atrocity as Oliver and Angelo a lifelong seclusion from intercourse with the humanity they dishonour would be the irreducible minimum of the penalty demanded rather than deserved by their crimes of intention and of action. But this moral defect in the equity of dramatic art which for once or for twice brings down Shakespeare as a playwright to the ethical level of Fletcher is not a more serious dereliction in the dark and deep tragedy of the graver play than in the pastoral romance of 'As you like it'. And apart from this entirely subordinate question there can be no doubt and no denial of the obvious truth that the true tragedy' of human life and character never found more glorious expression or more terrible exposition than in the tragic scenes of this magnificent if not faultless comi-tragedy. It is not the least among the miracles wrought by the almighty hand of Shakespeare that it should have been able to create one of the supreme glories of all poetry, one of the crowning examples which testify to his transcendent power, out of the shameful agony of a shameless coward in face of nothing more terrible than death. Too sublime for attraction, too severe for fascination, Isabella is yet not only one of Shakespeare's women' but one of his noblest and most memorable. Some injustice has been done to her excellent duke by critics who condemn or deride him as a busybody on the score of his rather theatrical satisfaction in the sensational conduct of his detective business: he is on the whole a not unrighteous or ignoble justicer, and not unworthy to redeem the heroic object of his admiring affection from the threatened stagnation of a cloister. But, superb as is all the tragic part of this unique and singular play, it can be questioned only by the most questionable of moralists. that the comic part, lit up as it is by rare occasional flashes of Shakespearean power (with a streak in it of Jonsonian brutality), is generally far less humorous as

well as less good-humoured than usual, and decidedly not less gross than the kindred scenes of brothelry in a play to which they can have been contributed by no feebler hand than Shakespeare's.

The second of the only two doubtful plays ever ascribed to Shakespeare came out a year before the piratical publication of 'Troilus and Cressida ', ' Pericles,' and the Sonnets. A Yorkshire Tragedy' does not at any rate belong to the class of obviously spurious plays which it is impossible for any Englishman other than an incurable dunce to associate even in thought with the incomparable name of Shakespeare. Its tragic brutality is more repellent if not revolting than the comic brutality of Jonson at its worst. But the simple power of touch, the straightforward mastery of hand, can hardly perhaps be matched by any other man's we know. The ghastly and inhuman subject might possibly if not probably have been attempted by the author of A Woman Killed with Kindness': but the critic who could attribute this fearful little play to Heywood might as plausibly assign the authorship of 'The Inn Album' to Longfellow. This is not to say that I believe it to be Shakespeare's: indeed I would rather think that impossible: but impossible I cannot quite bring myself to feel comfortably assured that it is. The all but insoluble question involved in the problem is whether Shakespeare at the height of his powers would or could have taken as the subject of even a slight and rough-hewn bywork or study in stark-naked realism the case of a murderous monomaniac or criminal lunatic, as we now should define him; of a demoniac, or sufferer under the possession of an evil spirit incarnate in his flesh, as in Shakespeare's time they would have accounted him, and as in his last agony he assumes himself to have been.

That Shakespeare should have chosen so singular a subject as that of his last English historic play is not

stranger than that he should have handled it in so singular a fashion. From the opening to the close we are conscious of a certain defect in dramatic harmony of conception and poetic unity of action. The style of King Henry VIII' is unmistakably earlier than that of his last and greatest historic or tragic period; as rhetorical and effusive-' with a difference '-as that of 'King John' in many scenes of either play. The obvious metrical resemblance of more than a few passages to the versification of Middleton and of Fletcher is not exactly or conclusively sufficient to establish as rationally acceptable the assumption that Fletcher could have written the deathscene of Queen Katharine; or, indeed, the nobly and passionately eloquent scenes which set before us the death of Buckingham and the fall of Wolsey. Nor, for that matter, has Fletcher, whom his own generation preferred to Shakespeare as a painter or creator of women, left us as subtle and significant a study of female character as the finely finished and ambiguously attractive sketch of Anne Boleyn. But for the full and proper purpose of historic drama there should have been a second if not a third part to set before us the high patriotic action and the unlovely personal degeneration into passionate if not inhuman and reckless if not ruthless tyranny of the majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome' and fortified the independence of England on shore by the supremacy of England on the sea.

The insolubly enigmatic history of Troilus and Cressida' belongs likewise beyond all question to the penultimate period of Shakespeare's work. For the second and last time it is impossible to conjecture why a play of his designing begins as it does to end where it does. In fact, the close of King Henry VIII' is almost harmonious and satisfactory if compared with the cynically abrupt and dramatically inexplicable upshot of Troilus and Cressida. Nor is there any sufficiently

sustained interest either of action or of character to make amends for this rather serious defect or obliquity of design. The union and disunion of a violently hysterical young amorist and a congenitally changeable young wanton, both equally hot of blood and weak of heart, could never have seemed to any tragic poet a proper subject or groundwork for a tragic poem: but out of this most inadequate and unattractive material Shakespeare has been pleased to fashion some of the most glorious poetry in the world from this unpromising point of departure he has swerved aside and forged ahead so as to attain and to comprise within the strange scheme of his poem a philosophy as sublime in its truth as Hamlet's. This is as much as to say, what no rational reverence can deny, that the keynote of the dramatic poem, the keystone of the spiritual structure, is radically and indisputably cynical. Alone among Shakespeare's plays, it lives among the great works of the world by the right and might of only such individual scenes and passages as no other man could have given us. The majesty, the magnificence, the depth and breadth of creative thought, the height and reach of interpretative imagination, which inform and inspire the matchless music of the verse, can only be duly acknowledged by forbearance from all attempt at critical definition or articulate recognition of their peculiar quality or their immanent presence.

It must nevertheless be admitted by all students of normally healthy organs and tolerably cleanly instincts that there are too many passages in this abnormal if not amorphous masterpiece more discomfortable and even repugnant to natural taste and relish than the daring and admirably realistic scenes which have given an inheritance of ill fame among ignorant or prurient dunces to the name of 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre'. This evident recast or partial transfiguration of some earlier

and homelier play belongs, as far as the work belongs to Shakespeare, to his final and consummate period of incomparable achievement. In simplicity, in sublimity, in purity of pathos and in harmony of impression, it is above comparison with any but the greatest of its author's other works. The Homeric tragedy and terror of the storm, the Virgilian tenderness and fragrance of floral and musical tribute from a maiden mourning for the dead, the vivid and noble pathos of reunion between a forlorn father and a heroic child, could have been given as here they are given by Shakespeare alone, and by Shakespeare only at the very height and consummation of his most human when most superhuman power.

That power, clothed often in words of matchless charm and verse of matchless music, informs with immortality the greater part of the Sonnets of Shakespeare: all indeed, we may say, but a very few of a lighter and a slighter sort among the whole melodious number. They are not to be and indeed they cannot be read as a regular sequence composing one great poem of passionate emotion after the likeness of Sidney's unequalled 'Astrophel and Stella' but no province or division of Shakespeare's work is proportionately richer, even to overflowing, in supreme and ever memorable lines and passages and phrases impossible to any but one man's hand on record. No better and saner or more rational and reverent commentary on the entire text can be imagined or desired than that which accompanies the marvellously faithful, careful, and inspired version of François-Victor Hugo; the incomparably gifted and the incomparably devoted translator of all and more than all Shakespeare's actual or possible work. The little poem subjoined to the Sonnets, 'A Lover's Complaint,' has two superbly Shakespearean lines in it which any competent reader's memory will naturally and gratefully detach from their setting and reserve for his delight. Of that impudent