It was even before his accession that we detected, in _Hamlet_, the

first glance in the direction of James. The accentuation of Hamlet's

relations with the players is not without its acknowledgments and

appeal to the Scottish monarch. In _Measure for Measure_ the stress

laid upon the Duke's doubly careful watch over all that transpires

in Vienna during the apparent neglect of his absence was undoubtedly

intended to excuse James's somewhat cowardly desertion of London,

immediately after his coronation, for the whole time the plague raged

there. We find this feeling again in _Coriolanus_, and again in _The

Tempest_, which was written for the wedding festivities of the Princess

Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, and which contains, under cover of

the sagacious Prospero, many subtle and dainty, but utterly undeserved,

compliments to the wise and learned King James. There is a striking

analogy between the relations of Molière to Louis XIV. and those of

Shakespeare to his king. Both great men had the religious prejudices of

the people against them; both, as poets of the royal theatre, had to

make some show of subservience, but Molière could feel a more sincere

admiration for his Louis than could Shakespeare for his James.

In an otherwise masterly review of _The Tempest_ in the _Universal

Review_ for 1889, Richard Garnett has called _Coriolanus_ a reflection

of a Conservative's view of James's struggle with the Parliament. This

is an exaggeration, which leads him to raise the question as to whether

the play owed its origin to the first conflict with the House, or the

second in 1614. He pronounces for the latter, and thus arrives at an

opinion, held by himself alone, that _Coriolanus_ was Shakespeare's

last work.

The argument on which he bases this view proves, on closer inspection,

to be entirely worthless. Some lines in the fifth Act (sc. 5) run as

follows:

"Think with thyself

How much more unfortunate than all living women

Are we come thither."

In the older editions of North's translations of Plutarch (1595 and

1603) it stands thus: "How much more _unfortunately_ than all the women

living," the form _unfortunate_ of the tragedy not appearing until the

edition of 1612. This circumstance was detected by Halliwell-Phillips,

and led him and Garnett to the conclusion that Shakespeare used the

edition of 1612, and cannot therefore have written his drama before

that year. When we consider how very slight the deviation is, and

how it was practically necessitated by the metre, we see what a

poor criterion it is of the date of production. Moreover, precisely

the opposite conclusion might be drawn from a comparison of North's

translation with other details of the play. In the fourth Act (sc. 5)

we find, for example:

"----For if

I had feared death, of all men i' the world

I would have Voided thee; but _in mere spite_

To be quit of those my banishers

Stand I before thee here."

In the 1579 and 1595 editions of North it stands thus: "For if I had

feared death, I would not have come thither to have put myself in

hazard, but prickt forward _with spite_"

In all later editions the italicised words are omitted, "with desire

to be revenged" being substituted in their stead. According to this

method, a very much earlier date might be assumed for _Coriolanus_, but

both arguments are equally worthless.

We have, therefore, no occasion to abandon 1608 on that ground,

and we have certainly no need to do so for the sake of a fanciful

approximation of the position of Coriolanus to that of James at the

dissolution of Parliament in 1614.

Thus much, at any rate, can be declared with absolute certainty, that

the anti-democratic spirit and passion of the play sprang from no

momentary political situation, but from Shakespeare's heart of hearts.

We have watched its growth with the passing of years. A detestation of

the mob, a positive hatred of the mass as mass, can be traced in the

faltering efforts of his early youth. We may see its workings in what

is undoubtedly Shakespeare's own description of Jack Cade's rebellion

in the _Second Part of Henry VI_, and we divine it again in the

conspicuous absence of all allusion to Magna Charta displayed in _King

John_.

We have already stated that Shakespeare's aristocratic contempt for

the mob had its root in a purely physical aversion for the atmosphere

of the "people." We need but to glance through his works to find the

proof of it. In the _Second Part of Henry VI_. (Act iv. sc. 7) Dick

entreats Cade "that the laws of England may come out of his mouth;"

whereupon Smith remarks aside: "It will be stinking law; for his breath

stinks with eating toasted cheese." And again in Casca's description

of Cæsar's demeanour when he refuses the crown at the Lupercalian

festival: "He put it the third time by, and still he refused it; the

rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands, and threw up their

sweaty nightcaps, and _uttered such a deal of stinking breath_ because

Cæsar refused the crown, that it had almost choked Cæsar; for he

swooned and fell down at it: and for mine own part, I durst not laugh

for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air" (_Julius Cæsar_,

Act i. sc. 2).

Also the words in which Cleopatra (in the last scene of the play)

expresses her horror of being taken in Octavius Cæsar's triumph to Rome:

"Now, Iras, what thinkest thou?

Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown

In Rome as well as I: mechanic slaves,

With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall

Uplift us to the view; _in their thick breaths,"_

_Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclosed_

_And forced to drink their vapour._"

All Shakespeare's principal characters display this shrinking from the

mob, although motives of interest may induce them to keep it concealed.

When Richard II., having banished Bolingbroke, describes the latter's

farewell to the people, he says (_Richard II_., Act i. sc. 4):

"Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green,

Observed his courtship to the common people;

How did he seem to dive into their hearts

With humble and familiar courtesy,

Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smile

And patient underbearing of his fortune,

As 'twere to banish their effects with him.

Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench,

A brace of draymen bid God-speed him well,

And had the tribute of his supple knee,

With 'Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends.'"

The number of these passages proves that it was, in plain words, their

evil smell which repelled Shakespeare. He was the true artist in this

respect too, and more sensitive to noxious fumes than any woman. At

the present period of his life this particular distaste has grown to a

violent aversion. The good qualities and virtues of the people do not

exist for him; he believes their sufferings to be either imaginary or

induced by their own faults. Their struggles are ridiculous to him, and

their rights a fiction; their true characteristics are accessibility to

flattery and ingratitude towards their benefactors; and their only real

passion is an innate, deep, and concentrated hatred of their superiors;

but all these qualities are merged in this chief crime: they _stink_.

"_Cor_. For the mutable _rank-scented_ many, let them

Regard me as I do not flatter, and

Therein behold themselves" (Act iii. sc. I).

"_Brutus_. I heard him swear,

Were he to stand for consul, never would he

Appear i' the market-place, nor on him put

The napless vesture of humility;

Nor, showing as the manner is, his wounds

To the people, beg their _stinking breaths"_ (Act ii. sc. I).

When Coriolanus is banished by the people, he turns upon them with the

outburst:

"You common cry of curs! _whose breath I hate_

As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcases of unburied men

That do corrupt my air" (Act iii. sc. 3)

When old Menenius, Coriolanus's enthusiastic admirer, hears that the

banished man has gone over to the Volscians, he says to the People's

Tribunes:

"You have made good work,

You and your apron-men: you that stood so much

Upon the voice of occupation and

The breath of _garlic-eaters!_" (Act iv. sc. 6).

And a little farther on:

"Here come the clusters.

And is Aufidius with him? You are they

That made the air unwholesome when you cast

Your _stinking_ greasy caps up, hooting at

Coriolanus' exile."

If we seek to know how Shakespeare came by this non-political but

purely sensuous contempt for the people, we must search for the reason

among the experiences of his own daily life. Where but in the course of

his connection with the theatre would he come into contact with those

whom he looked upon as human vermin? He suffered under the perpetual

obligation of writing, staging, and acting his dramas with a view

to pleasing the Great Public. His finest and best had always most

difficulty in making its way, and hence the bitter words in _Hamlet_

about the "excellent play" which "was never acted, or, if it was, not

above once; for the play, I remember, pleased not the _million_."

Into this epithet, "the million," Shakespeare has condensed his

contempt for the masses as art critics. Even the poets, and they are

many, who have been honest and ardent political democrats, have seldom

extended their belief in the majority to a faith in its capacity for

appraising their art. The most liberal-minded of them all well know

that the opinion of a connoisseur is worth more than the judgment of a

hundred thousand ignoramuses. With Shakespeare, however, his artist's

scorn for the capacity of the many did not confine itself to the sphere

of Art, but included the world beyond. As, year after year, his glance

fell from the stage upon the flat caps covering the unkempt hair of the

crowding heads down there in the open yard which constituted the pit,

his sentiments grew increasingly contemptous towards "the groundlings."

These unwashed citizens, "the understanding gentlemen of the ground,"

as Ben Jonson nicknamed them, were attired in unlovely black smocks

and goatskin jerkins, which had none too pleasant an odour. They were

called "nutcrackers" from their habit of everlastingly cracking nuts

and throwing the shells upon the stage. Tossing about apple-peel,

corks, sausage ends, and small pebbles was another of their amusements.

Tobacco, ale, and apple vendors forced their way among them, and even

before the curtain was lifted a reek of tobacco-smoke and beer rose

from the crowd impatiently waiting for the prima donna to be shaved.

The fashionable folk of the stage and boxes, whom they hated, and with

whom they were ever seeking occasion to brawl, called them _stinkards_.

Abuse was flung backwards and forwards between them, and the pit threw

apples and dirt, and even went so far as to spit on to the stage. In

the _Gull's Hornebooke_ (1609) Dekker says: "The stage, like time, will

bring you to most perfect light and lay you open: neither are you to

be hunted from thence, though the _scarecrows_ in the _yard_ hoot at

you, hiss at you, spit on you." As late as 1614 the prologue to an old

comedy, _The Hog has lost his Pearl_, says:

"We may be pelted off for what we know,

With apples, eggs, or stones, from _those below_."

Who knows if Shakespeare was better satisfied with the less rowdy

portion of his audience? Art was not the sole attraction of the

theatre. We read in an old book on English plays:--

"In the play-houses at London it is the fashion of youthes to go first

into the _yarde_ and carry their eye through every gallery; then, like

unto ravens, when they spy the carrion, thither they fly and press as

near to the fairest as they can."[1] These fine gentlemen, who sat or

reclined at full length on the stage, were probably as much occupied

with their ladies as the less well- to-do theatre-goers. We know that

they occasionally watched the play as Hamlet did, with their heads in

their mistresses' laps, for the position is described in Fletcher's

_Queen of Corinth_ (Act i. sc. 2):

"For the fair courtier, the woman's man,

That tells my lady stories, dissolves riddles,

Ushers her to her coach, _lies at her feet_

_At solemn masques, applauding what she laughs at._"

Dekker (_Gulfs Hornebooke_) informs us that keen card-playing went on

amongst some of the spectators, while others read, drank, or smoked

tobacco. Christopher Marlowe has an epigram on this last practice,

and Ben Jonson complains in his _Bartholomew Fair_ of "those who

accommodate gentlemen with tobacco at our theatres." He gives an

elaborate description in his play, _The Case is Altered_ of the manner

in which capricious lordlings conducted themselves at the performance

of a new piece:--

"And they have such a habit of dislike in all things, that they will

approve nothing, be it never so conceited or elaborate; but sit

dispersed, making faces and spitting, wagging their upright ears, and

cry, filthy, filthy; simply uttering their own condition, and using

their wryed countenances instead of a vice, to turn the good aspects of

all that shall sit near them, from what they behold" (Act ii. sc. 6).

The fact that women's parts were invariably played by young men may

have contributed to the general rowdyism of the play-going public,

although, on the other hand, it must have been conducive to greater

morality on the part of those directly connected with the theatre.

It was surely a real amelioration of Shakespeare's fate that the

difficulties with which he had to struggle were not increased by that

enthralling and ravishing evil which bears the name of actress.[2].

The notion of feminine characters being taken by a woman was so foreign

to England that the individual who ascertained the use of forks in

Italy, discovered the existence of actresses at the same time and

in the same place. Coryate writes from Venice in July 1608:--"Here

I observed certaine things that I never saw before; for I saw women

act, a thing I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath been

sometimes used in London; and they performed it with as good a grace,

action, gestures, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as I ever

saw any masculine actor." It was not until forty-four years after

Shakespeare's death that a woman stepped on to the English stage.

