Chapter VIII: Act V: Buckingham is taken and put to death; but Richmond's forces (3)

The blindness in the one case is sentimental, in the other wilful. Being established, fate makes use of it. One of the chief lessons of the plays is that man is only safe when his mind is perfectly just and calm. Any injustice, trouble or hunger in the mind delivers man to powers who restore calmness and justice by means violent or gentle according to the strength of the disturbing obsession. This play begins at the moment when an established blindness in two men is about to become an instrument of fate for the violent opening of their eyes. The blindness in both cases is against the course of nature. It is unnatural that Lear should give his kingship to women, and that he should curse his youngest child. It is unnatural that Gloucester should make much of a bastard son whom he has hardly seen for nine years. It is deeply unnatural that both Lear and Gloucester should believe evil suddenly of the youngest, best beloved, and most faithful spirits in the play. As the blindness that causes the injustice is great and unnatural, so the working of fate to purge the eyes and restore the balance is violent and unnatural. Every person important to the action is thrust into an unnatural way of life. Goneril and Regan rule their father, commit the most ghastly and beastly cruelty, lust after the same man, and die unnaturally (having betrayed each other), the one by her sister's hand, the other by her own. Lear is driven mad. The King of France is forced to war with his wife's sisters. Edmund betrays his half-brother to ruin and his father to blindness. Cornwall is stabbed by his servant. Edgar kills his half-brother. Gloucester, thrust out blind, dies when he finds that his wronged son loves him. Cordelia, fighting against her own blood, is betrayed to death by one who claims to love her sisters. The honest mild man, Albany, and the honest blunt man, Kent, survive the general ruin. Had Kent been a little milder and Albany a little blunter in the first act, before the fates were given strength, the ruin would not have been. All the unnatural treacherous evil comes to pass, because for a few fatal moments they were true to their natures.

The play is an excessive image of all that was most constant in Shakespeare's mind. Being an excessive image, it contains matter nowhere else given. It is all schemed and controlled with a power that he shows in no other play, not even in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_. The ideas of the play occur in many of the plays. Many images, such as the blasted oak, water in fury, servants insolent and servile, old honest men and young girls faithful to death, occur in other plays. That which each play added to the thought of the world is expressed in the single figure of someone caught in a net. Macbeth is a ruthless man so caught. Hamlet is a wise man so caught. Othello is a passionate and Antony a glorious man so caught. All are caught and all are powerless, and all are superb tragic inventions. King Lear is a grander, ironic invention, who hurts far more than any of these because he is a horribly strong man who is powerless. He is so strong that he cannot die. He is so strong that he nearly breaks the net, before the folds kill him.

No image in the world is so fierce with imaginative energy. The stormy soul runs out storming in a night of the soul as mad as the elements. With him goes the invention of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool, like conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him mad with ironic comment and bitter song.

The verse is as great as the invention. It rises and falls with the passion like music with singing. All the scale of Shakespeare's art is used; the terrible spiritual manner of

"You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,"

as well as the instinctive manner of a prose coloured to the height with all the traditions of country life.

Dramatic genius has the power of understanding half-a-dozen lives at once in tense, swiftly changing situations. This power is shown at its best in the last act of this play. One of the most wonderful and least praised of the inventions in the last scene is that of the dying Edmund. He has been treacherous to nearly every person in the play. His last treachery, indirectly the cause of his ruin, is still in act, the killing of Cordelia and the king. He has been stricken down. "The wheel has come full circle." He has learned too late that

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us."

He can hardly hope to live for more than a few minutes. The death of his last two victims cannot benefit him. A word from him would save them. No one else can save them. Yet at the last minute, his one little glimmer of faithfulness keeps the word unspoken. He is silent for Goneril's sake. If he ever cared for any one in the world, except himself, he may have cared a little for Goneril. He thinks of her now. She has gone from him. But she is on his side, and he trusts to her, and acts for her. He waits for some word or token from her. He waits to see her save him or avenge him. The death of Lear will benefit her. It will be to her something saved from the general wreck, something to the good, in the losing bout. An impulse stirs him to speak, but he puts it by. He keeps silent about Lear, till one comes saying that Goneril has killed herself. Still he does not speak. The news pricks the vanity in him. He strokes his plumes with a tender thought for the brightness of the life that made two princesses die for love of him. When he speaks of Lear, it is too late, the little, little instant which alters destiny has passed. Cordelia is dead. No mist stains the stone. She will come no more--

"Never, never, never, never, never."

