GEORGE BRANDES (continued 17)

Shakespeare has hardly put a word into the mouth of the Queen which may not be found in the Chronicle, but he has created a character of mingled charm and distinction, a union of Castilian pride with extreme simplicity, of inflexible resolution with gentlest resignation, and of a quick temper with a sincere piety, through which the temper sometimes shows. He has drawn with a caressing touch the figure of a queen neither beautiful nor brilliant, but true—true to the core, proud of her birth and queenly rank, but softer than wax in the hands of her royal lord, whom she loves after twenty-four years of married life as dearly as on her wedding-day. Her letters show how devoted and lovable she was, and in them she addresses Henry as "Your Grace, my husband, my Henry," and signs herself "Your humble wife and true servant." In those scenes in which it has fallen to Fletcher's lot to represent the Queen, he has adhered faithfully to Shakespeare's conception of her, which was virtually that of the Chronicle. Even in the hour of her death, Katharine does not forget to rebuke and punish the messenger who has failed in due respect by omitting to kneel; but she forgives her enemy the Cardinal and sends the King this last greeting:

"Remember me In all humility unto his highness: Say his long trouble now is passing Out of the world: tell him in death I bless'd him, For so I will.—Mine eyes grow dim."

Her stately dignity resembles that of Hermione, but she differs from the latter in her pride of race and piety. Hermione is neither pious nor proud; neither was Shakespeare. We find a little proof of his detestation of sectarianism even in the pompous play of Henry VIII. In the third scene of the fifth act the porter exclaims of the inquisitive multitude crowding to watch the christening procession:

"There are the youths that thunder at the playhouse and fight for bitten apples; that no audience but the Tribulation of Tower Hill or the limbs of Limehouse, their dear brothers, are able to endure."

Limehouse was an artisan house in London; there also the foreigners settled, and it resounded with the strife of religious sects. It is amusing to note how Shakespeare contrived to have a fling at his detested groundlings and his Puritan enemies at one and the same time.

As we all know, the drama closes with Cranmer's lengthy and flattering prediction of the greatness of Elizabeth and James, which is marred by the monotony of Fletcher's worst mannerisms. Shakespeare clearly had no share in this tirade, which makes all the more strange the part it has played in the discussions which have been carried on with so little psychology relative to Shakespeare's religious and denominational standpoint. How many times has the prophecy that under Elizabeth "God shall be truly known" been quoted in support of the great poet's firmly Protestant convictions? Yet the line was evidently never written by him, and not a single turn of thought in the whole of this lengthy speech owns any suggestion of his pathos and style. It is only here and there in the play that we obtain a glimpse of Shakespeare, and then he is fettered and hampered by collaboration with another man and by an uncongenial task, to which only a great exertion of his genius could here and there impart any dramatic interest.

XVIII

CYMBELINE—THE THEME—THE POINT OF DEPARTURE—THE MORAL—THE IDYLL —IMOGEN—SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE—SHAKESPEARE AND CALDERON

In Cymbeline Shakespeare is once more sole master of his material, and he works it up into such a many-coloured web as no loom but his can produce. Here, too, we find a certain off-hand carelessness of technique. The exposition is perfunctory; the preliminaries of the action are conveyed to us in a scene of pure narrative. The comic passages are, as a rule, weak, the mirth-moving device being for one of the other characters to ridicule or parody in asides the utterances of the coarse and vain Prince Cloten. In the middle of the play (iii. 3), a poorly-written monologue gives us a sort of supplementary exposition, necessary to the understanding of the plot. Finally, the dramatic knot is loosed by means of a deus ex machinâ, Jupiter, "upon his eagle back'd," appearing to the sleeping Posthumus, and leaving with him an oracular "label," in which, as though to bear witness to the poet's "small Latin" the deity childishly derives mulier from mollis aer, or "tender air." But, in spite of all this, Shakespeare is here once more at the height of his poetic greatness; the convalescent has recovered all his strength. He has thrown his whole soul into the creation of his heroine, and has so enchased this Imogen, this pearl among women, that all her excellences show to the best advantage, and the setting is not unworthy of the jewel.

As in Cleopatra and Cressida we had woman determined solely by her sex, so in Imogen we have an embodiment of the highest possible characteristics of womanhood—untainted health of soul, unshaken fortitude, constancy that withstands all trials, inexhaustible forbearance, unclouded intelligence, love that never wavers, and unquenchable radiance of spirit. She, like Marina, is cast into the snake-pit of the world. She is slandered, and not, like Desdemona, at second or third hand, but by the very man who boasts of her favours and supports his boast with seemingly incontrovertible proofs. Like Cordelia, she is misjudged; but whereas Cordelia is merely driven from her father's presence along with the man of her choice, Imogen is doomed to death by her cruelly-deceived husband, whom alone she adores; and through it all she preserves her love for him unweakened and unchanged.

Strange—very strange! In Imogen we find the fullest, deepest love that Shakespeare has ever placed in a woman's breast, and that although Cymbeline follows close upon plays which were filled to the brim with contempt for womankind. He believed, then, in such love, so impassioned, so immovable, so humble—believed in it now? He had, then, observed or encountered such a love—encountered it at this point of his life?

Even a poet has scant enough opportunities of observing love. Love is a rare thing, much rarer than the world pretends, and when it exists, it is apt to be sparing of words. Did he simply fall back on his own experiences, his own inward sensations, his knowledge of his own heart, and, transposing his feelings from the major to the minor key, place them on a woman's lips? Or did he love at this moment, and was he himself thus beloved at the end of the fifth decade of his life? The probability is, doubtless, that he wrote from some quite fresh experience, though it does not follow that the experience was actually his own. It is not often that women love men of his mental habit and stature with such intensity of passion. The rule will always be that a Molière shall find himself cast aside for some Comte de Guiche, a Shakespeare for some Earl of Pembroke. Thus we cannot with any certainty conclude that he himself was the object of the passion which had revived his faith in a woman's power of complete and unconditional absorption in love for one man, and for him alone. In the first place, had the experience been his own, he would scarcely have left London so soon. Yet the probability is that he must just about this time have gained some clear and personal insight into an ideal love. In the public sphere, too, it is not unlikely that Arabella Stuart's undaunted passion for Lord William Seymour, so cruelly punished by King James, may have afforded the model for Imogen's devotion to Leonatus Posthumus in defiance of the will of King Cymbeline.

Cymbeline was first printed in the Folio of 1623. The earliest mention of it occurs in the Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof kept by the above-mentioned astrologer and magician, Dr. Simon Forman. He was present, he says, at a performance of A Winters Tale on May 15, 1611, and at the same time he sketches the plot of Cymbeline, but unfortunately does not give the date of the performance. In all probability it was quite recent; the play was no doubt written in the course of 1610, while the fate of Arabella Stuart was still fresh in the poet's mind. Forman died in September 1611.

In depth and variety of colouring, in richness of matter, profundity of thought, and heedlessness of conventional canons, Cymbeline has few rivals among Shakespeare's plays. Fascinating as it is, however, this tragi-comedy has never been very popular on the stage. The great public, indeed, has neither studied nor understood it.

In none of his works has Shakespeare played greater havoc with chronology. He jumbles up the ages with superb indifference. The period purports to be that of Augustus, yet we are introduced to English, French, and Italian cavaliers, and hear them talk of pistol-shooting and playing bowls and cards. The list of characters ends thus—"Lords, ladies, Roman senators, tribunes, apparitions, a soothsayer, a Dutch gentleman, a Spanish gentleman, musicians, officers, captains, soldiers, messengers, and other attendants." Was there ever such a farrago?

What did Shakespeare mean by this play? is the question that now confronts us. My readers are aware that I never, in the first instance, try to answer this question directly. The fundamental point is, What impelled him to write? how did he arrive at the theme? When that is answered, the rest follows almost as a matter of course.

Where, then, is the starting-point of this seeming tangle? We find it on resolving the material of the play into its component parts.

There are three easily distinguishable elements in the action.

In his great storehouse of English history, Holinshed, Shakespeare found some account of a King Kymbeline or Cimbeline, who is said to have been educated at Rome, and there knighted by the Emperor Augustus, under whom he served in several campaigns. He is stated to have stood so high in the Emperor's favour that "he was at liberty to pay his tribute or not" as he chose. He reigned thirty-five years, was buried in London, and left two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. The name Imogen occurs in Holinshed's story of Brutus and Locrine. In the tragedy of Locrine, dating from 1595, Imogen is mentioned as the wife of Brutus.

Although Cymbeline, says Holinshed, is declared by most authorities to have lived at unbroken peace with Rome, yet some Roman writers affirm that the Britons having refused to pay tribute when Augustus came to the throne, that Emperor, in the tenth year after the death of Julius Cæsar, "made prouision to passe with an armie ouer into Britaine." He is said, however, to have altered his mind; so that the Roman descent upon Britain under Caius Lucius is an invention of the poet's.

