true, the good, and the beautiful, he is forced by the remorseless logic of events to give up his books, to despise his mother, to discard his friends, to break his Ophelia's heart, to stain his hands with gore, and to perish himself in the ruin of all he holds dear. All of this might have been averted had he been a man of action. The play is therefore an everlasting sermon on the inadequacy of books, scholarship, pedantry. In every line it is astonishingly fresh and modern. It was a common saying, early in the nineteenth century, in view of the scholarship of the Germans, that "Germany is Hamlet." But when in 1877 Furness published his "Variorum Hamlet," in words that hark back to 1871 and forward to 1914, he dedicated it to the Shakespeare society of Weimar as "representative of a people whose recent history has proved that ' Germany is not Hamlet.'" Hamlet lacks will power. He knows that he ought to kill Claudius, but he cannot bring himself to do it. In this he is in contrast to Macbeth. Hamlet philosophizes about what he is to do but does not act; Macbeth kills Duncan and spends the rest of his life in philosophizing about it and in getting deeper and deeper into a sea of blood. Like Claudius, he is a "limed soul that, struggling to be free," is "more engaged." He resembles a fly stuck on a piece of fly-paper. He is, for all his headlong impetuosity, really weaker than Hamlet. While the latter sees quite through his mother and Ophelia, Macbeth permits himself to be bullied, hoodwinked, and led into temptation by his wife. Even in length "Macbeth" is the antithesis of "Hamlet," being one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, which is indeed a natural consequence of its theme, "Look before you leap." In one respect, however, the two plays are alike. Both are marked by a richness of detail, a felicity of language, and a power of character portrayal such as no other author has attained. Different as are the Weird Sisters in Macbeth" and the Ghost in " Hamlet," they, along with the Fairies in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," constitute the most wonderful group of evil thoughts, hallucinations, and dreams in all literature. "Macbeth" was probably finished 1605; "Othello seems to have been acted at court November 1, 1604. Macaulay considered it Shakespeare's greatest play. Othello, a black man, by virtue of his great qualities as a soldier, wins and weds Desdemona, a dainty Vene tian lady. Iago, his ancient, enraged because Othello has promoted Cassio in preference to him, with diabolical ingenuity excites Othello's jealousy until, in a fit of madness, he slays his innocent wife. The play is thus in a way a sermon against ill-assorted marriages. Everything about it is swift, powerful, overwhelmingly pitiful. In its companion, " King Lear," we have a picture of an old man who seeks to escape from his responsibilities. Unlike Macbeth, Lear will not " die with harness on his back." Instead he decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters-Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. Before doing so he requires each to make expression of her love for him. Goneril and Regan please him with fulsome adulation; Cordelia, disgusted, speaks coldly. Enraged, he disowns her, and gives half his kingdom to Goneril and half to Regan, reserving certain dignities to himself. As soon as they can, they proceed to strip him of these; and, in spite of Cordelia's opposition, they succeed. Lear's madness, which is a result of their ingratitude, is one of the most terrible things in literature, and the character of his Fool, who, amid the wreck of his master's fortunes, remains true, one of the most wonderful. "His extraordinary success," says George Saintsbury, "has never been denied save by his unofficial successors." These four peerless masterpieces have been called the four wings of Shakespeare's spirit and the four wheels of his chariot. They raised him to the highest pinnacle of contemporary fame, creating a demand for his work which he evidently found himself unable single-handed to supply. The story is that he had made a contract to furnish the Globe Theatre with two plays a year. In his weariness he had recourse to one or all of three very natural expedients. He hastily worked over some pieces which he had previously begun and abandoned; he retouched some plays by other writers, adding a scene here and there; or he employed others to fill in outlines which he himself sketched. The result was that there appeared under his name five plays vastly inferior to his best but all bearing more or less unmistakably the marks of the master's hand. These are Troilus and Cressida," "Timon of Athens," " Pericles," "Measure for Measure," and "Henry VIII." "Troilus and Cressida " is a lively dramatization from the "Iliad "; in " Timon of Athens" the theme, like that of "Lear," is ingratitude; and " Pericles " is a rambling story based on Gower, which may perhaps account for the fact that it is the dullest thing Shakespeare ever wrote, if indeed he had any hand in it. Some things in it, however, must be, says George Saintsbury, "aut Shakespeare aut diabolus, and it must have been a most superior fiend who forged the shipwreck passage." While "Measure for Measure" and "Henry VIII" contain some of the best things in