Chapter VII: Act V: Buckingham is taken and put to death; but Richmond's forces (2)

Shakespeare's abundant power created beings who look before and after, even while they keep vigorous a passionate present. It is difficult to praise that power. Even those who know how difficult art is find it hard to praise perfect art. Art is not to be praised or blamed, but understood. This play will stand as an example of perfect art till a greater than Shakespeare set a better example further on. It is

"All beauty and without a spot."

The scene of the roisterers, rousing the night-owl in a catch, rouses the heart, as all real creation does, with the thought that life is too wonderful to end. The next, most lovely scene, where the Duke and Viola talk of love that keeps life from ending, and so often brings life down into the dust, assures the heart that even if life ends for us it will go on in others.

"the song we had last night.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age."

In his best plays Shakespeare used a double construction to express by turn the twofold energy of man, the energy of the animal and of the spirit. The mind that brooded sadly in

"For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour,"

and in

"She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,"

belonged to earth, and got a gladness from earth. Within two minutes of the talk of the woman who died of love he showed Contemplation making a rare turkey-cock of the one wise man in his play.

_All's Well that Ends Well._

_Written._ (?)

_Published._ 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The story of Helena's love for Bertram is
found in the _Decamerone_ of Boccaccio (giorn. 3, nov. 9).
Shakespeare may have read it in the _Palace of Pleasure_.

_The Fable._ Helena, orphan daughter of a physician, has been
brought up, as a dependant, in the house of the Countess of
Rousillon. She falls in love with Bertram, the son of the Countess
and the King's ward.

Bertram goes to the French Court, on his way to the wars. He finds
the King dangerously ill. Helena, hearing of the King's illness,
comes to the Court as a physician. She offers to cure the King with
one of her father's remedies, on condition that, when cured, he
will give her in marriage the man of her choice. The King accepts
these conditions; she cures him; she chooses for her husband
Bertram.

Bertram, the King's ward, has to do the King's bidding. He
grudgingly accepts her; they are married. He leaves her, and goes
to the wars in the service of the Duke of Florence, designing to
see her no more. Helena withdraws from the Countess's house, and
comes to Florence disguised.

Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her,
receives her unsuspecting husband at night, takes from him a ring,
and gives, in exchange, a ring given to her by the King of France.
At the end of the war, Bertram, hearing that Helena is dead,
returns to France, wearing the ring. The King sees it and
challenges it. Bertram can give no just account of how he got it.
Helena, quick with child by him, confronts him, with the ring that
he left with her at Florence. Diana, the Florentine maid, gives
evidence that Helena impersonated her on the night of Bertram's
visit at Florence. Bertram accepts Helena as his wife, and the play
ends happily.

This play (whenever written) was extensively revised during the ruthless mood that gave birth to _Measure for Measure_. The alterations were made in a mood so much deeper than the mood of its first composition that they make the play uneven. Something, perhaps some trick of health, that made the mind clearer than the imagination, gave to Shakespeare for a short time another (and pitiless) view of human obsessions.

It was a part of his belief that treachery is generally caused by blindness, blindness generally by some obsession of passion. In this play he treats of the removal of an obsession by making plain to the obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the treachery it causes.

Bertram is a young man fresh from home. He does not want to marry. He is eager to see the world and to win honour. He has been accustomed to look down on Helena as a poor dependant. He does not like her, and he does not like being ordered. He is suddenly ordered to marry her. He has been trapped by a woman's underhand trick. He sees himself brought into bondage with all the plumes of his youth clipped close. There is no way of escape; he has to marry her; but the King's order cannot quench his rage against the woman who has so snared him. His rage burns inward into a brooding, rankling ill-humour that becomes an obsession. It is one of the tragedies of life that an evil obsession blinds the judgment on more sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. A way of destruction may be as narrow as a way of virtue; but all the other ways of destruction run into it. Bertram in blinkers to the good in Helena is blind to the faults in himself and in Parolles his friend. Wilfully, as the sullen do, he thinks himself justified in doing evil because evil has been done to him. Hot blood is running in him. Temptation, never far from youth, is always near the unbalanced. He takes an unworthy confidant, as the obsessed do, and goes in over the ears. His sin is the giving of salutation to sportive blood, it is love, it is "natural rebellion," it is young man's pastime. But looked at coldly and judicially, with the nature of the confidant laid bare, and the lies of the sinner made plain, it is an ugly thing. Passion is sweet enough to seem truth, the only truth. Let the eyes be opened a little, and it will blast the heart with horror. What man thought true is then seen to be this, this thing, this devil of falseness who gives man this kind of friend, makes him tell this kind of lie, and brands him with this kind of shame.