In Boccaccio's Decameron, again (Book II. Novel 9), Shakespare found the story of the faithful Ginevra, of which this is the substance:—At a tavern in Paris, a company of Italian merchants, after supper one evening, fall to discussing their wives. Three of them have but a poor opinion of their ladies' virtue, but one, Bernabo Lomellini of Genoa, maintains that his wife would resist any possible temptation, however long he had been absent from her. A certain Ambrogiuolo lays a heavy wager with him on the point, and betakes himself to Genoa, but finds Bernabo's confidence fully justified. He hits upon the scheme of concealing himself in a chest which is conveyed into the lady's bedroom. In the middle of the night he raises the lid. "He crept quietly forth, and stood in the room, where a candle was burning. By its light, he carefully examined the furnishing of the apartment, the pictures, and other objects of note, and fixed them in his memory. Then he approached the bed, and when he saw that both she and a little child who lay beside her were sleeping soundly, he uncovered her and beheld that her beauty in nowise consisted in her attire. But he could not discover any mark whereby to convince her husband, save one which she had under the left breast; it was a birth-mark around which there grew certain yellow hairs." Then he takes from one of her chests a purse and a night-gown, together with certain rings and belts, and conceals them in his own hiding-place. He hastens back to Paris, summons the merchants together, and boasts of having won the wager. The description of the room makes little impression on Bernabo, who remarks that all this he may have learnt by bribing a chambermaid; but when the birth-mark is described, he feels as though a dagger had been plunged into his heart. He despatches a servant with a letter to his wife, requesting her to meet him at a country-house some twenty miles from Genoa, and at the same time orders the servant to murder her on the way. The lady receives the letter with great joy, and next morning takes horse to ride with the servant to the country house. Loathing his task, the man consents to spare her, gives her a suit of male attire, and suffers her to escape, bringing his master false tidings of her death, and producing her clothes in witness of it. Ginevra, dressed as a man, enters the service of a Spanish nobleman, and accompanies him to Alexandria, whither he goes to convey to the Sultan a present of certain rare falcons. The Sultan notices the pretty youth in his train, and makes him (or rather her) his favourite. In the market-place of Acre she chances upon a booth in the Venetian bazaar where Ambrogiuolo has displayed for sale, among other wares, the purse and belt he stole from her. On her inquiring where he got them, he replies that they were given him by his mistress, the Lady Ginevra. She persuades him to come to Alexandria, manages to bring her husband thither also, and makes them both appear before the Sultan. The truth is brought to light and the liar shamed; but he does not escape so easily as Iachimo in the play. He who had falsely boasted of a lady's favour, and thereby brought her to ruin, is, with true mediæval consistency, allotted the punishment he deserves: "Wherefore the Sultan commanded that Ambrogiuolo should be led forth to a high place in the city, and should there be bound to a stake in the full glare of the sunshine, and smeared all over with honey, and should not be set free till his body fell to pieces by its own decay. So that he was not alone stung to death in unspeakable torments by flies, wasps, and hornets, which greatly abound in that country, but also devoured to the last particle of his flesh. His white bones, held together by the sinews alone, stood there unremoved for a long time, a terror and a warning to all."

These two tales—of the wars between Rome and heathen Britain, and of the slander, peril, and rescue of Ginevra—were in themselves totally unconnected. Shakespeare welded them by making Ginevra, whom he calls Imogen, a daughter of King Cymbeline by his first marriage, and therefore next in succession to the crown of Britain.

There remains a third element in the play—the story of Belarius, his banishment, his flight with the king's sons, his solitary life in the forest with the two youths, the coming of Imogen, and so forth. All this is the fruit of Shakespeare's free invention, slightly stimulated, perhaps, by a story in the Decameron (Book II. Novel 8). It is in this invented portion, studied in its relation of complement and contrast to the rest, that we shall find an unmistakable index to the moods, sentiments, and ideas under the influence of which he chose this subject and shaped it to his ends.

I conceive the situation in this wise: the mood he has been living through, the mood which has left its freshest impress on his mind, is one in which life in human society seems unendurable, and especially life in a large town and at a court. Never before had he felt so keenly and indignantly what a court really is. Stupidity, coarseness, weakness, and falsehood flourish in courts, and carry all before them. Cymbeline is stupid and weak, Cloten is stupid and coarse, the queen is false.

Here the best men are banished, like Belarius and Posthumus; here the best woman is foully wronged, like Imogen. Here the high-born murderess sits in the seat of the mighty—the queen herself deals in poisons, and demands deadly "compounds" of her physicians. Corruption reaches its height at courts; but in great towns as a whole, wherever multitudes of men are gathered together, it is impossible even for the best to keep himself above reproach. The weapons used against him—lies, slanders, and perfidy—force him to employ whatever means he can in self-defence. Let us then turn our backs on the town, and seek an idyllic existence in the country, in the lonely woodland places.

This note recurs persistently in all the works of Shakespeare's latest period. Timon longed to escape from Athens and make the solitudes echo with his invectives. Here Belarius and the king's two sons live secluded in a romantic wilderness; and we shall presently find Florizel and Perdita surrounded by the autumnal beauty of a rustic festival, and Prospero dwelling with Miranda on a lovely uninhabited island.

When Shakespeare, in early years, had conjured up visions of a fantastic life in sylvan solitudes, it was simply because it amused him to place his Rosalinds and Celias in surroundings worthy of their exquisiteness, ideal Ardennes, or perhaps we should say ideal Forests of Arden like that in which, as a boy, he had learnt to read the secrets of Nature. In these regions, exempt from the cares of the working-day world, young men and maidens passed their days together in happy idleness, pensive or blithesome, laughing or loving. The forest was simply a republic created by Nature herself for a witty and amorous élite of the most brilliant cavaliers and ladies he had known, or rather had bodied forth in his own image that he might live in the company of his peers. The air resounded with songs and sighs and kisses, with wordplays and laughter. It was a dreamland, a paradise of dainty lovers.

How differently does he now conceive of the solitude of the country! It has become to him the one thing in life, the refuge, the sanctuary. It means for him an atmosphere of purity, the home of spiritual health, the stronghold of innocence, the one safe retreat for whoso would flee from the pestilence of falsehood and perfidy that rages in courts and cities.

There no one can escape it. But now, we must observe, Shakespeare no longer regards this contagion of untruth and unfaith with the eyes of a Timon. He now looks down from higher and clearer altitudes.

It is true that no one can keep his life wholly free from falsehood, deceit, and violence towards others. But neither falsehood nor deceit, nor even violence is always and inevitably a crime; it is often a necessity, a legitimate weapon, a right. At bottom, Shakespeare had always held that there were no such things as unconditional duties and absolute prohibitions. He had never, for example, questioned Hamlet's right to kill the king, scarcely even his right to run his sword through Polonius. Nevertheless he had hitherto been unable to conquer a feeling of indignation and disgust when he saw around him nothing but breaches of the simplest moral laws. Now, on the other hand, the dim divinations of his earlier years crystallised in his mind into a coherent body of thought to this effect: no commandment is unconditional; it is not in the observance or non-observance of an external fiat that the merit of an action, to say nothing of a character, consists; everything depends upon the volitional substance into which the individual, as a responsible agent, transmutes the formal imperative at the moment of decision.

In other words, Shakespeare now sees clearly that the ethics of intention are the only true, the only possible ethics.

Imogen says (iv. 2):

"If I do lie, and do No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope They'll pardon it."

Pisanio says in his soliloquy (iii. 5):

"Thou bidd'st me to my loss: for, true to thee, Were to prove false, which I will never be To him that is most true."

And he hits the nail on the head when he characterises himself in these words (iv. 3):

"Wherein I am false, I am honest; not true, to be true."

That is to say, he lies and deceives because he cannot help it; but his character is none the worse, nay, all the better on that account. He disobeys his master, and thereby merits his gratitude; he hoodwinks Cloten, and therein he does well.

In the same way, all the nobler characters fly in the face of accepted moral laws. Imogen disobeys her father and braves his wrath, and even his curse, because she will not renounce the husband of her choice. So, too, she afterwards deceives the young men in the forest by appearing in male attire and under an assumed name—untruthfully, and yet with a higher truth, calling herself Fidele, the faithful one. So, too, the upright Belarius robs the king of both his sons, but thereby saves them for him and for the country; and during their whole boyhood he puts them off, for their own good, with false accounts of things. So, too, the honest physician deceives the queen, whose wickedness he has divined, by giving her an opiate in place of a poison, and thereby baffling her attempt at murder. So, too, Guiderius acts rightly in taking the law into his own hands, and answering Cloten's insults by killing him at sight and cutting off his head. He thus, without knowing it, prevents the brutish idiot's intended violence to Imogen.

Thus all the good characters commit acts of deception, violence, and falsehood, or even live their whole life under false colours, without in the least derogating from their moral worth. They touch evil without defilement, even if they suffer and now and then feel themselves insecure in their strained relations to truth and right.

Beyond all doubt, it must have been actual and intimate experience that first darkened Shakespeare's view of life, and then opened his eyes again to its brighter aspects. But it is the idea which he here indirectly expresses that seems to have played the essential and decisive part in uplifting his spirit above the mood of mere hatred and contempt for humanity: the realisation that the quality of a given act depends rather on the agent than on the act itself. Although it be true, for example; that falsehood and deceit encounter us on every hand, it does not necessarily follow that human nature is utterly corrupt. Neither deceit nor any other course of action in conflict with moral law is absolutely and unconditionally wrong. The majority, indeed, of those who speak falsely and act unlawfully are an ignoble crew; but even the best, the noblest, may systematically transgress the moral law and be good and noble still. This is the meaning of moral self-government; the only true morality consists in following out our own ends, by our own means, and on our own responsibility. The only real and binding laws are those which we lay down for ourselves, and it is the breach of these laws alone that degrades us.