The heart-breaking scene at the end has been blamed as "too painful for tragedy." Shakespeare's opinion of what is tragic is worth that of all his critics together. He gave to every soul in this play an excessive and terrible vitality. On the excessive terrible soul of Lear he poured such misery that the cracking of the great heart is a thing of joy, a relief so fierce that the audience should go out in exultation singing--

"O, our lives' sweetness!
That we the pain of death would hourly die
Rather than die at once!"

Tragedy is a looking at fate for a lesson in deportment on life's scaffold. If we find the lesson painful, how shall we face the event?

_Macbeth._

_Written._ 1605-6 (?)

_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ Raphael Holinshed tells the story of Macbeth
at length in his _Chronicle of Scottish History_. He indicates the
character of Lady Macbeth in one line.

When Shakespeare wrote the play, London was full of Scotchmen,
brought thither by the accession of James I. Little details of the
play may have been gathered in conversation.

_The Fable._ Macbeth, advised by witches that he is to be a king,
is persuaded by his wife to kill his sovereign (King Duncan) and
seize the crown. King Duncan, coming to Macbeth's castle for a
night, is there killed by Macbeth and his lady. Duncan's sons fly
to England. Macbeth causes himself to be proclaimed king.

Being king, he tries to assure himself of power by destroying the
house of Banquo, of whom the witches prophesied that he should be
the father of a line of kings. Banquo is killed; but his son
escapes.

The witches warn Macbeth to beware of Macduff.

Macduff escapes to England, but his wife and children are killed by
Macbeth's order.

Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of
the Scottish crown.

Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill
him.

Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shakespearean plays. In the order of composition it is either the fourth or the fifth of the seven. In point of merit it is neither greater nor less than the other six. It is different from them, in that it belongs more wholly to the kingdom of vision.

Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man betrayed by an obsession. Caesar is betrayed by an obsession of the desire of glory, Antony by passion, Tarquin by lust, Wolsey by worldly greed, Coriolanus and Timon by their nobleness, Angelo by his righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. God sends on many men "strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie." Othello is one such. Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true, half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like love; love feels like nobility; spiritualism seems like revelation.

Among these things few are stronger than the words spoken in unworldly states, in trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by soothsayers, by the wholly excited people who are also half sane, by whoever obtains a half knowledge of the spirit by destruction of intellectual process.

"to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence."

Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us. Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him. Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief in life would lead to peace. This thought passes through his mind. Then fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for treachery. The king had an "absolute trust" in him; but there is no judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act of murder.

The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed, but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary. He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them. The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.

"And you all know security
Is mortal's chiefest enemy,"

He has supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he has been tricked by--

"the equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth."

His queen has killed herself. All the welter of murder has been useless. All that he has done is to damn his soul through the centuries during which the line of Banquo will reign. He dies with a courage that is half fury against the fate that has tricked him.

No play contains greater poetry. There is nothing more intense. The mind of the man was in the kingdom of vision, hearing a new speech and seeing what worldly beings do not see, the rush of the powers, and the fury of elemental passions. No play is so full of an unspeakable splendour of vision--

"his virtues
Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued."

"And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air."

"Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible."

"In the great hand of God I stand."

"A falcon towering in her pride of place
Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.
And Duncan's horses--a thing most strange and certain--
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make
War with mankind.
'Tis said they eat each other."

"the time has been
That, when the brains were out, the man would die."

All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and re-praised. Noble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less noble, is less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words--

"I did hear
The galloping of horse: who was't came by?"

It was the galloping of messengers with the news that Macduff, who is to be the cause of his ruin, has fled to England. An echo of the galloping stays in the brain, as though the hoofs of some horse rode the night, carrying away Macbeth's luck for ever.

_Antony and Cleopatra._

_Written._ 1607-8 (?)

_Published_, in the folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's
translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.

