CHAPTER XIII_An Introduction to Shakespeare

THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD--ROMANTIC TRAGI-COMEDY

No less clear than the interest in tragic themes which attracted the

London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the

shifting of popular approval towards a new form of drama about 1608.

This was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which puts a theme

of sentimental interest into events and situations that come close to

the tragic. Shakespeare's plays of this type are often called

romances, since they tell a story of the same type found in romantic

novels of the time. His plays contain rather less of the tragic, and

more of fanciful and playful humor than do the plays of the other

famous masters in this type, Beaumont and Fletcher; his characters are

rather more lifelike and appealing.

While the tragi-comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, which were written

from 1609 to 1611, have been shown to have influenced Shakespeare in

his romances, yet in several ways they are very different. The work of

Beaumont and Fletcher tells of court intrigue and exaggerated passions

of hatred, envy, and lust; Shakespeare's plays tell of out-of-door

adventures, and the restoration and reconciliation of families and

friends parted by misfortune. Fletcher contrives {197}

well-constructed plots, depending, indeed, rather too much on incident

and situation for effect; Shakespeare chooses for his plots stories

which possess only slight unity of theme, and depends upon character

and atmosphere for his appeal. Thus the romances of Shakespeare stand

out as a strongly marked part of his work, different in treatment from

the plays of his rivals which perhaps suggested his use of this form.

Here, as everywhere, Shakespeare exhibits complete mastery of the form

in which he works.

In addition to the romances of this period, Shakespeare had some share

in the undramatic and belated chronicle play, _The Life of Henry the

Eighth_, most of which is assigned to John Fletcher. In looseness of

construction, in the emphasis on character in distress, and in the

introduction of a masque, as well as in other ways, this play resembles

the tragi-comedies of the period rather than any earlier chronicle.

Thus the term "romantic tragi-comedy" may be properly used to describe

all the work of the Fourth Period.

+Pericles, Prince of Tyre+, was probably the earliest, as it is

certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances. But the story was one

of the most popular in all fiction, and _Pericles_ was, no doubt, in

its time what its first title-page claimed for it, a 'much-admired

play.' Its hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by storm

and misfortune from one shore to another. The five acts which tell his

adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great

surges of good and ill luck. The significance of his daughter's name,

Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea

is not only her birthplace, but is the {198} symbol throughout of

Fortune and Romance. From the polluted coast of Antioch, where

Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where

he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis,

where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand

of the Princess Thaisa, the waves of chance carry the Prince. They

overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives

him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thaisa safely to

land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina

from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene. Here,

upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter;

and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind

influence of Diana, their goddess. We are never far from the sound of

the shore, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell

of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."

_Pericles_ in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a

dramatic romance. The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have

had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective. To help out the stage

action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval

poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts. He was supplemented, when his

affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw

clutched at by the desperate playwright. But at the beginning of Act

III the master's music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are

lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles

speaks to the storm at sea:--

{199}

"Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges

Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast

Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,

Having call'd them from the deep! ...

The seaman's whistle

Is as a whisper in the ears of death,

Unheard."

In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which anticipate the

similar scene in _The Tempest_; in the character of Marina, girlish and

fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are

scarcely less potent than Prospero's; in the grieving Pericles, who,

like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his

wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the

dramatic romances which are to follow. Throughout all this Shakespeare

is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina's misery in

Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting

nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's

speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of

her character.

+Authorship and Date+.--The play was entered to Edward Blount in the

Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608. It was probably written but little

before. Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was

not included among Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio (1664).

The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground

that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the

printing rights. The former of these hypotheses is generally favored,

since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work

of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier

speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play. In 1608 a novel was {200}

published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately

presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower." The author was

George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability. He is generally accepted

as Shakespeare's collaborator. The claims of William Rowley for a

share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.

Source.--Shakespeare used Gower's _Confessio Amantis_, and the version

in Laurence Twine's _Pattern of Painful Adventures_, 1606. The tale is

also in the _Gesta Romanorum_.

+Cymbeline+.--"A father cruel, and a step-dame false,

A foolish suitor to a wedded lady,

That hath her husband banish'd."

Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline,

king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the

story. The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her

fidelity under this affliction. Neither her father's anger, nor the

stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her

brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous

Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her

own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her

slain, shake in the least degree her true affection. Such constancy

cannot fail of its reward, and in the end Imogen wins back both father

and husband.

In such a story, where virtue's self is made to shine, other characters

must of necessity suffer. Posthumus, Imogen's husband, appears weak

and impulsive, foolish in making his wife's constancy a matter for

wagers, and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her. His weakness

is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant fight in defense of his

native Britain, and by his {201} outburst of genuine shame and remorse

when perception of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him.

Cymbeline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, with none

of his tenderness. The wicked Queen and her son are purely wicked.