Seen from this point of view, the world puts on a less gloomy aspect. The poet is no longer impelled by a spiritual necessity to bring down his curtain to the notes of the trump of doom, to make all voyages end in shipwreck, all dramas issue in annihilation, or even to leaven the tragedy of life with consistent scorn and execration for humanity at large.

In his present frame of mind there is a touch of weary tolerance. He no longer cares to dwell upon the harsh realities of life; he seeks distraction in dreaming. And he dreams of retribution, of the suppression of the utterly vile (the queen dies, Cloten is killed), of letting mercy season justice in the treatment of certain human beasts of prey (Iachimo), and of preserving a little circle, a chosen few, whom neither the errors into which passion has led them, nor the acts of deceit and violence they have committed in self-defence, render unworthy of our sympathies. Life on earth is still worth living so long as there are women like Imogen and men like her brothers. She, indeed, is an ideal, and they creatures of romance; but their existence is a condition-precedent of poetry.

It is to this fertilising mist of feeling, this productive trend of thought, that the play owes its origin.

Shakespeare has so far taken heart again that he can give us something more and something better than poetical fragments or plays which, like his recent ones, produce a powerful but harsh effect. He will once more unroll a large, various, and many-coloured panorama.

The action of Cymbeline, like that of Lear, is only nominally located in pre-Christian England. There is not the slightest attempt at representation of the period, and the barbarism depicted is mediæval rather than antique. For the rest, the starting-point of Cymbeline vaguely resembles that of Lear. Cymbeline is causelessly estranged from Imogen, as Lear is from Cordelia; there is something in Cymbeline's weakness and folly that recalls the unreason of Lear. But in the older play everything is tragically designed and in the great manner, whereas here the whole action is devised with a happy end in view.

The consort of this pitiful king is a crafty and ambitious woman, who, by alternately flattering and defying him, has got him entirely under her thumb. She says herself (i. 2):—

"I never do him wrong But he does buy my injuries to be friends, Pays dear for my offences."

In other words, she knows that she can always find her profit in a scene of reconciliation. Her object is to make Imogen the wife of Cloten, her son by a former marriage, and thus to secure for him the succession to the throne. This scheme of hers is the original source of all the misfortunes which overwhelm the heroine. For Imogen loves Posthumus, in spite of his poverty a paragon among men, and cannot be induced to renounce the husband she has chosen. Therefore the play opens with the banishment of Posthumus.

The characters and incidents of Shakespeare's own invention give perspective to the play, the underplot forming a parallel to the main action, as the story of Gloucester and his cruel son forms a parallel to that of Lear and his heartless daughters. Belarius, a soldier and statesman, has twenty years ago fallen into unmerited disgrace with Cymbeline, who, listening to the voice of calumny, has outlawed him with the same unreasoning passion with which he now sends Posthumus into exile. In revenge for this wrong, Belarius has carried off Cymbeline's two sons, who have ever since lived with him in a lonely place among the mountains, believing him to be their father. To them comes Imogen in her hour of need, disguised as a boy, and is received with the utmost warmth and tenderness by the brothers, who do not know her, and whom she does not know. One of them, Guiderius, kills Cloten, who insulted and challenged him. Both the young men take up arms to meet the Roman invaders, and, together with Belarius and Posthumus, they save their father's kingdom.

Gervinus has acutely and justly remarked that the fundamental contrast expressed in their story, as in Cymbeline's political situation, in Imogen's relation to Posthumus and Pisanio's relation to them both, is precisely the dual contrast expressed in the English words true and false—true meaning at once "veracious" and "faithful" (ideas which, in the play, shade off into each other), while false, in like manner, means both "mendacious" and "faithless."

Life at court is beset with treacherous quicksands. The king is stupid, passionate, perpetually misguided; the queen is a wily murderess; and between them stands her son, Cloten, one of Shakespeare's most original figures, a true creation of genius, without a rival in all the poet's long gallery of fools and dullards. His stupid inefficiency and undisguised malignity have nothing in common with his mother's hypocritical and supple craft; he takes after her in worthlessness alone.

For the sake of an inartistic stage effect, Shakespeare has endowed him with a bodily frame indistinguishable from that of the handsome Posthumus, leaving it to his head alone to express the world-wide difference between them. But how admirably has the poet characterised the dolt and boor by making him shoot forth his words with an explosive stammer! With profound humour and delicate observation, he has endowed him with the loftiest notions of his own dignity, and given him no shadow of doubt as to his rights. There are no bounds to his vanity, his coarseness, his bestiality. If words could do it, not a word of his but would wound others to the quick. And not only his words, but his intents are of the most malignant; he would outrage Imogen at Milford Haven and "spurn her home" to her father. His stupidity, fortunately, renders him less dangerous, and with delicate art Shakespeare has managed to make him from first to last produce a comic effect, thereby softening the painful impression of the portraiture. We take pleasure in him as in Caliban, whom he foreshadows, and who had the same designs upon Miranda as he upon Imogen. We might even describe Caliban as Cloten developed into a type, a symbol.

It is such personages as these that compose the world which Belarius depicts to Guiderius and Arviragus (iii. 3), when the two youths repine against the inactivity of their lonely forest life, and yearn to plunge into the social turmoil and "drink delight of battle with their peers:"

"How you speak! Did you but know the city's usuries, And felt them knowingly: the art o' the court, As hard to leave as keep; whose top to climb Is certain falling, or so slippery, that The fear's as bad as falling: the toil o' the war, A pain that only seems to seek out danger I' the name of fame and honour; which dies i' the search, And hath as oft a slanderous epitaph. As record of fair act; nay, many times Doth ill deserve by doing well; what's worse, Must court'sy at the censure.—O boys! this story The world may read in me."

Amid these surroundings two personages have grown up whom Shakespeare would have us regard as beings of a loftier order.

He has taken all possible pains, from the very first scene of the play, to inspire the spectator with the highest conception of Posthumus. One nobleman speaks of him to another in terms such as, in bygone days, the poet had applied to Henry Percy:

"He liv'd in court (Which rare it is to do) most prais'd, most lov'd; A sample to the youngest, to the more mature A glass that feated them; and to the graver A child that guided dotards."

A little farther on, Iachimo says of him to Imogen (i. 6):

"He sits 'mongst men like a descended god; He hath a kind of honour sets him off More than a mortal seeming;"

and finally, at the close of the play (v. 5), "He was the best of all, amongst the rar'st of good ones"—an appreciation which it is a pity Iachimo did not arrive at a little sooner, as it might have prevented him from committing his villainies. Shakespeare throws into relief the dignity and repose of Posthumus, and his selfpossession when the king denounces and banishes him. We see that he obeys because he regards it as unavoidable, though he has set at naught the king's will in relation to Imogen. In the compulsory haste of his leave-taking, he shows himself penetrated with a sense of his inferiority to her, and appeals to us by the way in which he tempers the loftiness of his bearing towards the outer world with a graceful humility towards his wife. It is rather surprising that he never for a moment seems to think of carrying Imogen with him into exile. This passivity is probably explained by her reluctance to take any step not absolutely forced upon her, that should render more difficult an eventual reconciliation. He will wait for better times, and long and hope for them.

As he is on the point of departure, Cloten forces himself upon him, insults and challenges him. He remains unruffled, ignores the challenge, contemptuously turns his back upon the oaf, and calmly leaves him to entertain the courtiers with boasts of his own valour and the cowardice of Posthumus, well knowing that no one will believe him.

The character, then, is well sketched out. But his mediæval fable compelled Shakespeare to introduce traits which, in the light of our humaner age, seem inconsistent and inadmissible. No man with any decency of feeling would in our days make such a wager as his; no man would give a stranger, and one, moreover, who is to all appearance a vain and quite unscrupulous woman-hunter, the warmest and most insistent letter of recommendation to his wife; and still less would any one give the same man an unwritten license to employ every means in his power to shake her virtue, simply in order to enjoy his discomfiture when all his arts shall have failed. And even if we could forgive or excuse such conduct in Posthumus, we cannot possibly extend our tolerance to his easy credulity when Iachimo boasts of his conquest, his insane fury against Imogen, and the base falsehood of the letter he sends her in order to facilitate Pisanio's murderous task. Even in the worst of cases we do not admit a man's right to have a woman assassinated because she has forgotten her love for him. They thought otherwise in the days of the Renaissance; they did not look so closely into the plots of the old novelle, and were content, in the domain of romance, with traditional views of right and duty.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare has done what he could to mitigate the painful impression produced by Posthumus's conduct. Long before he knows that Iachimo has deceived him, he repents of his cruel deed, bitterly deplores that Pisanio has (as he thinks) obeyed him, and speaks in the warmest terms of Imogen's worth. He says, for instance (v. 4):

"For Imogen's dear life take mine; and though 'Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life."

