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characters; while in the comic passages, with which the two parts of Henry the Fourth especially abound, he descends without difficulty from this exalted style and abandons himself to the licence of a brilliant prose. In the characters there is now the variety of shading exhibited by human nature; and they no longer rant in the tone of the stage but converse with the restraint of real life. Passages occur on almost every page which you feel inclined to quote-sometimes only a line or two of condensed and proverbial wisdom, sometimes a lengthy outburst of sustained eloquence, sometimes a figure of speech elaborately worked out, sometimes a scene of delicate beauty or moving pathos.

King John, the first of all the Histories in time, stands by itself, separated in its subject from these four connected dramas; but it is on the same level of excellence. Henry the Eighth, at the opposite end of the decade of dramas, is also a noble poem, remarkable not only for the fine picture, already alluded to, of an unselfish, patriotic and highminded woman in the person of Queen Katharine, but for the spectacle of Cardinal Wolsey in his splendour and his fall. In this drama, however, Shakspeare is believed to have been again working in collaboration with another dramatist, so that the work is unequal and lacks unity.

On the whole, therefore, the first five Histories 1 are 1 That is, as generally printed.

those in which we see Shakspeare at his best; and the other five serve rather as a foil to make visible by what stages he advanced to perfection.

The saying of the celebrated Duke of Marlborough is well known, that he knew English history only as he had learned it from these Histories of Shakspeare. But, though this remark has often been praised, it is misleading. No doubt a man might derive a deep attachment to his native country through reading these poems alone; and this is one of the best results of reading history; but he could not from Shakspeare obtain anything like so accurate an account of the facts of history as he might from the commonest schoolbook. In the first place, there are great blanks: it is only an inconsiderable number of the reigns of the English monarchs that Shakspeare has dramatized. Besides, a great deal has been left out even in the reigns with which he has dealt; and any close inquiry would discover numerous anachronisms.1 Shakspeare's aim is misunderstood when, in any usual sense, he is regarded as a teacher of historical facts. He was a poet, and selected from the materials supplied to his hand the elements which could be poetically treated. He could not depart very far from fact, for this would have excited protest in the minds of those acquainted

1 Examples in Ulrici, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art, bk. VI., ch. II.

with the history; but he was not nervous about accuracy in details. What he had to do was to select out of the materials of a reign those which were poetically significant and build these into a structure which should be in itself a thing of beauty, and yet should sufficiently correspond with the facts to justify its name; and the marvel of the whole thing is, how he could take the common and chaotic materials presented in an ordinary chronicle and transmute them into a coherent, melodious, eloquent poem, which can thrill us with passion or make us shake with laughter or move us to tears.

Equally mistaken, in my opinion, is the attempt to find in these poems a philosophy of history. German critics have gone most astray in this direction, reading into the poet their own ideas under the pretence that they are expounding his. Ulrici, for example, in the work just quoted, tries to show that Shakspeare, having before him all the forces of the time, such as Chivalry, the Church, the Crown, the Commons, and so forth, has accurately shown their relations to one another and their interaction, making visible, so to speak, the concealed wires by which the puppets of history were moved and the ends towards which Providence was guiding the half-conscious movements of men. This, it seems to me, is a complete exaggeration. There is of course a certain amount of truth in it. In the eight central dramas especially

there is a close articulation. It is made clear that in the very way in which the Lancastrian dynasty came to the throne there lay the seed and prophecy of its ultimate decline; and the reader is conscious, a all through, of this predetermined fate working itself out. But, on the other hand, Shakspeare displays little apprehension of the crescent forces of English history even in the periods to which his dramas refer. In King John, for example, Magna Charta holds a very insignificant place; and no emphasis is laid anywhere on the growth of law or religious opinion or the power of the common people. In any philosophical history of England, such as Green's, the development of these forces is exhibited with far more interest than in Shakspeare; and the reason is, that to write the philosophy of history was not Shakspeare's business. It is not with the hidden principles by which history is moved that he is concerned, but with the action itself. He approaches the history from the outside and, observing as a spectator its movement, its splendour, its pathos, points out to others its significant features. What, he asks, took place in those days of old which is worthy to be remembered and to be sung? It is not in abstract forces working behind history that he is interested, but in the passions of the actors who were the men and women who made the history? and how did the history mould and develop them?

There are four outstanding themes, which may be called the pivots round which the poet's thought revolves: these are Patriotism, Royalty, War and Character.

PATRIOTISM.-It is a common criticism that the mind of Shakspeare was so catholic and impartial-he was able so perfectly to put himself into the place of every character which he created-that it is impossible to tell what his own sentiments were. To a large extent this is true: he knew human nature in all its forms, whether great or mean, and he could enter so sympathetically into the views and feelings of king and beggar alike that, even when he is expressing an opinion with the greatest force, it is difficult to say whether he is speaking with the force of conviction or only with the borrowed passion of the person of the drama. Occasionally, however, he drops the mask, and there is an accent which betrays that his own heart is speaking.

Nowhere is this so obviously the case, in these Histories, as when he is giving utterance to patriotic sentiment. Here he is as much himself as Milton in his sonnets or Burns in his songs. The name of England always touches Shakspeare to the quick; and he cannot utter it without a rush of emotion. He calls England, in allusion to the chalk cliffs of the southern coast,

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