A Life of William Shakespeare Part 17

Although Shakespeare's powers showed no sign of exhaustion, he reverted in the year following the colossal effort of 'Lear' (1607) to his earlier habit of collaboration, and with another's aid composed two dramas--'Timon of Athens' and 'Pericles.' An extant play on the subject of 'Timon of Athens' was composed in 1600, {242} but there is nothing to show that Shakespeare and his coadjutor were acquainted with it. They doubtless derived a part of their story from Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' and from a short digression in Plutarch's 'Life of Marc Antony,' where Antony is described as emulating the life and example of 'Timon Misanthropos the Athenian.' The dramatists may, too, have known a dialogue of Lucian ent.i.tled 'Timon,' which Boiardo had previously converted into a comedy under the name of 'Il Timone.' Internal evidence makes it clear that Shakespeare's colleague was responsible for nearly the whole of acts III. and V. But the character of Timon himself and all the scenes which he dominates are from Shakespeare's pen. Timon is cast in the mould of Lear.

'Pericles.'

There seems some ground for the belief that Shakespeare's coadjutor in 'Timon' was George Wilkins, a writer of ill-developed dramatic power, who, in 'The Miseries of Enforced Marriage' (1607), first treated the story that afterwards served for the plot of 'The Yorkshire Tragedy.' At any rate, Wilkins may safely be credited with portions of 'Pericles,' a romantic play which can be referred to the same year as 'Timon.'

Shakespeare contributed only acts III. and V. and parts of IV., which together form a self-contained whole, and do not combine satisfactorily with the remaining scenes. The presence of a third hand, of inferior merit to Wilkins, has been suspected, and to this collaborator (perhaps William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays who could show capacity on occasion) are best a.s.signed the three scenes of purposeless coa.r.s.eness which take place in or before a brothel (IV. ii., v. and vi.) From so distributed a responsibility the piece naturally suffers. It lacks h.o.m.ogeneity, and the story is helped out by dumb shows and prologues.

But a matured felicity of expression characterises Shakespeare's own contributions, narrating the romantic quest of Pericles for his daughter Marina, who was born and abandoned in a shipwreck. At many points he here antic.i.p.ated his latest dramatic effects. The shipwreck is depicted (IV. i.) as impressively as in the 'Tempest,' and Marina and her mother Thaisa enjoy many experiences in common with Perdita and Hermione in the 'Winter's Tale.' The prologues, which were not by Shakespeare, were spoken by an actor representing the mediaeval poet John Gower, who in the fourteenth century had versified Pericles's story in his 'Confessio Amantis' under the t.i.tle of 'Apollonius of Tyre.' It is also found in a prose translation (from the French), which was printed in Lawrence Twyne's 'Patterne of Painfull Adventures' in 1576, and again in 1607.

After the play was produced, George Wilkins, one of the alleged coadjutors, based on it a novel called 'The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre, being the True History of the Play of Pericles as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet, John Gower'

(1608). The play was issued as by William Shakespeare in a mangled form in 1608, and again in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was not included in Shakespeare's collected works till 1664.

'Antony and Cleopatra.'

In May 1608 Edward Blount entered in the 'Stationers' Registers,' by the authority of Sir George Buc, the licenser of plays, 'a booke called "Anthony and Cleopatra."' No copy of this date is known, and once again the company probably hindered the publication. The play was first printed in the folio of 1623. The source of the tragedy is the life of Antonius in North's 'Plutarch.' Shakespeare closely followed the historical narrative, and a.s.similated not merely its temper, but, in the first three acts, much of its phraseology. A few short scenes are original, but there is no detail in such a pa.s.sage, for example, as En.o.barbus's gorgeous description of the pageant of Cleopatra's voyage up the Cydnus to meet Antony (II. ii. 194 seq.), which is not to be matched in Plutarch. In the fourth and fifth acts Shakespeare's method changes and he expands his material with magnificent freedom. {245} The whole theme is in his hands instinct with a dramatic grandeur which lifts into sublimity even Cleopatra's moral worthlessness and Antony's criminal infatuation. The terse and caustic comments which Antony's level-headed friend En.o.barbus, in the role of chorus, pa.s.ses on the action accentuate its significance. Into the smallest as into the greatest personages Shakespeare breathed all his vitalising fire. The 'happy valiancy' of the style, too--to use Coleridge's admirable phrase--sets the tragedy very near the zenith of Shakespeare's achievement, and while differentiating it from 'Macbeth,' 'Oth.e.l.lo,' and 'Lear,' renders it a very formidable rival.

'Coriola.n.u.s.'