He imposes upon himself the sternest penance. He comes to England with the Roman army, and then, nameless and disguised as a peasant, fights against the invaders. Together with Belarius and the king's sons, he is instrumental in staying the flight of the Britons, freeing Cymbeline, who has already been taken prisoner, winning the battle, and saving the kingdom. This done, he once more assumes his Roman garb, and seeks death at the hands of his countrymen, whose saviour he has been. He is taken prisoner and brought before the king, when all is cleared up.

From the moment he sets foot on English ground, there is in his course of action a more high-pitched and overstrained idealism than we are apt to find in Shakespeare's heroes—a craving for self-imposed expiation. Still the character fails to strike us as the perfect whole the poet would fain make of it. Posthumus impresses us, not as a favourite of the gods, but as a man whose penitence is as unbridled and excessive as his blind passion.

Far other is the case of Imogen. In her perfection is indeed attained. She is the noblest and most adorable womanly figure Shakespeare has ever drawn, and at the same time the most various. He has drawn spiritual women before her—Desdemona, Cordelia—but the secret of their being could be expressed in two words. He has also drawn brilliant women—Beatrice, Rosalind—whereas Imogen is not brilliant at all. Nevertheless she is designed and depicted as incomparable among her sex—"she is alone the Arabian bird." We see her in the most various situations, and she is equal to them all. We see her exposed to trial after trial, each harder than the last, and she emerges from them all, not only scatheless, but with her rare and enchanting qualities thrown into ever stronger relief.

At the very outset she gives proof of perfect self-command in her relation to her weak and passionate father, her false and venomous stepmother. The treasure of tenderness that fills her soul betrays itself in her parting from Posthumus, in her passionate regret that she could not give him one kiss more, and in the fervour with which she reproaches Pisanio for having left the shore before his master's ship had quite sunk below the horizon. During his absence her thoughts are unceasingly fixed on him. She repels with firmness the advances of her clownish wooer, Cloten. Brought face to face with Iachimo, she first receives him graciously, then sees through him at once when he begins to speak ill of Posthumus, and finally treats him with princely dignity when he has excused his offensive speeches as nothing but an ill-timed jest.

Next comes the bedroom scene, in which she falls asleep, and Iachimo, as she slumbers, paints for us her exquisite purity. Then we have her disdainful dismissal of Cloten; her reception of the letter from Posthumus; her calm confronting (as it seems) of certain death; her exquisite communion with her brothers; her death-like sleep and horror-struck awakening beside the body which she takes to be her husband's; her denunciations of Pisanio as the supposed murderer; and, finally, the moment of reunion—all scenes which are pearls of Shakespeare's art, the rarest jewels in his diadem, never outshone in the poetry of any nation.

He depicts her as born for happiness, but early inured to suffering, and therefore calm and collected. When Posthumus is banished, she acquiesces in the separation; she will live in the memory of her love. Every one commiserates her; herself, she scarcely complains. She wishes no evil to her enemies; at the end, when the detestable queen is dead, she laments her father's bereavement, little dreaming that nothing but the death of the murderess could have saved her father's life.

Only one relation in life can stir her to passionate utterance—her relation to Posthumus. When she takes leave of him she says (i. 2):

"You must be gone; And I shall here abide the hourly shot Of angry eyes; not comforted to live, But that there is this jewel in the world, That I may see again."

And to his farewell she replies:

"Nay, stay a little. Were you but riding forth to air yourself, Such parting were too petty."

When he is gone she cries:

"There cannot be a pinch in death More sharp than this is."

Her father's upbraidings leave her cold:

"I am senseless of your wrath'; a touch more rare Subdues all pangs, all fears."

To his continued reproaches she only replies with a rapturous eulogy of Posthumus:

"He is A man worth any woman; overbuys me Almost the sum he pays."

And her passion deepens after her husband's departure. She envies the handkerchief he has kissed; she laments that she could not watch his receding ship; she would have "broke her eye-strings" to see the last of it. He has been torn away from her while she had yet "most pretty things to say;" how she would think of him and beg him to think of her at three fixed hours of every day; and she would have made him swear not to forget her for any "she of Italy." He was gone before she could give him the parting kiss which she had set "betwixt two charming words."

She is devoid of ambition. She would willingly exchange her royal station for idyllic happiness in a country retreat such as that for which Shakespeare is now longing. When Posthumus has left her she exclaims (i. 2):

"Would I were A neatherd's daughter, and my Leonatus Our neighbour shepherd's son!"

In other words, she sighs for the lot in life which we shall find in The Winters Tale apportioned to Prince Florizel and Princess Perdita. In the same spirit she reflects before the coming of Iachimo (i. 7):

"Blessed be those, How mean soe'er, that have their honest wills, Which seasons comfort."

And then when Iachimo ("little Iago") slanders Posthumus to her, as he will presently slander her to Posthumus, how different is her conduct from her husband's! She has turned pale at his entrance, at Pisanio's mere announcement of a nobleman from Rome with letters from her lord. To Iachimo's first whispers of Posthumus's infidelity, she merely answers:

"My lord, I fear, Has forgot Britain."

But when Iachimo proceeds to draw a gloating picture of her husband's debaucheries, and offers himself as an instrument for her revenge upon the faithless one, she replies with the exclamation:

"What, ho, Pisanio!"

She summons her servant; she has seen all she wants of this Italian.

Even when she says nothing she fills the scene, as when, having gone to rest, she lies in bed reading, dismisses her attendant, closes the book and falls asleep. How wonderfully has Shakespeare brought home to us the atmosphere of purity in this sleeping-chamber by means of the passionate words he places in the mouth of Iachimo (ii. 2):

"Cytherea, How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch! But kiss; one kiss!—Rubies unparagon'd, How dearly they do't!—'Tis her breathing that Perfumes the chamber thus."

The influence of this scene—interpreting as it does the overpowering impression that emanates even from the material surroundings of exquisite womanhood, the almost magical glamour of purity and loveliness combined—may in all probability be traced in the rapture expressed by Goethe's Faust when he and Mephistopheles enter Gretchen's chamber. Iachimo is here the love-sick Faust and the malign Mephistopheles in one. Remember Faust's outburst:

"Willkommen, süsser Dämmerschein, Der Du dies Heiligthum durchwebst Ergreif mein Herz, du süsse Liebespein, Die Du vom Thau der Hoffnung schmachtend lebst! Wie athmet hier Gefühl der Stille."

Despite the difference between the two situations, there can be no doubt that the one has influenced the other.[1]

As though in ecstasy over this incomparable creation, Shakespeare once more bursts forth into song. Once and again he pays her lyric homage; here in Cloten's morning song, "Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings," and afterwards in the dirge her brother's chant over what they believe to be her dead body.

Shakespeare makes her lose her self-control for the first time when Cloten ventures to speak disparagingly of her husband, calling him a "base wretch," a beggar "foster'd with cold dishes, with scraps o' the court," "a hilding for a livery," and so on. Then she bursts forth into words of more than masculine violence, and almost as opprobrious as Cloten's own (ii. 3):

"Profane fellow! Wert thou the son of Jupiter, and no more But what thou art besides, thou wert too base To be his groom: thou wert dignified enough, Even to the point of envy, if't were made Comparative for your virtues, to be styl'd The under-hangman of his kingdom, and hated For being preferr'd so well."

It is in the same flush of anger that she speaks the words which first sting Cloten to comic fury, and then inspire him with his hideous design. Leonatus' meanest garment, she says, is "dearer in her respect" than Cloten's whole person—an expression which rankles in the mind of the noxious dullard, until at last it drives him out of his senses.

New charm and new nobility breathe around her in the scene in which she receives the letter from her husband, designed to lure her to her death. First all her enthusiasm, and then all her passion, blaze forth and burn with the clearest flame. Hear this (iii. 2):

"Pisanio. Madam, here is a letter from my lord. Imogen. Who? thy lord? that is my lord: Leonatus. O learn'd indeed were that astronomer That knew the stars as I his characters; He'd lay the future open.—You good gods, Let what is here contain'd relish of love, Of my lord's health, of his content,—yet not, That we two are asunder,—let that grieve him: Some griefs are medicinable; that is one of them, For it doth physic love:—of his content, All but in that!—Good wax, thy leave.—Bless'd be You bees, that make these locks of counsel!"

She reads that her lord appoints a meeting-place at Milford Haven, little dreaming that she is summoned there only to be murdered:

"O for a horse with wings!—Hear'st thou, Pisanio? He is at Milford Haven: read, and tell me How far 'tis thither. If one of mean affairs May plod it in a week, why may not I Glide thither in a day?—Then, true Pisanio, (Who long'st, like me, to see thy lord; who long'st,— O let me 'bate!—but not like me;—yet long'st,— But in a fainter kind:—O not like me, For mine's beyond beyond) say, and speak thick, (Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing, To the smothering of the sense), how far it is To this same blessed Milford: and, by the way, Tell me how Wales was made so happy as To inherit such a haven: but, first of all, How we may steal from hence; and, for the gap That we shall make in time, from our hencegoing And our return, to excuse: but first, how get hence: Why should excuse be born or e'er begot? We'll talk of that hereafter.... Prithee, speak, How many score of miles may we well ride 'Twixt hour and hour? Pis. One score, 'twixt sun and sun, Madam's, enough for you: [Aside] and too much too. Imo. Why, one that rode to's execution, man, Could never go so slow; I have heard of riding wagers, Where horses have been nimbler than the sands That run i' the clock's behalf. But this is foolery: Go bid my woman feign a sickness."

