version from the French; given also in Gower's Confessio Amantis, and originally written about the fifth or sixth century of our era, in Greek. In all these earlier forms of the tale the name of the prince or king of Tyre is Apollonius, not Pericles. Both Twine and Gower appear to have been made use of by the writers of Pericles, and the debt to Gower is acknowledged by his introduction as the "presenter" of the play. It should be noted that in 1608, probably immediately after the production of the play, appeared a novel by George Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which once more tells the story in prose, the version in this instance being in great measure founded upon the play, of which Wilkins him. self is conjectured to have been one of the authors. The drama as a whole is singularly undramatic. It entirely lacks unity of action, and the prominent figures of the opening scenes quickly drop out of the play. A main part of the story is briefly told in rhymed verse by the presenter, Gower, or is set forth in dumb show. But Shakspere's portion is one and indivisible. It opens on shipboard with a tempest, and in Shakspere's later play of storm and wreck he has not attempted to rival the earlier treatment of the subject. "No poetry of shipwreck and the sea," a living poet writes, "has ever equalled the great scene of Pericles ; no such note of music was ever struck out of the clash and contention of tempestuous elements." Milton, when writing Lycidas, the elegy upon his drowned friend, remembered this scene, and one line in particular— And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse. To this rage of storm succeeds the hush of Cerimon's studious chamber, in which the wife of Pericles, tossed ashore by the waves, wakens wonderingly from her trance to the sound of melancholy music. Cerimon, who is master of the secrets of nature, who is liberal in his "learned charity," who held it ever Virtue and cunning were endowments greater is like a first study for Prospero. In the fifth act Marina, so named from her birth at sea, has grown to the age of fourteen years, and is, as it were, a sister of Miranda and Perdita (note in each case the significant name). She, like Perdita, is a child lost by her parents, and, like Perdita, we see her flower-like with her flowers only these flowers of Marina are not for a merrymaking, but a grave. The melancholy of Pericles is a clear-obscure of sadness, not a gloom of cloudy remorse like that of Leontes. His meeting with his lost Marina is like an anticipation of the scene in which Cymbeline recovers his sons and daughter; but the scene in Pericles is filled with a rarer, keener passion of joy. And again, the marvellous meeting between Leontes and Hermione is anticipated by the union of Pericles and his Thaisa. Thus Pericles containing the motives of much that was worked out more fully in later dramas, may be said to bear to the Romances somewhat of the same relation which The Two Gentlemen of Verona bears to the comedies of love which succeeded it in Shakspere's second dramatic period. 37. Cymbeline interweaves with a fragment of British history taken from Holinshed, a story from Boccaccio's Decameron (9th Novel of 2nd Day), the Genevra of the Italian novel corresponding to Shakspere's Imogen. The story is told in a tract called Westward for Smelts, 1620 (stated by Steevens and Malone to have been published as early as 1603); but Shakspere appears in some way, directly or indirectly, to have made acquaintance with it as given by Boccaccio. It is a singular circumstance that in the 1600 quarto edition of Much Ado about Nothing, the opening stage direction runs : "Enter Leonato [and] Innogen his wife;" but no speech is assigned in the comedy to Innogen, nor does her name reappear. Here Imogen is wife to Leonatus Posthumus. The names of the two princes Shakspere found, as well as the king's name, in Holinshed; but the incidents of their having been stolen, and their life among the mountains of Wales, appear to have been invented by the dramatist. Dr. Forman records in his MS. Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof, that he saw Cymbeline acted; but he gives no date. His book, however, belongs to the years 1610-1611, and the metrical and other internal evidence point to that time as about the period when the drama must have been written. It is loosely constructed, and some passages possess little dramatic intensity. Several critics have questioned whether the vision of Posthumus (Act V. Sc. iv.) is of Shakspere's authorship, and it is certainly poorly conceived and written. Nevertheless, the play is one of singular charm, and contains in Imogen one of the loveliest of Shakspere's creations of female character. 