makes one of the Trojan heroes speak of Aristotle or one of the characters in Coriolanus mention Cato; but it may be doubted whether he was not himself aware of these anachronisms; and it is infinitely easier to be correct in such trifles than accurately to reproduce the spirit of the ancient world. Perhaps this Roman stamp is most distinctly felt in Coriolanus. The characters have the force, the individuality and the severe simplicity of ancient sculpture. As you read, you feel how natural it was that this race should have descended from brothers who were suckled by a wolf; that it should have produced men like Curtius and Cato and women like Lucretia and Cornelia; that the tramp of its legions should have shaken the world; that its military roads, uniting country to country, should have been so constructed that they have lasted to the present day; and that its system of law should have laid the ground-work of all modern legislation. In Antony and Cleopatra the mighty force of Rome is also everywhere felt; but the atmosphere is not so distinctively Roman. The prodigal and magnificent manhood of the hero masters the author and runs away with him, so that he forgets the Roman in the man; and he departs more from the literal record than in the other plays. Coleridge says of Antony and Cleopatra that it ranks with the four great tragedies; and well may he say so; for the power, accumul ating as it proceeds, rises in the last two acts into overwhelming sublimity. 1 Julius Cæsar is, however, the most perfect of these three plays. Its art has, indeed, been objected to, because it is a question who is the hero-whether Julius Cæsar, after whom it is named, or Brutus. I have heard a German Shakspeare Society discuss this question for hours, when the orators were hidden in clouds of tobacco-smoke, and the arguments were washed down with rivers of bad beer. But, whatever may be said on such a technical point, this is one of the few plays in which Shakspeare exhibits all the resources of a perfect workman. Antony and Cleopatra has a keener human interest and displays a more gigantic power; but it exhibits also a giant's violence and lack of control; the material strays about like an unkept wood; and there are portions which only retard and obscure the movement of the whole. But in Julius Cæsar everything superfluous is pruned away. It is as if the poet had loved his work and gone over it again and again, giving the finishing touches, as a sculptor does to his statue. In Coriolanus the thought is frequently obscure; you feel as if you were reading a corrupt text; the interior heat is not intense enough to raise the meaning into relief. But in Julius Cæsar such is the intensity of the poetic inspiration that the language is resonant, the thought clearly intelligible, and the movement swift and sure from the first page to the last. Nowhere else, even in Shakspeare, do you come upon more passages which you would like to quote. In respect of perfection of execution Julius Cæsar among the Histories ranks with Macbeth among the Tragedies and the Merchant of Venice among the Comedies; but it excels both. I do not say, by any means, that it is the greatest of Shakspeare's plays; but it is the most perfect; and, if one wished to tempt anyone who had read nothing of Shakspeare, this would be the play to place in his hands. In Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar Shakspeare has chosen for illustration two of the critical moments of Roman history-the one the point, in early ages, when aristocracy was passing into democracy, the other the point, in later times, at which the republic was passing into the empire. Antony and Cleopatra is a kind of appendix to Julius Cæsar: and in it the political situation is unchanged. These plays being thus derived from junctures of history when opposite political principles were in violent collision, it might be natural to expect in them the discussion of the rival theories of government. And in Coriolanus at all events, it might be maintained, this expectation is realised. History says that, in the earliest ages, Rome was ruled first by kings and then by an oligarchy. But the common people fretted under the government of the nobles and claimed a share in the management of the state which they had helped to create. At last their complaints were rendered so urgent and ominous by the pinch of famine that the nobles had to a certain extent to give way: officers, named tribunes, were created to watch over the interests of the common people, whose voice was also declared to be necessary before the consuls, the highest officers of state, could be duly elected. Of these changes Coriolanus is the bitter opponent; in him is concentrated the arrogant tradition of the aristrocracy. He hates the common people and ridicules their tribunes. Shakspeare gives him full scope. Coriolanus calls the common people to their faces curs and geese, scabs and measles of the state; they are "the mutable, rankscented many"; their tribunes are tritons among the minnows; when they are perishing of hunger, he dissents from the vote of the senate to give them free corn : They say there's grain enough. Would the nobility lay aside their ruth And let me use my sword, I'd make a quarry With thousands of these quartered slaves, as high As I could pick my lance. He argues with intense conviction that there cannot be two masters in the state :— My soul aches To know, when two authorities are up, May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take The people, being by far the more numerous of the parties in the state, will have the bigger poll; and, if wisdom cannot act without waiting on the yea or nay of ignorance, it must omit real necessities, and nothing will be done to purpose. But Shakspeare introduces a far keener reasoner on the same side in Menenius Agrippa. Menenius is as thorough an aristocrat as Coriolanus, but has far more coolness and shrewdness. Unlike Coriolanus, he has no dislike to mingle with common men, though he has quite as little faith in their virtues. He does not, like Coriolanus, denounce the tribunes, but unmercifully chaffs them-taking the coats of office, so to speak, off their backs and showing what mechanic souls are hidden within them. Here is Shakspeare's rendering of his famous fable of the Stomach and the Members: Menenius is surrounded by an angry mob of mutinous citizens, whom he is endeavouring to quiet; and he says: I shall tell you A pretty tale; it may be you have heard it; |
