William Shakespeare Part 17

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

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

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

He then returns to Tyre.

Act IV. The years pa.s.s. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm that she pa.s.ses the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen, deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina.

Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and musician.

Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great melancholy for the loss of wife and child, hears Marina sing. He learns that she is his daughter. The G.o.ddess Diana bids him go to her temple at Ephesus. He goes, and finds Thaisa. The play ends happily with the reuniting of the family.

The acts are opened by rhyming prologues designed to be spoken by John Gower. The prologues to each of the three first acts are followed by Dumb Shows, an invention of the theatre to explain those things not easily to be shown in action. The prologues, the invention of the dumb shows, and the first two acts, are not by Shakespeare. They are like the poetical work of George Wilkins, who published a prose romance of _The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre_ in the year 1608, probably after the play had been produced.

The construction of the last three acts makes it likely that the play (in its original state) was by the constructor of the first two acts. It is not known how it came to pa.s.s that Shakespeare took the play in hand.

From the comparative feebleness of his work upon it, it may be judged that it was not a labour of love. The impression given is that nothing in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great mind, that Shakespeare was not deeply interested in the play, but that he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a theatre on which many depended for bread.

There is little that is precious in the play. The scenes in the brothel at Mitylene (in Act IV) have power. Many find their unpleasantness an excuse for saying that Shakespeare never wrote them. They are certainly by Shakespeare. Cant would always persuade itself that the power to see clearly ought not to be turned upon evil. Those who can read--

_Bawd._ ... they are so pitifully sodden.

_Pandar._ ... The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little baggage.

_Boult._ Ay ... she made him roast-meat for worms--

with disgust at Shakespeare's foulness, yet without horror of heart that the evil still goes on among human beings, must be strangely made. These scenes, the very vigorous sea scenes, including the account of the storm at sea, put into the mouth of Marina--

"My father, as nurse said, did never fear, But cried 'Good seamen!' to the sailors, galling His kingly hands, haling ropes; And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea That almost burst the deck....

Never was waves nor wind more violent: And from the ladder-tackle washes off A canvas-climber. 'Ha,' says one, 'wilt out?'

And with a dropping industry they skip From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles, and The master calls and trebles their confusion"--

and the scene in which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most lovely things in the play.

_Cymbeline._

_Written._ (?)

_Published_, in the folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_ tell of Cymbeline and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (giorn.

2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's _Westward for Smelts_, and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman falsely accused of adultery.

_The Fable._ Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten, may marry Imogen.

Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an incomparable chast.i.ty. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste.

Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is killed by one of the sons.

The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished.

Cymbeline's queen kills herself. Posthumus is taught that Iachimo deceived him. Imogen is restored to him. The lost sons are restored to Cymbeline. Prophecy is fulfilled and pardon given. All ends happily.

It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun as a tragedy during the great mood of tragical creation, then laid aside unfinished, from some failure in the vision, or change in the creative mood, and brought to an end later in a new spirit, perhaps in another place, in the country, away from the life which makes writing alive. It is the least perfect of the later plays. The least soft of Shakespeare's critics calls it "unresisting imbecility." It is perhaps the first composed of the romantic plays with which Shakespeare ended his life's work.

Though the writing is so careless and the construction so loose that no one can think of it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes, one faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty. It deals with the Shakespearean subject of craft working upon a want of faith for personal ends, and being defeated, when almost successful, by something simple and instinctive in human nature. It is thus not unlike _Oth.e.l.lo_; but in _Oth.e.l.lo_ the subject is simple, and the treatment purely tragic. In _Cymbeline_ the subject is only partly extricated, and the treatment is coloured with romance, with that strange, touching, very Shakespearean romance, of the thing long lost beautifully recovered before the end, so that the last years of the chief man in the play may be happy and complete. The end of life would be as happy as the beginning if the dead might be given back to us. Shakespeare had lost a child.

There can be no doubt that when the play was first conceived, the craft of the queen, working upon the insufficient faith of Cymbeline, was designed to be as important to the action as the craft of Iachimo working upon the insufficient faith of Posthumus. This was never wrought out. The play advances and halts. As in all unfinished works of art one sees in it something fine trying to get free but failing.

