but he takes his injuries firmly, like a man of action and experience, and sets about the subduing of his base antagonists. Apemantus, again, is the dog-like reviler of men, knowing their baseness and base himself. Here, Troilus, the noble green-goose, goes through his youthful agony of ascertaining the unworthiness of her to whom he had given his faith and hope; but he is made of a stronger and more energetic fibre than Timon, and comes out of his trial a man, no longer a boy; somewhat harder, perhaps, than before, but strung-up for sustained and determined action. He is completely delivered from Cressida and from Pandar, and by Hector's death supplied with a motive for the utmost exertion of his heroic powers. Ulysses, the antithesis of Troilus, is the much-experienced man of the world, possessed of its highest and broadest wisdom, which yet always remains worldly wisdom, and never rises into the spiritual contemplation of a Prospero. He sees all the unworthiness of human life, but will use it for high worldly ends; the spirit of irreverence and insubordination in the camp he would restrain by the politic machinery of what he calls "degree" (Act I. Sc. iii. L. 75-136). Cressida he reads at a glance, seeing to the bottom of her sensual shallow nature, and he assists at the disillusioning of the young prince, whose nobleness is apparent to him from the first. Thersites also sees through the illusions of the world, but his very incapacity to have ever been deceived is a sign of the ignoble nature of the wretch. He feeds and grows strong upon garbage; physical nastiness and moral sores are the luxuries of his imagination. The other characters-the brute warrior, Ajax; the insolent self-worshipper, Achilles; Hector, heroic but too careless how and when he expends his heroic strength-are of minor importance. As the blindness of youthful love is shown in Troilus, so old age, in its least venerable form, given up to a gratification of sensuality by proxy, is exposed to derision in Pandar. The materials for Troilus and Cressida were found by

Shakspere in Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide, Caxton's translation from the French, Recuyles, or Destruction of Troy, perhaps, also, Lydgate's Troye Boke. Thersites he probably found in book ii. of Chapman's Homer. Shakspere's conception of Cressida and of Pandar differs widely from Chaucer's: in Shakspere's hands, in accordance with the general design of the drama, Cressida and her uncle grow base and contemptible. Some critics have supposed that the love-story was written at a much earlier date than the part which treats of Ulysses; but we have seen that the contrasted characters of Troilus and Ulysses are both essential parts of the conception of the drama, and were created as counterparts.

30. Othello is the only play which appeared in quarto (1622) in the interval between Shakspere's death and the publication of the first folio. We have no means, except by internal evidence, of ascertaining the date at which the play was written. Upon the strength of a supposed allusion to the armorial bearings of the new order of Baronets, instituted in 1611—

The hearts of old gave hands,

But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.

(Act III. Sc. iv. L. 46–47.)—

the play has been referred to a year not earlier than 1611. But the metrical tests confirm the impression produced by the general character and spirit of the tragedy, that it cannot belong to the same period as The Tempest, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale. It evidently is one of the group of tragedies of passion which includes Macbeth and Lear. The year 1604 has been accepted by several critics as a not improbable date for Othello.

The original of the story is found in Cinthio's Hecatomithi, but it has been in a marvellous manner elevated and re-created by Shakspere. The incident of an intended attack on Cyprus by the Turks may have been suggested by the historical fact that such an attack was actually made in the year 1570.

Coleridge has justly said that the agonised doubt which lays hold of the Moor is not the jealousy of a man of naturally jealous temper, and he contrasts Othello with Leontes in The Winter's Tale, and Leonatus in Cymbeline. A mean watchfulness or prying suspicion is the last thing that Othello could be guilty of. He is of a free and noble nature, naturally trustful, with a kind of grand innocence, retaining some of his barbaric simpleness of soul in midst of the subtle and astute politicians of Venice. He is great in simple heroic action, but unversed in the complex affairs of life, and a stranger to the malignant deceits of the debased Italian character. Nothing is more chivalrous, more romantic, than the love of Othello and Desdemona. The beautiful Italian girl is fascinated by the regal strength and grandeur, and tender protectiveness of the Moor. He is charmed by the sweetness, the sympathy, the gentle disposition, the gracious womanliness of Desdemona. But neither quite rightly knows the other; there is none of that perfect equality and perfect knowledge between them which unites so flawlessly Brutus and Portia.

