whether the inspired antics that sparkle from the surface of his mind are in more impressive contrast with the dark tragic scenes into which they are thrown, like rockets into a midnight tempest, or with the undercurrent of deep tragic thoughtfulness out of which they falteringly issue and play." *

Of the tragedy of King Lear a critic wishes to say as little as may be; for in the case of this play, words are more than ordinarily inadequate to express or describe its true impression. A tempest or a dawn will not be analysed in words; we must feel the shattering fury of the gale, we must watch the calm light broadening.t

* Shakespeare's Life, Art, and Characters, vol. ii., pp. 351, 352. What follows, too long to quote, is also excellent.

+ In Victor Hugo's volume of dithyrambic prophesying entitled "William Shakespeare," a passage upon King Lear (ed. 1869, pp. 205-209) is particularly note-worthy. His point of view-that the tragedy is "Cordelia," not "King Lear," that the old King is only an occasion for his daughter-is absolutely wrong; but the criticism, notwithstanding, catches largeness and passion from the play. "Et quelle figure que le père ! quelle cariatide ! C'est l'homme courbé. Il ne fait que changer de fardeaux, toujours plus lourds. Plus le vieillard faiblit, plus le poids augmente. Il vit sous la surcharge. Il porte d'abord l'empire, puis l'ingratitude, puis l'isolement, puis le désespoir, puis la faim et la soif, puis la folie, puis toute la nature. Les nuées viennent sur sa tête, les forêts l'accablent d'ombre, l'ouragan s'abat sur sa nuque, l'orage plombe son manteau, la pluie pèse sur ses épaules, il marche plié et hagard, comme s'il avait les deux genoux de la nuit sur son dos. Eperdu et immense, il jette aux bourrasques et aux grêles ce cri épique: Pourquoi me haïssez-vous, tempêtes? pourquoi me persécutez-vous? vous n'êtes pas mes filles. Et alors, c'est fini; la lueur s'éteint, la raison se décourage, et s'en va, Lear est en enfance. Ah! il est enfant, ce vieillard. Eh bien! il lui faut une mère. Sa fille paraît. Son unique fille, Cordelia. Car les deux autres, Regane et Goneril ne sont plus ses filles que de la quantité nécessaire pour avoir droit au nom de parricides." For the description of "l'adorable allaitement," "the maternity of the daughter over the father," see what follows, p. 208.

And the sensation experienced by the reader of King Lear resembles that produced by some grand natural phenomenon. The effect cannot be received at second hand; it cannot be described; it can hardly be suggested.*

* In addition to the medical studies of Lear's case by Doctors Bucknill and Kellogg, we may mention the "König Lear" of Dr Carl Stark, (Stuttgart, 1871) favourably noticed in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. vi., and again by Meissner in his study of the play, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. vii., pp. 110-115.

CHAPTER VI.

THE ROMAN PLAYS.

I.

THE two books which contributed the largest material towards the building-up of Shakspere's art-structure were the Chronicles of Holinshed, a quarry worked by the poet previous to 1600; and North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, a quarry worked after 1600. To this latter source we owe Julius Cæsar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and, in part, Timon of Athens. Shakspere treated the material which lay before him in Holinshed and in Plutarch with reverent care. It was not a happy falsifying of the facts of history to which he, as dramatist, aspired, but an imaginative rendering of the very facts themselves. Plutarch he follows even more studiously and closely than he followed Holinshed. Yet it is to be noted that, while Shakspere is profoundly faithful to Roman life and character, it is an ideal truth, truth spiritual rather than truth material, which he seeks to discover. His method, as critics have pointed out, is widely different from that of his contemporary, Ben Jonson. Mr Knight, treating this subject, has said, "Jonson has left us two Roman plays produced essentially upon a different principle. In his Sejanus there is scarcely

a speech or an incident that is not derived from the ancient authorities; and Jonson's own edition of the play is crowded with references as minute as would have been required from any modern annalist. . . . His characters are made to speak according to the very words of Tacitus and Suetonius; but they are not living men.' Shakspere was aware that his personages must be men before they were Romans; he felt that the truth of poetry must be vital and selfevidencing; that if it has got hold of the fact, no reference to authority will make the validity of the fact more valid. He knew that the buttressing up of art with erudition will not give stability to that which must stand by no aid of material props and stays, but, if at all, by virtue of the one living soul of which it is the body.

. .

The German Romanticist critic Franz Horn has said that the hero of Shakspere's King John "stands not in the list of personages, and could not stand with them. The hero is England." Mr Knight adds, that the hero of Shakspere's great classical trilogy is Rome. Important, however, as the political significance doubtless is there is something more important. Whether at any time Shakspere was concerned as deeply about corporate life, ecclesiastical, political, or even national, as he was about the life and destiny of the individual man, may well be questioned. But at this time the play of social forces certainly did not engage his imagination with exclusive or supreme interest. The struggle of patrician and plebeian is not the subject of Coriolanus, and the

* Charles Knight. Studies of Shakspere, 1851, p. 405.

tragedy resolves itself by no solution of that political problem. Primarily the tragedy is that of an individual soul. It is important to note the dates of these plays. Julius Cæsar, which Malone assigned to the year 1607, is now with good reason carried back as early as 1601, and thus it lies side by side in point of time with Hamlet.* After an interval of seven years or upwards, the second of the Roman Plays, Antony and Cleopatra, was written. The events of Roman history connect Antony and Cleopatra immediately with Julius Cæsar; yet Shakspere allowed a number of years to pass, during which he was actively engaged as author, before he * Mr Halliwell pointed out the following lines in Weever's "Mirror of Martyrs," 1601,—

The many-headed multitude were drawn

By Brutus' speech, that Cæsar was ambitious;
When eloquent Mark Antony had shown

His virtues, who but Brutus then was vicious?

The theory of Mr Fleay (New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874) that our present Julius Cæsar is a play of Shakspere's altered by Ben Jonson about 1607, is unsupported by any sufficient evidence, internal or external. Delius dates Julius Cæsar "before December 1604."

+ There is an entry in the Stationers' Registers, by Edward Blount, May 20, 1608, of "a booke called Antony and Cleopatra." This is generally supposed to have been Shakspere's play, (so Malone, Chalmers, Drake, Collier, Delius, Gervinus, Hudson, Fleay and others). Knight and Verplanck assign a later date. Mr Halliwell on comparing the early editions of North's Plutarch-1579, 1595, 1603, 1612—noticed many small differences between them, "and in one case, in Coriolanus, hit on a word 'vnfortunate,' altered by the 1612 edition from the former one's 'vnfortunately,' which 'vnfortunate' was the word used by Shakspere in his tragedy of Coriolanus. This was therefore primâ facie evidence that Shakspere used the 1612 edition of North for his Coriolanus, if not for his other Roman plays." (Transactions of the New Shakspere Society.) Mr Paton claims for a copy of North's Plutarch now in the Greenock library the honour of having been Shakspere's own copy. In it appear the initials W.S.; it is a copy of the 1612 edition.