the narrative is perpetually checked by elaborate exercises of fancy. The companion poem Lucrece reverses the motive of the Venus; in the Venus feminine passion strives against boyish coldness; here male lust makes its assault on womanly chastity. Deep notes are sounded by the poet, radiant heights are touched; but he cannot in these poems transcend the manner of his age. He follows rather than leads. Having made these brilliant essays in a province not properly his own, Shakespeare, notwithstanding the popularity of both poems, seems to have recognized the fact that here his genius could not find its true sphere, and he never again attempted the miniature epic.

While engaged on his early comedies Shakespeare was also at work on historical tragedy. But here he attained artistic independence only by degrees, and at first he was manifestly in tutelage to his great predecessor Marlowe. The authorship of the first part of Henry VI. is not ascertained; it probably received additions from Shakespeare's hand; but we may say of this play, as we have said of Titus Andronicus, that it is essentially pre-Shakespearian. In the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. the work of Shakespeare is found side by side with that of Marlow, and the pupil proved himself so apt that it is a matter of extreme difficulty to distinguish his contributions from those of the master. The younger poet had much to learn from the mighty wielder of blank verse who had poured into the English drama the life-blood of passion and an unquenchable ardour of imagination. In the tragedy of King Richard III. Shakespeare completed the tetralogy of the house of York, and he sustained and even developed the Marlowesque style of the earlier dramas. "This only of all Shakespeare's plays," says Mr. Swinburne, "belongs absolutely to the school of Marlowe. The influence of the elder master, and that influence alone, is perceptible from end to end. . . . It is as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often though never so inflated in expression, as Tamburlaine itself." The protagonist, as in the tragedies of Marlowe, is thrust forward and dominates the whole play. Its opening is in the manner of Marlowe-an exordium in the form of a soliloquy. The tetralogy of the House of Lancaster opens with King Richard II. Whether that play was chronologically a little earlier or a little later than King Richard III. we shall do well to group the three parts of King Henry VI. with King Richard III., connected as they are by their subject, and closely related by their Marlowesque style. King Richard II., it seems to me, while historically the first of the series of plays which is continued in King Henry IV. and King Henry V., in point of style, and perhaps also in the date of its production, lies close to King John. In both plays Shakespeare has almost entirely delivered himself from the influence of Marlowe, though some scenes of King Richard II. were not written without a vivid recollection of passages in Marlowe's English historical drama. In both plays Shakespeare seems to be feeling after a way of his ownthat manner which was perfected in King Henry IV.; in both plays rhyme is freely used, much more freely, however, in King Richard II., which is certainly

earlier in the chronological order than King John; from both plays prose is absent. The subjects are not historically connected; King John stands apart from both the Lancastrian and the Yorkist series. But there is this in common between King John and King Richard II., that in each the dramatist studies the ruin of his country as caused by evil or incompetent rule, and in each he sounds some of those trumpet-notes of patriotic enthusiasm which must have echoed gloriously in the hearts of men who had witnessed the recent overthrow of the Armada. The poet does not often deal in mere panegyric of his native land, and he can smile humorously at the foibles of his countrymen; he doubtless felt that it is the part of a genuine patriot to make keen inquisition into the sources of national disaster and defection. But twice or three times his pride and joy in the glorious land of his birth must have an outbreak:

Come the three corners of the world in arms

And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true:

With such a trumpet-note King John closes. And amid Gaunt's prophetic fears upon his death-bed appears the vision of England as it had been and might be again

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-Paradise,

This blessed spot, the earth, this realm, this England.

In King John the feebleness of foreign policy, in King Richard II. the vices of domestic government are censured. In each play individual strength and courage are honoured; in King John the hope of England centres in the person of Cœur de Lion's bastard son, a mediæval John Bull cased in armour; in King Richard II. such salvation as is possible must come from the aspiring Bolingbroke, "one still strong man in a blatant land." Not that Shakespeare justifies usurpation; the crime will surely work out its evil effects, but even the usurping Bolingbroke as compared with the sentimental Richard—a royal poseur-may be regarded as a "saviour of society."