These outbursts are beyond all praise; but quite on a level with them stands her answer when Pisanio shows her Posthumus's letter to him, denouncing her with the foulest epithets, and the whole extent of her misfortune becomes clear to her. It is then she utters the words (iii. 4) which Sören Kierkegaard admired so deeply:

"False to his bed! what is it to be false? To lie in watch there and to think on him? To weep 'twixt clock and clock? if sleep charge nature To break it with a fearful dream of him And cry myself awake? that's false to's bed, is it?"

It is very characteristic that she never for a moment believes that Posthumus can really think it possible she should have given herself to another. She seeks another explanation for his inexplicable conduct:

"Some jay of Italy, Whose mother was her painting, hath betray'd him."

This is scant comfort to her, however, and she implores Pisanio, who would spare her, to strike, for life has now lost all value for her. As she is baring her breast to the blow, she speaks these admirable words:

"Come, here's my heart: Something's afore't:—soft, soft! we'll no defence; Obedient as the scabbard.—What is here? The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus, All turn'd to heresy? Away, away, Corrupters of my faith! you shall no more Be stomachers to my heart."

With the same intentness, or rather with the same tenderness, has Shakespeare, all through the play, imbued himself with her spirit, never losing touch of her for a moment, but lovingly filling in trait upon trait, until at last he represents her, half in jest, as the sun of the play. The king says in the concluding scene:

"See, Posthumus anchors upon Imogen; And she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye On him, her brothers, me, her master, hitting Each object with a joy: the counterchange Is severally in all."

Early in the play Imogen expressed the wish that she were a neatherd's daughter, and Leonatus a shepherd's son. Later, when, clad in manly attire, she chances upon the lonely forest cave in which her brothers dwell, she feels completely at ease in their neighbourhood, and in the primitive life for which she has always longed—as Shakespeare longs for it now. The brothers are happy with her, and she with them. She says (Act iii. sc. 6):

"Pardon me, gods! I'd change my sex to be companions with them, Since Leonatus's false."

And later (Act iv. sc. 2):

"These are kind creatures. Gods! what lies I have heard! Our courtiers say all's savage but at court."

Belarius exclaims in the same spirit (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Oh, this life Is nobler than attending for a check, Richer than doing nothing for a bauble, Prouder than rustling in unpaid for silk."

The princes, in whom the royal soldierly blood asserts itself in a thirst for adventure, reply in a contrary strain:

"Guiderius. Haply this life is best If quiet life be best; sweeter to you That have a sharper known; well corresponding With your stiff age; but unto us it is A call of ignorance, travelling a-bed; A prison for a debtor, that not dares To stride a limit."

And his brother adds:

"What should we speak of When we are as old as you? When we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December. . . . . We have seen nothing; We are beastly."

Shakespeare has diffused a marvellous poetry throughout this forest idyl; a matchless freshness and primitive charm pervade the whole. In this period of detestation for the abortions of culture, the poet has beguiled himself by picturing a life far from all civilisation, an innately noble youth in a natural state, and he depicts two young men who have seen nothing of life and never looked upon the face of woman; whose days have been passed in the pursuit of game, and who, like the Homeric warriors, prepared and cooked with their own hands the spoil procured by their bows and arrows. But their race shines through, and they prove of better stock than we should have looked for in the sons of the contemptible Cymbeline. Their instincts all tend towards the noble and princely ideal.

In the Spanish drama, which twenty-five years later received such an impetus under Calderon, it became a leading motive to portray young men and women brought up in solitude without having seen a single being of the other sex, and without knowledge of their rank and parentage. Thus in Calderon's Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño) of 1635, we are shown a king's son leading a solitary life in utter ignorance of his royal descent. He is seized by a passionate love on his first meeting with mankind kind, and is crudely violent in the face of any opposition, but, like the princes in Cymbeline, the seeds of majesty are lying dormant and the princely instincts spring readily into life. In the play En esta vida todo as verdad y todo es mentira of 1647, a faithful servant carries off the emperor's son from the pursuit of a tyrant, and seeks refuge in a mountain cave of Sicily. He also takes charge of a base-born son of the tyrant, and the two lads are brought up together. They see no one but their foster-father, are clad in the skins of animals and live upon game and fruit. When the tyrant appears to claim his child and slay the emperor's son, none can tell him which is which, and neither threats nor entreaties can prevail upon the servant to yield the secret. Here, as in Life is a Dream, the first glimpse of a woman rouses instant love in both young men. In A Daughter of the Air (La hija del ayre) of 1664, Semiramis is brought up by an old priest, as Miranda is by Prospero in The Tempest. Like all these beings reared in solitude remote from the turmoil of life, Semiramis nourishes an impatient longing to be out in the world. In the two plays of 1672, Eco y Narciso and El monstruo de los jardines, Calderon employs a variation of the same idea. Narcissus in the one and Achilles in the other are brought up in solitude in order that we may see all the emotions aroused, especially those of love and jealousy, in a being so primitive that it cannot even name its own sensations.

In this episode, and throughout this last period of his poetry, Shakespeare entered a realm which the imagination of the Latin races immediately seized upon and made their own. But in all their dramatic poetry of this nature they never surpassed that of the English poet.

He refrained entirely from the erotic in this idyl, and instead of the demands of a lover's passion, he portrayed unconscious brotherly love offered to a sister disguised as a boy. Imogen and the two strong-natured, high-minded youths dwell charmingly together, but their companionship is destroyed in the bud when Imogen, after having drunk the narcotic supplied by the physician to the queen instead of poison, lies as one dead. A gently touching element is introduced into this moving play when the two brothers bear her forth and sing over her bier. We witness a burial without rites or ceremonies, requiems or church formalities, an attempt being made to fill their place with spontaneous natural symbols. A similar attempt was made by Goethe in the double chorus sung over Mignon's body in Wilhelm Meister (Book VIII. chap. viii.). Imogen's head is laid towards the east, and the brothers sing over her the beautiful duet which their father had taught them at the burial of their mother. Its rhythm contains the germ of all that later became Shelley's poetry.

The first verse runs:

"Fear no more the heat of sun, Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweeper, come to dust."[2]

The concluding verses, in which the voices are heard first in solo and then in duets, form a wonderful harmony of metric and poetic art.

This idyl, in which he found and expressed his reawakened love for the heart of Nature, has been worked out by Shakespeare with especial tenderness. He by no means intended to represent a flight from scorn of mankind as a thing desirable in itself, but merely to depict solitude as a refuge for the weary, and existence in the country as a happiness for those who have done with life.

As a drama, Cymbeline contains more of the nature of intrigue than any earlier play. There is no little skill displayed in the way Pisanio misleads Cloten by showing him Posthumus's letter, and where Imogen takes the headless Cloten, attired in Posthumus's clothes, for her murdered husband. The mythological dream vision seems to have been interpolated for use at court festivities. The explanatory tablet left by Jupiter, and the king's joyful outburst in the last scene, "Am I a mother to the birth of three?" prove that even at his fullest and ripest Shakespeare was never securely possessed of an unfailing good taste, but such trifling errors of judgment are more than counterbalanced by the overflowing richness of the fairylike poetry of this drama

XIX

WINTER'S TALE—AN EPIC TURN—CHILDLIKE FORMS—THE PLAY AS A MUSICAL STUDY—SHAKESPEARE'S ÆSTHETIC CONFESSION OF FAITH

We are now about to see Shakespeare enthralled and reinspired by the glamour of fairy tale and romance.

The Winter s Tale was first printed in the Folio of 1623, but, as we have already mentioned, an entry in Dr. Simon Forman's diary informs us that he saw it played at the Globe Theatre on the 15th of May 1611. A notice in the official diary of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, goes to prove that at that date the play was quite new. "For the king's players. An olde playe called Winter's Tale, formerly allowed of by Sir George Bucke, and likewyse by mee on Mr. Hemmings his word that nothing profane was added or reformed, though the allowed book was missinge; and therefore I returned itt without fee this 19th of August 1623." The Sir George Bucke mentioned here did not receive his official appointment as censor until August 1610. Therefore it was probably one of the first performances of the Winters Tale at which Forman was present in the spring of 1611.

We have already drawn attention to Ben Jonson's little fling at the play in the introduction to his Bartholomew's Fair in 1614.

The play was founded on a romance of Robert Greene's, published in 1588 under the title of "Pandosto, the Triumph of Time," and was re-named half-a-century later "The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia." So popular was it, that it was printed again and again. We know of at least seventeen editions, and in all likelihood there were more.

Shakespeare had adapted Lodge's Rosalynde in his earlier pastoral play, As You Like It, very soon after its publication in 1590. It is significant that this other tale, with its peculiar blending of the pathetic and idyllic, should only now, though it must have long been familiar to him, strike him as suitable for dramatic treatment. Karl Elze's theory that Shakespeare had adapted the story in some earlier work, which Greene had in his mind when he wrote his famous and violent accusation of plagiarism, cannot be considered as more than a random conjecture. Greene's attack was sufficiently accounted for by that remodelling and adaptation of older works which was practised by the young poet from the very first, and it clearly aimed at Henry VI.

