppositi_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is
+     found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on
+     waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment
+     is the performance of this play before him.
+
+     The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames
+     the shrew Katharina; 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 Petruchio 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's Labour's Lost_ he showed a matchless sense of country
+life. 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
+rightness of poetry. In writing them, he wrought with his daily nature,
+from something intimately known, or inbred in him, during childhood. Man
+can only write happily 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 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
+     pallabris_; 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 audience of to-day knows a horse as the Elizabethan
+had to know him. The speech sets one wondering at the art of the unknown
+Elizabethan 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
+schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly,
+she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor
+who 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."
+
+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, Part I._
+
+     _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 Fable._ 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 uncommon
+     man, whose uncommonness is unsupported by 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 opens at a time when the oaths of Henry Bolingbroke, to
+do justice, have been broken on all sides, lest the injustice of his
+assumption 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. Opposed 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 swiftness 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 desperate 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 lines 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 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 careless and callous
+though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's
+throne. He chooses to live in society as common 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 Falstaff are so little good-natured that he stands upon
+his princehood whenever the old man 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 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 _The Famous Victories of Henry
+     V_. Holinshed's _Chronicles_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Northumberland and the other conspirators against the
+     King learn 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 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 fighting 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 treacheries 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 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 everything
+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 imaginative
+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 manifold 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. 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 downstairs is the finest tavern scene
+ever written. Those placed in Gloucestershire are the perfect 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 Nightwork, 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.
+
+All of those scenes seem to have been written easily, out of the fulness
+of an instinctive power. In the other scenes Shakespeare 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 Lancaster 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 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, Mowbray'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 Shakespeare
+has left to us. In the plays the characters 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.
+
+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_, imperfectly, 1600; as we now 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-burning."
+
+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, eked out with
+soldiers' squabbles. It seems to have been written to fill a gap in the
+series of the historical plays. Perhaps the management 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. Detached 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 to beget the son who dies broken-hearted after
+bringing all to waste again.
+
+    "Hear him but reason in divinity,"
+
+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.
+Falstaff 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 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 condemn 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
+the imaginations of her sons.
+
+
+_The Merry Wives of Windsor._
+
+     _Written._ 1599 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in a mutilated form, 1602; in a complete form, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ A tale in Straparola's _Notti_ (iv. 4).
+     Tarleton's _News out of Purgatorie_. Giovanni Florentino's _Il
+     Pecorone_. Kinde Kit of Kingston's _Westward for Smelts_.
+
+     _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, needlessly 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 Herne
+     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 heart, 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, (_b_) that it nicely suited the Tudor sense of
+humour. It is the least interesting of the genuine plays. 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 intensely 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 interested in cuckoldry, Mrs.
+Ford in mockery, Ford, Evans and Caius in jealousy and rivalry, Bardolph
+is going to be a tapster, the 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 Falstaff--
+
+    "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 Herne the hunter--
+
+    "There is an old tale goes, that Herne 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."
+
+Modern poets would describe Herne's dress and appearance. The creative
+poet describes his actions.
+
+It is possible that when this play was written Shakespeare had thoughts
+of consecrating 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 predilections, his reading. He had found a
+channel in which his thoughts could express themselves. Writing was no
+longer so pleasant to him as it had been. He had done an incredible
+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 excellent, the great from the supreme. All writers, 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 attributed 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 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. Touchstone, the worldly wise, marries a
+fool. Audrey, born a clown, marries a courtier. Phebe, scorning a man,
+falls in love with a woman.
+
+Jaques, the only wise one, is the only one 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 important line, show
+that in the character of Jaques Shakespeare was expounding a philosophy
+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
+commentator 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 wish, not to be counted
+wise but to have as great liberty as the fool to express his thought--
+
+              "weed your 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 invariable 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 of help. The Duke ministers to Orlando. Jaques wants to know "of
+what kind this cock should come of." He speaks banteringly, the Duke
+speaks kindly. The impression 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, dismissing 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, is a
+golden woman, a daughter of the sun, smiling-natured, but limited.
+Phebe, like Rosalind, is black-haired, black-eyed, black-eyebrowed, 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.
+
+
+_Much 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 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, listening 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 Benedick's love for her,
+changes her mind about 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 Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare's greatest creative period. It is full of great
+and wonderful things. The character-drawing is so abundant and precise
+that 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 Shakespeare 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.
+
+     _Leonato._ 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.
+
+     _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 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 "Historie of Apolonius and Silla"
+     as told by Barnabe Riche in the book _Riche his Farewell to
+     Militarie 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 Fable._ Viola, who thinks that she has lost her brother
+     Sebastian by shipwreck, disguises herself 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 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-woman. 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 loveliest of all the Shakespearean
+plays. It is the best English comedy. The great mind that mixed a
+tragedy of intellect with a tragedy of stupidity, 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. Orsino is in an unreal mood of emotion. Love is an
+active passion. Orsino is in the clutch of its dangerous passive enemy
+called sentimentality. He lolls upon a couch to music when he ought to
+be carrying her glove to battle. Olivia is in an unreal mood of mourning
+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-dreams, 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 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 something real into their lives; and all
+three, in coming to the active state, cease to be interesting and
+beautiful and pathetic.
+
+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
+    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 Contemplation making a
+rare turkey-cock of the one wise man in his play.
+
+
+_All's 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, the 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 withdraws from the Countess's house, and
+     comes to Florence disguised.
+
+     Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her,
+     receives her unsuspecting 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 the 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 Florentine 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 extensively 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 obsession 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 dependant. He does not like her, and he does
+not like 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 obsession blinds the judgment on more
+sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. 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 unbalanced. He takes an unworthy
+confidant, 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 is 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
+possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised
+as one of the noblest 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 ignominy 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 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."
+
+
+_Julius Cæsar._
+
+     _Written._ 1601 (?)
+
+     _Produced._ (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius
+     Cæsar in Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_.
+
+     A tragedy of Julius Cæsar, now lost, was performed by Shakespeare's
+     company in 1594. Shakespeare must have known this play.
+
+     _The Fable._ Cassius, fearing that Julius Cæsar is about to
+     extinguish all trace of Republican rule in Rome, persuades Brutus
+     and others to plot a change. They decide to murder Cæsar.
+
+     On the morning chosen for the murder, Cæsar 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.
+
+     Cassius is killed by his servant when he sees that all is lost.
+     Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills himself.
+
+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 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
+feeding 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 performances 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 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 said that the last acts of _Julius Cæsar_ make anti-climax
+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. If a Greek had constructed _Julius Cæsar_, 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 Cæsar is dead. In _Macbeth_ he
+constructs the last half of his play in much the same manner.
+
+In both plays he is considering the conception, the doing, and the
+results of a violent act. In both plays this act is the murder of the
+head of a State. In neither case is he deeply interested in the victim.
+Duncan, in _Macbeth_, is a generous gentleman; Cæsar, in this play, is a
+touchy man of affairs whose head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination
+broods on the fact that the killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by
+an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by
+an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases
+the killers show base personal ingratitude and treachery. In both plays,
+an avenging justice makes even the scales. The mind of the poet follows
+them from the moment when the guilty thought is prompted, through the
+agony and exultation of dreadful acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the
+treacherous, 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, nor yet the tragical
+end of a ruler. His subject in both plays is the working of Fate who
+prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and then destroys him. 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 conception that makes it like
+gathering and breaking storm. The cause of the murder is a great
+personal treachery inspired by an unselfish idea. Though it seems
+inevitable, it is a very little thing that makes it possible. Both
+Cæsar'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.
+Cæsar 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 Philippi.
+
+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--
+
+    "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 _Historia Danica_.
+     Francis de Belleforest printed a version of it in his _Histoires
+     Tragiques_. An English translation from de Belleforest, called the
+     _Hystorie of Hamblet_, was published (or perhaps reprinted) in
+     London in 1608. Shakespeare 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 reveals the manner of the murder
+     to him, and makes him swear to be revenged. The revelation so
+     affects him that the murderers begin to fear him. He cannot bring
+     himself 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 revenge 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 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 Shakespearean scheme it is not
+revenge, it is justice, and therefore neither good nor bad but
+necessary. 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 leads to a baffling
+of the living, and, at last, to something like an arrest of life, a
+deadlock, 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 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 schoolfellow, 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 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 first half
+of the play, though it exposes and develops the fable, is a dual image
+of a search for truth, 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 his hand.
+Fate offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the
+instant by, with his baffling 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 _Hamlet_,
+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 King's position. By his death life 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
+purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by with his baffling swiftness, which
+strikes on the instant, 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 pathway of excess leads, not as with Blake, to the
+palace of wisdom, but to destruction. The two extremes in Hamlet, of
+slowness and swiftness, set up in life the counter forces which destroy
+extremes, so that life, 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 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. Revenge 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 play 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--
+
+             "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 constructed 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._ After publication.
+
+     _Published._ 1609.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of _Troilus and
+     Creseide_. John Lydgate's _Troy Boke_. 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, cursing.
+
+_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 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
+cruelly and sullenly, by the boor thus mocked.
+
+The two subjects and the setting are not and cannot be brought into
+unity. Shakespeare'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
+imperfect 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--
+
+    "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. 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 incomprehensible 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.
+
+
+_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 Historie 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 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 prudential 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 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 the
+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 eyes. It is the thorn in the side
+under the cloak of the beauty of youth. In Shakespeare'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 manhood. 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 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 temptation 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 imprisoned 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 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 unflinching thought. Like all the
+greatest of the plays, it is so full of illustration of the main idea
+that it gives an illusion of an infinity like that of life. It is
+constructed closely and subtly for the stage. It is more full of the
+ingenuities of play-writing than any of the plays. The verse and the
+prose have that smoothness of happy ease which makes one think of
+Shakespeare not as a poet writing, but as a sun shining.
+
+    " ... It deserves with characters of brass
+     A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time."
+
+The thought of the play is penetrating rather than impassioned. The
+poetry follows the thought. There are cold lines like Death laying a
+hand on the blood. The faultless lyric, "Take, O take those lips away"
+occurs. Some say Fletcher wrote it, some Bacon. "Love talks with better
+knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love." The music of the great
+manner rings--
+
+    "Merciful Heaven!
+     Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
+     Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
+     Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,
+     Drest in a little brief authority,
+     Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
+     His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
+     Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
+     As make the angels weep."
+
+The prose accompaniment to what is unrestrained in youth provides a
+cruel comedy.
+
+
+_Othello, the Moor of Venice._
+
+     _Written._ 1604 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in quarto, and in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The tale appears in _The Hecatomithi_ of
+     G. B. Giraldi Cinthio. Shakespeare follows Cinthio in the main; but a
+     few details suggest that he knew the story in an ampler version.
+
+     _The Fable._ Iago, ensign to Othello, the Moor of Venice, is
+     jealous of Cassio, his lieutenant. He plots to oust Cassio from the
+     lieutenancy.
+
+     Othello marries Desdemona, and sails with her to the wars in
+     Cyprus. Iago resolves to make use of Desdemona to cause Cassio's
+     downfall.
+
+     He procures Cassio's discharge from the lieutenancy by involving
+     him in a drunken brawl. Cassio beseeches Desdemona to intercede
+     with Othello for him. Iago hints to Othello that she has good
+     reason to wish Cassio to be restored. He suggests that Cassio is
+     her lover. Partly by fortune, partly by craft, he succeeds in
+     establishing in Othello's mind the conviction that Desdemona is
+     guilty.
+
+     Othello smothers Desdemona, learns, too late, that he has been
+     deceived, and kills himself. Cassio's character is cleared. Iago is
+     led away to torture.
+
+A man's greatest works differ from his lesser works in degree, not in
+kind. They may be more perfect, but they express similar ideas. "A man
+grows, he does not become a different man." In this play of _Othello_
+the ideas are those that inspire nearly all the plays, that life seeks
+to preserve a balance, and that obsessions, which upset the balance,
+betray life to evil.
+
+These ideas are in the earliest work of all, in _Venus and Adonis_. In
+_Othello_ they are expressed with the variety and power of the great
+period. The obsession chosen for illustration is that of jealous
+suspicion. It is displayed at work in a mean mind and in a generous
+mind. The varying quality of its working makes the action of the play.
+
+As in _The Merchant of Venice_, the chief character is a man of
+intellect who has been warped out of humanity by the world's injustice.
+Iago is a man of fine natural intellect who has not been trained in the
+personal qualities that bring preferment. An educated man is advanced
+above him, as in life it happens. He broods over the injustice and
+schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged
+him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as
+upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves
+him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter
+and the newly-married wife are lovers.
+
+He succeeds in this, through his natural adroitness, the working of
+chance, and the generosity of Othello, who has too much passion to be
+anything but blind under passionate influence like love or jealousy. The
+mean man's want of emotion keeps always the conduct of the vengeance
+precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to
+the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is
+ruined.
+
+That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's
+justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection.
+Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a
+want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but
+too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain
+to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging
+from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is
+that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven
+about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate
+and instinctive.
+
+The influence and importance of the little thing in the great event is
+marked in this scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the greater
+tragedies. We are all or may at any time become immensely important to
+the play of the world. Had Emilia come a minute sooner or a minute
+later the end of the play would have been very different. Desdemona
+would have lived to repent her marriage at leisure, or she would have
+gone to her grave branded.
+
+Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this
+play, as in _Richard III_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, he brooded upon
+the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he
+created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the
+earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being
+but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or
+the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry
+line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only
+his intellect. What he is in himself is as mysterious as life. Life is
+clear, up to a point, but beyond that point it is always baffling.
+Shakespeare's task was to look at life clearly. Looking at it clearly he
+was as baffled by what he saw, as we, who only see by his aid. He found
+in Iago an image like life itself, a power and an activity, prompted by
+something secret and silent.
+
+Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The
+action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into
+ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly
+practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as
+Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after
+reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That
+those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws
+under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.
+
+The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that
+when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the
+falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father.
+The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty
+things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights have violent
+ends and bring violent ends to others.
+
+The poetry of _Othello_ is nearly as well known as that of _Hamlet_.
+Many quotations from the play have passed into the speech of the people.
+A play of intrigue does not give the fullest opportunity for great
+poetry; but supreme things are spoken throughout the action. Othello's
+cry--
+
+    "It is the very error of the moon.
+     She comes more near the earth than she was wont
+     And drives men mad,"
+
+is one of the most perfect of all the perfect things in the tragedies.
+
+
+_King Lear._
+
+     _Written._ 1605-6.
+
+     _Published._ 1608.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The story of Lear is told in Holinshed's
+     _Chronicles_, in a play by an unknown hand, _The True Chronicle
+     History of King Leir_, and in a few stanzas of the tenth canto of
+     the second Book of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
+
+     The character of Gloucester seems to have been suggested by the
+     character of a blind king in Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_.
+
+     _The Fable._ King Lear, in his old age, determines to give up his
+     kingdom to his three daughters. Before he does so, he tries to
+     assure himself of their love for him. The two elder women, Goneril
+     and Regan, vow that they love him intensely; the youngest,
+     Cordelia, can only tell him that she cares for him as a daughter
+     should. He curses and casts off Cordelia, who is taken to wife by
+     the King of France.
+
+     Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his
+     son.
+
+     King Lear, thwarted and flouted by Goneril and Regan, goes mad, and
+     wanders away with his Fool. Gloucester, trying to comfort him
+     against the wishes of Goneril and Regan, is betrayed by his bastard
+     Edmund, and blinded. He wanders away with Edgar, who has disguised
+     himself as a madman.
+
+     Regan's husband is killed. Seeking to take Edmund in his stead, she
+     rouses the jealousy of Goneril, who has already made advances to
+     him.
+
+     Cordelia lands with French troops to repossess Lear of his kingdom.
+     She finds Lear, and comforts him. In an engagement with the
+     sisters' armies, she and Lear are captured.
+
+     Edmund's baseness is exposed. He is attainted and struck down.
+     Goneril poisons Regan, and kills herself. Edmund, before he dies,
+     reveals that he has given order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed.
+     His news comes too late to save Cordelia. She is brought in dead.
+     Lear dies over her body.
+
+     Albany, Goneril's husband, Kent, Lear's faithful servant, and
+     Edgar, Edmund's slayer, are left to set the kingdom in order.
+
+The play of _King Lear_ is based upon a fable and a fairy story. It
+illustrates the most terrible forms of treachery, that of child against
+father, and father against child. It is the most affecting and the
+grandest of the plays.
+
+The evil which makes the action springs from two sources, both fatal.
+One is the blindness or fatuity in Lear, which makes him give away his
+strength and cast out Cordelia. The other, equally deadly, but more
+cruel in its results, springs from an unrepented treachery, done long
+before by Gloucester, when he broke his marriage vows to beget Edmund.
+Memory of the sweetness of that treachery gives to Gloucester a
+blindness to the boy's nature, just as a sweetness, or ease, in the
+treachery of giving up the cares of kingship (against oath and the
+kingdom's good) helps to blind Lear to the natures of his daughters.
+
+The blindness in the one case is sentimental, in the other wilful. Being
+established, fate makes use of it. One of the chief lessons of the plays
+is that man is only safe when his mind is perfectly just and calm. Any
+injustice, trouble or hunger in the mind delivers man to powers who
+restore calmness and justice by means violent or gentle according to the
+strength of the disturbing obsession. This play begins at the moment
+when an established blindness in two men is about to become an
+instrument of fate for the violent opening of their eyes. The blindness
+in both cases is against the course of nature. It is unnatural that Lear
+should give his kingship to women, and that he should curse his youngest
+child. It is unnatural that Gloucester should make much of a bastard son
+whom he has hardly seen for nine years. It is deeply unnatural that both
+Lear and Gloucester should believe evil suddenly of the youngest, best
+beloved, and most faithful spirits in the play. As the blindness that
+causes the injustice is great and unnatural, so the working of fate to
+purge the eyes and restore the balance is violent and unnatural. Every
+person important to the action is thrust into an unnatural way of life.
+Goneril and Regan rule their father, commit the most ghastly and beastly
+cruelty, lust after the same man, and die unnaturally (having betrayed
+each other), the one by her sister's hand, the other by her own. Lear is
+driven mad. The King of France is forced to war with his wife's sisters.
+Edmund betrays his half-brother to ruin and his father to blindness.
+Cornwall is stabbed by his servant. Edgar kills his half-brother.
+Gloucester, thrust out blind, dies when he finds that his wronged son
+loves him. Cordelia, fighting against her own blood, is betrayed to
+death by one who claims to love her sisters. The honest mild man,
+Albany, and the honest blunt man, Kent, survive the general ruin. Had
+Kent been a little milder and Albany a little blunter in the first act,
+before the fates were given strength, the ruin would not have been. All
+the unnatural treacherous evil comes to pass, because for a few fatal
+moments they were true to their natures.
+
+The play is an excessive image of all that was most constant in
+Shakespeare's mind. Being an excessive image, it contains matter nowhere
+else given. It is all schemed and controlled with a power that he shows
+in no other play, not even in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_. The ideas of the
+play occur in many of the plays. Many images, such as the blasted oak,
+water in fury, servants insolent and servile, old honest men and young
+girls faithful to death, occur in other plays. That which each play
+added to the thought of the world is expressed in the single figure of
+someone caught in a net. Macbeth is a ruthless man so caught. Hamlet is
+a wise man so caught. Othello is a passionate and Antony a glorious man
+so caught. All are caught and all are powerless, and all are superb
+tragic inventions. King Lear is a grander, ironic invention, who hurts
+far more than any of these because he is a horribly strong man who is
+powerless. He is so strong that he cannot die. He is so strong that he
+nearly breaks the net, before the folds kill him.
+
+No image in the world is so fierce with imaginative energy. The stormy
+soul runs out storming in a night of the soul as mad as the elements.
+With him goes the invention of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool,
+like conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him mad with ironic comment
+and bitter song.
+
+The verse is as great as the invention. It rises and falls with the
+passion like music with singing. All the scale of Shakespeare's art is
+used; the terrible spiritual manner of
+
+    "You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
+     Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,"
+
+as well as the instinctive manner of a prose coloured to the height with
+all the traditions of country life.
+
+Dramatic genius has the power of understanding half-a-dozen lives at
+once in tense, swiftly changing situations. This power is shown at its
+best in the last act of this play. One of the most wonderful and least
+praised of the inventions in the last scene is that of the dying Edmund.
+He has been treacherous to nearly every person in the play. His last
+treachery, indirectly the cause of his ruin, is still in act, the
+killing of Cordelia and the king. He has been stricken down. "The wheel
+has come full circle." He has learned too late that
+
+    "The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
+     Make instruments to plague us."
+
+He can hardly hope to live for more than a few minutes. The death of his
+last two victims cannot benefit him. A word from him would save them. No
+one else can save them. Yet at the last minute, his one little glimmer
+of faithfulness keeps the word unspoken. He is silent for Goneril's
+sake. If he ever cared for any one in the world, except himself, he may
+have cared a little for Goneril. He thinks of her now. She has gone from
+him. But she is on his side, and he trusts to her, and acts for her. He
+waits for some word or token from her. He waits to see her save him or
+avenge him. The death of Lear will benefit her. It will be to her
+something saved from the general wreck, something to the good, in the
+losing bout. An impulse stirs him to speak, but he puts it by. He keeps
+silent about Lear, till one comes saying that Goneril has killed
+herself. Still he does not speak. The news pricks the vanity in him. He
+strokes his plumes with a tender thought for the brightness of the life
+that made two princesses die for love of him. When he speaks of Lear, it
+is too late, the little, little instant which alters destiny has passed.
+Cordelia is dead. No mist stains the stone. She will come no more--
+
+    "Never, never, never, never, never."
+
+The heart-breaking scene at the end has been blamed as "too painful for
+tragedy." Shakespeare's opinion of what is tragic is worth that of all
+his critics together. He gave to every soul in this play an excessive
+and terrible vitality. On the excessive terrible soul of Lear he poured
+such misery that the cracking of the great heart is a thing of joy, a
+relief so fierce that the audience should go out in exultation singing--
+
+               "O, our lives' sweetness!
+    That we the pain of death would hourly die
+    Rather than die at once!"
+
+Tragedy is a looking at fate for a lesson in deportment on life's
+scaffold. If we find the lesson painful, how shall we face the event?
+
+
+_Macbeth._
+
+     _Written._ 1605-6 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Raphael Holinshed tells the story of Macbeth
+     at length in his _Chronicle of Scottish History_. He indicates the
+     character of Lady Macbeth in one line.
+
+     When Shakespeare wrote the play, London was full of Scotchmen,
+     brought thither by the accession of James I. Little details of the
+     play may have been gathered in conversation.
+
+     _The Fable._ Macbeth, advised by witches that he is to be a king,
+     is persuaded by his wife to kill his sovereign (King Duncan) and
+     seize the crown. King Duncan, coming to Macbeth's castle for a
+     night, is there killed by Macbeth and his lady. Duncan's sons fly
+     to England. Macbeth causes himself to be proclaimed king.
+
+     Being king, he tries to assure himself of power by destroying the
+     house of Banquo, of whom the witches prophesied that he should be
+     the father of a line of kings. Banquo is killed; but his son
+     escapes.
+
+     The witches warn Macbeth to beware of Macduff.
+
+     Macduff escapes to England, but his wife and children are killed by
+     Macbeth's order.
+
+     Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of
+     the Scottish crown.
+
+     Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill
+     him.
+
+Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shakespearean plays. In the order
+of composition it is either the fourth or the fifth of the seven. In
+point of merit it is neither greater nor less than the other six. It is
+different from them, in that it belongs more wholly to the kingdom of
+vision.
+
+Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man
+betrayed by an obsession. Cæsar is betrayed by an obsession of the
+desire of glory, Antony by passion, Tarquin by lust, Wolsey by worldly
+greed, Coriolanus and Timon by their nobleness, Angelo by his
+righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger
+or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his
+worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. God sends on many men
+"strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie." Othello is one such.
+Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true,
+half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie
+direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by
+arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in
+the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like
+love; love feels like nobility; spiritualism seems like revelation.
+
+Among these things few are stronger than the words spoken in unworldly
+states, in trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by soothsayers,
+by the wholly excited people who are also half sane, by whoever obtains
+a half knowledge of the spirit by destruction of intellectual process.
+
+               "to win us to our harm,
+    The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
+    Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
+    In deepest consequence."
+
+Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds
+to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with
+prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the
+beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us.
+Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the
+letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him.
+Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be
+fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for
+him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So
+often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something
+planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief
+in life would lead to peace. This thought passes through his mind. Then
+fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully
+from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a
+thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for
+treachery. The king had an "absolute trust" in him; but there is no
+judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes
+Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs
+him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son
+will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he
+goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining
+towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with
+definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act
+of murder.
+
+The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also
+a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an
+unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is
+made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed,
+but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so
+knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing
+men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the
+end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth
+to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary.
+He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his
+kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them.
+The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his
+trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.
+
+    "And you all know security
+     Is mortal's chiefest enemy,"
+
+He has supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with
+gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that
+he has been tricked by--
+
+        "the equivocation of the fiend
+    That lies like truth."
+
+His queen has killed herself. All the welter of murder has been useless.
+All that he has done is to damn his soul through the centuries during
+which the line of Banquo will reign. He dies with a courage that is half
+fury against the fate that has tricked him.
+
+No play contains greater poetry. There is nothing more intense. The mind
+of the man was in the kingdom of vision, hearing a new speech and seeing
+what worldly beings do not see, the rush of the powers, and the fury of
+elemental passions. No play is so full of an unspeakable splendour of
+vision--
+
+                           "his virtues
+    Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued."
+
+    "And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
+    Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed
+    Upon the sightless couriers of the air."
+
+    "Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
+     Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death,
+     And prophesying with accents terrible."
+
+    "In the great hand of God I stand."
+
+    "A falcon towering in her pride of place
+     Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.
+     And Duncan's horses--a thing most strange and certain--
+     Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
+     Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
+     Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make
+     War with mankind.
+                'Tis said they eat each other."
+
+                "the time has been
+    That, when the brains were out, the man would die."
+
+All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and
+re-praised. Noble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the
+mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less noble, is
+less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the
+hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words--
+
+                            "I did hear
+    The galloping of horse: who was't came by?"
+
+It was the galloping of messengers with the news that Macduff, who is to
+be the cause of his ruin, has fled to England. An echo of the galloping
+stays in the brain, as though the hoofs of some horse rode the night,
+carrying away Macbeth's luck for ever.
+
+
+_Antony and Cleopatra._
+
+     _Written._ 1607-8 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's
+     translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes
+     himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He
+     makes a pact with the young Cæsar, by marrying Cæsar's sister
+     Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra,
+     he falls into wars with Cæsar. 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 Cæsar, also kills
+     herself.
+
+In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his
+constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some
+obsession.
+
+                      "Strange it is
+    That nature must compel us to lament
+    Our most persisted deeds."
+
+It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this
+period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other
+play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for
+the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played
+out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the
+poetry answer the greatness of the subject.
+
+Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Othello_, and
+this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is
+not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in
+_Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and
+generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays
+the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a
+blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute,
+astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund,
+the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Cæsar are such souls.
+All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the
+mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from
+human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a
+colourable cloak of human excuse.
+
+The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's
+plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that
+obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is
+drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke
+in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a
+way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return
+to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Cæsar, and to his
+country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition
+of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all
+drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and
+is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in
+the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly
+defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon
+Octavius to meet him in single combat.
+
+                        "men's judgments are
+    A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
+    Do draw the inward quality after them,
+    To suffer all alike."
+
+      "when we in our viciousness grow hard,
+    O misery on't--the wise gods seel our eyes;
+    In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us
+    Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut
+    To our confusion."
+
+The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is
+one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once,
+this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in
+Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the
+senate house, before Cæsar's murderers. He was very great and noble
+then. Now
+
+                   "The star is fall'n
+    And time is at his period."
+
+    "The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"
+
+has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.
+
+The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation
+of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy
+makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry--
+
+    "We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,
+     Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
+     And make Death proud to take us ...
+                  .... we have no friend
+     But resolution and the briefest end,"
+
+begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays.
+Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is
+the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her
+death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the
+most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words--
+
+    "Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,
+     And we are for the dark,"
+
+and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush
+of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling--
+
+              "O eastern star!
+                              Peace, peace!
+    Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
+    That sucks the nurse asleep?"
+
+are among the most beautiful things ever written by man.
+
+
+_Coriolanus._
+
+     _Written._ 1608 (?)
+
+     _Published._ 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The life of Coriolanus in Sir Thomas North's
+     translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Marcius, a noble Roman, of an excessive pride,
+     bitterly opposes the rabble.
+
+     In the war against the Volscians he bears himself so nobly that he
+     wins the title of Coriolanus. On his return from the wars he seeks
+     the Consulship, woos the voices of the multitude, is accepted, and
+     then cast by them. For his angry comment on their behaviour the
+     tribunes contrive his banishment from the city.
+
+     Being banished, he makes league with the Volscians. He takes
+     command in the Volscian army and invades Roman territory.
+
+     Coming as a conqueror to the walls of Rome, his mother and wife
+     persuade him to spare the city. He causes the Volscians to make
+     peace. The Volscians return home dissatisfied.
+
+     On his return to the Volscian territory Coriolanus is impeached as
+     a traitor, and stabbed to death by conspirators.
+
+Shakespeare's tragical characters are all destroyed by the excess of
+some trait in them, whether good or ill matters nothing. Nature cares
+for type, not for the excessive. Sooner or later she checks the
+excessive so that the type may be maintained. She is stronger than the
+excessive, though she may be baser. To Nature, progress, though it be
+infinitesimal, must be a progress of the whole mass, not a sudden
+darting out of one quality or one member.
+
+Timon of Athens is betrayed by an excessive generosity. Coriolanus is
+betrayed by an excessive contempt for the multitude. He is one born into
+a high tradition of life. He has the courage, the skill in arms, and the
+talent for affairs that come with high birth in the manly races. He has
+also the faith in tradition that makes an unlettered upper class narrow
+and obstructionist. Like the rich in France before the Revolution, he
+despises the poor. He denies them the right to complain of their hunger.
+Rather than grant them that right, or the means of urging redress, he
+would take a short way with them, as was practised here, at Manchester
+and elsewhere.
+
+    "Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,
+     And let me use my sword, I'ld make a quarry
+     With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high
+     As I could pick my lance."
+
+Like all conservative, aristocratic men, he sees in the first granting
+of political power to the people the beginning of revolution.
+
+                          "It will in time
+    Win power upon and throw forth greater themes
+    For insurrection's arguing."
+
+He regards the people as a necessary, evil-smelling, many-headed beast,
+good enough, under the leadership of men like himself, to make inferior
+troops to be spent as the State pleases. It is possible that Napoleon
+and Bismarck looked upon the mob with similar scorn. The ideas are those
+of an absolute monarch or super-man. The country squire holds those
+ideas, though want of power and want of intellect combine to keep him
+from applying them. The sincerity of the ideas is tested from time to
+time, in free countries, by general elections.
+
+Much of the pride of Coriolanus springs from a sense of his superiority
+to others in the gifts of fortune. Much of it comes from the knowledge
+that he is superior in himself. Leading, as becomes his birth, in the
+war against the Volscians he shows himself so much superior to others
+that the campaign is his triumph. He is "the man" whom Napoleon counted
+"everything in war." The knowledge of his merit is so bright within
+himself that he is unable to see that it is less bright in others. He is
+willing to become the head of the State if the post may be given to him
+as a right due to merit, not as a favour begged. He has no lust for
+power. But knowing himself to be the best man in Rome, he thinks that
+his merit is sufficiently great to excuse him from the indignity of
+sueing for it. The laws of free countries prescribe that he who wishes
+to be elected must appeal to the electors whether he love them or loathe
+them. Instead of appealing to them, Coriolanus insults them with such
+arrogance that they drive him from the city.
+
+He fails as a traitor, because he is too noble to be fiercely
+revengeful. A lesser man, a Richard III, or an Iago, would have exacted
+a bloody toll from Rome. Coriolanus cannot bring himself to be stern, in
+the presence of his old mother and his wife. Something generous and
+truly aristocratic in him makes him a second time a traitor, this time
+to his hosts the Volscians. He spares Rome by the sacrifice of those who
+have given him a shelter and a welcome. Treachery (even from a noble
+motive) is never forgiven in these plays. It is always avenged, seldom
+mercifully. The Volscians avenge themselves on Coriolanus by an act of
+treachery that brings the noble heart under the foot of the traitor.
+
+_Coriolanus_ is one of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of
+the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art
+without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood
+intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a
+popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country.
+Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the
+four most popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's Plutarch,
+Cinthio, and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic
+has supplanted fable, and subject comes to the artist untrimmed and
+unlit by the vitality of many minds. In reading _Coriolanus_ and the
+other plays of the great period a man feels that Shakespeare fed his
+fire with all that was passionate in the thought about him. He appears
+to be his age focussed. The great man now stands outside his age, like
+Timon.
+
+_Coriolanus_ is a play of the clash of the aristocratic temper with the
+world. It contains most of the few speeches in Shakespeare which ring
+with what seems like a personal bitterness. Hatred of the flunkey mind,
+and of the servile, insolent mob mind, "false as water," appears in
+half-a-dozen passages. Some of these passages are ironic inventions, not
+prompted by Plutarch. The great mind, brooding on the many forms of
+treachery, found nothing more treacherous than the mob, and nothing more
+dog-like, for good or evil, than the servant.
+
+Greatness is sometimes shown in very little things. Few things in
+Shakespeare show better the fulness of his happy power than the
+following--
+
+    (_Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils._)
+
+    _1st Roman._ This will I carry to Rome.
+
+    _2nd Roman._ And I this.
+
+    _3rd Roman._ A murrain on't. I took this for silver.
+
+
+_Timon of Athens._
+
+     _Written._ 1606-8 (?)
+
+     _Published._ 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ William Paynter's _Palace of Pleasure_.
+     Plutarch's _Life of Antonius_. Lucian's _Dialogue_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives
+     to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none
+     grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him.
+     None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing
+     of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens,
+     finding a like ingratitude in the State, openly makes war upon it,
+     reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.
+
+_Timon of Athens_ is a play of mixed authorship. Shakespeare's share in
+it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown
+poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a
+skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked personality. It cannot
+now be known how the collaboration was arranged. Either the unknown
+collaborated with Shakespeare, or the unknown wrote the play and
+Shakespeare revised it.
+
+Ingratitude is one of the commonest forms of treachery. It is the form
+that leads most quickly to the putting back of the world, because it
+destroys generosity of mind. It creates in man the bitter and
+destructive quality of misanthropy, or a destroying passion of revenge.
+In this play the two authors show the different ways in which the human
+mind may be turned to those bitter passions.
+
+Apemantus is currish, because others are not. He has wit without
+charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the
+rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a
+large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly
+generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish,
+nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes
+himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness
+that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is
+parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition
+of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a noble mind
+embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic
+energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend,
+shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the
+noble generosity in faithful service.
+
+Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography.
+Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with
+such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and
+unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story
+of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the
+heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more
+difficult and more noble to do than to pin their hearts on their
+sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon
+with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from
+something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth,
+and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as
+the hundred other passionate moods that built up the system of his soul.
+
+The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner--
+
+                       "will these moss'd trees,
+    That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,
+    And skip when thou point'st out?"
+
+    "Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
+     Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
+     Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:
+     Who, once a day with his embossed froth
+     The turbulent surge shall cover."
+
+The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades after he has read the epitaph,
+with which Timon goes down to death, like some hurt thing shrinking even
+from the thought of passers, is one of the most lovely examples of the
+power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech.
+
+    _Alcib._ (reading) _Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and
+    stay not here thy gait._
+
+    These well express in thee thy latter spirits:
+    Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,
+    Scorned'st our brain's flow and those our droplets which
+    From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
+    Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
+    On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead
+    Is noble Timon: of whose memory
+    Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,
+    And I will use the olive with my sword,
+    Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
+    Prescribe to other as each other's leech.
+    Let our drums strike.
+
+
+_Pericles, Prince of Tyre._
+
+     _Written._ 1607-8 (?)
+
+     _Published._ 1608.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The plot is taken from an English prose
+     version of a Latin translation of a fifth century Greek romance.
+     This version was published by Lawrence Twine, in the year 1576,
+     under the name of _The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures_ (etc.,
+     etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story
+     was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his _Confessio
+     Amantis_. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.
+
+     _The Fable._ Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to
+     guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will
+     be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess
+     wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the
+     Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from
+     Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's
+     vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.
+
+     Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes
+     jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and
+     marries her.
+
+     Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter,
+     dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ashore at Ephesus,
+     and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles
+     dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina,
+     the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus.
+     He then returns to Tyre.
+
+     Act IV. The years pass. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm
+     that she passes the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen,
+     deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina.
+     Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel
+     in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and
+     musician.
+
+     Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great
+     melancholy for the loss of wife and child, hears Marina sing. He
+     learns that she is his daughter. The goddess Diana bids him go to
+     her temple at Ephesus. He goes, and finds Thaisa. The play ends
+     happily with the reuniting of the family.
+
+The acts are opened by rhyming prologues designed to be spoken by John
+Gower. The prologues to each of the three first acts are followed by
+Dumb Shows, an invention of the theatre to explain those things not
+easily to be shown in action. The prologues, the invention of the dumb
+shows, and the first two acts, are not by Shakespeare. They are like the
+poetical work of George Wilkins, who published a prose romance of _The
+Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre_ in the year 1608,
+probably after the play had been produced.
+
+The construction of the last three acts makes it likely that the play
+(in its original state) was by the constructor of the first two acts. It
+is not known how it came to pass that Shakespeare took the play in hand.
+From the comparative feebleness of his work upon it, it may be judged
+that it was not a labour of love. The impression given is that nothing
+in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great
+mind, that Shakespeare was not deeply interested in the play, but that
+he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece
+and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the
+knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a
+theatre on which many depended for bread.
+
+There is little that is precious in the play. The scenes in the brothel
+at Mitylene (in Act IV) have power. Many find their unpleasantness an
+excuse for saying that Shakespeare never wrote them. They are certainly
+by Shakespeare. Cant would always persuade itself that the power to see
+clearly ought not to be turned upon evil. Those who can read--
+
+    _Bawd._ ... they are so pitifully sodden.
+
+    _Pandar._ ... The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the
+    little baggage.
