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.