Shakespeare, who could not, of course, use Greene's title, called his play A Winters Tale; a title which would convey an impression, at that time, of a serious and touching or exciting story, and he plainly strove for a dream-like and fantastic effect in his work. Mamillius says, when he begins his little story (Act ii. sc. I), "A sad tale's best for winter," and in three different places the romantic impossibility of the plot is impressed upon the audience. In the description of the discovery of Perdita we are warned that "this news, which is called true, is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion" (Act v. sc. 2).

The geographical extravagances are those of the romance; it was Greene who surrounded Bohemia with the sea and transferred the Oracle of Delphi to the Island of Delphos. But Shakespeare contributed the anachronisms; it was he who made the oracle exist contemporaneously with Russia as an empire, who made Hermione a daughter of a Russian Emperor and caused her statue to be executed by Giulio Romano. The religion of the play is decidedly vague, the very characters themselves seem to forget at times what they are, one moment figuring as Christians, and the next worshipping Jupiter and Proserpina. In the same play in which a pilgrimage is made to Delphi to obtain an oracle, a shepherd lad says there is "but one puritan amongst them, and he sings songs to hornpipes" (Act iv. sc. 2). All this is unintentional, no doubt, but it greatly adds to the general fairy tale effect.

We do not know why Shakespeare transposed the localities. In Greene's book the tragedy of the play occurs in Bohemia, and the idyllic part in Sicily; in the drama the situations are reversed. It might be that Bohemia seemed to him a more suitable country for the exposure of an infant than the better known and more thickly populated island of the Mediterranean.

All the main features of the play are drawn from Greene, first and foremost the king's unreasonable jealousy because his wife, at his own urgent request, invites Polixenes to prolong his stay and speaks to him in friendly fashion. Among the grounds of jealousy enumerated by Greene was the naïve and dramatically unsuitable one that Bellaria, in her desire to please and obey her husband by showing every attention to his guest, frequently entered his bed-chamber to ascertain if anything was needed there.[1] Greene's queen really dies when she is cast off by the king in his jealous madness, but this tragic episode, which would have deprived him of his reconciliation scene, was not adopted by Shakespeare. He did, however, include and amplify the death of Mamillius, their little son, who pines away from sorrow for the king's harsh treatment of his mother. Mamillius is one of the gems of the play; a finer sketch of a gifted, large-hearted child could not be. We can but feel that Shakespeare, in drawing this picture of the young boy and his early death, must once again have had his own little son in his mind, and that it was of him he was thinking when he makes Polixenes say of his young prince (Act i. sc. 2):

"If at home, sir, He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter; Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy; My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all: He makes a July's day short as December; And with his varying childness, cures in me Thoughts that would thick my blood." Leontes. So stands this squire Offic'd with me."

The father's tone towards little Mamillius is at first a jesting one.

"Mamillius, art thou my boy?" Mamillius. Ay, my good lord. Leontes. Why, that's my bawcock. What, hast smutch'd thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine."

Later, when jealousy grows upon him, he cries:

"Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear'st! my collop!—Can thy dam?—may'st be?"

The children of the French poets of the middle and end of that century were never childlike. They would have made a little prince destined to a sad and early death talk solemnly and maturely, like little Joas in Racine's Athelie; but Shakespeare had no hesitation in letting his princeling talk like a real child. He says to the lady-in-waiting who offers to play with him:

"No, I'll none of you. l^st Lady. Why, my sweet lord? Mamillius. You'll kiss me hard, and speak to me as if I were a baby still."

He announces that he likes another lady better because her eyebrows are black and fine; and he knows that eyebrows are most becoming when they are shaped like a half-moon, and look as though drawn with a pen.

"2nd Lady. Who taught you this? Mamillius. I learn'd it out of women's faces. Pray, now. What colour are your eyebrows? l^st Lady. Blue, my lord. Mam. Nay, that's a mock; I have seen a lady's nose That has been blue, but not her eyebrows."

The tale he is about to tell is cut short by the entrance of the furious king.

During the trial scene, which forms a parallel to that in Henry VIII., tidings are brought of the prince's death (Act iii. sc. I):

"——whose honourable thoughts (Thoughts too high for one so tender) cleft the heart That could conceive a gross and foolish fire Blemished his gracious dam."

In Greene's tale the death of the child causes that of his mother, but in the play, where it follows immediately upon the king's defiant rejection of the oracle, it effects a sudden revulsion of feeling in him as a punishment direct from Heaven. Shakespeare allowed Hermione to be merely reported dead because his mood at this time required that the play should end happily. That Mamilius seems to pass entirely out of every one's memory is only another proof of a fact we have already touched upon, namely, Shakespeare's negligent style of work in these last years of his working life. The poet, however, is careful to keep Hermione well in mind; she is brought before us in the vision Antigonus sees shortly before his death, and she is preserved during sixteen years of solitude that she may be restored to us at the last. It is, indeed, chiefly by her personality that the two markedly distinct parts of this wasp-waisted play are held together.

Although, as in Pericles, there is more of an epic than a dramatic character about the work, it possesses a certain unity of tone and feeling. As a painting may contain two comparatively unconnected groups which are yet united by a general harmony of line and colouring, so, in this apparently disconnected plot, there is an all-pervading poetic harmony which we may call the tone or spirit of the play. Shakespeare was careful from the first that its melancholy should not grow to such an incurable gloom as to prevent our enjoyment of the charming scenes between Florizel and Perdita at the sheep-shearing festival, or the thievish tricks of the rascal Autolycus. The poet sought to make each chord of feeling struck during the play melt away in the gentle strain of reconciliation at the close. If Hermione had returned to the king at once, which would have been the most natural course of events, the play would have ended with the third act. She therefore disappears, finally returning to life and the embrace of the weeping Leontes in the semblance of a statue.

Looked upon from a purely abstract point of view, as though it were a musical composition, the play might be considered in the light of a soul's history. Beginning with powerful emotions, suspense and dread; with terrible mistakes entailing deserved and undeserved suffering, it leads to a despair which in turn gradually yields to forgetfulness and levity; but not lastingly. Once alone with its helpless grief and hopeless repentance, the heart still finds in its innermost sanctuary the memory which, death-doomed and petrified, has yet been faithfully guarded and cherished unscathed until, ransomed by tears, it consents to live once more. The play has its meaning and moral just as a symphony may have, neither more nor less. It would be absurd to seek for a psychological reason for Hermione's prolonged concealment. She reappears at the end because her presence is required, as the final chord is needed in music or the completing arabesque in a drawing.

Among Shakespeare's additions in the first part of the play we find the characters of the noble and resolute Paulina and her weakly good-natured husband. Paulina, who has been overlooked by both Mrs. Jameson and Heine in their descriptions of Shakespeare's feminine characters, is one of the most admirable and original figures he has put upon the stage. She has more courage than ten men, and possesses that natural eloquence and power of pathos which determined honesty and sound common sense can bestow upon a woman. She would go through fire and water for the queen whom she loves and trusts. She is untouched by sentimentality; there is as little of the erotic as there is of repugnance in her attitude towards her husband. Her treatment of the king's jealous frenzy reminds us of Emilia in Othello, but the resemblance ends there. In Paulina there is a vein of that rare metal which we only find in excellent women of this not essentially feminine type. We meet it again in the nineteenth century in the character of Christiana Oehlenschläger as we see it in Hauch's beautiful commemorative poem.

The rustic fête in the second part of the play, with the conversations between Florizel and Perdita, is entirely Shakespeare's work; above all is the diverting figure of Autolycus his own peculiar property.

In Greene's tale the king falls violently in love with his daughter when she is restored to him a grown woman, and he kills himself in despair when she is wedded to her lover. Shakespeare rejected this stupid and ugly feature; his ending is all pure harmony.

Here, as in Cymbeline, we see the poet compelled by the nature of his theme to dwell upon the disastrous effects of jealousy. This is the third time he treats of such suspicions driving to madness. Othello was the first great example, then Posthumus, and now Leontes.

The case of Leontes is so far unique that no one has suggested causes of jealousy, nor slandered Hermione to him. His own coarse and foolish imaginings alone are to blame. This variation of the vice was evidently intended to darken the background against which womanly high-mindedness and blamelessness were to shine forth.

Mrs. Jameson has charmingly said that Hermione combines such rare virtues as "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness." As queen, wife, and mother, there is a majestic lovableness about her, a grand and gracious simplicity, a natural self-control, the proverb, "Still waters run deep," being eminently applicable to her. Her gentle dignity contrasts well with Paulina's enthusiastic intrepidity, and her noble reticence with Paulina's free outspokenness. Her attitude and language during the trial scene are superb, far outshining Queen Katherine's on a similar occasion. Her nature, the ideal Englishwoman's nature, all meekness and submissiveness, rises in dignified protest. She is brief in her self-defence; life has no value for her since she has lost her husband's love, since her little son has been removed from her as though she were plague-stricken, and her new-born daughter "from her breast, the innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, haled out to murder." Her only desire is to vindicate her honour, yet the first words of this cruelly accused and shamefully treated woman are full of pity for the remorse which Leontes will some day suffer. Her language is that of innocent fortitude. When about to be taken to prison she says:

"There's some ill planet reigns: I must be patient till the heavens look With an aspect more favourable. Good my lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities: but I have That honourable grief lodged here which burns Worse than tears drown."