+
+    _Boult._ Ay ... she made him roast-meat for worms--
+
+with disgust at Shakespeare's foulness, yet without horror of heart that
+the evil still goes on among human beings, must be strangely made. These
+scenes, the very vigorous sea scenes, including the account of the storm
+at sea, put into the mouth of Marina--
+
+    "My father, as nurse said, did never fear,
+     But cried 'Good seamen!' to the sailors, galling
+     His kingly hands, haling ropes;
+     And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea
+     That almost burst the deck....
+     Never was waves nor wind more violent:
+     And from the ladder-tackle washes off
+     A canvas-climber. 'Ha,' says one, 'wilt out?'
+     And with a dropping industry they skip
+     From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles, and
+     The master calls and trebles their confusion"--
+
+and the scene in which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to
+study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most
+lovely things in the play.
+
+
+_Cymbeline._
+
+     _Written._ (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_ tell of Cymbeline
+     and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (giorn.
+     2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's _Westward for Smelts_,
+     and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman
+     falsely accused of adultery.
+
+     _The Fable._ Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His
+     only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to
+     Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to
+     destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten, may marry
+     Imogen.
+
+     Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an
+     incomparable chastity. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick
+     obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste.
+     Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where
+     Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is
+     killed by one of the sons.
+
+     The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the
+     two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished.
+     Cymbeline's queen kills herself. Posthumus is taught that Iachimo
+     deceived him. Imogen is restored to him. The lost sons are restored
+     to Cymbeline. Prophecy is fulfilled and pardon given. All ends
+     happily.
+
+It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun as a tragedy during the great
+mood of tragical creation, then laid aside unfinished, from some
+failure in the vision, or change in the creative mood, and brought to an
+end later in a new spirit, perhaps in another place, in the country,
+away from the life which makes writing alive. It is the least perfect of
+the later plays. The least soft of Shakespeare's critics calls it
+"unresisting imbecility." It is perhaps the first composed of the
+romantic plays with which Shakespeare ended his life's work.
+
+Though the writing is so careless and the construction so loose that no
+one can think of it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes, one
+faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty. It deals with the
+Shakespearean subject of craft working upon a want of faith for personal
+ends, and being defeated, when almost successful, by something simple
+and instinctive in human nature. It is thus not unlike _Othello_; but in
+_Othello_ the subject is simple, and the treatment purely tragic. In
+_Cymbeline_ the subject is only partly extricated, and the treatment is
+coloured with romance, with that strange, touching, very Shakespearean
+romance, of the thing long lost beautifully recovered before the end,
+so that the last years of the chief man in the play may be happy and
+complete. The end of life would be as happy as the beginning if the dead
+might be given back to us. Shakespeare had lost a child.
+
+There can be no doubt that when the play was first conceived, the craft
+of the queen, working upon the insufficient faith of Cymbeline, was
+designed to be as important to the action as the craft of Iachimo
+working upon the insufficient faith of Posthumus. This was never wrought
+out. The play advances and halts. As in all unfinished works of art one
+sees in it something fine trying to get free but failing.
+
+The lyric "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" is the most lovely thing in
+the play. The most powerful moment is that which exposes the poisoning
+of a generous mind by false report. Posthumus believes Iachimo's lie and
+breaks out railing against women.
+
+                    "For there's no motion
+    That tends to vice in man but I affirm
+    It is the woman's part."
+
+Noble instants are marked in the lines--
+
+    "Be not, as in our fangled world, a garment
+     Nobler than that it covers,"
+
+and in the symbol of the eagle--
+
+                         "the Roman eagle,
+    From south to west on wing soaring aloft,
+    Lessen'd herself and in the beams o' the sun
+    So vanished."
+
+
+_The Winter's Tale._
+
+     _Written._ 1610-11.
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The story appears in Robert Greene's romance
+     of _Pandosto_. Shakespeare greatly improves the fable by completing
+     it. Greene ends it. Greene makes the story an accident with an
+     unhappy end. Shakespeare makes it a vision of the working of fate
+     with the tools of human passion.
+
+     _The Fable._ Leontes, King of Sicilia, suspecting that his wife
+     Hermione is guilty of adultery with Polixenes, King of Bohemia,
+     tries her on that count. He causes her daughter to be carried to a
+     desert place and there exposed.
+
+     The oracle of Apollo declares to him that Hermione is innocent,
+     that he himself is a jealous tyrant, and that he will die without
+     an heir should he fail to recover the daughter lost. The truth of
+     the oracle is confirmed by the (apparent) death of Hermione and the
+     real death of Mamillius, his son. Repenting bitterly of his
+     obsession of jealousy he goes into mourning.
+
+     The little daughter is found by country people who nourish and
+     cherish her. She grows up to beautiful and gracious girlhood.
+     Florizel, the son of Polixenes, falls in love with her, and seeks
+     to marry her without his father's knowledge. Being discovered by
+     Polixenes, he flies with her to the sea. Taking ship, the couple
+     come to Leontes' court, where it is proved that the girl is the
+     lost princess. She is married to Florizel. Leontes is reconciled to
+     Polixenes. Hermione completes the general happiness by rejoining
+     the husband who has so long mourned her.
+
+Dr. Simon Forman, the first critic of this play, made note to "remember"
+two things in it, "how he sent to the orakell of Appollo," and "also the
+rog that cam in all tottered like Coll Pipci." He drew from it this
+moral lesson, that one should "Beware of trustinge feined beggars or
+fawninge fellouse."
+
+The moral lesson is still of value to the world, and it is most
+certainly one which Shakespeare strove to impress. Shakespeare's mind
+was always brooding on the working of fate. He was always watching the
+results of some obsession upon an individual and the people connected
+with him. He saw that a blindness falling upon a person suddenly, for no
+apparent reason, except that something strikes the something not quite
+sound in the nature, has the power to alter life violently. It was his
+belief that life must not be altered violently. Life is a thing of
+infinitely gradual growth, that would perfect itself if the blindness
+could be kept away. Any deceiving thing, like a passion or a feigned
+beggar, is a cause of the putting back of life, indefinitely.
+
+In this play, he followed his usual practice, of showing the results of
+a human blindness upon human destiny. The greater plays are studies of
+treachery and self-betrayal. This play is a study of deceit and
+self-deception. Leontes is deceived by his obsession, Polixenes by his
+son, the country man by Autolycus, life, throughout, by art. In the last
+great scene, life is mistaken for art. In the first great scene a true
+friendship is mistaken for a false love.
+
+It may be called the gentlest of Shakespeare's plays. It is done with a
+tenderer hand than the other works. The name, _A Winter's Tale_, is
+taken from a scene in the second act. Hermione sits down with her son,
+by the winter fire, to listen to his story. It is the last time she ever
+sees her son. He has hardly opened his lips when Leontes enters to
+accuse her of adultery. She is hurried off to prison, and Mamillius dies
+before the oracle's message comes to clear her. The sudden shocks and
+interruptions of life, which play so big a part in the action of these
+late romances, have full power here. The winter's tale is interrupted.
+The rest of the play results from the interruption. Much of it is very
+beautiful. To us, the wonderful thing is the strangeness of the
+tenderness which makes some scenes in the fifth act so passionate with
+grief for old injustice done to the dead. The cry of Leontes remembering
+the wronged dead woman's eyes--
+
+                  "Stars, stars,
+    And all eyes else dead coals,"
+
+is haunting and heart-breaking. All his longing of remorse gives to the
+last great scene, before the supposed statue, an intensity of beauty
+hardly endurable.
+
+The passion of remorse is a romantic, not a tragic passion. It is the
+mood which follows the tragic mood. Shakespeare's creative life is like
+a Shakespearean play. It ends with an easing of the strain and a making
+of peace.
+
+It is said that an old horse near to death turns towards the pastures
+where he was foaled. It is true of human beings. Man wanders home to the
+fields which bred him. A part of the romance of this poem is the turning
+back of the poet's mind to the Cotswold country, of which he sang so
+magically, in his first play, sixteen or eighteen years before. There
+are fine scenes of shepherds at home, among the sheep bells and clean
+wind. There is a very lovely talk of flowers--
+
+                                 "daffodils,
+    That come before the swallow dares, and take
+    The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
+    But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
+    Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
+    That die unmarried, ere they can behold
+    Bright Phoebus in his strength."
+
+To Shakespeare, the magically happy man, the going back to them must
+have been a time for thanksgiving. But to the supremely happy man all
+times are times of thanksgiving, deep, tranquil and abundant, for the
+delight, the majesty and the beauty of the fulness of the rolling world.
+
+
+_The Tempest._
+
+     _Written._ 1610-11.
+
+     _Published_, in the folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ It is likely that many sources contributed to
+     the making of this plot. If Shakespeare took the fable from a
+     single source, that source is not now known. He may have taken
+     suggestions for it from the following books:--
+
+     1st. From a little collection of novels by Antonio de Eslava, a
+     Spanish writer, whose book, _Noches de Invierno_, was published in
+     Barcelona in 1609. Three tales in this collection seem to have
+     given hints for the play. The fourth chapter, about "The Art Magic
+     of King Dardano," helped him more than the others. Whether the
+     title of the book suggested the title of _A Winter's Tale_ is not
+     known.
+
+     2nd. From a German play, _Die schöne Sidea_, by a Nuremberg
+     dramatist, named Jacob Ayrer.
+
+     3rd. From the tracts relating to the discovery of the Bermuda
+     Islands in 1609. Of the known tracts, _A Discovery of the Bermuda
+     Islands_, by Sylvester Jourdain, gave Shakespeare the most hints.
+
+     Several other books may have suggested lines and passages.
+
+     _The Fable._ Prospero, Duke of Milan, having been driven from his
+     dukedom by Antonio his brother, flies to sea with his daughter
+     Miranda, lands on an island, and there lives, served by two
+     creatures, one an airy spirit, the other a loutish monster.
+
+     By art magic, he brings to the island his usurping brother and the
+     king and heir of Naples. Miranda falls in love with the heir of
+     Naples. Prospero dismisses his spirits, reconciles himself with his
+     brother, and plans to sail at once for Milan.
+
+In this play, as in the two other original romantic plays, Shakespeare
+follows the workings of a treacherous act from its performance to the
+repentance of the sinner and the granting of the victim's forgiveness.
+In the great plays the victim dies and the sinner does not repent.
+Presently the wheel comes full circle, and a justice from outside life
+smites him dead. In these plays the betrayed live to forgive the
+traitors--
+
+    "Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
+     Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury
+     Do I take part. The rarer action is
+     In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
+     The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
+     Not a frown further."
+
+In this play, as in the other two and in _Pericles_, much is made of the
+chances and accidents of life, and of the sudden changes of worldly
+circumstance due to them. In this play, for the first and last time,
+Shakespeare treats of the power of the resolved imagination to command
+the brutish, the base, the noble and the spiritual for wise human ends.
+
+It is easy to interpret the play as allegory. Youth in this country has
+reason to regard allegory as a clumsy man's way of introducing Sunday on
+a weekday. It is so seldom successful that it may be called the literary
+method of creative minds below the first rank. Shakespeare's method was
+never allegorical. The _Tempest_ is perhaps no more allegorical than
+any other good romance. But the thought of it is so clear that the first
+impression given is that it is thin. It is the study of a man of
+intellect, who has been forced from power by a treacherous brother.
+Living alone with his bright, unspoiled daughter, he attains, by
+intellectual labour, to a power over destiny. Like the wise man of the
+proverb, he learns to master his stars. He uses this power nobly to put
+an end to ancient hatred and old injustice.
+
+The minor vision of the play is a study, often very amusing, but deeply
+earnest, of the coming of the fifth part civilised to the mostly brutal.
+In Shakespeare's time, men like the quite thoughtless and callous
+Stephano and Trinculo, the "sea-dogs" who manned our ships, and of whom
+Raleigh wrote that it was an offence to God to minister oaths to the
+generality of them, were "spreading civilisation" in various parts of
+the world. Shakespeare, looking at them gravely, saw them to be,
+perhaps, more dangerous to the needs of life, to wisdom, and to unlit
+animal strength than the base Sebastian and the treacherous Antonio.
+
+The exquisite lyrics, and the masque of the goddesses, show that the
+taste of the audience of 1610-11 needed to be tickled. Times had changed
+since the lion-like and ramping days, eighteen years before, when
+"Jeronimy" was a new word, and Tamora a serious invention. The man who
+had changed the times was thinking, like Prospero, that he had "got his
+dukedom," and that now, having "pardoned the deceiver," he might go to
+Stratford to enjoy it.
+
+
+_King Henry VIII_, or _All is True_.
+
+     _Written._ 1611-13 (?)
+
+     _Produced._ (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_. Hall's
+     _Chronicles_. Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Act I. Two of the scenes in this act are by
+     Shakespeare. In the first, Cardinal Wolsey contrives the attainting
+     of his enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. In the other he procures to
+     bring Queen Katharine into disfavour.
+
+     Act II. In this act, Buckingham is beheaded, the King shows favour
+     to Anne Bullen, and Queen Katharine is brought to trial. It is hard
+     to believe that Shakespeare wrote any part of this act. He is often
+     credited with the third scene, apparently on the ground that though
+     it is bad it is still too good to be by Bacon.
+
+     Act III. In this act, the King shows Wolsey that he has discovered
+     his plottings. About half of the second scene (all the masculine
+     part of it) is by Shakespeare. The rest (very beautiful) is by
+     Fletcher.
+
+     Act IV. Anne Bullen is crowned. Wolsey dies. Queen Katharine dies.
+     None of this act is by Shakespeare.
+
+     Act V. Cranmer escapes from his enemies in time to be godfather at
+     the christening of Anne Bullen's daughter Elizabeth. If any of this
+     act be by Shakespeare it can only be the first scene.
+
+Little of this play is by Shakespeare. The greater part of it is by John
+Fletcher. Some scenes bear the marks of a third hand, like that of
+Philip Massinger. The play reads as though the two lesser poets had
+worked from a scenario of Shakespeare's less complete than the draft of
+_Troilus and Cressida_. It is certain that they received no hint of the
+lines on which Shakespeare meant to proceed after the end of Act III.
+Not knowing what to do, they patched up a piece without any central
+tragical idea, and hid their want of thought with much effective
+theatrical invention, pageants, a trial, a coronation, a christening,
+etc., and with bright, facile, vinous dialogue, of the kind that will
+hold an uncritical audience. The play, when done, was mounted with
+extreme splendour at the Globe Theatre. Wadding from the cannons
+discharged in the first act set fire to the theatre, and burned it to
+the ground, June 29, 1613.
+
+Shakespeare's dramatic intention is indicated in the scenes written by
+him. Knowing his practice, and having before us Holinshed, his
+authority, it is easy to sketch out the kind of play that he would have
+written by himself. Wolsey, eaten up by his obsession for worldly power,
+betraying Buckingham to his fall, breaking the power of the Queen, and
+ruling England, would have filled the first two acts. The third act
+would have told (much more subtly than Fletcher has told) of his
+downfall. Fletcher attributes the downfall to the chance discovery of
+his attempt to thwart the king's marriage with Anne Bullen. That
+discovery would have been put to full dramatic use by Shakespeare; but
+it would have been represented as something working from beyond the
+grave, the result of many unjust acts that have cried to God for justice
+till God hears. The last acts would have exposed other sides of Wolsey's
+character. The play would have been a fuller, nobler work than _Richard
+II_, and of an ampler canvas than _Timon_. Shakespeare's share in the
+play as we have it is all noble work. Wolsey, Katharine and the King are
+drawn with the great, sharp, ample line of a master. The difference
+between genius and supreme genius is shown very clearly in the first
+act, where a great work, greatly begun, with the masterly power of
+exposition that makes Shakespeare's first acts like daybreaks, is ended
+by another spirit, without vision, but with a tremendous sense of Vanity
+Fair.
+
+
+WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE
+
+A play called _Cardenno_, or _Cardenna_, was acted at Court by
+Shakespeare's company in 1613. It is thought that this play was the
+_History of Cardenio_, described as "by Fletcher and Shakespeare," which
+was licensed for publication in 1653 but never published. The play is
+now lost. It was attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare on very poor
+authority.
+
+_Arden of Feversham_ is a domestic tragedy founded on a story told by
+Holinshed. It was published anonymously in 1592. It is held by some to
+be an early work of Shakespeare's, on the ground that no other known
+poet, then living, could have written it. It is a strong play, but it is
+the work of a joyless mind. It bears no single trace of Shakespeare's
+mind. It could not have been written by him at any stage in his career.
+
+_Edward III_ is an historical chronicle play by at least two unknown
+hands. It was published anonymously in 1596. Some think that part of Act
+I and the whole of Act II (dealing with the King's obsession of passion
+for the Countess of Salisbury) were by Shakespeare, on the grounds that
+the writing is too good to be by anybody else then living, and that the
+unknown author makes use of a line and a phrase which occur in the
+genuine sonnets of Shakespeare. The scenes attributed to Shakespeare
+contain several beautiful lines in something of the Shakespearean
+manner. The construction of the scenes, and their relation to the rest
+of the play is un-Shakespearean. It is unlikely that Shakespeare wrote
+them.
+
+_The Spanish Tragedy_, a play by Thomas Kyd, published in 1592 and
+reprinted with many additions ten years later, contains in the additions
+several magnificent scenes of the passion of grief raised to madness.
+Some think that Ben Jonson wrote these scenes; others, that they are too
+good to be by any one but Shakespeare. They are not like Shakespeare's
+work.
+
+_The Two Noble Kinsmen_, a romantic tragedy on the subject of Chaucer's
+_Knight's Tale_, was first published in 1634. It was described on the
+title-page as the joint work of Fletcher and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's
+hand is plainly marked upon the play; but it seems likely that most of
+the scenes usually credited to him are by Massinger. Few can have ears
+dull enough to credit Shakespeare with all the scenes that are plainly
+not by Fletcher.
+
+About a dozen other plays and parts of plays have been attributed to
+Shakespeare, either by lying publishers, anxious to make money, or by
+foolish critics eager to make a noise. "Evil men understand not
+judgment: and he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent."
+There is not a glimmer of evidence in any line or scene to show that
+Shakespeare had a hand in any of them.
+
+
+THE POEMS
+
+_Venus and Adonis._--This poem was published in 1593 with a dedication
+to the Earl of Southampton, then a youth. In the dedication Shakespeare
+speaks of the poem as "the first heire of my invention," from which
+some conclude that it was the first poem ever made public by him.
+
+Though it may be his earliest poem, the thought expressed by it is the
+thought expressed in the greatest of the plays, that evil comes of
+obsession.
+
+Venus, a lustful woman, pursuing her opposite, a chaste youth, comes to
+misery. Adonis, a chaste youth, fleeing from her, comes to death.
+
+The poem is beautiful and wild blooded. It is fierce with the excelling
+animal zest of something young and untainted.
+
+    "The sun ariseth in his majesty
+     Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
+     That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."
+
+It is full of the images of delicate quick-blooded things going swiftly
+and lustily from the boiling of the April in them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Rape of Lucrece._--This poem was published in 1594, with a
+dedication to the Earl of Southampton. Like so many of the works of
+Shakespeare, it describes at length the prompting, acting, and results
+of a treachery inspired by an obsession. Tarquin, hearing of Lucrece's
+chastity, longs to attempt her. Coming stealthily to her home, in her
+lord's absence, he foully ravishes her. She kills herself and he is
+banished from Rome. The subject is not unlike that of _Venus and
+Adonis_, with the sexes reversed. In both poems the subject is sexual
+obsession and its results.
+
+_Lucrece_ is a wiser and a finer poem than _Venus and Adonis_. It is
+constructed with the art of a man familiar with the theatre. The
+delaying of the great moments so as to heighten the expectation, is
+contrived with rapturous energy. The poem is heaped and overflowing with
+the abundance of imaginative power. The wealth of the young man's mind
+is poured out like life in June.
+
+It is strange that both Lucrece and Hamlet, in their moments of
+distraction, turn to the image of Troy blazing with the punishment of
+treachery.
+
+_The Passionate Pilgrim._--This little collection of poems was published
+in 1599, under Shakespeare's name, by William Jaggard, a dishonest
+bookseller. It contains poems by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin,
+Christopher Marlowe, and one or more unknown hands. It also contains two
+genuine Shakespearean sonnets, three more from the text of _Love's
+Labour's Lost_, and three (less certainly his) on the subject of _Venus
+and Adonis_, which have the ring of his freshest youthful manner.
+Whether any others in the collection be by Shakespeare can only be a
+matter of opinion. The nineteenth poem has a smack of his mind about it.
+If it be by him it must be his earliest extant work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Sonnets._--_Written_ between 1592 and 1609. _Published_
+(piratically) 1609.
+
+These personal poems have puzzled many readers. Many writers have tried
+to interpret them. Although their first editor tells us that they are
+"serene, cleare, and elegantlie plaine (with) no intricate and cloudie
+stuffe to trouble and perplex the intellect," much good and bad brain
+work has been spent on them. Some have held that they are poetical
+exercises. Others find that they are confessions. Others wrest from dark
+lines dark meanings, till they have laid bare a story from them. Others
+interpret spiritually. Others find evidence in them that Shakespeare was
+guilty of an abnormal form of passion. The facts about them may be
+stated--
+
+     1. They are personal poems. Some of them are of great beauty;
+     others are unsuccessful.
+
+     2. They were written in many moods. Some were written in a mood of
+     the intensest tranquil ecstasy, others in a fit of earthly passion,
+     others in a trivial mood.
+
+     3. They were written to more than one person. Many were written to
+     an attractive, handsome, young, unmarried man, Shakespeare's dear
+     friend. Men with imagination enjoy sweeter and closer friendships
+     than the many know. The many, mulish as ever, therefore imagine
+     evil.
+
+     4. Some of the sonnets were written to a woman, of the kind
+     described in two or three of the plays, viz. a black-haired,
+     black-eyed, white-faced, witty wanton, false to her marriage vows
+     and the cause of similar falseness in Shakespeare himself, and in
+     his friend.
+
+     5. Many of them show that Shakespeare, loving this woman, against
+     his better nature, was wilfully betrayed by her to all the devils
+     of jealousy, craving and self-loathing, which follow the banner of
+     lechery. Among the objects of the jealousy another poet figured.
+
+No one knows who the friend, the lady and the rival poet were. The
+discovery of letters and manuscripts may some day remove the mystery.
+"Against that time, if ever that time come," men of intellect would do
+well to accept the sonnets as beautiful poems, and try to write as good
+ones to their wives.
+
+Beautiful as many of the sonnets are, they are less wonderful
+achievements and less important to the soul of man than the plays. Few
+people thought much of them until the degradation of the English theatre
+had hidden from English minds the greater glory of the creative system.
+That they are now widely read while the plays are seldom acted, is
+another proof that this age cares more for what was perishing and
+personal in Shakespeare than for that which went winging on, in the
+great light, surveying the eternal in man.
+
+What Shakespeare thought of his perishing self is expressed in the
+noblest of the sonnets. Two syllables are missing from the second line.
+
+    "Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
+     (   ) these rebel powers that thee array,
+     Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
+     Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
+     Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
+     Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
+     Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
+     Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?
+     Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
+     And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
+     Buy terms divine with selling hours of dross;
+     Within be fed, without be rich no more:
+     So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
+     And Death once dead, there's no more dying then."
+
+The sonnets were piratically published in a quarto volume in 1609. At
+the end of the volume a narrative poem was printed, under the name _A
+Lover's Complaint_. It tells in the first person the story of a girl who
+has been seduced by a plausible villain. It is a work of Shakespeare's
+youth, fresh and felicitous as youth's work often is, and very nearly
+as empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Phoenix and The Turtle._--This strange, very beautiful poem was
+published in 1601 in an appendix to Robert Chester's _Love's Martyr, or
+Rosalin's Complaint_, to which several famous poets contributed. In dark
+and noble verse it describes a spiritual marriage, suddenly ended by
+death. It is too strange to be the fruit of a human sorrow. It is the
+work of a great mind trying to express in unusual symbols a thought too
+subtle and too intense to be expressed in any other way. Spiritual
+ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that
+key it can only be so many strange words set in a noble rhythm for no
+apparent cause.
+
+Poetry moves in many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action
+of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an
+intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not
+human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives
+to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery
+and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind
+with their crying.
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+Shakespeare's plays were printed carelessly, often from imperfect, torn,
+ill-written or stolen copies. When printed, they were seldom corrected.
+When reprinted, the original errors were often made much worse. Thus,
+"he met the night-mare," or "a met the night-mare," in the original
+manuscript, was printed "a nellthu night more," and reprinted "anelthu
+night Moore." Those who lightly read the modern editions seldom know
+that years of mental toil went to the preparation of the texts so easily
+read to-day.
+
+Many English minds have paid tribute to Shakespeare. Few of them deserve
+more praise than the Cambridge Editors, whose six years of labour
+cleared the text of countless errors and corruptions. The correction of
+a corrupt text by collation and conjecture, is one of the most difficult
+and least amusing tasks that a fine mind can have. The Cambridge
+_Shakespeare_, the work of William George Clark and Dr. William Aldis
+Wright, gives a text not likely to be improved until the poet's
+corrected manuscripts are found.
+
+The _Life of William Shakespeare_ has been ably written by Dr. Sidney
+Lee, whose judgment equals his learning.
+
+Some of the dramatic methods of Shakespeare have been nobly studied by
+Dr. A. C. Bradley in his _Shakespearean Tragedy_.
+
+To these books and to the Shakespearean Essays in Mr. W. B. Yeats's
+_Ideas of Good and Evil_, I am deeply indebted, as all modern students
+of Shakespeare must be.
+
+Our knowledge of Shakespeare is imperfect. It can only be increased by
+minute and patient study, by the rejection of surmise about him, and by
+the constant public playing of his plays, in the Shakespearean manner,
+by actors who will neither mutilate nor distort what the great mind
+strove to make just.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF CHARACTERS
+
+
+Achilles, 169, 170
+
+Adonis, 241, 242
+
+Adriana, 46, 47
+
+Ægeon, 44, 46, 49
+
+Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, 139
+
+Ajax, 169, 172
+
+Albany, Duke of, 187, 190
+
+Alcibiades, 214, 215, 217, 218
+
+Angelo, 174, 175, 177, 196
+
+Anne Bullen, 236, 237
+
+Anne, Lady, 93, 100
+
+Antipholus of Ephesus, 44, 46
+
+Antipholus of Syracuse, 44
+
+Antonio (_Merchant of Venice_), 103
+
+Antonio (_Tempest_), 232, 235
+
+Antonio (_Two Gentlemen of Verona_), 34
+
+Apemantus, 215
+
+Armado, 30, 31
+
+Arthur, Prince, 75, 80, 83, 84
+
+Audrey, 129
+
+Austria, Lymoges, Duke of, 81
+
+Autolycus, 228
+
+
+Banquo, 195, 200
+
+Bardolph, 122, 124, 125
+
+Bassanio, 103
+
+Beatrice, 133, 134, 136, 137
+
+Beaufort, Cardinal, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59
+
+Belarius, 223
+
+Belch, Sir Toby, 82, 138, 139, 217
+
+Benedick, 133, 134, 136
+
+Bertram, 144, 145, 146
+
+Bianca, 105, 108
+
+Biondello, 107
+
+Biron, 24, 25, 32, 36
+
+Blanch of Spain, 75, 79
+
+Borachio, 134, 135
+
+Bottom, 63
+
+Boyet, 30
+
+Brutus, 149, 150, 154, 156
+
+Buckingham, Duke of (_Richard III_), 94, 98, 99
+
+Buckingham, Duke of (_Henry VIII_), 235, 237
+
+
+Cade, Jack, 55, 57
+
+Caius, Dr., 124, 125
+
+Calchas, 169
+
+Carlisle, Bishop of, 89, 92
+
+Cassio, 180, 181, 183
+
+Cassius, 149
+
+Cawdor, 198
+
+Celia, 128, 129
+
+Cerimon, 222
+
+Clarence, George, Duke of, 93, 94, 98, 100
+
+Claudio (_Measure for Measure_), 174, 177, 178
+
+Claudio (_Much Ado_), 133, 134, 135
+
+Claudius (_Hamlet_), 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166
+
+Cleopatra, 202, 203, 207, 217
+
+Cloten, 223
+
+Cordelia, 187, 188, 190, 192
+
+Coriolanus, 196, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212
+
+Cornwall, Duke of, 190
+
+Costard, 30, 31
+
+Cranmer, 236
+
+Cressida, 169
+
+Cymbeline, 223, 225
+
+
+Demetrius, 63
+
+Desdemona, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185
+
+Diana (_All's Well_), 144
+
+Diana (_Pericles_), 219, 220
+
+Don John, 133, 134, 135
+
+Don Pedro, 133, 134, 136
+
+Dorset, Marquess of, 98
+
+Dromio of Ephesus, 44
+
+Dromio of Syracuse, 44, 46
+
+Dumaine, 24, 32
+
+Duncan, King, 154, 195, 198, 201
+
+
+Edgar, 187, 190
+
+Edmund, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 204
+
+Edward III, 239
+
+Edward IV, 93, 94
+
+Edward, Prince of Wales (_Henry VI_), 62
+
+Edward, Prince of Wales (_Richard III_), 99
+
+Eglamour, 41
+
+Elinor, Queen, 78
+
+Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, 94
+
+Elizabeth, Princess, 236
+
+Emilia, 183, 184
+
+Evans, Sir Hugh, 124, 125
+
+
+Falstaff, Sir John, 112, 113, 116, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126
+
+Flavius, 216
+
+Florizel, 227
+
+Fluellen, 123
+
+Fool (_Lear_), 192
+
+Ford, Mistress, 124, 125
+
+Fortinbras, 161
+
+Frederick, Duke, 128, 129, 132
+
+Friar Laurence, 68, 71, 74
+
+
+Gertrude, Queen, 157, 158, 161, 165
+
+Ghost (_Hamlet_), 158
+
+Gloucester, Earl of, 187, 188, 189, 190
+
+Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59
+
+Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (_Henry VI_), 61
+
+Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (_Richard III_), 93, 115
+
+Goneril, 187, 189, 193
+
+Grey, Lord, 98, 99
+
+
+Hamlet, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 191, 196, 243
+
+Hastings, Lord, 99
+
+Hector, 169, 170
+
+Helen, 171
+
+Helena (_Midsummer Night's Dream_), 63
+
+Helena (_All's Well_), 144, 145, 147
+
+Henry IV, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116
+
+Henry V, 120, 121
+
+Henry VI, 51, 52, 60, 61, 62
+
+Henry VIII, 235, 236, 237, 238
+
+Henry, Prince of Wales, 109, 111, 112, 114, 118
+
+Henry Bolingbroke, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92
+
+Hermia, 63
+
+Hermione, 226, 227, 229
+
+Hero, 133, 134, 135
+
+Hippolyta, 63
+
+Hotspur, Henry Percy, surnamed, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 119
+
+Hubert de Burgh, 80, 83
+
+
+Iachimo, 223, 225
+
+Iago, 181, 182, 181, 185, 204, 211
+
+Imogen, 223
+
+Isabella, 174, 175
+
+
+Jaques, 129, 131, 132
+
+Joan of Arc, 51, 54
+
+John, King of England, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80
+
+John of Gaunt, 86, 89, 91
+
+John of Lancaster, 114, 118
+
+Julia, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42
+
+Juliet, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71
+
+Julius Cæsar, 149, 153, 154, 156, 196
+
+
+Katharina, 106, 108
+
+Katharine, 32
+
+Katharine of France, 120
+
+Katharine, Queen, 235, 236, 237, 238
+
+Kent, 187, 190
+
+
+Laertes, 158, 161
+
+Launce, 42
+
+Lear, King, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194
+
+Lennox, 202
+
+Leonato, 135, 136
+
+Leontes, King of Sicilia, 226, 227, 228, 229
+
+Lewis the Dauphin, 75, 79
+
+Longaville, 24, 32
+
+Lucio, 177,178
+
+Lucrece, 243
+
+Lysander, 63
+
+
+Macbeth, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 217
+
+Macbeth, Lady, 195, 199, 200
+
+Macduff, 195, 202
+
+Malcolm, 195
+
+Malvolio, 138, 139, 140, 141
+
+Mamillius, 227, 229
+
+Marcius, 208
+
+Margaret of Anjou, 52, 55, 62, 94
+
+Maria, 139
+
+Mariana, 174, 175
+
+Marina, 219, 220, 222
+
+Mark Antony, 149, 191, 196, 202, 204, 206
+
+Mercutio, 68, 70
+
+Milan, Duke of, 34, 35, 38, 39
+
+Miranda, 232
+
+Mortimer, 53
+
+
+Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of, 86, 119
+
+Northumberland, Henry Percy, Earl of, 114
+
+Nurse to Juliet, 74
+
+Nym, 123, 124
+
+
+Oberon, 63
+
+Octavia, 202
+
+Octavius Cæsar, 149, 202, 203, 205
+
+Olivia, 138, 140, 141
+
+Oliver, 128, 129
+
+Ophelia, 157, 158, 166
+
+Orlando, 128, 129, 131
+
+Orsino, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142
+
+Othello, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 191, 196
+
+
+Page, Anne, 124
+
+Page, Mistress, 124
+
+Pandarus, 169
+
+Pandulph, Cardinal, 75
+
+Paris, 68
+
+Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 213, 219, 220
+
+Petruchio, 105, 107
+
+Phebe, 129, 132, 133
+
+Philip the Bastard, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83
+
+Philip of France, 75, 80
+
+Pistol, 117, 122, 123, 124
+
+Polixenes, King of Bohemia, 226, 227, 228
+
+Polonius, 158, 161
+
+Portia, 102, 103, 104, 132
+
+Posthumus, 223, 225
+
+Prospero, Duke of Milan, 232, 235
+
+Proteus, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41
+
+Puck, 63
+
+Pyramus, 63
+
+
+Queen (_Cymbeline_), 223, 225
+
+Quickly, Mrs., 124
+
+
+Regan, 187, 189
+
+Richard II, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 115, 119
+
+Richard III, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 211
+
+Richard, Duke of York, 99
+
+Rivers, Earl, 98, 99
+
+Roderigo, 183
+
+Romeo, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71
+
+Rosalind, 128, 129, 132
+
+Rosaline, 25, 31, 32, 69, 133
+
+
+Salisbury, Countess of, 239
+
+Scroop, Lord, 122
+
+Sebastian (_Tempest_), 235
+
+Sebastian (_Twelfth Night_), 138
+
+Shallow, Justice, 82, 124
+
+Shylock, 103, 104
+
+Silvia, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41
+
+Simpcox, 65, 59
+
+Slender, Master, 124
+
+Sly, Christopher, 105, 107
+
+Somerset, Earl of, 51
+
+Stephano, 234
+
+Suffolk, Earl of, 52, 55, 57
+
+
+Talbot, 51, 54
+
+Tamora, 49, 50
+
+Tarquin, 196, 243
+
+Thaisa, 219, 220, 222
+
+Thersites, 172
+
+Theseus, 63, 66
+
+Thisbe, 63
+
+Thurio, 34, 35, 37, 38
+
+Timon of Athens, 196, 209, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218
+
+Titania, 63
+
+Titus Andronicus, 49, 50
+
+Touchstone, 129
+
+Trinculo, 234
+
+Troilus, 169
+
+Tybalt, 68, 70
+
+
+Ulysses, 170
+
+Ursula, 133
+
+
+Valentine, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41
+
+Venus, 241, 242
+
+Vienna, Duke of, 174, 178
+
+Viola, 138, 139, 141, 142
+
+
+Warwick, Earl of, 59, 61
+
+Wolsey, Cardinal, 196, 235, 236, 237, 238
+
+
+York, Edmund of Langley, Duke of, 89, 92
+
+York, Edward, Duke of, 61
+
+York, Richard, Duke of, 51, 55, 57, 62
+
+
+_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
+
+
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+PROF. WM. T. BREWSTER, M.A.
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+By Dr W. S. BRUCE, F.R.S.E., Leader of the "Scotia" Expedition. (With
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+
+12. _THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA_
+
+By Sir H. H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. (With Maps.) "The
+Home University Library is much enriched by this excellent
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+13. _MEDIÆVAL EUROPE_
+
+By H. W. C. DAVIS, M.A. (With Maps.) "A good specimen of the work of the
+modern historian,"--_Christian World._ "One more illustration of the
+fact that it takes a complete master of the subject to write briefly
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+
+14. _THE PAPACY & MODERN TIMES_ (1303-1870)
+
+By WILLIAM BARRY, D.D. "Dr Barry has a wide range of knowledge and an
+artist's power of selection."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+23. _HISTORY OF OUR TIME_, 1885-1911
+
+By G. P. GOOCH, M.A. "Mr Gooch contrives to breathe vitality into his
+story, and to give us the flesh as well as the bones of recent
+happenings."--_Observer._
+
+25. _THE CIVILISATION OF CHINA_
+
+By H. A. GILES, LL.D., Professor of Chinese in the University of
+Cambridge. "In all the mass of facts, Professor Giles never becomes
+dull. He is always ready with a ghost story or a street adventure for
+the reader's recreation."--_Spectator._
+
+29. _THE DAWN OF HISTORY_
+
+By J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S.A., Wykeham Professor of Ancient History,
+Oxford. "There is not a page in it that is not suggestive."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+33. _THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND_:
+
+_A Study in Political Evolution._
+
+By Prof. A. F. POLLARD, M.A. With a Chronological Table. "A vivid study
+of tendencies, not a solid mass of facts.... It is a most stimulating,
+energetic, and suggestive piece of work."--_Daily News._ "It
+takes its place at once among the authoritative works on English
+history."--_Observer._ "It is marked by the wealth of detail, the sanity
+of outlook, the severe impartiality which we always find in Prof.
+Pollard's writings."--_London Teacher._
+
+34. _CANADA_
+
+By A. G. BRADLEY. "Who knows Canada better than Mr A. G.
+Bradley?"--_Daily Chronicle._ "The volume makes an immediate appeal to
+the man who wants to know something vivid and true about
+Canada."--_Canadian Gazette._ "As interesting and as absorbing as a good
+novel."--_Canadian Mail._
+
+37. _PEOPLES & PROBLEMS OF INDIA_
+
+By Sir T. W. HOLDERNESS, K.C.S.I., Secretary of the Revenue, Statistics,
+and Commerce Department of the India Office. "Just the book which
+newspaper readers require to-day, and a marvel of comprehensiveness in
+bringing all the factors of a great subject into view within a limited
+space."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+42. _ROME_
+
+By W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A. "A masterly sketch of Roman character and of
+what it did for the world."--_The Spectator._ "It has all the lucidity
+and charm of presentation we expect from this writer."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+48. _THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR_
+
+By F. L. PAXSON, Professor of American History, Wisconsin University.
+(With Maps.)
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_ANCIENT GREECE._ By Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.