_The Fable._ Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes
himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He
makes a pact with the young Caesar, by marrying Caesar's sister
Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra,
he falls into wars with Caesar. Being unhappy in his fortune and
deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having lost
her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Caesar, also kills
herself.

In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some obsession.

"Strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds."

It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the poetry answer the greatness of the subject.

Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Othello_, and this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in _Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute, astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund, the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls. All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a colourable cloak of human excuse.

The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon Octavius to meet him in single combat.

"men's judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them,
To suffer all alike."

"when we in our viciousness grow hard,
O misery on't--the wise gods seel our eyes;
In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us
Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut
To our confusion."

The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once, this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the senate house, before Caesar's murderers. He was very great and noble then. Now

"The star is fall'n
And time is at his period."

"The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"

has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.

The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry--

"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make Death proud to take us ...
.... we have no friend
But resolution and the briefest end,"

begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays. Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words--

"Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark,"

and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling--

"O eastern star!
Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?"

are among the most beautiful things ever written by man.

_Coriolanus._

_Written._ 1608 (?)

_Published._ 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The life of Coriolanus in Sir Thomas North's
translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.

_The Fable._ Marcius, a noble Roman, of an excessive pride,
bitterly opposes the rabble.

In the war against the Volscians he bears himself so nobly that he
wins the title of Coriolanus. On his return from the wars he seeks
the Consulship, woos the voices of the multitude, is accepted, and
then cast by them. For his angry comment on their behaviour the
tribunes contrive his banishment from the city.

Being banished, he makes league with the Volscians. He takes
command in the Volscian army and invades Roman territory.

Coming as a conqueror to the walls of Rome, his mother and wife
persuade him to spare the city. He causes the Volscians to make
peace. The Volscians return home dissatisfied.

On his return to the Volscian territory Coriolanus is impeached as
a traitor, and stabbed to death by conspirators.

Shakespeare's tragical characters are all destroyed by the excess of some trait in them, whether good or ill matters nothing. Nature cares for type, not for the excessive. Sooner or later she checks the excessive so that the type may be maintained. She is stronger than the excessive, though she may be baser. To Nature, progress, though it be infinitesimal, must be a progress of the whole mass, not a sudden darting out of one quality or one member.

Timon of Athens is betrayed by an excessive generosity. Coriolanus is betrayed by an excessive contempt for the multitude. He is one born into a high tradition of life. He has the courage, the skill in arms, and the talent for affairs that come with high birth in the manly races. He has also the faith in tradition that makes an unlettered upper class narrow and obstructionist. Like the rich in France before the Revolution, he despises the poor. He denies them the right to complain of their hunger. Rather than grant them that right, or the means of urging redress, he would take a short way with them, as was practised here, at Manchester and elsewhere.

"Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,
And let me use my sword, I'ld make a quarry
With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high
As I could pick my lance."

Like all conservative, aristocratic men, he sees in the first granting of political power to the people the beginning of revolution.

"It will in time
Win power upon and throw forth greater themes
For insurrection's arguing."

He regards the people as a necessary, evil-smelling, many-headed beast, good enough, under the leadership of men like himself, to make inferior troops to be spent as the State pleases. It is possible that Napoleon and Bismarck looked upon the mob with similar scorn. The ideas are those of an absolute monarch or super-man. The country squire holds those ideas, though want of power and want of intellect combine to keep him from applying them. The sincerity of the ideas is tested from time to time, in free countries, by general elections.

Much of the pride of Coriolanus springs from a sense of his superiority to others in the gifts of fortune. Much of it comes from the knowledge that he is superior in himself. Leading, as becomes his birth, in the war against the Volscians he shows himself so much superior to others that the campaign is his triumph. He is "the man" whom Napoleon counted "everything in war." The knowledge of his merit is so bright within himself that he is unable to see that it is less bright in others. He is willing to become the head of the State if the post may be given to him as a right due to merit, not as a favour begged. He has no lust for power. But knowing himself to be the best man in Rome, he thinks that his merit is sufficiently great to excuse him from the indignity of sueing for it. The laws of free countries prescribe that he who wishes to be elected must appeal to the electors whether he love them or loathe them. Instead of appealing to them, Coriolanus insults them with such arrogance that they drive him from the city.