We know precisely when and in what play she appeared. On the 8th of

December 1660 the part of Desdemona was taken by an Englishwoman. The

prologue read upon this occasion is still in existence.[3]

A theatrical audience of those days was, to Shakespeare's eyes at any

rate, an uncultivated horde, and it was this crowd] which represented

to him "the people." He may have looked upon them in his youth with

a certain amount of goodwill and forbearance, but they had become

entirely odious to him now. It was undoubtedly the constant spectacle

of the "_understanders_" and the atmosphere of their exhalations, which

caused his scorn to flame so fiercely over democratic movements and

their leaders, and all that ingratitude and lack of perception which,

to him, represented "the people."

With his necessarily slight historical knowledge and insight,

Shakespeare would look upon the old days of both Rome and England in

precisely the same light in which he saw his own times. His first Roman

drama testifies to his innately anti-democratic tendencies. He seized

with avidity upon every instance in Plutarch of the stupidity and

brutality of the masses. Recall, for example, the scene in which the

mob murders Cinna, the poet, for no better reason than its fury against

Cinna, the conspirator (_Julius Cæsar_, Act iii. sc. 3):

"_Third Citizen_. Your name, sir, truly.

"_Cinna_. Truly my name is Cinna.

"_First Citizen_. Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.

"_Cinna_. I am Cinna the poet. I am Cinna the poet.

"_Fourth Citizen_. Tear him for his bad verses. Tear him for

his bad verses.

"_Cinna_. I am not Cinna the conspirator.

"_Fourth Citizen_. It is no matter, his name's Cinna; pluck

but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

"_Third Citizen_. Tear him, tear him!"

All four citizens are alike in their bloodthirsty fury. Shakespeare

displays the same aristocratic contempt for the fickle crowd, whose

opinion wavers with every speaker; witness its complete change of front

immediately after Antony's oration. It was this feeling, possibly,

which was at the bottom of his want of success in dealing with Cæsar.

He probably found Cæsar antipathetic, not on the ground of his

subversion of a republican form of government, but as leader of the

Roman democracy. Shakespeare sympathised with the conspiracy of the

nobles against him because all popular rule--even that which was guided

by genius--was repugnant to him, inasmuch as it was power exercised,

directly or indirectly, by an ignorant herd.

This point of view meets us again and again in _Coriolanus_; and

whereas, in his earlier plays, it was only occasionally and, as it

were, accidentally expressed, it has now grown and strengthened into

deliberate utterance.

I am aware that, generally speaking, neither English nor German critics

will agree with me in this. Englishmen, to whom Shakespeare is not only

their national poet, but the voice of wisdom itself, will, as a rule,

see nothing in his poetry but a love of all that is simple, just, and

true. They consider that due attention, on the whole, has been paid to

the rights of the people in this play; that it contains the essence,

as it were, of all that can be urged in favour of either democracy or

aristocracy, and that Shakespeare himself was impartial. His hero is

by no means, they say, represented in a favourable light; he is ruined

by his pride, which, degenerating into unbearable arrogance, causes

him to commit the crime of turning his arms against his country, and

brings him to a miserable end. His relations with his mother represent

the sole instance in which the inhuman, anti-social intractability

of Coriolanus' character relaxes and softens; otherwise he is hard

and unlovable throughout. The Roman people, on the other hand, are

represented as good and amiable in the main; they are certainly

somewhat inconstant, but Coriolanus is no less fickle than they, and

certainly less excusable. That plebeian greed of plunder which so

exasperated Marcius at Corioli is common to the private soldier of all

times. No, they say, Shakespeare was totally unprejudiced, or, if he

had a preference, it was for old Menenius, the free-spoken, patriotic

soul who always turns a cheerfully humorous side to the people, even

when he sees their faults most plainly.

I am simply repeating here a view of the matter actually expressed

by eminent English and American critics--a view which, presumably

therefore, represents that of the English-speaking public in general.[4]

In Germany also--more particularly at the time when Shakespeare's

dramas were interpreted by liberal professors, who involuntarily

brought them into harmony with their own ideas and those of the

period--many attempts were made to prove that Shakespeare was

absolutely impartial in political matters. Some even sought to make him

a Liberal after the fashion of those who, early in this century, went

by that name in Central Europe.

We have no interest, however, in re-fashioning Shakespeare. It is

enough for us if our perception is fine and keen enough to recognise

him in his works, and we must actually put on blinders not to see on

which side Shakespeare's sympathies lie here. He is only too much of

one mind with the senators who say that "poor suitors have strong

breaths," and Coriolanus, who is never refuted or contradicted, says no

more than what the poet in his own person would endorse.

In the first scene of the play, immediately following Menenius'

well-known parable of the belly and the other members of the body,

Marcius appears and fiercely advocates the view Menenius has humorously

expressed:

"He that will give good words to thee will flatter

Beneath abhorring. What would you have, you curs,

That like not peace nor war? He that trusts to you,

Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;

Where foxes, geese; you are no surer, no,

Than is the coal of fire upon the ice,

Or hailstone in the sun. Your virtue is

To make him worthy whose offence subdues him,

And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness,

Deserves your hate; and your affections are

A sick man's appetite, who desires most that

Which would increase his coil ...

... Hang ye! Trust ye!

With every minute you do change a mind;

And call him noble that was now your hate,

Him vile that was your garland."

The facts of the play bear out every statement here made by Coriolanus,

including the one that the plebeians are only brave with their tongues,

and run as soon as it comes to blows. They turn tail on the first

encounter with the Volscians.

"_Marcius_. All the contagion of the south light on you,

You shames of Rome! You herd of--Boils and plagues'

Plaster you o'er! that you may be abhorred

Farther than seen, and one infest another

Against the wind a mile! You souls of geese,

That bear the shapes of men, how have you run

From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell!

All hurt behind; backs red and faces pale

With flight and agu'd fear!" (Act i. sc. 4).

By dint of threatening to draw his sword upon the runaways, he succeeds

in driving them back to the attack, compels the enemy to retreat,

and forces himself single-handed, like a demigod or very god of war,

through the gates of the town, which close upon him before his comrades

can follow. When he comes forth again, bleeding, and the town is taken,

his wrath thunders afresh on finding that the only idea of the soldiery

is to secure as much booty as possible:

"See here these movers, that do prize their hours

At a crack'd drachm! Cushions, leaden spoons,

Irons of a doit, doublets that hangmen would

Bury with those that wore them, these base slaves,

Ere yet the fight be done, pack up:--Down with them!"

As far as Coriolanus is concerned the popular party is simply the body

of those who "cannot rule nor ever will be ruled" (Act iii. sc. I).

The majority of nobles are too weak to venture to oppose the people's

tribunes as they should, but Coriolanus, perceiving the danger of

allowing these men to gain influence in the government of the city,

courageously, if imprudently, braves their hatred in order to thwart

and repress them (Act iii. sc. I).

"_First Senator_. No more words, we beseech you.

_Coriolanus_. How! no more?

As for my country I have shed my blood,

Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs

Coin words till their decay, against those measels,

Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought

The very way to catch them."

He further asserts that the people had not deserved the recent

distribution of corn, for they had attempted to evade the summons

to arms, and during the war they chiefly displayed their courage in

mutinying. They had brought groundless accusations against the senate,

and it was contemptible to allow them, out of fear of their numbers,

any share in the government. His last words upon the subject are:

"... This double worship,

Where one part does disdain with cause, the other

Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom,

Cannot conclude but by the yea and no

Of general ignorance,--it must omit

Real necessities, and give way the while

To unstable slightness: purpose so barr'd it follows,

Nothing is done to purpose. ..."

So, in _Troilus and Cressida_, would Ulysses, who represents all

that is truly wise in statesmanship, have spoken. There is no humane

consideration for the oppressed condition of the poor, no just

recognition of the right of those who bear the burden to have a voice

in its distribution. That Shakespeare held the same political views

as Coriolanus is amply shown by the fact that the most dissimilar

characters approve of them in every particular, excepting only the

violent and defiant manner in which they are expressed. Menenius'

description of the tribunes of the people is not a whit less scathing

than that of Marcius.

"Our very priests must become mockers, if they shall encounter such

ridiculous subjects as you are. When you speak best unto the purpose,

it is not worth the wagging of your beards; and your beards deserve

not so honourable a grave as to stuff a butcher's cushion, or to be

entombed in an ass's pack-saddle. Yet you must be saying, Marcius is

proud, who, in a cheap estimation, is worth all your predecessors since

Deucalion" (Act ii. sc. I).

When Coriolanus's freedom of speech has procured his banishment,

Menenius exclaims in admiration (Act iii. sc. I):

"_His nature is too noble for this world_:

He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,

Or Jove for's power to thunder. His heart's his mouth."

Thus he is exiled for his virtues, not for his failings, and at

heart they all agree with Menenius. When Coriolanus has gone over to

the enemy, and their one anxiety is to appease his wrath, Cominius

expresses the same view of the culpability of people and tribunes

towards him (Act iv. sc. 4):

"Who shall ask it?

The tribunes cannot do't for shame; the people

Deserve such pity of him as the wolf

Does of the shepherd."

Even the voice of one of the two serving-men of the Capitol exalts

Coriolanus and justifies his scorn for the love or hatred of the

people, the ignorant, bewildered masses--

"... So that, if they love, they know not why, they hate upon no better

a ground: therefore for Coriolanus neither to care whether they love or

hate him manifests the true knowledgehe has of their dispositions; and

out of his noble carelessness lets them plainly see't" (Act ii. sc. 2).

This is almost too well expressed for a servant; we perceive that the

poet has taken no particular pains to disguise his own voice. The same

man tells how well Coriolanus has deserved of his country; he did not

rise, as some do, by standing hat in hand and bowing himself into

favour with the people:

"... But he hath so planted his honours in their eyes and his actions

in their hearts, that for their tongues to be silent and not confess

so much were a kind of ungrateful injury; to report otherwise were a

malice, that giving itself to lie, would pluck reproof and rebuke from

every ear that heard it."

This uncultured mind bears the same testimony as that of the most

refined and intelligent patricians to the greatness of the hero. It is

not difficult, I think, to follow the mental processes from which this

work evolved. When Shakespeare came to reflect on what had constituted

his chief gladness here on earth and made his melancholy life endurable

to him, he found that his one lasting, if not too freely flowing,

source of pleasure had been the friendship and appreciation of one or

two noble and nobly-minded gentlemen.

For the people he felt nothing but scorn, and he was now, more

than ever, incapable of seeing them as an aggregation of separate

individualities, they were merged in the brutality which distinguished

them in the mass. Humanity in general was to him not millions of

individuals, but a few great entities amidst millions of non-entities.

He saw more and more clearly that the existence of these few

illustrious men was all that made life worth living, and the belief

gave impetus to that hero-worship which had been characteristic of his

early youth. Formerly, however, this worship had lacked its present

polemical quality. The fact that Coriolanus was a great warrior made

no particular impression on Shakespeare at this period; it was quite

incidental, and he included it simply because he must. It was not

the soldier that he wished to glorify but the demigod. His present

impression of the circumstances and conditions of life is this: there

must of necessity be formed around the solitary great ones of this

earth a conspiracy of envy and hatred raised by the small and mean. As

Coriolanus says, "Who deserves greatness, deserves your hate."

Owing to this turn of thought, Shakespeare found fewer heroes to

worship; but his worship became the more intense, and appears in this

play in greater force than ever before. The patricians, who have a

proper understanding of his merit, regard Coriolanus with a species of

lover-like enthusiasm, a sort of adoration. When Marcius's mother tells

Menenius that she has had a letter from her son, and adds, "And I think

there's one at home for you," Menenius cries:

"I will make my very house reel to-night: a letter for me!

"_Virgilia_. Yes, certain, there's a letter for you; I saw't.

"_Menenius_. A letter for me! It gives me an estate of

seven years' health; in which time I will make a lip at the

physician: the most sovereign prescription in Galen is but

empiricutic, and, to this preservative, of no better report

than a horse-drench" (Act ii. sc. I).

So speaks his friend; we will now listen to his bitterest enemy,

Aufidius, the man whom he has defeated and humiliated in battle after

battle, who hates him, and vows that neither temple nor prayer of

priest, nor any of those things which usually restrain a man's wrath,

shall prevail to soften him. He has sworn that wherever he may find

his enemy, be it even on his own hearth, he will wash his hands in

his heart's blood. But when Marcius forsakes Rome, and repairing to

the Volscians, actually seeks Aufidius in his own home, upon his own

hearth, we hear only the admiration and genuine enthusiasm which the

sound of his voice and the mere majesty of his presence calls forth in

the adversary who would gladly hate him, and still more gladly despise

him if he could.

