To do that thing that ends all other deeds;
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change;
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dug,
The beggar's nurse and Cæsar's.

One more negotiation, and attempt to save something out of the wreck, and suddenly Cleopatra finds herself taken prisoner by treachery. Now the outer skin of feminine daintiness in which her wild spirit had ever been wrapped is touched.

This mortal house I'll ruin,

Do Cæsar what he can. Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court,
Nor once be chastised with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome?

Two motives are combining their full force in Cleopatra: outraged delicacy, and memory of Antony.

...

I dream'd there was an Emperor Antony .
His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear'd arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't; and autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping.1

Unity of purpose becomes ever stronger, and settles into a character for Cleopatra.

Now from head to foot

I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.2

The two elements of this character are reflected in the final scene : she has "pursued conclusions infinite to die," and discovered the

delicate wonder of the aspic; yet, in approaching death, she is rising nearer to Antony.

I have

Immortal longings in me

methinks I hear

Antony call; I see him rouse himself

To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
The luck of Cæsar . . . Husband, I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title!

I am fire and air: my other elements

I give to baser life.1

So, in royal robes and crown, her maidens beside her sharing her fate, Cleopatra finds the stroke of death like a lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired; as sweet as balm, as soft as air. What the Roman conquerors break in to behold is the ideal of Roman constancy imitated in the cold marble of luxurious daintiness.

She shall be buried by her Antony:

No grave upon the earth shall clip in it

A pair so famous. High events as these

Strike those that make them; and their story is

No less in pity than his glory which

Brought them to be lamented.

1 V. ii, from 283.

VII

MORAL PROBLEMS DRAMATISED

POETRY is the chemistry of human life, and the theatre is the moral laboratory. Just as the physicist supplements observation by experiment, setting up artificial combinations of forces in order that he may watch these working out to a natural issue, so it is the high function of story to initiate some special situation of characters and circumstances pregnant with moral suggestiveness; the course of the story then follows the situation as in the nature of things it unfolds itself and reaches a point of satisfaction, the initial doubt satisfied, the initial perplexity resolved into clearness. The Shakespearean drama abounds in these moral problems dramatised. Sometimes the situation which constitutes the problem seems to arise casually in the course of human affairs. In other cases there may be even within the story itself traces of contrivance and design to set up a pregnant situation; the problem. then becomes, in the fullest sense, an experiment in morals.

I have elsewhere1 discussed at length the play of King Lear as a problem drama: its plot may be thus stated. When Lear, at a check from Cordelia, suddenly overturns the carefully arranged division of the kingdom, we have imperious passion overthrowing conscience (represented in the interference of Kent), and setting up an unnatural distribution of power: power being taken from the good (Cordelia) and lodged in the hands of the bad (Goneril and Regan). The situation of unstable moral equilibrium thus set up makes the problem: for its solution we trace three interests side by side in the sequel of events. First, we have the nemesis

1 In my Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: Chapter X.

upon the wrongdoer; a double nemesis, for Lear receives only ill from the daughters unjustly exalted, only good from the Cordelia he has injured. Again, in the sufferings of the innocent Cordelia and Kent we see a second consequence of Lear's wrong. For a third, we note, in the adulterous intrigues of Goneril and Regan, how power in the hands of the evil is used by them only to work out their own destruction. The problem as thus stated is duplicated in the underplot: in the family of Gloucester a father is misled into an unnatural distribution of power, power being wrongfully taken from the good (Edgar) and assigned to the bad (Edmund); there is the same triple series of consequences the double nemesis on the wrongdoer, the sufferings of the innocent, the unrighteous exaltation used by Edmund for the intrigues in which he meets his doom. Again: the special interest of the Court Fool which is introduced into this play serves to emphasise a plot of this kind; it is just where Lear's sufferings at the hands of his daughters might divert our sympathies into a different channel that the Jester's part, with its strange compound of idle fooling with home thrusts of rebuke, comes to keep before us the idea that Lear is only meeting the solution of the problem his own rash act has set up. One more interest completes the plot of Lear. Though the underplot is a duplication of the main plot, yet there is a difference of spirit between the two. When Lear would sin, conscience strongly embodied in Kent starts up to hinder; in the case of Gloucester there is no such restraining power, but, on the contrary, the strong Edmund is a force tempting and leading his too credulous father on to his fatal error. Thus in the dim background of the story is suggested one of the fundamental problems of the moral world: how there are two types of sinners, those whose environment is a restraining force, like an embodied conscience, and those on the contrary, whose whole surroundings make one embodied temptation. The wider problem is only touched; something however of solution is hinted. when we note how the tempter who misleads Gloucester is the offspring of illicit amour, so announced by Gloucester at the be

ginning of the play in a tone of unrepenting levity:1 the fruits of the former sins are seen to make the temptations of the future.

In this play the problem takes the form of disturbed equilibrium in the moral world working out to a position of rest. In Measure for Measure the movement is of a different character: the complexity of a situation may present itself to our minds as a problem, and the solution will display complexity gradually drawn into moral harmony. Much of our thinking on ethical subjects falls into the form of antitheses: not oppositions, as when good is set against evil, honesty against fraud; but relations of ideas which may be in opposition, but also may be in harmony. A twofold conception of this kind underlies the plot of Measure for Measure. One is the antithesis of purity and passion. For the other, the old antithesis of outer and inner life appears in the form of the law and the individual. These two antitheses underlie all parts of the plot, bringing its complexity up to the level of a moral problem; the climax reveals the diverse elements in complete reconciliation.

The life presented in Measure for Measure takes a threefold form as it is surveyed from the standpoint of purity. We have what may be called respectable life: the law of purity is here fully accepted; there is sin against purity in Angelo and Claudio, but their full acceptance of the law plunges 'them in bitter remorse. Between this and its opposite we find, represented in Lucio, that which is excellently described by the term ordinary conversation applies to it loose life: respectability is claimed, yet there is tampering with vice, the spirit of raillery acting like Milton's conception of an easy bridge from earth to hell. And in the third place we have low life: not only is it vicious, but vice is an accepted institution.

At this point a question arises which is a disturbance to many readers: Why should low life of this type be allowed to appear on the stage at all? The iniquity of the brothel and the life of pros

1 I. i, from 9. For the whole chapter compare pages 353 and 354.