dered powerless by magic, and he is made the bearer of logs for his mistress; in both the story ends with reconciliation and the happiness of the lovers. English actors were in Ayrer's town, Nürnberg, in 1604 and 1606; in 1613, English actors performed in German a Sedea. Possibly Shakspere, through some company acting in Germany, may have received an account of Ayrer's play.

The Tempest, although far from lacking dramatic or human interest, has something in its spirit of the nature of a clear and solemn vision. It expresses Shakspere's highest and serenest view of life, Prospero, the great enchanter, is altogether the opposite of the vulgar magician. With command over the elemental powers, which study has brought to him, he possesses moral grandeur, and a command over himself, in spite of occasional fits of involuntary abstraction and of intellectual impatience; he looks down on life, and sees through it, yet will not refuse to take his part in it. In Shakspere's early play of supernatural agencies-A Midsummer Night's Dream-the "human mortals " were made the sport of the frolic-loving elves; here the supernatural powers attend on and obey their ruler, man. It has been suggested that Prospero, the great enchanter, is Shakspere himself, and that when he breaks his staff, drowns his book, and dismisses his airy spirits, going back to the duties of his dukedom, Shakspere was thinking of his own resigning of his powers of imaginative enchantment, his parting from the theatre, where his attendant spirits had played their parts, and his return to Stratford.

The persons in this play, while remaining real and living, are conceived in a more abstract way, more as types than those in any other work of Shakspere. Prospero is the highest wisdom and moral attainment; Gonzalo is humorous common-sense incarnated; all that is meanest and most despicable appears in the wretched conspirators; Miranda, whose name seems to suggest wonder, is almost an elemental being,

framed in the purest and simplest type of womanhood, yet made substantial by contrast with Ariel, who is an unbodied joy, too much a creature of light and air to know human affection or human sorrow; Caliban -the name formed from cannibal (?)—stands at the other extreme, with all the elements in him--appetites, intellect, even imagination--out of which man emerges into early civilisation, but with a moral nature that is still gross and malignant. Over all presides Prospero like a providence. And the spirit of reconciliation, of forgiveness, harmonising the contentions of men, appears in The Tempest in the same noble manner that it appears in The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and Henry VIII. (See Mr. Brooke's Primer: English Literature, pp. 86, 87.)

Shakspere seems in this play, among other things, to consider the question: What is true freedom ? Ariel, incapable of human bonds, pants for liberty; Caliban sings his drunken song of freedom, and conspires to throw off the yoke of Prospero's rule; but Ferdinand, the lover, finds true freedom in service. to her he loves; and Prospero, resigning his magic powers, finds it in the law of human duty.

The conception of Caliban, it may be noted, had occurred to Shakspere when he wrote Troilus and Cressida (Act III. Sc. iii. L. 264). The action of The Tempest is comprised within three hours.

39. The Winter's Tale was seen at the Globe on May 15, 1611, by Dr. Forman, and is described in his MS. Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof. The versification is that of Shakspere's latest group of plays; no five-measure lines are rhymed; run-on lines and double endings are numerous. The tone and feeling of The Winter's Tale place it in the same period with The Tempest and Cymbeline; its breezy air is surely that which blew over Warwickshire fields upon Shakspere now returned to Stratford; its country lads and lasses, and their junketings, are those with which the poet had in a happy spirit renewed his acquaintance. It is perhaps the last complete play that Shakspere wrote.

Like the romantic pastoral of Shakspere's mid-period of authorship, As You Like It, this comedy is founded upon the tale of an early contemporary of the poet— upon Greene's Pandosto, or, as it was afterwards named, Dorastus and Fawnia, first published in 1588. The idea of introducing Time as a chorus comes from Greene, and all the principal characters, except Paulina and the incomparable rogue Autolycus. As if to prove his right to deal as he pleased with the dramatic unity of time, Shakspere includes all the incidents of The Tempest within the period of three hours, while the spectator of The Winter's Tale sees Perdita first as a babe, and afterwards as a maiden of sixteen about to become a wife. In Greene's tale, Bellaria, whom Shakspere has named Hermione, dies upon hearing of the loss of her son; in Shakspere's play she lives to be reunited to her repentant husband.