"O Marcius, Marcius!

Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart

A root of ancient envy. If Jupiter

Should from yond cloud speak divine things,

And say ''Tis true,' I'd not believe them more

Than thee, all noble Marcius. Let me twine

Mine arms about that body, where against

My grained ash an hundred times hath broke,

And scarred the moon with splinters: here I clip

The anvil of my sword, and do contest

As hotly and as nobly with thy love,

As ever in ambitious strength I did

Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,

I loved the maid I married; never man

Sighed truer breath; but that I see thee here,

Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart

Than when I first my wedded mistress saw

Bestride my threshold" (Act iv. sc. 5).

We have, then, in this play an almost wildly enthusiastic hero-worship

upon a background of equally unqualified contempt for the populace.

It is something different, however, from the humble devotion of his

younger days to alien greatness (as in _Henry V._), and is founded

rather on an overpowering and defiant consciousness of his own worth

and superiority.

The reader must recall the fact that his contemporaries looked

upon Shakespeare not so much as a poet who earned his living as an

actor, but as an actor who occasionally wrote plays. We must also

remember that the profession of an actor was but lightly esteemed in

those days, and the work of a dramatist was considered as a kind of

inferior poetry, which scarcely ranked as literature. Probably most

of Shakespeare's intimates considered his small narrative poems--his

_Venus and Adonis_, his _Lucretia,_ &c.--his real claim to notoriety,

and they would regret that for the sake of money he had joined the

ranks of the thousand and one dramatic writers. We are told in the

dedication of _Histrio Mastix_ (1634), that the playwrights of the day

took no trouble with what they wrote, but covetously pillaged from old

and new sources, "chronicles, legends, and romances."

Shakespeare did not even publish his own plays, but submitted to their

appropriation by grasping booksellers, who published them with such a

mutilation of the text, that it must have been a perfect terror to him

to look at them. This mishandling of his plays would be so obnoxious

to him, that it was not likely he would care to possess any copies. He

was in much the same position in this respect as the modern author,

who, unprotected by any law of international copyright, sees his works

mangled and mutilated in foreign languages.

He would doubtless enjoy a certain amount of popularity, but he

remained to the last an actor among actors (not even then in the first

rank with Burbage) and a poet among poets. Never once did it occur to

any of his contemporaries that he stood alone, and that all the others

taken together were as nothing in comparison with him.

He lived and died one of the many.

That his spirit rose in silent but passionate rebellion against this

judgment is obvious. Were there moments in which he clearly felt and

keenly recognised his greatness? It must have been so, and these

moments had grown more frequent of late. Were there also times when

he said to himself, "Five hundred, a thousand years hence, my name

will still be known to mankind and my plays read"? We cannot say;

it hardly seems probable, or he would surely have contended for the

right to publish his own works. We cannot doubt that he believed

himself worthy at this time of such lasting fame, but he had, as we

can well understand, no faith at all that future generations would

see more clearly, judge more truly, and appraise more justly than his

contemporaries. He had no idea of historical evolution, his belief was

rather that the culture of his native country was rapidly declining.

He had watched the growth of narrow-minded prejudice, had seen the

triumphant progress of that pious stupidity which condemned his art

as a wile of the devil; and his detestation of the mass of men, past,

present, and to come, made him equally indifferent to their praise or

blame. Therefore it pleased him to express this indifference through

the medium of Coriolanus, the man who turns his back upon the senate

when it eulogises him, and of whom Plutarch tells us that the one thing

for which he valued his fame was the pleasure it gave his mother. Yet

Shakespeare makes him say (Act i. sc. 9):

"My mother,

Who has a charter to extol her blood,

When she does praise me grieves me."

Shakespeare has now broken with the judgments of mankind. He dwells on

the cold heights above the snow-line, beyond human praise or blame,

beyond the joys of fame and the perils of celebrity, breathing that

keen atmosphere of indifference in which the soul hovers, upheld by

scorn.

Some few on this earth are men, the rest are _spawn_, as Menenius calls

them; and so Shakespeare sympathises with Coriolanus and honours him,

endowing him with Cordelia's hatred of unworthy flattery, even placing

her very words in his mouth (Act ii. sc. 2):

"But your people

I love them as they weigh."

Therefore it is he equips his hero with the same stern devotion to

truth with which, later in the century, Molière endows his Alceste,

but, instead of in the semi-farcical, it is in the wholly heroic manner

(Act iii. sc. 3):

"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death,

Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger

But with a grain a day. I would not buy

Their mercy at the price of one fair word."

We see Shakespeare's whole soul with Coriolanus when he cannot bring

himself to ask the Consulate of the people in requital of his services.

Let them freely give him his reward, but that he should have to ask for

it--torture!

When his friends insist upon his conforming to custom and appearing in

person as applicant, Shakespeare, who has hitherto followed Plutarch

step by step, here diverges, in order to represent this step as being

excessively disagreeable to Marcius. According to the Greek historian,

Coriolanus at once proceeds with a splendid retinue to the Forum, and

there displays the wounds he has received in the recent wars; but

Shakespeare's hero cannot bring himself to boast of his exploits to the

people, nor to appeal to their admiration and compassion by making an

exhibition of his wounds:

"I cannot

Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them,

For my wounds' sake, to give their suffrage: please you

That I may pass this doing" (Act ii. sc. 2).

He finally yields, but has hardly set foot in the Forum before he

begins to curse at the position in which he has placed himself:

"What must I say?

'I pray, sir '--Plague upon't! I cannot bring

My tongue to such a pace:--'Look, sir, my wounds!

I got them in my country's service when

Some certain of your brethren roared and ran

From the noise of our own drums'" (Act ii. sc. 3).

He makes an effort to control himself, and, turning brusquely to the

nearest bystanders, he addresses them with ill-concealed irony. On

being asked what has induced him to stand for the Consulate, he hastily

and rashly replies:

"Mine own desert.

"_Second Citizen_. Your own desert!.

"_Coriolanus_. Ay, but not mine own desire.

"_Third Citizen_. How not your own desire?

"_Coriolanus_. No, sir, 'twas never my desire to trouble

the poor with begging."

Having secured a few votes in this remarkably tactless manner, he

exclaims:

"Most sweet voices!

Better to die, better to starve,

Than crave the hire which first we do deserve."

When the intrigues of the tribunes succeed in inducing the people to

revoke his election, he so far forgets himself in his fury at the

insult that they are enabled to pronounce sentence of banishment

against him. He then bursts into an outbreak of taunts and threats:

"You common cry of curs! I banish _you_!"--which recalls how some

thousand years later another chosen of the people and subsequent object

of democratic jealousy, Gambetta, thundered at the noisy assembly at

Belleville: "Cowardly brood! I will follow you up into your very dens."

The nature of the material and the whole conception of the play

required that the pride of Coriolanus should occasionally be expressed

with repellant arrogance. But we feel, through all the intentional

artistic exaggeration of the hero's self-esteem, how there arose in

Shakespeare's own soul, from the depth of his stormy contempt for

humanity, a pride immeasurably pure and steadfast.

[1] _Plays confuted in Five several Actions_, by Stephen

Gosson, 1580.

[2] It is therefore a droll error into which the otherwise

admirable writer, Professor Fr. Paulson, falls in his essay, _Hamlet

die Tragedie des Pessimismus (Deutsche Rundschau_, vol. lix. p. 243),

when he remarks as a proof of the sensuality of Hamlet's nature: "Man

erinnere sich nur seiner Intimität mit der Schauspielern; als sie

ankommen, fällt sein Blick sogleich auf die Füsse der _Schauspielerin._

[3] "A Prologue to introduce the first woman that came to act

on this stage, in the tragedy called _The Moor of Venice_: "--

"I come unknown to any of the rest

To tell you news; I saw the lady drest.

The woman plays to day; mistake me not,

No man in gown or page in petticoat:

A woman to my knowledge, yet I can't

If I should die, make affidavit on't....

'Tis possible a virtuous woman may

Abhor all sorts of looseness and yet play,

Play on the stage when all eyes are upon her.

Shall we count that a crime, France counts an honour?"

[4] See _Shakespeare's Tragedy of Coriolanus_, by the Rev.

Henry N. Hudson, Professor of Shakespeare at Boston University. Boston,

1881.

XII

_CORIOLANUS AS A DRAMA_

The tragedy of _Coriolanus_ is constructed strictly according to rule;

the plot is simple and powerful, and is developed, with steadily

increasing interest, to a logical climax. With the exception of

_Othello_, Shakespeare has never treated his material in a more simply

intelligible fashion. It is the tragedy of an inviolably truthful

personality in a world of small-minded folk; the tragedy of the

punishment a reckless egoism incurs when it is betrayed into setting

its own pride above duty to state and fatherland.

Shakespeare's aristocratic sympathies did not blind him to Coriolanus'

unjustifiable crime and its inevitable consequences. Infuriated by

his banishment; the great soldier goes over to the enemies of Rome

and leads the Volscian army against his native city, plundering and

terrifying as he goes. He spurns the humble entreaties of his friends,

and only yields to the women of the city when, led by his mother and

his wife, they come to implore mercy and peace.

Coriolanus' fierce outburst when the name of traitor is flung at him

proves that Shakespeare did not look upon treason as a pardonable crime:

"The fires of the lowest hell fold in your people!

Call me their traitor!--Thou injurious tribune!

Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,

In thy hands clutched as many millions, in

Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say

'Thou liest,' unto thee, with a voice as free

As I do pray the gods" (Act iii. sc. 3).

Immediately after this his outraged pride leads him to commit the very

crime he has so wrathfully disclaimed. No consideration for his country

or fellow-citizens can restrain him. The forces which arrest his

vengeance are the mother he has worshipped all his life and the wife

he tenderly loves. He knows that it is himself he is offering up when

he sacrifices his rancour on the altar of his family. The Volscians

will never forgive him for delivering up their triumph to Rome after he

had practically delivered up Rome to them. And so he perishes, finally

overtaken by Aufidius' long-accumulated jealousy acting through the

disappointed rage of the Volscians. In Plutarch Shakespeare found his

plot and the chief characters of his play ready to hand. He added the

individuality of the tribunes and of Menenius (with the exception of

the parable of the belly). Virgilia, who is little more than a name in

the original, Shakespeare has transformed by one of his own wonderful

touches into a woman whose chief charm lies in the quiet gentleness of

her nature. "My gracious silence, hail!" thus Marcius greets her (Act

ii. sc. I), and she is exhaustively defined in the exclamation. Her

principal utterances, as well as Volumnia's most important speeches,

are mere versifications of Plutarch's prose, and this is why these

women have so much genuinely Roman blood in their veins. Volumnia is

the true Roman matron of the days of the Republic. Shakespeare has

wrought her character with special care, and her rich and powerful

personality is not without its darker side. Her kinship with her son is

perceptible in all her ways and words. She is more prone, as a woman,

to employ, or at least approve of, dissimulation, but her nature is not

a whit less defiantly haughty. Her first thought may be jesuitical; her

second is always violent:

"_Vol_. Oh, sir, sir, sir,

I would have had you put your power well on,

Before you had worn it out.

_Cor_ Let go.

_Vol_. You might have been enough the man you are,

With striving less to be so: lesser had been

The thwartings of your dispositions, _if

You had not showed them how ye were disposed

Ere they lacked power to cross you._

_Cor_. Let them hang.

_Vol. Ay, and burn too_" (Act iii. sc. 2).

When matters come to a climax, she shows no more discretion in her

treatment of the tribunes than did her son, but displays precisely

the same power of vituperation. On reading her speeches we realise

the satisfaction and relief it was to Shakespeare to vent himself in

furious invectives through the medium of his dramatic creations:

"_Vol_.... Hadst thou foxship

To banish him that struck more blows for Rome

Than thou hast spoken words?

_Sic_. O blessed heavens!