Romantic tragedy as distinguished from historical is represented by one work of early date. Romeo and Juliet stands alone as the lyrical tragedy of youth and love and death. The poet in Shakespeare, as we have said, somewhat embarrassed the dramatist in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the dramatist embarrassed the poet in the Rape of Lucrece. Here, in Romeo and Juliet, each aids the other, and the result is a work harmonious and triumphant, in which song and speech become one or something rarer than either is born of the two. The play has no secondary action; our interest from first to last is centred upon the star-crossed lovers. Varying from his original, Shakespeare has accelerated the action of the story, so that the movement of the piece acquires a lyric swiftness and its passion a lyric intensity. Here for the first time on the English

stage the terror of tragedy became beautiful. The spectator in the presence of untimely death and all the apparatus of the grave is not overwhelmed by gross horror, but sustained by the presence of beauty and the very chivalry of young love. There are tokens of immature workmanship in some portions of the play; inopportune conceits, overstrained ingenuities, over-florid diction; but we note such errors of style only to make us feel more vividly that in Romeo and Juliet we have still to do with the greatest of poets in his prime, when his adult art has not yet lost all traces of its adolescence. The mastery of his material appears as much in the humorous scenes as in the tragic. When we reflect that Mercutio and the Nurse are but subordinate figures we obtain some measure of the writer's affluence of creative power.

But unlike “Juliet and her Romeo" there are lovers on whom all the stars shed favourable influence. In the Merchant of Venice Shakespeare makes amends for the piteousness of his tragedy by expending his finest art in making two human creatures happy. The play, as I take it, stands midway in the chronological sequence of the comedies between the earlier group of which I have spoken, and those later comedies which lie close, on either side, to the year 1600. In versification it has something in common with the Two Gentlemen of Verona, although its blank verse is far more vigorous and dramatic. In its strength and beauty of characterization it might take a place by the side of Much Ado about Nothing or Twelfth Night. The story of the caskets and the story of the pound of flesh are skilfully intertangled. The deeper interest of the play is over with the fourth act; but in the fifth we have a delightful epilogue; a counterfeit lovers'-quarrel must put an edge on the bliss of Bassanio and Portia. If any single thought presides over the double action of the comedy and reappears in a playful way in the fifth act it has reference to the moral force of bonds and promises and inherited obligations; but we must not, like the German critics, reduce the play, full as it is of life and its joys, to an abstraction. In none of the previous comedies can such breadth and strength of portraiture be found as here in the figure of Shylock. And even Juliet seems but a passoniate child of the South when compared with the gracious lady of Belmont, so richly endowed with gifts of mind, so firm of will, so buoyant of temper, so noble in her serious moods, so charming in her play, so great a giver, yet so delicate in her art of giving.

From comedy Shakespeare returned to history; from Italy he returned to England. In the two parts of King Henry IV. and King Henry V. he brought his series of English historical plays to a close. The progress is great from King Richard II. and King John. The dramatist has almost escaped from the trammels of rhyme, and he has learnt all the advantages of alternating verse with prose. He knows how to ally the historical drama with comedy now, not merely by an occasional scene (like that of Jack Cade and his followers), but by the presence of a great humorous personage. The royal Bolingbroke, worn and

saddened by the weight of an usurper's crown, which yet he will not resign till death discrown him, is at once a majestic and a pathetic figure. But he is almost overshadowed by the ample figure of King Falstaff on his tavern throne. French critic has placed Falstaff by the side of Panurge and Sancho as one of the humorous trinity created by the Renaissance imagination; but these seem compounded of simple elements when compared with the rich amalgam of comic qualities which make up Sir John. He disappears of sad yet glorious necessity before we set foot on the embattled plains of France. On the stern field of Agincourt there is no place for a champion so considerate on behalf of his own fat carcass, and therefore Jack Falstaff must needs take refuge from an ungrateful world in "Arthur's bosom."