Shakespeare, they are vastly inferior, the one to "As You Like It," the other to Henry IV." This group of plays, indeed, reminds one forcibly of Pope's acute comment: 66 Shakespeare, whom you and every playhouse bill, In other words, while he wished for solid literary fame, he expected to gain it from his plays as little as Rudyard Kipling or Maurice Maeterlinck would expect to-day to gain it by writing librettos for the movies." He has left on record his envy and admiration of Spenser's fame and his impatience, not to say contempt, for the theatre. In two early poems, as we have already seen, he had tried to win a permanent name. Probably realizing the insufficiency of his "Venus" and "Lucrece " for this purpose, in 1609 he allowed one of his friends to print in addition a little volume which of itself would have sufficed to make his name immortal. It contained 154 sonnets. Some, if not all, of them had been written years before. Probably they are a spiritual diary of a portion of the poet's earlier life. Their meaning has been a source of interminable controversy, but one thing is certain: there is nothing commonplace about them except the people who have written comments on them. They are full of superb poetry. In lines such as these the high-water mark of English verse is reached: "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow II. III. XVII. "The painful warrior famousëd for fight, "Not marble, not the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." XXV. LV. It is impossible, however, by quotation to convey an idea of the power and beauty of these sonnets. The student who wishes to discover what they are at their best should read 18, 30, 33, 56, 73, 98, 106, 116, and 130. If, after that, he does not voluntarily read the rest, he may escape whipping, but he should banish from his mind the idea that he can learn to appreciate literature. The year previous to the publication of the sonnets, Shakespeare had retired to Stratford and taken up his dwelling in New Place. In his novel, “ Judith Shakespeare," William Black has made a picture of the poet's life there which can be read without much intellectual exertion and with some pleasure as well as profit. Black depicts Judith as the light of her father's house. We have better evidence than his, however, that in her he found the chief comfort and delight of his declining years. Tired as he was, he continued to write, but in a less strenuous spirit. After the storm and stress of " Othello" and Lear," his bark found calmer waters in the romantic beauty of "A Winter's Tale," "Cymbeline," and "The Tempest." In each of these the most attractive figure is a daughter; and, while Perdita, Imogene, and Miranda are as different as three good and lovely young women can be, it seems as if there must be something of Judith Shakespeare in each of them. Aside from Perdita, the most interesting thing about " A Winter's Tale" is the picture it contains of the rogue Autolycus, who is at once peddler, thief, and ballad monger. Just as we are shown in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" how the rude mechanicals presented their crude plays in mediæval England, so we are shown in "A Winter's Tale" how a travelling fakir sang and sold ballads to clown and shepherd. It is all ludicrously realistic and yet for poetry one of the ballads of Autolycus is unmatchable even in Shakespeare: "Cymbeline" is as riotous and sweet with disorderly beauty as an abandoned back pasture on a Vermont hillside in the early days of July when the wild raspberries are beginning to ripen. The easiest way to form an idea of its power and charm is to remember that Tennyson, on his death-bed, called for the volume that contained it, and that when he breathed his last it was clasped in his hands. "The Tempest" was the last of Shakespeare's works to be written. Along with the "Comedy of Errors," it differs in one respect from all of his other plays. It observes, or almost observes, the Greek rule that the action of a drama must be confined to one place and to 24 hours. The disregard of these unities, as they are called, enabled Shakespeare to "hold the mirror up to nature," thereby giving to his work a variety and richness which the Greek drama lacks, though at the sacrifice of severe simplicity of effect. In the "Tempest," however, he combined Greek unity with the rich coloring that marks his best work. The play is, indeed, one of the most marvellous creations of the human mind. Prospero, King of Naples, and his daughter Miranda are exposed on a desert island by a usurper; by magic arts he subdues to his will Ariel, the most spiritual, and Caliban, the grossest, of its denizens; the usurper, being wrecked on the island, falls into Prospero's power; and the end is happy. Not without reason have some critics seen in the "Tempest " a spiritual autobiography of the poet and a farewell to his art. Prospero is Shakespeare; Naples, Stratford; the island, London; Ariel, air; Caliban, earth; Prospero's magic art, with which he subdues the world, poetry, etc., etc. And, when the tempest is over, Prospero buries his book and takes leave of his art in words that seem designed by Shakespeare for his own farewell to the stage and an exposition of his philosophy of life: "Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, |