_Vol_. More noble blows, than ever thou wise words;

And for Rome's good. I'll tell thee what; yet go:

Nay, but thou shalt stay too: I would my son

Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him,

His good sword in his hand" (Act iv. sc. 2).

A comparison between Volumnia's final appeal to her son in the last act

and the speech as it is given in Plutarch is of the greatest interest.

Shakespeare has followed his author step by step, but has enriched him

by the addition of the most artlessly human touches:

"There's no man in the world

More bound to's mother; yet here he lets me prate

Like one i' the stocks. Thou hast never in thy life

Showed thy dear mother any courtesy;

When she, (poor hen!) fond of no second brood,

Has clucked thee to the wars and safely home,

Loaden with honour" (Act v. sc. 3).

How the stern, soldierly bearing of the woman is softened by these

touches with which Shakespeare has embellished her portrait!

The diction both here and throughout the play is that of Shakespeare's

most matured period; but never before had he used bolder similes, shown

more independence in his method of expression, nor condensed so much

thought and feeling into so few lines. We have already drawn attention

to the masterly handling of his material--a handling, however, which by

no means precludes the intrusion of several extravagances, some heroic,

some simply childish.

The hero's bodily strength and courage, for example, are strained to

the mythical. He forces his way single-handed into a hostile town,

holds his own there against a whole army, and finally makes good his

retreat, wounded but not subdued. Even Bible tradition, in which divine

aid comes to the rescue, cannot furnish forth such deeds. Neither

Samson's escape from Gaza (Judges xvi.) nor David's from Keilah (1 Sam.

xxiii.) can compare with this amazing exploit.

Equally unlikely is the foolishly defiant and arrogant attitude

assumed by the senate, and more especially by Coriolanus, towards the

plebeian party. Upon what do the nobles rely to support them in such an

attitude? They have already been compelled to yield the political power

of tribuneship, and it never even occurred to them to defy the sentence

of banishment pronounced by these same tribunes. How comes it then that

they seize every opportunity to taunt and scorn? How is it that these

patricians, who have spoken so many brave words, make so poor a show of

resistance when the Volscians are at their gates? They are so steeped

in party spirit that their first thought, when defeat comes upon them,

is to rejoice in the confusion and discomfiture the plebeians have

brought upon themselves, and finally, abandoning all self-respect, they

crawl to the feet of their exasperated conqueror.

The confusion of Shakespeare's authority in this part of the story

would account for much.[1] According to Plutarch, Coriolanus, in the

course of his victorious march from one Latin town to another, plunders

the plebeians, but spares the patricians. A sudden change of public

opinion occurs in Rome during his siege of Lavinium, and the popular

party desires to recall Coriolanus, but the senate refuses--why, we

are not told. The enemy is close upon them before a parley is agreed

upon. Coriolanus offers easy terms, the admission of the Volscians to

the Latin Federation being the chief stipulation. Despite the general

feeling of discouragement in Rome, the senate answers haughtily that

Romans will never yield to fear, and the Volscians must first lay down

their arms if they desire to obtain a "favour." Directly after this

defiance they make the most abject submission, and send their women as

suppliants to the hostile camp.

While Shakespeare's Coriolanus has none of this consideration for

his former friends, his patricians are as cowardly and incapable as

the historian's. Cominius, Titus Lartius, and the others, who are

originally represented as valiant men, make a very poor show at the

end. Several, in short, of Plutarch's abundant contradictions have

found their way into Shakespeare's play; they mark the beginning of a

certain inconsequence which henceforward betrays itself in his work.

From this point onwards his plays are no longer as highly finished as

formerly.

I am not alluding here to the inconsistencies of his hero, for they

only serve to give life and truth to his character, and the poet either

represented them unconsciously, or was too ingenuous to avoid them;

witness the reflection made by Coriolanus at the very moment of his

rebellious disinclination to ask the suffrages of the people:

"Custom calls me to't;

What custom wills, in all things should we do't,

The dust on antique time would lie unswept,

And mountainous error be too highly heapt

For truth to o'er-peer" (Act ii. sc. 3).

Coriolanus is utterly unconscious that this speech of his strikes at

the very root of that ultra-conservatism which he affects. The very

thing he has refused to understand is, that if we invariably followed

custom, the follies of the past would never be swept away, nor the

rocks which hinder our progress burst asunder. To Coriolanus, what is

customary is right, and he never realises the fact that his disdain

for the tribunes and people has led him into a politically untenable

position. We are by no means sure that Shakespeare's perceptions

in this case were any keener than his hero's; but, consciously or

unconsciously, it is this very inconsistency in Coriolanus' character

which makes it so vividly lifelike.

_ Troilus and Cressida_ overflowed with contempt for the feminine sex

as such, for love as a comical or pitiable sensuality, for mock heroics

and sham military glory. _Coriolanus_ is brimful of scorn for the

masses; for the stupidity, fickleness, and cowardice of the ignorant,

slavish souls, and for the baseness of their leaders.

But the passionate disdain possessing Shakespeare's soul is destined to

a stronger and wilder outburst in the work he next takes in hand. The

outbreak in _Timon_ is against no one sex, no one caste, no one nation

or fraction of humanity; it is the result of an overwhelming contempt,

which excepts nothing and no one, but embraces the whole human race.

[1] The matter is interestingly discussed in Kreyssig's

instructive and sympathetic work: _Vorlesungen über Shakespeare_, 1859,

vol. ii. p. 110.

XIII

_TIMON OF ATHENS--HATRED OF MANKIND_

Timon of Athens has come down to us in a pitiable condition. The text

is in a terrible state, and there are, not only between one scene and

another, but between one page and another, such radical differences in

the style and general spirit of the play as to preclude the possibility

of its having been the work of one man. The threads of the story are

often entirely disconnected, and circumstances occur (or are referred

to) for which we were in no way prepared. The best part of the

versification is distinctly Shakespearian, and contains all that wealth

of thought which was characteristic of this period of his life; but the

other parts are careless, discordant, and desperately monotonous. The

prose dialogue especially jars, thrust as it is, with its long-winded

straining after effect, into scenes which are otherwise compact and

vigorous.

All Shakespeare students of the present day concur in the opinion that

_Timon of Athens_, like _Pericles_, is but a great fragment from the

master-hand.

The _Lyfe of Timon of Athens_ was printed for the first time in the

old folio edition of 1623. Careful examination shows us that the first

pages of the play of _Timon_ (which is inserted between _Romeo and

Juliet_ and _Julius Cæsar_) are numbered 80, 81, 82, 81, instead of

78, 79, 80, 81, and end at page 98. The names of the actors, for which

in no other case is more than the necessary space allowed, here occupy

the whole of page 99, and page 100 is left blank. _Julius Cæsar_ begins

upon the next page, which is numbered 109. Fleay noticed that _Troilus

and Cressida_, which, as we remarked, is unnumbered, would exactly fill

the pages 78 to 108. By some error, which furnishes us with another

hint, the second and third pages of this play are numbered 79 and 80.

Obviously it was the publisher's original intention to include _Troilus

and Cressida_ among the tragedies. On its being subsequently observed

that there was nothing really tragic about the play, they cast about,

since _Julius Cæsar_ was already printed, for another tragedy which

would as nearly as possible fill the vacant space.

Shakespeare found the material for _Timon of Athens_ in the course of

his reading for _Antony and Cleopatra_. There is, in Plutarch's "Life

of Antony," a brief sketch of Timon and his misanthropy, his relations

with Alcibiades and the Cynic Apemantus, the anecdote of the fig-tree,

and the two epitaphs. The subject evidently attracted Shakespeare by

its harmony with his own distraught and excited frame of mind at the

time. He was soon absorbed in it, and in some form or another he made

acquaintance with Lucian's hitherto untranslated dialogue _Timon_,

which contained many incidents giving fulness to the story, and from

which he appropriated the discovery of the treasure, the consequent

return of the parasitic friends, and Timon's scornful treatment of them.

Shakespeare probably found these details in some old play on the same

subject. Dyce published, in 1842, an old drama on Timon which had been

found in manuscript, and was judged by Steevens to date from 1600, or

thereabouts. It seems to have been written for some academic circle,

and in it we find the faithful steward and the farewell banquet with

which the third act closes. In the older drama, instead of warm water,

Timon throws stones, painted to resemble artichokes, at his guests.

Some trace of these stones may be found in these lines in Shakespeare's

play:

"_Second Lord_. Lord Timon's mad.

_Third Lord_. I feel't upon my bones.

_Fourth Lord_. One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones."

In the old play, when Timon finds the gold, and his faithless mistress

and friends flock around him once more, he repulses them, crying:

"Why vexe yee me, yee Furies? I protest,

and all the Gods to witnesse invocate,

I doe abhorre the titles of a friende,

of father, or companion. I curse

the aire yee breathe, I lothe to breathe that air."

He naïvely intimates a change of mind in the epilogue:

"I now am left alone: this rascall route

hath left my side. What's this? I feele through out

a sodeine change: my fury doth abate,

my hearte grows milde and lays aside its hate;"

and concludes with a still more ingenuous appeal for applause:

"Let loving hands, loude sounding in the ayre,

cause Timon to the citty to repaire."

We have no proof that Shakespeare was acquainted with this particular

work. He probably used some other contemporary play, belonging to the

theatre, which had proved a failure in its original form, and which

both his company and his own inclinations urged him to thoroughly

recast. It was not so entirely rewritten, however, that we can look

upon the play as actually the work of Shakespeare--there are too many

traces of another and a feebler hand; but the vital, lyrical, powerful

pathos is his, and his alone.

There are two theories on this subject. Fleay, in his well-known

and thorough investigation of the matter, endeavours to prove that

the original scheme was Shakespeare's, but that some inferior hand

amplified it for acting purposes. Fleay selected all the indubitably

Shakespearian portions, and had them printed as a separate play,

contending that it "not only included all that was of any value (which

will scarcely be disputed), but that, on the score of intelligibility,

none of the rejected speeches were needed."[1] Swinburne, who scarcely

ever agrees with Fleay, also shares the belief that Shakespeare used no

ready-made groundwork for his play. His first opinion was that _Timon

of Athens_ was interrupted by Shakespeare's premature death, but later

he inclined to the theory that, after working upon it for some time,

the poet laid it aside as being little suited to dramatic treatment.

Swinburne does not undervalue the work done by Shakespeare on that

account, but remarks, on the contrary, that, had Juvenal been gifted

with the inspiration of Æschylus, he might have written just such

another tragedy as the fourth act of the drama.[2]

The theory that Shakespeare made use of a finished play which he only

partially rewrote, leaving the rest in its clumsy imperfection, was

originally propounded by the English critics Sympson and Knight. It was

first attacked and afterwards eagerly supported by Delius, who gives

the reasons for his change of opinion at great length.[3] H. A. Evans,

the commentator of the Irving edition, also shares this latter view.

There is no dispute between the two parties concerning the portions

written by Shakespeare; the contention is simply this: Did Shakespeare

remodel another man's play, or did another man complete his?

As Fleay's attempt to construct a connected and intelligible play from

the Shakespearian fragments failed, because a great part of the weak

and spurious matter is absolutely necessary to the coherence of the

whole, it certainly seems more reasonable to accept Shakespeare as the

reviser. Some of the English critics incline to the opinion that the

inferior scenes were the work of the contemporary poets George Wilkins

and John Day.

After a lapse of nearly 300 years it is impossible to give any decided

opinion on the matter, more especially for a critic whose mother

tongue is not English. In these days of occultism and spiritualism the

simplest way out of the difficulty would be for some of those favoured

individuals, who hold communion with the other world by means of small

tables and pencils, to induce Shakespeare himself to settle the matter

once for all. Meanwhile we must be content with probabilities. To those

who only know the work through translations, or to those who, like

Gervinus and Kreyssig, the German critics, have not devoted sufficient

attention to the language, the necessity of assuming a second writer

may not be so obvious. It is not impossible, of course, that the

feeble, prosy, and long-winded parts were written by Shakespeare,

roughly sketched in such a fit of despondency and utter indifference

to detail that he could not force himself to revise, re-write, and

condense; but the possibility is an exceedingly remote one. We know how

finely Shakespeare generally constructed his plays, even in the first

rough draft.