Only the faithful servant, Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in

this court group.

But in the exiled noble Belarius, and the two sons of Cymbeline whom he

has stolen in infancy and brought up with him in a wild life in the

mountains, single-hearted nobility rules. When Imogen, disguised as a

page, in her flight from the court to Posthumus comes upon them, there

is the instant sympathy of noble minds, and there is a brief respite

from her misfortunes. They rid her of the troublesome Cloten, and

their victory over Rome brings to book the intriguing Iachimo and

accomplishes her final recovery of love and honor. A reading of the

play leaves as the brightest picture upon the memory their joy at

meeting Imogen, and their grief when the potion she drinks robs them of

her. In them we find expressed that noble simplicity which

romanticists have always associated with true children of nature.

To Imogen, who has a far longer part to play than any other of

Shakespeare's heroines, the poet has also given a completer

characterization, in which every charm of the highest type of woman is

delineated. The one trait which a too censorious audience might

criticize, that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes Chaucer's

patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to modern readers, is in

Imogen completely redeemed by her resolution in the face of danger, and

by a certain {202} imperiousness which well becomes the daughter of a

king.

+Authorship+.--Some later hand probably made up the vision of Posthumus

(V, iv, 30-90), where a series of irregular stanzas of inferior

poetical merit are inserted to form "an apparition."

+Date+.--Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 1611,

describes the performance of _Cymbeline_ at which he was present. The

entry occurs between those telling of _Macbeth_ (April 20, 1610) and

_The Winter's Tale_ (May 15, 1611). The tests of verse assign it also

to this period. The first print was that of the First Folio, 1623.

+Source+.--From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual

historical fact in the play, that one Cunobelinus was an ancient king

of Britain. Cymbeline's two sons are likewise from Holinshed, as is

the rout of an army by a countryman and his two sons; but the two

stories are separate. The ninth novel of the second day of the

_Decameron_ of Boccaccio tells a story much resembling the part of the

play which concerns Posthumus. The play called _The Rare Triumphs of

Love and Fortune_ (1589) contains certain characters not unlike Imogen,

Posthumus, Belarius, and Cloten. Fidelia, Imogen's name in disguise,

is the heroine's name. But direct borrowing cannot be proved.

+The Winter's Tale+.--Nowhere is Shakespeare more lavish of his powers

of characterization and of poetic treatment of life than in this play.

He found for his plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true

queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband's friend, dies of

grief at the death of her son, while her infant daughter, abandoned to

the seas in a boat, grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the

king of whom her father had been jealous. Disregarding the essentially

undramatic nature of the story, as well as its improbabilities, he

achieved a signal {203} triumph of his art in the creation of his two

heroines, and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh,

joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of convention.

In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme portrait of woman's

fortitude. Hermione is brave, not by nature, but inspired by high

resolve for her honor and for her children. Nobly indignant at the

slanders uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the slanderer in

pity for the blindness of unreason which has caused his action.

Shakespeare's dramatic instinct made him alter Hermione's death in the

earlier story to life in secret, with poetic justice in store.

Artificial as the long period of waiting seems, before the final

reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the magnificent appeal

of the mother's love when the lost daughter kneels in joy before her.

In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, depicted the true

daughter of such a mother. Although her nature at first seems all

innocence, beauty, youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the

knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king's son, and that his

father has discovered it, her courage rises with the danger, and her

words echo her mother's resolution:--

"I think affliction may subdue the cheek,

But not take in the mind."

In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English sheepshearing,

with its merrymaking, a pair of honest English country fellows in the

old shepherd and his son, the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved

vagabonds {204} in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff's,

are more lovable than other people's virtues. Fortune, which will not

suffer him to be honest, makes his thieveries, in her extremity of

whim, to be but benefits for others.

Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita's lover, is that

rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of

soul. Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty

and devotion. Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in

the violence of his jealousy. As the study of a mind overborne by an

obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.

+Date+.--Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the

Globe Theater, May 16, 1611. It was probably written about this time.

Jonson's _Masque of Oberon_, produced January 1, 1611, contains an

antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance

in IV, iv, 331 ff. The First Folio contains the earliest print of the

play.

+Source+.--The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the

source of _The Winter's Tale_, was Robert Greene's _Pandosto: The

Triumph of Time_, sometimes called by its later title, _The History of

Dorastus and Fawnia_. Fourteen editions followed one another from its

appearance in 1588. Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia,

and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily. In _The Winter's

Tale_ two kingdoms are interchanged. Nevertheless the "seacoast of

Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, is found

in Greene's story. Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital

importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive,

instead of dying in grief for her son's death, to be restored again in

the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is

given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita;

and the complications of {205} Dorastus's (Florizel's) destiny as the

prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's

(Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on

learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted. The characters of

Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own

invention.

