only of a romance, but of a tragedy called 'Epitia.' Before Shakespeare
wrote his play, Cinthio's romance had been twice rendered into English by
George Whetstone. Whetstone had not only given a somewhat altered
version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy play of 'Promos and
Cassandra' (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he had also freely
translated it in his collection of prose tales, 'Heptameron of Civil
Discources' (1582). Yet there is every likelihood that Shakespeare also
knew Cinthio's play, which, unlike his romance, was untranslated; the
leading character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was known by
another name to Cinthio in his story, but Cinthio in his play (and not in
his novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which doubtless
suggested Shakespeare's designation. {237} In the hands of Shakespeare's
predecessors the tale is a sordid record of lust and cruelty. But
Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the
narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he
not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and
moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions
Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother's life. The
central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and
unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare's alterations, like the
Duke's abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily conceived. But
his creation of the pathetic character of Mariana 'of the moated
grange'--the legally affianced bride of Angelo, Isabella's would-be
seducer--skilfully excludes the possibility of a settlement (as in the
old stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of marriage.
Shakespeare's argument is throughout philosophically subtle. The poetic
eloquence in which Isabella and the Duke pay homage to the virtue of
chastity, and the many expositions of the corruption with which unchecked
sexual passion threatens society, alternate with coarsely comic
interludes which suggest the vanity of seeking to efface natural
instincts by the coercion of law. There is little in the play that seems
designed to recommend it to the Court before which it was first
performed. But the two emphatic references to a ruler's dislike of mobs,
despite his love of his people, were perhaps penned in deferential
allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was notorious. In act i. sc.
i. 67-72 the Duke remarks:
I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement.
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it.
Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act ii. sc. iv. 27-30):
The general [_i.e._ the public], subject to a well-wish'd king, . . .
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love
Must needs appear offence.
'Macbeth.'
In 'Macbeth,' his 'great epic drama,' which he began in 1605 and
completed next year, Shakespeare employed a setting wholly in harmony
with the accession of a Scottish king. The story was drawn from
Holinshed's 'Chronicle of Scottish History,' with occasional reference,
perhaps, to earlier Scottish sources. {239} The supernatural machinery
of the three witches accorded with the King's superstitious faith in
demonology; the dramatist lavished his sympathy on Banquo, James's
ancestor; while Macbeth's vision of kings who carry 'twofold balls and
treble sceptres' (iv. i. 20) plainly adverted to the union of Scotland
with England and Ireland under James's sway. The allusion by the porter
(ii. iii. 9) to the 'equivocator . . . who committed treason' was perhaps
suggested by the notorious defence of the doctrine of equivocation made
by the Jesuit Henry Garnett, who was executed early in 1606 for his share
in the 'Gunpowder Plot.' The piece was not printed until 1623. It is in
its existing shape by far the shortest of all Shakespeare's tragedies,
('Hamlet' is nearly twice as long) and it is possible that it survives
only in an abbreviated acting version. Much scenic elaboration
characterised the production. Dr. Simon Forman witnessed a performance
of the tragedy at the Globe in April 1611, and noted that Macbeth and
Banquo entered the stage on horseback, and that Banquo's ghost was
materially represented (iii. iv. 40 seq.) Like 'Othello,' the play ranks
with the noblest tragedies either of the modern or the ancient world.
The characters of hero and heroine--Macbeth and his wife--are depicted
with the utmost subtlety and insight. In three points 'Macbeth' differs
somewhat from other of Shakespeare's productions in the great class of
literature to which it belongs. The interweaving with the tragic story
of supernatural interludes in which Fate is weirdly personified is not
exactly matched in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. In the second
place, the action proceeds with a rapidity that is wholly without
parallel in the rest of Shakespeare's plays. Nowhere, moreover, has
Shakespeare introduced comic relief into a tragedy with bolder effect
than in the porter's speech after the murder of Duncan (II. iii. I seq.)
