true confidence, no steadfast strength of love possible between Antony and his "serpent of old Nile." Each inspires the other with a mastering spirit of fascination, but Antony knows not the moment when Cleopatra may be faithless to him, and Cleopatra weaves her endless snares to retain her power over Antony. The great Roman soldier gradually loses his energy, his judgment, and even his joy in life; at last, the despair of spent forces settles down upon him, and it is only out of despair that he snatches strength enough to fight fiercely when driven to bay. He is the ruin of Cleopatra's magic. Upon Cleopatra herself the genius of Shakspere has been lavished. She is the most wonderful of his creations of women, formed of the greatest number of elements apparently conflicting elements, yet united by the mystery of life. "To heap up together all that is most unsubstantial, frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the worthlessness be lost in the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from the very elements of littleness to do this belonged only to Shakspere, that worker of miracles." While creating, with so much imaginative ardour, his Cleopatra, Shakspere yet stands away from her, and, in a manner, criticises her. Enobarbus, who sees through every wile and guile of the Queen, is, as it were, a chorus to the play, a looker-on at the game; he stands clear of the golden haze which makes up the atmosphere around Cleopatra ; and yet he is not a mere critic or commentator (Shakspere never permitting the presence of a person in his drama who is not a true portion of it). Enobarbus himself is under the influence of the charm of Antony, and slays himself because he has wronged his master. The figures of Antony and the Queen are ennobled and elevated by the strong power of attraction, even of devotion, which they exert over those about them -Antony over Enobarbus, Cleopatra over her attendants, Charmian and Iras. : 34. Coriolanus was written about 1608, as appears from the metrical characteristics. The light-ending test puts it next after Antony and Cleopatra, and it is probable that such is its actual place in the chronological order. Shakspere in his North's Plutarch found another subject for tragedy. Having rendered into art the history of the ruin of a noble nature through voluptuous self-indulgence, he went on to represent the ruin of a noble nature through haughtiness and pride. From Egypt, with its splendours, its glow, its revels, its moral licence, we pass back to austere republican Rome. The majestic figure of Volumnia is Shakspere's ideal of the Roman matron. The gentle Virgilia is the most dutiful and tenderly loyal of wives, and her friend Valeria-(how remote from the free-tongued girls of Cleopatra)—is The moon of Rome, chaste as the icicle That's curdied by the frost from purest snow But, although free from voluptuousness, the condition of Rome is not strong and sound. There is political division between the patricians and plebeians. Shakspere regards the people as an overgrown child with good and kindly instincts; owning a basis of untutored common-sense, but capable of being led astray by its leaders; possessed of little judgment and no reasoning powers, and without capacity for selfrestraint. It is not for the people that Shakspere in this play reserves his scorn, but for their tribunes, the demagogues, who mislead and pervert them- -a pair of political foxes. Although nobler types of individual character are to be found among the patricians than the plebeians, the dramatist is not blind to the patrician vices, and indeed the whole tragedy turns upon the existence and the influence of these. Coriolanus is by nature of a kindly and generous disposition, but he inherits the aristocratical tradition, and his kindliness strictly limits itself to the circle which includes those of his own rank and class. For his mother he has a veneration approaching to worship; he is content to be a subordinate under Cominius; for the old Menenius he has an almost filial regard; but the people are "slaves," "curs," "minnows." His haughtiness becomes towering, because his personal pride, which in itself is great, is built up over a solid and highreared pride of class. When he is banished his bitterness arises not only from his sense of the contemptible nature of the adversaries to whom he is forced to yield, but from the additional sense that he has been deserted by his own class, "the dastard nobles." He would henceforward, if possible, be himself alone, standing As if a man were author of himself And it is in this spirit of revolt against the bonds of society and of nature that he advances against his native city. But his haughtiness cannot really place him above nature. In the presence of his wife, his boy, and his mother, the strong man gives way, and is restored once more to human love. And so his fate comes upon him. To the last something of his pride remains, and the immediate occasion of his death is an outbreak of that sudden passion, springing from his self-esteem, which had already often and grievously wronged him. Menenius Agrippa is like an earlier Gonzalo of The Tempest, an incarnation of humorous common-sense; he has for Coriolanus a fatherly care, regards him with a fatherly admiration, and would if possible save him from himself. 