Shakespeare is just to Bertram. The treachery of a woman is often the cause of a man's treachery to womanhood. Helena's obsession of love makes her blind to the results of her actions. She twice puts the man whom she loves into an intolerable position, which nothing but a king can end. The fantasy is not made so real that we can believe in the possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised as one of the noblest of Shakespeare's women. Shakespeare saw her more clearly than any man who has ever lived. He saw her as a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art's sake, nor for charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end. He saw her put a man into a position of ignominy quite unbearable, and then plot with other women to keep him in that position. Lastly, he saw her beloved all the time by the conventionally minded of both sexes.

The play is full of effective theatrical situations. It contains much fine poetry. Besides the poetry there are startling moments of insight--

"My mother told me just how he would woo
As if she sat in's heart...."

"Now, God delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves,
What things are we! Merely our own traitors."

"I would gladly have him see his company anatomised,
That he might take a measure of his own judgments."

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."

"Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust."

_Julius Caesar._

_Written._ 1601 (?)

_Produced._ (?)

_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius
Caesar in Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_.

A tragedy of Julius Caesar, now lost, was performed by Shakespeare's
company in 1594. Shakespeare must have known this play.

_The Fable._ Cassius, fearing that Julius Caesar is about to
extinguish all trace of Republican rule in Rome, persuades Brutus
and others to plot a change. They decide to murder Caesar.

On the morning chosen for the murder, Caesar is warned by many omens
not to stir abroad. He is persuaded to ignore the omens. He goes to
the Senate House, and is there killed. Mark Antony, his friend,
obtains leave from the murderers to make a public oration over the
corpse.

In his speech he so inflames the populace against the murderers
that they are compelled to leave Rome.

Joining himself to Octavius, he takes the field against Brutus and
Cassius, and helps to defeat them at Philippi.

Cassius is killed by his servant when he sees that all is lost.
Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills himself.

The modern play climbs to its culmination by a series of interruptions or crises. The modern playwright tries to end his acts at an arresting or splendid moment, artfully delayed, and carefully prepared. He tries to end his play by a gradual knitting together of all the energies of his characters into a situation, happier or more haunting, than any that has preceded it in the course of the action. The art by which this is done, when it is done, is called dramatic construction. There are many kind of dramatic construction. Each age tends to form a new one. Each writer uses many. In art a subject can only be expressed in the form most fitting to it. In the art of the theatre a mistake in the choice of the form, or in the right handling of it when chosen leads infallibly to the irritation of the audience and the failure of the play. When a play is badly constructed the actors cannot so interpret the author's emotion that it will dominate the collective emotion in the audience.

It is often said, by those who ought to know better (it was said to Racine by Frenchmen), that dramatic construction cannot matter, if the passion or spirit with which the author writes, be abundant and sincere. The powder in a cartridge may be abundant and the bullet at the end may be sincerely meant, yet neither will do execution till they are put properly into the proper weapon, rightly aimed, and judgingly fired. So with passion in the arts. Without art, inspiration is breath and a feeding of the wind. In the theatre, inspiration without art is as a sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal.

It is sometimes maintained in print, by those saddened or maddened by bad modern performances of the plays, that Shakespeare "could not construct," that he is constantly "rambling," "chaotic," or "intolerable," and that he is only played to-day because of his "poetry." Those who maintain these things forget that an Elizabethan play was constructed for a theatre much unlike the modern theatre, and performed in a manner suited to that theatre, but less well suited to the theatre of our times. Shakespeare's plays were constructed closely and carefully to be effective on the Elizabethan stage. On that stage they were highly and nobly effective. On the modern stage, produced in the modern manner, they are less effective. There are many reasons why they should be less effective on the modern stage. During the last thirty years there has been a tendency towards naturalism in the theatre. Modern audiences have learned not to care for poetry on the stage unless it is made "natural" by realistic scenery. Modern audiences are accustomed to the modern forms of dramatic construction, which are unlike the Elizabethan forms. They know that modern playwrights put a strong scene at the end of an act and a great scene at the end of the play. They have learned to expect a play to be arranged in that manner, and to count as ill constructed the play not so arranged. As it is frequently said that the last acts of _Julius Caesar_ make anti-climax and spoil the play, it is necessary to consider Shakespeare's constructive practice in this and in some other plays.

The Greek tragic poets ended the action of their plays in the modern manner, at the great scene, but, unlike us, they delayed the departure of the audience for some minutes more, generally by a chorus of men and women who expounded the moral value of the action in noble verse. The audience came away calmed. If a Greek had constructed _Julius Caesar_, he would have ended the action at the murder. A chorus of senators would then have chanted something noble about the results of pride, the vanity of human glory, and the strangeness of the ways of the gods. A modern writer would have caused the curtain to fall at the murder, for to-day, when the brains are out the play dies and there an end. Shakespeare carries on his play for two acts after Caesar is dead. In _Macbeth_ he constructs the last half of his play in much the same manner.