+
+_ANCIENT EGYPT._ By Dr F. L. GRIFFITH, M.A., F.R.S.
+
+_A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE._ By HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+
+_THE REFORMATION._ By Principal LINDSAY, LL.D.
+
+_A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA._ By Prof. MILYOUKOV.
+
+_MODERN TURKEY._ By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A.
+
+_FRANCE OF TO-DAY._ By ALBERT THOMAS.
+
+_HISTORY OF SCOTLAND._ By R. S. RAIT, M.A.
+
+_SOUTH AMERICA._ By Prof. W. R. SHEPHERD.
+
+_MASTER MARINERS._ By J. R. SPEARS.
+
+_NAPOLEON._ By HERBERT FISHER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+_Literature and Art_
+
+
+2. _SHAKESPEARE_
+
+By JOHN MASEFIELD. "The book is a joy. We have had half-a-dozen more
+learned books on Shakespeare in the last few years, but not one so
+wise."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+27. _ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN_
+
+By G. H. MAIR, M.A. "Altogether a fresh and individual
+book."--_Observer._
+
+35. _LANDMARKS IN FRENCH LITERATURE_
+
+By G. L. STRACHEY. "Short handbooks on great subjects are among the most
+difficult tasks that a man of letters can undertake, and Mr Strachey is
+to be congratulated on his courage and success. It is difficult to
+imagine how a better account of French Literature could be given in two
+hundred and fifty small pages than he has given here."--_The Times._
+
+39. _ARCHITECTURE_
+
+By Prof. W. R. LETHABY. (Over forty Illustrations.) "Popular guide-books
+to architecture are, as a rule, not worth much. This volume is a welcome
+exception."--_Building News._ "Delightfully bright reading."--_Christian
+World._
+
+43. _ENGLISH LITERATURE: MEDIÆVAL._
+
+By Prof. W. P. KER, M.A.
+
+45. _THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE_
+
+By L. PEARSALL SMITH, M.A.
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL._ By Miss JANE HARRISON, LL.D., D.Litt.
+
+_THE RENAISSANCE._ By Mrs R. A. TAYLOR.
+
+_ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE._ By ROGER E. FRY, M.A.
+
+_ENGLISH COMPOSITION._ By Prof. WM. T. BREWSTER.
+
+_GREAT WRITERS OF AMERICA._ By Prof. W. P. TRENT and Prof. J. ERSKINE.
+
+_GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA._ By C. T. HAGBERG WRIGHT, LL.D.
+
+_THE LITERATURE OF GERMANY._ By Prof. J. G. ROBERTSON, M.A., Ph.D.
+
+
+
+
+_Science_
+
+
+7. _MODERN GEOGRAPHY_
+
+By Dr MARION NEWBIGIN. (Illustrated.) "Geography, again: what a dull,
+tedious study that was wont to be!... But Miss Marion Newbigin invests
+its dry bones with the flesh and blood of romantic interest, taking
+stock of geography as a fairy-book of science."--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+9. _THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS_
+
+By Dr D. H. SCOTT, M.A., F.R.S., late Hon. Keeper of the Jodrell
+Laboratory, Kew. (Fully illustrated.) "The information which the book
+provides is as trustworthy as first-hand knowledge can make it.... Dr
+Scott's candid and familiar style makes the difficult subject both
+fascinating and easy."--_Gardeners' Chronicle._
+
+17. _HEALTH AND DISEASE_
+
+By W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D., Local Government Board, Edinburgh. "The
+science of public health administration has had no abler or more
+attractive exponent than Dr Mackenzie. He adds to a thorough grasp of
+the problems an illuminating style, and an arresting manner of treating
+a subject often dull and sometimes unsavoury."--_Economist._
+
+18. _INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS_
+
+By A. N. WHITHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S. (With Diagrams.) "Mr Whitehead has
+discharged with conspicuous success the task he is so exceptionally
+qualified to undertake. For he is one of our great authorities upon the
+foundations of the science, and has the breadth of view which is so
+requisite in presenting to the reader its aims. His exposition is clear
+and striking."--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+19. _THE ANIMAL WORLD_
+
+By Professor F. W. GAMBLE, D.Sc., F.R.S. With Introduction by Sir Oliver
+Lodge. (Many Illustrations.) "A delightful and instructive epitome of
+animal (and vegetable) life.... A most fascinating and suggestive
+survey."--_Morning Post._
+
+20. _EVOLUTION_
+
+By Professor J. ARTHUR THOMSON and Professor PATRICK GEDDES. "A
+many-coloured and romantic panorama, opening up, like no other book we
+know, a rational vision of world-development."--_Belfast News-Letter._
+
+22. _CRIME AND INSANITY_
+
+By Dr C. A. MERCIER, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S., Author of "Text-Book of
+Insanity," etc. "Furnishes much valuable information from one occupying
+the highest position among medico-legal psychologists."--_Asylum News._
+
+28. _PSYCHICAL RESEARCH_
+
+By Sir W. F. BARRETT, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of
+Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "As a former President of the Psychical
+Research Society, he is familiar with all the developments of this most
+fascinating branch of science, and thus what he has to say on
+thought-reading, hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism,
+divinings, and so on, will be read with avidity."--_Dundee Courier._
+
+31. _ASTRONOMY_
+
+By A. R. HINKS, M.A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory, "Original
+in thought, eclectic in substance, and critical in treatment.... No
+better little book is available."--_School World._
+
+32. _INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE_
+
+By J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History,
+Aberdeen University. "For those who have not yet become possessed of the
+Library, this would form an appropriate introduction. Professor
+Thomson's delightful literary style is well known; and here he
+discourses freshly and easily on the methods of science and its
+relations with philosophy, art, religion, and practical
+life."--_Aberdeen Journal._
+
+36. _CLIMATE AND WEATHER_
+
+By H. N. DICKSON, D.Sc. Oxon., M.A., F.R.S.E., President of the Royal
+Meteorological Society; Professor of Geography in University College,
+Reading. (With Diagrams.) "The author has succeeded in presenting in a
+very lucid and agreeable manner the causes of the movement of the
+atmosphere and of the more stable winds. The information throughout
+appears to be reliable, and is certainly conveyed in an attractive
+form."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+41. _ANTHROPOLOGY_
+
+By R. R. MARETT, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford
+University. "An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a child could
+understand it, so fascinating and human that it beats fiction 'to a
+frazzle.'"--_Morning Leader._
+
+44. _THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY_
+
+By Prof. J. G. MCKENDRICK, M.D.
+
+46. _MATTER AND ENERGY_
+
+By F. SODDY, M.A., F.R.S.
+
+49. _PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR_
+
+By Prof. W. MCDOUGALL, F.R.S., M.B.
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_ELECTRICITY._ By Dr GISBERT KAPP.
+
+_CHEMISTRY._ By Prof. R. MELDOLA, F.R.S.
+
+_THE MAKING OF THE EARTH._ By Prof. T. W. GREGORY, F.R.S.
+
+_THE MINERAL WORLD._ By Sir T. H. HOLLAND, K.C.I.E., D.Sc.
+
+_THE HUMAN BODY._ By Dr A. KEITH, M.D., F.R.C.S.
+
+_PLANT LIFE._ By Prof. J. B. FARMER, F.R.S.
+
+
+
+
+_Philosophy and Religion_
+
+
+15. _MOHAMMEDANISM_
+
+By Prof. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.Litt. "This generous shilling's
+worth of wisdom.... A delicate, humorous, and most responsible tractate
+by an illuminative professor."--_Daily Mail._
+
+40. _THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY_
+
+By the Hon. BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S. "A book that the 'man in the
+street' will recognise at once to be a boon.... Consistently lucid and
+non-technical throughout."--_Christian World._
+
+47. _BUDDHISM_
+
+By Mrs RHYS DAVIDS, M.A.
+
+50. _NONCONFORMITY: ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS_
+
+By Principal W. B. SELBIE, M.A.
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_THE OLD TESTAMENT._ By Prof. GEORGE MOORE, D.D., LL.D.
+
+_BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS._ By R. H. CHARLES, D.D.
+
+_THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT._ By Prof. B. W. BACON, Litt.D., D.D.
+
+_COMPARATIVE RELIGION._ By Prof. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, D.Litt.
+
+_A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT._ By Prof. J. B. BURY, LL.D.
+
+_ETHICS._ By G. E. MOORE.
+
+_MISSIONS._ By Mrs CREIGHTON.
+
+
+
+
+_Social Science_
+
+
+1. _PARLIAMENT_
+
+Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir COURTENAY P. ILBERT,
+K.C.B., K.C.S.I., Clerk of the House of Commons. "The best book on the
+history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's
+'Constitution.'"--_Yorkshire Post._
+
+5. _THE STOCK EXCHANGE_
+
+By F. W. HIRST, Editor of "The Economist." "A little treatise which to
+an unfinancial mind must be a revelation.... The book is as clear,
+vigorous, and sane as Bagehot's 'Lombard Street,' than which there is no
+higher compliment."--_Morning Leader._
+
+6. _IRISH NATIONALITY_
+
+By Mrs J. R. GREEN. "As glowing as it is learned. No book could
+be more timely."--_Daily News._ "A powerful study.... A
+magnificent demonstration of the deserved vitality of the Gaelic
+spirit."--_Freeman's Journal._
+
+10. _THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT_
+
+By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P. "Admirably adapted for the purpose of
+exposition."--_The Times._ "Mr MacDonald is a very lucid exponent....
+The volume will be of great use in dispelling illusions about the
+tendencies of Socialism in this country."--_The Nation._
+
+11. _CONSERVATISM_
+
+By Lord HUGH CECIL, M.A., M.P.
+
+16. _THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH_
+
+By J. A. HOBSON, M.A. "Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among
+living economists.... The text-book produced is altogether admirable.
+Original, reasonable, and illuminating."--_The Nation._
+
+21. _LIBERALISM_
+
+By L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A., Professor of Sociology in the University of
+London. "A book of rare quality.... We have nothing but praise for the
+rapid and masterly summaries of the arguments from first principles
+which form a large part of this book."--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+24. _THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY_
+
+By D. H. MACGREGOR, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in the
+University of Leeds. "A volume so dispassionate in terms may be
+read with profit by all interested in the present state of
+unrest."--_Aberdeen Journal._
+
+26. _AGRICULTURE_
+
+By Prof. W. SOMERVILLE, F.L.S.
+
+30. _ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW_
+
+By W. M. GELDART, M.A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law at
+Oxford. "Contains a very clear account of the elementary principles
+underlying the rules of English law; and we can recommend it to all who
+wish to become acquainted with these elementary principles with a
+minimum of trouble."--_Scots Law Times._
+
+38. _THE SCHOOL_
+
+_An Introduction to the Study of Education._
+
+By J. J. FINDLAY, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in Manchester
+University. "An amazingly comprehensive volume.... It is a remarkable
+performance, distinguished in its crisp, striking phraseology as well as
+its inclusiveness of subject-matter."--_Morning Post._
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES._ By Prof. PATRICK GEDDES.
+
+_ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY._ By Prof. S. J. CHAPMAN.
+
+_COMMONSENSE IN LAW._ By Prof. P. VINOGRADOFF, D.C.L.
+
+_THE CIVIL SERVICE._ By GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A.
+
+_MISSIONS._ By Mrs CREIGHTON.
+
+_PRACTICAL IDEALISM._ By MAURICE HEWLETT.
+
+_NEWSPAPERS._ By G. B. DIBBLEE.
+
+_ENGLISH VILLAGE LIFE._ By E. N. BENNETT, M.A.
+
+
+London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+_And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. Obvious
+printer errors have been corrected, and are listed below.
+
+For the chapter heading, "The Second Part of King Henry IV", the Table
+of Contents lists it as "King Henry IV, Part II"; this was not changed.
+In addition other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.
+
+Page 36: "obession is at the root" changed to "obsession is at the
+root".
+
+Page 94: "great historical play" changed to "great historical plays".
+
+Page 253: "Aegon" changed to "Ægeon".
+
+Page 256: Index entry for page 133 of "Rosaline" was moved to
+"Rosalind".
+
+Page 256: Index entry for page 92 of "York, Edmund of Langley, Duke" was
+removed.
+
+Page 262: "Py Prof. R. Medola" changed to "By Prof. R. Medola".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of William Shakespeare, by John Masefield
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ***
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of William Shakespeare, by John Masefield
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: William Shakespeare
+
+Author: John Masefield
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2008 [EBook #27264]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Carla Foust and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<h3>Transcriber's note</h3>
+
+
+<p>Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. Obvious
+printer errors have been corrected, and they are indicated with a
+<a class="correction" title="like this" href="#tnotes">mouse-hover</a>
+and listed at the <a href="#tnotes">end</a>.
+<br /><br />
+
+For the chapter heading, "The Second Part of King Henry IV", the Table
+of Contents lists it as "King Henry IV, Part II"; this was not changed.
+In addition other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><b>HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY</b><br />
+<b>OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE</b></p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<h1>WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE</h1>
+
+<p class="fm2"><span class="smcap">By</span> JOHN MASEFIELD</p>
+
+<p class="fm3"><span class="smcap">London</span></p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">WILLIAMS &amp; NORGATE</p>
+
+<p class="fm2">HENRY HOLT &amp; Co., <span class="smcap">New York</span></p>
+<p class="fm2"><span class="smcap">Canada</span>: WM. BRIGGS, <span class="smcap">Toronto</span></p>
+<p class="fm2"><span class="smcap">India</span>: R. &amp; T. WASHBOURNE, <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<p style="font-size: 150%"><b>HOME</b><br /><br /><br />
+<b>UNIVERSITY</b><br />
+<br />
+<b>LIBRARY</b><br />
+<br /></p>
+<p style="font-size: 100%"><b>OF</b><br />
+<br /></p>
+<p style="font-size: 125%"><b>MODERN KNOWLEDGE</b><br /></p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm3"><i>Editors:</i><br /><br />
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prof.</span> GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT., LL.D., F.B.A.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prof.</span> J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prof.</span> WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.<br />
+(Columbia University, U.S.A.)<br /></p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">NEW YORK<br />
+<br />
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY<br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="fm1">
+WILLIAM<br />
+SHAKESPEARE<br />
+<br /></p>
+<p class="fm3">BY<br /><br /></p>
+<p class="fm2">JOHN MASEFIELD</p>
+
+
+<p style="font-weight: bold">AUTHOR OF "THE TRAGEDY OF POMPEY THE GREAT," "MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE,"
+"LOST ENDEAVOUR," "CAPTAIN MARGARET," "THE TRAGEDY OF NAN," ETC.</p>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="fm3">
+NEW AND REVISED EDITION<br />
+<br />
+LONDON<br />
+<br /></p>
+<p class="fm2">WILLIAMS AND NORGATE<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">CHAP.</td>
+<td class="tdr page" colspan="2">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">I</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Life of Shakespeare</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">II</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Elizabethan Theatres</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">III</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Plays</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Love's Labour's Lost</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_24">24</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Two Gentlemen of Verona</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Comedy of Errors</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Titus Andronicus</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_49">49</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King Henry VI, Part I</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">"&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  "&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ "&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; II</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_54">54</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">"&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  "&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ "&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; III</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">A Midsummer Night's Dream</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Romeo and Juliet</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King John</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King Richard II</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King Richard III</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Merchant of Venice</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Taming of the Shrew</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King Henry IV, Part I</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">"&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  "&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ "&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; II</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King Henry V</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Merry Wives of Windsor</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">As You Like It</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Much Ado About Nothing</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_133">133</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Twelfth Night</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">All's Well that Ends Well</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Hamlet, Prince of Denmark</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Troilus and Cressida</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Othello, the Moor of Venice</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King Lear</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Macbeth</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Antony and Cleopatra</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_208">208</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Timon of Athens</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_214">214</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Pericles, Prince of Tyre</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Cymbeline</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Winter's Tale</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Tempest</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">King Henry VIII</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Work Attributed to Shakespeare</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_238">238</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Poems</span></td>
+<td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Venus and Adonis</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Rape of Lucrece</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_242">242</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Passionate Pilgrim</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Sonnets</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Ph&oelig;nix and the Turtle</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Author's Note</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Index</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="WILLIAM_SHAKESPEARE" id="WILLIAM_SHAKESPEARE"></a>WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE</h1>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE</h3>
+
+
+<p>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,
+refreshment 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
+buildings. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> 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 dwellings 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.</p>
+
+<p>The church in which Shakespeare, his wife, and little son are buried
+stands near the river. It is a beautiful building of a type common 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.</p>
+
+<p>The country about Stratford is uninteresting, pretty, and well watered.
+A few miles away the Cotswold hills rise. They have a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> 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 Shakespeare. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Legends about Shakespeare began to spring up in Stratford as soon as
+there was a demand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> for them. Legends are a stupid man's excuse 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Hathaway, 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).</p>
+
+<p>At this point he disappears. Legend, written 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> 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 company "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 seaman, 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 became a king, an ancient
+Roman, a tapster or a brothel keeper.</p>
+
+<p>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 Shakespeare, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>fessed
+the quality of actor. Legend says that he acted well in what are called
+"character parts." Soon after his entrance into the profession he began
+to show a talent for improving the plays of others.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing interesting is known of his subsequent 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 23rd
+April, 1616, aged fifty-two years. The cause of his death is not known.
+His wife and daughters survived him.</p>
+
+<p>Little is known of his human relationships. He is described as "gentle."
+Had he been not gentle we should know more of him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>That we know little of his human relationships 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.</p>
+
+<p>Three portraits&mdash;a bust, an engraving, and a painting&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> vivacity of
+mind. The face is that of an aloof and sunny spirit, full of energy and
+effectiveness. Another portrait is that engraved 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
+representation of an unusual man.</p>
+
+<p>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
+represent 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,
+profound, vivacious being, alive to the finger tips, and quick with an
+energy never since granted to man, they are as false as water.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRES</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 represent an inner chamber. The three storeys of seats
+were divided by partitions into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> "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 spectators 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 performance. 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+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 (<i>a</i>) those which rest the actors and (<i>b</i>) 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 thoughtful, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> played very swiftly, without hesitation or dawdling over
+"business."</p>
+
+<p>There was little or no scenery to most plays. The properties, <i>i.e.</i>
+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 <i>Henry VIII</i>) they were of
+an excessive splendour. Music and singing added much to the beauty of
+many scenes.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> This may account for their wholesome, animal
+robustness. There is no trace of the modern heroine, the common woman
+overstrained, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PLAYS</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 <i>Love's Labour's
+Lost</i> as his first play. It is commonly said by critics that <i>Love's
+Labour's Lost</i> 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 something 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Love's Labour's Lost.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> Between 1589 and 1592.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, after correction and augmentation, from a badly
+corrected copy, 1598.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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
+affairs.</p>
+
+<p>At the discussion, the King falls in love with the Princess, his
+three courtiers fall in love with the ladies of her train.</p>
+
+<p>The lovers send vows of love to their ladies. They <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The ladies twit the men with a double perjury: that they have
+broken their vow to study, and their love vows.</p>
+
+<p>The play is kept within the bounds of fantastic comedy by the
+members of the sub-plot, who intrude with their fun 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 heightened by ragging from the courtiers. When it is 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; the reality is brought unexpectedly, by
+beauty. A messenger enters to tell the Princess that her father is
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The members of the sub-plot enter. They end the play with the
+singing of a lyric.</p></div>
+
+<p>The play gives the reader the uncanny feeling 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 Shakespeare'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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Love's Labour's Lost</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> wastes the spiritual gift in
+the praise of a form of death.</p>
+
+<p>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 intention seems to have been this&mdash;to show
+intellect turned from a high resolve, from a consecration to mental
+labour, by the coming of women, who represent, perhaps, untutored,
+natural intelligence. 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 intellect. The end
+of the play is not so much an end as a clearing of the road of life.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 liveliest, in the wits of women</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"Keen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Above the sense of sense,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and that style is a poor thing beside the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> "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
+intellect 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.</p>
+
+<p>In the sub-plot, among much low comedy, this truth is emphasised by the
+triumph of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For where is any author in the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He shows a prejudice against Boyet, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> courtier in attendance on the
+Princess. This prejudice is expressed bitterly&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"This is the flower that smiles on every one,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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
+personality; 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The sweet war-man is dead and rotten: sweet chucks, beat not the
+bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> literary efforts towards the obtaining
+of the power. Longaville (in Act II, sc. i) makes the scene alive by the
+question&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I beseech you a word. What is she in the white?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What's her name in the cap?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Rosaline.</i> You'll ne'er be friends with him: he killed your sister.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Katharine.</i> He made her melancholy, sad, and heavy;</span><br />
+<span class="i4">&nbsp;&nbsp;And so she died: had she been light, like you,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">&nbsp;&nbsp;Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">&nbsp;&nbsp;She might have been a granddam ere she died.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The power of giving life in a line is seen in the remark of Dumaine (Act
+IV, sc. iii)&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To look like her, are chimney-sweepers black."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>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 performed publicly. The men and women converse with a
+frankness and suggestiveness not now usual, except among the young.
+Shakespeare is blamed for not conforming to standards unknown to his
+generation.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> are in peril, and the world is in peril
+through them.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>The Two Gentlemen of Verona.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> Before 1592.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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 <i>La Diana Enamorada</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>A play based on this story was acted in England in 1584. It is now
+lost. The gist of the story was published in lame English verses,
+by Barnabe Googe, in 1563.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+Valentine joins a gang of outlaws.</p>
+
+<p>Proteus woos Silvia for himself, and is rejected by her.</p>
+
+<p>Julia, who has come in boy's dress from Verona to look for Proteus,
+finds him still unsuccessfully courting Silvia. She enters his
+service as a page. He sends her on a message to Silvia.</p>
+
+<p>On her way to deliver the message, Julia meets Silvia flying from
+home in search of Valentine.</p>
+
+<p>In her search for Valentine, Silvia is caught by the gang of
+outlaws.</p>
+
+<p>Proteus rescues her, and threatens to resume his suit with
+violence.</p>
+
+<p>Valentine, entering, stops this.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Love's Labour's Lost</i> is fantasy. The <i>Two Gentlemen of Verona</i> 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 <i>Love's Labour's Lost</i>. It is the work of a
+troubled mind. It comes from the mood in which the sonnets were written.</p>
+
+<p>Twice in <i>Love's Labour's Lost</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>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)&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Sow'd cockle reap'd no corn:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And justice always whirls in equal measure:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the <i>Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>, this idea, the idea that treachery
+caused by some
+<a name="corr1" id="corr1"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn1" title="changed from 'obession'">obsession</a>
+is at the root of most tragedy, was treated by
+him at length, perhaps for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 death 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 <i>Two Gentlemen of Verona</i> he is
+interested less in the destruction than in the moral blindness that
+leads to it.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare neither praises nor blames. His task is to see justly. It is
+we who conclude that treachery looks ugly beside its opposite.</p>
+
+<p>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 exposed in an act of treachery to his benefactor.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> The scenes
+in which the disguised Julia witnesses her lover's falseness, and the
+scene in which the play is brought to an end, are deeply and nobly
+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 falseness
+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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Who should be trusted now, when one's right hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;I am sorry I must never trust thee more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;But count the world a stranger for thy sake.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The private wound is deepest...."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>followed so soon by Julia's words&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And entertained them deeply in her heart:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the root....<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Women to change their shapes, than men their minds"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>rouse Proteus to the confounding instant of self-recognition. His answer
+is like a voice from one of the later plays. It is in Shakespeare'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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Than men their minds! 'tis true. O heaven! Were man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;But constant, he were perfect: that one error<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"By penitence the Eternal's wrath's appeased."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, sc. ii. The fine lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O, how this spring of love resembleth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The uncertain glory of an April day"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and the pretty speech of Julia in Act II, sc. vii&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And make a pastime of each weary step,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Till the last step have brought me to my love;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;A blessed soul doth in Elysium"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are memorable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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, according
+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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>The Comedy of Errors.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> Before 1594.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The plot was taken from the <i>Men&aelig;chmi</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The sub-plot, in this case a duplication of the plot, was suggested
+by a part of the <i>Amphitruo</i> of Plautus.</p>
+
+<p>The play is brought on to the plane of human feeling by the
+character of &AElig;geon. This character was suggested by a story in <i>Gli
+Suppositi</i> (The Supposes) of Ariosto.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Like all comedies of mistake, the <i>Comedy of Errors</i>
+has an extremely complicated plot. The play consists of a number of
+ingeniously contrived situations <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>in which either the Antipholus
+and the Dromio of Ephesus 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 &AElig;geon to his long-lost
+wife.</p></div>
+
+<p>Poets are great or little according to the nobleness of their endeavour
+to build a mansion for the soul. Shakespeare, like other poets, grew by
+continual, very difficult mental labour, by the deliberate and prolonged
+exercise 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
+<i>Men&aelig;chmi</i> fable. A playwright not yet sure of his art sees and admires<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+behind the comedy the firm, intricate mental outline that has kept the
+play alive for more than two thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Men&aelig;chmi</i> 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 handling 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> that shows a fine, sustained power of dramatic
+construction.</p>
+
+<p>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 &AElig;geon tells his story (in Act I, sc. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">("My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits")<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How dearly it would touch thee to the quick,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Shouldst thou but hear I were licentious,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And that this body, consecrate to thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;By ruffian lust should be contaminate!<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span><span class="i0">&nbsp;Wouldst them not spit at me and spurn at me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And hurl the name of husband in my face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And tear the stain'd skin off my harlot brow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And from my false hand cut the wedding-ring...?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;My blood is mingled with the crime of lust:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;For, if we two be one, and thou play false,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;I do digest the poison of thy flesh."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is no other poetry of this intensity in the play.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to compare Shakespeare's mind with Plautus's in the
+description of Epidamnum. Plautus says&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"This is the home of the greatest lechers and drunkards.</p>
+
+<p>"Very many tricksters and cheaters live in this city.</p>
+
+<p>"Nowhere are wheedling whores more cunning at bilking people."</p></div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare gives the horror a spiritual turn that adds much to the
+intensity of the farce.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"They say, this town is full of cozenage:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span><span class="i0">&nbsp;Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Soul-killing witches that deform the body,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And many such like liberties of sin."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 &AElig;geon is the best in the play</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Titus Andronicus.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose firstborn 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>The only poetry in the play comes in the three lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You sad-fac'd men, people and sons of Rome,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;By uproar sever'd, like a flight of fowl<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Scatter'd by winds and high tempestuous gusts."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>King Henry VI, Part I.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1589-91.</p>
+
+<p><i>Produced.</i> 1591.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Raphael Holinshed's <i>Chronicles</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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
+progress by causing Talbot to raise the siege.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 (sometimes 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Glory is like a circle in the water,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to nought."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"If underneath the standard of the French<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;She carry armour."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now thou art come unto a feast of death."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thus, while the vulture of sedition<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Feeds in the bosom of such great commanders,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span><span class="i0">&nbsp;Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;That ever-living man of memory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Henry the Fifth."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 imminent 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.</p>
+
+<p>The only other scenes that bear marks of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> 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. Shakespeare'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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>King Henry VI, Part II.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1591-2.</p>
+
+<p><i>Produced.</i> 1592.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>After the first production of this version, Shakespeare and some
+other writer, possibly Marlowe, revised, improved and enlarged it.
+This revised version, the <i>Second Part of King Henry VI</i>, as we now
+have it, was first published in the first folio in 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Edward Hall's <i>Chronicle</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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 situation 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
+lightened by the cheat of Simpcox and by the rebellion of Jack
+Cade. In modern theatres the passage of time is indicated by the
+dropping 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.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> upset the plans of the capitalist 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+"Is not this braver? Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were
+alive....<br /><br />
+Now part them again."
+</div>
+
+<p>These are some of the results of the working of a fine intellect in
+which&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And not a thought but thinks on dignity."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Bring me unto my trial when you will.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Died he not in his bed? where should he die?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Can I make men live, whe'r they will or no?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;O, torture me no more, I will confess.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span><span class="i0">&nbsp;Alive again? then show me where he is:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;I'll give a thousand pound to look upon him.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Comb down his hair: Look! look! it stands upright.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Give me some drink."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 rectitude of a police
+inspector. At the death-bed of the Cardinal, he makes the remark of a
+fiend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"See how the pangs of death do make him grin."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The one human, tender figure is that of the King, who betrays his
+friend, his only true friend&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"With sad unhelpful tears; and with dimm'd eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Looks after him, and cannot do him good."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>King Henry VI, Part III.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, 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 Sixt, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Edward Hall's <i>Chronicle</i>. Raphael
+Holinshed's <i>Chronicle</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> The play describes the rise to power of Edward, Duke
+of York, afterwards Edward IV. It carries on the 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 Gloucester, 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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare had little hand in this ruthless chronicle. The idea of the
+piece seems to be this, that&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"It is war's prize to take all vantages,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I cleft his beaver with a downright blow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;That this is true, father, behold his blood."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>There are three scenes that rouse human emotion: that in 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So minutes, hours, days, moneths and years,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Pass'd over to the end they were created,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Ah, what a life were this. How sweet. How lovely.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Gives not the hawthorn-bush a sweeter shade<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Than doth a rich-embroidered canopy<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;To kings that fear their subjects' treachery."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span></div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>A Midsummer Night's Dream.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1595 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1600.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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 contribution
+were to recognise his bantling, he could only cry to it, "Bless
+thee, Bottom, thou art translated." Shakespeare did never this
+particular kind of wrong but with just cause.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Theseus, Duke of Athens, is about to marry Hippolyta.
+Bottom, the weaver, and his friends, plan to play the tragedy of
+Pyramus and Thisbe before the Duke after the wedding.</p>
+
+<p>Hermia and Lysander, two lovers, whose match is opposed, plan to
+escape from Athens to a state where they can marry.</p>
+
+<p>Demetrius, in love with Hermia, is loved by Helena.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is a strange and sad thing that the English poets have cared little
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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, wandering and working; but he is not
+enough removed from the beasts to escape the prick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> in the heart that
+turns the tired horse homeward, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+away, where the mind could be happy listening to the voice of the
+beloved&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There was a memory of happiness about the wood. It was</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"the wood, where often you and I<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 and 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.</p>
+
+<p>All the earth of England is consecrated by the intense memories of the
+English. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> 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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"russet-pated choughs, many in sort<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rising and cawing at the gun's report,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>gives to the passenger a sense of the enduringness of the pageant upon
+which those seeing eyes looked more than three centuries ago.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Romeo and Juliet.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1591-96.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in a mutilated form, 1597.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The story existed in many forms, mostly
+Italian. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke's metrical version
+(<i>Romeus and Juliet</i>), and possibly consulted the prose version in
+William Painter's <i>Palace of Pleasure</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> The houses of Montague and Capulet are at feud in
+Verona.</p>
+
+<p>Romeo, of the house of Montague, falls in love with Juliet, of the
+house of Capulet. She returns his love. A friar marries them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Capulets plan to marry Juliet to the Count Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Juliet, in great distress, consults the Friar who married her to
+Romeo. He gives her a potion to create an apparent 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> sign of early work is the mention of
+the dark lady, the Rosaline of the <i>Comedy of Errors</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> united by marriage, as at the end of
+<i>Richard III</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The play tells the story of a feud greater than that of the Verona
+houses. There is always feud where there is not understanding. 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
+brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"Come, civil night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou sober-suited matron, all in black"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and the most exquisite, unmatchable lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And death's pale flag is not advanc&egrave;d there"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>show with what a tender beauty the great mind feels when touched.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For nought so vile that on the earth doth live<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;But to the earth some special good doth give;<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span><span class="i0">&nbsp;Nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And vice sometimes by action dignified."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>King John.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Shakespeare's tragedy is founded on a play
+called <i>The Troublesome Raigne of King John</i> (author not known),
+which was printed (after stage performance) in 1591. Some people
+think that Shakespeare wrote <i>The Troublesome Raigne</i>. There are
+some glimmerings 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 <i>King John</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>a disturbed condition. The French resolve to attempt the
+conquest of England.</p>
+
+<p>The report that Arthur has been murdered by the King's order sets
+England in turmoil. The French land in Kent. The lords find
+Arthur's dead body outside Northampton castle. They are convinced
+that King John has caused him to be murdered.</p>
+
+<p>King 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. The 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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, <i>King John</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In the historical plays, Shakespeare's mind broods on the idea that our
+tragical kings failed because they did not conform to a type<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> lower than
+themselves. Henry V conforms to type. He has the qualities 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 qualities 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> capacity, the man
+whom we meet again, as a successful king, in the play of <i>Henry V</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 kingship. 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 greatness of all well-defined
+things. He remains a chaos shooting out occasional fire.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span> was seduced
+by the "long and vehement suit" of C&oelig;ur 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
+Bastard's heritage.</p>
+
+<p>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 heartbreak and death. The common people of
+England begin to betray their genius for obedience by preparing to rise
+against the man in power.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The fourth act begins with the famous scene in which Hubert fails to
+blind Prince Arthur. Even in the act of mercy he is treacherous. 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 treacherous 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">"Naught shall make us rue<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If England to itself do rest but true."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This thought is one among many thoughts taken by Shakespeare from the
+play of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span><i>The Troublesome Raigne</i>, and taken by the author of that play
+direct from Holinshed's <i>Chronicles</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 courage, and devoted service
+should go so often<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> with real animal boorishness and the incapacity 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 Englishman 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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> 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 something
+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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I am amaz'd, methinks, and lose my way<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Among the thorns and dangers of the world"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How easy dost thou take all England up."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This tragedy of the death of a child causes nearly all that is nobly
+poetical in the play.</p>
+
+<p>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
+Shakespeare of a want of heart, of a want of imagination, 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.</p>
+
+<p>There is a great change in the manner of the poetical passages. The
+poetry of the <i>Henry VI</i> plays is mostly in bright, sweetly running
+groups of rhetorical lines. In <i>King John</i> it is either built up
+elaborately into an effect of harmony several lines long, or it is put
+into a single line or couplet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The rhetoric is compressed&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That shakes the rotten carcase of old Death,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O death, made proud with pure and princely beauty,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Old Time the clock-setter, that bald sexton Time."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The finest poetry is intensely compressed&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;For grief is proud,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I have heard you say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;That we shall see and know our friends in heaven.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;If that be true, I shall see my boy again,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When I shall meet him in the court of heaven<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;I shall not know him."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The characters in this truly noble play daunt the reader with a sense of
+their creator's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> power. It is difficult to know intimately any human
+soul, even with love as a lamp. Shakespeare'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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>King Richard II.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1597.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot</i>. The lives of King Richard II and King Henry
+IV in Raphael Holinshed's <i>Chronicles</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> I. The Duke of Gloucester, uncle of King Richard, has
+died under suspicious circumstances at Calais, after an accusation
+of treachery. Henry Bolingbroke, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>III. Bolingbroke's party prospers. Richard is taken and deposed.</p>
+
+<p>IV. Bolingbroke makes himself king.</p>
+
+<p>V. Richard, after sorrowing alone, and inspiring a hopeless attempt
+at restoration, is killed, desperately fighting, at Pomfret.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>King Richard is of a type very interesting to Shakespeare. He is wilful,
+complex, passionate, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> 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, if
+questioned), is deeply and nobly generous to York, who would condemn 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is a proof of the greatness of Shakespeare'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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span> as temperament, is to blame for his tragedy. When
+life 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And here have I the daintiness of ear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;To check time broke in a disorder'd string;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;But for the concord of my state and time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Had not an ear to hear my true time broke."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 Welshmen 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As in all the tragedies, there is much noble poetry. John of Gaunt's
+speech about England is often quoted. Shakespeare's mind is our triumph,
+not a dozen lines of rhetoric. Less well known are the couplets&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My inch of taper will be burnt and done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And blindfold death not let me see my son."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"... let him not come there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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. <i>Richard II</i>, like other plays of spiritual tragedy,
+needs interpretation. When he wrote it, Shakespeare had not wholly the
+power that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> afterwards he achieved, of himself interpreting his vision
+by many-coloured images. It is not one of the beloved plays.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"His body to that pleasant country's earth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Under whose colours he had fought so long."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is instructive to note how Bolingbroke takes the news&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Bol.</i> Why, bishop, is Norfolk dead?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Carl.</i> As surely as I live, my lord.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Bol.</i> Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">&nbsp;Of good old Abraham. Lords appellants,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">&nbsp;Your differences, etc.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>The feeling that the poet's mind saw the clash as the clash between the
+common and the uncommon man is strengthened by the Queen's speech to
+Richard as he is led to prison&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"thou most beauteous inn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why should hard-favour'd grief be lodged in thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When triumph is become an alehouse guest?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>King Richard III.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1594 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1597.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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 <i>Chronicles</i>.
+Shakespeare may have seen a worthless play (<i>The True Tragedy of
+Richard III</i>) which was published in 1594, by an unknown author.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Act I. The play begins in the last days of King Edward
+IV, when the King'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
+committal, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>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 Court 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Bosworth 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.</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Richard III</i> is the last of the great historical
+<a name="corr2" id="corr2"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn2" title="changed from 'play'">plays</a>
+about the Wars
+of the Roses. The subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> 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 impressive
+than the speech in which the intellect that has ended the bloodshed
+prays humbly that God may bless and help England with peace.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> could have known
+human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Strength by limping sway disabled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And art made tongue-tied by authority,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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,
+Buckingham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call down curses on him
+that breaks them, themselves 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.</p>
+
+<p>All through the play there are warnings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> against human certainty. Of all
+the dangerous 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 them. 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 conscience sends
+him flying to death. The little Princes lay down to sleep&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"girdling one another<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Within their innocent alabaster arms.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span><span class="i0">Their lips were four red roses on a stalk<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which in their summer beauty kissed each other"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>when their waking time came they were stamped down under the stones at
+the stair foot.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>There are many superb Shakespearean openings. No poet in history opens a
+play with a more magnificent certainty. The opening of this play&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now is the winter of our discontent<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Made glorious summer by this sun of York,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Your fire-new stamp of honour is scarce current"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"then came wandering by<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A shadow like an angel, with bright hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dabbled in blood; and he squeaked out aloud,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury'"&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>the exquisitely tender lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And there the little souls of Edward's children<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Whisper the spirits"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>The Merchant of Venice.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1600.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The ancient story of the merciless Jew is
+told in the <i>Gesta Romanorum</i>, and re-told, with delicate grace, by
+Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-century Italian writer, in his
+<i>Il Pecorone</i> (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 <i>Gesta Romanorum</i>. 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 suggested 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Portia, the lady of Belmont, has three caskets, one of
+gold, one of silver, one of lead. She is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>vowed to marry the man
+who, on viewing the caskets, guesses which of them contains her
+portrait. Various attempting suitors fail to guess rightly.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Bassanio guesses rightly and weds Portia.</p>
+
+<p>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 threefold. Shylock refuses the offer.