'Coriola.n.u.s' (first printed from a singularly bad text in 1623) similarly owes its origin to the biography of the hero in North's 'Plutarch,'

although Shakespeare may have first met the story in Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' (No. iv.) He again adhered to the text of Plutarch with the utmost literalness, and at times--even in the great crises of the action--repeated North's translation word for word. {246} But the humorous scenes are wholly of Shakespeare's invention, and the course of the narrative was at times slightly changed for purposes of dramatic effect. The metrical characteristics prove the play to have been written about the same period as 'Antony and Cleopatra,' probably in 1609. In its austere temper it contrasts at all points with its predecessor. The courageous self-reliance of Coriola.n.u.s's mother, Volumnia, is severely contrasted with the submissive gentleness of Virgilia, Coriola.n.u.s's wife.

The hero falls a victim to no sensual flaw, but to unchecked pride of caste, and there is a searching irony in the emphasis laid on the ign.o.ble temper of the rabble, who procure his overthrow. By way of foil, the speeches of Menenius give dignified expression to the maturest political wisdom. The dramatic interest throughout is as single and as unflaggingly sustained as in 'Oth.e.l.lo.'

XV--THE LATEST PLAYS

The latest plays.

In 'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest,' the three latest plays that came from his unaided pen, Shakespeare dealt with romantic themes which all end happily, but he instilled into them a pathos which sets them in a category of their own apart alike from comedy and tragedy.

The placidity of tone conspicuous in these three plays (none of which was published in his lifetime) has been often contrasted with the storm and stress of the great tragedies that preceded them. But the commonly accepted theory that traces in this change of tone a corresponding development in the author's own emotions ignores the objectivity of Shakespeare's dramatic work. All phases of feeling lay within the scope of his intuition, and the successive order in which he approached them bore no explicable relation to substantive incident in his private life or experience. In middle life, his temperament, like that of other men, acquired a larger measure of gravity and his thought took a profounder cast than characterised it in youth. The highest topics of tragedy were naturally more congenial to him, and were certain of a surer handling when he was nearing his fortieth birthday than at an earlier age. The serenity of meditative romance was more in harmony with the fifth decade of his years than with the second or third. But no more direct or definite connection can be discerned between the progressive stages of his work and the progressive stages of his life. To seek in his biography for a chain of events which should be calculated to stir in his own soul all or any of the tempestuous pa.s.sions that animate his greatest plays is to under-estimate and to misapprehend the resistless might of his creative genius.

'Cymbeline.'

In 'Cymbeline' Shakespeare freely adapted a fragment of British history taken from Holinshed, interweaving with it a story from Boccaccio's 'Decameron' (day 2, novel ix.) Ginevra, whose falsely suspected chast.i.ty is the theme of the Italian novel, corresponds to Shakespeare's Imogen.

Her story is also told in the tract called 'Westward for Smelts,' which had already been laid under contribution by Shakespeare in the 'Merry Wives.' {249} The by-plot of the banishment of the lord, Belarius, who in revenge for his expatriation kidnapped the king's young sons and brought them up with him in the recesses of the mountains, is Shakespeare's invention. Although most of the scenes are laid in Britain in the first century before the Christian era, there is no pretence of historical vraisemblance. With an almost ludicrous inappropriateness the British king's courtiers make merry with technical terms peculiar to Calvinistic theology, like 'grace' and 'election.' {250} The action, which, owing to the combination of three threads of narrative, is exceptionally varied and intricate, wholly belongs to the region of romance. On Imogen, who is the central figure of the play, Shakespeare lavished all the fascination of his genius. She is the crown and flower of his conception of tender and artless womanhood. Her husband Posthumus, her rejected lover Cloten, her would-be seducer Iachimo are contrasted with her and with each other with consummate ingenuity. The mountainous retreat in which Belarius and his fascinating boy-companions play their part has points of resemblance to the Forest of Arden in 'As You Like It;' but life throughout 'Cymbeline' is grimly earnest, and the mountains nurture little of the contemplative quiet which characterises existence in the Forest of Arden. The play contains the splendid lyric 'Fear no more the heat of the sun' (IV. ii. 258 seq.) The 'pitiful mummery' of the vision of Posthumus (V. iv. 30 seq.) must have been supplied by another hand. Dr. Forman, the astrologer who kept notes of some of his experiences as a playgoer, saw 'Cymbeline' acted either in 1610 or 1611.

'A Winter's Tale.'

'A Winter's Tale' was seen by Dr. Forman at the Globe on May 15, 1611, and it appears to have been acted at court on November 5 following.