In both plays he is considering the conception, the doing, and the results of a violent act. In both plays this act is the murder of the head of a State. In neither case is he deeply interested in the victim. Duncan, in _Macbeth_, is a generous gentleman; Caesar, in this play, is a touchy man of affairs whose head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination broods on the fact that the killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases the killers show base personal ingratitude and treachery. In both plays, an avenging justice makes even the scales. The mind of the poet follows them from the moment when the guilty thought is prompted, through the agony and exultation of dreadful acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the treacherous, till Fate's just sword falls in vengeance. His imagination is most keenly stirred just as ours is, by the great event, the murder of the victim: but his subject is not the murder, nor yet the tragical end of a ruler. His subject in both plays is the working of Fate who prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and then destroys him. We are interested in crisis and in topic. The Elizabethans, with a wider vision, could not detach an act from its place in the pageant of history. In a modern play the heroine is put into an unpleasant position, or an evil is exposed, or our faults are made visible and laughable. The point of view is that of the sympathiser, reformer, and moralist looking on from the window near by. The field of vision is restricted and the object brought near. In this great play, as in _Macbeth_, Shakespeare strove to present a violent act and its consequences from the point of view of a great just spirit outside life.

The play is generally considered to be the earliest of the supreme plays. Little more can be said of it at this time than that it is supreme. There is a majesty in the conception that makes it like gathering and breaking storm. The cause of the murder is a great personal treachery inspired by an unselfish idea. Though it seems inevitable, it is a very little thing that makes it possible. Both Caesar's murder and Brutus' downfall are almost prevented. A hand stretches out to save both of them. A little domestic treachery inspired by a selfish idea puts aside the interposing hand in both instances. Caesar will not listen to his wife because he is sure of himself. Brutus will not answer his wife for the same reason. They go on to the magnificent hour which makes the one fine soul in the play a haunted and unhappy soul till he snatches at Death at Philippi.

The verse is calm, like the noble art that shapes the scenes. It is full of majesty. Lines occur in which single unusual words are charged with an incalculable power of meaning.

"Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glazed upon me and went surly by."

"It is the bright day that brings forth the adder."

Shakespeare's intensest and most solemn thought, the Law that directed the creation of some of his greatest work, is spoken by Brutus--

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."

_Hamlet, Prince of Denmark._

_Written._ 1601-2.

_Published_, in an imperfect form, 1603; more perfectly, 1604.

_Source of the Plot._ A play upon the subject of Hamlet, now lost,
seems to have been popular in London during the last decades of the
sixteenth century. Some think that it was an early work of
Shakespeare's. No evidence supports this theory. He probably knew
the play, and may have acted in it.

The story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his _Historia Danica_.
Francis de Belleforest printed a version of it in his _Histoires
Tragiques_. An English translation from de Belleforest, called the
_Hystorie of Hamblet_, was published (or perhaps reprinted) in
London in 1608. Shakespeare seems to have known both de Belleforest
and the _Hystorie_.

_The Fable._ Claudius, brother to the King of Denmark, conniving
with Gertrude the Queen, poisons his brother, and seizes the
throne. Soon afterwards he marries Gertrude. At this point the play
begins.

Hamlet, son of the murdered king, sick at heart at his mother's
hasty re-marriage, and troubled by his love for Ophelia, returns to
Denmark. The ghost of his father reveals the manner of the murder
to him, and makes him swear to be revenged. The revelation so
affects him that the murderers begin to fear him. He cannot bring
himself to kill Claudius. In a play he shows them that he knows
their guilt.

While speaking with his mother, he discovers and kills a spy hidden
behind the arras. The spy is Polonius, father of Laertes and of
Ophelia.

Claudius causes Hamlet to sail for England, on the pretext that the
killing of Polonius has brought him into danger with the populace.
He plans that Hamlet shall be killed on his arrival. Hamlet
discovers the treacherous purpose and returns unhurt to Denmark.

During Hamlet's absence at sea, Laertes learns how Polonius was
killed and swears to be revenged on Hamlet. Hamlet's return gives
him his opportunity.

Claudius suggests that the revenge be taken at a fencing-bout.
Laertes shall fence with Hamlet, using a poisoned foil. If this
fails, Hamlet shall be given poisoned wine.

In a scuffle during the fencing-bout the fencers change foils.
Gertrude, by mistake, drinks the poisoned wine and dies. Laertes,
hurt by the poisoned foil, dies. Hamlet, also hurt by the poisoned
foil, kills Claudius and dies too.