After his manner, Shakspere drives forward to what chiefly interests him in the subject. The jealousy of Leontes is not a detailed dramatic study like the love and jealousy of Othello. It is a gross madness which mounts to the brain, and turns Leontes' whole nature into unreasoning passion. The character of the noble sufferer Hermione is that with which the dramatist is above all concerned-this first; and, secondly, the grace, beauty, and girlish happiness of Perdita; while of the subordinate persons of the drama, Shakspere delights chiefly in his own creation, Autolycus, the most charming of rogues and rovers. Hermione may be placed side by side with the Queen Katharine of Henry VIII., which play belongs to this period. Both are noble sufferers, who by the dignity and purity of their natures transcend all feeling of vulgar resentment. Deep and even quick feeling never renders Hermione incapable of an admirable justice, nor deprives her of a true sense of pity for him who so gravely wrongs both her and himself. The meeting of kindred, with forgiveness and reconciliation, if these are called for by past offences, forms the common ending

of the last plays of Shakspere. The return to life of the lost Hermione is, as it were, set visibly before our eyes; we assist at the reanimating of one who had become a monumental memory; for her recovered daughter she has words of tenderness; her husband she embraces in silence, and we know that the forgiveness is without reserve.

Perdita belongs to the group of exquisite youthful figures set over against those of their graver and sadder elders in the plays of this period. She is one of the same company with Miranda and Marina, and the youthful sons of Cymbeline. The shepherdessprincess, "queen of curds and cream," is less a vision than Miranda, the child of wonder, but more perhaps a creature of this earth. There is nothing lovelier or more innocently joyous in poetry than Perdita at the rustic merry-making, sharing her flowers with old and young. And in Florizel she has found a lover, full of the innocence and chivalry of unstained early manhood.

Autolycus stands by himself among the creations of the dramatist. The art of thieving as practised by him is no crime, but the gift of some knavish god. He does not trample on the laws of morality, but dances or leaps over them with so nimble a foot that we forbear to stay him. In the sad world which contains a Leontes and can lose a Mamillius, so lighthearted a wanderer must be pardoned even if he be light-fingered, and sometimes mistakes for his own the sheet bleaching on the hedge, which happens to be ours. The name Autolycus Shakspere probably found in Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 40. King Henry VIII., as we learn from Sir Henry Wotton and from T. Lorking, was being enacted as a new play at the Globe Theatre, under the name All is True, in June, 1613, when some burning paper shot off from a cannon set fire to the thatch and occasioned the destruction of the building. It has been shown conclusively by Mr. Spedding (Gentlemen's Magazine, Aug., 1850, reprinted in New Shakspere

Society's Transactions, 1874) that the play is in part from Shakspere's hand, in part from Fletcher's. A German critic (Hertzberg) has described Henry VIII. as "a chronicle-history with three and a half catastrophes, varied by a marriage and a coronation pageant, ending abruptly with the baptism of a child." It is indeed incoherent in structure. After all our sympathies have been engaged upon the side of the wronged Queen Katharine, we are called upon to rejoice in the marriage triumph of her rival, Anne Bullen. "The greater part of the fifth act, in which the interest ought to be gathering to a head, is occupied with matters in which we have not been prepared to take any interest by what went before, and on which no interest is reflected by what comes after." But viewed from another side, that of its metrical workmanship, the play is equally deficient in unity, and indeed betrays unmistakably the presence of two writers. Fletcher's verse had certain strongly-marked characteristics, one of which is the very frequent occurrence of double endings. A portion of Henry VIII. is written in the verse of Fletcher, and a portion as certainly in Shakspere's verse. Going over the play, scene by scene, Mr. Spedding arrived at the following result :

Shakspere's part: Act I. Sc. i., ii. ; Act II. Sc. iii., iv. Act III. Sc. ii. (to exit of the king), Act V. Sc. i. The rest of the play is by Fletcher.

In Shakspere's part the proportion of double endings is 1 to 3; in Fletcher's, 1 to 17 (SPEDDING); in Shakspere's part the proportion of unstopt lines is I to 203; in Fletcher's, I to 3'79 (FURNIVAL); in Shakspere's part there are 45 light endings and 37 weak endings; in Fletcher's, 7 light endings and I weak ending (INGRAM); in Shakspere's part there are six rhymes, al accidental; in Fletcher's, ten rhymes (FLEAY),

Upon what plan were the joint labours of Shakspere and Fletcher conducted? The following is Mr. Spedding's conjecture: "It was not unusual in those

;