The drama, as it stands, presents the picture of a thoughtlessly and

extravagantly open-handed nature, whose one unfailing pleasure is

to give. King Lear only gave away his possessions once, and then in

his old age and to his daughters; but Timon daily bestows money and

jewels upon all and sundry. At the opening of the play he is, without

appearing to be personally luxurious, living in the midst of all the

voluptuousness with which a Mæcenas, in the gayest of all the world's

gay capitals, could surround himself. Artists and merchants flock

round the generous patron who pays them more than they ask. A chorus

of sycophants sing his praises day and night. It is but natural that,

under those circumstances, a carelessly good-natured temperament should

look upon society as a circle for the exchange of friendly services,

which it is equally honourable to render or receive.

He pays no heed to the faithful steward who warns him that this life

cannot last. He no more disturbs himself about the melting of his money

from his coffers than if he were living in a communistic society with

the general wealth at his disposal.

At last the tide of fortune turns. His coffers are empty; the steward

is no longer able to find him money to fling away, and Timon must go

a borrowing in his turn. Almost before the report of his ruin has had

time to spread, bills come pouring in, and his impatient creditors,

yesterday his comrades, send messengers for their money. All his

requests for a loan are refused by his former friends--one on the

ground of his own poverty, while another professes to be offended

because he was not applied to in the first instance, and a third will

not even lend a portion of the large sums Timon has but lately lavished

upon him.

Timon has hitherto been one of fortune's favourites, but now the true

nature of the world is suddenly revealed to him, as it was to Hamlet

and King Lear. Like theirs, but far more harshly and bitterly, his

former confiding simplicity is replaced by frantic pessimism. Wishing

to show his false friends all the contempt he feels for them, Timon

invites them to a final banquet, and they supposing that he has

recovered his wealth, attend with excuses on their lips for their

recent behaviour. The table is sumptuously spread, but the covered

dishes contain only warm water, which Timon disdainfully flings in the

faces of his guests.

He cuts himself adrift from all intercourse with mankind, and retreats

to the woods to lead the solitary life of a Stoic. The half-jesting

retirement of Jaques in _As You Like It_, and his dismissal of all who

trouble his solitude, are here carried out in grim earnest.

It is not for long that he remains poor, for he has hardly begun to

dig for the roots on which he lives than he finds treasure buried in

the earth. Unlike Lucian's misanthrope, who rejoices in the possession

of gold as a means of securing a life free from care, Shakespeare's

Timon sickens at the sight of his wealth. Neither does he care for the

honourable amends made by his countrymen. We learn it so late in the

day that we can scarcely believe that Timon was formerly a skilful

general, who had done good service to his country. This feature is

taken from Lucian, and the character of the luxurious Mæcenas would

have gained in interest and nobility if this trait had been impressed

upon us earlier in the play. The senate, meanwhile, being threatened

with war, offers Timon the sole command. He proudly rejects the

overtures made by these misers and usurers in purple, and even remains

unsoftened by the faithful devotion of his steward. He anathematises

every one and all things, and returns to his cave to die by his own

hand.

The non-Shakespearian elements of the play do not prevent his genius

and master-hand from pervading the whole, and it is easy to see how

this work grew out of the one immediately preceding it, to trace the

connecting links between the two plays.

When Coriolanus is exasperated by the ingratitude of the plebeians, he

joins the enemies of his country and people, and becomes the assailant

of his native city. When Timon falls a victim to the thanklessness of

those he has loaded with benefits, his hatred embraces the whole human

race. The contrast is very suggestive. The despair of Coriolanus is of

an active kind, driving him to deeds and placing him at the head of

an army. Timon's is of the passive sort: he merely curses and shuns

mankind. It is not until the discovery of the treasure determines him

to use his wealth in spreading corruption and misery that his hatred

takes a semi-practical form. This contrast was not an element of the

drama until Shakespeare made it so.

The whole conduct of his Alcibiades forms a complete parallel to that

of Coriolanus, and here again the connection between the two plays is

obvious. Shakespeare found a brief account of the mutual relations

of Timon and Alcibiades in North's translation of Plutarch's "Life

of Antony," together with a description of Timon's good-will towards

the general on account of the calamities that he foresaw he would

bring upon the Athenians. The name of Alcibiades would not recall

to Shakespeare, as it does to us, the most glorious period of Greek

culture, and such names as Pericles, Aristophanes, and Plato--he

generally gives Latin names to his Greeks, such as Lucius, Flavius,

Servilius, &c.; nor did it represent to him the unrivalled

subtlety, charm, instability, and reckless extravagance of the man.

He would read Plutarch's comparison of Alcibiades and Coriolanus, in

which the Greek and Roman generals are considered homogeneous, and

for Shakespeare Alcibiades was merely the soldier and commander; on

that account he let him occupy much the same relation to Timon that

Fortinbras did to Hamlet.

Where Timon merely hates, Alcibiades seizes his weapons; and when Timon

curses indiscriminately, Alcibiades punishes severely but deliberately.

He does not tear down the city walls and put every tenth citizen to the

sword, as he is invited to do; he only seeks vengeance on his personal

enemies and those whom he considers guilty. But Timon, like Hamlet,

generalises his bitter experiences, and loathes everything that bears

the form or name of man. When Athens sends to entreat him to take

the command and save the city from the violence of Alcibiades, he is

harder and colder, and a hundred times more bitterly relentless, than

Coriolanus, who, after all, could bow to entreaty, or than Alcibiades,

who is satisfied with a strictly limited vengeance. Timon's loathing of

life and hatred of humanity is consistent throughout.

Like _Coriolanus_, this play was undoubtedly written in a frame of mind

which prompted Shakespeare less to abandon himself to the waves of

imagination than to dwell upon the worthlessness of mankind, and the

scornful branding of the contemptible. There is even less inventiveness

here than in _Coriolanus_: the plot is not only simple, it is

scanty--more appropriate to a parable or didactic poem than a drama.

Most of the characters are merely abstractly representative of their

class or profession, _e.g._ the Poet, the Painter, the servants, the

false friends, the flatterers, the creditors and mistresses. They are

simply employed to give prominence to the principal figure, or rather,

to a great lyrical outburst of bitterness, scorn, and execration.

In the poet's description of his work in the first scene of the play,

Shakespeare has indicated his point of view with unusual precision:

"I have, in this rough work, shaped out a man

Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hug

With amplest entertainment. . .

. . . His large fortune,

Upon his good and gracious nature hanging,

Subdues and properties to his love and tendance

All sorts of hearts."

He unfolds an allegory in which Fortune is represented as enthroned

upon a high and pleasant hill, from whose base all kinds of people are

struggling upwards to better their condition:

"Amongst them all

Whose eyes are on this sovereign lady fixed,

One do I personate of lord Timon's fame,

Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her;

Whose present grace to present slaves and servants

Translates his rivals."

The Painter justly observes that the allegory of the hill and the

enthroned Fortune could be equally well expressed in a picture as a

poem, but the Poet continues:

"When Fortune, in her shift and change of mood,

Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants,

Which laboured after him to the mountain's top,

Even on their knees and hands, let him slip down,

Not one accompanying his declining foot."

Shakespeare has defined his purpose here as clearly as did Daudet, some

hundreds of years later, in the first chapter of his _Sappho_, in which

the whole course of the story is symbolised in the ever-increasing

difficulty with which the hero mounts the stairs, carrying the heroine

to the highest story of the house in which he lives. The bitterness of

Shakespeare's mood is shown in the distinct indication that the Poet

and the Painter, rogues and toadies as they are, stand in the first

ranks of their professions, and cannot, therefore, claim the excuse

of poverty. It is significant of the dramatist's low opinion of his

fellow-craftsmen--not one of them is mentioned in his will--that he

should make his Poet most eloquent in condemnation of his own peculiar

faults. Hence Timon's ejaculation in the last act:

"Must thou needs stand for a villain in thine own work

Wilt thou whip thine own faults in other men?"

In _Timon_, as in _Coriolanus_, Shakespeare put his own thoughts

and feelings into the mouths of the various characters of the play.

Falseness and ingratitude are the subjects of the most frequent

allusion. They were uppermost in the poet's mind at the time, and the

changes are rung upon these vices by the Epicurean and the Cynic, by

servants and strangers, before and after the climax. Even the fickle

Poet serves, as we have seen, as spokesman for the all-prevailing idea;

and the Painter, who is every whit as worthless, says with droll irony

(Act v. sc. I):

"Promising is the very air o' the time: it opens the eyes of

expectation: performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in

the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite

out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable: performance

is a kind of will or testament, which argues a great sickness in his

judgment that makes it."

If there was one thing Shakespeare loathed above another, it was the

lifeless ceremony which disguises hollowness and fraud. Early in the

play (Act i. sc. 2) Timon says to his guests:

"Nay, my lords,

Ceremony was but devised at first

To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes,

Recanting goodness, sorry ere 'tis shown;

But where there is true friendship, there needs none."

Although Apemantus is the converse of Timon at every point--coarse

where he is refined, mean where he is generous, and base where he is

noble--yet in his first monologue the Cynic also strikes the keynote of

the piece (Act i. sc. 2):

"We make ourselves fools, to disport ourselves;

And spend our flatteries, to drink those men

Upon whose age we void it up again,

With poisonous spite and envy.

Who lives, that's not depraved or depraves?

Who dies, that bears not one spurn to their graves

Of their friend's gift?"

The first stranger says in a speech, whose monotony betrays the fact

that it was not entirely Shakespeare's although he has retouched it in

several places (notably the italicised lines):

"Who can call him

His friend that dips in the same dish? for, in

My knowing, Timon hath been this lord's father,

And kept his credit with his purse;

Supported his estate; nay, Timon's money

Has paid his men their wages: _he ne'er drinks,

But Timon's silver treads upon his lip_;

And yet, (oh, see the monstrousness of man

When he looks out in an ungrateful shape!)

He does deny him in respect of his,

What charitable men afford to beggars" (Act iii. sc. 2).

Finally, like the serving-man in the Capitol, who expresses his

approval of Coriolanus' self-conceit, Timon's servant, when his

application for a loan is refused, says:

"The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic; he

crossed himself by 't: and I cannot think but, in the end,

the villainies of men will set him clear. How fairly this

lord strives to appear foul! takes virtuous copies to be

wicked; _like those that, under hot, ardent zeal, would set

whole realms on fire._"

This direct, unmistakable attack upon Puritanism has a remarkable

effect coming from the lips of a Grecian servant, and we may gather

from it some idea of the general aim of all these outbursts against

hypocrisy.

We must now, with a view to defining the non-Shakespearian elements

of the play, devote some attention to its dual authorship. In the

first act it is particularly the prose dialogues between Apemantus and

others which seem unworthy of Shakespeare. The repartee is laconic but

laboured--not always witty, though invariably bitter and disdainful.

The style somewhat resembles that of the colloquies between Diogenes

and Alexander in Lyly's _Alexander and Campaspe_. The first of

Apemantus' conversations might have been written by Shakespeare--it

seems to have some sort of continuity with the utterances of Thersites

in _Troilus and Cressida_--but the second has every appearance of

being either an interpolation by a strange hand, or a scene which

Shakespeare had forgotten to score out. Flavius's monologue (Act i. sc.

2) never came from Shakespeare's pen in this form. Its marked contrast

to the rest shows that it might be the outcome of notes taken by some

blundering shorthand writer among the audience.

The long conversation, in the second act, between Apemantus, the Fool,

Caphis, and various servants, was, in all probability, written by an

alien hand. It contains nothing but idle chatter devised to amuse the

gallery, and it introduces characters who seem about to take some

standing in the play, but who vanish immediately, leaving no trace. A

Page comes with messages and letters from the mistress of a brothel,

to which the Fool appears to belong, but we are told nothing of the

contents of these letters, whose addresses the bearer is unable to read.

In the third act there is much that is feeble and irrelevant, together

with an aimless unrest which incessantly pervades the stage. It is not

until the banqueting scene towards the end of the act that Shakespeare

makes his presence felt in the storm which bursts from Timon's lips.