+He clamours for his pound of flesh. The case comes to trial.</p>
+
+<p>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 Christian'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 indignation at the loss of the
+ring ends the last act with comedy.</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Portia has been much praised during two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> centuries of criticism. She is
+one of the smiling 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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>The Taming of the Shrew.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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 <i>The Taming of A Shrew</i>, author not known.
+The other part is based on <i>The Supposes</i> of George Gascoigne, a
+comedy adapted from Ariosto's <i>I Suppositi</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is
+found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on
+waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment
+is the performance of this play before him.</p>
+
+<p>The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames
+the shrew Katharina; in the other, Katharina's sister Bianca is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+wooed by lovers in disguise. The two plots have little connection
+with each other. That which relates to Petruchio and Katharina is
+certainly by Shakespeare. The other seems to be by a dull man who
+did not know his craft as a dramatist.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>Love's Labour's Lost</i> he showed a matchless sense of country
+life. 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
+rightness of poetry. In writing them, he wrought with his daily nature,
+from something intimately known, or inbred in him, during childhood. Man
+can only write happily 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> the farms and sheep-walks at
+the western end of the Cotswolds.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Sly.</i> Y' are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in the
+chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore <i>paucas
+pallabris</i>; let the world slide: <i>Sessa!</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Hostess.</i> You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?</p>
+
+<p><i>Sly.</i> No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold bed, and
+warm thee.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the third act, Biondello's description of the appearance of
+Petruchio's horse has the abundance of the great mind.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>" ... 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>It is something no longer possible in a city theatre. Neither the
+dramatist nor the audi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>ence of to-day knows a horse as the Elizabethan
+had to know him. The speech sets one wondering at the art of the unknown
+Elizabethan actor who first spoke hurriedly this speech of strange words
+full of sibilants.</p>
+
+<p>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
+schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly,
+she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor
+who 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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Such duty as the subject owes the prince,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Even such a woman oweth to her husband."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+
+<p><i>King Henry IV, Part I.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1598.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Most of the comic scenes are the fruit of
+Shakespeare's invention. A very popular play, <i>The Famous Victories
+of Henry V</i>, by an unknown hand, gave him the suggestion for an
+effective comic scene. In the historical scenes he follows closely
+the <i>Chronicles</i> of Holinshed.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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 uncommon
+man, whose uncommonness is unsupported by 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.</p></div>
+
+<p>The play treats of a period some four years after the killing of King
+Richard II. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> opens at a time when the oaths of Henry Bolingbroke, to
+do justice, have been broken on all sides, lest the injustice of his
+assumption 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. Opposed 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>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 desperate 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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And time, that takes survey of all the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Must have a stop"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and dies. The man who kills him says a few trite lines over his body,
+and leaves the stage talking of Falstaff's bowels.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> 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 careless and callous
+though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's
+throne. He chooses to live in society as common 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 Falstaff are so little good-natured that he stands upon
+his princehood whenever the old man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>There is little great poetry in the play. The magnificent image&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Baited like eagles having lately bathed"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sound all the lofty instruments of war,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And by that music let us all embrace"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are all noble.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>The Second Part of King Henry IV.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1597 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1600.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The play of <i>The Famous Victories of Henry
+V</i>. Holinshed's <i>Chronicles</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Northumberland and the other conspirators against the
+King learn 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Prince Henry begins his reign as Henry V by casting off all his old
+associates.</p></div>
+
+<p>The second part of the play of <i>King Henry IV</i> is Shakespeare's ending
+of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> tragedy of <i>Richard II</i>. 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 fighting 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 treacheries of the reign. Just as the play
+of <i>Richard III</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> 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 everything
+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 imaginative
+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 manifold 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."</p>
+
+<p>Many scenes in this play are great.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> 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 downstairs is the finest tavern scene
+ever written. Those placed in Gloucestershire are the perfect 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 Nightwork, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All of those scenes seem to have been written easily, out of the fulness
+of an instinctive power. In the other scenes Shakespeare wrote with
+intense mental effort after brooding intensely on human destiny&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"how chances mock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And changes fill the cup of alteration<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With divers liquors,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and on the truth that&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There is a history in all men's lives,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Figuring the nature of the times deceased;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The which observed, a man may prophesy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;With a near aim, of the main chance of things<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;As not yet come to life."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 Lancaster 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> princes," must have rung in
+Shakespeare's head as he wrote these scenes.</p>
+
+<p>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, Mowbray'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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Shakespeare
+has left to us. In the plays the characters 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.</p>
+
+<p>Who are his hearers? Not the English.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>King Henry V.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1598 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, imperfectly, 1600; as we now have it, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The play of <i>The Famous Victories of Henry
+V</i>. Holinshed's <i>Chronicles</i>. (Possibly) an earlier play, now lost.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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-burning."</p></div>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> eked out with
+soldiers' squabbles. It seems to have been written to fill a gap in the
+series of the historical plays. Perhaps the management of the Globe
+Theatre, where the play was performed, wished to play the series
+through, from <i>Richard II</i> to <i>Richard III</i>, and persuaded Shakespeare
+to write this play to link <i>Henry IV</i> to <i>Henry VI</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>The play ought to be seen and judged as a part of the magnificent tragic
+series. Detached 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> to beget the son who dies broken-hearted after
+bringing all to waste again.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hear him but reason in divinity,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+Falstaff 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.</p>
+
+<p>He has a liking for knocks. Courage tempered by stupidity (as in the
+persons of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> 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 condemn sentiment in his one profound speech&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All other devils that suggest by treasons<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Do botch and bungle up damnation<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;With patches, colours, and with forms being fetch'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;From glistering semblances of piety."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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
+the imaginations of her sons.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>The Merry Wives of Windsor.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1599 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in a mutilated form, 1602; in a complete form, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> A tale in Straparola's <i>Notti</i> (iv. 4).
+Tarleton's <i>News out of Purgatorie</i>. Giovanni Florentino's <i>Il
+Pecorone</i>. Kinde Kit of Kingston's <i>Westward for Smelts</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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, needlessly jealous, resolves to search the
+house for him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Still believing in Mrs. Ford's love for him, he keeps a third
+assignation, this time in Windsor Forest, in the disguise of Herne
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The play is eked out by other actions. Chief of these is the wooing
+of Anne Page, Mrs. Page's daughter, by three men&mdash;a foreigner, Dr.
+Caius; an idiot, Master Slender; and the man of her heart, 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.</p></div>
+
+<p>An old tradition says that this play was written in a fortnight by
+command of Queen Elizabeth. There can be no doubt (<i>a</i>) that it was
+written hurriedly, (<i>b</i>) that it nicely suited the Tudor sense of
+humour. It is the least interesting of the genuine plays.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 intensely 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 interested in cuckoldry, Mrs.
+Ford in mockery, Ford, Evans and Caius in jealousy and rivalry, Bardolph
+is going to be a tapster, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> 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 Falstaff&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"I never prospered since I forswore myself at primero."<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>His other idea, that obsession is a danger to life, is expressed later
+in the words&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"See now, how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill
+employment."</p></div>
+
+<p>There is little poetry in the play. The most poetical passage is the
+account of Herne the hunter&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There is an old tale goes, that Herne the Hunter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Some time a keeper here in Windsor Forest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;In a most hideous and dreadful manner."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Modern poets would describe Herne's dress and appearance. The creative
+poet describes his actions.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that when this play was written Shakespeare had thoughts
+of consecrating 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 predilections, his reading. He had found a
+channel in which his thoughts could express themselves. Writing was no
+longer so pleasant to him as it had been. He had done an incredible
+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 excellent, the great from the supreme. All writers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>As You Like It.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1600 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Thomas Lodge's novel of <i>Rosalynde</i>, Euphues'
+<i>Golden Legacie</i> (published in 1590) supply the fable. The tale is
+that tale of Gamelyn, wrongly attributed to Chaucer. The <i>Practise</i>
+(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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Orlando, basely used by his elder brother Oliver,
+leaves home, annoys the usurping Duke Frederick, and is advised to
+leave the country.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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. Touchstone, the worldly wise, marries a
+fool. Audrey, born a clown, marries a courtier. Phebe, scorning a man,
+falls in love with a woman.</p>
+
+<p>Jaques, the only wise one, is the only one 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 important line, show
+that in the character of Jaques Shakespeare was expounding a philo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+commentator 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.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing this, Jaques wishes, as all wise men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> wish, not to be counted
+wise but to have as great liberty as the fool to express his thought&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"weed your better judgments<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of all opinion that grows rank in them<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I am wise. I must have liberty<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Withal, as large a charter as the wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To blow on whom I please; for so fools have.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">... give me leave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To speak my mind, and I will through and through<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If they will patiently receive my medicine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 invariable artistic practice, that his
+aim will be at sin, not at particular sinners.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> of help. The Duke ministers to Orlando. Jaques wants to know "of
+what kind this cock should come of." He speaks banteringly, the Duke
+speaks kindly. The impression 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, dismissing 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.</p>
+
+<p>Rosalind and Phebe are of the two kinds of woman who come much into
+Shakespeare's early and middle plays. Rosalind, like Portia,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> is a
+golden woman, a daughter of the sun, smiling-natured, but limited.
+Phebe, like Rosalind, is black-haired, black-eyed, black-eyebrowed, 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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Much Ado about Nothing.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1600.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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 <i>Faerie Queene</i>). It was also known to
+the Elizabethans in a play now lost.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Benedick, a lord of Padua, pledges himself to
+bachelorhood. Beatrice, a disdainful lady, is scornful of men.</p>
+
+<p>Claudio plans to marry Hero.</p>
+
+<p>Don John, enemy of Claudio, plans to thwart the marriage by letting
+it appear that Hero is unchaste.</p>
+
+<p>Don Pedro and Claudio make Benedick believe that Beatrice is dying
+of love for him.</p>
+
+<p>Ursula and Hero make Beatrice believe that Benedick is dying of
+love for her.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>brought into close alliance by their upholding of
+Hero's cause.</p>
+
+<p>Proof is obtained that Hero has been falsely accused. She is
+recovered from her swoon. Claudio marries her. Benedick and
+Beatrice plight troth.</p></div>
+
+<p>In this play Shakespeare writes of the power of report, of the thing
+overheard, to alter human destiny. Antonio's man, listening 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.</p>
+
+<p>Benedick, overhearing the report of Beatrice's love for him, changes his
+mind about marriage. Beatrice, hearing of Benedick's love for her,
+changes her mind about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> 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 Shakespeare 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.</p>
+
+<p>Though the play is not one of the most passionate of the plays, it
+belongs to Shakespeare's greatest creative period. It is full of great
+and wonderful things. The character-drawing is so abundant and precise
+that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> 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 Shakespeare filled all
+these images with a vitality that interests and compels. The wit and
+point of the dialogue&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Don Pedro.</i> I think this is your daughter.</p>
+
+<p><i>Leonato.</i> Her mother hath many times told me so.</p>
+
+<p><i>Benedick.</i> Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?</p>
+
+<p><i>Leonato.</i> Signior Benedick, no; for then you were a child;</p></div>
+
+<p>or (as in the later passage)&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Beatrice.</i> I may sit in a corner and cry heigh ho for a husband.</p>
+
+<p><i>Don Pedro.</i> Lady Beatrice, I will get you one.</p>
+
+<p><i>Beatrice.</i> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Don Pedro.</i> Will you have me, lady?</p>
+
+<p><i>Beatrice.</i> No, my lord, unless I might have another for working
+days: your Grace is too costly to wear every  day&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"'tis all men's office to speak patience<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To those that wring under the load of sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But no man's virtue nor sufficiency,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To be so moral when he shall endure<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The like himself."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> soul to
+thrilling soul with a touch as delicate as it is certain.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Twelfth Night.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1600 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The story of Orsino, Viola, Olivia and
+Sebastian is to be found in the "Historie of Apolonius and Silla"
+as told by Barnabe Riche in the book <i>Riche his Farewell to
+Militarie Profession</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>The sub-plot, and the characters contained in it, seem to be
+original creations.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Viola, who thinks that she has lost her brother
+Sebastian by shipwreck, disguises herself 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.</p>
+
+<p>Olivia, who is in mourning for her brother, refuses the Duke's
+suit, but falls in love with Cesario.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>with him. The thought makes his
+behaviour so strange that he is locked up as a madman.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They are married. The Duke marries Viola. Malvolio is released from
+prison. Sir Toby marries Maria, Olivia's waiting-woman. Sir Andrew
+is driven out like a plucked pigeon. Malvolio, unappeased by his
+release, vows to be revenged for the mock put upon him.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is the happiest and one of the loveliest of all the Shakespearean
+plays. It is the best English comedy. The great mind that mixed a
+tragedy of intellect with a tragedy of stupidity, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> Orsino is in an unreal mood of emotion. Love is an
+active passion. Orsino is in the clutch of its dangerous passive enemy
+called sentimentality. He lolls upon a couch to music when he ought to
+be carrying her glove to battle. Olivia is in an unreal mood of mourning
+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-dreams, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 something real into their lives; and all
+three, in coming to the active state, cease to be interesting and
+beautiful and pathetic.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All beauty and without a spot."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">"the song we had last night.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The spinsters and the knitters in the sun<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span><span class="i0">And the free maids that weave their thread with bones<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And dallies with the innocence of love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like the old age."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For women are as roses, whose fair flower<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and in</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"She never told her love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>belonged to earth, and got a gladness from earth. Within two minutes of
+the talk of the woman who died of love he showed Contemplation making a
+rare turkey-cock of the one wise man in his play.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p><i>All's Well that Ends Well.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The story of Helena's love for Bertram is
+found in the <i>Decamerone</i> of Boccaccio (giorn. 3, nov. 9).
+Shakespeare may have read it in the <i>Palace of Pleasure</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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, the son of the Countess
+and the King's ward.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 withdraws from the Countess's house, and
+comes to Florence disguised.</p>
+
+<p>Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her,
+receives her unsuspecting 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 the 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 Florentine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>This play (whenever written) was extensively revised during the ruthless
+mood that gave birth to <i>Measure for Measure</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 obsession by making plain to the
+obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the treachery it
+causes.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> dependant. He does not like her, and he does
+not like 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 obsession blinds the judgment on more
+sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. 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 unbalanced. He takes an unworthy
+confidant,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> 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 is 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised
+as one of the noblest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span> 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 ignominy 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.</p>
+
+<p>The play is full of effective theatrical situations. It contains much
+fine poetry. Besides the poetry there are startling moments of insight&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My mother told me just how he would woo<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;As if she sat in's heart...."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now, God delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;What things are we! Merely our own traitors."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I would gladly have him see his company anatomised,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;That he might take a measure of his own judgments."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"Our rash faults<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Make trivial price of serious things we have,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not knowing them until we know their grave:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Destroy our friends and after weep their dust."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>Julius C&aelig;sar.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1601 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Produced.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius
+C&aelig;sar in Sir Thomas North's <i>Plutarch</i>.</p>
+
+<p>A tragedy of Julius C&aelig;sar, now lost, was performed by Shakespeare's
+company in 1594. Shakespeare must have known this play.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Cassius, fearing that Julius C&aelig;sar is about to
+extinguish all trace of Republican rule in Rome, persuades Brutus
+and others to plot a change. They decide to murder C&aelig;sar.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning chosen for the murder, C&aelig;sar 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.</p>
+
+<p>In his speech he so inflames the populace against the murderers
+that they are compelled to leave Rome.</p>
+
+<p>Joining himself to Octavius, he takes the field against Brutus and
+Cassius, and helps to defeat them at Philippi.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Cassius is killed by his servant when he sees that all is lost.
+Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills himself.</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> dominate the collective emotion in the audience.</p>
+
+<p>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
+feeding of the wind. In the theatre, inspiration without art is as a
+sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal.</p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes maintained in print, by those saddened or maddened by
+bad modern performances 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> said that the last acts of <i>Julius C&aelig;sar</i> make anti-climax
+and spoil the play, it is necessary to consider Shakespeare's
+constructive practice in this and in some other plays.</p>
+
+<p>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. If a Greek had constructed <i>Julius C&aelig;sar</i>, 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 C&aelig;sar is dead. In <i>Macbeth</i> he
+constructs the last half of his play in much the same manner.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In both plays he is considering the conception, the doing, and the
+results of a violent act. In both plays this act is the murder of the
+head of a State. In neither case is he deeply interested in the victim.
+Duncan, in <i>Macbeth</i>, is a generous gentleman; C&aelig;sar, in this play, is a
+touchy man of affairs whose head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination
+broods on the fact that the killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by
+an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by
+an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases
+the killers show base personal ingratitude and treachery. In both plays,
+an avenging justice makes even the scales. The mind of the poet follows
+them from the moment when the guilty thought is prompted, through the
+agony and exultation of dreadful acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the
+treacherous, 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span> nor yet the tragical
+end of a ruler. His subject in both plays is the working of Fate who
+prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and then destroys him. 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
+<i>Macbeth</i>, Shakespeare strove to present a violent act and its
+consequences from the point of view of a great just spirit outside life.</p>
+
+<p>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 conception that makes it like
+gathering and breaking storm. The cause of the murder is a great
+personal treachery inspired by an unselfish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span> idea. Though it seems
+inevitable, it is a very little thing that makes it possible. Both
+C&aelig;sar'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.
+C&aelig;sar 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 Philippi.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Against the Capitol I met a lion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Who glazed upon me and went surly by."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"It is the bright day that brings forth the adder."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's intensest and most solemn thought, the Law that directed
+the creation of some of his greatest work, is spoken by Brutus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Between the acting of a dreadful thing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And the first motion, all the interim is<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Like a phantasma or a hideous dream:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The Genius and the mortal instruments<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Are then in council, and the state of man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Like to a little kingdom, suffers then<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The nature of an insurrection."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1601-2.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in an imperfect form, 1603; more perfectly, 1604.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his <i>Historia Danica</i>.
+Francis de Belleforest printed a version of it in his <i>Histoires
+Tragiques</i>. An English translation from de Belleforest, called the
+<i>Hystorie of Hamblet</i>, was published (or perhaps reprinted) in
+London in 1608. Shakespeare seems to have known both de Belleforest
+and the <i>Hystorie</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>reveals the manner of the murder
+to him, and makes him swear to be revenged. The revelation so
+affects him that the murderers begin to fear him. He cannot bring
+himself to kill Claudius. In a play he shows them that he knows
+their guilt.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Claudius suggests that the revenge be taken at a fencing-bout.
+Laertes shall fence with Hamlet, using a poisoned foil. If this
+fails, Hamlet shall be given poisoned wine.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Hamlet</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> 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 Shakespearean scheme it is not
+revenge, it is justice, and therefore neither good nor bad but
+necessary. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> leads to a baffling
+of the living, and, at last, to something like an arrest of life, a
+deadlock, in which each act, however violent, makes the obscuring of
+life's purpose greater.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> 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 schoolfellow, and the
+leader of a cry of players.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 first half
+of the play, though it exposes and develops the fable, is a dual image
+of a search for truth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Our wills and fates do so contrary run<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;That our devices still are overthrown"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and a faith in the omnipotence of intellect&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 his hand.
+Fate offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the
+instant by, with his baffling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Macbeth</i>, a not dissimilar play, the life violently altered is kept
+in the strange channel by a succession of violent acts. In <i>Hamlet</i>,
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span> the King's position. By his death life 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
+purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by with his baffling swiftness, which
+strikes on the instant, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Extremes in the Shakespearean system are tragical things. In
+Shakespeare, the pathway of excess leads, not as with Blake, to the
+palace of wisdom, but to destruction. The two extremes in Hamlet, of
+slowness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> and swiftness, set up in life the counter forces which destroy
+extremes, so that life, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span> 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. Revenge 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to praise the poetry of <i>Hamlet</i>. Nearly all the play is
+as familiar by often quotation as the New Testament. The great, wise,
+and wonderful beauty of the play 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 <i>Hamlet</i>. Lines that are
+little quoted are the lines to quote here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"this fell sergeant, death,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is strict in his arrest."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"O proud death!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That thou so many princes, at a shot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So bloodily hast struck?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 constructed on a
+similar metrical basis.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"Let four captains<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For he was likely, had he been put on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The soldier's music and the rites of war<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Speak loudly for him.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take up the bodies: such a sight as this<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Go, bid the soldiers shoot."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>Troilus and Cressida.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Produced.</i> After publication.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1609.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+<i>Troilus and
+Creseide</i>. John Lydgate's <i>Troy Boke</i>. William Caxton's translation
+of the French book of the <i>Recuyels of Troy</i>. George Chapman's
+translation of Homer's <i>Iliad</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Among many other possible sources may be mentioned a now lost play
+of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> (produced in 1599) by the poets Thomas
+Dekker and Henry Chettle.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Pandarus succeeds in bringing Cressida to love Troilus.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Ajax takes up Hector's challenge. They fight a friendly bout and
+then go to feast, where the moody Achilles insults Hector.</p>
+
+<p>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, cursing.</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Troilus and Cressida</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+cruelly and sullenly, by the boor thus mocked.</p>
+
+<p>The two subjects and the setting are not and cannot be brought into
+unity. Shakespeare'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
+imperfect 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.</p>
+
+<p>The finished scenes are full of wisdom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;A great-sized monster of ingratitude:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;As fast as they are made, forgot as soon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;As done: perseverance, dear my lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to hang<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Quite out of fashion."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"O, let not virtue seek<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Remuneration for the thing it was."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And sometimes we are devils to ourselves."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> During the course of the war the two
+chief combatants came to blows.</p>
+
+<p>It is sad that Shakespeare should be credited with the paltriness of
+lesser men. His view of his task is expressed in <i>Timon of Athens</i> with
+the perfect golden clearness of supreme power&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"my free drift<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Halts not particularly, but moves itself<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a wide sea of wax: no levell'd malice<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Infects one comma in the course I hold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leaving no tract behind."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 incomprehensible 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p><i>Measure for Measure.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1603-4 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Produced.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> 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 <i>Hecatomithi</i>, by Giraldi
+Cinthio; from the play, <i>The rare Historie of Promos and
+Cassandra</i>, founded on Cinthio's novel, by one George Whetstone,
+and from Whetstone's prose rendering of the story in his book <i>The
+Heptameron of Civil Discourses</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> The Duke of Vienna, going on a secret mission, leaves
+his power in the hands of Angelo, a man of strict life.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He contrives to check Angelo's treachery, that would have caused
+Claudio's death in spite of the submission.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly he reveals himself, exposes Angelo's sin, compels him to
+marry Mariana, pardons Claudio, and makes Isabella his Duchess.</p></div>
+
+<p>This play is now seldom performed. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In this play Shakespeare seems to have brooded on the fact that the
+common prudential 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> above life itself. Like other obsessions, they
+come to grief in the presence of something real.</p>
+
+<p>These two characters make the action. The play is concerned with the
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> the eyes. It is the thorn in the side
+under the cloak of the beauty of youth. In Shakespeare'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 manhood. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> 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 temptation 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 imprisoned 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span> put out of the way by some swift
+merciful death so that the horror of the knowledge of himself may end,
+too.</p>
+
+<p>The play is a marvellous piece of unflinching thought. Like all the
+greatest of the plays, it is so full of illustration of the main idea
+that it gives an illusion of an infinity like that of life. It is
+constructed closely and subtly for the stage. It is more full of the
+ingenuities of play-writing than any of the plays. The verse and the
+prose have that smoothness of happy ease which makes one think of
+Shakespeare not as a poet writing, but as a sun shining.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">" ... It deserves with characters of brass<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span> knowledge with dearer love." The music of the great
+manner rings&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Merciful Heaven!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Drest in a little brief authority,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;His glassy essence, like an angry ape,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;As make the angels weep."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The prose accompaniment to what is unrestrained in youth provides a
+cruel comedy.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Othello, the Moor of Venice.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1604 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in quarto, and in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The tale appears in <i>The Hecatomithi</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Iago, ensign to Othello, the Moor of Venice, is
+jealous of Cassio, his lieutenant. He plots to oust Cassio from the
+lieutenancy.</p>
+
+<p>Othello marries Desdemona, and sails with her to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>wars in
+Cyprus. Iago resolves to make use of Desdemona to cause Cassio's
+downfall.</p>
+
+<p>He procures Cassio's discharge from the lieutenancy by involving
+him in a drunken brawl. Cassio beseeches Desdemona to intercede
+with Othello for him. Iago hints to Othello that she has good
+reason to wish Cassio to be restored. He suggests that Cassio is
+her lover. Partly by fortune, partly by craft, he succeeds in
+establishing in Othello's mind the conviction that Desdemona is
+guilty.</p>
+
+<p>Othello smothers Desdemona, learns, too late, that he has been
+deceived, and kills himself. Cassio's character is cleared. Iago is
+led away to torture.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>Othello</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>These ideas are in the earliest work of all, in <i>Venus and Adonis</i>. In
+<i>Othello</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span> generous
+mind. The varying quality of its working makes the action of the play.</p>
+
+<p>As in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, the chief character is a man of
+intellect who has been warped out of humanity by the world's injustice.
+Iago is a man of fine natural intellect who has not been trained in the
+personal qualities that bring preferment. An educated man is advanced
+above him, as in life it happens. He broods over the injustice and
+schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged
+him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as
+upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves
+him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter
+and the newly-married wife are lovers.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> the conduct of the vengeance
+precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to
+the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is
+ruined.</p>
+
+<p>That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's
+justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection.
+Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a
+want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but
+too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain
+to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging
+from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is
+that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven
+about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate
+and instinctive.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this
+play, as in <i>Richard III</i> and <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, he brooded upon
+the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he
+created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the
+earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being
+but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or
+the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry
+line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only
+his intellect. What he is in himself is as mysterious as life. Life is
+clear, up to a point, but beyond that point it is always baffling.
+Shakespeare's task was to look at life clearly. Looking at it clearly he
+was as baffled by what he saw, as we, who only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span> see by his aid. He found
+in Iago an image like life itself, a power and an activity, prompted by
+something secret and silent.</p>
+
+<p>Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The
+action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into
+ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly
+practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as
+Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after
+reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That
+those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws
+under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that
+when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the
+falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father.
+The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty
+things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span> have violent
+ends and bring violent ends to others.</p>
+
+<p>The poetry of <i>Othello</i> is nearly as well known as that of <i>Hamlet</i>.
+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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"It is the very error of the moon.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;She comes more near the earth than she was wont<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And drives men mad,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is one of the most perfect of all the perfect things in the tragedies.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>King Lear.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1605-6.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1608.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The story of Lear is told in Holinshed's
+<i>Chronicles</i>, in a play by an unknown hand, <i>The True Chronicle
+History of King Leir</i>, and in a few stanzas of the tenth canto of
+the second Book of Spenser's <i>Faerie Queene</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The character of Gloucester seems to have been suggested by the
+character of a blind king in Sir Philip Sidney's <i>Arcadia</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his
+son.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Cordelia lands with French troops to repossess Lear of his kingdom.
+She finds Lear, and comforts him. In an engagement with the
+sisters' armies, she and Lear are captured.</p>
+
+<p>Edmund's baseness is exposed. He is attainted and struck down.
+Goneril poisons Regan, and kills herself. Edmund, before he dies,
+reveals that he has given order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed.
+His news comes too late to save Cordelia. She is brought in dead.
+Lear dies over her body.</p>
+
+<p>Albany, Goneril's husband, Kent, Lear's faithful servant, and
+Edgar, Edmund's slayer, are left to set the kingdom in order.</p></div>
+
+<p>The play of <i>King Lear</i> is based upon a fable and a fairy story. It
+illustrates the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>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 established blindness in two men is about to become an
+instrument of fate for the violent opening of their eyes. The blindness
+in both cases is against the course of nature. It is unnatural that Lear
+should give his kingship to women, and that he should curse his youngest
+child. It is unnatural that Gloucester should make much of a bastard son
+whom he has hardly seen for nine years. It is deeply unnatural that both
+Lear and Gloucester should believe evil suddenly of the youngest, best
+beloved, and most faithful spirits in the play. As the blindness that
+causes the injustice is great and unnatural, so the working of fate to
+purge the eyes and restore the balance is violent and unnatural. Every
+person important to the action is thrust into an unnatural way of life.
+Goneril and Regan rule their father, commit the most ghastly and beastly
+cruelty, lust<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span> after the same man, and die unnaturally (having betrayed
+each other), the one by her sister's hand, the other by her own. Lear is
+driven mad. The King of France is forced to war with his wife's sisters.
+Edmund betrays his half-brother to ruin and his father to blindness.
+Cornwall is stabbed by his servant. Edgar kills his half-brother.
+Gloucester, thrust out blind, dies when he finds that his wronged son
+loves him. Cordelia, fighting against her own blood, is betrayed to
+death by one who claims to love her sisters. The honest mild man,
+Albany, and the honest blunt man, Kent, survive the general ruin. Had
+Kent been a little milder and Albany a little blunter in the first act,
+before the fates were given strength, the ruin would not have been. All
+the unnatural treacherous evil comes to pass, because for a few fatal
+moments they were true to their natures.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span> controlled with a power that he shows
+in no other play, not even in <i>Macbeth</i> and <i>Hamlet</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span> of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool,
+like conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him mad with ironic comment
+and bitter song.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as well as the instinctive manner of a prose coloured to the height with
+all the traditions of country life.</p>
+
+<p>Dramatic genius has the power of understanding half-a-dozen lives at
+once in tense, swiftly changing situations. This power is shown at its
+best in the last act of this play. One of the most wonderful and least
+praised of the inventions in the last scene is that of the dying Edmund.
+He has been treacherous to nearly every person in the play. His last
+treachery, indirectly the cause of his ruin, is still in act, the
+killing of Cordelia and the king.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> He has been stricken down. "The wheel
+has come full circle." He has learned too late that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Make instruments to plague us."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He can hardly hope to live for more than a few minutes. The death of his
+last two victims cannot benefit him. A word from him would save them. No
+one else can save them. Yet at the last minute, his one little glimmer
+of faithfulness keeps the word unspoken. He is silent for Goneril's
+sake. If he ever cared for any one in the world, except himself, he may
+have cared a little for Goneril. He thinks of her now. She has gone from
+him. But she is on his side, and he trusts to her, and acts for her. He
+waits for some word or token from her. He waits to see her save him or
+avenge him. The death of Lear will benefit her. It will be to her
+something saved from the general wreck, something to the good, in the
+losing bout. An impulse stirs him to speak, but he puts it by. He keeps
+silent about Lear, till one comes saying that Goneril<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Never, never, never, never, never."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"O, our lives' sweetness!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That we the pain of death would hourly die<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rather than die at once!"<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Macbeth.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1605-6 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Raphael Holinshed tells the story of Macbeth
+at length in his <i>Chronicle of Scottish History</i>. He indicates the
+character of Lady Macbeth in one line.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The witches warn Macbeth to beware of Macduff.</p>
+
+<p>Macduff escapes to England, but his wife and children are killed by
+Macbeth's order.</p>
+
+<p>Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of
+the Scottish crown.</p>
+
+<p>Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill
+him.</p></div>
+
+<p>Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man
+betrayed by an obsession. C&aelig;sar is betrayed by an obsession of the
+desire of glory, Antony by passion, Tarquin by lust, Wolsey by worldly
+greed, Coriolanus and Timon by their nobleness, Angelo by his
+righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger
+or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his
+worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. God sends on many men
+"strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie." Othello is one such.
+Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true,
+half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie
+direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by
+arousing pity, are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> the dangerous things because their attack is made in
+the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like
+love; love feels like nobility; spiritualism seems like revelation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"to win us to our harm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The instruments of darkness tell us truths,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Win us with honest trifles, to betray's<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In deepest consequence."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also
+a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an
+unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is
+made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed,
+but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so
+knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing
+men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the
+end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth
+to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary.
+He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his
+kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them.
+The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his
+trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And you all know security<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Is mortal's chiefest enemy,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"the equivocation of the fiend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That lies like truth."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"his virtues<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span><span class="i0">"And pity, like a naked new-born babe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Upon the sightless couriers of the air."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And prophesying with accents terrible."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"In the great hand of God I stand."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A falcon towering in her pride of place<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And Duncan's horses&mdash;a thing most strange and certain&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;War with mankind.<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">&nbsp;'Tis said they eat each other."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">"the time has been<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That, when the brains were out, the man would die."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and
+re-praised. Noble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the
+mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less noble, is
+less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the
+hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"I did hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The galloping of horse: who was't came by?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Antony and Cleopatra.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1607-8 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's
+translation of Plutarch's <i>Lives</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes
+himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He
+makes a pact with the young C&aelig;sar, by marrying C&aelig;sar's sister
+Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra,
+he falls into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>wars with C&aelig;sar. 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 C&aelig;sar, also kills
+herself.</p></div>
+
+<p>In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his
+constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some
+obsession.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"Strange it is<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That nature must compel us to lament<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our most persisted deeds."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's later tragedies, <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Coriolanus</i>, <i>Othello</i>, and
+this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is
+not the man of intellect, hounded down by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> the man of affairs, as in
+<i>Richard II</i>, <i>Richard III</i>, and <i>Henry IV</i>, but the man of large and
+generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays
+the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a
+blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute,
+astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund,
+the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius C&aelig;sar 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span> 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 C&aelig;sar, 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"men's judgments are<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do draw the inward quality after them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To suffer all alike."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"when we in our viciousness grow hard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O misery on't&mdash;the wise gods seel our eyes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To our confusion."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>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 C&aelig;sar's murderers. He was very great and noble
+then. Now</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"The star is fall'n<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And time is at his period."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.</p>
+
+<p>The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation
+of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy
+makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span><span class="i0">&nbsp;And make Death proud to take us ...<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">.... we have no friend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;But resolution and the briefest end,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And we are for the dark,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush
+of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"O eastern star!<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">Peace, peace!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That sucks the nurse asleep?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are among the most beautiful things ever written by man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Coriolanus.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1608 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The life of Coriolanus in Sir Thomas North's
+translation of Plutarch's <i>Lives</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Marcius, a noble Roman, of an excessive pride,
+bitterly opposes the rabble.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Being banished, he makes league with the Volscians. He takes
+command in the Volscian army and invades Roman territory.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On his return to the Volscian territory Coriolanus is impeached as
+a traitor, and stabbed to death by conspirators.</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> be
+infinitesimal, must be a progress of the whole mass, not a sudden
+darting out of one quality or one member.</p>
+
+<p>Timon of Athens is betrayed by an excessive generosity. Coriolanus is
+betrayed by an excessive contempt for the multitude. He is one born into
+a high tradition of life. He has the courage, the skill in arms, and the
+talent for affairs that come with high birth in the manly races. He has
+also the faith in tradition that makes an unlettered upper class narrow
+and obstructionist. Like the rich in France before the Revolution, he
+despises the poor. He denies them the right to complain of their hunger.
+Rather than grant them that right, or the means of urging redress, he
+would take a short way with them, as was practised here, at Manchester
+and elsewhere.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And let me use my sword, I'ld make a quarry<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;As I could pick my lance."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Like all conservative, aristocratic men, he sees in the first granting
+of political power to the people the beginning of revolution.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">"It will in time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Win power upon and throw forth greater themes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For insurrection's arguing."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> Leading, as becomes his birth, in the
+war against the Volscians he shows himself so much superior to others
+that the campaign is his triumph. He is "the man" whom Napoleon counted
+"everything in war." The knowledge of his merit is so bright within
+himself that he is unable to see that it is less bright in others. He is
+willing to become the head of the State if the post may be given to him
+as a right due to merit, not as a favour begged. He has no lust for
+power. But knowing himself to be the best man in Rome, he thinks that
+his merit is sufficiently great to excuse him from the indignity of
+sueing for it. The laws of free countries prescribe that he who wishes
+to be elected must appeal to the electors whether he love them or loathe
+them. Instead of appealing to them, Coriolanus insults them with such
+arrogance that they drive him from the city.</p>
+
+<p>He fails as a traitor, because he is too noble to be fiercely
+revengeful. A lesser man, a Richard III, or an Iago, would have exacted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
+a bloody toll from Rome. Coriolanus cannot bring himself to be stern, in
+the presence of his old mother and his wife. Something generous and
+truly aristocratic in him makes him a second time a traitor, this time
+to his hosts the Volscians. He spares Rome by the sacrifice of those who
+have given him a shelter and a welcome. Treachery (even from a noble
+motive) is never forgiven in these plays. It is always avenged, seldom
+mercifully. The Volscians avenge themselves on Coriolanus by an act of
+treachery that brings the noble heart under the foot of the traitor.</p>
+
+<p><i>Coriolanus</i> is one of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of
+the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art
+without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood
+intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a
+popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country.
+Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the
+four most popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> Plutarch,
+Cinthio, and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic
+has supplanted fable, and subject comes to the artist untrimmed and
+unlit by the vitality of many minds. In reading <i>Coriolanus</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Coriolanus</i> is a play of the clash of the aristocratic temper with the
+world. It contains most of the few speeches in Shakespeare which ring
+with what seems like a personal bitterness. Hatred of the flunkey mind,
+and of the servile, insolent mob mind, "false as water," appears in
+half-a-dozen passages. Some of these passages are ironic inventions, not
+prompted by Plutarch. The great mind, brooding on the many forms of
+treachery, found nothing more treacherous than the mob, and nothing more
+dog-like, for good or evil, than the servant.</p>
+
+<p>Greatness is sometimes shown in very little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span> things. Few things in
+Shakespeare show better the fulness of his happy power than the
+following&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+(<i>Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+<i>1st Roman.</i> This will I carry to Rome.<br />
+<br />
+<i>2nd Roman.</i> And I this.<br />
+<br />
+<i>3rd Roman.</i> A murrain on't. I took this for silver.<br />
+</div>
+
+
+<p><i>Timon of Athens.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1606-8 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>. 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> William Paynter's <i>Palace of Pleasure</i>.
+Plutarch's <i>Life of Antonius</i>. Lucian's <i>Dialogue</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives
+to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none
+grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him.
+None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing
+of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens,
+finding a like ingratitude in the State, openly makes war upon it,
+reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Timon of Athens</i> is a play of mixed authorship. Shakespeare's share in
+it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown
+poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a
+skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span> men base, he removes
+himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness
+that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is
+parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition
+of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a noble mind
+embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic
+energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend,
+shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the
+noble generosity in faithful service.</p>
+
+<p>Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography.
+Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with
+such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and
+unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story
+of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the
+heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more
+difficult and more noble to do than to pin their hearts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> on their
+sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon
+with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from
+something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth,
+and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as
+the hundred other passionate moods that built up the system of his soul.</p>
+
+<p>The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"will these moss'd trees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And skip when thou point'st out?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Come not to me again: but say to Athens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Timon hath made his everlasting mansion<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Who, once a day with his embossed froth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The turbulent surge shall cover."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> passers, is one of the most lovely examples of the
+power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Alcib.</i> (reading) <i>Pass by and curse thy fill;
+but pass, and stay not here thy gait.</i></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">These well express in thee thy latter spirits:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scorned'st our brain's flow and those our droplets which<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is noble Timon: of whose memory<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I will use the olive with my sword,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prescribe to other as each other's leech.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let our drums strike.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>Pericles, Prince of Tyre.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1607-8 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published.</i> 1608.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The plot is taken from an English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>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 <i>The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures</i> (etc.,
+etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story
+was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his <i>Confessio
+Amantis</i>. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to
+guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will
+be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess
+wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the
+Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from
+Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's
+vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.</p>
+
+<p>Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes
+jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and
+marries her.</p>
+
+<p>Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter,
+dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ashore at Ephesus,
+and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles
+dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina,
+the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus.
+He then returns to Tyre.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>The
+Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre</i> in the year 1608,
+probably after the play had been produced.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span> labour of love. The impression given is that nothing
+in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great
+mind, that Shakespeare was not deeply interested in the play, but that
+he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece
+and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the
+knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a
+theatre on which many depended for bread.</p>
+
+<p>There is little that is precious in the play. The scenes in the brothel
+at Mitylene (in Act IV) have power. Many find their unpleasantness an
+excuse for saying that Shakespeare never wrote them. They are certainly
+by Shakespeare. Cant would always persuade itself that the power to see
+clearly ought not to be turned upon evil. Those who can read&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Bawd.</i> ... they are so pitifully sodden.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Pandar.</i> ... The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little baggage.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Boult.</i> Ay ... she made him roast-meat for worms&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My father, as nurse said, did never fear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;But cried 'Good seamen!' to the sailors, galling<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;His kingly hands, haling ropes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;That almost burst the deck....<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Never was waves nor wind more violent:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And from the ladder-tackle washes off<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;A canvas-climber. 'Ha,' says one, 'wilt out?'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And with a dropping industry they skip<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles, and<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The master calls and trebles their confusion"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p><i>Cymbeline.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Holinshed's <i>Chronicles</i> tell of Cymbeline
+and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's <i>Decameron</i> (giorn.
+2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's <i>Westward for Smelts</i>,
+and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman
+falsely accused of adultery.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an
+incomparable chastity. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick
+obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste.
+Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where
+Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is
+killed by one of the sons.</p>
+
+<p>The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the
+two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished.
+Cymbeline's queen kills herself. Posthumus is taught that Iachimo
+deceived him. Imogen is restored to him. The lost sons are restored
+to Cymbeline. Prophecy is fulfilled and pardon given. All ends
+happily.</p></div>
+
+<p>It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun as a tragedy during the great
+mood of tragical creation, then laid aside unfinished, from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Though the writing is so careless and the construction so loose that no
+one can think of it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes, one
+faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty. It deals with the
+Shakespearean subject of craft working upon a want of faith for personal
+ends, and being defeated, when almost successful, by something simple
+and instinctive in human nature. It is thus not unlike <i>Othello</i>; but in
+<i>Othello</i> the subject is simple, and the treatment purely tragic. In
+<i>Cymbeline</i> the subject is only partly extricated, and the treatment is
+coloured with romance, with that strange, touching, very Shakespearean
+romance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>There can be no doubt that when the play was first conceived, the craft
+of the queen, working upon the insufficient faith of Cymbeline, was
+designed to be as important to the action as the craft of Iachimo
+working upon the insufficient faith of Posthumus. This was never wrought
+out. The play advances and halts. As in all unfinished works of art one
+sees in it something fine trying to get free but failing.</p>
+
+<p>The lyric "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" is the most lovely thing in
+the play. The most powerful moment is that which exposes the poisoning
+of a generous mind by false report. Posthumus believes Iachimo's lie and
+breaks out railing against women.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"For there's no motion<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That tends to vice in man but I affirm<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is the woman's part."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Noble instants are marked in the lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Be not, as in our fangled world, a garment<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Nobler than that it covers,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and in the symbol of the eagle&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"the Roman eagle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From south to west on wing soaring aloft,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lessen'd herself and in the beams o' the sun<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So vanished."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><i>The Winter's Tale.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1610-11.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> The story appears in Robert Greene's romance
+of <i>Pandosto</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The oracle of Apollo declares to him that Hermione is innocent,
+that he himself is a jealous tyrant, and that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The little daughter is found by country people who nourish and
+cherish her. She grows up to beautiful and gracious girlhood.
+Florizel, the son of Polixenes, falls in love with her, and seeks
+to marry her without his father's knowledge. Being discovered by
+Polixenes, he flies with her to the sea. Taking ship, the couple
+come to Leontes' court, where it is proved that the girl is the
+lost princess. She is married to Florizel. Leontes is reconciled to
+Polixenes. Hermione completes the general happiness by rejoining
+the husband who has so long mourned her.</p></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>The moral lesson is still of value to the world, and it is most
+certainly one which Shakespeare strove to impress. Shakespeare's mind
+was always brooding on the working of fate. He was always watching the
+results of some obsession upon an individual and the people con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>nected
+with him. He saw that a blindness falling upon a person suddenly, for no
+apparent reason, except that something strikes the something not quite
+sound in the nature, has the power to alter life violently. It was his
+belief that life must not be altered violently. Life is a thing of
+infinitely gradual growth, that would perfect itself if the blindness
+could be kept away. Any deceiving thing, like a passion or a feigned
+beggar, is a cause of the putting back of life, indefinitely.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It may be called the gentlest of Shakespeare's plays. It is done with a
+tenderer hand than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> the other works. The name, <i>A Winter's Tale</i>, is
+taken from a scene in the second act. Hermione sits down with her son,
+by the winter fire, to listen to his story. It is the last time she ever
+sees her son. He has hardly opened his lips when Leontes enters to
+accuse her of adultery. She is hurried off to prison, and Mamillius dies
+before the oracle's message comes to clear her. The sudden shocks and
+interruptions of life, which play so big a part in the action of these
+late romances, have full power here. The winter's tale is interrupted.
+The rest of the play results from the interruption. Much of it is very
+beautiful. To us, the wonderful thing is the strangeness of the
+tenderness which makes some scenes in the fifth act so passionate with
+grief for old injustice done to the dead. The cry of Leontes remembering
+the wronged dead woman's eyes&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"Stars, stars,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all eyes else dead coals,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is haunting and heart-breaking. All his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span> longing of remorse gives to the
+last great scene, before the supposed statue, an intensity of beauty
+hardly endurable.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">"daffodils,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That come before the swallow dares, and take<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span><span class="i0">But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That die unmarried, ere they can behold<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bright Ph&oelig;bus in his strength."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>The Tempest.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1610-11.</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> It is likely that many sources contributed to
+the making of this plot. If Shakespeare took the fable from a
+single source, that source is not now known. He may have taken
+suggestions for it from the following books:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1st. From a little collection of novels by Antonio de Eslava, a
+Spanish writer, whose book, <i>Noches de Invierno</i>, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>the book suggested the title of <i>A Winter's Tale</i> is not
+known.</p>
+
+<p>2nd. From a German play, <i>Die sch&ouml;ne Sidea</i>, by a Nuremberg
+dramatist, named Jacob Ayrer.</p>
+
+<p>3rd. From the tracts relating to the discovery of the Bermuda
+Islands in 1609. Of the known tracts, <i>A Discovery of the Bermuda
+Islands</i>, by Sylvester Jourdain, gave Shakespeare the most hints.</p>
+
+<p>Several other books may have suggested lines and passages.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>In this play, as in the two other original romantic plays, Shakespeare
+follows the workings of a treacherous act from its performance to the
+repentance of the sinner and the granting of the victim's forgiveness.
+In the great plays the victim dies and the sinner does not repent.
+Presently the wheel comes full circle, and a justice from outside life
+smites him dead. In these plays the betrayed live to forgive the
+traitors<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Do I take part. The rarer action is<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;The sole drift of my purpose doth extend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Not a frown further."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In this play, as in the other two and in <i>Pericles</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to interpret the play as allegory. Youth in this country has
+reason to regard allegory as a clumsy man's way of introducing Sunday on
+a weekday. It is so seldom successful that it may be called the literary
+method of creative minds below the first rank. Shakespeare's method was
+never allegorical. The <i>Tempest</i> is perhaps no more allegorical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> than
+any other good romance. But the thought of it is so clear that the first
+impression given is that it is thin. It is the study of a man of
+intellect, who has been forced from power by a treacherous brother.
+Living alone with his bright, unspoiled daughter, he attains, by
+intellectual labour, to a power over destiny. Like the wise man of the
+proverb, he learns to master his stars. He uses this power nobly to put
+an end to ancient hatred and old injustice.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span> strength than the base Sebastian and the treacherous Antonio.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>King Henry VIII</i>, or <i>All is True</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Written.</i> 1611-13 (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Produced.</i> (?)</p>
+
+<p><i>Published</i>, in the first folio, 1623.</p>
+
+<p><i>Source of the Plot.</i> Holinshed's <i>Chronicles</i>. Hall's
+<i>Chronicles</i>. Foxe's <i>Book of Martyrs</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Fable.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Act II. In this act, Buckingham is beheaded, the King <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>shows favour
+to Anne Bullen, and Queen Katharine is brought to trial. It is hard
+to believe that Shakespeare wrote any part of this act. He is often
+credited with the third scene, apparently on the ground that though
+it is bad it is still too good to be by Bacon.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Act IV. Anne Bullen is crowned. Wolsey dies. Queen Katharine dies.
+None of this act is by Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>Act V. Cranmer escapes from his enemies in time to be godfather at
+the christening of Anne Bullen's daughter Elizabeth. If any of this
+act be by Shakespeare it can only be the first scene.</p></div>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i>. 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's dramatic intention is indicated in the scenes written by
+him. Knowing his practice, and having before us Holinshed, his
+authority, it is easy to sketch out the kind of play that he would have
+written by himself. Wolsey, eaten up by his obsession for worldly power,
+betraying Buckingham to his fall, breaking the power of the Queen, and
+ruling England, would have filled the first two acts. The third act
+would have told (much more subtly than Fletcher has told) of his
+downfall. Fletcher attributes the downfall to the chance discovery of
+his attempt to thwart the king's marriage with Anne Bullen. That
+discovery would have been put to full dramatic use by Shakespeare; but
+it would have been repre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>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 <i>Richard
+II</i>, and of an ampler canvas than <i>Timon</i>. Shakespeare's share in the
+play as we have it is all noble work. Wolsey, Katharine and the King are
+drawn with the great, sharp, ample line of a master. The difference
+between genius and supreme genius is shown very clearly in the first
+act, where a great work, greatly begun, with the masterly power of
+exposition that makes Shakespeare's first acts like daybreaks, is ended
+by another spirit, without vision, but with a tremendous sense of Vanity
+Fair.</p>
+
+
+<p>WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE</p>
+
+<p>A play called <i>Cardenno</i>, or <i>Cardenna</i>, was acted at Court by
+Shakespeare's company in 1613. It is thought that this play was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+<i>History of Cardenio</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Arden of Feversham</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Edward III</i> is an historical chronicle play by at least two unknown
+hands. It was published anonymously in 1596. Some think that part of Act
+I and the whole of Act II (dealing with the King's obsession of passion
+for the Countess of Salisbury) were by Shakespeare, on the grounds that
+the writing is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span> too good to be by anybody else then living, and that the
+unknown author makes use of a line and a phrase which occur in the
+genuine sonnets of Shakespeare. The scenes attributed to Shakespeare
+contain several beautiful lines in something of the Shakespearean
+manner. The construction of the scenes, and their relation to the rest
+of the play is un-Shakespearean. It is unlikely that Shakespeare wrote
+them.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Spanish Tragedy</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Two Noble Kinsmen</i>, a romantic tragedy on the subject of Chaucer's
+<i>Knight's Tale</i>, was first published in 1634. It was described on the
+title-page as the joint work of Fletcher and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p>THE POEMS</p>
+
+<p><i>Venus and Adonis.</i>&mdash;This poem was published in 1593 with a dedication
+to the Earl of Southampton, then a youth. In the dedication Shakespeare
+speaks of the poem as "the first heire of my invention," from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> which
+some conclude that it was the first poem ever made public by him.</p>
+
+<p>Though it may be his earliest poem, the thought expressed by it is the
+thought expressed in the greatest of the plays, that evil comes of
+obsession.</p>
+
+<p>Venus, a lustful woman, pursuing her opposite, a chaste youth, comes to
+misery. Adonis, a chaste youth, fleeing from her, comes to death.</p>
+
+<p>The poem is beautiful and wild blooded. It is fierce with the excelling
+animal zest of something young and untainted.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The sun ariseth in his majesty<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Who doth the world so gloriously behold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is full of the images of delicate quick-blooded things going swiftly
+and lustily from the boiling of the April in them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><i>The Rape of Lucrece.</i>&mdash;This poem was published in 1594, with a
+dedication to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span> 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 <i>Venus and
+Adonis</i>, with the sexes reversed. In both poems the subject is sexual
+obsession and its results.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lucrece</i> is a wiser and a finer poem than <i>Venus and Adonis</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange that both Lucrece and Hamlet, in their moments of
+distraction, turn to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span> image of Troy blazing with the punishment of
+treachery.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Passionate Pilgrim.</i>&mdash;This little collection of poems was published
+in 1599, under Shakespeare's name, by William Jaggard, a dishonest
+bookseller. It contains poems by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin,
+Christopher Marlowe, and one or more unknown hands. It also contains two
+genuine Shakespearean sonnets, three more from the text of <i>Love's
+Labour's Lost</i>, and three (less certainly his) on the subject of <i>Venus
+and Adonis</i>, which have the ring of his freshest youthful manner.
+Whether any others in the collection be by Shakespeare can only be a
+matter of opinion. The nineteenth poem has a smack of his mind about it.
+If it be by him it must be his earliest extant work.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><i>The Sonnets.</i>&mdash;<i>Written</i> between 1592 and 1609. <i>Published</i>
+(piratically) 1609.</p>
+
+<p>These personal poems have puzzled many readers. Many writers have tried
+to interpret<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span> them. Although their first editor tells us that they are
+"serene, cleare, and elegantlie plaine (with) no intricate and cloudie
+stuffe to trouble and perplex the intellect," much good and bad brain
+work has been spent on them. Some have held that they are poetical
+exercises. Others find that they are confessions. Others wrest from dark
+lines dark meanings, till they have laid bare a story from them. Others
+interpret spiritually. Others find evidence in them that Shakespeare was
+guilty of an abnormal form of passion. The facts about them may be
+stated&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. They are personal poems. Some of them are of great beauty;
+others are unsuccessful.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>3. They were written to more than one person. Many were written to
+an attractive, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>handsome, young, unmarried man, Shakespeare's dear
+friend. Men with imagination enjoy sweeter and closer friendships
+than the many know. The many, mulish as ever, therefore imagine
+evil.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>No one knows who the friend, the lady and the rival poet were. The
+discovery of letters and manuscripts may some day remove the mystery.
+"Against that time,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Beautiful as many of the sonnets are, they are less wonderful
+achievements and less important to the soul of man than the plays. Few
+people thought much of them until the degradation of the English theatre
+had hidden from English minds the greater glory of the creative system.
+That they are now widely read while the plays are seldom acted, is
+another proof that this age cares more for what was perishing and
+personal in Shakespeare than for that which went winging on, in the
+great light, surveying the eternal in man.</p>
+
+<p>What Shakespeare thought of his perishing self is expressed in the
+noblest of the sonnets. Two syllables are missing from the second line.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;(   ) these rebel powers that thee array,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span><span class="i0">&nbsp;Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Why so large cost, having so short a lease,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And let that pine to aggravate thy store;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Buy terms divine with selling hours of dross;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Within be fed, without be rich no more:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;And Death once dead, there's no more dying then."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>A
+Lover's Complaint</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span> felicitous as youth's work often is, and very nearly
+as empty.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><i>The Ph&oelig;nix and The Turtle.</i>&mdash;This strange, very beautiful poem was
+published in 1601 in an appendix to Robert Chester's <i>Love's Martyr, or
+Rosalin's Complaint</i>, to which several famous poets contributed. In dark
+and noble verse it describes a spiritual marriage, suddenly ended by
+death. It is too strange to be the fruit of a human sorrow. It is the
+work of a great mind trying to express in unusual symbols a thought too
+subtle and too intense to be expressed in any other way. Spiritual
+ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that
+key it can only be so many strange words set in a noble rhythm for no
+apparent cause.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+<p>AUTHOR'S NOTE</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's plays were printed carelessly, often from imperfect, torn,
+ill-written or stolen copies. When printed, they were seldom corrected.
+When reprinted, the original errors were often made much worse. Thus,
+"he met the night-mare," or "a met the night-mare," in the original
+manuscript, was printed "a nellthu night more," and reprinted "anelthu
+night Moore." Those who lightly read the modern editions seldom know
+that years of mental toil went to the preparation of the texts so easily
+read to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Many English minds have paid tribute to Shakespeare. Few of them deserve
+more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span> praise than the Cambridge Editors, whose six years of labour
+cleared the text of countless errors and corruptions. The correction of
+a corrupt text by collation and conjecture, is one of the most difficult
+and least amusing tasks that a fine mind can have. The Cambridge
+<i>Shakespeare</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Life of William Shakespeare</i> has been ably written by Dr. Sidney
+Lee, whose judgment equals his learning.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the dramatic methods of Shakespeare have been nobly studied by
+Dr. A. C. Bradley in his <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>To these books and to the Shakespearean Essays in Mr. W. B. Yeats's
+<i>Ideas of Good and Evil</i>, I am deeply indebted, as all modern students
+of Shakespeare must be.</p>
+
+<p>Our knowledge of Shakespeare is imperfect. It can only be increased by
+minute and patient study, by the rejection of surmise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span> about him, and by
+the constant public playing of his plays, in the Shakespearean manner,
+by actors who will neither mutilate nor distort what the great mind
+strove to make just.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX_OF_CHARACTERS" id="INDEX_OF_CHARACTERS"></a>INDEX OF CHARACTERS</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+Achilles, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a><br />
+<br />
+Adonis, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a><br />
+<br />
+Adriana, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="corr3" id="corr3"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn3" title="changed from '&AElig;gon'">&AElig;geon</a>,
+<a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a><br />
+<br />
+Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a><br />
+<br />
+Ajax, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a><br />
+<br />
+Albany, Duke of, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a><br />
+<br />
+Alcibiades, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a><br />
+<br />
+Angelo, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a><br />
+<br />
+Anne Bullen, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a><br />
+<br />
+Anne, Lady, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a><br />
+<br />
+Antipholus of Ephesus, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a><br />
+<br />
+Antipholus of Syracuse, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a><br />
+<br />
+Antonio (<i>Merchant of Venice</i>), <a href='#Page_103'>103</a><br />
+<br />
+Antonio (<i>Tempest</i>), <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a><br />
+<br />
+Antonio (<i>Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>), <a href='#Page_34'>34</a><br />
+<br />
+Apemantus, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a><br />
+<br />
+Armado, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a><br />
+<br />
+Arthur, Prince, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a><br />
+<br />
+Audrey, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a><br />
+<br />
+Austria, Lymoges, Duke of, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a><br />
+<br />
+Autolycus, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Banquo, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a><br />
+<br />
+Bardolph, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a><br />
+<br />
+Bassanio, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a><br />
+<br />
+Beatrice, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a><br />
+<br />
+Beaufort, Cardinal, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a><br />
+<br />
+Belarius, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a><br />
+<br />
+Belch, Sir Toby, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a><br />
+<br />
+Benedick, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a><br />
+<br />
+Bertram, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a><br />
+<br />
+Bianca, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a><br />
+<br />
+Biondello, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a><br />
+<br />
+Biron, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a><br />
+<br />
+Blanch of Spain, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a><br />
+<br />
+Borachio, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
+<br />
+Bottom, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Boyet, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a><br />
+<br />
+Brutus, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a><br />
+<br />
+Buckingham, Duke of (<i>Richard III</i>), <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
+<br />
+Buckingham, Duke of (<i>Henry VIII</i>), <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Cade, Jack, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a><br />
+<br />
+Caius, Dr., <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a><br />
+<br />
+Calchas, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a><br />
+<br />
+Carlisle, Bishop of, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a><br />
+<br />
+Cassio, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a><br />
+<br />
+Cassius, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a><br />
+<br />
+Cawdor, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a><br />
+<br />
+Celia, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a><br />
+<br />
+Cerimon, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a><br />
+<br />
+Clarence, George, Duke of, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a><br />
+<br />
+Claudio (<i>Measure for Measure</i>), <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a><br />
+<br />
+Claudio (<i>Much Ado</i>), <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
+<br />
+Claudius (<i>Hamlet</i>), <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a><br />
+<br />
+Cleopatra, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a><br />
+<br />
+Cloten, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a><br />
+<br />
+Cordelia, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a><br />
+<br />
+Coriolanus, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a><br />
+<br />
+Cornwall, Duke of, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a><br />
+<br />
+Costard, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span><br />
+Cranmer, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a><br />
+<br />
+Cressida, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a><br />
+<br />
+Cymbeline, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Demetrius, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Desdemona, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a><br />
+<br />
+Diana (<i>All's Well</i>), <a href='#Page_144'>144</a><br />
+<br />
+Diana (<i>Pericles</i>), <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a><br />
+<br />
+Don John, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
+<br />
+Don Pedro, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a><br />
+<br />
+Dorset, Marquess of, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a><br />
+<br />
+Dromio of Ephesus, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a><br />
+<br />
+Dromio of Syracuse, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a><br />
+<br />
+Dumaine, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a><br />
+<br />
+Duncan, King, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Edgar, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a><br />
+<br />
+Edmund, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a><br />
+<br />
+Edward III, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a><br />
+<br />
+Edward IV, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a><br />
+<br />
+Edward, Prince of Wales (<i>Henry VI</i>), <a href='#Page_62'>62</a><br />
+<br />
+Edward, Prince of Wales (<i>Richard III</i>), <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
+<br />
+Eglamour, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a><br />
+<br />
+Elinor, Queen, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a><br />
+<br />
+Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a><br />
+<br />
+Elizabeth, Princess, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a><br />
+<br />
+Emilia, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a><br />
+<br />
+Evans, Sir Hugh, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Falstaff, Sir John, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a><br />
+<br />
+Flavius, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a><br />
+<br />
+Florizel, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a><br />
+<br />
+Fluellen, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a><br />
+<br />
+Fool (<i>Lear</i>), <a href='#Page_192'>192</a><br />
+<br />
+Ford, Mistress, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a><br />
+<br />
+Fortinbras, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a><br />
+<br />
+Frederick, Duke, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a><br />
+<br />
+Friar Laurence, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Gertrude, Queen, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a><br />
+<br />
+Ghost (<i>Hamlet</i>), <a href='#Page_158'>158</a><br />
+<br />
+Gloucester, Earl of, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a><br />
+<br />
+Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a><br />
+<br />
+Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (<i>Henry VI</i>), <a href='#Page_61'>61</a><br />
+<br />
+Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (<i>Richard III</i>), <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a><br />
+<br />
+Goneril, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a><br />
+<br />
+Grey, Lord, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hamlet, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a><br />
+<br />
+Hastings, Lord, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
+<br />
+Hector, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a><br />
+<br />
+Helen, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a><br />
+<br />
+Helena (<i>Midsummer Night's Dream</i>), <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Helena (<i>All's Well</i>), <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a><br />
+<br />
+Henry IV, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a><br />
+<br />
+Henry V, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a><br />
+<br />
+Henry VI, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a><br />
+<br />
+Henry VIII, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a><br />
+<br />
+Henry, Prince of Wales, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a><br />
+<br />
+Henry Bolingbroke, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a><br />
+<br />
+Hermia, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Hermione, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a><br />
+<br />
+Hero, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
+<br />
+Hippolyta, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Hotspur, Henry Percy, surnamed, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span><br />
+Hubert de Burgh, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Iachimo, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a><br />
+<br />
+Iago, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a><br />
+<br />
+Imogen, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a><br />
+<br />
+Isabella, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Jaques, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a><br />
+<br />
+Joan of Arc, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a><br />
+<br />
+John, King of England, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a><br />
+<br />
+John of Gaunt, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a><br />
+<br />
+John of Lancaster, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a><br />
+<br />
+Julia, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a><br />
+<br />
+Juliet, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a><br />
+<br />
+Julius C&aelig;sar, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Katharina, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a><br />
+<br />
+Katharine, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a><br />
+<br />
+Katharine of France, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a><br />
+<br />
+Katharine, Queen, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a><br />
+<br />
+Kent, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Laertes, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a><br />
+<br />
+Launce, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a><br />
+<br />
+Lear, King, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a><br />
+<br />
+Lennox, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a><br />
+<br />
+Leonato, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a><br />
+<br />
+Leontes, King of Sicilia, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a><br />
+<br />
+Lewis the Dauphin, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a><br />
+<br />
+Longaville, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a><br />
+<br />
+Lucio, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a><br />
+<br />
+Lucrece, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a><br />
+<br />
+Lysander, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Macbeth, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a><br />
+<br />
+Macbeth, Lady, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a><br />
+<br />
+Macduff, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a><br />
+<br />
+Malcolm, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a><br />
+<br />
+Malvolio, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a><br />
+<br />
+Mamillius, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a><br />
+<br />
+Marcius, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a><br />
+<br />
+Margaret of Anjou, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a><br />
+<br />
+Maria, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a><br />
+<br />
+Mariana, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a><br />
+<br />
+Marina, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a><br />
+<br />
+Mark Antony, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a><br />
+<br />
+Mercutio, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a><br />
+<br />
+Milan, Duke of, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a><br />
+<br />
+Miranda, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a><br />
+<br />
+Mortimer, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a><br />
+<br />
+Northumberland, Henry Percy, Earl of, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a><br />
+<br />
+Nurse to Juliet, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a><br />
+<br />
+Nym, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Oberon, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Octavia, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a><br />
+<br />
+Octavius C&aelig;sar, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a><br />
+<br />
+Olivia, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a><br />
+<br />
+Oliver, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a><br />
+<br />
+Ophelia, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a><br />
+<br />
+Orlando, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a><br />
+<br />
+Orsino, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a><br />
+<br />
+Othello, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Page, Anne, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+<br />
+Page, Mistress, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+<br />
+Pandarus, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a><br />
+<br />
+Pandulph, Cardinal, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a><br />
+<br />
+Paris, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a><br />
+<br />
+Pericles, Prince of Tyre, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a><br />
+<br />
+Petruchio, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span><br />
+Phebe, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a><br />
+<br />
+Philip the Bastard, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a><br />
+<br />
+Philip of France, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a><br />
+<br />
+Pistol, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+<br />
+Polixenes, King of Bohemia, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a><br />
+<br />
+Polonius, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a><br />
+<br />
+Portia, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a><br />
+<br />
+Posthumus, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a><br />
+<br />
+Prospero, Duke of Milan, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a><br />
+<br />
+Proteus, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a><br />
+<br />
+Puck, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Pyramus, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Queen (<i>Cymbeline</i>), <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a><br />
+<br />
+Quickly, Mrs., <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Regan, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a><br />
+<br />
+Richard II, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a><br />
+<br />
+Richard III, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a><br />
+<br />
+Richard, Duke of York, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
+<br />
+Rivers, Earl, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
+<br />
+Roderigo, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a><br />
+<br />
+Romeo, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="corr4" id="corr4"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn4" title="Index entry for page 133 of Rosaline was moved to Rosalind">Rosalind</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a><br />
+<br />
+Rosaline, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Salisbury, Countess of, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a><br />
+<br />
+Scroop, Lord, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a><br />
+<br />
+Sebastian (<i>Tempest</i>), <a href='#Page_235'>235</a><br />
+<br />
+Sebastian (<i>Twelfth Night</i>), <a href='#Page_138'>138</a><br />
+<br />
+Shallow, Justice, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+<br />
+Shylock, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a><br />
+<br />
+Silvia, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a><br />
+<br />
+Simpcox, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a><br />
+<br />
+Slender, Master, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+<br />
+Sly, Christopher, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a><br />
+<br />
+Somerset, Earl of, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a><br />
+<br />
+Stephano, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a><br />
+<br />
+Suffolk, Earl of, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Talbot, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a><br />
+<br />
+Tamora, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a><br />
+<br />
+Tarquin, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a><br />
+<br />
+Thaisa, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a><br />
+<br />
+Thersites, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a><br />
+<br />
+Theseus, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a><br />
+<br />
+Thisbe, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Thurio, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a><br />
+<br />
+Timon of Athens, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a><br />
+<br />
+Titania, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a><br />
+<br />
+Titus Andronicus, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a><br />
+<br />
+Touchstone, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a><br />
+<br />
+Trinculo, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a><br />
+<br />
+Troilus, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a><br />
+<br />
+Tybalt, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ulysses, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a><br />
+<br />
+Ursula, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Valentine, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a><br />
+<br />
+Venus, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a><br />
+<br />
+Vienna, Duke of, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a><br />
+<br />
+Viola, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Warwick, Earl of, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a><br />
+<br />
+Wolsey, Cardinal, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="corr5" id="corr5"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn5" title="Index entry for page 92 was removed">York, Edmund of Langley, Duke of</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a><br />
+<br />
+York, Edward, Duke of, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a><br />
+<br />
+York, Richard, Duke of, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Printed by Hazell, Watson &amp; Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="bbox">
+<p class="fm1">Home University Library<br /></p>
+<p class="fm2">of Modern<br />
+Knowledge<br />
+<br />
+<i>A Comprehensive Series of New<br />
+and Specially Written Books</i><br /></p>
+
+<div class="bb"></div>
+<p class="fm4">EDITORS:<br /></p>
+<p class="fm2"><span class="smcap">Prof. GILBERT MURRAY</span>, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.<br />
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON</span>, M.A.<br />
+<span class="smcap">Prof. WM. T. BREWSTER</span>, M.A.<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="bb"></div>
+
+<p class="fm2">The Home University Library</p>
+
+<p class="fl1">
+"Is without the slightest doubt the pioneer in supplying serious
+literature for a large section of the public who are interested in
+the liberal education of the State."&mdash;<i>The Daily Mail.</i>
+<br /><br />
+"The fact is," says the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, "that this remarkable
+library helps to realise one of those functions of a true
+University which English Universities have culpably neglected....
+This Library makes a most effective and useful beginning
+in the popularisation of knowledge.... The scope of the series
+is as wisely outlined as its methods are effective and praiseworthy."
+<br /><br />
+"The Home University Library places within the reach of
+every man, woman, or child with a shilling to spend fruitfully,
+the products of the best brains of to-day in all departments of
+modern knowledge."&mdash;<i>Morning Leader.</i>
+<br /><br />
+"Each volume represents a three-hours' traffic with the talking-power
+of a good brain, operating with the ease and interesting
+freedom of a specialist dealing with his own subject.... A series
+which promises to perform a real social service."&mdash;<i>The Times.</i>
+<br /><br />
+"We can think of no series now being issued which better
+deserves support."&mdash;<i>The Observer.</i>
+<br /><br />
+"Certainly no publishing enterprise of our time is more
+remarkable or better deserving of success."&mdash;<i>Manchester
+Guardian.</i><br />
+<br />
+"Here is the world's learning in little, and none too poor to
+give it house-room!"&mdash;<i>Daily Telegraph.</i><br /></p>
+
+<div class="bb"></div>
+
+<table summary="ADS">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdc"><p class="fm2"><b>1/- net in cloth</b></p></td>
+<td class="tdl"><p class="fm2"><b>|</b></p></td>
+<td class="tdc"><p class="fm2">256 Pages</p></td>
+<td class="tdl"><p class="fm2"><b>|</b></p></td>
+<td class="tdc"><p class="fm2"><b>2/6 net in leather</b></p></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class="bbox1"><div class="bbox2">
+<p class="fm1"><i>History and Geography</i></p>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="u"><p>3. <i>THE FRENCH REVOLUTION</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">Hilaire Belloc</span>, M.A. (With Maps.) "It is coloured with all the
+militancy of the author's temperament."&mdash;<i>Daily News.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>4. <i>HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By G. H. <span class="smcap">Perris</span>. The Rt. Hon. <span class="smcap">James Bryce</span> writes: "I have read it with
+much interest and pleasure, admiring the skill with which you have
+managed to compress so many facts and views into so small a volume."</p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>8. <i>POLAR EXPLORATION</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Dr W. S. <span class="smcap">Bruce</span>, F.R.S.E., Leader of the "Scotia" Expedition. (With
+Maps.) "A very freshly written and interesting narrative."&mdash;<i>The Times.</i>
+"A fascinating book."&mdash;<i>Portsmouth Times.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>12. <i>THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Sir H. H. <span class="smcap">Johnston</span>, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. (With Maps.) "The
+Home University Library is much enriched by this excellent
+work."&mdash;<i>Daily Mail.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>13. <i>MEDI&AElig;VAL EUROPE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By H. W. C. <span class="smcap">Davis</span>, M.A. (With Maps.) "A good specimen of the work of the
+modern historian,"&mdash;<i>Christian World.</i> "One more illustration of the
+fact that it takes a complete master of the subject to write briefly
+upon it."&mdash;<i>Manchester Guardian.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>14. <i>THE PAPACY &amp; MODERN TIMES</i> (1303-1870)</p></div>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">William Barry</span>, D.D. "Dr Barry has a wide range of knowledge and an
+artist's power of selection."&mdash;<i>Manchester Guardian.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>23. <i>HISTORY OF OUR TIME</i>, 1885-1911</p></div>
+
+<p>By G. P. <span class="smcap">Gooch</span>, M.A. "Mr Gooch contrives to breathe vitality into his
+story, and to give us the flesh as well as the bones of recent
+happenings."&mdash;<i>Observer.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>25. <i>THE CIVILISATION OF CHINA</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By H. A. <span class="smcap">Giles</span>, LL.D., Professor of Chinese in the University of
+Cambridge. "In all the mass of facts, Professor Giles never becomes
+dull. He is always ready with a ghost story or a street adventure for
+the reader's recreation."&mdash;<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>29. <i>THE DAWN OF HISTORY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By J. L. <span class="smcap">Myres</span>, M.A., F.S.A., Wykeham Professor of Ancient History,
+Oxford. "There is not a page in it that is not suggestive."&mdash;<i>Manchester
+Guardian.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>33. <i>THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND</i>:</p></div>
+
+<p><i>A Study in Political Evolution</i>.</p>
+
+<p>By Prof. A. F. <span class="smcap">Pollard</span>, M.A. With a Chronological Table. "A vivid study
+of tendencies, not a solid mass of facts.... It is a most stimulating,
+energetic, and suggestive piece of work."&mdash;<i>Daily News.</i> "It takes its
+place at once among the authoritative works on English
+history."&mdash;<i>Observer.</i> "It is marked by the wealth of detail, the sanity
+of outlook, the severe impartiality which we always find in Prof.
+Pollard's writings."&mdash;<i>London Teacher.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>34. <i>CANADA</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By A. G. <span class="smcap">Bradley</span>. "Who knows Canada better than Mr A. G.
+Bradley?"&mdash;<i>Daily Chronicle.</i> "The volume makes an immediate appeal to
+the man who wants to know something vivid and true about
+Canada."&mdash;<i>Canadian Gazette.</i> "As interesting and as absorbing as a good
+novel."&mdash;<i>Canadian Mail.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>37. <i>PEOPLES &amp; PROBLEMS OF INDIA</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Sir T. W. <span class="smcap">Holderness</span>, K.C.S.I., Secretary of the Revenue, Statistics,
+and Commerce Department of the India Office. "Just the book which
+newspaper readers require to-day, and a marvel of comprehensiveness in
+bringing all the factors of a great subject into view within a limited
+space."&mdash;<i>Pall Mall Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>42. <i>ROME</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By W. <span class="smcap">Warde Fowler</span>, M.A. "A masterly sketch of Roman character and of
+what it did for the world."&mdash;<i>The Spectator.</i> "It has all the lucidity
+and charm of presentation we expect from this writer."&mdash;<i>Manchester
+Guardian.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>48. <i>THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By F. L. <span class="smcap">Paxson</span>, Professor of American History, Wisconsin University.
+(With Maps.)</p>
+
+<div class="u"><p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">In Preparation</span></p></div>
+
+<p class="fl2">
+<i>ANCIENT GREECE.</i> By Prof. <span class="smcap">Gilbert Murray</span>, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.<br /><br />
+
+<i>ANCIENT EGYPT.</i> By Dr F. L. <span class="smcap">Griffith</span>, M.A., F.R.S.<br /><br />
+
+<i>A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE.</i> By <span class="smcap">Herbert Fisher</span>, M.A., F.B.A.<br /><br />
+
+<i>THE REFORMATION.</i> By Principal <span class="smcap">Lindsay</span>, LL.D.<br /><br />
+
+<i>A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA.</i> By Prof. <span class="smcap">Milyoukov</span>.<br /><br />
+
+<i>MODERN TURKEY.</i> By D. G. <span class="smcap">Hogarth</span>, M.A.<br /><br />
+
+<i>FRANCE OF TO-DAY.</i> By <span class="smcap">Albert Thomas</span>.<br /><br />
+
+<i>HISTORY OF SCOTLAND.</i> By R. S. <span class="smcap">Rait</span>, M.A.<br /><br />
+
+<i>SOUTH AMERICA.</i> By Prof. W. R. <span class="smcap">Shepherd</span>.<br /><br />
+
+<i>MASTER MARINERS.</i> By J. R. <span class="smcap">Spears</span>.<br /><br />
+
+<i>NAPOLEON.</i> By <span class="smcap">Herbert Fisher</span>, M.A.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class="bbox1"><div class="bbox2">
+<p class="fm1"><i>Literature and Art</i></p>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<div class="u"><p>2. <i>SHAKESPEARE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">John Masefield</span>. "The book is a joy. We have had half-a-dozen more
+learned books on Shakespeare in the last few years, but not one so
+wise."&mdash;<i>Manchester Guardian.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>27. <i>ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">G. H. Mair, M.A</span>. "Altogether a fresh and individual
+book."&mdash;<i>Observer.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>35. <i>LANDMARKS IN FRENCH LITERATURE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">G. L. Strachey</span>. "Short handbooks on great subjects are among the most
+difficult tasks that a man of letters can undertake, and Mr Strachey is
+to be congratulated on his courage and success. It is difficult to
+imagine how a better account of French Literature could be given in two
+hundred and fifty small pages than he has given here."&mdash;<i>The Times.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>39. <i>ARCHITECTURE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Prof. <span class="smcap">W. R. Lethaby</span>. (Over forty Illustrations.) "Popular guide-books
+to architecture are, as a rule, not worth much. This volume is a welcome
+exception."&mdash;<i>Building News.</i> "Delightfully bright reading."&mdash;<i>Christian
+World.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>43. <i>ENGLISH LITERATURE: MEDI&AElig;VAL.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Prof. <span class="smcap">W. P. Ker, M.A.</span></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>45. <i>THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">L. Pearsall Smith, M.A.</span></p>
+
+
+<div class="u"><p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">In Preparation</span></p></div>
+
+<p class="fl2">
+<i>ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL.</i> By Miss <span class="smcap">Jane Harrison</span>, LL.D., D.Litt.