With the reign of Henry V. and the King's laughing prophecy to his bride of a son "that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard," Shakespeare almost touches the point from which he had at first set out the reign of Henry VI. His portraits of English kings comprise that of the pseudosaint, a sorry plaything of circumstance, Henry VI.; the bold criminal, a warped creature of dæmonic force, Richard III.; the royal voluptuary and sentimentalist, Richard II.; the usurper strong and prudent, Henry IV., master of men and events so far as they can be controlled by anxious care and firm volition; and finally Henry V., in whom a frank goodness is at one with a genius for empire and for battle. He is Shakespeare's ideal King of England, his ideal man of action. Around him as around its centre the loyalty of England, Scotland, Wales is organized. But while thus presenting a series of historical portraits Shakespeare also traces the logic of historical events, and exhibits the law of moral retribution in process from generation to generation, the abiding and living influence of good and evil deeds. We read in his plays, and with a remarkable degree of fulness and faithfulness, the ethics of English history, deduced from the day of Bolingbroke's challenge of Norfolk to the day when Richard and Elizabeth entered on their heritage of loyalty and power.

These studies in English history gave breadth to Shakespeare's view of the world; they saved him from any danger there may have been of his narrowing as dramatist into an interpreter of the mere romance of personal passion. And in shaping for artistic purposes the substantial matter of history, as he found it crudely presented in the chronicle of Holinshed, he gained strength and skill of hand; he could not here be fantastic; he could not permit himself to be misled by ingenuities and conceits; he must take his material as it was given to him, discover where it would yield and where it would resist, and so by prudent dealing mould it into dramatic form.

It was probably while he was at work on the English historical plays, but at what precise date is undetermined, that Shakespeare made his recast of the old Taming of a Shrew, and wrote the admirably humorous Induction. We have good reason for believing that the Merry Wives of Windsor was an offshoot from

King Henry IV. In the Shrew Shakespeare followed the lead of his dramatic predecessor; in The Merry Wives he worked by command, and, if we may trust the tradition, with unusual haste. The humour of both plays has something in common with that of the lower scenes of the later English histories. It would seem as if Shakespeare had carried over into comedy some of the roughness and realism of the comic part of the historical drama into which necessarily the romantic could not enter. Katherina is a very enjoyable whirlwind in petticoats; but we cannot place her by the side of Beatrice or Rosalind. English low life is presented in the miniature farce of Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burtonheath, pedlar, bear-herd, card-maker, and tinker; English middle-class life in the Fords and Pages of Windsor, with their laughing dames, that comely English maiden sweet Anne Page, her valiant lover young Master Slender, and the learned justice Robert Shallow, of the county of Gloucester, esquire. In King Henry V. the Welshman plays his part and diverts the audience with his courageous innocence and his "prave 'orts;" there is also some pretty fooling of the Princess Katherine in her French-English. Here in The Merry Wives the Welsh parson displays another kind of valour from that of Fluellen with a like valorous maiming of the King's English, and is paired over against the French doctor, whose passion is so cruelly cozened at the close. From plump Jack Falstaff drinking water of Thames amid a redundance of foul linen we piously avert our eyes. The same buoyant temper which animates King Henry V. and gives its breezy freshness to The Merry Wives of Windsor is sustained in the romantic comedy of Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice and Benedick are perhaps a re-incarnation, and in a finer stage of existence, of Rosaline and Biron in the early comedy, which about this time Shakespeare revised and partly rewrote. How the gayest spirits may be allied with good breeding Beatrice will show us; she is not only witty, but also brave, generous, and wise. And it is delightful to see how a being so delightfully brilliant can be beguiled, not to her destruction but to her own happiness, by the blind leadings of her heart. If cleverness and infinite vivacity need their foil in pompous dulness, we find that also in the play, for Dogberry and goodman Verges climb to a height of sapient stupidity and majestic ineptitude which borders on the sublime.

Much Ado About Nothing was followed speedily by As You Like It, and probably after no long interval by Twelfth Night. These three are the sunniest of Shakespeare's comedies. In the woods of Arden, indeed, the sunlight is tempered by green boughs; the good Duke lives in banishment, his daughter has had to fly from the usurper's court, and in Jaques we meet for the first time in Shakespeare's plays the satirist of humanity. But the Duke turns to sweetness his light adversity; Rosalind is not afflicted as she strolls through the woodland lawns which give Orlando shelter; Jaques, the dilettante satirist, is anything but a Timon, and in fact when he rails at mankind is only indulging an idle humour; and have we not Touchstone always at hand, moralist, courtier, critic, lover, poet, d

VOL. VIII.