The powerful fourth act displays Shakespeare at his best and strongest;

there is very little here which could be attributed to alien sources.

I cannot understand the decision with which English critics (including

a poet like Tennyson) have condemned as spurious Flavius's monologue

at the close of the second scene. Its drift is that of the speech in

the following scene, in which he expresses the whole spirit of the play

in one line: "What viler things upon the earth than friends!" Although

there is evidently some confusion in the third scene (for example, the

intimation of the Poet's and Painter's appearance long before they

really arrive), I cannot agree with Fleay that Shakespeare had no share

in the passage contained between the lines, "Where liest o' nights,

Timon?" and "Thou art the cap of all the fools alive."

One speech in particular betrays the master-hand. It is that in which

Timon expresses the wish that Apemantus's desire to become a beast

among beasts may be fulfilled:

"If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee: if thou

wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee: if thou wert the fox,

the lion would suspect thee when, peradventure, thou wert

accused by the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would

torment thee: and still thou livedst but as a breakfast

to the wolf: if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would

afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy

dinner."

There is as much knowledge of life here as in a concentrated essence of

all Lafontaine's fables.

The last scenes of the fifth act were evidently never revised by

Shakespeare. It is a comical incongruity that makes the soldier who,

we are expressly told, is unable to read, capable of distinguishing

Timon's tomb, and even of having the forethought to take a wax

impression of the words. There is also an amalgamation of the two

contradictory inscriptions, of which the first tells us that the dead

man wishes to remain nameless and unknown, while the last two lines

begin with the declaration, "Here lie I, Timon." Notwithstanding the

shocking condition of the text, the repeatedly occurring confusion

of the action, and the evident marks of an alien hand, Shakespeare's

leading idea and dominant purpose is never for a moment obscured. Much

in _Timon_ reminds us of _King Lear_, the injudiciously distributed

benefits and the ingratitude of their recipients are the same, but in

the former the bitterness and virulence are tenfold greater, and the

genius incontestably less. Lear is supported in his misfortunes by

the brave and manly Kent, the faithful Fool, that truest of all true

hearts, Cordelia, her husband, the valiant King of France. There is but

one who remains faithful to Timon, a servant, which in those days meant

a slave, whose self-sacrificing devotion forces his master, sorely

against his will, to except one man from his universal vituperation. In

his own class he does not meet with a single honestly devoted heart,

either man's or woman's; he has no daughter, as Lear; no mother, as

Coriolanus; no friend, not one.

How far more fortunate was Antony! It is a corrupt world in the process

of dissolution that we find in _Antony and Cleopatra._ Most of it is

rotten or false, but the passion binding the two principal characters

together by its magic is entirely genuine. Perdican's profound speech

in De Musset's "_On ne badine pas avec l'amour_ applies both to them

and the whole play: "Tous les hommes sont menteurs, inconstants, faux,

bavards, hypocrites, orgueilleux; toutes les femmes sont artificieuses,

perfides, vaniteuses; le monde n'est qu'un égout sans fond; mais il

y au monde une chose sainte et sublime, c'est l'union de deux de ces

êtres imparfaits." This simple fact, that Antony and Cleopatra love

one another, ennobles and purifies them both, and consoles us, the

spectators, for the disaster their passion brings upon them. Timon has

no mistress, no relation with the other sex, only contempt for it.

There is a significant revelation of the crudity and stupidity with

which, even before the end of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare's

admirers made free with him, in an adaptation which Shadwell published

in 1678 under the title "The History of Timon the Man Hater into a

Play." In this Timon is represented as deserting his mistress Evandra,

by whom he is passionately loved to the last. This introduction of a

sympathetic woman's character naturally secured the play a success

which was never attained by Shakespeare's hero, a solitary misanthrope

alone with his bitterness. Shakespeare has intentionally veiled the

defects of nature and judgment which deprive Timon to some extent of

our sympathy, both in his prosperity and his misfortunes. He had never

in his bright days attached himself so warmly to any heart that he felt

it beat in unison with his own. Had he ever been powerfully drawn to a

single friend, he would not have squandered his possessions so lightly

on all the world. Because he only loved mankind in the mass, he now

hates them in the mass. He never, now as then, shows any powers of

discrimination.

Shakespeare merely used him as a well-known example of the punishment

simple-minded trustfulness brings upon itself; his indiscretion is the

outcome of native nobility, and his wrath is perfectly justifiable. We

feel that Timon possesses the poet's sympathy and compassion, even when

his abhorrence of humanity passes the bounds of hatred, and becomes a

passion for its annihilation. Timon turns hermit in order to escape

from the sight of human beings, and this misanthropy is no mere mask

worn to conceal his despair at the loss of this world's goods, since it

stands the test of the finding of the treasure. He no longer looks upon

wealth as the means of procuring pleasure, but only as an instrument of

vengeance. It is for that, and that alone, that he rejoices when the

"yellow glittering, precious gold" falls into his hands:

"Why, this

Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,

. . . Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves

And give them title, knee, and approbation

With senators on the bench; this is it

That makes the wappened widow wed again;

She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices

To the April day again" (Act iv. sc. 3)

When Alcibiades, who was formerly on friendly terms with him and has

retained some kindly feeling towards him, disturbs his solitude by a

visit, Timon receives him with the exclamation:

"The canker gnaw thy heart

For showing me again the eyes of man!

_Alcibiades_. What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee

That art thyself a man?

_Timon_. I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind

For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog

That I might love thee something" (Act iv. sc.3).

So might old Schopenhauer, with his loathing for men and his love for

dogs, have expressed himself. Timon explains this hatred as the result

of a dispassionate insight into the worthlessness of human nature:

"For every guise of fortune

Is smoothed by that below: the learned pate

Ducks to the golden fool: all is oblique;

There's nothing level in our cursèd natures

But direct villany."

When Alcibiades, who appears in company with two hetæræ addresses

Timon in friendly fashion, the latter turns to abuse one of the women,

declaring that she carries more destruction with her than the soldier

does in his sword. She retorts, and he rails at her in the fashion of

_Troilus and Cressida_. In his eyes the wanton woman is merely the

disseminator of disease, and he expresses the hope that she may bring

many a young man to sickness and misery. Alcibiades offers to serve him:

"Noble Timon,

What friendship may I do thee?

_Timon_. None, but to maintain my opinion.

_Alcibiades_. What is it, Timon?

_Timon_. Promise me friendship, but perform none."

When Alcibiades informs him that he is leading his army against Athens,

Timon prays that the gods will give him the victory, in order that he

may exterminate the people root and branch, and himself afterwards. He

gives him gold for his war, and conjures him to rage like a pestilence:

"Let not thy sword skip one:

Pity not honoured age for his white beard;

He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron,

It is her habit only that is honest,

Herselfs a bawd: let not the virgin's cheek

Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk paps

That through the window bars bore at men's eyes

Are not within the leaf of pity writ,

But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe,

Whose dimpled smile from fools exhaust their mercy;

Think it a bastard, whom the oracle

Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut,

And mince it sans remorse: swear against objects;

Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes;

Whose proofs, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes,

Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding,

Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay thy soldiers:

Make large confusion: and, thy fury spent,

Confounded be thyself" (Act iv. sc. 3).

The women, seeing his wealth, immediately beg him for gold, and he

answers, "Hold up, you sluts, your aprons mountant." They are not to

swear, for their oaths are worthless, but they are to go on deceiving,

and being "whores still," they are to seduce him to attempts to convert

them, and to deck their own thin hair with the hair of corpses, that

of hanged women preferably; they are to paint and rouge until they

themselves lie dead: "Paint till a horse may mire upon your face."

They shout to him for more gold; they will "do anything for gold."

Timon answers them in words which Shakespeare, for all the pathos of

his youth, has never surpassed, words whose frenzied scathing has never

been equalled:

"Consumptions sow

In hollow bones of men: strike their sharp shins,

And mar men's spurring; crack the lawyer's voice,

That he may never more false title plead,

Nor sound his quillets shrilly: hoar the flamen,

That scolds against the quality of flesh,

And not believes himself: down with the nose,

Down with it flat: take the bridge quite away

Of him that, his particular to foresee,

Smells from the general weal: make curled-pate ruffians bald,

And let the unscarred ruffians of the war

Derive some pain from you: plague all:

That your activity may defeat and quell

The source of all erection. There's more gold:

Do you damn others, and let this damn you,

And ditches grave you all.

_Phrynia and Timandra_. More counsel with more gold,

bounteous Timon."

The passion in this is overpowering. One need only compare it with

Lucian to realise the fire that Shakespeare has put into the old Greek,

whose reflections are only savage in substance, being absolutely tame

in expression--"The name of misanthrope shall sound sweetest in my

ears, and my characteristics shall be peevishness, harshness, rudeness,

hostility towards men," &c. Compare this scene with the latter part

of Plutarch's _Alcibiades_, to which we know Shakespeare had referred,

and see what the poet's acrimony has made of Timandra, the faithful

mistress who follows Alcibiades to Phrygia. They are together when his

murderess sets fire to the house, and it is Timandra who enshrouds

his body in the most costly material she possesses, and gives him as

splendid a funeral as her isolated position can secure.

Apemantus follows close upon Alcibiades, and after he is driven away,

two bandits appear, attracted by the report of the treasure. Timon

welcomes them, crying, "Rascal thieves, here's gold." He adds good

advice to the money. They are to drink wine until it drives them mad,

so they may, perchance, escape hanging; they are to put no trust in

physicians, whose antidotes are poisons; when they can, they are to

kill as well as steal. Theft is universal, the law itself being only

made to conceal robbery:

"Rob one another. There's more gold. Cut throats.

All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go;

Break open shops; _nothing can you steal_

_But thieves do lose it_."

The worthy Proudhon himself has not set forth more plainly his axiom,

"Property is theft."

When the Senate appeals to Timon for his assistance as general and

statesman, he first professes sympathy, then cries:

"If Alcibiades kill my countrymen,

Let Alcibiades know this of Timon,

That Timon cares not."

He may sack Athens, pull old men by the beard, and give the sacred

virgins over to the mercies of the soldiery. Timon cares as little as

the soldier's knife recks of the throats it cuts. The most worthless

blade in Alcibiades' camp is more valued by him than any life in

Athens. All feeling for country, home, even for the helpless, has

utterly perished.

Shakespeare borrows a final touch from Plutarch, which, in his hand,

becomes a masterpiece of bloodthirsty irony. He declares he does not,

as they suppose, rejoice in the general desolation; his countrymen

shall once more enjoy his hospitality. A fig-tree grows by his cave,

which it is his intention to cut down; but before it is felled, any

friend of his, high or low, who wishes to escape the horrors of a

siege, is welcome to come and hang himself. He next announces that his

grave is prepared, and they that seek him may come thither and find an

oracle in his tombstone, then:

"Lips, let sour words go by and language end:

What is amiss, plague and infection mend!

Graves only be man's works and death their gain!

Sun, hide thy beams! Timon hath done his reign."

These are his last words. May pestilence rage amongst men! May it

infect and destroy so long as there is a man left to dig a grave! May

the world be annihilated as Timon is about to annihilate himself. The

light of the sun will presently be extinguished for him; let it be

extinguished for all!

This is not Othello's sorrow over the power of evil to wreck

the happiness of noble hearts, nor King Lear's wail over the

ever-threatening possibilities and the heaped-up miseries of life:

it is an angry bitterness, caused by ingratitude, which has grown so

great that it darkens the sky of life and causes the thunder to roll

with such threatening peals as we have never heard even in Shakespeare.

All that he has lived through in these last years, and all that he

has suffered from the baseness of other men, is concentrated in this

colossal figure of the desperate man-hater, whose wild rhetoric is like

a dark essence of blood and gall drawn off to relieve suffering.

[1] _New Shakespeare Society's Transactions_, 1874, pp. 130-194.

[2] Swinburne: _A Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 212-215.

[3] _Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespearegesellschaft_, iii. pp. 334-361.

XIV

_CONVALESCENCE--TRANSFORMATION--THE NEW TYPE_

The last, wildest words of this bitter outbreak had been spoken. The

dark cloud had burst and the skies were slowly clearing.