The theory that this passage was from another hand does not merit
acceptance. {240} It cannot, however, be overlooked that the second
scene of the first act--Duncan's interview with the 'bleeding
sergeant'--falls so far below the style of the rest of the play as to
suggest that it was an interpolation by a hack of the theatre. The
resemblances between Thomas Middleton's later play of 'The Witch' (1610)
and portions of 'Macbeth' may safely be ascribed to plagiarism on
Middleton's part. Of two songs which, according to the stage directions,
were to be sung during the representation of 'Macbeth' (III. v. and IV.
i.), only the first line of each is noted there, but songs beginning with
the same lines are set out in full in Middleton's play; they were
probably by Middleton, and were interpolated by actors in a stage version
of 'Macbeth' after its original production.
'King Lear.'
'King Lear,' in which Shakespeare's tragic genius moved without any
faltering on Titanic heights, was written during 1606, and was produced
before the Court at Whitehall on the night of December 26 of that year.
{241a} It was entered on the 'Stationers' Registers' on November 26,
1607, and two imperfect editions, published by Nathaniel Butter, appeared
in the following year; neither exactly corresponds with the other or with
the improved and fairly satisfactory text of the Folio. The three
versions present three different playhouse transcripts. Like its
immediate predecessor, 'Macbeth,' the tragedy was mainly founded on
Holinshed's 'Chronicle.' The leading theme had been dramatised as early
as 1593, but Shakespeare's attention was no doubt directed to it by the
publication of a crude dramatic adaptation of Holinshed's version in 1605
under the title of 'The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three
Daughters--Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella.' Shakespeare did not adhere
closely to his original. He invested the tale of Lear with a hopelessly
tragic conclusion, and on it he grafted the equally distressing tale of
Gloucester and his two sons, which he drew from Sidney's 'Arcadia.'
{241b} Hints for the speeches of Edgar when feigning madness were drawn
from Harsnet's 'Declaration of Popish Impostures,' 1603. In every act of
'Lear' the pity and terror of which tragedy is capable reach their
climax. Only one who has something of the Shakespearean gift of language
could adequately characterise the scenes of agony--'the living
martyrdom'--to which the fiendish ingratitude of his daughters condemns
the abdicated king--'a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward.'
The elemental passions burst forth in his utterances with all the
vehemence of the volcanic tempest which beats about his defenceless head
in the scene on the heath. The brutal blinding of Gloucester by Cornwall
exceeds in horror any other situation that Shakespeare created, if we
assume that he was not responsible for the like scenes of mutilation in
'Titus Andronicus.' At no point in 'Lear' is there any loosening of the
tragic tension. The faithful half-witted lad who serves the king as his
fool plays the jesting chorus on his master's fortunes in penetrating
earnest and deepens the desolating pathos.
'Timon of Athens.'
Although Shakespeare's powers showed no sign of exhaustion, he reverted
in the year following the colossal effort of 'Lear' (1607) to his earlier
habit of collaboration, and with another's aid composed two
dramas--'Timon of Athens' and 'Pericles.' An extant play on the subject
of 'Timon of Athens' was composed in 1600, {242} but there is nothing to
show that Shakespeare and his coadjutor were acquainted with it. They
doubtless derived a part of their story from Painter's 'Palace of
Pleasure,' and from a short digression in Plutarch's 'Life of Marc
Antony,' where Antony is described as emulating the life and example of
'Timon Misanthropos the Athenian.' The dramatists may, too, have known a
dialogue of Lucian entitled 'Timon,' which Boiardo had previously
converted into a comedy under the name of 'Il Timone.' Internal evidence
makes it clear that Shakespeare's colleague was responsible for nearly
the whole of acts III. and V. But the character of Timon himself and all
the scenes which he dominates are from Shakespeare's pen. Timon is cast
in the mould of Lear.
'Pericles.'
There seems some ground for the belief that Shakespeare's coadjutor in
'Timon' was George Wilkins, a writer of ill-developed dramatic power,
who, in 'The Miseries of Enforced Marriage' (1607), first treated the
story that afterwards served for the plot of 'The Yorkshire Tragedy.' At
any rate, Wilkins may safely be credited with portions of 'Pericles,' a
romantic play which can be referred to the same year as 'Timon.'
Shakespeare contributed only acts III. and V. and parts of IV., which
together form a self-contained whole, and do not combine satisfactorily
with the remaining scenes. The presence of a third hand, of inferior
merit to Wilkins, has been suspected, and to this collaborator (perhaps
William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays who could show capacity
on occasion) are best assigned the three scenes of purposeless coarseness
which take place in or before a brothel (IV. ii., v. and vi.) From so
distributed a responsibility the piece naturally suffers. It lacks
homogeneity, and the story is helped out by dumb shows and prologues.
But a matured felicity of expression characterises Shakespeare's own
contributions, narrating the romantic quest of Pericles for his daughter
Marina, who was born and abandoned in a shipwreck. At many points he
here anticipated his latest dramatic effects. The shipwreck is depicted
(IV. i.) as impressively as in the 'Tempest,' and Marina and her mother
Thaisa enjoy many experiences in common with Perdita and Hermione in the
'Winter's Tale.' The prologues, which were not by Shakespeare, were
spoken by an actor representing the mediaeval poet John Gower, who in the
fourteenth century had versified Pericles's story in his 'Confessio
Amantis' under the title of 'Apollonius of Tyre.' It is also found in a
prose translation (from the French), which was printed in Lawrence
Twyne's 'Patterne of Painfull Adventures' in 1576, and again in 1607.
After the play was produced, George Wilkins, one of the alleged
coadjutors, based on it a novel called 'The Painful Adventures of
Pericles, Prynce of Tyre, being the True History of the Play of Pericles
as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet, John Gower'
(1608). The play was issued as by William Shakespeare in a mangled form
in 1608, and again in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was not included in
Shakespeare's collected works till 1664.
'Antony and Cleopatra.'
In May 1608 Edward Blount entered in the 'Stationers' Registers,' by the
authority of Sir George Buc, the licenser of plays, 'a booke called
"Anthony and Cleopatra."' No copy of this date is known, and once again
the company probably hindered the publication. The play was first
printed in the folio of 1623. The source of the tragedy is the life of
Antonius in North's 'Plutarch.' Shakespeare closely followed the
historical narrative, and assimilated not merely its temper, but, in the
first three acts, much of its phraseology. A few short scenes are
original, but there is no detail in such a passage, for example, as
Enobarbus's gorgeous description of the pageant of Cleopatra's voyage up
the Cydnus to meet Antony (II. ii. 194 seq.), which is not to be matched
in Plutarch. In the fourth and fifth acts Shakespeare's method changes
and he expands his material with magnificent freedom. {245} The whole
theme is in his hands instinct with a dramatic grandeur which lifts into
sublimity even Cleopatra's moral worthlessness and Antony's criminal
infatuation. The terse and caustic comments which Antony's level-headed
friend Enobarbus, in the role of chorus, passes on the action accentuate
its significance. Into the smallest as into the greatest personages
Shakespeare breathed all his vitalising fire. The 'happy valiancy' of
the style, too--to use Coleridge's admirable phrase--sets the tragedy
very near the zenith of Shakespeare's achievement, and while
differentiating it from 'Macbeth,' 'Othello,' and 'Lear,' renders it a
very formidable rival.
'Coriolanus.'
'Coriolanus' (first printed from a singularly bad text in 1623) similarly
owes its origin to the biography of the hero in North's 'Plutarch,'
although Shakespeare may have first met the story in Painter's 'Palace of
Pleasure' (No. iv.) He again adhered to the text of Plutarch with the
utmost literalness, and at times--even in the great crises of the
action--repeated North's translation word for word. {246} But the
humorous scenes are wholly of Shakespeare's invention, and the course of
the narrative was at times slightly changed for purposes of dramatic
effect. The metrical characteristics prove the play to have been written
about the same period as 'Antony and Cleopatra,' probably in 1609. In
its austere temper it contrasts at all points with its predecessor. The
courageous self-reliance of Coriolanus's mother, Volumnia, is severely
contrasted with the submissive gentleness of Virgilia, Coriolanus's wife.
The hero falls a victim to no sensual flaw, but to unchecked pride of
caste, and there is a searching irony in the emphasis laid on the ignoble
temper of the rabble, who procure his overthrow. By way of foil, the
speeches of Menenius give dignified expression to the maturest political
wisdom. The dramatic interest throughout is as single and as
unflaggingly sustained as in 'Othello.'
