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Manningham writes of the play: "Much like The Comedy of Errors or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni.” There are two Italian plays of an earlier date than Twelfth Night, entitled Gl' Inganni (The Cheats), containing incidents in some degree resembling those of Shakspere's comedy, and in that by Gonzaga, the sister who assumes male attire, producing thereby confusion of identity with her brother, is named Cesare (Shakspere's Cesario). But a third Italian play, Gl' Ingannati, presents a still closer resemblance to Twelfth Night, and in its poetical induction, Il Sacrificio, occurs the name Malevolti (Malvolio). The story is told in Bandello's novel (ii. 36), and was translated by Belleforest into French, in Histoires Tragiques. Whether Shakspere consulted any Italian source or not, he had doubtless before him the version of the story (from Cinthio's Hecatomithi) by Barnabe Rich-the Historie of Apolonius and Silla in Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581)-and this, in the main, he followed. The characters of Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, the clown Feste, and Maria, with the part they play in the comedy, are creations of Shakspere.

No comedy of Shakspere's unites such abounding mirth and fine satire, with the charm of a poetical romance. It is the summing up of the several admirable qualities which appear in the joyous comedies, of which it forms the last. An edge is put on the roystering humour of Sir Toby by the sharp waiting-maid wit of Maria, which saves it from becoming an aimless rollicking. Sir Andrew is a Slender grown adult in brainlessness, and who has forgotten that he is not as richly endowed by nature as by fortune; and yet he is visited by a glimmering suspicion that others may think he is an ass, which obliges him to air his incapacity and give it importance. Feste, the clown, is less quaint than Touchstone, but more versatile, less a contemplative

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fool, and more actively a lover of jest and waggery. Among this abandoned crew of topers and drolls stalks the solemn "yellow-legged stork Malvolio. His sense of self-importance has diffused itself over all the details of life, so that the whole of human existence, as he would have it, must become pompous and as exemplary as the manners of my lady's steward. The cruelty of his deception and disillusion is in proportion to the greatness of his distempered self-esteem.

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The Duke Orsino is infected with the lover's melancholy, which is fantastical and nice. He nurses his love and dallies with it, and tries to yield up all his consciousness to it, as to a delicious sensation; and therefore his love is not quite earnest or deep; it is like the colour in an opal; and the loss of Olivia is but the loss of a fair vision, which is replaced by one as fair and more real. Olivia has not the lovelanguor of the Duke, but her resolved sorrow for her lost brother, so soon forgotten in a stronger feeling, shows a little of the same unreality of self-conscious emotion which we perceive in the Duke's love; she is of a nature harmonious and refined, but is too much a child of wealth and ease to win away our chief interest from the heroine of the play. Viola is like a heightened portrait of the Julia of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, enriched with lovely colour and placed among more poetical surroundings. She has not the pretty sauciness of Rosalind in her disguise, but owns a heart as tender, sweet-natured, and soundnatured as even Rosalind's. The mirth of the play belongs to other actors than Viola; her occasional playfulness falls back into her deep tenderness and is lost in it.

It has been suggested (see Hunter: New Illustrations of Shakespeare, vol. i. p. 380) that Shakspere ridicules, in the scene between the clown, as Sir Topas, and Malvolto, the exorcisms by Puritan ministers, in the case of a family named Starchy

(1596-99), and that the difficult word Strachy (Act II. Sc. v. L. 45) was a hint to the audience to expect subsequent allusion to the Starchy affair. But all this is highly doubtful.

25. Julius Cæsar was produced as early as 1601; Eo we infer from the passage quoted p. 34, from Weever's Mirror of Martyrs. In Drayton's Barons' War, 1603, occurs a passage which closely resembles some lines of the speech of Antony over Brutus' body (last scene of the play). The style of the versification, the diction, the characterisation, all bear out the opinion that 1600 or 1601 is the date of Julius Cæsar. The historical materials of the play were found by the dramatist in the lives of Cæsar, of Brutus, and of Antony, as given in North's translation of Plutarch. Hints for the speeches of Brutus and Antony seem to have been obtained from Appian's Civil Wars, B. II. ch. 137-147, translated into English in 1578.