It seems as though the blackest of his griefs had been lightened in

the utterance, and now that the steady _crescendo_ had burst into its

most furious _forte_, he breathed more freely again. He had said his

say; Timon had called for the extinction of humanity by plague, sexual

disease, slaughter, and suicide. The powers of cursing could go no

farther.

Shakespeare has shouted himself hoarse and his fury is spent. The fever

is over and convalescence has set in. The darkened sun shines out once

more, and the gloomy sky shines blue again.

How and why! Who shall say?

In all the obscurity of Shakespeare's life-history, nowhere do we

feel our ignorance of his personal experiences more acutely than

here. Some have sought an explanation in the resignation which comes

with advancing years, and of which we certainly catch glimpses in

his latest works. But Shakespeare neither was, nor felt himself, old

at forty-five; and the word resignation is meaningless in connection

with this marvellous softening of his long exasperated mood. It is

more than a mere reconciliation; it is a revival of that free and

lambent imagination which has lain so long in what seemed to be its

death-swoon. There is no play of fancy in resignation.

Once more he finds life worth living, the earth beautiful,

enchantingly, fantastically attractive, and those who dwell upon it

worthy of his love.

In the purely external circumstances no change has occurred. The

political outlook in England is the same, and it is not likely that he

would be greatly stirred by events such as the assassination of Henry

IV. of France in 1610 and the consequent expulsion of the Jesuits from

Great Britain. Details--like the decree forbidding English Catholics

(Recusants) from coming within ten miles of the Court, and James's

removal of his mother's bones and their pompous re-interment in

Westminster Abbey--could have little effect upon Shakespeare.

What has personally befallen him that has had such power to re-attune

his spirit and lead it back from discord to the old melody and harmony?

Surely we are now brought face to face with one of the decisive crises

of his life.

Let us anticipate the works yet to be written--_Pericles, Cymbeline,

Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest._

In this last splendid period of his life's glowing September, his

dramatic activity, bearing about it the clear transparent atmosphere of

early autumn, is more richly varied now than it has ever been.

What figures occupy the most prominent place in the poet's sumptuous

harvest-home but the young, womanly forms of Marina, Imogen, Perdita,

and Miranda. These girlish and forsaken creatures are lost and found

again, suffer grievous wrongs, and are in no case cherished as they

deserve; but their charm, purity, and nobility of nature triumph over

everything.

They must have had their prototypes or type.

A new world has opened out to Shakespeare, but it would be profitless

to spend much time on more or less probable conjectures concerning how

and by whom it was revealed. We will, therefore, only lightly touch

upon the possibility that Shakespeare, after and during the violent

crisis of his loathing for humanity, was gradually reconciled to life

by some young and womanly nobility of soul, and by all the poetry which

surrounds it and follows in its train.

All these youthful women are akin, and are sharply separated from the

heroines of his former plays. They are half-real, half-imaginary. The

charm of youth and fantastic romance shines round them like a halo; the

foulness of life has no power to defile them. They are self-reliant

without being endowed with the buoyant spirit of his earlier

adventurous maidens, and they are gentle without being overshadowed by

the pathetic mournfulness of his sacrificial victims. Not one comes to

a tragic end, and not one ever utters a jest, but all are holy in the

poet's eyes.

The situations of Marina and Perdita are very similar; both are

castaways, apparently fatherless and motherless, left solitary amidst

dangerous or pitiable circumstances. Imogen is suspected and her life

threatened, like Marina's, and although she is suspected and sentenced

to death by her nearest and dearest, her strength never falters, and

even her love for her unworthy husband is unimpaired.

Miranda is deprived of her rank and condemned to the solitude of a

desert island, but is sheltered even there by a father's watchful

care. There is indeed a half-fatherly tenderness in the delineation of

Miranda, and the conception of the native charm of a young girl as a

wonderful mystery of nature. Neither Molière's Agnes nor Shakespeare's

Miranda have ever looked upon the face of a young man before they meet

the one they love, but Agnes possesses only the artificially-preserved

ignorance and innocence which disappear like dew before the sun of

love. To Shakespeare, Miranda appears like a being from another world,

an ideal of pure spiritual womanhood and maidenly passion, before which

he almost kneels in worship.

Let us glance back at Shakespeare's gallery of women.

There are the viragoes of his youth, bloodthirsty women like Tamora,

guilty and powerful ones like Margaret of Anjou, and later, Lady

Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan; there are feeble women like Anne in

Richard III., and shrews like Katharine and Adriana, in whom we seem to

detect a reminiscence of the wife at Stratford.

Then we have the passionately loving, like Julia in _Two Gentlemen of

Verona_, Venus, Titania, Helena in _All's Well that Ends Well_, and,

above all, Juliet. There are the charmingly witty and often frolicsome

young girls, like Rosaline in _Love's Labours Lost_, Portia in the

_Merchant of Venice_, Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind.

Then the simply-minded, deeply-feeling, silent natures, with an element

of tragedy about them, pre-ordained to destruction--Ophelia, Desdemona,

Cordelia. After these come the merely sensual types of his bitter

mood--Cleopatra and Cressida.

And now, lastly, the young girl, drawn with the ripened man's rapture

over her youth, and a certain passion of admiration.[1]. She had been

lost to him, as Marina to her father Pericles, and Perdita to her

father Leontes. He feels for her the same fatherly tenderness which his

last incarnation, the magician Prospero, feels for his daughter Miranda.

He had taken a greater burden of life upon himself in the past than

he well could bear, and he now lays its heaviest portion aside. No

more tragedies! No more historical dramas! No more of the horrors of

realism! In their stead a fantastic reflection of life, with all the

changes and chances of fairy-tale and legend! A framework of fanciful

poetry woven around the charming seriousness of the youthful woman and

the serious charm of the young girl.

It works like a vision from another world, an enchantment set in

surroundings as dream-like as itself. A ship in the open sea off

Mitylene; a strange, delightful, ocean-encircled Bohemia; a lonely,

magically-protected island; a Britain, where kings of the Roman period

and Italians of the sixteenth century meet young princes who dwell in

woodland caves and have never seen the face of woman.

Thus he gradually returns to those brighter moods of his youth from

which the fairy dances of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ had evolved, or

that unknown Forest of Arden in which cypresses grew and lions prowled,

and happy youth and mirthful maidenhood carelessly roamed. Only the

spirit of frolic has departed, while free play is given to a fancy

unhampered by the laws of reality, and much earnest discernment lies

behind the untrammelled sport of imagination. He waves the magician's

wand and reality vanishes, now, as formerly. But the light heart has

grown sorrowful, and its mirth is no more than a faint smile. He offers

the daydreams of a lonely spirit now, rich but evanescent visions,

occupying in all a period of from four to five years.

Then Prospero buries his magic wand a fathom deep in the earth for ever.

[1] In Mrs. Jameson's charming old book, _Shakespeare's

Female Characters_, she has grouped his women in an arbitrary manner.

Disregarding all chronological sequence, she divides twenty-three

characters into four groups:--1. Characters of Intellect. 2. Characters

of Passion and Imagination. 3. Characters of the Affections. 4.

Historical characters. Heine characterises forty-five feminine figures

in his _Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen_, but the last twenty-one are

only distinguished by a few quotations, and he makes no attempt at any

deeper interpretation, historical or psychological.

XV

_PERICLES--COLLABORATION WITH WILKINS AND ROWLEY--SHAKESPEARE AND

CORNEILLE_

Sevenfold darkness surrounds Shakespeare's productions in that

transition period during which morbid distrust was giving way to the

brighter view of life we find in his later plays. We possess a brief

series of plays: _Timon of Athens_ and _Pericles_, which are plainly

only partially his work, and _Henry VIII._ and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_,

of which we may confidently assert that Shakespeare had nothing to do

with them beyond the insertion of single important speeches and the

addition of a few valuable touches.

He had not adapted other men's work since his novitiate, neither

had he blended his own intellectual produce with alien and inferior

efforts. What is the reason of such an association suddenly and

repeatedly occurring now? I will state my view of the matter without

any circumlocution or criticism of the opinion of others. We noticed

in _Coriolanus_ that Shakespeare's changed attitude towards humanity

had also affected his attitude towards his art. A certain carelessness

of execution had made itself felt. His steadily increasing despair

of finding any virtue or worth in the world, and the ever-growing

resentment against the coarseness and thanklessness of men, were

accompanied by his corresponding indifference and negligence as a

dramatist.

We have followed Shakespeare through his early struggles and youthful

happiness to the great and serious epoch of his life, and through the

anything but brief period of gloom to its crisis in the wild outburst

of _Timon of Athens_; after which we recognised the first symptoms

of convalescence. A perspective of not too profoundly-serious nor

realistic dramas has opened out before us, whose freely playing fantasy

proves that Shakespeare is once more reconciled to life.

It stands to reason that this reconciliation was not effected by any

sudden change, and Shakespeare would not immediately return to the old

striving after perfection in his profession--did not do so, in fact,

until that very last work in which he laid aside his art for ever. We

saw that he had strained too much at life, and he now realises that he

has done the same with art. Either he no longer taxes his strength to

the uttermost when he writes, or he has lost that power for which no

task was too heavy, no horror too terrible to depict. From this moment

we feel a foreboding that this mighty genius will lay down his pen some

years before his life is to end, and we realise that his mind is being

gradually withdrawn from the theatre. He has already ceased to act;

soon he will have ceased to write for the stage. He longs for rest,

for solitude, away from the town, far into the country; away from his

life's battlefield to the quietude of his birthplace, there to pass his

remaining years and die.

He may have reasoned thus: For whom should he write? Where were they

for whom he had written the plays of his youth? They were dead or

far away; he had lost sight of them and they of him--how long does

any warm sympathy with a productive intellect usually last? With his

ever-increasing indifference to fame, he shrank more and more from

the exertion entailed by laborious planning and careful execution,

and as little did he care whether the work he did was known by his

or another man's name. In his utter contempt for what the crowd did

or did not believe about him, he allowed piratical booksellers to

publish one worthless play after another with his immortal name upon

the title-page--_Sir John Oldcastle_ in 1600, _The London Prodigal_ in

1605, _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ in 1608, _Lord Cromwell_ in 1613--and he

either obscured or permitted others to obscure his work by associating

it with the feeble or affected productions of younger and inferior

men. We saw in _Timon_, as we shall presently see in _Pericles_ and

other plays, how the lines drawn by his master-hand have been blurred

by others, traced by clumsy and unsteady fingers. It is not always

easy to distinguish whether it was Shakespeare who began the play and

wearied of his work half-way through, as Michael Angelo so frequently

did, carelessly looking on at its completion by another hand, or

whether he had the attempts of others lying before him and hid his own

poetical strength and greatness in these fungus growths of childish

versification and unhealthy prose, leaving it to chance whether the

future generations, to whom he never gave much thought, would be able

to distinguish his part in them. It may be that he treated his work for

the theatre much as a modern author does when he makes over his ideas

to a collaborator, or writes anonymously in a newspaper or periodical.

He believes that among his friends are three or four who will recognise

his style, and if they do not (as frequently happens) it is no great

matter.

On the title-page of the first quarto edition of _Pericles_, in 1609,

are these words: "The late, and much admired play called Pericles,

Prince of Tyre.... By William Shakespeare." "The late"--the play cannot

have been acted before 1608, for there is no contemporary mention of it

before that date, whereas from 1609 onwards it is frequently noticed.

"The much admired play"--everything witnesses to the truth of these

words.[1] Many contemporary references testify to the favour the play

enjoyed. In an anonymous poem, _Pimlyco, or Runne Redcap_ (1609),

Pericles is mentioned as the new play which gentle and simple crowd to

see:

"Amazde I stood, to see a Crowd

Of civill Throats stretched out so lowd

(As at a New Play). All the Roomes

Did swarm with Gentiles mix'd with Groomes,

So that I truly thought all These

Came to see _Shore_ or _Pericles_."

The previously mentioned prologue (p. 539) to Robert Tailor's

_The Hog has Lost his Pearl_ (1614) cannot wish the play anything

better than that it may succeed as well as _Pericles_:

"And if it prove so happy as to please,

Weele say 'tis fortunate like _Pericles_."