35. Timon of Athens is, beyond reasonable doubt, only in part the work of Shakspere. Whether Shakspere worked upon materials furnished by an older play, or whether he left his play a fragment to be completed by another hand, is uncertain: the former supposition is perhaps the correct one, and the older writer may possibly have been George Wilkins. There is a substantial agreement among the best critics as to what portions of the play arc Shakspere's and what are not. The following may be be distinguished, with some confidence, as the nonShaksperian parts: Act I. Sc. i. L. 189-240, 258–273 (or? from entrance of Apemantus to end of scene), ii. (certainly); Act II. Sc. ii. L. 45~124; all Act III., except Sc. vi. L. 98–115; Act IV. Sc. ii. L. 30-50, (?) iii. L. 292-362, 399–413, 454–543; Act V. (?) Sc. i. L. i.-59, ii., iii. There is no external evidence which helps to determine the date at which Shakspere wrote his part of the play; but it was probably later than Macbeth and earlier than Pericles. The year 1607 is a date which cannot be far astray. The sources from which Shakspere derived an acquaintance with the story of Timon were Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, a passage in Plutarch's Life of Mark Antony, and, in particular, a dialogue of Lucian. But if Shakspere worked upon an older play, it may have been through it that he obtained the materials which appear to come from Lucian. Another play on the subject of Timon existed in 1600, which has been edited by Dyce. It was, in the opinion of Dyce, intended for an academic audience, and there is no evidence sufficient to prove that it had been seen by Shakspere. Although only a fragment, Shakspere's part of the play is written with the highest dramatic energy. Nothing is more intense than the conception and rendering of Timon's feelings when he turns in hatred from the evil world. The rich Lord Timon has lived in a rose-coloured mist of pleasant delusions. The conferring of favours has been with him a mode of kindly self-indulgence, and he has assumed that everyone is as liberal-hearted and of as easy generosity as he is himself. Out of his pleasant dream he wakes to find the baseness, the selfishness, and ingratitude of the world. And he passes violently over from his former lax philanthropy to a fierce hatred of mankind. The practical Alcibiades sets at once about righting the wrongs which he has suffered. But Timon can only rage and then die. His rage implies the elements of a possible nobleness in him; he cannot acclimatise himself, as Alcibiades can, to the harsh and polluted air of the world; yet the rage also proceeds from a weakness of nature. The dog-like Apemantus accepts, well-contented, the evil which Alcibiades would punish, and from which Timon flies. He barks and snarls, but does not really suffer. The play is a painful one, unrelieved by the presence of beauty or human worth, except such worth as Timon's steward possesses, and this his master blinded by his fierce misanthropy, has no eyes to see. 36. Pericles is the first of the group of plays which I have named Romances. Shakspere's portion of the play has something of the slightness of a preliminary sketch. The first two acts are evidently by another writer than Shakspere, and probably the scenes in Act IV. (Sc. ii., v., and vi.), so revolting to our moral feeling, are also to be assigned away from him. What remains (Acts III., IV., V., omitting the scenes just mentioned), is the pure and charming romance of Marina the sea-born child of Pericles, her loss, and the recovery of both child and mother by the afflicted Prince. Whether Shakspere worked upon the foundation of an earlier play, or whether the non-Shaksperian parts of Pericles were additions made to what he had written, we cannot say with certainty. It is supposed by some critics that three hands can be distinguished : that of a general reviser who wrote the first two acts and Gower's choruses-possibly the dramatist George Wilkins; that of a second writer who contributed the offensive scenes of Act IV.; and, thirdly, the hand of Shakspere. Pericles was entered in the Stationers' register, 1608, by the bookseller Blount, and was published with a very ill-arranged text the next year (1609) by another bookseller, who had, it is believed, surreptitiously obtained his copy. It was not included among the plays given in the first or second folios, but appeared, with six added plays, in the third folio, 1664. The story upon which Pericles is founded is that given in Laurence Twine's Patterne of Painfull Adventures (1607)-itself a reprint of an early printed |