According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1

ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in

Robert Wilson's _Three Ladies of London_ (1584).

+The Tempest+, probably the last complete drama from Shakespeare's pen,

differs from the other "romances" in possessing a singular unity. It

comes, indeed closer than any play, save the _Comedy of Errors_, to

fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and place. This may

be due to the fact that the poet is here making up his own plot, not,

as in other cases, dramatizing a novel of extended adventure.

The central theme of _The Tempest_ is, like that of the other romances,

restoration of those exiled and reconciliation of those at enmity; but

the treatment of the story could not be more different. Where the

chance of fortune has hitherto brought about the happy ending, here

magic and the supernatural in control of man are the means employed.

Those who had plotted or connived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of

Milan, and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his infant

daughter and his books for company, are wrecked through his art upon

the island of which he has become the master. Ariel, the spirit who

serves Prospero, a mysterious, ever changing form, now fire, now a

Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a Harpy, striking guilt into the

conscience (and yet apparently not interested in either vice or virtue,

but {206} longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prospero's

cave, and receives freedom for his toil. His spirit pervades every

scene, whether we view the king's son Ferdinand loving innocent

Miranda, or the silent king mourning his son's loss, or the guilty

conspirators plotting the king's death, or the drunken steward and

jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the overthrow of

Prospero. All of them are led, by the wisdom of Prospero acting

through Ariel, away from their own wrong impulses, and into

reconcilement and peace. How much of _The Tempest_ Shakespeare meant

as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere

the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the

dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.

There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is

inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare's own voice. In

one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and

compares life itself to the transitory play. In the other, Prospero

bids farewell to his magic art. These are often interpreted as

Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage and to his art,--with what

justification every reader must decide for himself.

In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint

of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty. The falling in

love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and

nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the

creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge

of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,--all these

are the work of {207} a genius still in the full pride of power.

Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in

the evening."

+Date+.--Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the

play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611. The play certainly

is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609. It was acted during

the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other

plays were revived.

+Sources+.--Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey

told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda

Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in

1609. From these Shakespeare drew for many details. His island,

however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land. Other

details have been traced from various sources. Ariel is a name of a

spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne's

_Essays_, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's

imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a

devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's _History of Travaile_ (1577).

The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably

Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose

daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who

through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from

some old folk tale; since a German play, _Die Schoene Sidea_, by Jakob

Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details. The

relations, if any, between the two plays are remote.

+The Life of Henry the Eighth+, the last of the historical plays, in

date of composition as in the history it pictures, suffers from the

very fact that it boasts in its second title, _All is True_. The play

might have been built around any one of the half-dozen persons which in

turn claim our chief interest,--Buckingham, Queen Katherine, Anne

Bullen; the King, Wolsey, or {208} Cranmer; but fidelity to history,

while it did not hinder some slight alteration of incident and time,

required that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a

complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to be given. The

result was a complete abandonment of anything like unity of theme.

It is, of course, a disappointment to one who has just read _I Henry

IV_. On the other hand, this play may be regarded as a kind of

pageant, as the word is used nowadays in England and America. It

presents, in the manner of a modern pageant, a series of brilliant

scenes telling of Buckingham's fall, of Wolsey's triumph and ruin, of

Katherine's trial and death, of Anne Bullen's coronation, and of

Cranmer's advancement, joined together by the well-drawn character of

the King, powerful, masterful, selfish, and vindictive, but not without

a suggestion of better qualities. The gayety of the Masque, in the

first act, where King Henry first meets Anne Bullen, is also in perfect

harmony with the modern pageant, which always employs music and dancing

as aids to the picture.

In Queen Katherine we have a suffering and wronged woman, gifted with

queenly grace and dignity, and with strong sympathies and a keen sense

of justice. From her first entrance, when she ventures, Esther-like,

into the presence of the king to intercede for an oppressed people,

through all her vain struggle against the King's wayward inclination

and the Cardinal's wiles, up to the very moment when she is stricken

with mortal illness, she holds our sympathy. If in her great trial

scene she is weaker and more impulsive than Hermione in hers, yet the

circumstances are {209} different; she is not keyed up to so high an

endeavor as that lady, nor in so much danger for herself or her

children.

+Authorship+.--Differences in style and meter, and the fragmentary

quality of the whole play have long confirmed the theory that

Shakespeare in _Henry VIII_ engaged in a very loose sort of

collaboration. Only the Buckingham scene (I, i,), the scenes of

Katherine's entrance and trial (I, ii, II, iv), a brief scene of Anne

Bullen (II, iii), and the first half of the scene in which Wolsey's

schemes are exposed and Henry alienated from him (III, i, 1-203) are

confidently ascribed to Shakespeare. The rest of the play fits best

the style and metrical habit of John Fletcher, at this time one of the