+<br /><br />
+<i>THE RENAISSANCE.</i> By Mrs R. A. <span class="smcap">Taylor</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE.</i> By <span class="smcap">Roger E. Fry</span>, M.A.
+<br /><br />
+<i>ENGLISH COMPOSITION.</i> By Prof. <span class="smcap">Wm. T. Brewster</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>GREAT WRITERS OF AMERICA.</i> By Prof. W. P. <span class="smcap">Trent</span> and Prof. J. <span class="smcap">Erskine</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA.</i> By C. T. <span class="smcap">Hagberg Wright</span>, LL.D.
+<br /><br />
+<i>THE LITERATURE OF GERMANY.</i> By Prof. J. G. <span class="smcap">Robertson</span>, M.A., Ph.D.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class="bbox1"><div class="bbox2">
+<p class="fm1"><i>Science</i></p>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<div class="u"><p>7. <i>MODERN GEOGRAPHY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Dr <span class="smcap">Marion Newbigin</span>. (Illustrated.) "Geography, again: what a dull,
+tedious study that was wont to be!... But Miss Marion Newbigin invests
+its dry bones with the flesh and blood of romantic interest, taking
+stock of geography as a fairy-book of science."&mdash;<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>9. <i>THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Dr D. H. <span class="smcap">Scott</span>, M.A., F.R.S., late Hon. Keeper of the Jodrell
+Laboratory, Kew. (Fully illustrated.) "The information which the book
+provides is as trustworthy as first-hand knowledge can make it.... Dr
+Scott's candid and familiar style makes the difficult subject both
+fascinating and easy."&mdash;<i>Gardeners' Chronicle.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>17. <i>HEALTH AND DISEASE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By W. <span class="smcap">Leslie Mackenzie</span>, M.D., Local Government Board, Edinburgh. "The
+science of public health administration has had no abler or more
+attractive exponent than Dr Mackenzie. He adds to a thorough grasp of
+the problems an illuminating style, and an arresting manner of treating
+a subject often dull and sometimes unsavoury."&mdash;<i>Economist.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>18. <i>INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By A. N. <span class="smcap">Whithead</span>, Sc.D., F.R.S. (With Diagrams.) "Mr Whitehead has
+discharged with conspicuous success the task he is so exceptionally
+qualified to undertake. For he is one of our great authorities upon the
+foundations of the science, and has the breadth of view which is so
+requisite in presenting to the reader its aims. His exposition is clear
+and striking."&mdash;<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>19. <i>THE ANIMAL WORLD</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Professor F. W. <span class="smcap">Gamble</span>, D.Sc., F.R.S. With Introduction by Sir Oliver
+Lodge. (Many Illustrations.) "A delightful and instructive epitome of
+animal (and vegetable) life.... A most fascinating and suggestive
+survey."&mdash;<i>Morning Post.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>20. <i>EVOLUTION</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Professor J. <span class="smcap">Arthur Thomson</span> and Professor <span class="smcap">Patrick Geddes</span>. "A
+many-coloured and romantic panorama, opening up, like no other book we
+know, a rational vision of world-development."&mdash;<i>Belfast News-Letter.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>22. <i>CRIME AND INSANITY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Dr C. A. <span class="smcap">Mercier</span>, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S., Author of "Text-Book of
+Insanity," etc. "Furnishes much valuable information from one occupying
+the highest position among medico-legal psychologists."&mdash;<i>Asylum News.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>28. <i>PSYCHICAL RESEARCH</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Sir W. F. <span class="smcap">Barrett</span>, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of
+Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "As a former President of the Psychical
+Research Society, he is familiar with all the developments of this most
+fascinating branch of science, and thus what he has to say on
+thought-reading, hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism,
+divinings, and so on, will be read with avidity."&mdash;<i>Dundee Courier.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>31. <i>ASTRONOMY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By A. R. <span class="smcap">Hinks</span>, M.A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory, "Original
+in thought, eclectic in substance, and critical in treatment.... No
+better little book is available."&mdash;<i>School World.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>32. <i>INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By J. <span class="smcap">Arthur Thomson</span>, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History,
+Aberdeen University. "For those who have not yet become possessed of the
+Library, this would form an appropriate introduction. Professor
+Thomson's delightful literary style is well known; and here he
+discourses freshly and easily on the methods of science and its
+relations with philosophy, art, religion, and practical
+life."&mdash;<i>Aberdeen Journal.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>36. <i>CLIMATE AND WEATHER</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By H. N. <span class="smcap">Dickson</span>, D.Sc. Oxon., M.A., F.R.S.E., President of the Royal
+Meteorological Society; Professor of Geography in University College,
+Reading. (With Diagrams.) "The author has succeeded in presenting in a
+very lucid and agreeable manner the causes of the movement of the
+atmosphere and of the more stable winds. The information throughout
+appears to be reliable, and is certainly conveyed in an attractive
+form."&mdash;<i>Manchester Guardian.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>41. <i>ANTHROPOLOGY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By R. R. <span class="smcap">Marett</span>, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford
+University. "An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a child could
+understand it, so fascinating and human that it beats fiction 'to a
+frazzle.'"&mdash;<i>Morning Leader.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>44. <i>THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Prof. J. G. <span class="smcap">McKendrick</span>, M.D.</p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>46. <i>MATTER AND ENERGY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By F. <span class="smcap">Soddy</span>, M.A., F.R.S.</p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>49. <i>PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Prof. W. <span class="smcap">McDougall</span>, F.R.S., M.B.</p>
+
+
+<div class="u"><p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">In Preparation</span></p></div>
+
+<p class="fl2">
+<i>ELECTRICITY.</i> By Dr <span class="smcap">Gisbert Kapp</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>CHEMISTRY.</i>
+<a name="corr6" id="corr6"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn6" title="changed from 'Py'">By</a>
+Prof. R. <span class="smcap">Meldola</span>, F.R.S.
+<br /><br />
+<i>THE MAKING OF THE EARTH.</i> By Prof. T. W. <span class="smcap">Gregory</span>, F.R.S.
+<br /><br />
+<i>THE MINERAL WORLD.</i> By Sir T. H. <span class="smcap">Holland</span>, K.C.I.E., D.Sc.
+<br /><br />
+<i>THE HUMAN BODY.</i> By Dr A. <span class="smcap">Keith</span>, M.D., F.R.C.S.
+<br /><br />
+<i>PLANT LIFE.</i> By Prof. J. B. <span class="smcap">Farmer</span>, F.R.S.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class="bbox1"><div class="bbox2">
+<p class="fm1"><i>Philosophy and Religion</i></p>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="u"><p>15. <i>MOHAMMEDANISM</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Prof. D. S. <span class="smcap">Margoliouth</span>, M.A., D.Litt. "This generous shilling's
+worth of wisdom.... A delicate, humorous, and most responsible tractate
+by an illuminative professor."&mdash;<i>Daily Mail.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>40. <i>THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By the Hon. <span class="smcap">Bertrand Russell</span>, F.R.S. "A book that the 'man in the
+street' will recognise at once to be a boon.... Consistently lucid and
+non-technical throughout."&mdash;<i>Christian World.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>47. <i>BUDDHISM</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Mrs <span class="smcap">Rhys Davids</span>, M.A.</p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>50. <i>NONCONFORMITY: ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Principal W. B. <span class="smcap">Selbie</span>, M.A.</p>
+
+
+<div class="u"><p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">In Preparation</span></p></div>
+
+<p class="fl2">
+<i>THE OLD TESTAMENT.</i> By Prof. <span class="smcap">George Moore</span>, D.D., LL.D.
+<br /><br />
+<i>BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS.</i> By R. H. <span class="smcap">Charles</span>, D.D.
+<br /><br />
+<i>THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.</i> By Prof. B. W. <span class="smcap">Bacon</span>, Litt.D., D.D.
+<br /><br />
+<i>COMPARATIVE RELIGION.</i> By Prof. J. <span class="smcap">Estlin Carpenter</span>, D.Litt.
+<br /><br />
+<i>A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT.</i> By Prof. J. B. <span class="smcap">Bury</span>, LL.D.
+<br /><br />
+<i>ETHICS.</i> By G. E. <span class="smcap">Moore</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>MISSIONS.</i> By Mrs <span class="smcap">Creighton</span>.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class="bbox1"><div class="bbox2">
+<p class="fm1"><i>Social Science</i></p>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<div class="u"><p>1. <i>PARLIAMENT</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir <span class="smcap">Courtenay P. Ilbert</span>,
+K.C.B., K.C.S.I., Clerk of the House of Commons. "The best book on the
+history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's
+'Constitution.'"&mdash;<i>Yorkshire Post.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>5. <i>THE STOCK EXCHANGE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By F. W. <span class="smcap">Hirst</span>, Editor of "The Economist." "A little treatise which to
+an unfinancial mind must be a revelation.... The book is as clear,
+vigorous, and sane as Bagehot's 'Lombard Street,' than which there is no
+higher compliment."&mdash;<i>Morning Leader.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>6. <i>IRISH NATIONALITY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Mrs J. R. <span class="smcap">Green</span>. "As glowing as it is learned. No book could be more
+timely."&mdash;<i>Daily News.</i> "A powerful study.... A magnificent
+demonstration of the deserved vitality of the Gaelic
+spirit."&mdash;<i>Freeman's Journal.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>10. <i>THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By J. <span class="smcap">Ramsay MacDonald</span>, M.P. "Admirably adapted for the purpose of
+exposition."&mdash;<i>The Times.</i> "Mr MacDonald is a very lucid exponent....
+The volume will be of great use in dispelling illusions about the
+tendencies of Socialism in this country."&mdash;<i>The Nation.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>11. <i>CONSERVATISM</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Lord <span class="smcap">Hugh Cecil</span>, M.A., M.P.</p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>16. <i>THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By J. A. <span class="smcap">Hobson</span>, M.A. "Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among
+living economists.... The text-book produced is altogether admirable.
+Original, reasonable, and illuminating."&mdash;<i>The Nation.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>21. <i>LIBERALISM</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By L. T. <span class="smcap">Hobhouse</span>, M.A., Professor of Sociology in the University of
+London. "A book of rare quality.... We have nothing but praise for the
+rapid and masterly summaries of the arguments from first principles
+which form a large part of this book."&mdash;<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>24. <i>THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By D. H. <span class="smcap">Macgregor</span>, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in the
+University of Leeds. "A volume so dispassionate in terms may be read
+with profit by all interested in the present state of
+unrest."&mdash;<i>Aberdeen Journal.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>26. <i>AGRICULTURE</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By Prof. W. <span class="smcap">Somerville</span>, F.L.S.</p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>30. <i>ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW</i></p></div>
+
+<p>By W. M. <span class="smcap">Geldart</span>, M.A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law at
+Oxford. "Contains a very clear account of the elementary principles
+underlying the rules of English law; and we can recommend it to all who
+wish to become acquainted with these elementary principles with a
+minimum of trouble."&mdash;<i>Scots Law Times.</i></p>
+
+<div class="u"><p>38. <i>THE SCHOOL</i></p></div>
+
+<p><i>An Introduction to the Study of Education.</i></p>
+
+<p>By J. J. <span class="smcap">Findlay</span>, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in Manchester
+University. "An amazingly comprehensive volume.... It is a remarkable
+performance, distinguished in its crisp, striking phraseology as well as
+its inclusiveness of subject-matter."&mdash;<i>Morning Post.</i></p>
+
+
+<div class="u"><p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">In Preparation</span></p></div>
+
+<p class="fl2">
+<i>THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES.</i> By Prof. <span class="smcap">Patrick Geddes</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.</i> By Prof. S. J. <span class="smcap">Chapman</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>COMMONSENSE IN LAW.</i> By Prof. P. <span class="smcap">Vinogradoff</span>, D.C.L.
+<br /><br />
+<i>THE CIVIL SERVICE.</i> By <span class="smcap">Graham Wallas</span>, M.A.
+<br /><br />
+<i>MISSIONS.</i> By Mrs <span class="smcap">Creighton</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>PRACTICAL IDEALISM.</i> By <span class="smcap">Maurice Hewlett</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>NEWSPAPERS.</i> By G. B. <span class="smcap">Dibblee</span>.
+<br /><br />
+<i>ENGLISH VILLAGE LIFE.</i> By E. N. <span class="smcap">Bennett</span>, M.A.
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p class="fm2">London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE</p>
+
+<p class="fm3"><i>And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<div class="transnote"><a name="tnotes" id="tnotes"></a>
+<h3>Transcriber's note</h3>
+
+
+<p>Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. Obvious
+printer errors have been corrected and are listed below.
+<br /><br />
+
+For the chapter heading, "The Second Part of King Henry IV", the Table
+of Contents lists it as "King Henry IV, Part II"; this was not changed.
+In addition other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.</p>
+
+<p>Page 36: "obession is at the root" changed to
+"<a name="cn1" id="cn1"></a><a href="#corr1">obsession</a> is at the
+root".</p>
+
+<p>Page 94: "great historical play" changed to "great historical
+<a name="cn2" id="cn2"></a><a href="#corr2">plays</a>".</p>
+
+<p>Page 253: "&AElig;gon" changed to "<a name="cn3" id="cn3"></a><a href="#corr3">&AElig;geon</a>".</p>
+
+<p>Page 256: Index entry for page 133
+of "Rosaline" was moved to
+"<a name="cn4" id="cn4"></a><a href="#corr4">Rosalind</a>".</p>
+
+<p>Page 256: Index entry for page 92 of
+"<a name="cn5" id="cn5"></a><a href="#corr5">York, Edmund of Langley, Duke</a>" was removed.</p>
+
+<p>Page 262: "Py Prof. R. Medola" changed to
+"<a name="cn6" id="cn6"></a><a href="#corr6">By</a> Prof. R. Medola".</p>
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of William Shakespeare, by John Masefield
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of William Shakespeare, by John Masefield
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: William Shakespeare
+
+Author: John Masefield
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2008 [EBook #27264]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Carla Foust and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. Obvious
+printer errors have been corrected, and are listed at the end.
+
+For the chapter heading, "The Second Part of King Henry IV", the Table
+of Contents lists it as "King Henry IV, Part II"; this was not changed.
+In addition other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.
+
+
+
+
+    HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
+    OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
+
+    BY JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+    LONDON
+
+    WILLIAMS & NORGATE
+
+    HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YORK
+    CANADA: WM. BRIGGS, TORONTO
+    INDIA: R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.
+
+
+
+
+    UNIVERSITY
+
+    LIBRARY
+
+    OF
+
+    MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+    _Editors:_
+
+    HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+
+    PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT.,
+        LL.D., F.B.A.
+
+    PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+
+    PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+        (Columbia University, U.S.A.)
+
+
+    NEW YORK
+
+    HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+    WILLIAM
+    SHAKESPEARE
+
+    BY
+
+    JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE TRAGEDY OF POMPEY THE GREAT," "MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE,"
+"LOST ENDEAVOUR," "CAPTAIN MARGARET," "THE TRAGEDY OF NAN," ETC.
+
+    NEW AND REVISED EDITION
+
+    LONDON
+
+    WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+    CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAP.                                       PAGE
+
+      I THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE                    9
+
+     II THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRES                  18
+
+    III 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
+
+           "     "    "    "  II                  54
+
+           "     "    "    "  III                 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
+
+           "     "    "   "   II                 114
+
+          King Henry V                           120
+
+          The Merry Wives of Windsor             123
+
+          As You Like It                         128
+
+          Much Ado About Nothing                 133
+
+          Twelfth Night                          138
+
+          All's Well that Ends Well              144
+
+          Julius Caesar                           149
+
+          Hamlet, Prince of Denmark              157
+
+          Troilus and Cressida                   168
+
+          Measure for Measure                    174
+
+          Othello, the Moor of Venice            180
+
+          King Lear                              186
+
+          Macbeth                                195
+
+          Antony and Cleopatra                   202
+
+          Coriolanus                             208
+
+          Timon of Athens                        214
+
+          Pericles, Prince of Tyre               218
+
+          Cymbeline                              223
+
+          The Winter's Tale                      226
+
+          The Tempest                            231
+
+          King Henry VIII                        235
+
+        WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE           238
+
+        THE POEMS:
+
+          Venus and Adonis                       241
+
+          The Rape of Lucrece                    242
+
+          The Passionate Pilgrim                 244
+
+          The Sonnets                            244
+
+          The Phoenix and the Turtle             249
+
+        AUTHOR'S NOTE                            250
+
+        INDEX                                    253
+
+
+
+
+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,
+refreshment 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
+buildings. 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 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 dwellings 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 common 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 uninteresting, pretty, and well watered.
+A few miles away the Cotswold hills rise. They have a 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 Shakespeare. 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 Shakespeare began to spring up in Stratford as soon as
+there was a demand for them. Legends are a stupid man's excuse 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 Hathaway, 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, written 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 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 company "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 seaman, 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 became 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 Shakespeare, 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 professed
+the quality of actor. Legend says that he acted well in what are called
+"character 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 subsequent 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 23rd
+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. 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 relationships 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 vivacity of
+mind. The face is that of an aloof and sunny spirit, full of energy and
+effectiveness. Another portrait is that engraved 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
+representation 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
+represent 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.
+
+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,
+profound, 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 represent an inner chamber. The three storeys of seats
+were divided by partitions into "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 spectators 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 performance. 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.
+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 thoughtful, 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 played very swiftly, without hesitation or dawdling over
+"business."
+
+There was little or no scenery to most plays. The properties, _i.e._
+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. This may account for their wholesome, animal
+robustness. There is no trace of the modern heroine, the common woman
+overstrained, 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 something 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 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.
+
+     _The 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
+     affairs.
+
+     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 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 fun 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 heightened by ragging from the courtiers. When it is 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; 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 feeling 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.
+
+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 Shakespeare'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 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 intention 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 intelligence. 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 intellect. 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 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 liveliest, in the wits of women
+
+                       "Keen
+    Above the sense of sense,"
+
+and that style is a poor thing beside the "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
+intellect 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 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 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
+personality; 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 literary efforts towards the obtaining
+of the power. Longaville (in Act II, sc. 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 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 performed publicly. The men and women converse 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, 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 published in lame English verses,
+     by Barnabe 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.
+
+     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 enters 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 _Love's 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 characters 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 obsession 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.
+
+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 death 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 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 yarn, 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 exposed in an act of treachery to his benefactor. The scenes
+in which the disguised Julia witnesses her lover's falseness, and the
+scene in which the play is brought to an end, are deeply and nobly
+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 falseness
+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,
+     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 Shakespeare'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! '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."
+
+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 appeased."
+
+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, 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, sc. 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.
+
+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, according
+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 _Menaechmi_ 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 _Amphitruo_ of Plautus.
+
+     The play is brought on to the plane of human feeling by the
+     character of AEgeon. 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 in which either the Antipholus
+     and the Dromio of Ephesus 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 AEgeon to his long-lost
+     wife.
+
+Poets are great or little according to the nobleness of their endeavour
+to build a mansion for the soul. Shakespeare, like other poets, grew by
+continual, very difficult mental labour, by the deliberate and prolonged
+exercise 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
+_Menaechmi_ fable. A playwright not yet sure of his art sees and admires
+behind the comedy the firm, intricate mental outline that has kept the
+play alive for more than two thousand years.
+
+The _Menaechmi_ 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 handling 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 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 AEgeon tells his story (in Act I, sc. 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 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--
+
+    ("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!
+     Wouldst them 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 cunning 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,
+     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 AEgeon is the best in the play
+
+
+_Titus Andronicus._
+
+     _Written._ (?)
+
+     _Published._ (?)
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ (?)
+
+     _The Fable._ Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose firstborn 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."
+
+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 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 I._
+
+     _Written._ 1589-91.
+
+     _Produced._ 1591.
+
+     _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
+     progress 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.
+
+     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 (sometimes 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,
+     Sleeping neglection 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 imminent 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 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. Shakespeare'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.
+
+     _Produced._ 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 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, improved 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 situation 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
+     lightened by the cheat of Simpcox and by the rebellion of Jack
+     Cade. In modern theatres the passage of time is indicated by the
+     dropping 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.
+
+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 upset the plans of the capitalist 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 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.
+     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 rectitude of a police
+inspector. At the death-bed of the Cardinal, he makes the remark of a
+fiend--
+
+    "See how the pangs of death do make him grin."
+
+The one human, 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 III._
+
+     _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 Sixt, 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.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Edward Hall's _Chronicle_. Raphael
+     Holinshed's _Chronicle_.
+
+     _The Fable._ The play describes the rise to power of Edward, Duke
+     of York, afterwards Edward IV. It carries on the 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 Gloucester, 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."
+
+There are three scenes that rouse human emotion: that in 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."
+
+
+_A Midsummer Night's Dream._
+
+     _Written._ 1595 (?)
+
+     _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 contribution
+     were to recognise his bantling, he could only cry to it, "Bless
+     thee, Bottom, thou art translated." Shakespeare 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
+     Pyramus 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.
+
+It is a strange and sad thing that the English poets have cared little
+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, wandering and working; but he is not
+enough removed from the beasts to escape the prick in the heart that
+turns the tired horse homeward, 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
+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 and 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 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 enduringness 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, 1597.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The story existed in many forms, mostly
+     Italian. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke's metrical version
+     (_Romeus and Juliet_), and possibly consulted 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.
+
+     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 apparent 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 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 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 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 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 understanding. 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
+brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright, 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.
+
+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;
+     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 performance) in 1591. Some people
+     think that Shakespeare wrote _The Troublesome Raigne_. There are
+     some glimmerings 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 a disturbed condition. The French resolve to attempt the
+     conquest of England.
+
+     The report that Arthur has been murdered by the King's order sets
+     England in turmoil. The French land in Kent. The lords find
+     Arthur's dead body outside Northampton castle. They are convinced
+     that King John has caused him to be murdered.
+
+     King 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. The 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 lower than
+themselves. Henry V conforms to type. He has the qualities 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 qualities 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 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 kingship. 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 greatness 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 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
+Bastard'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 heartbreak and death. The common people of
+England begin to betray their genius for obedience by preparing to rise
+against the man in power.
+
+The fourth act begins with the famous scene in which Hubert fails to
+blind Prince Arthur. Even in the act of mercy he is treacherous. 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 treacherous 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 Troublesome Raigne_, 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 courage, and devoted service
+should go so often with real animal boorishness and the incapacity 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 Englishman 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 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 something
+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--
+
+    "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
+Shakespeare of a want of heart, of a want of imagination, 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 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 power. It is difficult to know intimately any human
+soul, even with love as a lamp. Shakespeare'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 Bolingbroke, 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.
+
+     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, passionate, 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 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 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, if
+questioned), is deeply and nobly generous to York, who would condemn 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 Shakespeare'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 as temperament, is to blame for his tragedy. When
+life 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 disorder'd 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 Welshmen 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.
+
+As in all the tragedies, there is much noble poetry. John of Gaunt's
+speech about England 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 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 Bolingbroke 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
+           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 uncommon 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 (?)
+
+     _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 King'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
+     committal, 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 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 Court 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 Bosworth 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 plays about the Wars
+of the Roses. The subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare's 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 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 impressive
+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 could have known
+human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse 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--
+
+    "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,
+Buckingham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call down curses on him
+that breaks them, themselves 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 against human certainty. Of all
+the dangerous 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 them. 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 conscience sends
+him flying to death. The little Princes lay down to sleep--
+
+                   "girdling one another
+    Within their innocent alabaster arms.
+    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 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 opening 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 Tewkesbury'"--
+
+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 Romanorum_, and re-told, with delicate grace, by
+     Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-century Italian writer, in his
+     _Il 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 _Gesta Romanorum_. 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 suggested 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 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 threefold. 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 Christian'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 indignation 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 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 centuries of criticism. She is
+one of the smiling 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 _I Suppositi_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is
+     found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on
+     waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment
+     is the performance of this play before him.
+
+     The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames
+     the shrew Katharina; 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 Petruchio 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's Labour's Lost_ he showed a matchless sense of country
+life. 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
+rightness of poetry. In writing them, he wrought with his daily nature,
+from something intimately known, or inbred in him, during childhood. Man
+can only write happily 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 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
+     pallabris_; 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 audience of to-day knows a horse as the Elizabethan
+had to know him. The speech sets one wondering at the art of the unknown
+Elizabethan 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
+schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly,
+she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor
+who 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."
+
+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, Part I._
+
+     _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 Fable._ 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 uncommon
+     man, whose uncommonness is unsupported by 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 opens at a time when the oaths of Henry Bolingbroke, to
+do justice, have been broken on all sides, lest the injustice of his
+assumption 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. Opposed 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 swiftness 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 desperate 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 lines 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 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 careless and callous
+though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's
+throne. He chooses to live in society as common 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 Falstaff are so little good-natured that he stands upon
+his princehood whenever the old man 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 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 _The Famous Victories of Henry
+     V_. Holinshed's _Chronicles_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Northumberland and the other conspirators against the
+     King learn 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 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 fighting 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 treacheries 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 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 everything
+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 imaginative
+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 manifold 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. 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 downstairs is the finest tavern scene
+ever written. Those placed in Gloucestershire are the perfect 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 Nightwork, 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.
+
+All of those scenes seem to have been written easily, out of the fulness
+of an instinctive power. In the other scenes Shakespeare 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 Lancaster 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 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, Mowbray'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 Shakespeare
+has left to us. In the plays the characters 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.
+
+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_, imperfectly, 1600; as we now 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-burning."
+
+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, eked out with
+soldiers' squabbles. It seems to have been written to fill a gap in the
+series of the historical plays. Perhaps the management 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. Detached 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 to beget the son who dies broken-hearted after
+bringing all to waste again.
+
+    "Hear him but reason in divinity,"
+
+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.
+Falstaff 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 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 condemn 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
+the imaginations of her sons.
+
+
+_The Merry Wives of Windsor._
+
+     _Written._ 1599 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in a mutilated form, 1602; in a complete form, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ A tale in Straparola's _Notti_ (iv. 4).
+     Tarleton's _News out of Purgatorie_. Giovanni Florentino's _Il
+     Pecorone_. Kinde Kit of Kingston's _Westward for Smelts_.
+
+     _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, needlessly 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 Herne
+     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 heart, 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, (_b_) that it nicely suited the Tudor sense of
+humour. It is the least interesting of the genuine plays. 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 intensely 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 interested in cuckoldry, Mrs.
+Ford in mockery, Ford, Evans and Caius in jealousy and rivalry, Bardolph
+is going to be a tapster, the 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 Falstaff--
+
+    "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 Herne the hunter--
+
+    "There is an old tale goes, that Herne 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."
+
+Modern poets would describe Herne's dress and appearance. The creative
+poet describes his actions.
+
+It is possible that when this play was written Shakespeare had thoughts
+of consecrating 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 predilections, his reading. He had found a
+channel in which his thoughts could express themselves. Writing was no
+longer so pleasant to him as it had been. He had done an incredible
+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 excellent, the great from the supreme. All writers, 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 attributed 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 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. Touchstone, the worldly wise, marries a
+fool. Audrey, born a clown, marries a courtier. Phebe, scorning a man,
+falls in love with a woman.
+
+Jaques, the only wise one, is the only one 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 important line, show
+that in the character of Jaques Shakespeare was expounding a philosophy
+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
+commentator 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 wish, not to be counted
+wise but to have as great liberty as the fool to express his thought--
+
+              "weed your 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 invariable 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 of help. The Duke ministers to Orlando. Jaques wants to know "of
+what kind this cock should come of." He speaks banteringly, the Duke
+speaks kindly. The impression 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, dismissing 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, is a
+golden woman, a daughter of the sun, smiling-natured, but limited.
+Phebe, like Rosalind, is black-haired, black-eyed, black-eyebrowed, 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.
+
+
+_Much 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 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, listening 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 Benedick's love for her,
+changes her mind about 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 Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare's greatest creative period. It is full of great
+and wonderful things. The character-drawing is so abundant and precise
+that 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 Shakespeare 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.
+
+     _Leonato._ 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.
+
+     _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 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 "Historie of Apolonius and Silla"
+     as told by Barnabe Riche in the book _Riche his Farewell to
+     Militarie 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 Fable._ Viola, who thinks that she has lost her brother
+     Sebastian by shipwreck, disguises herself 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 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-woman. 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 loveliest of all the Shakespearean
+plays. It is the best English comedy. The great mind that mixed a
+tragedy of intellect with a tragedy of stupidity, 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. Orsino is in an unreal mood of emotion. Love is an
+active passion. Orsino is in the clutch of its dangerous passive enemy
+called sentimentality. He lolls upon a couch to music when he ought to
+be carrying her glove to battle. Olivia is in an unreal mood of mourning
+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-dreams, 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 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 something real into their lives; and all
+three, in coming to the active state, cease to be interesting and
+beautiful and pathetic.
+
+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
+    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 Contemplation making a
+rare turkey-cock of the one wise man in his play.
+
+
+_All's 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, the 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 withdraws from the Countess's house, and
+     comes to Florence disguised.
+
+     Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her,
+     receives her unsuspecting 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 the 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 Florentine 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 extensively 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 obsession 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 dependant. He does not like her, and he does
+not like 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 obsession blinds the judgment on more
+sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. 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 unbalanced. He takes an unworthy
+confidant, 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 is 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
+possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised
+as one of the noblest 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 ignominy 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 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."
+
+
+_Julius Caesar._
+
+     _Written._ 1601 (?)
+
+     _Produced._ (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius
+     Caesar in Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_.
+
+     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 Republican rule in Rome, persuades Brutus
+     and others to plot a change. They decide to murder Caesar.
+
+     On the morning chosen for the murder, Caesar 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.
+
+     Cassius is killed by his servant when he sees that all is lost.
+     Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills himself.
+
+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 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
+feeding 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 performances 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 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 said that the last acts of _Julius Caesar_ make anti-climax
+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. If a Greek had constructed _Julius Caesar_, 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. In _Macbeth_ he
+constructs the last half of his play in much the same manner.
+
+In both plays he is considering the conception, the doing, and the
+results of a violent act. In both plays this act is the murder of the
+head of a State. In neither case is he deeply interested in the victim.
+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 killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by
+an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by
+an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases
+the killers show base personal ingratitude and treachery. In both plays,
+an avenging justice makes even the scales. The mind of the poet follows
+them from the moment when the guilty thought is prompted, through the
+agony and exultation of dreadful acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the
+treacherous, 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, nor yet the tragical
+end of a ruler. His subject in both plays is the working of Fate who
+prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and then destroys him. 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 conception that makes it like
+gathering and breaking storm. The cause of the murder is a great
+personal treachery inspired by an unselfish idea. Though it seems
+inevitable, it is a very little 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 Philippi.
+
+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--
+
+    "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 _Historia Danica_.
+     Francis de Belleforest printed a version of it in his _Histoires
+     Tragiques_. An English translation from de Belleforest, called the
+     _Hystorie of Hamblet_, was published (or perhaps reprinted) in
+     London in 1608. Shakespeare 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 reveals the manner of the murder
+     to him, and makes him swear to be revenged. The revelation so
+     affects him that the murderers begin to fear him. He cannot bring
+     himself 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 revenge 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 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 Shakespearean scheme it is not
+revenge, it is justice, and therefore neither good nor bad but
+necessary. 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 leads to a baffling
+of the living, and, at last, to something like an arrest of life, a
+deadlock, 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 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 schoolfellow, 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 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 first half
+of the play, though it exposes and develops the fable, is a dual image
+of a search for truth, 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 his hand.
+Fate offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the
+instant by, with his baffling 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 _Hamlet_,
+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 King's position. By his death life 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
+purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by with his baffling swiftness, which
+strikes on the instant, 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 pathway of excess leads, not as with Blake, to the
+palace of wisdom, but to destruction. The two extremes in Hamlet, of
+slowness and swiftness, set up in life the counter forces which destroy
+extremes, so that life, 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 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. Revenge 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 play 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--
+
+             "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 constructed 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._ After publication.
+
+     _Published._ 1609.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of _Troilus and
+     Creseide_. John Lydgate's _Troy Boke_. 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, cursing.
+
+_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 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
+cruelly and sullenly, by the boor thus mocked.
+
+The two subjects and the setting are not and cannot be brought into
+unity. Shakespeare'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
+imperfect 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--
+
+    "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. 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 incomprehensible 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.
+
+
+_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 Historie 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 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 prudential 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 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 the
+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 eyes. It is the thorn in the side
+under the cloak of the beauty of youth. In Shakespeare'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 manhood. 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 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 temptation 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 imprisoned 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 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 unflinching thought. Like all the
+greatest of the plays, it is so full of illustration of the main idea
+that it gives an illusion of an infinity like that of life. It is
+constructed closely and subtly for the stage. It is more full of the
+ingenuities of play-writing than any of the plays. The verse and the
+prose have that smoothness of happy ease which makes one think of
+Shakespeare not as a poet writing, but as a sun shining.
+
+    " ... It deserves with characters of brass
+     A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time."
+
+The thought of the play is penetrating rather than impassioned. The
+poetry follows the thought. There are cold lines like Death laying a
+hand on the blood. The faultless lyric, "Take, O take those lips away"
+occurs. Some say Fletcher wrote it, some Bacon. "Love talks with better
+knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love." The music of the great
+manner rings--
+
+    "Merciful Heaven!
+     Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
+     Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
+     Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,
+     Drest in a little brief authority,
+     Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
+     His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
+     Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
+     As make the angels weep."
+
+The prose accompaniment to what is unrestrained in youth provides a
+cruel comedy.
+
+
+_Othello, the Moor of Venice._
+
+     _Written._ 1604 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in quarto, and in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The tale appears in _The Hecatomithi_ of
+     G. B. Giraldi Cinthio. Shakespeare follows Cinthio in the main; but a
+     few details suggest that he knew the story in an ampler version.
+
+     _The Fable._ Iago, ensign to Othello, the Moor of Venice, is
+     jealous of Cassio, his lieutenant. He plots to oust Cassio from the
+     lieutenancy.
+
+     Othello marries Desdemona, and sails with her to the wars in
+     Cyprus. Iago resolves to make use of Desdemona to cause Cassio's
+     downfall.
+
+     He procures Cassio's discharge from the lieutenancy by involving
+     him in a drunken brawl. Cassio beseeches Desdemona to intercede
+     with Othello for him. Iago hints to Othello that she has good
+     reason to wish Cassio to be restored. He suggests that Cassio is
+     her lover. Partly by fortune, partly by craft, he succeeds in
+     establishing in Othello's mind the conviction that Desdemona is
+     guilty.
+
+     Othello smothers Desdemona, learns, too late, that he has been
+     deceived, and kills himself. Cassio's character is cleared. Iago is
+     led away to torture.
+
+A man's greatest works differ from his lesser works in degree, not in
+kind. They may be more perfect, but they express similar ideas. "A man
+grows, he does not become a different man." In this play of _Othello_
+the ideas are those that inspire nearly all the plays, that life seeks
+to preserve a balance, and that obsessions, which upset the balance,
+betray life to evil.
+
+These ideas are in the earliest work of all, in _Venus and Adonis_. In
+_Othello_ they are expressed with the variety and power of the great
+period. The obsession chosen for illustration is that of jealous
+suspicion. It is displayed at work in a mean mind and in a generous
+mind. The varying quality of its working makes the action of the play.
+
+As in _The Merchant of Venice_, the chief character is a man of
+intellect who has been warped out of humanity by the world's injustice.
+Iago is a man of fine natural intellect who has not been trained in the
+personal qualities that bring preferment. An educated man is advanced
+above him, as in life it happens. He broods over the injustice and
+schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged
+him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as
+upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves
+him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter
+and the newly-married wife are lovers.
+
+He succeeds in this, through his natural adroitness, the working of
+chance, and the generosity of Othello, who has too much passion to be
+anything but blind under passionate influence like love or jealousy. The
+mean man's want of emotion keeps always the conduct of the vengeance
+precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to
+the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is
+ruined.
+
+That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's
+justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection.
+Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a
+want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but
+too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain
+to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging
+from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is
+that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven
+about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate
+and instinctive.
+
+The influence and importance of the little thing in the great event is
+marked in this scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the greater
+tragedies. We are all or may at any time become immensely important to
+the play of the world. Had Emilia come a minute sooner or a minute
+later the end of the play would have been very different. Desdemona
+would have lived to repent her marriage at leisure, or she would have
+gone to her grave branded.
+
+Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this
+play, as in _Richard III_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, he brooded upon
+the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he
+created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the
+earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being
+but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or
+the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry
+line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only
+his intellect. What he is in himself is as mysterious as life. Life is
+clear, up to a point, but beyond that point it is always baffling.
+Shakespeare's task was to look at life clearly. Looking at it clearly he
+was as baffled by what he saw, as we, who only see by his aid. He found
+in Iago an image like life itself, a power and an activity, prompted by
+something secret and silent.
+
+Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The
+action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into
+ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly
+practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as
+Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after
+reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That
+those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws
+under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.
+
+The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that
+when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the
+falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father.
+The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty
+things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights have violent
+ends and bring violent ends to others.
+
+The poetry of _Othello_ is nearly as well known as that of _Hamlet_.
+Many quotations from the play have passed into the speech of the people.
+A play of intrigue does not give the fullest opportunity for great
+poetry; but supreme things are spoken throughout the action. Othello's
+cry--
+
+    "It is the very error of the moon.
+     She comes more near the earth than she was wont
+     And drives men mad,"
+
+is one of the most perfect of all the perfect things in the tragedies.