In 1629, Ben Jonson, exasperated by the utter failure of his play _The

New Inn_, affords evidence, in the ode addressed to himself which

accompanies the drama, of the persistent popularity of _Pericles_:

"No doubt some mouldy tale

Like Pericles, and stale

As the shrieves crusts and nasty as his fish--

Scraps out of every dish

Thrown forth and raked into the common tub,

May keep up the Play-club."

In Sheppard's poem, _The Times displayed in Six Sestyads._ Shakespeare

is said to equal Sophocles and surpass Aristophanes, and all for

_Pericles'_ sake:

"With Sophocles we may

Compare great Shakespeare: Aristophanes

Never like him his Fancy could display,

Witness the _Prince of Tyre, his Pericles._"

This play was not included in the First Folio edition, probably because

the editors could not come to an agreement with the original publisher;

for these pirates were protected by law as soon as the book was entered

at Stationers' Hall. During Shakespeare's lifetime and after his death

it was one of the most popular of English dramas.

_Pericles_ was formerly considered one of Shakespeare's earliest works,

an opinion held strangely enough by Karl Elze in our own day. But all

English critics now believe, what Hallam was the first to discover,

that the language of such parts of it as were written by Shakespeare

belongs in style to his latest period, and it is unanimously declared

to have been written somewhere about the year 1608, after _Antony and

Cleopatra_ and before _Cymbeline_ and _The Tempest_. (See, for example,

P. Z. Round's introduction to the Irving edition, or Furnival's _Triar

Table of the order of Shakespeare's Plays_, reprinted in Dowden and

elsewhere.) My own opinion of course is, that _Pericles_ follows

naturally upon _Coriolanus_ and _Timon of Athens_, and forms an

appropriate overture to the succeeding fantastically idyllic plays.

The reader will have noticed that, unlike Dowden and Furnivall, I

have not been able to assign so early a date for the whole series

of pessimistic dramas as 1608 would imply.[2] I assume that certain

portions of _Pericles_ were forming in Shakespeare's mind even in the

midst of the venom to which he was giving vent for the last time in

_Timon of Athens_. In such periods of violent upheaval there may be an

undercurrent to the surface-current in the mind of a poet as well as in

another man's, and it is this undercurrent which will presently gain

strength and become the prevalent mood.

The intelligent reader will have realised that all this dating of

Shakespeare's pessimistic works can only be approximate. I am inclined

to advance them a year, because I fancy I can trace a connection

between _Coriolanus_ and Shakespeare's own thoughts of his mother, who

died in 1608. But a son does not only think of his mother at the moment

she is taken from him, and the fear of losing her in the illness which

probably preceded her death may have recalled his mother's image to

Shakespeare's mind with special force long before he actually lost her.

Here, as in all cases where it is not expressly mentioned, the reader

is requested to see an underlying Perhaps or Possibly, and to add one

where he feels the need of it. Only the main lines of the sequence are

at all certain. Where external criterions are missing, the internal

alone cannot determine the question of a year or a month. As far as

_Pericles_ is concerned, we do possess some guide, for it is most

unlikely that Shakespeare's share in the play would be added after it

was performed in 1608, especially in the face of the assurance on the

title-page.

The work as it has come down to us is not in reality a drama at all,

but an incompletely dramatised epic poem. We are taken back to the

childhood of dramatic art. The prologue to each act and the various

explanatory passages interpolated throughout the play are supposed

to be spoken by the old English poet John Gower, who had treated the

subject in narrative verse about the year 1390. He introduces the play

to the audience and explains it, as it were, with his pointer. Anything

that cannot well be acted he narrates, or has represented in dumb-show.

He speaks in the old octosyllabic rhymed iambics, which, as a rule,

however, do not rhyme:

"To sing a song that old was _sung_

From ashes ancient Gower has _come_,

Assuming man's _infirmities_,

To glad your ears and please your _eyes_"

And in the last lines of the prologue to the fourth act:

"Dionyza doth _appear_,

With Leonine a _murderer_."

He jestingly alludes to the fact that the play includes nearly the

whole of Pericles' life, from youth to old age. Marina is born at the

beginning of the third act, and is about to be married at the close of

the fifth. Nothing could well be farther from that unity of time and

place which was attempted in France at a later period. The first act

is laid at Antioch, Tyre, and Tarsus; the second in Pentapolis, on the

sea-shore, in a corridor of Simonides' palace, and lastly in a hall of

state. The third act opens on board ship and continues in the house of

Cerimon at Ephesus. The fourth act begins with an open place near the

sea-shore and ends in a brothel at Mitylerie; the fifth, on Pericles'

ship off Mitylene, ending in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. There is

as little unity of action as of time and place about the play; its

disconnected details are merely held together by the individuality of

the principal characters, and there is neither rhyme nor reason in its

various incidents; pure chance seems to rule all. The reader will seek

in vain for any intention--I do not mean moral, but any fundamental

idea in the play. Gower certainly institutes a contrast between an

immoral princess at the beginning of the play and a virtuous one at the

close, but this moral contrast has no connection with the intermediate

acts.

Pericles was an old and very popular subject. Its earliest form was

probably that of a Greek romance of the fifth century, of which a

Latin translation is still extant. It was translated into various

languages during the Middle Ages, and one version has found its way

into the _Gesta Romanorum_. In the twelfth century it was incorporated

by Godfrey of Viterbo in his great _Chronicle_. John Gower, who adapts

it in the eighth book of his _Confessio Amantis,_ gives Godfrey as his

authority. The Latin tale was translated into English by Lawrence Twine

in 1576, under the title of _The Patterne of Paynfull Aduentures_, a

second edition of which was published in 1607. In all but the English

adaptations the hero's name is given as Apollonius of Tyre. There can

be no doubt that Shakespeare's play was based upon the 1607 editon, and

this in itself is sufficient to refute the antiquated notion that his

part in it belonged to his youthful period. It was on the substance

of this play, and doubtless also upon Shakespeare's share in it, that

George Wilkins founded the romance he published in 1608 under the

title of _The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, Being

the true history of the Play of Pericles as it was lately presented

by the worthy and ancient John Gower_. The fact that Wilkins, in the

dedication of his book, which is a mere abstract of Twine and the play,

calls it "a poor infant of my braine," and the still more remarkable

similarity of the style and metrical structure of the first act of

_Pericles_ with Wilkins' own play, _The Miseries of enforced Marriage_,

would seem to point to him as the author of the extraneous portions

of _Pericles_. In both dramas a quantity of disconnected material has

been brought together in a long-drawn-out play, destitute of dramatic

situations or interest, and in both we find the same jarring and

awkward inversions of words. The incidents of the _Enforced Marriage_

recall some of the non-Shakespearian elements of _Timon_; here, also,

we are shown a spendthrift, evidently in possession of the sympathies

of his author, by whom he is considered a victim. The mingling of

prose, blank verse, and clumsily-introduced couplets with the same

rhymes constantly recurring, reminds us of those acts and scenes in

which Shakespeare had no part. Fleay observes that 195 rhymed lines

occur in the two first acts of _Pericles_, and only fourteen in the

last three, so marked is the contrast of style between the two parts,

and he notices that this frequency of rhyme corresponds closely to

the method of George Wilkins' own work. Both he and Boyle agree with

Delius, who was the first to express the opinion, that Wilkins is

the author of the first two acts. By dint of comparisons of style,

Fleay came to the conclusion that Gower's two speeches in five-footed

iambics, before and after Scenes 5 and 6 (which differ so markedly in

form and language from his other monologues), were written by William

Rowley, who had been associated in the previous year with Wilkins and

Day in the production of a wretched melodrama, _The Travels of Three

English Brothers_. His attempt, however, to ascribe to Rowley the two

prose scenes which take place in the brothel is made more on moral

than æsthetic grounds, and can have very little weight. My own opinion

is that they were entirely written by Shakespeare. They are plainly

presupposed in certain passages which are unmistakably Shakesparean;

they accord with that general view of life from which he is but now

beginning to escape, and they markedly recall the corresponding scenes

in _Measure for Measure_.

It is impossible to ascertain the precise circumstances under which

the play was produced. Some critics have maintained that it originally

began with what is now the third act, and that Shakespeare, having lain

it aside, gave Wilkins and Rowley permission to complete it for the

stage. But in reality the two men wrote the play in collaboration and

disposed of it to Shakespeare's company, which in turn submitted it to

the poet, who worked upon such parts as appealed to his imagination. As

the play now belonged to the theatre, and Wilkins was not at liberty

to publish it, he forestalled the booksellers by bringing it out as a

story, taking all the credit of invention and execution upon himself.

Never was a drama contrived out of more unlikely material. The name of

the knightly Prince of Tyre is changed, probably because it did not

suit the metre, from Apollonius to Pericles, which was corrupted from

the Pyrocles of Sidney's _Arcadia_. He comes to Antioch to risk his

life on the solution of a riddle. According to his success or failure

he is to be rewarded by the Princess's hand or death. The riddle

betrays to him the abominable fact that the Princess is living in

incest with her own father. He withdraws from the contest, and flies

from the country to escape the wrath of the wicked prince, who is even

more certain to slay him for success than for failure. He returns

to Tyre, but feeling insecure even there, he falls into a state of

melancholy, and quits his kingdom to escape the pursuit of Antiochus.

Arriving at Tarsus at a time when its inhabitants are suffering from

famine, he succours them with corn from his ships. Soon afterwards

he is wrecked off Pentapolis and cast ashore. His armour is dragged

out of the sea in fishermen's nets, and Pericles takes part in a

knightly tournament. The king's daughter, Thaisa, falls in love with

him at first sight, as did Nausicaa with Odysseus. She ignores all the

young knights around her for the sake of this noble stranger, who has

suffered shipwreck and so many other misfortunes. She will marry him

or none; he shines in comparison with the others as a precious stone

beside glass. Pericles weds Thaisa, and bears her away with him on

his ship. They are overtaken by a storm, during which Thaisa dies in

giving birth to a daughter. The superstition of the sailors requires

that her corpse shall be immediately thrown into the sea. The coffin

drifts ashore at Ephesus, where Thaisa reawakes to life unharmed.

The newborn child is left by Pericles to be nursed at Tarsus. As

Marina grows up, her foster-mother determines to kill her because she

outshines her daughter. Pirates land and prevent the murder; carrying

off Marina, they sell her to the mistress of a brothel in Mitylene. She

preserves her purity amidst these horrible surroundings, and, finding

a protector, gains her release. She is taken on board Pericles' ship

that she may charm away his melancholy. A recognition ensues, and, in

obedience to a sign from Diana, they sail to Ephesus; the husband is

reunited to his wife and the newly-found daughter to her mother.

This is the dramatically impossible canvas which Shakespeare undertook

to retouch and finish. That he should have made the first sketch of

the play, as Fleay so warmly maintains, seems very improbable upon a

careful study of the plot. To write such a beginning to an already

finished end would have been an almost impossible task for Wilkins

and his collaborator, involving a terribly active vigilance; for the

setting of the Shakespearian scenes, Gower's prologues, interludes,

and epilogues, &c., is a frame of their own making. Everything favours

the theory that it was Shakespeare who undertook to shape a half- or

wholly-finished piece of patchwork.

He hardly touched the first two acts, but they contain some traces of

his pen--the delicacy with which the incest of the Princess is treated,

for example, and Thaisa's timid, almost mute, though suddenly-aroused

love for him who at first glance seems to her the chief of men. The

scene between the three fishermen, with which the second act opens,

owns some turns which speak of Shakespeare, especially where a

fisherman says that the avaricious rich are the whales "o' the land,

who never leave gaping till they've swallowed the whole parish, church,

steeple, bells, and all," and another replies, "But, master, if I had

been the sexton, I would have been that day in the belfry.'

"_Second Fisherman_. Why, man?

"_Third Fisherman_. Because he should have swallowed me too:

and when I had been in his belly, I would have kept such a

jangling of the bells, that he should never have left till

he cast bells, steeple, church, and parish up again."