The lyric "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" is the most lovely thing in the play. The most powerful moment is that which exposes the poisoning of a generous mind by false report. Posthumus believes Iachimo's lie and breaks out railing against women.

"For there's no motion That tends to vice in man but I affirm It is the woman's part."

n.o.ble instants are marked in the lines--

"Be not, as in our fangled world, a garment n.o.bler than that it covers,"

and in the symbol of the eagle--

"the Roman eagle, From south to west on wing soaring aloft, Lessen'd herself and in the beams o' the sun So vanished."

_The Winter's Tale._

_Written._ 1610-11.

_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The story appears in Robert Greene's romance of _Pandosto_. Shakespeare greatly improves the fable by completing it. Greene ends it. Greene makes the story an accident with an unhappy end. Shakespeare makes it a vision of the working of fate with the tools of human pa.s.sion.

_The Fable._ Leontes, King of Sicilia, suspecting that his wife Hermione is guilty of adultery with Polixenes, King of Bohemia, tries her on that count. He causes her daughter to be carried to a desert place and there exposed.

The oracle of Apollo declares to him that Hermione is innocent, that he himself is a jealous tyrant, and that he will die without an heir should he fail to recover the daughter lost. The truth of the oracle is confirmed by the (apparent) death of Hermione and the real death of Mamillius, his son. Repenting bitterly of his obsession of jealousy he goes into mourning.

The little daughter is found by country people who nourish and cherish her. She grows up to beautiful and gracious girlhood.

Florizel, the son of Polixenes, falls in love with her, and seeks to marry her without his father's knowledge. Being discovered by Polixenes, he flies with her to the sea. Taking ship, the couple come to Leontes' court, where it is proved that the girl is the lost princess. She is married to Florizel. Leontes is reconciled to Polixenes. Hermione completes the general happiness by rejoining the husband who has so long mourned her.

Dr. Simon Forman, the first critic of this play, made note to "remember"

two things in it, "how he sent to the orakell of Appollo," and "also the rog that cam in all tottered like Coll Pipci." He drew from it this moral lesson, that one should "Beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouse."

The moral lesson is still of value to the world, and it is most certainly one which Shakespeare strove to impress. Shakespeare's mind was always brooding on the working of fate. He was always watching the results of some obsession upon an individual and the people connected with him. He saw that a blindness falling upon a person suddenly, for no apparent reason, except that something strikes the something not quite sound in the nature, has the power to alter life violently. It was his belief that life must not be altered violently. Life is a thing of infinitely gradual growth, that would perfect itself if the blindness could be kept away. Any deceiving thing, like a pa.s.sion or a feigned beggar, is a cause of the putting back of life, indefinitely.

In this play, he followed his usual practice, of showing the results of a human blindness upon human destiny. The greater plays are studies of treachery and self-betrayal. This play is a study of deceit and self-deception. Leontes is deceived by his obsession, Polixenes by his son, the country man by Autolycus, life, throughout, by art. In the last great scene, life is mistaken for art. In the first great scene a true friendship is mistaken for a false love.

It may be called the gentlest of Shakespeare's plays. It is done with a tenderer hand than the other works. The name, _A Winter's Tale_, is taken from a scene in the second act. Hermione sits down with her son, by the winter fire, to listen to his story. It is the last time she ever sees her son. He has hardly opened his lips when Leontes enters to accuse her of adultery. She is hurried off to prison, and Mamillius dies before the oracle's message comes to clear her. The sudden shocks and interruptions of life, which play so big a part in the action of these late romances, have full power here. The winter's tale is interrupted.

The rest of the play results from the interruption. Much of it is very beautiful. To us, the wonderful thing is the strangeness of the tenderness which makes some scenes in the fifth act so pa.s.sionate with grief for old injustice done to the dead. The cry of Leontes remembering the wronged dead woman's eyes--

"Stars, stars, And all eyes else dead coals,"

is haunting and heart-breaking. All his longing of remorse gives to the last great scene, before the supposed statue, an intensity of beauty hardly endurable.