XV--THE LATEST PLAYS
The latest plays.
In 'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest,' the three latest
plays that came from his unaided pen, Shakespeare dealt with romantic
themes which all end happily, but he instilled into them a pathos which
sets them in a category of their own apart alike from comedy and tragedy.
The placidity of tone conspicuous in these three plays (none of which was
published in his lifetime) has been often contrasted with the storm and
stress of the great tragedies that preceded them. But the commonly
accepted theory that traces in this change of tone a corresponding
development in the author's own emotions ignores the objectivity of
Shakespeare's dramatic work. All phases of feeling lay within the scope
of his intuition, and the successive order in which he approached them
bore no explicable relation to substantive incident in his private life
or experience. In middle life, his temperament, like that of other men,
acquired a larger measure of gravity and his thought took a profounder
cast than characterised it in youth. The highest topics of tragedy were
naturally more congenial to him, and were certain of a surer handling
when he was nearing his fortieth birthday than at an earlier age. The
serenity of meditative romance was more in harmony with the fifth decade
of his years than with the second or third. But no more direct or
definite connection can be discerned between the progressive stages of
his work and the progressive stages of his life. To seek in his
biography for a chain of events which should be calculated to stir in his
own soul all or any of the tempestuous passions that animate his greatest
plays is to under-estimate and to misapprehend the resistless might of
his creative genius.
'Cymbeline.'
In 'Cymbeline' Shakespeare freely adapted a fragment of British history
taken from Holinshed, interweaving with it a story from Boccaccio's
'Decameron' (day 2, novel ix.) Ginevra, whose falsely suspected chastity
is the theme of the Italian novel, corresponds to Shakespeare's Imogen.
Her story is also told in the tract called 'Westward for Smelts,' which
had already been laid under contribution by Shakespeare in the 'Merry
Wives.' {249} The by-plot of the banishment of the lord, Belarius, who
in revenge for his expatriation kidnapped the king's young sons and
brought them up with him in the recesses of the mountains, is
Shakespeare's invention. Although most of the scenes are laid in Britain
in the first century before the Christian era, there is no pretence of
historical vraisemblance. With an almost ludicrous inappropriateness the
British king's courtiers make merry with technical terms peculiar to
Calvinistic theology, like 'grace' and 'election.' {250} The action,
which, owing to the combination of three threads of narrative, is
exceptionally varied and intricate, wholly belongs to the region of
romance. On Imogen, who is the central figure of the play, Shakespeare
lavished all the fascination of his genius. She is the crown and flower
of his conception of tender and artless womanhood. Her husband
Posthumus, her rejected lover Cloten, her would-be seducer Iachimo are
contrasted with her and with each other with consummate ingenuity. The
mountainous retreat in which Belarius and his fascinating boy-companions
play their part has points of resemblance to the Forest of Arden in 'As
You Like It;' but life throughout 'Cymbeline' is grimly earnest, and the
mountains nurture little of the contemplative quiet which characterises
existence in the Forest of Arden. The play contains the splendid lyric
'Fear no more the heat of the sun' (IV. ii. 258 seq.) The 'pitiful
mummery' of the vision of Posthumus (V. iv. 30 seq.) must have been
supplied by another hand. Dr. Forman, the astrologer who kept notes of
some of his experiences as a playgoer, saw 'Cymbeline' acted either in
1610 or 1611.
'A Winter's Tale.'
'A Winter's Tale' was seen by Dr. Forman at the Globe on May 15, 1611,
and it appears to have been acted at court on November 5 following.
{251a} It is based upon Greene's popular romance which was called
'Pandosto' in the first edition of 1588, and in numerous later editions,
but was ultimately in 1648 re-christened 'Dorastus and Fawnia.'
Shakespeare followed Greene, his early foe, in allotting a seashore to
Bohemia--an error over which Ben Jonson and many later critics have made
merry. {251b} A few lines were obviously drawn from that story of
Boccaccio with which Shakespeare had dealt just before in 'Cymbeline.'