She bids her women not weep until she has deserved imprisonment; then indeed their tears will have cause to flow.

In the second half of the Winters Tale we are surrounded by a fresh and charming country, and shown a picture of rustic happiness and well-being. No one was less influenced by the sentimental vagaries of the fantastic pastorals of the day than Shakespeare. He had drawn in Corin and Phebe, in As You Like It, an extremely natural, and therefore not particularly poetical, shepherd and shepherdess; and the herdsmen in the Winters Tale are no beautiful languishing souls. They do not write sonnets and madrigals, but drink ale and eat pies and dance. The hostess serves her guests with a face that is "o' fire with labour and the thing she took to quench it." The clowns' heads are full of the prices of wool; they have no thought for roses and nightingales, and their simplicity is rather comical than touching. They are more than overmatched by the light-fingered Autolycus, who educates them by means of ballads, and eases them of their purses at the same time. He is a Jack-of-all-trades, has travelled the country with a monkey, been a process-server, bailiff, and servant to Prince Florizel; he has gone about with a puppet-show playing the Prodigal Son; finally, he marries a tinker's wife and settles down as a confirmed rogue. He is the clown of the piece—roguish, genial, witty, and always master of the situation. In spite of the fact that Shakespeare seized every opportunity to flout the lower classes, that he always gave a satirical and repellent picture of them as a mass, yet their natural wit, good sense, and kind-heartedness are always portrayed in his clowns with a sympathetic touch. Before his time, the buffoon was never an inherent part of the play; he came on and danced his jig without any connection with the plot, and was, in fact, merely intended to amuse the uneducated portion of the audience and make them laugh. Shakespeare was the first to incorporate him into the plot, and to endow him, not merely with the jester's wit, but with the higher faculties and feelings of the Fool in Lear, or the gay humour of the vagabond pedlar, Autolycus.

The clown in the Winter's Tale is the drollest and sharpest of knaves, and is employed to unravel the knot in the story. He it is who transports the old shepherd and his son from Bohemia to the court of King Leontes in Sicily.

The ludicrous features of rustic society, however, are quite overpowered by the kind-heartedness which stamps every word coming from the lips of these worthy country folk, and prepares us for the appearance of Perdita in their midst.

She has been adopted out of compassion, and, with her gold, proves a source of prosperity to her adoptive parents. Thus she grows up without feeling the pressure of poverty or servitude. She wins the prince's heart by the beauty of her youth, and when we first see her she is attired in all her splendour as queen of a rural festival. Modest and charming as she is, she shows the courage of a true princess in face of the difficulties and hardships she must encounter for the sake of her love.

She is one of Shakespeare's cherished children, and he has endowed her with his favourite trait—a distaste for anything artificial or unnatural. Not even to improve the flowers in her garden will she employ the art of special means of cultivation. She will not have the rich blooms of "carnations and streaked gillyflowers" there; they do not thrive and she will not plant them. When Polixenes asks why she disdains them, she replies (Act iv. sc. 3):

"For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature."

To which Polixenes makes the profound response:

"Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so over that art Which you say adds to nature is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race; this is an art Which does mend nature,—change it rather; but The art itself is nature." With great creating nature."

These are the most profound and subtle words that could well be spoken on the subject of the relations between nature and culture; the clearest repudiation of that gospel of naturalism against which the figure of Caliban and the ridicule cast upon Gonzalo's Utopia in The Tempest are protests. Perdita herself is one of those chosen flowers which are the product of that true culture which preserves and ennobles nature.

They are also words of genuine wisdom on the relative positions of nature and art. Shakespeare's art was that of nature itself, and in this short speech we possess his æsthetic confession of faith.

His ideal was a poetry which strayed neither in matter nor manner from what Hamlet calls "the modesty of nature." Although he did not wholly succeed in escaping its infection, Shakespeare invariably pursued the artificial taste of the times with gibes. From the days when he made merry at the expense of Euphuisms in Love's Labours Lost and Falstaff, until now, when he puts such affectedly poetical language in the mouths of his courtiers in the Winter s Tale, he has always ridiculed it vigorously.

In the first scene of the play Camillo says in praise of Mamillius:

"They that went on crutches before he was born desire still their life to see him a man.

Whereupon Archidamus sarcastically inquires:

"Would they else be content to die?"

and Camillo is forced to laughingly confess:

"Yes, if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live."

Still more absurd is the style in which the Third Gentleman describes, in the last scene of the play, the meeting between the king and his long-lost daughter and the aspect of the spectators. He says of Paulina:

She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled.[2]

This comical diction reaches a climax in the following expressions:

"One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes, caught water though not the fish, was when at the relation of the queen's death, with the manner how she came to't, bravely confessed and lamented by the king, how attentiveness wounded his daughter; till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an 'Alas,' I would fain say, bleed tears, for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed colour; some swooned, all sorrowed: if all the world could have seen't the woe had been universal."

That Shakespeare's æsthetic sense did not sanction such expressions as these of the Third Gentleman scarcely needs stating. Perdita's language is that of nature itself. So great is her dislike of artificiality, that she will not even plant gardener's flowers in her garden, saying:

"No more than were I painted I would wish This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore Desire to breed by me."

Nowhere is Shakespeare's knowledge of nature more charmingly displayed than in her speeches. It is not only the poetic expression that is so wonderful in Perdita's distribution of flowers; it is the intimacy shown with their habits. She says (Act iv. sc. 3):

"Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun And with him rises weeping."

How well she knows that in England the daffodils bloom as early as February and March, while the swallow does not come till April:

"——O Proserpina, For the flowers now that, frighted, thou lett'st fall From Dis's waggon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phœbus in his strength—a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one! Oh, these I lack To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o'er and o'er! Florizel. What, like a corse? Perdita. No, like a bank for love to lie and play on: Not like a corse; or if, not to be buried, 'But quick and in mine arms." ...

Florizel's answer describes her with a lover's eloquence:

"What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it ever: when you sing I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms, Pray so, and, for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too."...

Her charm is equalled by her pride and resolution. When the king threatens to have her "beauty scratched with briars" if she dares retain her hold upon his son, although she believes all is lost, she says:

"I was not much afraid; for once or twice I was about to speak and tell him plainly, The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike." ...

The delineation of the love between Florizel and Perdita is marked by certain features not to be found in Shakespeare's youthful works, but which reappear with Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest. There is a certain remoteness from the world about it, a tenderness for those who are still yearning and hoping for happiness and a renunciation of any expectation as far as himself is concerned. He stands outside and beyond it all now. In the old days the poet stood on a level, as it were, with the love he was portraying; now he looks upon it from above with a fatherly eye.

As in Cymbeline, the court is here placed in contrast with idyllic life, and shown as the abode of cruelty, stupidity, and vice. Even the better of the two kings, Polixenes, is rough and harsh, and Leontes, whom we are not to look upon as criminal, but only as misled by his miserable suspicions, offers a true picture of the princely attitude and princely behaviour of the time of the Renaissance, during the sixteenth century in Italy and about a century later in England. It was with good reason that Belarius said in Cymbeline (Act iii. sc. 3):

"And we will fear no poison, which attends In place of greater state."

We see that the thoughts of the king immediately turn to poison when he believes that his wife has deceived him, and we also see that the courtier in whom he confides has all the means ready to hand (Act i. sc. 2):

"And thou ... ... might'st bespice a cup, To give mine enemy a lasting wink; Which draught to me were cordial. Camillo. Sir, my lord, I could do this, and that with no rash potion, But with a lingering dram that should not work Maliciously like poison."

When, to escape committing this crime, Camillo takes flight with Polixenes, and the king has to be content with wreaking his vengeance on the hapless Hermione and her infant, he returns again and again to the thought of having them burned:

"Say that she were gone, Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest Might come to me again."'

Then the command with regard to the child:

"Hence with it, and, together with the dam, Commit them to the fire!" (Act ii/sc. 3).'

Paulina shall share their fate for daring to oppose him:

"I'll ha' thee burnt!"

When she is gone, he repeats his order for the burning of the infant:

"Take it hence And see it instantly consumed with fire.... ... If thou refuse, And wilt encounter with my wrath, say so; The bastard brains with these my proper hands Shall I dash out. Go, take it to the fire!"

We can see that Shakespeare had no intention of allowing the drama to become mawkish by giving too free scope to the humours of a pastoral play.

The resemblance between the sufferings of the infant Perdita, put ashore on the coast of Bohemia during a tempest, and those of the infant Marina, born during a storm at sea, is accentuated by lines which markedly recall a well-known passage in Pericles. In the Winter's Tale we have (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Thou'rt like to have A lullaby too rough: I never saw The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour!"[3]

The impression designedly produced upon the audience, that all this is not serious earnest, enables Shakespeare to approach more nearly to tragic dissonance than would otherwise be permissible in a work of this kind. The atmosphere of fairy tale, so skilfully breathed here and there throughout the play, carries with it a certain playfulness of expression which gives a touch of raillery to incidents which would otherwise be horrible. Playfulness it is, and we once more obtain a glimpse of this quality which has so long deserted Shakespeare. It would be difficult to find a more roguish bit of drollery than the old shepherd's monologue on finding the child (Act iii. sc. 3):

"A pretty one; a very pretty one: sure, some 'scape: though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the 'scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work: they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here."

