In The Winter's Tale between Acts iii. and iv. we have Father Time himself dragged in by the forelock, or beard, to exhibit an hour-glass and plead

Impute it not a crime

To me on my swift passage that I slide

O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried

Of that wide gap.

And then of a sudden, in The Tempest Shakespeare brings off the trick! The whole action of the play, with the whole tale of ancient wrong unfolded, the whole company of injuring and injured gathered into a knot, the whole machinery of revenge turned to forgiveness, takes place in about three hours of imagined time, or just the time of its actual representation on the stage!

"Marvellous stage-craft!"? Yes. I would not make too much of the famous Unities, but though discredited as laws, they abide as graces of drama; and pre-eminently a grace is this Unity of Time, whereby the author, in Dryden's words—

sets the audience, as it were, at the post where the race is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, suffers you not to behold him till he is in sight of goal and just upon you. "Marvellous"? Yes. . . But will anyone tell me that Shakespeare, having solved the problem which had beaten him—great master of his craft—not once only but thrice, turned back afterwards to imitate, in The Winter's Tale, old failures?

Such a thing does not happen.

Here I take leave to speak positively. We must all bring our small private experiences to the task of

interpreting our Shakespeare. He is so truly a child of Nature, and so wise in her, that we feel we owe him that service hardly less than we owe it to Nature herself we read him, reading ourselves into him.—

O Lady! we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live :

Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.

And just here any man who has seriously devoted his days, or the best of them, to inventive art-no matter how feeble the result-can stand up without false modesty and speak with more authority than any commentator who, learned as we please in other things, has never been baptised, never initiated, never made one of the cult. An artist may-I think the greatest do, and must-care little for what he has done as Shakespeare, we know, took no further care for a play once written. As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello-he tossed them over his broad shoulder, and whoso list might pick them up. But he-the artist-passes on to some new strange search; and of its object we divine nothing nor know more than this-that, until found, it is the essential jewel of his soul.

A friend, the other day, called my attention to a note-a memorandum-by the late Dr. Furnivall :

When I asked Browning what struck him most in Shakespeare, he said, "The royal ease with which he walks up the steps and takes his seat on the throne, while we poor fellows have to struggle hard to get up a step or two."

If ever a man in invention displayed that royal ease, yes, certainly it was Shakespeare. All his contem

poraries bear testimony to this that Browning noted. If in any one play he steps to his throne more eminently a king than in all the rest, that play is The Tempest. But in previous lectures I have tried to anatomise the artist that goes up-yes, so royally-to his platform to draw the curtain for the last time; and I think of Arnold's lines-

These things, Ulysses,

The wise bards also
Behold and sing.

But O, what labour !

O Prince, what pain!

and of these other lines of Arnold's

Such, Poets, is your bride, the Muse! Young, gay,
Radiant adorn'd outside: a hidden ground

Of thought and of austerity within.

CHAPTER XVII

THE TEMPEST

III

Argument for The Tempest being a marriage play-Its position in the Folio-An imagined first night-The uses of the inner stage The realistic accuracy of the opening sceneLandlubber criticisms Coleridge on Prospero's "retrospective narration"-The dignity of Perdita and MirandaShakespeare's sympathy extending to Caliban-The contribution of Stephano-Comparison of The Tempest and A Midsummer-Night's Dream-Prospero-Danger of supposing autobiography-A play for all time.

(1)

ALTHOUGH, as we have seen in a previous chapter, The Tempest was pretty certainly presented at Court, in some form or another, on Hallowmas Night, 1611, it was quite certainly represented there early in 1613 to grace the nuptials of the Prince Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth, and almost as certainly played as we now have it, whether there had been a previous form or not. For while it seems we must reject Dr. Garnett's main thesis, that Shakespeare wrote it for that great occasion, I hold this much proved all but unanswerably. As it now stands, it was written for Court, and to celebrate a wedding. I am even inclined to add "a royal wedding." Its brevity (for a monarch and his guests must not be unduly tired,

nor a bridal couple either) is one small indication. Its economy of scene-shifting, unique among Shakespeare's plays, is another and stronger one: and by a paradox, the stationary splendour of its setting, a third. For it is observable that while a royal banqueting house, such as that of Whitehall, allows a more sumptuous frame than an ordinary theatre; and while for a royal performance it encourages rich dress in the players, with refinement of bodily motion and the speaking voice; and while again it lends itself, as we know, to all the apparatus of a Masque; it cannot— it could not then, as Windsor cannot to-day-compete with a professional theatre in what we may call the tricks of the trade. When at Whitehall or at Windsor we come to these, we come, if not to "two trestles and a board," at furthest to something like a glorified Assembly-Room,

Now, as Dr. Garnett has pointed out, “after the first brief representation of the deck of the storm-tossed vessel with which the play opens, there is practically but one scene. For though the action occasionally shifts from the space before Prospero's cell to some other part of the island, everything is avoided which might necessitate a change of decoration. Neither is there any change of costume except Prospero's assumption of his ducal robes in the last Act: and this takes place on the stage.

But of course Dr. Garnett's argument rests mainly on the two masques, and specially on the nuptial masque of Iris, Cercs, and Juno: which, if the real purpose of the play--or as I should prefer to put it,