{251a} It is based upon Greene's popular romance which was called 'Pandosto' in the first edition of 1588, and in numerous later editions, but was ultimately in 1648 re-christened 'Dorastus and Fawnia.'

Shakespeare followed Greene, his early foe, in allotting a seash.o.r.e to Bohemia--an error over which Ben Jonson and many later critics have made merry. {251b} A few lines were obviously drawn from that story of Boccaccio with which Shakespeare had dealt just before in 'Cymbeline.'

{251c} But Shakespeare created the high-spirited Paulina and the thievish pedlar Autolycus, whose seductive roguery has become proverbial, and he invented the reconciliation of Leontes, the irrationally jealous husband, with Hermione, his wife, whose dignified resignation and forbearance lend the story its intense pathos. In the boy Mamilius, the poet depicted childhood in its most attractive guise, while the courtship of Florizel and Perdita is the perfection of gentle romance. The freshness of the pastoral incident surpa.s.ses that of all Shakespeare's presentations of country life.

'Tempest.'

'The Tempest' was probably the latest drama that Shakespeare completed.

In the summer of 1609 a fleet bound for Virginia, under the command of Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, and the admiral's ship, the 'Sea-Venture,' was driven on the coast of the hitherto unknown Bermuda Isles. There they remained ten months, pleasurably impressed by the mild beauty of the climate, but sorely tried by the hogs which overran the island and by mysterious noises which led them to imagine that spirits and devils had made the island their home.

Somers and his men were given up for lost, but they escaped from Bermuda in two boats of cedar to Virginia in May 1610, and the news of their adventures and of their safety was carried to England by some of the seamen in September 1610. The sailors' arrival created vast public excitement in London. At least five accounts were soon published of the shipwreck and of the mysterious island, previously uninhabited by man, which had proved the salvation of the expedition. 'A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels,' written by Sylvester Jourdain or Jourdan, one of the survivors, appeared as early as October.

A second pamphlet describing the disaster was issued by the Council of the Virginia Company in December, and a third by one of the leaders of the expedition, Sir Thomas Gates. Shakespeare, who mentions the 'still vexed Bermoothes' (I. i. 229), incorporated in 'The Tempest' many hints from Jourdain, Gates, and the other pamphleteers. The references to the gentle climate of the island on which Prospero is cast away, and to the spirits and devils that infested it, seem to render its identification with the newly discovered Bermudas unquestionable. But Shakespeare incorporated the result of study of other books of travel. The name of the G.o.d Setebos whom Caliban worships is drawn from Eden's translation of Magellan's 'Voyage to the South Pole' (in the 'Historie of Travell,'

1577), where the giants of Patagonia are described as worshipping a 'great devil they call Setebos.' No source for the complete plot has been discovered, but the German writer, Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605, dramatised a somewhat similar story in 'Die schone Sidea,' where the adventures of Prospero, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Miranda are roughly antic.i.p.ated. {253a} English actors were performing at Nuremberg, where Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and may have brought reports of the piece to Shakespeare. Or perhaps both English and German plays had a common origin in some novel that has not yet been traced. Gonzalo's description of an ideal commonwealth (II. i. 147 seq.) is derived from Florio's translation of Montaigne's essays (1603), while into Prospero's great speech renouncing his practice of magical art (V. i. 33-57) Shakespeare wrought reminiscences of Golding's translation of Medea's invocation in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (vii. 197-206). {253b} Golding's rendering of Ovid had been one of Shakespeare's best-loved books in youth.

A highly ingenious theory, first suggested by Tieck, represents 'The Tempest' (which, excepting the 'The Comedy of Errors,' is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays) as a masque written to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth (like Miranda, an island-princess) with the Elector Frederick. This marriage took place on February 14, 1612-13, and 'The Tempest' formed one of a series of nineteen plays which were performed at the nuptial festivities in May 1613. But none of the other plays produced seem to have been new; they were all apparently chosen because they were established favourites at Court and on the public stage, and neither in subject-matter nor language bore obviously specific relation to the joyous occasion. But 1613 is, in fact, on more substantial ground far too late a date to which to a.s.sign the composition of 'The Tempest.'