_Hamlet_ is the most baffling of the great plays. It is the tragedy of a man and an action continually baffled by wisdom. The man is too wise. The dual action, pressing in both cases to complete an event, cannot get past his wisdom into the world. The action in one case is a bad one. It is simply murder. In the other, and more important case, it is, according to our scheme, also a bad one. It is revenge, or, at best, the taking of blood for blood. In the Shakespearean scheme it is not revenge, it is justice, and therefore neither good nor bad but necessary. The situation which causes the tragedy is one very common in Shakespeare's system. Life has been wrenched from her course. Wrenching is necessary to bring her back to her course or to keep her where she is. Hamlet is a man who understands too humanly to wish to wrench either this way or that, and too shrewdly to be himself wrenched by grosser instruments of Fate.

The action consists in the baffling of action. Mostly, it consists in the baffling of life's effort to get back to her course. All through the play there is the uneasiness of something trying to get done, something from outside life trying to get into life, but baffled always because the instrument chosen is, himself, a little outside life, as the wise must be. This baffling of the purpose of the dead leads to a baffling of the living, and, at last, to something like an arrest of life, a deadlock, in which each act, however violent, makes the obscuring of life's purpose greater.

The powers outside life send a poor ghost to Hamlet to prompt him to an act of justice. After baffled hours, often interrupted by cock-crow, he gives his message. Hamlet is charged with the double task of executing judgment and showing mercy. It is a charge given to many people (generally common people) in the system of the plays. It is given to two other men in this play. It is nothing more than the fulfilling of the kingly office, so bloodily seized by Claudius before the opening of the play. At this point, it may be well to consider the society in which the kingly office is to be exercised.

The society is created with Shakespeare's fullest power. It is not an image of the world in little, like the world of the late historical plays. It is an image of the world as intellect is made to feel it. It is a society governed by the enemies of intellect, by the sensual and the worldly, by deadly sinners and the philosophers of bread and cheese. The King is a drunken, incestuous murderer, who fears intellect. The Queen is a false woman, who cannot understand intellect. Polonius is a counsellor who suspects intellect. Ophelia is a doll without intellect. Laertes is a boor who destroys intellect. The courtiers are parasites who flourish on the decay of intellect. Fortinbras, bright and noble, marching to the drum to win a dunghill, gives a colour to the folly. The only friends of the wise man are Horatio, the schoolfellow, and the leader of a cry of players.

The task set by the dead is a simple one. All tasks are simple to the simple-minded. To the delicate and complex mind so much of life is bound up with every act that any violent act involves not only a large personal sacrifice of ideal, but a tearing-up by the roots of half the order of the world. Wisdom is founded upon justice; but justice, to the wise man, is more a scrupulous quality in the mind than the doing of expedient acts upon sinners. Hamlet is neither "weak" nor "unpractical," as so many call him. What he hesitates to do may be necessary, or even just, as the world goes, but it is a defilement of personal ideals, difficult for a wise mind to justify. It is so great a defilement, and a world so composed is so great a defilement, that death seems preferable to action and existence alike.

The play at this point presents a double image of action baffled by wisdom. Hamlet baffles the dealing of the justice of Fate, and also the death plotted for him by his uncle. His weapon, in both cases, is his justice, his precise scrupulousness of mind, the niceness of mental balance which gives to all that he says the double-edge of wisdom. It is the faculty, translated into the finer terms of thought, which the ghost seeks to make real with bloodshed. Justice, in her grosser as in her finer form, is concerned with the finding of the truth. The first half of the play, though it exposes and develops the fable, is a dual image of a search for truth, of a seeking for a certainty that would justify a violent act. The King is probing Hamlet's mind with gross human probes, to find out if he is mad. Hamlet is searching the King's mind with the finest of intellectual probes, to find out if he is guilty. The probe used by him, the fragment of a play within a play, is the work of a man with a knowledge of the impotence of intellect--

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown"--

and a faith in the omnipotence of intellect--

"Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."

To this man, five minutes after the lines have exposed the guilty man, comes a chance to kill his uncle. Hamlet "might do it pat" while he is at prayers. The knowledge that the sword will not reach the real man, since damnation comes from within, not from without, arrests his hand. Fate offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by, with his baffling slowness, made up of mercy and wisdom. Fate, or the something outside life which demands the King's blood, so that life may go back to her channel, is foiled. The action cannot bring itself to be. A wise human purpose is, for the moment, stronger than the eternal purpose of Nature, the roughly just.

It is a part of this play's ironic teaching that life must not be baffled; but that, when she has been wrenched from her course, she must either be wrenched back to it or kept violently in the channel to which she has been forced.