+
+
+_King Lear._
+
+     _Written._ 1605-6.
+
+     _Published._ 1608.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The story of Lear is told in Holinshed's
+     _Chronicles_, in a play by an unknown hand, _The True Chronicle
+     History of King Leir_, and in a few stanzas of the tenth canto of
+     the second Book of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
+
+     The character of Gloucester seems to have been suggested by the
+     character of a blind king in Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_.
+
+     _The Fable._ King Lear, in his old age, determines to give up his
+     kingdom to his three daughters. Before he does so, he tries to
+     assure himself of their love for him. The two elder women, Goneril
+     and Regan, vow that they love him intensely; the youngest,
+     Cordelia, can only tell him that she cares for him as a daughter
+     should. He curses and casts off Cordelia, who is taken to wife by
+     the King of France.
+
+     Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his
+     son.
+
+     King Lear, thwarted and flouted by Goneril and Regan, goes mad, and
+     wanders away with his Fool. Gloucester, trying to comfort him
+     against the wishes of Goneril and Regan, is betrayed by his bastard
+     Edmund, and blinded. He wanders away with Edgar, who has disguised
+     himself as a madman.
+
+     Regan's husband is killed. Seeking to take Edmund in his stead, she
+     rouses the jealousy of Goneril, who has already made advances to
+     him.
+
+     Cordelia lands with French troops to repossess Lear of his kingdom.
+     She finds Lear, and comforts him. In an engagement with the
+     sisters' armies, she and Lear are captured.
+
+     Edmund's baseness is exposed. He is attainted and struck down.
+     Goneril poisons Regan, and kills herself. Edmund, before he dies,
+     reveals that he has given order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed.
+     His news comes too late to save Cordelia. She is brought in dead.
+     Lear dies over her body.
+
+     Albany, Goneril's husband, Kent, Lear's faithful servant, and
+     Edgar, Edmund's slayer, are left to set the kingdom in order.
+
+The play of _King Lear_ is based upon a fable and a fairy story. It
+illustrates the most terrible forms of treachery, that of child against
+father, and father against child. It is the most affecting and the
+grandest of the plays.
+
+The evil which makes the action springs from two sources, both fatal.
+One is the blindness or fatuity in Lear, which makes him give away his
+strength and cast out Cordelia. The other, equally deadly, but more
+cruel in its results, springs from an unrepented treachery, done long
+before by Gloucester, when he broke his marriage vows to beget Edmund.
+Memory of the sweetness of that treachery gives to Gloucester a
+blindness to the boy's nature, just as a sweetness, or ease, in the
+treachery of giving up the cares of kingship (against oath and the
+kingdom's good) helps to blind Lear to the natures of his daughters.
+
+The blindness in the one case is sentimental, in the other wilful. Being
+established, fate makes use of it. One of the chief lessons of the plays
+is that man is only safe when his mind is perfectly just and calm. Any
+injustice, trouble or hunger in the mind delivers man to powers who
+restore calmness and justice by means violent or gentle according to the
+strength of the disturbing obsession. This play begins at the moment
+when an established blindness in two men is about to become an
+instrument of fate for the violent opening of their eyes. The blindness
+in both cases is against the course of nature. It is unnatural that Lear
+should give his kingship to women, and that he should curse his youngest
+child. It is unnatural that Gloucester should make much of a bastard son
+whom he has hardly seen for nine years. It is deeply unnatural that both
+Lear and Gloucester should believe evil suddenly of the youngest, best
+beloved, and most faithful spirits in the play. As the blindness that
+causes the injustice is great and unnatural, so the working of fate to
+purge the eyes and restore the balance is violent and unnatural. Every
+person important to the action is thrust into an unnatural way of life.
+Goneril and Regan rule their father, commit the most ghastly and beastly
+cruelty, lust after the same man, and die unnaturally (having betrayed
+each other), the one by her sister's hand, the other by her own. Lear is
+driven mad. The King of France is forced to war with his wife's sisters.
+Edmund betrays his half-brother to ruin and his father to blindness.
+Cornwall is stabbed by his servant. Edgar kills his half-brother.
+Gloucester, thrust out blind, dies when he finds that his wronged son
+loves him. Cordelia, fighting against her own blood, is betrayed to
+death by one who claims to love her sisters. The honest mild man,
+Albany, and the honest blunt man, Kent, survive the general ruin. Had
+Kent been a little milder and Albany a little blunter in the first act,
+before the fates were given strength, the ruin would not have been. All
+the unnatural treacherous evil comes to pass, because for a few fatal
+moments they were true to their natures.
+
+The play is an excessive image of all that was most constant in
+Shakespeare's mind. Being an excessive image, it contains matter nowhere
+else given. It is all schemed and controlled with a power that he shows
+in no other play, not even in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_. The ideas of the
+play occur in many of the plays. Many images, such as the blasted oak,
+water in fury, servants insolent and servile, old honest men and young
+girls faithful to death, occur in other plays. That which each play
+added to the thought of the world is expressed in the single figure of
+someone caught in a net. Macbeth is a ruthless man so caught. Hamlet is
+a wise man so caught. Othello is a passionate and Antony a glorious man
+so caught. All are caught and all are powerless, and all are superb
+tragic inventions. King Lear is a grander, ironic invention, who hurts
+far more than any of these because he is a horribly strong man who is
+powerless. He is so strong that he cannot die. He is so strong that he
+nearly breaks the net, before the folds kill him.
+
+No image in the world is so fierce with imaginative energy. The stormy
+soul runs out storming in a night of the soul as mad as the elements.
+With him goes the invention of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool,
+like conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him mad with ironic comment
+and bitter song.
+
+The verse is as great as the invention. It rises and falls with the
+passion like music with singing. All the scale of Shakespeare's art is
+used; the terrible spiritual manner of
+
+    "You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
+     Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,"
+
+as well as the instinctive manner of a prose coloured to the height with
+all the traditions of country life.
+
+Dramatic genius has the power of understanding half-a-dozen lives at
+once in tense, swiftly changing situations. This power is shown at its
+best in the last act of this play. One of the most wonderful and least
+praised of the inventions in the last scene is that of the dying Edmund.
+He has been treacherous to nearly every person in the play. His last
+treachery, indirectly the cause of his ruin, is still in act, the
+killing of Cordelia and the king. He has been stricken down. "The wheel
+has come full circle." He has learned too late that
+
+    "The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
+     Make instruments to plague us."
+
+He can hardly hope to live for more than a few minutes. The death of his
+last two victims cannot benefit him. A word from him would save them. No
+one else can save them. Yet at the last minute, his one little glimmer
+of faithfulness keeps the word unspoken. He is silent for Goneril's
+sake. If he ever cared for any one in the world, except himself, he may
+have cared a little for Goneril. He thinks of her now. She has gone from
+him. But she is on his side, and he trusts to her, and acts for her. He
+waits for some word or token from her. He waits to see her save him or
+avenge him. The death of Lear will benefit her. It will be to her
+something saved from the general wreck, something to the good, in the
+losing bout. An impulse stirs him to speak, but he puts it by. He keeps
+silent about Lear, till one comes saying that Goneril has killed
+herself. Still he does not speak. The news pricks the vanity in him. He
+strokes his plumes with a tender thought for the brightness of the life
+that made two princesses die for love of him. When he speaks of Lear, it
+is too late, the little, little instant which alters destiny has passed.
+Cordelia is dead. No mist stains the stone. She will come no more--
+
+    "Never, never, never, never, never."
+
+The heart-breaking scene at the end has been blamed as "too painful for
+tragedy." Shakespeare's opinion of what is tragic is worth that of all
+his critics together. He gave to every soul in this play an excessive
+and terrible vitality. On the excessive terrible soul of Lear he poured
+such misery that the cracking of the great heart is a thing of joy, a
+relief so fierce that the audience should go out in exultation singing--
+
+               "O, our lives' sweetness!
+    That we the pain of death would hourly die
+    Rather than die at once!"
+
+Tragedy is a looking at fate for a lesson in deportment on life's
+scaffold. If we find the lesson painful, how shall we face the event?
+
+
+_Macbeth._
+
+     _Written._ 1605-6 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Raphael Holinshed tells the story of Macbeth
+     at length in his _Chronicle of Scottish History_. He indicates the
+     character of Lady Macbeth in one line.
+
+     When Shakespeare wrote the play, London was full of Scotchmen,
+     brought thither by the accession of James I. Little details of the
+     play may have been gathered in conversation.
+
+     _The Fable._ Macbeth, advised by witches that he is to be a king,
+     is persuaded by his wife to kill his sovereign (King Duncan) and
+     seize the crown. King Duncan, coming to Macbeth's castle for a
+     night, is there killed by Macbeth and his lady. Duncan's sons fly
+     to England. Macbeth causes himself to be proclaimed king.
+
+     Being king, he tries to assure himself of power by destroying the
+     house of Banquo, of whom the witches prophesied that he should be
+     the father of a line of kings. Banquo is killed; but his son
+     escapes.
+
+     The witches warn Macbeth to beware of Macduff.
+
+     Macduff escapes to England, but his wife and children are killed by
+     Macbeth's order.
+
+     Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of
+     the Scottish crown.
+
+     Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill
+     him.
+
+Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shakespearean plays. In the order
+of composition it is either the fourth or the fifth of the seven. In
+point of merit it is neither greater nor less than the other six. It is
+different from them, in that it belongs more wholly to the kingdom of
+vision.
+
+Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man
+betrayed by an obsession. Caesar is betrayed by an obsession of the
+desire of glory, Antony by passion, Tarquin by lust, Wolsey by worldly
+greed, Coriolanus and Timon by their nobleness, Angelo by his
+righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger
+or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his
+worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. God sends on many men
+"strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie." Othello is one such.
+Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true,
+half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie
+direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by
+arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in
+the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like
+love; love feels like nobility; spiritualism seems like revelation.
+
+Among these things few are stronger than the words spoken in unworldly
+states, in trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by soothsayers,
+by the wholly excited people who are also half sane, by whoever obtains
+a half knowledge of the spirit by destruction of intellectual process.
+
+               "to win us to our harm,
+    The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
+    Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
+    In deepest consequence."
+
+Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds
+to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with
+prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the
+beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us.
+Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the
+letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him.
+Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be
+fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for
+him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So
+often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something
+planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief
+in life would lead to peace. This thought passes through his mind. Then
+fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully
+from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a
+thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for
+treachery. The king had an "absolute trust" in him; but there is no
+judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes
+Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs
+him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son
+will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he
+goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining
+towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with
+definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act
+of murder.
+
+The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also
+a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an
+unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is
+made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed,
+but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so
+knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing
+men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the
+end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth
+to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary.
+He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his
+kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them.
+The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his
+trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.
+
+    "And you all know security
+     Is mortal's chiefest enemy,"
+
+He has supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with
+gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that
+he has been tricked by--
+
+        "the equivocation of the fiend
+    That lies like truth."
+
+His queen has killed herself. All the welter of murder has been useless.
+All that he has done is to damn his soul through the centuries during
+which the line of Banquo will reign. He dies with a courage that is half
+fury against the fate that has tricked him.
+
+No play contains greater poetry. There is nothing more intense. The mind
+of the man was in the kingdom of vision, hearing a new speech and seeing
+what worldly beings do not see, the rush of the powers, and the fury of
+elemental passions. No play is so full of an unspeakable splendour of
+vision--
+
+                           "his virtues
+    Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued."
+
+    "And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
+    Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed
+    Upon the sightless couriers of the air."
+
+    "Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
+     Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death,
+     And prophesying with accents terrible."
+
+    "In the great hand of God I stand."
+
+    "A falcon towering in her pride of place
+     Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.
+     And Duncan's horses--a thing most strange and certain--
+     Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
+     Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
+     Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make
+     War with mankind.
+                'Tis said they eat each other."
+
+                "the time has been
+    That, when the brains were out, the man would die."
+
+All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and
+re-praised. Noble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the
+mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less noble, is
+less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the
+hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words--
+
+                            "I did hear
+    The galloping of horse: who was't came by?"
+
+It was the galloping of messengers with the news that Macduff, who is to
+be the cause of his ruin, has fled to England. An echo of the galloping
+stays in the brain, as though the hoofs of some horse rode the night,
+carrying away Macbeth's luck for ever.
+
+
+_Antony and Cleopatra._
+
+     _Written._ 1607-8 (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's
+     translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes
+     himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He
+     makes a pact with the young Caesar, by marrying Caesar's sister
+     Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra,
+     he falls into wars with Caesar. Being unhappy in his fortune and
+     deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having lost
+     her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Caesar, also kills
+     herself.
+
+In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his
+constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some
+obsession.
+
+                      "Strange it is
+    That nature must compel us to lament
+    Our most persisted deeds."
+
+It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this
+period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other
+play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for
+the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played
+out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the
+poetry answer the greatness of the subject.
+
+Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Othello_, and
+this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is
+not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in
+_Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and
+generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays
+the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a
+blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute,
+astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund,
+the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls.
+All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the
+mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from
+human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a
+colourable cloak of human excuse.
+
+The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's
+plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that
+obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is
+drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke
+in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a
+way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return
+to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his
+country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition
+of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all
+drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and
+is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in
+the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly
+defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon
+Octavius to meet him in single combat.
+
+                        "men's judgments are
+    A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
+    Do draw the inward quality after them,
+    To suffer all alike."
+
+      "when we in our viciousness grow hard,
+    O misery on't--the wise gods seel our eyes;
+    In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us
+    Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut
+    To our confusion."
+
+The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is
+one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once,
+this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in
+Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the
+senate house, before Caesar's murderers. He was very great and noble
+then. Now
+
+                   "The star is fall'n
+    And time is at his period."
+
+    "The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"
+
+has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.
+
+The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation
+of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy
+makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry--
+
+    "We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,
+     Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
+     And make Death proud to take us ...
+                  .... we have no friend
+     But resolution and the briefest end,"
+
+begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays.
+Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is
+the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her
+death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the
+most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words--
+
+    "Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,
+     And we are for the dark,"
+
+and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush
+of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling--
+
+              "O eastern star!
+                              Peace, peace!
+    Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
+    That sucks the nurse asleep?"
+
+are among the most beautiful things ever written by man.
+
+
+_Coriolanus._
+
+     _Written._ 1608 (?)
+
+     _Published._ 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The life of Coriolanus in Sir Thomas North's
+     translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Marcius, a noble Roman, of an excessive pride,
+     bitterly opposes the rabble.
+
+     In the war against the Volscians he bears himself so nobly that he
+     wins the title of Coriolanus. On his return from the wars he seeks
+     the Consulship, woos the voices of the multitude, is accepted, and
+     then cast by them. For his angry comment on their behaviour the
+     tribunes contrive his banishment from the city.
+
+     Being banished, he makes league with the Volscians. He takes
+     command in the Volscian army and invades Roman territory.
+
+     Coming as a conqueror to the walls of Rome, his mother and wife
+     persuade him to spare the city. He causes the Volscians to make
+     peace. The Volscians return home dissatisfied.
+
+     On his return to the Volscian territory Coriolanus is impeached as
+     a traitor, and stabbed to death by conspirators.
+
+Shakespeare's tragical characters are all destroyed by the excess of
+some trait in them, whether good or ill matters nothing. Nature cares
+for type, not for the excessive. Sooner or later she checks the
+excessive so that the type may be maintained. She is stronger than the
+excessive, though she may be baser. To Nature, progress, though it be
+infinitesimal, must be a progress of the whole mass, not a sudden
+darting out of one quality or one member.
+
+Timon of Athens is betrayed by an excessive generosity. Coriolanus is
+betrayed by an excessive contempt for the multitude. He is one born into
+a high tradition of life. He has the courage, the skill in arms, and the
+talent for affairs that come with high birth in the manly races. He has
+also the faith in tradition that makes an unlettered upper class narrow
+and obstructionist. Like the rich in France before the Revolution, he
+despises the poor. He denies them the right to complain of their hunger.
+Rather than grant them that right, or the means of urging redress, he
+would take a short way with them, as was practised here, at Manchester
+and elsewhere.
+
+    "Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,
+     And let me use my sword, I'ld make a quarry
+     With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high
+     As I could pick my lance."
+
+Like all conservative, aristocratic men, he sees in the first granting
+of political power to the people the beginning of revolution.
+
+                          "It will in time
+    Win power upon and throw forth greater themes
+    For insurrection's arguing."
+
+He regards the people as a necessary, evil-smelling, many-headed beast,
+good enough, under the leadership of men like himself, to make inferior
+troops to be spent as the State pleases. It is possible that Napoleon
+and Bismarck looked upon the mob with similar scorn. The ideas are those
+of an absolute monarch or super-man. The country squire holds those
+ideas, though want of power and want of intellect combine to keep him
+from applying them. The sincerity of the ideas is tested from time to
+time, in free countries, by general elections.
+
+Much of the pride of Coriolanus springs from a sense of his superiority
+to others in the gifts of fortune. Much of it comes from the knowledge
+that he is superior in himself. Leading, as becomes his birth, in the
+war against the Volscians he shows himself so much superior to others
+that the campaign is his triumph. He is "the man" whom Napoleon counted
+"everything in war." The knowledge of his merit is so bright within
+himself that he is unable to see that it is less bright in others. He is
+willing to become the head of the State if the post may be given to him
+as a right due to merit, not as a favour begged. He has no lust for
+power. But knowing himself to be the best man in Rome, he thinks that
+his merit is sufficiently great to excuse him from the indignity of
+sueing for it. The laws of free countries prescribe that he who wishes
+to be elected must appeal to the electors whether he love them or loathe
+them. Instead of appealing to them, Coriolanus insults them with such
+arrogance that they drive him from the city.
+
+He fails as a traitor, because he is too noble to be fiercely
+revengeful. A lesser man, a Richard III, or an Iago, would have exacted
+a bloody toll from Rome. Coriolanus cannot bring himself to be stern, in
+the presence of his old mother and his wife. Something generous and
+truly aristocratic in him makes him a second time a traitor, this time
+to his hosts the Volscians. He spares Rome by the sacrifice of those who
+have given him a shelter and a welcome. Treachery (even from a noble
+motive) is never forgiven in these plays. It is always avenged, seldom
+mercifully. The Volscians avenge themselves on Coriolanus by an act of
+treachery that brings the noble heart under the foot of the traitor.
+
+_Coriolanus_ is one of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of
+the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art
+without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood
+intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a
+popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country.
+Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the
+four most popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's Plutarch,
+Cinthio, and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic
+has supplanted fable, and subject comes to the artist untrimmed and
+unlit by the vitality of many minds. In reading _Coriolanus_ and the
+other plays of the great period a man feels that Shakespeare fed his
+fire with all that was passionate in the thought about him. He appears
+to be his age focussed. The great man now stands outside his age, like
+Timon.
+
+_Coriolanus_ is a play of the clash of the aristocratic temper with the
+world. It contains most of the few speeches in Shakespeare which ring
+with what seems like a personal bitterness. Hatred of the flunkey mind,
+and of the servile, insolent mob mind, "false as water," appears in
+half-a-dozen passages. Some of these passages are ironic inventions, not
+prompted by Plutarch. The great mind, brooding on the many forms of
+treachery, found nothing more treacherous than the mob, and nothing more
+dog-like, for good or evil, than the servant.
+
+Greatness is sometimes shown in very little things. Few things in
+Shakespeare show better the fulness of his happy power than the
+following--
+
+    (_Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils._)
+
+    _1st Roman._ This will I carry to Rome.
+
+    _2nd Roman._ And I this.
+
+    _3rd Roman._ A murrain on't. I took this for silver.
+
+
+_Timon of Athens._
+
+     _Written._ 1606-8 (?)
+
+     _Published._ 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ William Paynter's _Palace of Pleasure_.
+     Plutarch's _Life of Antonius_. Lucian's _Dialogue_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives
+     to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none
+     grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him.
+     None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing
+     of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens,
+     finding a like ingratitude in the State, openly makes war upon it,
+     reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.
+
+_Timon of Athens_ is a play of mixed authorship. Shakespeare's share in
+it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown
+poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a
+skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked personality. It cannot
+now be known how the collaboration was arranged. Either the unknown
+collaborated with Shakespeare, or the unknown wrote the play and
+Shakespeare revised it.
+
+Ingratitude is one of the commonest forms of treachery. It is the form
+that leads most quickly to the putting back of the world, because it
+destroys generosity of mind. It creates in man the bitter and
+destructive quality of misanthropy, or a destroying passion of revenge.
+In this play the two authors show the different ways in which the human
+mind may be turned to those bitter passions.
+
+Apemantus is currish, because others are not. He has wit without
+charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the
+rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a
+large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly
+generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish,
+nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes
+himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness
+that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is
+parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition
+of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a noble mind
+embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic
+energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend,
+shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the
+noble generosity in faithful service.
+
+Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography.
+Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with
+such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and
+unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story
+of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the
+heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more
+difficult and more noble to do than to pin their hearts on their
+sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon
+with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from
+something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth,
+and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as
+the hundred other passionate moods that built up the system of his soul.
+
+The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner--
+
+                       "will these moss'd trees,
+    That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,
+    And skip when thou point'st out?"
+
+    "Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
+     Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
+     Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:
+     Who, once a day with his embossed froth
+     The turbulent surge shall cover."
+
+The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades after he has read the epitaph,
+with which Timon goes down to death, like some hurt thing shrinking even
+from the thought of passers, is one of the most lovely examples of the
+power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech.
+
+    _Alcib._ (reading) _Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and
+    stay not here thy gait._
+
+    These well express in thee thy latter spirits:
+    Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,
+    Scorned'st our brain's flow and those our droplets which
+    From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
+    Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
+    On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead
+    Is noble Timon: of whose memory
+    Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,
+    And I will use the olive with my sword,
+    Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
+    Prescribe to other as each other's leech.
+    Let our drums strike.
+
+
+_Pericles, Prince of Tyre._
+
+     _Written._ 1607-8 (?)
+
+     _Published._ 1608.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The plot is taken from an English prose
+     version of a Latin translation of a fifth century Greek romance.
+     This version was published by Lawrence Twine, in the year 1576,
+     under the name of _The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures_ (etc.,
+     etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story
+     was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his _Confessio
+     Amantis_. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.
+
+     _The Fable._ Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to
+     guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will
+     be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess
+     wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the
+     Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from
+     Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's
+     vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.
+
+     Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes
+     jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and
+     marries her.
+
+     Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter,
+     dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ashore at Ephesus,
+     and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles
+     dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina,
+     the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus.
+     He then returns to Tyre.
+
+     Act IV. The years pass. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm
+     that she passes the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen,
+     deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina.
+     Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel
+     in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and
+     musician.
+
+     Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great
+     melancholy for the loss of wife and child, hears Marina sing. He
+     learns that she is his daughter. The goddess Diana bids him go to
+     her temple at Ephesus. He goes, and finds Thaisa. The play ends
+     happily with the reuniting of the family.
+
+The acts are opened by rhyming prologues designed to be spoken by John
+Gower. The prologues to each of the three first acts are followed by
+Dumb Shows, an invention of the theatre to explain those things not
+easily to be shown in action. The prologues, the invention of the dumb
+shows, and the first two acts, are not by Shakespeare. They are like the
+poetical work of George Wilkins, who published a prose romance of _The
+Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre_ in the year 1608,
+probably after the play had been produced.
+
+The construction of the last three acts makes it likely that the play
+(in its original state) was by the constructor of the first two acts. It
+is not known how it came to pass that Shakespeare took the play in hand.
+From the comparative feebleness of his work upon it, it may be judged
+that it was not a labour of love. The impression given is that nothing
+in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great
+mind, that Shakespeare was not deeply interested in the play, but that
+he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece
+and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the
+knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a
+theatre on which many depended for bread.
+
+There is little that is precious in the play. The scenes in the brothel
+at Mitylene (in Act IV) have power. Many find their unpleasantness an
+excuse for saying that Shakespeare never wrote them. They are certainly
+by Shakespeare. Cant would always persuade itself that the power to see
+clearly ought not to be turned upon evil. Those who can read--
+
+    _Bawd._ ... they are so pitifully sodden.
+
+    _Pandar._ ... The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the
+    little baggage.
+
+    _Boult._ Ay ... she made him roast-meat for worms--
+
+with disgust at Shakespeare's foulness, yet without horror of heart that
+the evil still goes on among human beings, must be strangely made. These
+scenes, the very vigorous sea scenes, including the account of the storm
+at sea, put into the mouth of Marina--
+
+    "My father, as nurse said, did never fear,
+     But cried 'Good seamen!' to the sailors, galling
+     His kingly hands, haling ropes;
+     And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea
+     That almost burst the deck....
+     Never was waves nor wind more violent:
+     And from the ladder-tackle washes off
+     A canvas-climber. 'Ha,' says one, 'wilt out?'
+     And with a dropping industry they skip
+     From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles, and
+     The master calls and trebles their confusion"--
+
+and the scene in which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to
+study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most
+lovely things in the play.
+
+
+_Cymbeline._
+
+     _Written._ (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_ tell of Cymbeline
+     and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (giorn.
+     2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's _Westward for Smelts_,
+     and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman
+     falsely accused of adultery.
+
+     _The Fable._ Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His
+     only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to
+     Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to
+     destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten, may marry
+     Imogen.
+
+     Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an
+     incomparable chastity. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick
+     obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste.
+     Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where
+     Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is
+     killed by one of the sons.
+
+     The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the
+     two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished.
+     Cymbeline's queen kills herself. Posthumus is taught that Iachimo
+     deceived him. Imogen is restored to him. The lost sons are restored
+     to Cymbeline. Prophecy is fulfilled and pardon given. All ends
+     happily.
+
+It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun as a tragedy during the great
+mood of tragical creation, then laid aside unfinished, from some
+failure in the vision, or change in the creative mood, and brought to an
+end later in a new spirit, perhaps in another place, in the country,
+away from the life which makes writing alive. It is the least perfect of
+the later plays. The least soft of Shakespeare's critics calls it
+"unresisting imbecility." It is perhaps the first composed of the
+romantic plays with which Shakespeare ended his life's work.
+
+Though the writing is so careless and the construction so loose that no
+one can think of it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes, one
+faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty. It deals with the
+Shakespearean subject of craft working upon a want of faith for personal
+ends, and being defeated, when almost successful, by something simple
+and instinctive in human nature. It is thus not unlike _Othello_; but in
+_Othello_ the subject is simple, and the treatment purely tragic. In
+_Cymbeline_ the subject is only partly extricated, and the treatment is
+coloured with romance, with that strange, touching, very Shakespearean
+romance, of the thing long lost beautifully recovered before the end,
+so that the last years of the chief man in the play may be happy and
+complete. The end of life would be as happy as the beginning if the dead
+might be given back to us. Shakespeare had lost a child.
+
+There can be no doubt that when the play was first conceived, the craft
+of the queen, working upon the insufficient faith of Cymbeline, was
+designed to be as important to the action as the craft of Iachimo
+working upon the insufficient faith of Posthumus. This was never wrought
+out. The play advances and halts. As in all unfinished works of art one
+sees in it something fine trying to get free but failing.
+
+The lyric "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" is the most lovely thing in
+the play. The most powerful moment is that which exposes the poisoning
+of a generous mind by false report. Posthumus believes Iachimo's lie and
+breaks out railing against women.
+
+                    "For there's no motion
+    That tends to vice in man but I affirm
+    It is the woman's part."
+
+Noble instants are marked in the lines--
+
+    "Be not, as in our fangled world, a garment
+     Nobler than that it covers,"
+
+and in the symbol of the eagle--
+
+                         "the Roman eagle,
+    From south to west on wing soaring aloft,
+    Lessen'd herself and in the beams o' the sun
+    So vanished."
+
+
+_The Winter's Tale._
+
+     _Written._ 1610-11.
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ The story appears in Robert Greene's romance
+     of _Pandosto_. Shakespeare greatly improves the fable by completing
+     it. Greene ends it. Greene makes the story an accident with an
+     unhappy end. Shakespeare makes it a vision of the working of fate
+     with the tools of human passion.
+
+     _The Fable._ Leontes, King of Sicilia, suspecting that his wife
+     Hermione is guilty of adultery with Polixenes, King of Bohemia,
+     tries her on that count. He causes her daughter to be carried to a
+     desert place and there exposed.
+
+     The oracle of Apollo declares to him that Hermione is innocent,
+     that he himself is a jealous tyrant, and that he will die without
+     an heir should he fail to recover the daughter lost. The truth of
+     the oracle is confirmed by the (apparent) death of Hermione and the
+     real death of Mamillius, his son. Repenting bitterly of his
+     obsession of jealousy he goes into mourning.
+
+     The little daughter is found by country people who nourish and
+     cherish her. She grows up to beautiful and gracious girlhood.
+     Florizel, the son of Polixenes, falls in love with her, and seeks
+     to marry her without his father's knowledge. Being discovered by
+     Polixenes, he flies with her to the sea. Taking ship, the couple
+     come to Leontes' court, where it is proved that the girl is the
+     lost princess. She is married to Florizel. Leontes is reconciled to
+     Polixenes. Hermione completes the general happiness by rejoining
+     the husband who has so long mourned her.
+
+Dr. Simon Forman, the first critic of this play, made note to "remember"
+two things in it, "how he sent to the orakell of Appollo," and "also the
+rog that cam in all tottered like Coll Pipci." He drew from it this
+moral lesson, that one should "Beware of trustinge feined beggars or
+fawninge fellouse."
+
+The moral lesson is still of value to the world, and it is most
+certainly one which Shakespeare strove to impress. Shakespeare's mind
+was always brooding on the working of fate. He was always watching the
+results of some obsession upon an individual and the people connected
+with him. He saw that a blindness falling upon a person suddenly, for no
+apparent reason, except that something strikes the something not quite
+sound in the nature, has the power to alter life violently. It was his
+belief that life must not be altered violently. Life is a thing of
+infinitely gradual growth, that would perfect itself if the blindness
+could be kept away. Any deceiving thing, like a passion or a feigned
+beggar, is a cause of the putting back of life, indefinitely.
+
+In this play, he followed his usual practice, of showing the results of
+a human blindness upon human destiny. The greater plays are studies of
+treachery and self-betrayal. This play is a study of deceit and
+self-deception. Leontes is deceived by his obsession, Polixenes by his
+son, the country man by Autolycus, life, throughout, by art. In the last
+great scene, life is mistaken for art. In the first great scene a true
+friendship is mistaken for a false love.
+
+It may be called the gentlest of Shakespeare's plays. It is done with a
+tenderer hand than the other works. The name, _A Winter's Tale_, is
+taken from a scene in the second act. Hermione sits down with her son,
+by the winter fire, to listen to his story. It is the last time she ever
+sees her son. He has hardly opened his lips when Leontes enters to
+accuse her of adultery. She is hurried off to prison, and Mamillius dies
+before the oracle's message comes to clear her. The sudden shocks and
+interruptions of life, which play so big a part in the action of these
+late romances, have full power here. The winter's tale is interrupted.
+The rest of the play results from the interruption. Much of it is very
+beautiful. To us, the wonderful thing is the strangeness of the
+tenderness which makes some scenes in the fifth act so passionate with
+grief for old injustice done to the dead. The cry of Leontes remembering
+the wronged dead woman's eyes--
+
+                  "Stars, stars,
+    And all eyes else dead coals,"
+
+is haunting and heart-breaking. All his longing of remorse gives to the
+last great scene, before the supposed statue, an intensity of beauty
+hardly endurable.
+
+The passion of remorse is a romantic, not a tragic passion. It is the
+mood which follows the tragic mood. Shakespeare's creative life is like
+a Shakespearean play. It ends with an easing of the strain and a making
+of peace.
+
+It is said that an old horse near to death turns towards the pastures
+where he was foaled. It is true of human beings. Man wanders home to the
+fields which bred him. A part of the romance of this poem is the turning
+back of the poet's mind to the Cotswold country, of which he sang so
+magically, in his first play, sixteen or eighteen years before. There
+are fine scenes of shepherds at home, among the sheep bells and clean
+wind. There is a very lovely talk of flowers--
+
+                                 "daffodils,
+    That come before the swallow dares, and take
+    The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
+    But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
+    Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
+    That die unmarried, ere they can behold
+    Bright Phoebus in his strength."
+
+To Shakespeare, the magically happy man, the going back to them must
+have been a time for thanksgiving. But to the supremely happy man all
+times are times of thanksgiving, deep, tranquil and abundant, for the
+delight, the majesty and the beauty of the fulness of the rolling world.
+
+
+_The Tempest._
+
+     _Written._ 1610-11.
+
+     _Published_, in the folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ It is likely that many sources contributed to
+     the making of this plot. If Shakespeare took the fable from a
+     single source, that source is not now known. He may have taken
+     suggestions for it from the following books:--
+
+     1st. From a little collection of novels by Antonio de Eslava, a
+     Spanish writer, whose book, _Noches de Invierno_, was published in
+     Barcelona in 1609. Three tales in this collection seem to have
+     given hints for the play. The fourth chapter, about "The Art Magic
+     of King Dardano," helped him more than the others. Whether the
+     title of the book suggested the title of _A Winter's Tale_ is not
+     known.
+
+     2nd. From a German play, _Die schoene Sidea_, by a Nuremberg
+     dramatist, named Jacob Ayrer.
+
+     3rd. From the tracts relating to the discovery of the Bermuda
+     Islands in 1609. Of the known tracts, _A Discovery of the Bermuda
+     Islands_, by Sylvester Jourdain, gave Shakespeare the most hints.
+
+     Several other books may have suggested lines and passages.
+
+     _The Fable._ Prospero, Duke of Milan, having been driven from his
+     dukedom by Antonio his brother, flies to sea with his daughter
+     Miranda, lands on an island, and there lives, served by two
+     creatures, one an airy spirit, the other a loutish monster.
+
+     By art magic, he brings to the island his usurping brother and the
+     king and heir of Naples. Miranda falls in love with the heir of
+     Naples. Prospero dismisses his spirits, reconciles himself with his
+     brother, and plans to sail at once for Milan.
+
+In this play, as in the two other original romantic plays, Shakespeare
+follows the workings of a treacherous act from its performance to the
+repentance of the sinner and the granting of the victim's forgiveness.
+In the great plays the victim dies and the sinner does not repent.
+Presently the wheel comes full circle, and a justice from outside life
+smites him dead. In these plays the betrayed live to forgive the
+traitors--
+
+    "Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
+     Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury
+     Do I take part. The rarer action is
+     In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
+     The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
+     Not a frown further."
+
+In this play, as in the other two and in _Pericles_, much is made of the
+chances and accidents of life, and of the sudden changes of worldly
+circumstance due to them. In this play, for the first and last time,
+Shakespeare treats of the power of the resolved imagination to command
+the brutish, the base, the noble and the spiritual for wise human ends.
+
+It is easy to interpret the play as allegory. Youth in this country has
+reason to regard allegory as a clumsy man's way of introducing Sunday on
+a weekday. It is so seldom successful that it may be called the literary
+method of creative minds below the first rank. Shakespeare's method was
+never allegorical. The _Tempest_ is perhaps no more allegorical than
+any other good romance. But the thought of it is so clear that the first
+impression given is that it is thin. It is the study of a man of
+intellect, who has been forced from power by a treacherous brother.
+Living alone with his bright, unspoiled daughter, he attains, by
+intellectual labour, to a power over destiny. Like the wise man of the
+proverb, he learns to master his stars. He uses this power nobly to put
+an end to ancient hatred and old injustice.
+
+The minor vision of the play is a study, often very amusing, but deeply
+earnest, of the coming of the fifth part civilised to the mostly brutal.
+In Shakespeare's time, men like the quite thoughtless and callous
+Stephano and Trinculo, the "sea-dogs" who manned our ships, and of whom
+Raleigh wrote that it was an offence to God to minister oaths to the
+generality of them, were "spreading civilisation" in various parts of
+the world. Shakespeare, looking at them gravely, saw them to be,
+perhaps, more dangerous to the needs of life, to wisdom, and to unlit
+animal strength than the base Sebastian and the treacherous Antonio.
+
+The exquisite lyrics, and the masque of the goddesses, show that the
+taste of the audience of 1610-11 needed to be tickled. Times had changed
+since the lion-like and ramping days, eighteen years before, when
+"Jeronimy" was a new word, and Tamora a serious invention. The man who
+had changed the times was thinking, like Prospero, that he had "got his
+dukedom," and that now, having "pardoned the deceiver," he might go to
+Stratford to enjoy it.
+
+
+_King Henry VIII_, or _All is True_.
+
+     _Written._ 1611-13 (?)
+
+     _Produced._ (?)
+
+     _Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
+
+     _Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_. Hall's
+     _Chronicles_. Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_.
+
+     _The Fable._ Act I. Two of the scenes in this act are by
+     Shakespeare. In the first, Cardinal Wolsey contrives the attainting
+     of his enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. In the other he procures to
+     bring Queen Katharine into disfavour.
+
+     Act II. In this act, Buckingham is beheaded, the King shows favour
+     to Anne Bullen, and Queen Katharine is brought to trial. It is hard
+     to believe that Shakespeare wrote any part of this act. He is often
+     credited with the third scene, apparently on the ground that though
+     it is bad it is still too good to be by Bacon.
+
+     Act III. In this act, the King shows Wolsey that he has discovered
+     his plottings. About half of the second scene (all the masculine
+     part of it) is by Shakespeare. The rest (very beautiful) is by
+     Fletcher.
+
+     Act IV. Anne Bullen is crowned. Wolsey dies. Queen Katharine dies.
+     None of this act is by Shakespeare.
+
+     Act V. Cranmer escapes from his enemies in time to be godfather at
+     the christening of Anne Bullen's daughter Elizabeth. If any of this
+     act be by Shakespeare it can only be the first scene.
+
+Little of this play is by Shakespeare. The greater part of it is by John
+Fletcher. Some scenes bear the marks of a third hand, like that of
+Philip Massinger. The play reads as though the two lesser poets had
+worked from a scenario of Shakespeare's less complete than the draft of
+_Troilus and Cressida_. It is certain that they received no hint of the
+lines on which Shakespeare meant to proceed after the end of Act III.
+Not knowing what to do, they patched up a piece without any central
+tragical idea, and hid their want of thought with much effective
+theatrical invention, pageants, a trial, a coronation, a christening,
+etc., and with bright, facile, vinous dialogue, of the kind that will
+hold an uncritical audience. The play, when done, was mounted with
+extreme splendour at the Globe Theatre. Wadding from the cannons
+discharged in the first act set fire to the theatre, and burned it to
+the ground, June 29, 1613.