{251c} But Shakespeare created the high-spirited Paulina and the
thievish pedlar Autolycus, whose seductive roguery has become proverbial,
and he invented the reconciliation of Leontes, the irrationally jealous
husband, with Hermione, his wife, whose dignified resignation and
forbearance lend the story its intense pathos. In the boy Mamilius, the
poet depicted childhood in its most attractive guise, while the courtship
of Florizel and Perdita is the perfection of gentle romance. The
freshness of the pastoral incident surpasses that of all Shakespeare's
presentations of country life.
'Tempest.'
'The Tempest' was probably the latest drama that Shakespeare completed.
In the summer of 1609 a fleet bound for Virginia, under the command of
Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, and the
admiral's ship, the 'Sea-Venture,' was driven on the coast of the
hitherto unknown Bermuda Isles. There they remained ten months,
pleasurably impressed by the mild beauty of the climate, but sorely tried
by the hogs which overran the island and by mysterious noises which led
them to imagine that spirits and devils had made the island their home.
Somers and his men were given up for lost, but they escaped from Bermuda
in two boats of cedar to Virginia in May 1610, and the news of their
adventures and of their safety was carried to England by some of the
seamen in September 1610. The sailors' arrival created vast public
excitement in London. At least five accounts were soon published of the
shipwreck and of the mysterious island, previously uninhabited by man,
which had proved the salvation of the expedition. 'A Discovery of the
Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels,' written by Sylvester
Jourdain or Jourdan, one of the survivors, appeared as early as October.
A second pamphlet describing the disaster was issued by the Council of
the Virginia Company in December, and a third by one of the leaders of
the expedition, Sir Thomas Gates. Shakespeare, who mentions the 'still
vexed Bermoothes' (I. i. 229), incorporated in 'The Tempest' many hints
from Jourdain, Gates, and the other pamphleteers. The references to the
gentle climate of the island on which Prospero is cast away, and to the
spirits and devils that infested it, seem to render its identification
with the newly discovered Bermudas unquestionable. But Shakespeare
incorporated the result of study of other books of travel. The name of
the god Setebos whom Caliban worships is drawn from Eden's translation of
Magellan's 'Voyage to the South Pole' (in the 'Historie of Travell,'
1577), where the giants of Patagonia are described as worshipping a
'great devil they call Setebos.' No source for the complete plot has
been discovered, but the German writer, Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605,
dramatised a somewhat similar story in 'Die schone Sidea,' where the
adventures of Prospero, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Miranda are roughly
anticipated. {253a} English actors were performing at Nuremberg, where
Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and may have brought reports of the piece
to Shakespeare. Or perhaps both English and German plays had a common
origin in some novel that has not yet been traced. Gonzalo's description
of an ideal commonwealth (II. i. 147 seq.) is derived from Florio's
translation of Montaigne's essays (1603), while into Prospero's great
speech renouncing his practice of magical art (V. i. 33-57) Shakespeare
wrought reminiscences of Golding's translation of Medea's invocation in
Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (vii. 197-206). {253b} Golding's rendering of
Ovid had been one of Shakespeare's best-loved books in youth.
A highly ingenious theory, first suggested by Tieck, represents 'The
Tempest' (which, excepting the 'The Comedy of Errors,' is the shortest of
Shakespeare's plays) as a masque written to celebrate the marriage of
Princess Elizabeth (like Miranda, an island-princess) with the Elector
Frederick. This marriage took place on February 14, 1612-13, and 'The
Tempest' formed one of a series of nineteen plays which were performed at
the nuptial festivities in May 1613. But none of the other plays
produced seem to have been new; they were all apparently chosen because
they were established favourites at Court and on the public stage, and
neither in subject-matter nor language bore obviously specific relation
to the joyous occasion. But 1613 is, in fact, on more substantial ground
far too late a date to which to assign the composition of 'The Tempest.'
According to information which was accessible to Malone, the play had 'a
being and a name' in the autumn of 1611, and was no doubt written some
months before. {254} The plot, which revolves about the forcible
expulsion of a ruler from his dominions, and his daughter's wooing by the
son of the usurper's chief ally, is, moreover, hardly one that a shrewd
playwright would deliberately choose as the setting of an official
epithalamium in honour of the daughter of a monarch so sensitive about
his title to the crown as James I. {255a}