In _Macbeth_, a not dissimilar play, the life violently altered is kept in the strange channel by a succession of violent acts. In _Hamlet_, when Hamlet's merciful wisdom has decided that the life violently altered shall not be wrenched back, his destroying wisdom decides that she shall not be kept in the strange channel. The King, just in his way, seeks to find out if Hamlet be sane. If Hamlet be sane, he must die. His death will secure the King's position. By his death life will be kept in the strange channel. Polonius, the King's agent, learns that Hamlet is sane and something more. Fate demands violence this way if she may not have it in the other. She offers an instant for the doing of her purpose. Hamlet puts the instant by with his baffling swiftness, which strikes on the instant, when the Queen's honour and his own life depend on it. The first bout in this play of the baffling of action falls to Hamlet. The second bout, in which the King's purpose is again baffled, by the sending of the two courtiers to their death in England, also falls to Hamlet. The bloody purpose from outside life and the bloody purpose from within life are both baffled and kept from being by the two extremes so perfectly balanced in the wise nature.

Extremes in the Shakespearean system are tragical things. In Shakespeare, the pathway of excess leads, not as with Blake, to the palace of wisdom, but to destruction. The two extremes in Hamlet, of slowness and swiftness, set up in life the counter forces which destroy extremes, so that life, the common thing, may continue to be common. The mercy of Hamlet leaves the King free to plot his death. The swiftness of Hamlet gives to the King a hand and sword to work his will.

In other plays, the working of extremes to the punishment dealt by life to all excess is simple and direct. In this play, nothing is simple and direct. Fate's direct workings are baffled by a mind too complex to be active on the common planes. The baffling of Fate's purpose leads to a condition in life like the "slack water" between tides. Laertes, when his father is killed, raises the town and comes raving to the presence to stab the killer. He is baffled by the King's wisdom. Ophelia, "incapable of her own distress," goes mad and drowns herself. The play seems to hesitate and stand still while the energies spilled in the baffling of Fate work and simmer and grow strong, till they combine with Fate in the preparation of an end that shall not be baffled. Even so, "the end men looked for cometh not." The end comes to both actions at once in the squalor of a chance-medley. Fate has her will at last. Life, who was so long baffled, only hesitated. She destroys the man who wrenched her from her course, and the man who would neither wrench her back nor let her stay, and the women who loved these men, and the men who loved them. Revenge and chance together restore life to her course, by a destruction of the lives too beastly, and of the lives too hasty, and of the lives too foolish, and of the life too wise, to be all together on earth at the same time.

It is difficult to praise the poetry of _Hamlet_. Nearly all the play is as familiar by often quotation as the New Testament. The great, wise, and wonderful beauty of the play is a part of the English mind for ever. It is difficult to live for a day anywhere in England (except in a theatre) without hearing or reading a part of _Hamlet_. Lines that are little quoted are the lines to quote here--

"this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest."

"O proud death!
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes, at a shot,
So bloodily hast struck?"

The last speech, great as the speech at the end of Timon, and noble, like that, with a music beyond the art of voices, is constructed on a similar metrical basis.

"Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldier's music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot."

_Troilus and Cressida._

_Written._ (?)

_Produced._ After publication.

_Published._ 1609.

_Source of the Plot._ Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of _Troilus and
Creseide_. John Lydgate's _Troy Boke_. William Caxton's translation
of the French book of the _Recuyels of Troy_. George Chapman's
translation of Homer's _Iliad_.

Among many other possible sources may be mentioned a now lost play
of _Troilus and Cressida_ (produced in 1599) by the poets Thomas
Dekker and Henry Chettle.

_The Fable._ The scene is Troy. Cressida is a Trojan woman, whose
father, Calchas, has gone over to the Greeks. She is beloved by the
youth Troilus. Her uncle, Pandarus, seeks to bring her to accept
Troilus. Hector, brother to Troilus, challenges a Greek champion to
single combat.

In the Greek camp there is much disaffection. Achilles, the chief
Greek champion, conceiving himself wronged, makes a mock of the
other leaders. To teach him his place the leaders plan that Ajax
shall be chosen in his stead to take up Hector's challenge.

Pandarus succeeds in bringing Cressida to love Troilus.

Calchas, in the Greek camp, sends to Troy for Cressida. She is
delivered over to the Greeks. Forgetting Troilus, she entangles one
of the Greeks with her wiles.

Ajax takes up Hector's challenge. They fight a friendly bout and
then go to feast, where the moody Achilles insults Hector.

The next day, Hector and Troilus come to the field, the one to
avenge Achilles' insults, the other to kill the man who has won
Cressida. Hector is cruelly and cowardly killed by Achilles.
Troilus is left unhurt, cursing.

_Troilus and Cressida_ is the dialogue scenario of a play that was never finished. It seems to have been written before 1603, then laid aside, incomplete, until the mood that inspired it had died. Conflicting evidence makes it doubtful whether it was acted during Shakespeare's life. It was published, under mysterious circumstances, a year or two before he retired to Stratford.