Desdemona and Othello are parted on their voyage to Cyprus, and at meeting their happiness touches a height which is almost too rare and exquisite. From that moment of rapture and reunion to the moment when Othello slays himself by the body of his murdered wife, there is an unalleviated intensity of tragic pain. Othello cannot hate Desdemona; his misery is that he must love her although he strives to hate, and must slay her, although he would die that she might be pure and live. There is no character in Shakspere's plays so full of serpentine power and serpentine poison as Iago. The Iachimo of Cymbeline is a faint sketch in water-colours of the absolute villain lago. He is envious of Cassio, and suspects that the Moor may have wronged his honour; but his malignancy is out of all proportion to even its alleged motives. Cassio, notwithstanding his moral weaknesses, is a chivalrous nature possessed by

enthusiastic admiration of his great gcneral and the beautiful lady who is his wife. But Iago can see neither human virtue nor greatness. All things to him are common and unclean, and he is content that they should be so. He is not the sly, sneaking, and too manifest villain of some of the actors of his part. He is "honest Iago," and passes for a rough yet shrewd critic of life, who is himself frank and candid. To ensnare the nobly guileless Othello was, therefore, no impossible task. Shakspere does not allow Iago to triumph; his end is wretched as his life had been. And Othello, restored to love through such tragic calamity, dies once more reunited to his wife, and loyal, in spite of all his wrongs, to the city of his adoption. It is he who has sinned, and not she who was dearer to him than himself, and of his own wrongs and griefs he can make a sudden end.

Emilia may be compared with Paulina of The Winter's Tale.

31. King Lear, among the tragedies of passion, is the one in which passions assume the largest proportions, act upon the widest theatre, and attain their absolute extremes. The story of Lear and his daughters was found by Shakspere in Holinshed, and he may have taken a few hints from an old play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, &c. In both Holinshed's version and that of the True Chronicle, the army of Lear and his French allies is victorious; Lear is reinstated in his kingdom; but Holinshed relates how, after Lear's death, her sisters' sons warred against Cordelia, and took her prisoner, when "being a woman of a manly courage and despairing to recover liberty," she slew herself. The story is also told by Higgins in The Mirror for Magistrates; by Spenser (Fairie Queene, II. x. 27-32), from whom Shakspere adopted the form of the name "Cordelia ;" and in a ballad (printed in Percy's Reliques) probably later in date than Shakspere's play. With the story of Lear Shakspere connects that of Gloucester and his two

sons.

An episode in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia sup

plied characters and incidents for this portion of the play, Sidney's blind king of Paphlagonia corresponding to the Gloucester of Shakspere. But here, too, the story had in the dramatist's original a happy ending the Paphlagonian king is restored to his throne, and the brothers are reconciled.

The date of Shakspere's play is probably 1605 or 1606. It was entered on the Stationers' register, Nov. 26, 1607, and the entry states that it had been acted " upon St. Stephan's day at Christmas last," i.e. Dec. 26, 1606. The play was printed in quarto in 1608. "An upward limit of date is supplied by the publication of Harsnet's Declaration of Popish Impostures, 1603, to which Shakspere was indebted for the names of many of the devils in Edgar's speeches." It has been suggested that Gloucester's mention of "late eclipses in the sun and moon" (Act I. Sc. ii. L. 112) refers to the great eclipse of the sun, October, 1605, preceded within a month by an eclipse of the moon, and that the words which follow shortly after the mention of eclipses, "machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves," had special point if delivered on the stage while the Gunpowder Plot of Nov. 5, 1605, was fresh in men's minds.

Shakspere cares little to give the opening incidents of his play a look of prosaic, historical probability. The spectator or reader is asked, as it were, to grant the dramatist certain data, and then to observe what the imagination can make of them. Good and evil in this play are clearly severed from one another(more so than in Macbeth or in Othello)—and at the last, goodness, if we judge merely by external fortune, would seem to be, if not defeated, at least not triumphant. Shakspere has dared, while paying little regard to mere historical verisimilitude, to represent the most solemn and awful mysteries of life as they actually are, without attempting to offer a ready-made explanation of them. Cordelia dies strangled in prison; yet we know that her devotion of