Everything is wrought out in the play with great care and completeness; it is well planned and well proportioned; there is no tempestuousness of passion, and no artistic mystery. The style is full, but not overburdened with thought or imagery; this is one of the most perfect of Shakspere's plays; greater tragedies are less perfect, perhaps for the very reason that they try to grasp greater, more terrible, or more piteous themes.

In King Henry V. Shakspere had represented a great and heroic man of action. In the serious plays, which come next in chronological order, Julius Cæsar and Hamlet, the poet represents two men who were forced to act—to act in public affairs, and affairs of life and death-yet who were singularly disqualified for playing the part of men of action. Hamlet can

not act because his moral energy is sapped by a kind of scepticism and sterile despair about life, because his own ideas are more to him than deeds, because his will is diseased. Brutus does act, but he acts

as an idealist and theoriser might, with no eye for the actual bearing of facts, and no sense of the true importance of persons. Intellectual doctrines and moral ideals rule the life of Brutus; and his life is most noble, high, and stainless, but his public action is a series of practical mistakes. Yet even while he errs we admire him, for all his errors are those of a pure and lofty spirit. He fails to see how full of power Antony is, because Antony loves pleasure, and is not a Stoic, like himself; he addresses calm arguments to the excited Roman mob; he spares the life of Antony and allows him to address the people; he advises ill in military matters. All the practical gifts, insight and tact, which Brutus lacks, are possessed by Cassius; but of Brutus's moral purity, veneration of ideals, disinterestedness, and freedom from unworthy personal motive, Cassius possesses little. And the moral power of Brutus has in it something magisterial, which enables it to oversway the practical judgment of Cassius. In his wife-Cato's daughter, Portia-Brutus has found one who is equal to and worthy of himself. Shakspere has shown her as perfectly a woman-sensitive, finely-tempered, tenderyet a woman who by her devotion to moral ideals might stand beside such a father and such a husband. And Brutus, with all his Stoicism, is gentle and tender : he can strike down Cæsar if Cæsar be a tyrant, but he cannot roughly rouse a sleeping boy (Act IV.. Sc. iii. L. 270). Antony is a man of genius, with many splendid and some generous qualities, but selfindulgent, pleasure-loving, and a daring adventurer, rather than a great leader of the State.

The character of Cæsar is conceived in a curious and almost irritating manner. Shakspere (as passages in other plays show) was certainly not ignorant of the greatness of one of the world's greatest men. But here it is his weaknesses that are insisted on. He is failing in body and mind, influenced by superstition, yields to flattery, thinks of himself as almost

superhuman, has lost some of his insight into character, and his sureness and swiftness of action. Yet the play is rightly named Julius Cæsar. His bodily presence is weak, but his spirit rules throughout the play, and rises after his death in all its might, towering over the little band of conspirators, who at length fall before the spirit of Cæsar as it ranges for revenge.

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26. Hamlet represents the mid period of the growth of Shakspere's genius, when comedy and history ceased to be adequate for the expression of his deeper thoughts and sadder feelings about life, and when he was entering upon his great series of tragic writings. In July, 1602, the printer Roberts entered in the Stationers' register, "The Revenge of Hamlett, Prince of Denmark, as yt latelie was acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servantes," and in the next year the play was printed. The true relation of this first quarto of Hamlet to the second quarto, published in 1604-"newly imprinted, and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was -is a matter in dispute. It is believed by some critics that the quarto of 1603 is merely an imperfect report of the play as we find it in the edition of the year after; but there are some material differences which cannot thus be explained. In the earlier quarto, instead of Polonius and Reynaldo, we find the names Corambis and Montano; the order of certain scenes varies from that of the later quarto; "the madness of Hamlet is much more pronounced, and the Queen's innocence of her husband's murder much more explicitly stated.” We are forced to. believe either that the earlier quarto contains portions of an old play by some other writer than Shakspere-an opinion adopted on apparently insufficient grounds by some recent editors-or that it represents imperfectly Shakspere's first draught of the play, and that the difference between it and the second quarto is due to Shakspere's revision of his own work. This last opinion seems to be the true one, but the value of any comparison between the two quartos,

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