Two or three scenes are finished. The rest is indicated in the crudest dialogue, written so hastily that it is often undramatic and nearly always without wit or beauty. The finished scenes are among the grandest ever conceived by Shakespeare, but the grandeur is that of thought, not of action. They make it plain to us why the play was never completed. The subject is this: a light woman throwing over a boy. The setting, the Trojan war: a light woman overthrowing a city, is so much bigger than the subject that it overshadows it. Another subject arises in the circumstance of the Trojan war. Achilles, the man of action, without honour or imagination, sulks. The wise man, Ulysses, suggests that he be brought from his sulks by mockery. The result of this wise counsel is that Hector, the one bright and noble soul in the play, is killed cruelly and sullenly, by the boor thus mocked.

The two subjects and the setting are not and cannot be brought into unity. Shakespeare's mind wandered from his real subject to brood upon the obsession of Helen that betrayed Troy to the fire, and upon the tragical working of wisdom that brought about an end so foul. Other, and bigger, subjects for plays tempted him from the work. He put it aside before it was half alive. As it stands, it has neither life nor meaning. It oppresses the mind into making gloomy interpretation. Tragedy in its imperfect form cannot but be gloomy. It is nothing but the record of a fatal event. But Shakespearean tragedy is tragedy in its perfect form. It is an exultation of the soul over the husks of life and the winds that blow them. This play, had it ever been finished, would have been like the other tragedies of the great years. That it is not finished is our misfortune.

The finished scenes are full of wisdom--

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitude:
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion."

"O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was."

"Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves."

"And sometimes we are devils to ourselves."

Some have thought that this play was written by Shakespeare to ridicule the two poets, Ben Jonson (in the person of Ajax) and John Marston (in the person of Thersites). Those two poets were engaged, with others, in the years 1601-2, in what is called the War of the Theatres, that is, they wrote plays to criticise and mock each other. These plays are often scurrilous and seldom amusing. During the course of the war the two chief combatants came to blows.

It is sad that Shakespeare should be credited with the paltriness of lesser men. His view of his task is expressed in _Timon of Athens_ with the perfect golden clearness of supreme power--

"my free drift
Halts not particularly, but moves itself
In a wide sea of wax: no levell'd malice
Infects one comma in the course I hold;
But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on,
Leaving no tract behind."

He held that view throughout his creative life, as a great poet must. At the time during which this play was written his thought was more rigidly kept to the just survey of life than at any other period. Creative art has been so long inglorious that the practice and ideas of supreme poets have become incomprehensible to the many. This play is a great hint of something never, now, to be made clear. Those who count it a mark of Shakespeare's littleness expose their own.

_Measure for Measure._

_Written._ 1603-4 (?)

_Produced._ (?)

_Published._ 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The story is founded on an event that is said
to have taken place in Ferrara, during the Middle Ages. Shakespeare
took it from a collection of novels, the _Hecatomithi_, by Giraldi
Cinthio; from the play, _The rare Historie of Promos and
Cassandra_, founded on Cinthio's novel, by one George Whetstone,
and from Whetstone's prose rendering of the story in his book _The
Heptameron of Civil Discourses_.

_The Fable._ The Duke of Vienna, going on a secret mission, leaves
his power in the hands of Angelo, a man of strict life.

Angelo enforces old laws against incontinence. He arrests Claudio
and sentences him to be beheaded. Claudio's sister, Isabella,
pleads with Angelo for her brother's life. Being moved to lust,
Angelo tempts Isabella. He offers to spare Claudio if she will
submit to him. Claudio begs her to save him thus. She refuses.

The Duke returns to Vienna disguised, hears Isabella's story, and
resolves to entrap Angelo. He causes her to make an appointment to
that end. He causes Mariana, a maid who has been jilted by Angelo,
to personate Isabella, and keep the appointment. Mariana does so.

He contrives to check Angelo's treachery, that would have caused
Claudio's death in spite of the submission.

Lastly he reveals himself, exposes Angelo's sin, compels him to
marry Mariana, pardons Claudio, and makes Isabella his Duchess.

This play is now seldom performed. It is one of the greatest works of the greatest English mind. It deals justly with the case of the man who sets up a lifeless sentimentality as a defence against a living natural impulse. The spirit of Angelo has avenged itself on Shakespeare by becoming the guardian spirit of the British theatre.