According to information which was accessible to Malone, the play had 'a being and a name' in the autumn of 1611, and was no doubt written some months before. {254} The plot, which revolves about the forcible expulsion of a ruler from his dominions, and his daughter's wooing by the son of the usurper's chief ally, is, moreover, hardly one that a shrewd playwright would deliberately choose as the setting of an official epithalamium in honour of the daughter of a monarch so sensitive about his t.i.tle to the crown as James I. {255a}

In the theatre and at court the early representations of 'The Tempest'

evoked unmeasured applause. The success owed something to the beautiful lyrics which were dispersed through the play and had been set to music by Robert Johnson, a lutenist in high repute. {255b} Like its predecessor 'A Winter's Tale,' 'The Tempest' long maintained its first popularity in the theatre, and the vogue of the two pieces drew a pa.s.sing sneer from Ben Jonson. In the Induction to his 'Bartholomew Fair,' first acted in 1614, he wrote: 'If there be never a servant-monster in the Fair, who can help it he [_i.e._ the author] says? nor a nest of Antics. He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries.' The 'servant-monster' was an obvious allusion to Caliban, and 'the nest of Antics' was a glance at the satyrs who figure in the sheepshearing feast in 'A Winter's Tale.'

Fanciful interpretations of 'The Tempest.'

Nowhere did Shakespeare give rein to his imagination with more imposing effect than in 'The Tempest.' As in 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' magical or supernatural agencies are the mainsprings of the plot. But the tone is marked at all points by a solemnity and profundity of thought and sentiment which are lacking in the early comedy. The serious atmosphere has led critics, without much reason, to detect in the scheme of 'The Tempest' something more than the irresponsible play of poetic fancy.

Many of the characters have been represented as the outcome of speculation respecting the least soluble problems of human existence.

Little reliance should be placed on such interpretations. The creation of Miranda is the apotheosis in literature of tender, ingenuous girlhood unsophisticated by social intercourse, but Shakespeare had already sketched the outlines of the portrait in Marina and Perdita, the youthful heroines respectively of 'Pericles' and 'A Winter's Tale,' and these two characters were directly developed from romantic stories of girl-princesses, cast by misfortune on the mercies of nature, to which Shakespeare had recourse for the plots of the two plays. It is by accident, and not by design, that in Ariel appear to be discernible the capabilities of human intellect when detached from physical attributes.

Ariel belongs to the same world as Puck, although he is delineated in the severer colours that were habitual to Shakespeare's fully developed art.

Caliban--Ariel's ant.i.thesis--did not owe his existence to any conscious endeavour on Shakespeare's part to typify human nature before the evolution of moral sentiment. {257a} Caliban is an imaginary portrait, conceived with matchless vigour and vividness, of the aboriginal savage of the New World, descriptions of whom abounded in contemporary travellers' speech and writings, and universally excited the liveliest curiosity. {257b} In Prospero, the guiding providence of the romance, who resigns his magic power in the closing scene, traces have been sought of the lineaments of the dramatist himself, who in this play probably bade farewell to the enchanted work of his life. Prospero is in the story a scholar-prince of rare intellectual attainments, whose engrossing study of the mysteries of science has given him command of the forces of nature. His magnanimous renunciation of his magical faculty as soon as by its exercise he has restored his shattered fortunes is in perfect accord with the general conception of his just and philosophical temper.

Any other justification of his final act is superfluous.

Unfinished plays. The lost play of 'Cardenio.'

While there is every indication that in 1611 Shakespeare abandoned dramatic composition, there seems little doubt that he left with the manager of his company unfinished drafts of more than one play which others were summoned at a later date to complete. His place at the head of the active dramatists was at once filled by John Fletcher, and Fletcher, with some aid possibly from his friend Philip Ma.s.singer, undertook the working up of Shakespeare's unfinished sketches. On September 9, 1653, the publisher Humphrey Moseley obtained a license for the publication of a play which he described as 'History of Cardenio, by Fletcher and Shakespeare.' This was probably identical with the lost play, 'Cardenno,' or 'Cardenna,' which was twice acted at Court by Shakespeare's company in 1613--in May during the Princess Elizabeth's marriage festivities, and on June 8 before the Duke of Savoy's amba.s.sador. {258a} Moseley, whose description may have been fraudulent, {258b} failed to publish the piece, and nothing is otherwise known of it with certainty; but it was no doubt a dramatic version of the adventures of the lovelorn Cardenio which are related in the first part of 'Don Quixote' (ch. xxiii.-x.x.xvii.) Cervantes's amorous story, which first appeared in English in Thomas Shelton's translation in 1612, offers much incident in Fletcher's vein. When Lewis Theobald, the Shakespearean critic, brought out his 'Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers,' in 1727, he mysteriously represented that the play was based on an unfinished and unpublished draft of a play by Shakespeare. The story of Theobald's piece is the story of Cardenio, although the characters are renamed. There is nothing in the play as published by Theobald to suggest Shakespeare's hand, {259a} but Theobald doubtless took advantage of a tradition that Shakespeare and Fletcher had combined to dramatise the Cervantic theme.

'Two n.o.ble Kinsmen.'