He fails as a traitor, because he is too noble to be fiercely revengeful. A lesser man, a Richard III, or an Iago, would have exacted a bloody toll from Rome. Coriolanus cannot bring himself to be stern, in the presence of his old mother and his wife. Something generous and truly aristocratic in him makes him a second time a traitor, this time to his hosts the Volscians. He spares Rome by the sacrifice of those who have given him a shelter and a welcome. Treachery (even from a noble motive) is never forgiven in these plays. It is always avenged, seldom mercifully. The Volscians avenge themselves on Coriolanus by an act of treachery that brings the noble heart under the foot of the traitor.

_Coriolanus_ is one of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country. Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the four most popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's Plutarch, Cinthio, and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic has supplanted fable, and subject comes to the artist untrimmed and unlit by the vitality of many minds. In reading _Coriolanus_ and the other plays of the great period a man feels that Shakespeare fed his fire with all that was passionate in the thought about him. He appears to be his age focussed. The great man now stands outside his age, like Timon.

_Coriolanus_ is a play of the clash of the aristocratic temper with the world. It contains most of the few speeches in Shakespeare which ring with what seems like a personal bitterness. Hatred of the flunkey mind, and of the servile, insolent mob mind, "false as water," appears in half-a-dozen passages. Some of these passages are ironic inventions, not prompted by Plutarch. The great mind, brooding on the many forms of treachery, found nothing more treacherous than the mob, and nothing more dog-like, for good or evil, than the servant.

Greatness is sometimes shown in very little things. Few things in Shakespeare show better the fulness of his happy power than the following--

(_Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils._)

_1st Roman._ This will I carry to Rome.

_2nd Roman._ And I this.

_3rd Roman._ A murrain on't. I took this for silver.

_Timon of Athens._

_Written._ 1606-8 (?)

_Published._ 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ William Paynter's _Palace of Pleasure_.
Plutarch's _Life of Antonius_. Lucian's _Dialogue_.

_The Fable._ Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives
to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none
grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him.
None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing
of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens,
finding a like ingratitude in the State, openly makes war upon it,
reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.

_Timon of Athens_ is a play of mixed authorship. Shakespeare's share in it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked personality. It cannot now be known how the collaboration was arranged. Either the unknown collaborated with Shakespeare, or the unknown wrote the play and Shakespeare revised it.

Ingratitude is one of the commonest forms of treachery. It is the form that leads most quickly to the putting back of the world, because it destroys generosity of mind. It creates in man the bitter and destructive quality of misanthropy, or a destroying passion of revenge. In this play the two authors show the different ways in which the human mind may be turned to those bitter passions.

Apemantus is currish, because others are not. He has wit without charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish, nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a noble mind embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend, shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the noble generosity in faithful service.

Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography. Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more difficult and more noble to do than to pin their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth, and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as the hundred other passionate moods that built up the system of his soul.

The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner--

"will these moss'd trees,
That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,
And skip when thou point'st out?"

"Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:
Who, once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover."

The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades after he has read the epitaph, with which Timon goes down to death, like some hurt thing shrinking even from the thought of passers, is one of the most lovely examples of the power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech.

_Alcib._ (reading) _Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and
stay not here thy gait._

These well express in thee thy latter spirits:
Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,
Scorned'st our brain's flow and those our droplets which
From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead
Is noble Timon: of whose memory
Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive with my sword,
Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
Prescribe to other as each other's leech.
Let our drums strike.

_Pericles, Prince of Tyre._

_Written._ 1607-8 (?)

_Published._ 1608.

_Source of the Plot._ The plot is taken from an English prose
version of a Latin translation of a fifth century Greek romance.
This version was published by Lawrence Twine, in the year 1576,
under the name of _The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures_ (etc.,
etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story
was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his _Confessio
Amantis_. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.

_The Fable._ Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to
guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will
be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess
wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the
Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from
Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's
vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.

Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes
jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and
marries her.

Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter,
dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ashore at Ephesus,
and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles
dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina,
the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus.
He then returns to Tyre.

Act IV. The years pass. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm
that she passes the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen,
deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina.
Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel
in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and
musician.