In this play Shakespeare seems to have brooded on the fact that the common prudential virtues are sometimes due, not to virtue, but to some starvation of the nature. Chastity may proceed from a meanness in the mind, from coldness of the emotions, or from cowardice, at least as often as from manly and cleanly thinking. Two kinds of chastity are set at clash here. The one springs from a fire in the personality that causes Isabella to think death better than contamination, and gives her that whiteness of generosity which fills nunneries with living sacrifice; the other comes from the niggardliness that makes Angelo jilt Mariana rather than take her without a dower. Both are obsessions; both exalt a part of life above life itself. Like other obsessions, they come to grief in the presence of something real.

These two characters make the action. The play is concerned with the difficulty of doing justice in a world of animals swayed by rumour. The subject is one that occupied Shakespeare's mind throughout his creative life. Wisdom begins in justice. But how can man be just, without the understanding of God? Who is so faultless that he can sit in judgment on another? Who so wise that he can see into the heart, weigh the act with the temptation and strike the balance?

Sexual sin is the least of the sins in Dante. It is allied to love. It is an image of regeneration. No sin is so common, none is more glibly blamed. It is so easy to cry "treacherous," "base," and "immoral." But who, while the heart beats, can call himself safe from the temptation to this sin? It is mixed up with every generosity. It is a flood in the heart and a blinding wave over the eyes. It is the thorn in the side under the cloak of the beauty of youth. In Shakespeare's vision it is a natural force, incident to youth, as April is incident to the year. The young men live as though life were oil, and youth a bonfire to be burnt. Life is always wasteful. Youth is life's test for manhood. The clown finds in the prison a great company of the tested and rejected, calling through the bars for alms. In spite of all this choice, another victim is picked by tragical chance. Lucio, a butterfly of the brothel, a dirtier soul than Claudio, is spared. Claudio is taken and condemned. The beautiful, vain, high-blooded youth, so quick with life and glad of the sun, is to lie in earth, at the bidding of one less full of April.

Angelo, the man whose want of sympathy condemns Claudio, is in the state of security that precedes so much Shakespearean tragedy. He has received the name of being more than human because (unlike his admirers) he has not shown himself to be considerably less. He has come through youth unsinged. He has not been betrayed by his "gross body's treason." Both he and those about him think that he is proof against temptation to sexual sin. Suddenly his security is swept away. He is betrayed by the subtler temptation that would mean nothing to a grosser man. He is moved by the sight of the beauty of a distressed woman's mind. The sight means nothing to Claudio, and less than nothing to Lucio. The happy animal nature of youthful man has a way of avoiding distressed women. The cleverer man, who has shut himself up in the half life of sentiment, cannot so escape. He is attacked suddenly by the unknown imprisoned side of him as well as by temptation. He falls, and, like all who fall, he falls not to one sin, but to a degradation of the entire man. The sins come linked. "Treason and murder ever kept together." When he is once involved with lust, treachery and murder follow. He is swiftly so stained that when the wise Duke shows him as he is, he shrinks from the picture, with a cry that he may be put out of the way by some swift merciful death so that the horror of the knowledge of himself may end, too.

The play is a marvellous piece of unflinching thought. Like all the greatest of the plays, it is so full of illustration of the main idea that it gives an illusion of an infinity like that of life. It is constructed closely and subtly for the stage. It is more full of the ingenuities of play-writing than any of the plays. The verse and the prose have that smoothness of happy ease which makes one think of Shakespeare not as a poet writing, but as a sun shining.

" ... It deserves with characters of brass
A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time."

The thought of the play is penetrating rather than impassioned. The poetry follows the thought. There are cold lines like Death laying a hand on the blood. The faultless lyric, "Take, O take those lips away" occurs. Some say Fletcher wrote it, some Bacon. "Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love." The music of the great manner rings--

"Merciful Heaven!
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep."

The prose accompaniment to what is unrestrained in youth provides a cruel comedy.

_Othello, the Moor of Venice._

_Written._ 1604 (?)

_Published_, in quarto, and in the first folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The tale appears in _The Hecatomithi_ of
G. B. Giraldi Cinthio. Shakespeare follows Cinthio in the main; but a
few details suggest that he knew the story in an ampler version.

_The Fable._ Iago, ensign to Othello, the Moor of Venice, is
jealous of Cassio, his lieutenant. He plots to oust Cassio from the
lieutenancy.

Othello marries Desdemona, and sails with her to the wars in
Cyprus. Iago resolves to make use of Desdemona to cause Cassio's
downfall.

He procures Cassio's discharge from the lieutenancy by involving
him in a drunken brawl. Cassio beseeches Desdemona to intercede
with Othello for him. Iago hints to Othello that she has good
reason to wish Cassio to be restored. He suggests that Cassio is
her lover. Partly by fortune, partly by craft, he succeeds in
establishing in Othello's mind the conviction that Desdemona is
guilty.

Othello smothers Desdemona, learns, too late, that he has been
deceived, and kills himself. Cassio's character is cleared. Iago is
led away to torture.