The same tone is preserved in the young shepherd's account of how he saw Antigonus torn to pieces by a bear. Impossible to feel horror-stricken or solemn over this:

"And then for the land-service, to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone; how he cried to me for help, and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman. But to make an end of the ship, to see how the sea flap-dragoned it; but first how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them; and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than sea or weather."

It does not seem very likely that the unfortunate man's chief anxiety while the bear was tearing him to pieces would be to inform the shepherd of his name and rank. He forgot to add his age, although, through a slip on Shakespeare's part, the old shepherd knows without being told that Antigonus was aged.

Shakespeare did not concentrate his whole strength on this play either. He took no great pains to reduce his scattered materials to order, and, as if in defiance of those classically cultivated people who demanded unity of time and place, he allowed sixteen years to elapse between two acts, leaving us on the voyage between Sicily and Bohemia, between reality and wonderland. In other words, he has freely improvised on his instrument upon a given poetic theme; he has painted purely decoratively, content with a general harmony of colour and unity of tone, without giving much thought to any ultimate meaning.

XX

THE TEMPEST—WRITTEN FOR THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH'S WEDDING

It is a different matter with that rich, fantastic wonder-poem, The Tempest, on which Shakespeare concentrated for the last time all the powers of his mind. Everything here is ordered and concise, and so inspired with thought that we seem to be standing face to face with the poet's idea. In spite of all its boldness of imagination, the dramatic order and condensation are such that the whole complies with the severest rules of Aristotle, the action of the entire play occupying in reality only three hours.

Owing to a notice by the Master of the Revels concerning a performance of the play at Whitehall in 1611, the date 1610-11 was long accepted as the year of its production. This memorandum is, however, a forgery, and the sole bit of reliable information we possess of The Tempest, before its appearance in the Folio edition of 1613, is a notice in Vertue's Manuscripts of a performance at court in February 1613, as one of the festivities celebrating the Princess Elizabeth's wedding. We can prove that this was its first performance and that it was written expressly for the occasion.

The Princess Elizabeth had been educated at Combe Abbey, far from the impure atmosphere of the court, under the care of Lord and Lady Harrington, an honourable and right-minded couple. When returned to her parents at the age of fifteen, she was distinguished by a charm and dignity beyond her years, and soon became the special favourite of her brother Henry, then seventeen years of age. Claimants for her hand were not long in appearing. The Prince of Piedmont was among the first, but the Pope would not consent to a marriage between a Catholic potentate and a Protestant princess. The next wooer was no less a person than Gustavus Adolphus, and his suit was rejected because James refused to bestow his daughter upon the enemy of his friend and brother-in-law, Christian IV. of Denmark. As early as December 1611 negotiations were entered upon on behalf of Prince Frederick V., who had just succeeded his father as Elector of the Palatinate. There was much to be said in favour of an alliance with a son of the man who had stood at the head of the Protestant League in Germany, and in May 1612 a preliminary contract of betrothal was signed. In the August of the same year an ambassador from the young Elector came to England. Meanwhile the first suitor, strongly supported by the Queen's Catholic sympathies, had reappeared. The King of Spain had also made some overtures, but they had fallen through on account of their implying the conversion of the Princess to the Catholic faith. It was the Elector Frederick, therefore, who was finally victorious in the contest, and matters were soon so far settled that he could set out on his journey to England. He was very popular there by reason of his Protestantism, and he arrived at Gravesend amid general rejoicing. He sailed up to Whitehall on the 22nd of October, and was enthusiastically greeted by the crowd. King James received him warmly, and presented him with a ring worth eighteen hundred pounds. He was ardently supported by the young Prince of Wales, who announced his intention of following his sister on her wedding-tour to Germany, where it was his secret purpose to look for a bride for himself, regardless of political intrigue.

The Elector Palatine was a remarkably handsome and prepossessing young man. Born on the 16th of August 1596, he was at this time just sixteen years of age, and nothing in his conduct suggested the unmanly and contemptible character he displayed eight years later, when he, as King of Bohemia, lost the battle of Prague through a drunken revel. The contemporary English accounts of him abound with his praise. He made an excellent impression everywhere, and we read, of his dignified and princely behaviour in a letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, dated 22nd October 1612: "He hath a train of very sober and well-fashioned gentlemen, his whole number is not above 170, servants and all, being limited by the King not to exceed." The condition of the exchequer would not permit of any unnecessary extravagance, and in less than a month after the wedding the whole retinue appointed to attend on the Prince during his stay in England was dismissed—a slight which the young Princess took very much to heart.

The much beloved Prince Henry was far from well at the time of his future brother-in-law's arrival in London. He had injured himself by violent bodily exercise during the unusually hot summer, and had ruined his digestion by eating great quantities of fruit. We now know that the illness by which he was attacked was typhus fever, and it appears that not many days after he was convalescent he incurred a severe relapse by playing tennis in the cold open air with no more clothing on the upper part of his body than a shirt.

High-minded, enlightened, and honourable as he was, Prince Henry was the idol and hope of the English nation. Queen Anne had taken the Prince, while he was yet a boy, to visit Raleigh at the Tower, soon after the illustrious prisoner had been forced to abandon those hopes of the Admiralship of the Danish fleet which he had based on the visit of Christian the Fourth, to England. Prince Henry had been intimate with Raleigh since 1610, and is reported to have said, "No man but my father would have kept such a bird in a cage!" He had, with great difficulty, obtained from the King a promise that Raleigh should be released at Christmas 1612—a promise which was never kept.

On the morning of the 6th of November the Prince's condition was declared hopeless. The Queen sent to the Tower for a bottle of Raleigh's famous cordial, which she believed to have once saved her own life, and in which Raleigh himself placed the greatest faith. He despatched it with a message that it would save the Prince's life, unless he were dying of poison. It only availed to ease his death struggles, however, and, barely nineteen years of age, he died before the day was out.

Never before in the history of England had such hopes been fixed and such affection lavished on an heir-apparent, and we can realise how great would be the grief of the entire nation for his loss. According to the manner of the times, it was generally supposed that he had been poisoned. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, says that grave doubts were entertained, but adds that no traces of poison were found when the body was opened on the second day. The editor of these letters however (author of the Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea), remarks: "There is nothing conclusive in this; for, in the first place, there were poisons which left no trace of their presence; and, in the next, if the effects of poisoning had been visible, the physicians would have been afraid to say so. More than one writer has ventured to assert that the atrocious crime was perpetrated with the connivance of the king, whose notorious jealousy of the popular young prince at this period, and foolish fondness for his brother Charles, induced a wretch well known to have been guilty of similar practices—the King's favourite, Viscount Rochester—to cause the prince to be secretly put out of the way. It was hoped by all who objected to the marriage of the Princess to the German Elector that Prince Henry's death would stand in the way of the wedding, for it could hardly be celebrated at a time of such deep mourning. The Elector, however, had come over to England on purpose to be married, and it was not possible to delay the ceremony long. The final marriage contract was signed by the King on the 17th of November, and the formal betrothal took place on the 27th of the same month. The wedding was postponed, but only until February. Sir Thomas Lake writes on the 6th of January that mourning is given up, and the wedding festivities are arranged.

The bride of seventeen was solemnly united to the bridegroom of sixteen to the general gratification of the court, on the 14th of February, in the presence of many spectators. On the 18th of the same month John Chamberlain writes to Mrs. Carleton: "The bridegroom and bride were both in a suit of cloth of silver, richly embroidered with silver, her train carried up by thirteen young ladies, or lord's daughters at least, besides five or six more that could not come near it. These were all in the same livery with the bride, though not so rich. The bride was married in her hair, that hung down long, with an exceeding rich coronet on her head, which the King valued at a million of crowns."

The bridegroom, with the King and Prince Charles, took part in a tournament of the wedding, and earned great applause in the evening by a display of his splendid horsemanship (Court and Times of James the First). In Wilson's Contemporary History (p. 64) we read of the bride: "Her vestments were white, the emblem of Innocency, her hair dishevel'd, hanging down her back at length, an ornament of Virginity; a crown of pure gold upon her head, the cognizance of Majesty, being all beset with precious gems, shining liking a constellation, her train supported by twelve young ladies in white garments, so adorned with jewels that her passage looked like a milky way."

Among the various plays chosen for performance at court during these wedding festivities was The Tempest, and we shall see that it was written expressly for the occasion.

It is hardly necessary to confute Hunter's theory, argued at great length, that the play dates from 1596. One fact alone will sufficiently prove its absurdity, namely, that use is made in the play of a passage from Florio's translation of Montaigne, which was not published until 1603. Nor is there any foundation for Karl Elze's opinion (also lengthily set forth) that The Tempest was written by 1604. The metre shows that it belongs to Shakespeare's latest period. It has a proportion of 33 in the 100 of eleven-syllabled lines, whereas Antony and Cleopatra, written long after 1604, has but 25, and As You Like It, of the year 1600, only 12 in the 100.