66 'Posthumus and Imogen" would be a fitter name for the play than Cymbeline. The weak king, governed by his strong-minded, ambitious wife, has but a small share in the action; it is designed that the heroine shall have no true father, no friend or protector for a time, except her faithful servant, Pisanio. His children-royal in nature-inherit none of the king's weakness. The Queen transmits to her son only her evil disposition, with none of her force of intellect. Cloten is the aristocrat fool, thick-witted, violent, with the coarse conceit of a high-born boor. Imogen has the incredible bad taste to prefer to him "a poor and worthy gentleman," endowed with beautiful gifts of nature, and possessed of all the culture of his time. But Posthumus, with his plain British understanding, parted from his wife, is no match for the craft and cunning of Italy. His faith in Imogen is of a half-romantic kind, unconfirmed by calm and deep acquaintance with her heart: that faith is not subtly poisoned, like the love of Othello, but suddenly, in one brief and desperate encounter, overthrown. His jealousy is not heroic, like Othello's; it shows something of grossness, unworthy of his truer self. In due time penitential sorrow does its work, his nobler nature reasserts itself, and in the final reunion of parent and lost children, the erring husband is also restored to the quick-beating, joyous heart of his wife. Except grandeur and majesty, which were reserved for Hermione and Queen Katherine, everything that can make a woman lovely is given by the poet to Imogen quick and exquisite feelings, brightness of intellect, delicate imagination, energy to hate evil, and to right what is wrong, scorn for what is mean or rude, culture, dainty womanly accomplishments, the gift of song, a capacity for exquisite happiness, and no less sensitiveness to the sharpness of sorrow, a power of quick recovery from disaster when the warmth of love breathes upon her once more, beauty of a type which is noble and refined. And her lost brothers are gallant youths, bred happily far from the court, in wilds where their generous instincts and love of freedom and activity find innocent if insufficient modes of gratification. As in all the works of this period, an open-air feeling pervades a great part of the drama; nature, itself joyous and free, ministers to what is beautiful, simple, or heroic in man, while yet by Shakspere nature alone is never anywhere conceived as sufficient to satisfy the heart or the imagination of a human being. With reconciliation and reunion this, like the other Romances, closes. Even Iachimoa kind of less absolutely evil Iago, suitable to comedy instead of tragedy-must repent and be forgiven. 38. The Tempest was probably written late in the year 1610. A few months previously had appeared an account of the wreck of Sir George Somers' ship in a tempest off the Bermudas, entitled A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels, &c., written by Silvester Jourdan. Shakspere (Act I. Sc. ii. L. 229) makes mention of "the still-vexed Bermoothes." Several points of resemblance render it probable that Shakspere in writing the play had Jourdan's tract before him. (See preface to Clarendon Press edition of The Tempest, pp. 6, 7.) Add to this, that in following Greene's Pandosto, as Shakspere does in his Winter's Tale (acted 1611), the dramatist_turns aside from it in one important particular-Perdita is not cast adrift at sea in a rudderless boat. Why? Probably because Shakspere had already made use of this incident in The Tempest. In the Induction to Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, 1614, there is what seems an allusion to Shakspere's Caliban of The Tempest: "If there be never a Servant-monster i' the Fayre who can helpe it, he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries." The upward limit of date is fixed by a passage (Act II. Sc. i. L. 147-157) in which Gonzalo describes his imaginary commonwealth, borrowed from Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, published 1603. The striking resemblance of Shakspere's lines beginning "The cloud-capt towers" (Act IV. Sc. i. L. 152) to a passage in the Earl of Stirling's Tragedie of Darius (Edinburgh 1603, London 1604) should also be noted. Beyond the suggestions obtained from Jourdan's tract no source of the story of the play can be pointed out. Mention was made by the poet Collins of a tale called Aurelio and Isabella containing the same incidents, but Collins was in this point mistaken; he may, however, have seen some other Italian story which resembled The Tempest. The name Setebos (Sycorax's god, Act I. Sc. ii. L. 373), and perhaps other names of persons, Shakspere found in Eden's History of Travaile, 1577- In the absence of evidence as to a source of the play, the most interesting and important fact in connection with the subject is that the German dramatist Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605, was author of a play, Die schöne Sidea, the plot of which has so much in common with the plot of The Tempest that it has been supposed that they must have had the same original (see Clarendon Press edition of The Tempest, preface, p. 13). both appear a magician, his only daughter, and an attendant spirt; in both, the son of his enemy becomes the magician's prisoner, his sword being ren In |