A man's greatest works differ from his lesser works in degree, not in kind. They may be more perfect, but they express similar ideas. "A man grows, he does not become a different man." In this play of _Othello_ the ideas are those that inspire nearly all the plays, that life seeks to preserve a balance, and that obsessions, which upset the balance, betray life to evil.

These ideas are in the earliest work of all, in _Venus and Adonis_. In _Othello_ they are expressed with the variety and power of the great period. The obsession chosen for illustration is that of jealous suspicion. It is displayed at work in a mean mind and in a generous mind. The varying quality of its working makes the action of the play.

As in _The Merchant of Venice_, the chief character is a man of intellect who has been warped out of humanity by the world's injustice. Iago is a man of fine natural intellect who has not been trained in the personal qualities that bring preferment. An educated man is advanced above him, as in life it happens. He broods over the injustice and schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter and the newly-married wife are lovers.

He succeeds in this, through his natural adroitness, the working of chance, and the generosity of Othello, who has too much passion to be anything but blind under passionate influence like love or jealousy. The mean man's want of emotion keeps always the conduct of the vengeance precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is ruined.

That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection. Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate and instinctive.

The influence and importance of the little thing in the great event is marked in this scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the greater tragedies. We are all or may at any time become immensely important to the play of the world. Had Emilia come a minute sooner or a minute later the end of the play would have been very different. Desdemona would have lived to repent her marriage at leisure, or she would have gone to her grave branded.

Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this play, as in _Richard III_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, he brooded upon the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only his intellect. What he is in himself is as mysterious as life. Life is clear, up to a point, but beyond that point it is always baffling. Shakespeare's task was to look at life clearly. Looking at it clearly he was as baffled by what he saw, as we, who only see by his aid. He found in Iago an image like life itself, a power and an activity, prompted by something secret and silent.

Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.

The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father. The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights have violent ends and bring violent ends to others.

The poetry of _Othello_ is nearly as well known as that of _Hamlet_. Many quotations from the play have passed into the speech of the people. A play of intrigue does not give the fullest opportunity for great poetry; but supreme things are spoken throughout the action. Othello's cry--

"It is the very error of the moon.
She comes more near the earth than she was wont
And drives men mad,"

is one of the most perfect of all the perfect things in the tragedies.

_King Lear._

_Written._ 1605-6.

_Published._ 1608.

_Source of the Plot._ The story of Lear is told in Holinshed's
_Chronicles_, in a play by an unknown hand, _The True Chronicle
History of King Leir_, and in a few stanzas of the tenth canto of
the second Book of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.

The character of Gloucester seems to have been suggested by the
character of a blind king in Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_.

_The Fable._ King Lear, in his old age, determines to give up his
kingdom to his three daughters. Before he does so, he tries to
assure himself of their love for him. The two elder women, Goneril
and Regan, vow that they love him intensely; the youngest,
Cordelia, can only tell him that she cares for him as a daughter
should. He curses and casts off Cordelia, who is taken to wife by
the King of France.

Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his
son.

King Lear, thwarted and flouted by Goneril and Regan, goes mad, and
wanders away with his Fool. Gloucester, trying to comfort him
against the wishes of Goneril and Regan, is betrayed by his bastard
Edmund, and blinded. He wanders away with Edgar, who has disguised
himself as a madman.

Regan's husband is killed. Seeking to take Edmund in his stead, she
rouses the jealousy of Goneril, who has already made advances to
him.

Cordelia lands with French troops to repossess Lear of his kingdom.
She finds Lear, and comforts him. In an engagement with the
sisters' armies, she and Lear are captured.

Edmund's baseness is exposed. He is attainted and struck down.
Goneril poisons Regan, and kills herself. Edmund, before he dies,
reveals that he has given order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed.
His news comes too late to save Cordelia. She is brought in dead.
Lear dies over her body.

Albany, Goneril's husband, Kent, Lear's faithful servant, and
Edgar, Edmund's slayer, are left to set the kingdom in order.

The play of _King Lear_ is based upon a fable and a fairy story. It illustrates the most terrible forms of treachery, that of child against father, and father against child. It is the most affecting and the grandest of the plays.

The evil which makes the action springs from two sources, both fatal. One is the blindness or fatuity in Lear, which makes him give away his strength and cast out Cordelia. The other, equally deadly, but more cruel in its results, springs from an unrepented treachery, done long before by Gloucester, when he broke his marriage vows to beget Edmund. Memory of the sweetness of that treachery gives to Gloucester a blindness to the boy's nature, just as a sweetness, or ease, in the treachery of giving up the cares of kingship (against oath and the kingdom's good) helps to blind Lear to the natures of his daughters.