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of bookish men, even Cassius being a philosopher; but the fruits fall to the men of action. Coleridge says

that the scene between Brutus and Cassius, in the third Scene of the fourth Act, is one of those which convince him that Shakspeare was superhuman. Yet Antony's speech is greater still. This play should be read along with Antony and Cleopatra. The mob as fickle as in Coriolanus.

24. HAMLET.

1602 or 1604. Class A. The subject is the Contrast between Ideal and Real. Goethe's idea, in the criticism of this play in Wilhelm Meister, is the right one: an artistic nature, intending a life of pure, independent creation, summoned to a practical task, for which it proves to be unfit. The execution is full of passages affording opportunities to actors, with whom it is, therefore, popular; but it is not totus, teres atque rotundus, like Julius Cæsar or The Tempest. There is a tendency to verbiage; and it is absurd to suppose that any actors would have played such a piece as the interlude in such a court at such a time. Nevertheless, the verdict of the world, giving to this drama the foremost place, is no doubt just. In the same way, there are plays of Goethe more immaculate than Faust.

25. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. About 1603 or 1609. Class C. The subject is War with the Gilt off. The madness of Greece, in wasting its resources on Helen

of Troy, is exhibited in miniature in the frenzy of Troilus for Cressida. Love is here only a sensual passion and a mad pursuit, exciting men to their ruin for nothing. It is the same view as is set forth in the second section of the Sonnets. Ulrici supposes a satire on the revival of antiquity and on Ben Jonson. The heroes of Troy were only powerful brutes; observe the horribly vulgar way in which Hector is slain by Achilles. The Greeks are at bottom more barbarous than the Trojans. In the minds of Pandar and Thersites love and war are imaged with all the chivalry and romance absent. But even Ulysses, who looks from a higher level, has to acknowledge the baseness and brutality; he at once penetrates Cressida, and, therefore, he assists at the disillusionment of Troilus. At the end of the first Scene, in the fourth Act, Diomedes puts the whole case with brutal plainness. The language and the entire treatment gave an extraordinary impression of power, capable of wielding any subject in any manner.

26. OTHELLO. About 1604. Class A. The subject is Marriage. In spite of Ulrici, I think Shakspeare intended in this play to expound the rationality which underlies conventionalism. Marriage where there is difference of age, station and race, is likely to prove unfortunate, even though the favoured party have, like Othello, virtue and services. His disadvantages

make him jealous; the Moorish nature, held down by virtue, reasserts itself. Iago is almost the hero; and then the play would be a history of selfishness. In Iago's speeches extraordinary clearness and vigour. He is a thorough disbeliever in human nature, especially in woman; but Emilia, by turning upon her husband at last, proves him mistaken. Iago to be compared with Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles. Desdemona is like one of Thackeray's women, utterly lost in the man she loves; something exquisitely touching in her inability to believe in any woman's unfaithfulness. Frequent references to drunkenness, as in Macbeth.

1603 or 1604.

27. MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Class B. The subject is Pharisaism. The title is explained in the Duke's speech at the close of the third Act:

He who the sword of Heaven will bear

Should be as holy as severe.

Shame to him whose cruel striking

Kills for faults of his own liking!

Sensual sin in every degree. The execution is of sombre magnificence, and there is a world of character: Angelo in the centre, the dazzling purity of Isabella, the levity of Lucio, the mild wisdom of the Duke. The expedient in which Mariana is a tool occurs also in All's Well That Ends Well; and in both of these plays religion is prominent.

28. MACBETH. 1605 or 1606. Class A. The subject is Sorcery; see it expressed in the last Scene of the last Act:

And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense,

That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope;

and again, in the third Scene of the first Act:-
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's

In deepest consequence.

Or, the theme may be the Effect of False Ambition on a Noble Nature. Conscience, also, is here in all its majesty and revenge. The execution is marked by the most blood-curdling power. In Lady Macbeth is exhibited the badness of the bad among women. The comic supernatural in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the ideal supernatural in The Tempest; between these the Witches in this play. The composition of a drama on a Scottish theme may have been a compliment to James the First, a priceless patron to the dramatist.

29. KING LEAR. 1605 or 1606. Class B. The subject is the Filial Relation: its beautiful side in Cordelia and Edgar, the reverse in Goneril, Regan and Edmund. But may not the evil in children be due to

the parents' faults? Gloster's sin is apparent; Lear also has a filthy mind, the dregs of which may reappear in the wild-beast nature of his daughters; see this hinted as the theme in the last Scene of the last Act:

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

There is much in this play about the Uses of Adversity. In the execution there is a good deal of obscurity and confusion, yet a rude, primordial strength pervades the whole. Lear is bombastic, till he loses his reason, when his figure becomes gigantic. "Nothing in poetry is bolder or more wonderful," says Dowden, "than the scene on the night of the storm in the hovel, where the King, whose intellect has now given way, is in company with Edgar assuming madness, the Fool with his forced pathetic mirth, and Kent." Count Tolstoi passed on this play very depreciatory criticism on account of the monstrosity of Lear's daughters; but Dowden has this excuse for the unnatural elements: "The reader is asked to grant certain data, and then to observe what the imagination can make of them". Is this, however, convincing? This is one of the places where I find it difficult to agree with the greatest critical authorities, who raise this drama to the front rank.

30. TIMON OF ATHENS. 1607 or 1608, or 1610.

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