CHAPTER II.

THE ANCIENT HISTORIES

THE first great effort of Shakspeare's genius was the series of plays founded on the history of his native country. But it was natural that, when this task was approaching completion, he, who had now perfectly acquired the art of dramatizing history, should turn, in search of subjects, to the history of other countries. And at that period, when the Revival of Learning had just given the literature of Greece and Rome as a fresh possession to the modern world, no foreign history was so likely to attract attention as that of classical antiquity.

Long before this stage, indeed, Shakspeare had glanced into that ancient region. His first play was Titus Andronicus, the personages of which were supposed to belong to the later Roman Empire. It is, indeed, doubtful how far this play really belongs to him. It is extremely unlike anything else which we know for certain to be his. striking lines and even passages of greater length; but, as a whole, it is an extremely crude performance, full of extravagant passages and unnatural crimes. In

There are in it a few

short, the life it describes never was on sea or land, but only on the stage. If Shakspeare had any considerable hand in it, its principal interest lies in the evidence it affords of how, almost at a single bound, he afterwards passed beyond himself and beyond the style of his predecessors, whose turgid and bloodthirsty extravagances he had condescended for once to imitate.

Although Titus Andronicus is located in the Imperial Period, it has little or no connexion with actual history, its incidents being nearly all purely imaginary. Hence Coleridge has characterized it by the happy epithet of pseudo-classical. This name would apply also to another play, belonging to the dramatist's prime, Troilus and Cressida; which is founded on a lovestory taken from the earliest Greek history and embodies some incidents of the Trojan War, but cannot be looked upon in any strict sense as an attempt to dramatize history. It is a curious piece and has an important value as a document in Shakspeare's personal history. It seems to have been written at a time when he was disgusted with life, and especially with the character of woman. He turns out the seamy side of everything, satirizing the Homeric heroes and exposing the brutality and cunning which underlay their chivalry and splendour. There are some great qualities in the play, side by side with others which are repulsive; but it has hardly a place in the

series of Histories. Timon of Athens would also be one of those Pseudo-classical Dramas, or it may be reckoned among the Tragedies. In it there is much. of the disgust with life found in Troilus and Cressida, and it bears not a little resemblance to Hamlet.

The three plays on classical themes which distinctly belong to the category of Histories are Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra. These form the true continuation of the English Histories, and this is a hint which may guide the reader; though there was a long interval of time between the English and these Ancient Histories. All three were written at the height of the author's power, Julius Cæsar coming next after Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus immediately after Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. All three, it will be observed, belong to Roman history; Shakspeare has no play of the same species taken from the history of Greece.1

In contrast with the pseudo-classical plays, these derive their materials directly from history, with only limited invention of character or incident for poetical effect. The source from which Shakspeare chiefly obtained his information was a recently executed

1All the plays discussed in this chapter appear in the First Folio among the Tragedies. As for Troilus and Cressida, the editors themselves seem to have been uncertain where to place it; and no wonder ; for, as has been said, it is "a History in which historical verisimilitude s openly set at nought, a Comedy without genuine laughter, a Tragedy without pathos".

translation of Plutarch, the celebrated biographer of antiquity, who wrote the lives of the most distinguished personages of the ancient world, both Greek and Roman. In the more learned editions of the plays the narrative of Plutarch is usually printed in the introduction, that the student may see to what extent the modern author was indebted to it; and no one can compare the two versions of the events-the ancient and the modern, the prosaic and the poetical -without being struck with the closeness, almost slavishness, with which the playwriter adheres to his authority. Thus in Julius Cæsar (to quote the remarks of Gervinus, the German Shakspearian commentator) not only the historical action in general, but single incidents and speeches are taken from Plutarch, nay, even such details as one unacquainted with the ancient biographer would consider in form and manner to be quite Shakspearean: the omens of Cæsar's death, the warnings of the augur and of Artemidorus, the absence of the heart in the animal sacrificed, Calphurnia's dream, the peculiar traits of Caesar's character, hist remarks about thin people like Cassius, the circumstance that in the conspiracy no oath was taken, the withdrawal of Cicero, the relation of Portia to Brutus, her temptation, her words, his reply, her subsequent anxiety and death; the circumstances of Cæsar's death, the means taken by Decius Brutus to induce him to leave home, the behaviour of Antony, the murder of

the poet Cinna; further on, the contention of the Republican leaders concerning Lucius Pella, their conversation about suicide, the apparition of the ghost of Cæsar, the mistakes in the battle, its double issue, the suicide of Cassius by the same sword with which he had killed Cæsar-all are taken from Plutarch's narrative, from which the poet had only to omit whatever would have destroyed the unity of the action.

Such wholesale literary appropriation-and I have omitted some of the details enumerated by Gervinus. -takes away one's breath. Never was there so magnificent a thief as Shakspeare. The mere skeleton of a play he laid hands on wherever he could find it. But all the more wonderful on this account must appear the magic-touch with which everything thus appropriated is made his own and the creative power with which he is able to clothe the skeleton with flesh and beauty, and breathe into it the breath of life.

Shakspeare, as Ben Jonson, the scholar, has recorded, knew little Latin and less Greek. In short, his acquaintance with the ancient world must have been acquired almost, if not altogether, through translations. Yet the atmosphere of the classical ages, which other men learn to feel by long years of study, was so perfectly caught by him, with the childlike instinct. of genius, that, scholars have to allow, it could not have been better reproduced even by the most learned. He falls, indeed, into superficial blunders, as when he