+
+Shakespeare's dramatic intention is indicated in the scenes written by
+him. Knowing his practice, and having before us Holinshed, his
+authority, it is easy to sketch out the kind of play that he would have
+written by himself. Wolsey, eaten up by his obsession for worldly power,
+betraying Buckingham to his fall, breaking the power of the Queen, and
+ruling England, would have filled the first two acts. The third act
+would have told (much more subtly than Fletcher has told) of his
+downfall. Fletcher attributes the downfall to the chance discovery of
+his attempt to thwart the king's marriage with Anne Bullen. That
+discovery would have been put to full dramatic use by Shakespeare; but
+it would have been represented as something working from beyond the
+grave, the result of many unjust acts that have cried to God for justice
+till God hears. The last acts would have exposed other sides of Wolsey's
+character. The play would have been a fuller, nobler work than _Richard
+II_, and of an ampler canvas than _Timon_. Shakespeare's share in the
+play as we have it is all noble work. Wolsey, Katharine and the King are
+drawn with the great, sharp, ample line of a master. The difference
+between genius and supreme genius is shown very clearly in the first
+act, where a great work, greatly begun, with the masterly power of
+exposition that makes Shakespeare's first acts like daybreaks, is ended
+by another spirit, without vision, but with a tremendous sense of Vanity
+Fair.
+
+
+WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE
+
+A play called _Cardenno_, or _Cardenna_, was acted at Court by
+Shakespeare's company in 1613. It is thought that this play was the
+_History of Cardenio_, described as "by Fletcher and Shakespeare," which
+was licensed for publication in 1653 but never published. The play is
+now lost. It was attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare on very poor
+authority.
+
+_Arden of Feversham_ is a domestic tragedy founded on a story told by
+Holinshed. It was published anonymously in 1592. It is held by some to
+be an early work of Shakespeare's, on the ground that no other known
+poet, then living, could have written it. It is a strong play, but it is
+the work of a joyless mind. It bears no single trace of Shakespeare's
+mind. It could not have been written by him at any stage in his career.
+
+_Edward III_ is an historical chronicle play by at least two unknown
+hands. It was published anonymously in 1596. Some think that part of Act
+I and the whole of Act II (dealing with the King's obsession of passion
+for the Countess of Salisbury) were by Shakespeare, on the grounds that
+the writing is too good to be by anybody else then living, and that the
+unknown author makes use of a line and a phrase which occur in the
+genuine sonnets of Shakespeare. The scenes attributed to Shakespeare
+contain several beautiful lines in something of the Shakespearean
+manner. The construction of the scenes, and their relation to the rest
+of the play is un-Shakespearean. It is unlikely that Shakespeare wrote
+them.
+
+_The Spanish Tragedy_, a play by Thomas Kyd, published in 1592 and
+reprinted with many additions ten years later, contains in the additions
+several magnificent scenes of the passion of grief raised to madness.
+Some think that Ben Jonson wrote these scenes; others, that they are too
+good to be by any one but Shakespeare. They are not like Shakespeare's
+work.
+
+_The Two Noble Kinsmen_, a romantic tragedy on the subject of Chaucer's
+_Knight's Tale_, was first published in 1634. It was described on the
+title-page as the joint work of Fletcher and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's
+hand is plainly marked upon the play; but it seems likely that most of
+the scenes usually credited to him are by Massinger. Few can have ears
+dull enough to credit Shakespeare with all the scenes that are plainly
+not by Fletcher.
+
+About a dozen other plays and parts of plays have been attributed to
+Shakespeare, either by lying publishers, anxious to make money, or by
+foolish critics eager to make a noise. "Evil men understand not
+judgment: and he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent."
+There is not a glimmer of evidence in any line or scene to show that
+Shakespeare had a hand in any of them.
+
+
+THE POEMS
+
+_Venus and Adonis._--This poem was published in 1593 with a dedication
+to the Earl of Southampton, then a youth. In the dedication Shakespeare
+speaks of the poem as "the first heire of my invention," from which
+some conclude that it was the first poem ever made public by him.
+
+Though it may be his earliest poem, the thought expressed by it is the
+thought expressed in the greatest of the plays, that evil comes of
+obsession.
+
+Venus, a lustful woman, pursuing her opposite, a chaste youth, comes to
+misery. Adonis, a chaste youth, fleeing from her, comes to death.
+
+The poem is beautiful and wild blooded. It is fierce with the excelling
+animal zest of something young and untainted.
+
+    "The sun ariseth in his majesty
+     Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
+     That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."
+
+It is full of the images of delicate quick-blooded things going swiftly
+and lustily from the boiling of the April in them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Rape of Lucrece._--This poem was published in 1594, with a
+dedication to the Earl of Southampton. Like so many of the works of
+Shakespeare, it describes at length the prompting, acting, and results
+of a treachery inspired by an obsession. Tarquin, hearing of Lucrece's
+chastity, longs to attempt her. Coming stealthily to her home, in her
+lord's absence, he foully ravishes her. She kills herself and he is
+banished from Rome. The subject is not unlike that of _Venus and
+Adonis_, with the sexes reversed. In both poems the subject is sexual
+obsession and its results.
+
+_Lucrece_ is a wiser and a finer poem than _Venus and Adonis_. It is
+constructed with the art of a man familiar with the theatre. The
+delaying of the great moments so as to heighten the expectation, is
+contrived with rapturous energy. The poem is heaped and overflowing with
+the abundance of imaginative power. The wealth of the young man's mind
+is poured out like life in June.
+
+It is strange that both Lucrece and Hamlet, in their moments of
+distraction, turn to the image of Troy blazing with the punishment of
+treachery.
+
+_The Passionate Pilgrim._--This little collection of poems was published
+in 1599, under Shakespeare's name, by William Jaggard, a dishonest
+bookseller. It contains poems by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin,
+Christopher Marlowe, and one or more unknown hands. It also contains two
+genuine Shakespearean sonnets, three more from the text of _Love's
+Labour's Lost_, and three (less certainly his) on the subject of _Venus
+and Adonis_, which have the ring of his freshest youthful manner.
+Whether any others in the collection be by Shakespeare can only be a
+matter of opinion. The nineteenth poem has a smack of his mind about it.
+If it be by him it must be his earliest extant work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Sonnets._--_Written_ between 1592 and 1609. _Published_
+(piratically) 1609.
+
+These personal poems have puzzled many readers. Many writers have tried
+to interpret them. Although their first editor tells us that they are
+"serene, cleare, and elegantlie plaine (with) no intricate and cloudie
+stuffe to trouble and perplex the intellect," much good and bad brain
+work has been spent on them. Some have held that they are poetical
+exercises. Others find that they are confessions. Others wrest from dark
+lines dark meanings, till they have laid bare a story from them. Others
+interpret spiritually. Others find evidence in them that Shakespeare was
+guilty of an abnormal form of passion. The facts about them may be
+stated--
+
+     1. They are personal poems. Some of them are of great beauty;
+     others are unsuccessful.
+
+     2. They were written in many moods. Some were written in a mood of
+     the intensest tranquil ecstasy, others in a fit of earthly passion,
+     others in a trivial mood.
+
+     3. They were written to more than one person. Many were written to
+     an attractive, handsome, young, unmarried man, Shakespeare's dear
+     friend. Men with imagination enjoy sweeter and closer friendships
+     than the many know. The many, mulish as ever, therefore imagine
+     evil.
+
+     4. Some of the sonnets were written to a woman, of the kind
+     described in two or three of the plays, viz. a black-haired,
+     black-eyed, white-faced, witty wanton, false to her marriage vows
+     and the cause of similar falseness in Shakespeare himself, and in
+     his friend.
+
+     5. Many of them show that Shakespeare, loving this woman, against
+     his better nature, was wilfully betrayed by her to all the devils
+     of jealousy, craving and self-loathing, which follow the banner of
+     lechery. Among the objects of the jealousy another poet figured.
+
+No one knows who the friend, the lady and the rival poet were. The
+discovery of letters and manuscripts may some day remove the mystery.
+"Against that time, if ever that time come," men of intellect would do
+well to accept the sonnets as beautiful poems, and try to write as good
+ones to their wives.
+
+Beautiful as many of the sonnets are, they are less wonderful
+achievements and less important to the soul of man than the plays. Few
+people thought much of them until the degradation of the English theatre
+had hidden from English minds the greater glory of the creative system.
+That they are now widely read while the plays are seldom acted, is
+another proof that this age cares more for what was perishing and
+personal in Shakespeare than for that which went winging on, in the
+great light, surveying the eternal in man.
+
+What Shakespeare thought of his perishing self is expressed in the
+noblest of the sonnets. Two syllables are missing from the second line.
+
+    "Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
+     (   ) these rebel powers that thee array,
+     Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
+     Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
+     Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
+     Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
+     Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
+     Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?
+     Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
+     And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
+     Buy terms divine with selling hours of dross;
+     Within be fed, without be rich no more:
+     So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
+     And Death once dead, there's no more dying then."
+
+The sonnets were piratically published in a quarto volume in 1609. At
+the end of the volume a narrative poem was printed, under the name _A
+Lover's Complaint_. It tells in the first person the story of a girl who
+has been seduced by a plausible villain. It is a work of Shakespeare's
+youth, fresh and felicitous as youth's work often is, and very nearly
+as empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Phoenix and The Turtle._--This strange, very beautiful poem was
+published in 1601 in an appendix to Robert Chester's _Love's Martyr, or
+Rosalin's Complaint_, to which several famous poets contributed. In dark
+and noble verse it describes a spiritual marriage, suddenly ended by
+death. It is too strange to be the fruit of a human sorrow. It is the
+work of a great mind trying to express in unusual symbols a thought too
+subtle and too intense to be expressed in any other way. Spiritual
+ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that
+key it can only be so many strange words set in a noble rhythm for no
+apparent cause.
+
+Poetry moves in many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action
+of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an
+intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not
+human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives
+to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery
+and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind
+with their crying.
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+Shakespeare's plays were printed carelessly, often from imperfect, torn,
+ill-written or stolen copies. When printed, they were seldom corrected.
+When reprinted, the original errors were often made much worse. Thus,
+"he met the night-mare," or "a met the night-mare," in the original
+manuscript, was printed "a nellthu night more," and reprinted "anelthu
+night Moore." Those who lightly read the modern editions seldom know
+that years of mental toil went to the preparation of the texts so easily
+read to-day.
+
+Many English minds have paid tribute to Shakespeare. Few of them deserve
+more praise than the Cambridge Editors, whose six years of labour
+cleared the text of countless errors and corruptions. The correction of
+a corrupt text by collation and conjecture, is one of the most difficult
+and least amusing tasks that a fine mind can have. The Cambridge
+_Shakespeare_, the work of William George Clark and Dr. William Aldis
+Wright, gives a text not likely to be improved until the poet's
+corrected manuscripts are found.
+
+The _Life of William Shakespeare_ has been ably written by Dr. Sidney
+Lee, whose judgment equals his learning.
+
+Some of the dramatic methods of Shakespeare have been nobly studied by
+Dr. A. C. Bradley in his _Shakespearean Tragedy_.
+
+To these books and to the Shakespearean Essays in Mr. W. B. Yeats's
+_Ideas of Good and Evil_, I am deeply indebted, as all modern students
+of Shakespeare must be.
+
+Our knowledge of Shakespeare is imperfect. It can only be increased by
+minute and patient study, by the rejection of surmise about him, and by
+the constant public playing of his plays, in the Shakespearean manner,
+by actors who will neither mutilate nor distort what the great mind
+strove to make just.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF CHARACTERS
+
+
+Achilles, 169, 170
+
+Adonis, 241, 242
+
+Adriana, 46, 47
+
+AEgeon, 44, 46, 49
+
+Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, 139
+
+Ajax, 169, 172
+
+Albany, Duke of, 187, 190
+
+Alcibiades, 214, 215, 217, 218
+
+Angelo, 174, 175, 177, 196
+
+Anne Bullen, 236, 237
+
+Anne, Lady, 93, 100
+
+Antipholus of Ephesus, 44, 46
+
+Antipholus of Syracuse, 44
+
+Antonio (_Merchant of Venice_), 103
+
+Antonio (_Tempest_), 232, 235
+
+Antonio (_Two Gentlemen of Verona_), 34
+
+Apemantus, 215
+
+Armado, 30, 31
+
+Arthur, Prince, 75, 80, 83, 84
+
+Audrey, 129
+
+Austria, Lymoges, Duke of, 81
+
+Autolycus, 228
+
+
+Banquo, 195, 200
+
+Bardolph, 122, 124, 125
+
+Bassanio, 103
+
+Beatrice, 133, 134, 136, 137
+
+Beaufort, Cardinal, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59
+
+Belarius, 223
+
+Belch, Sir Toby, 82, 138, 139, 217
+
+Benedick, 133, 134, 136
+
+Bertram, 144, 145, 146
+
+Bianca, 105, 108
+
+Biondello, 107
+
+Biron, 24, 25, 32, 36
+
+Blanch of Spain, 75, 79
+
+Borachio, 134, 135
+
+Bottom, 63
+
+Boyet, 30
+
+Brutus, 149, 150, 154, 156
+
+Buckingham, Duke of (_Richard III_), 94, 98, 99
+
+Buckingham, Duke of (_Henry VIII_), 235, 237
+
+
+Cade, Jack, 55, 57
+
+Caius, Dr., 124, 125
+
+Calchas, 169
+
+Carlisle, Bishop of, 89, 92
+
+Cassio, 180, 181, 183
+
+Cassius, 149
+
+Cawdor, 198
+
+Celia, 128, 129
+
+Cerimon, 222
+
+Clarence, George, Duke of, 93, 94, 98, 100
+
+Claudio (_Measure for Measure_), 174, 177, 178
+
+Claudio (_Much Ado_), 133, 134, 135
+
+Claudius (_Hamlet_), 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166
+
+Cleopatra, 202, 203, 207, 217
+
+Cloten, 223
+
+Cordelia, 187, 188, 190, 192
+
+Coriolanus, 196, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212
+
+Cornwall, Duke of, 190
+
+Costard, 30, 31
+
+Cranmer, 236
+
+Cressida, 169
+
+Cymbeline, 223, 225
+
+
+Demetrius, 63
+
+Desdemona, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185
+
+Diana (_All's Well_), 144
+
+Diana (_Pericles_), 219, 220
+
+Don John, 133, 134, 135
+
+Don Pedro, 133, 134, 136
+
+Dorset, Marquess of, 98
+
+Dromio of Ephesus, 44
+
+Dromio of Syracuse, 44, 46
+
+Dumaine, 24, 32
+
+Duncan, King, 154, 195, 198, 201
+
+
+Edgar, 187, 190
+
+Edmund, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 204
+
+Edward III, 239
+
+Edward IV, 93, 94
+
+Edward, Prince of Wales (_Henry VI_), 62
+
+Edward, Prince of Wales (_Richard III_), 99
+
+Eglamour, 41
+
+Elinor, Queen, 78
+
+Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, 94
+
+Elizabeth, Princess, 236
+
+Emilia, 183, 184
+
+Evans, Sir Hugh, 124, 125
+
+
+Falstaff, Sir John, 112, 113, 116, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126
+
+Flavius, 216
+
+Florizel, 227
+
+Fluellen, 123
+
+Fool (_Lear_), 192
+
+Ford, Mistress, 124, 125
+
+Fortinbras, 161
+
+Frederick, Duke, 128, 129, 132
+
+Friar Laurence, 68, 71, 74
+
+
+Gertrude, Queen, 157, 158, 161, 165
+
+Ghost (_Hamlet_), 158
+
+Gloucester, Earl of, 187, 188, 189, 190
+
+Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59
+
+Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (_Henry VI_), 61
+
+Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, (_Richard III_), 93, 115
+
+Goneril, 187, 189, 193
+
+Grey, Lord, 98, 99
+
+
+Hamlet, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 191, 196, 243
+
+Hastings, Lord, 99
+
+Hector, 169, 170
+
+Helen, 171
+
+Helena (_Midsummer Night's Dream_), 63
+
+Helena (_All's Well_), 144, 145, 147
+
+Henry IV, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116
+
+Henry V, 120, 121
+
+Henry VI, 51, 52, 60, 61, 62
+
+Henry VIII, 235, 236, 237, 238
+
+Henry, Prince of Wales, 109, 111, 112, 114, 118
+
+Henry Bolingbroke, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92
+
+Hermia, 63
+
+Hermione, 226, 227, 229
+
+Hero, 133, 134, 135
+
+Hippolyta, 63
+
+Hotspur, Henry Percy, surnamed, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 119
+
+Hubert de Burgh, 80, 83
+
+
+Iachimo, 223, 225
+
+Iago, 181, 182, 181, 185, 204, 211
+
+Imogen, 223
+
+Isabella, 174, 175
+
+
+Jaques, 129, 131, 132
+
+Joan of Arc, 51, 54
+
+John, King of England, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80
+
+John of Gaunt, 86, 89, 91
+
+John of Lancaster, 114, 118
+
+Julia, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42
+
+Juliet, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71
+
+Julius Caesar, 149, 153, 154, 156, 196
+
+
+Katharina, 106, 108
+
+Katharine, 32
+
+Katharine of France, 120
+
+Katharine, Queen, 235, 236, 237, 238
+
+Kent, 187, 190
+
+
+Laertes, 158, 161
+
+Launce, 42
+
+Lear, King, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194
+
+Lennox, 202
+
+Leonato, 135, 136
+
+Leontes, King of Sicilia, 226, 227, 228, 229
+
+Lewis the Dauphin, 75, 79
+
+Longaville, 24, 32
+
+Lucio, 177,178
+
+Lucrece, 243
+
+Lysander, 63
+
+
+Macbeth, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 217
+
+Macbeth, Lady, 195, 199, 200
+
+Macduff, 195, 202
+
+Malcolm, 195
+
+Malvolio, 138, 139, 140, 141
+
+Mamillius, 227, 229
+
+Marcius, 208
+
+Margaret of Anjou, 52, 55, 62, 94
+
+Maria, 139
+
+Mariana, 174, 175
+
+Marina, 219, 220, 222
+
+Mark Antony, 149, 191, 196, 202, 204, 206
+
+Mercutio, 68, 70
+
+Milan, Duke of, 34, 35, 38, 39
+
+Miranda, 232
+
+Mortimer, 53
+
+
+Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of, 86, 119
+
+Northumberland, Henry Percy, Earl of, 114
+
+Nurse to Juliet, 74
+
+Nym, 123, 124
+
+
+Oberon, 63
+
+Octavia, 202
+
+Octavius Caesar, 149, 202, 203, 205
+
+Olivia, 138, 140, 141
+
+Oliver, 128, 129
+
+Ophelia, 157, 158, 166
+
+Orlando, 128, 129, 131
+
+Orsino, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142
+
+Othello, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 191, 196
+
+
+Page, Anne, 124
+
+Page, Mistress, 124
+
+Pandarus, 169
+
+Pandulph, Cardinal, 75
+
+Paris, 68
+
+Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 213, 219, 220
+
+Petruchio, 105, 107
+
+Phebe, 129, 132, 133
+
+Philip the Bastard, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83
+
+Philip of France, 75, 80
+
+Pistol, 117, 122, 123, 124
+
+Polixenes, King of Bohemia, 226, 227, 228
+
+Polonius, 158, 161
+
+Portia, 102, 103, 104, 132
+
+Posthumus, 223, 225
+
+Prospero, Duke of Milan, 232, 235
+
+Proteus, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41
+
+Puck, 63
+
+Pyramus, 63
+
+
+Queen (_Cymbeline_), 223, 225
+
+Quickly, Mrs., 124
+
+
+Regan, 187, 189
+
+Richard II, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 115, 119
+
+Richard III, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 211
+
+Richard, Duke of York, 99
+
+Rivers, Earl, 98, 99
+
+Roderigo, 183
+
+Romeo, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71
+
+Rosalind, 128, 129, 132
+
+Rosaline, 25, 31, 32, 69, 133
+
+
+Salisbury, Countess of, 239
+
+Scroop, Lord, 122
+
+Sebastian (_Tempest_), 235
+
+Sebastian (_Twelfth Night_), 138
+
+Shallow, Justice, 82, 124
+
+Shylock, 103, 104
+
+Silvia, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41
+
+Simpcox, 65, 59
+
+Slender, Master, 124
+
+Sly, Christopher, 105, 107
+
+Somerset, Earl of, 51
+
+Stephano, 234
+
+Suffolk, Earl of, 52, 55, 57
+
+
+Talbot, 51, 54
+
+Tamora, 49, 50
+
+Tarquin, 196, 243
+
+Thaisa, 219, 220, 222
+
+Thersites, 172
+
+Theseus, 63, 66
+
+Thisbe, 63
+
+Thurio, 34, 35, 37, 38
+
+Timon of Athens, 196, 209, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218
+
+Titania, 63
+
+Titus Andronicus, 49, 50
+
+Touchstone, 129
+
+Trinculo, 234
+
+Troilus, 169
+
+Tybalt, 68, 70
+
+
+Ulysses, 170
+
+Ursula, 133
+
+
+Valentine, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41
+
+Venus, 241, 242
+
+Vienna, Duke of, 174, 178
+
+Viola, 138, 139, 141, 142
+
+
+Warwick, Earl of, 59, 61
+
+Wolsey, Cardinal, 196, 235, 236, 237, 238
+
+
+York, Edmund of Langley, Duke of, 89, 92
+
+York, Edward, Duke of, 61
+
+York, Richard, Duke of, 51, 55, 57, 62
+
+
+_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+Home University
+Library
+of Modern
+Knowledge
+
+_A Comprehensive Series of New
+and Specially Written Books_
+
+EDITORS:
+
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+PROF. WM. T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Home University Library
+
+"Is without the slightest doubt the pioneer in supplying serious
+literature for a large section of the public who are interested in
+the liberal education of the State."--_The Daily Mail._
+
+"The fact is," says the _Pall Mall Gazette_, "that this remarkable
+library helps to realise one of those functions of a true
+University which English Universities have culpably neglected.
+ ... This Library makes a most effective and useful beginning
+in the popularisation of knowledge.... The scope of the series
+is as wisely outlined as its methods are effective and praiseworthy."
+
+"The Home University Library places within the reach of
+every man, woman, or child with a shilling to spend fruitfully,
+the products of the best brains of to-day in all departments of
+modern knowledge."--_Morning Leader._
+
+"Each volume represents a three-hours' traffic with the talking-power
+of a good brain, operating with the ease and interesting
+freedom of a specialist dealing with his own subject.... A series
+which promises to perform a real social service."--_The Times._
+
+"We can think of no series now being issued which better
+deserves support."--_The Observer._
+
+"Certainly no publishing enterprise of our time is more
+remarkable or better deserving of success."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+"Here is the world's learning in little, and none too poor to
+give it house-room!"--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+1/- net           256 Pages          2/6 net
+in cloth                             in leather
+
+
+
+
+_History and Geography_
+
+
+3. _THE FRENCH REVOLUTION_
+
+By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A. (With Maps.) "It is coloured with all the
+militancy of the author's temperament."--_Daily News._
+
+4. _HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE_
+
+By G. H. PERRIS. The Rt. Hon. JAMES BRYCE writes: "I have read it with
+much interest and pleasure, admiring the skill with which you have
+managed to compress so many facts and views into so small a volume."
+
+8. _POLAR EXPLORATION_
+
+By Dr W. S. BRUCE, F.R.S.E., Leader of the "Scotia" Expedition. (With
+Maps.) "A very freshly written and interesting narrative."--_The Times._
+"A fascinating book."--_Portsmouth Times._
+
+12. _THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA_
+
+By Sir H. H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. (With Maps.) "The
+Home University Library is much enriched by this excellent
+work."--_Daily Mail._
+
+13. _MEDIAEVAL EUROPE_
+
+By H. W. C. DAVIS, M.A. (With Maps.) "A good specimen of the work of the
+modern historian,"--_Christian World._ "One more illustration of the
+fact that it takes a complete master of the subject to write briefly
+upon it."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+14. _THE PAPACY & MODERN TIMES_ (1303-1870)
+
+By WILLIAM BARRY, D.D. "Dr Barry has a wide range of knowledge and an
+artist's power of selection."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+23. _HISTORY OF OUR TIME_, 1885-1911
+
+By G. P. GOOCH, M.A. "Mr Gooch contrives to breathe vitality into his
+story, and to give us the flesh as well as the bones of recent
+happenings."--_Observer._
+
+25. _THE CIVILISATION OF CHINA_
+
+By H. A. GILES, LL.D., Professor of Chinese in the University of
+Cambridge. "In all the mass of facts, Professor Giles never becomes
+dull. He is always ready with a ghost story or a street adventure for
+the reader's recreation."--_Spectator._
+
+29. _THE DAWN OF HISTORY_
+
+By J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S.A., Wykeham Professor of Ancient History,
+Oxford. "There is not a page in it that is not suggestive."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+33. _THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND_:
+
+_A Study in Political Evolution._
+
+By Prof. A. F. POLLARD, M.A. With a Chronological Table. "A vivid study
+of tendencies, not a solid mass of facts.... It is a most stimulating,
+energetic, and suggestive piece of work."--_Daily News._ "It
+takes its place at once among the authoritative works on English
+history."--_Observer._ "It is marked by the wealth of detail, the sanity
+of outlook, the severe impartiality which we always find in Prof.
+Pollard's writings."--_London Teacher._
+
+34. _CANADA_
+
+By A. G. BRADLEY. "Who knows Canada better than Mr A. G.
+Bradley?"--_Daily Chronicle._ "The volume makes an immediate appeal to
+the man who wants to know something vivid and true about
+Canada."--_Canadian Gazette._ "As interesting and as absorbing as a good
+novel."--_Canadian Mail._
+
+37. _PEOPLES & PROBLEMS OF INDIA_
+
+By Sir T. W. HOLDERNESS, K.C.S.I., Secretary of the Revenue, Statistics,
+and Commerce Department of the India Office. "Just the book which
+newspaper readers require to-day, and a marvel of comprehensiveness in
+bringing all the factors of a great subject into view within a limited
+space."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+42. _ROME_
+
+By W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A. "A masterly sketch of Roman character and of
+what it did for the world."--_The Spectator._ "It has all the lucidity
+and charm of presentation we expect from this writer."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+48. _THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR_
+
+By F. L. PAXSON, Professor of American History, Wisconsin University.
+(With Maps.)
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_ANCIENT GREECE._ By Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.
+
+_ANCIENT EGYPT._ By Dr F. L. GRIFFITH, M.A., F.R.S.
+
+_A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE._ By HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+
+_THE REFORMATION._ By Principal LINDSAY, LL.D.
+
+_A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA._ By Prof. MILYOUKOV.
+
+_MODERN TURKEY._ By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A.
+
+_FRANCE OF TO-DAY._ By ALBERT THOMAS.
+
+_HISTORY OF SCOTLAND._ By R. S. RAIT, M.A.
+
+_SOUTH AMERICA._ By Prof. W. R. SHEPHERD.
+
+_MASTER MARINERS._ By J. R. SPEARS.
+
+_NAPOLEON._ By HERBERT FISHER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+_Literature and Art_
+
+
+2. _SHAKESPEARE_
+
+By JOHN MASEFIELD. "The book is a joy. We have had half-a-dozen more
+learned books on Shakespeare in the last few years, but not one so
+wise."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+27. _ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN_
+
+By G. H. MAIR, M.A. "Altogether a fresh and individual
+book."--_Observer._
+
+35. _LANDMARKS IN FRENCH LITERATURE_
+
+By G. L. STRACHEY. "Short handbooks on great subjects are among the most
+difficult tasks that a man of letters can undertake, and Mr Strachey is
+to be congratulated on his courage and success. It is difficult to
+imagine how a better account of French Literature could be given in two
+hundred and fifty small pages than he has given here."--_The Times._
+
+39. _ARCHITECTURE_
+
+By Prof. W. R. LETHABY. (Over forty Illustrations.) "Popular guide-books
+to architecture are, as a rule, not worth much. This volume is a welcome
+exception."--_Building News._ "Delightfully bright reading."--_Christian
+World._
+
+43. _ENGLISH LITERATURE: MEDIAEVAL._
+
+By Prof. W. P. KER, M.A.
+
+45. _THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE_
+
+By L. PEARSALL SMITH, M.A.
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL._ By Miss JANE HARRISON, LL.D., D.Litt.
+
+_THE RENAISSANCE._ By Mrs R. A. TAYLOR.
+
+_ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE._ By ROGER E. FRY, M.A.
+
+_ENGLISH COMPOSITION._ By Prof. WM. T. BREWSTER.
+
+_GREAT WRITERS OF AMERICA._ By Prof. W. P. TRENT and Prof. J. ERSKINE.
+
+_GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA._ By C. T. HAGBERG WRIGHT, LL.D.
+
+_THE LITERATURE OF GERMANY._ By Prof. J. G. ROBERTSON, M.A., Ph.D.
+
+
+
+
+_Science_
+
+
+7. _MODERN GEOGRAPHY_
+
+By Dr MARION NEWBIGIN. (Illustrated.) "Geography, again: what a dull,
+tedious study that was wont to be!... But Miss Marion Newbigin invests
+its dry bones with the flesh and blood of romantic interest, taking
+stock of geography as a fairy-book of science."--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+9. _THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS_
+
+By Dr D. H. SCOTT, M.A., F.R.S., late Hon. Keeper of the Jodrell
+Laboratory, Kew. (Fully illustrated.) "The information which the book
+provides is as trustworthy as first-hand knowledge can make it.... Dr
+Scott's candid and familiar style makes the difficult subject both
+fascinating and easy."--_Gardeners' Chronicle._
+
+17. _HEALTH AND DISEASE_
+
+By W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D., Local Government Board, Edinburgh. "The
+science of public health administration has had no abler or more
+attractive exponent than Dr Mackenzie. He adds to a thorough grasp of
+the problems an illuminating style, and an arresting manner of treating
+a subject often dull and sometimes unsavoury."--_Economist._
+
+18. _INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS_
+
+By A. N. WHITHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S. (With Diagrams.) "Mr Whitehead has
+discharged with conspicuous success the task he is so exceptionally
+qualified to undertake. For he is one of our great authorities upon the
+foundations of the science, and has the breadth of view which is so
+requisite in presenting to the reader its aims. His exposition is clear
+and striking."--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+19. _THE ANIMAL WORLD_
+
+By Professor F. W. GAMBLE, D.Sc., F.R.S. With Introduction by Sir Oliver
+Lodge. (Many Illustrations.) "A delightful and instructive epitome of
+animal (and vegetable) life.... A most fascinating and suggestive
+survey."--_Morning Post._
+
+20. _EVOLUTION_
+
+By Professor J. ARTHUR THOMSON and Professor PATRICK GEDDES. "A
+many-coloured and romantic panorama, opening up, like no other book we
+know, a rational vision of world-development."--_Belfast News-Letter._
+
+22. _CRIME AND INSANITY_
+
+By Dr C. A. MERCIER, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S., Author of "Text-Book of
+Insanity," etc. "Furnishes much valuable information from one occupying
+the highest position among medico-legal psychologists."--_Asylum News._
+
+28. _PSYCHICAL RESEARCH_
+
+By Sir W. F. BARRETT, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of
+Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "As a former President of the Psychical
+Research Society, he is familiar with all the developments of this most
+fascinating branch of science, and thus what he has to say on
+thought-reading, hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism,
+divinings, and so on, will be read with avidity."--_Dundee Courier._
+
+31. _ASTRONOMY_
+
+By A. R. HINKS, M.A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory, "Original
+in thought, eclectic in substance, and critical in treatment.... No
+better little book is available."--_School World._
+
+32. _INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE_
+
+By J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History,
+Aberdeen University. "For those who have not yet become possessed of the
+Library, this would form an appropriate introduction. Professor
+Thomson's delightful literary style is well known; and here he
+discourses freshly and easily on the methods of science and its
+relations with philosophy, art, religion, and practical
+life."--_Aberdeen Journal._
+
+36. _CLIMATE AND WEATHER_
+
+By H. N. DICKSON, D.Sc. Oxon., M.A., F.R.S.E., President of the Royal
+Meteorological Society; Professor of Geography in University College,
+Reading. (With Diagrams.) "The author has succeeded in presenting in a
+very lucid and agreeable manner the causes of the movement of the
+atmosphere and of the more stable winds. The information throughout
+appears to be reliable, and is certainly conveyed in an attractive
+form."--_Manchester Guardian._
+
+41. _ANTHROPOLOGY_
+
+By R. R. MARETT, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford
+University. "An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a child could
+understand it, so fascinating and human that it beats fiction 'to a
+frazzle.'"--_Morning Leader._
+
+44. _THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY_
+
+By Prof. J. G. MCKENDRICK, M.D.
+
+46. _MATTER AND ENERGY_
+
+By F. SODDY, M.A., F.R.S.
+
+49. _PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR_
+
+By Prof. W. MCDOUGALL, F.R.S., M.B.
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_ELECTRICITY._ By Dr GISBERT KAPP.
+
+_CHEMISTRY._ By Prof. R. MELDOLA, F.R.S.
+
+_THE MAKING OF THE EARTH._ By Prof. T. W. GREGORY, F.R.S.
+
+_THE MINERAL WORLD._ By Sir T. H. HOLLAND, K.C.I.E., D.Sc.
+
+_THE HUMAN BODY._ By Dr A. KEITH, M.D., F.R.C.S.
+
+_PLANT LIFE._ By Prof. J. B. FARMER, F.R.S.
+
+
+
+
+_Philosophy and Religion_
+
+
+15. _MOHAMMEDANISM_
+
+By Prof. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.Litt. "This generous shilling's
+worth of wisdom.... A delicate, humorous, and most responsible tractate
+by an illuminative professor."--_Daily Mail._
+
+40. _THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY_
+
+By the Hon. BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S. "A book that the 'man in the
+street' will recognise at once to be a boon.... Consistently lucid and
+non-technical throughout."--_Christian World._
+
+47. _BUDDHISM_
+
+By Mrs RHYS DAVIDS, M.A.
+
+50. _NONCONFORMITY: ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS_
+
+By Principal W. B. SELBIE, M.A.
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_THE OLD TESTAMENT._ By Prof. GEORGE MOORE, D.D., LL.D.
+
+_BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS._ By R. H. CHARLES, D.D.
+
+_THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT._ By Prof. B. W. BACON, Litt.D., D.D.
+
+_COMPARATIVE RELIGION._ By Prof. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, D.Litt.
+
+_A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT._ By Prof. J. B. BURY, LL.D.
+
+_ETHICS._ By G. E. MOORE.
+
+_MISSIONS._ By Mrs CREIGHTON.
+
+
+
+
+_Social Science_
+
+
+1. _PARLIAMENT_
+
+Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir COURTENAY P. ILBERT,
+K.C.B., K.C.S.I., Clerk of the House of Commons. "The best book on the
+history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's
+'Constitution.'"--_Yorkshire Post._
+
+5. _THE STOCK EXCHANGE_
+
+By F. W. HIRST, Editor of "The Economist." "A little treatise which to
+an unfinancial mind must be a revelation.... The book is as clear,
+vigorous, and sane as Bagehot's 'Lombard Street,' than which there is no
+higher compliment."--_Morning Leader._
+
+6. _IRISH NATIONALITY_
+
+By Mrs J. R. GREEN. "As glowing as it is learned. No book could
+be more timely."--_Daily News._ "A powerful study.... A
+magnificent demonstration of the deserved vitality of the Gaelic
+spirit."--_Freeman's Journal._
+
+10. _THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT_
+
+By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P. "Admirably adapted for the purpose of
+exposition."--_The Times._ "Mr MacDonald is a very lucid exponent....
+The volume will be of great use in dispelling illusions about the
+tendencies of Socialism in this country."--_The Nation._
+
+11. _CONSERVATISM_
+
+By Lord HUGH CECIL, M.A., M.P.
+
+16. _THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH_
+
+By J. A. HOBSON, M.A. "Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among
+living economists.... The text-book produced is altogether admirable.
+Original, reasonable, and illuminating."--_The Nation._
+
+21. _LIBERALISM_
+
+By L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A., Professor of Sociology in the University of
+London. "A book of rare quality.... We have nothing but praise for the
+rapid and masterly summaries of the arguments from first principles
+which form a large part of this book."--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+24. _THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY_
+
+By D. H. MACGREGOR, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in the
+University of Leeds. "A volume so dispassionate in terms may be
+read with profit by all interested in the present state of
+unrest."--_Aberdeen Journal._
+
+26. _AGRICULTURE_
+
+By Prof. W. SOMERVILLE, F.L.S.
+
+30. _ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW_
+
+By W. M. GELDART, M.A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law at
+Oxford. "Contains a very clear account of the elementary principles
+underlying the rules of English law; and we can recommend it to all who
+wish to become acquainted with these elementary principles with a
+minimum of trouble."--_Scots Law Times._
+
+38. _THE SCHOOL_
+
+_An Introduction to the Study of Education._
+
+By J. J. FINDLAY, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in Manchester
+University. "An amazingly comprehensive volume.... It is a remarkable
+performance, distinguished in its crisp, striking phraseology as well as
+its inclusiveness of subject-matter."--_Morning Post._
+
+
+IN PREPARATION
+
+_THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES._ By Prof. PATRICK GEDDES.
+
+_ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY._ By Prof. S. J. CHAPMAN.
+
+_COMMONSENSE IN LAW._ By Prof. P. VINOGRADOFF, D.C.L.
+
+_THE CIVIL SERVICE._ By GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A.
+
+_MISSIONS._ By Mrs CREIGHTON.
+
+_PRACTICAL IDEALISM._ By MAURICE HEWLETT.
+
+_NEWSPAPERS._ By G. B. DIBBLEE.
+
+_ENGLISH VILLAGE LIFE._ By E. N. BENNETT, M.A.
+
+
+London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+_And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. Obvious
+printer errors have been corrected, and are listed below.
+
+For the chapter heading, "The Second Part of King Henry IV", the Table
+of Contents lists it as "King Henry IV, Part II"; this was not changed.
+In addition other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.
+
+Page 36: "obession is at the root" changed to "obsession is at the
+root".
+
+Page 94: "great historical play" changed to "great historical plays".
+
+Page 253: "Aegon" changed to "AEgeon".
+
+Page 256: Index entry for page 133 of "Rosaline" was moved to
+"Rosalind".
+
+Page 256: Index entry for page 92 of "York, Edmund of Langley, Duke" was
+removed.
+
+Page 262: "Py Prof. R. Medola" changed to "By Prof. R. Medola".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of William Shakespeare, by John Masefield
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ***
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