Chapter XXVIII: Part 28

"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."

It is not impossible, however, that these gleams of Shakespearean wit are mere imitations of his manner. But, on the other hand, the obvious mimicry of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ in Gower's prologue to the third act is commonplace and clumsy enough:

"Now sleep yslaked hath the rout;
No din but snores the house about.
. . . . . . .
The cat, with eyne of burning coal,
Now couches fore the mouse's hole;
And crickets sing at the oven's mouth,
E'er the blither for their drouth."

Compare this with Puck's:

"Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud," &c.

An awkwardly introduced pantomime interrupts the prologue, which is tediously renewed; then suddenly, like a voice from another world, a rich, full tone breaks in upon the feeble drivel, and we hear Shakespeare's own voice in unmistakable and royal power:

"Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou, that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having called them from the deep! Oh, still
Thy deafening, dreadful thunders; gently quench
Thy nimble, sulphurous flashes!--Oh, how, Lychorida,
How does my queen?--Thou stormest venomously:
Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard."...

The nurse brings the tiny new-born babe, saying:

"Here is a thing too young for such a place,
Who, if it had conceit, would die, as I
Am like to do: take in your arms this piece
Of your dead queen.
_Pericles_. How, how Lychorida!
_Lychorida_. Patience, good sir; do not assist the storm.
Here's all that is left living of your queen,
A little daughter: for the sake of it,
Be manly and take comfort."

The sailors enter, and, after a brief, masterly conversation, full of the raging storm and the struggle to save the ship, they superstitiously demand that the queen, who has but this instant drawn her last breath, should be thrown overboard. The king is compelled to yield, and turning a last look upon her, says:

"A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time
To give thee hallowed to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffined, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corse,
Lying with simple shells."

He gives orders to change the course of the ship and make for Tarsus, because "the babe cannot hold out to Tyrus." There is so mighty a breath of storm and raging seas, such rolling of thunder and flashing of lightning in these scenes, that nothing in English poetry, not excepting Shakespeare's _Tempest_ itself, nor Byron's and Shelley's descriptions of Nature, can surpass it. The storm blows and howls, hisses and screams, till the sound of the boatswain's whistle is lost in the raging of the elements. These scenes are famous and beloved among that seafaring folk for whom they were written, and who know the subject-matter so well.

The effect is tremendously heightened by the struggles of human passion amidst the fury of the elements. The tender and strong grief expressed in Pericles' subdued lament for Thaisa is not drowned by the storm; it sounds a clear, spiritual note of contrast with the raging of the sea. And how touching is Pericles' greeting to his new-born child:

"Now, mild may be thy life!
For a more blustrous birth had never babe:
Quiet and gentle thy conditions, for
Thou art the rudeliest welcomed to this world
That ever was prince's child. Happy what follows!
Thou hast as chiding a nativity
As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven can make,
To herald thee from the womb." ...

Although Wilkins' tale follows the course of the play very faithfully, there are but two points in which the resemblance between them extends to a similarity of wording. The first of these occurs in the second act, which was Wilkins' own work, and the second here. In his tale Wilkins says:

"Poor inch of nature! Thou art as rudely welcome to the
world as ever princess' babe was, and hast as chiding a
nativity as fire, air, earth, and water can afford thee."

Even more striking than the identity of words is the exclamation "Poor inch of nature!" It is so entirely Shakespearian that we are tempted to believe it must have been accidentally omitted in the manuscripts from which the first edition was printed.

It is not until the birth of Marina in the third act that Shakespeare really takes the play in hand. Why? Because it is only now that it begins to have any interest for him. It is the development of this character, this tender image of youthful charm and noble purity, which attracts him to the task.

How Shakespearian is the scene in which Marina is found strewing flowers on the grave of her dead nurse just before Dionyza sends her away to be murdered; it foreshadows two scenes in plays which are shortly to follow--the two brothers laying flowers on the supposed corpse of Fidelio in _Cymbeline_ and Perdita, disguised as a shepherdess, distributing all kinds of blossoms to the two strangers and her guests in _The Winter's Tale_.

Marina says

(Act iv. sc. I):

"No, I will rob Tellus of her weed
To strew thy green with flowers: the yellows, blues,
The purple violets, and marigolds,
Shall as a carpet hang upon thy grave
While summer-days do last.--Ay me! poor maid,
Born in a tempest, when my mother died,
This world to me is like a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends."