Chapter 3

"For nought so vile that on the earth doth liveBut to the earth some special good doth give;Nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use,Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,And vice sometimes by action dignified."

King John.

Written.(?)Published, in the first folio, 1623.Source of the Plot.Shakespeare's tragedy is founded on a play calledThe Troublesome Raigne of King John(author not known), which was printed (after stage performance) in 1591. Some people think that Shakespeare wroteThe Troublesome Raigne. There are some glimmerings of his mind here and there in it; but not many. Whether he wrote it or not he certainly made free use of it in writingKing John. He took from it with a bold hand, whenever he wished to spare himself mechanical labour. His other sources were the historians, Raphael Holinshed, Edward Hall, and Fabian.The Fable.King John has made himself King of England. Prince Arthur, who claims to be the rightful king (he is the son of King John's elder brother), causes the French King to support his claim. King John declares war against the French King.After some fighting in France the two kings patch up a peace. Arthur's claim is set aside. King John's niece is to marry the French King's son.At this point the Pope's legate causes the French King to break off the negotiations. The war begins again. King John captures Prince Arthur, and gives order that secretly he be put to death. England is ina disturbed condition. The French resolve to attempt the conquest of England.The report that Arthur has been murdered by the King's order sets England in turmoil. The French land in Kent. The lords find Arthur's dead body outside Northampton castle. They are convinced that King John has caused him to be murdered.King John finds that he cannot fight longer. He makes his submission to the Pope's legate, trusting that the legate may make the French King come to terms. The French King cannot be moved to peace. John summons up his forces, and gives successful battle to him. The English lords, who have allied themselves to the French King, break off and make their submission to King John. Without their help, the army is too weak. The French invasion comes to nothing. The Pope's legate makes peace. King John dies of poison given to him by a monk.

Written.(?)

Published, in the first folio, 1623.

Source of the Plot.Shakespeare's tragedy is founded on a play calledThe Troublesome Raigne of King John(author not known), which was printed (after stage performance) in 1591. Some people think that Shakespeare wroteThe Troublesome Raigne. There are some glimmerings of his mind here and there in it; but not many. Whether he wrote it or not he certainly made free use of it in writingKing John. He took from it with a bold hand, whenever he wished to spare himself mechanical labour. His other sources were the historians, Raphael Holinshed, Edward Hall, and Fabian.

The Fable.King John has made himself King of England. Prince Arthur, who claims to be the rightful king (he is the son of King John's elder brother), causes the French King to support his claim. King John declares war against the French King.

After some fighting in France the two kings patch up a peace. Arthur's claim is set aside. King John's niece is to marry the French King's son.

At this point the Pope's legate causes the French King to break off the negotiations. The war begins again. King John captures Prince Arthur, and gives order that secretly he be put to death. England is ina disturbed condition. The French resolve to attempt the conquest of England.

The report that Arthur has been murdered by the King's order sets England in turmoil. The French land in Kent. The lords find Arthur's dead body outside Northampton castle. They are convinced that King John has caused him to be murdered.

King John finds that he cannot fight longer. He makes his submission to the Pope's legate, trusting that the legate may make the French King come to terms. The French King cannot be moved to peace. John summons up his forces, and gives successful battle to him. The English lords, who have allied themselves to the French King, break off and make their submission to King John. Without their help, the army is too weak. The French invasion comes to nothing. The Pope's legate makes peace. King John dies of poison given to him by a monk.

Like the best Shakespearean tragedies,King Johnis an intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate the idea of treachery. The illustrations are very various. Perhaps the most interesting of them are those subtle ones that illustrate treachery to type, or want of conformity to a standard imagined or established.

In the historical plays, Shakespeare's mind broods on the idea that our tragical kings failed because they did not conform to a typelower than themselves. Henry V conforms to type. He has the qualities that impress the bourgeoisie. He is a success. Henry VI does not conform to type. He has the qualities of the Christian mystic. He is stabbed in the Tower. Edward IV conforms to type. He has the qualities that impress the rabble. He is a success. Richard II does not conform to type. He is a man of ideas. He is done to death at Pomfret. King John does not conform to type. His intellect is bigger than his capacity for affairs. He is poisoned by a monk at Swinstead.

King John presents that most subtle of all the images of treachery, a man who cannot conform to the standard of his own ideas. He fails as a king because his intellect prompts him to attempt what is really beyond the powers of his nature to perform. By his side, with an irony that is seldom praised, Shakespeare places the figure of the Bastard, the man who ought to have been king, the man fitted by nature to rule the English, the man without intellect but with a roughcapacity, the man whom we meet again, as a successful king, in the play ofHenry V.

King John is placed throughout the play in treacherous relations with life. He is a traitor to his brother's son, to his own ideas, to the English idea, and to his oath of kingship. He has a bigger intellect than any one about him. His brain is full of gusts and flaws that blow him beyond his age, and then let him sink below it. Persistence in any one course of treachery would give him the greatness of all well-defined things. He remains a chaos shooting out occasional fire.

The play opens with a scene that displays some of the human results of treachery. John's mother, Elinor, has been treacherous to one of her sons. John has usurped his brother's right, and, in following his own counsel, has been treacherous to his mother. These acts of treachery have betrayed England into a bloody and unjust war. The picture is turned suddenly. Another of the results of human treachery appears in the person of the Bastard, whose mother confesses that shewas seduced by the "long and vehement suit" of Cœur de Lion. The Bastard's half-brother, another domestic traitor, does not scruple to accuse his mother of adultery in the hope that, by doing so, he may obtain the Bastard's heritage.

The same breaking of faith for advantage gives points to the second act, where the French and English Kings turn from their pledged intention to effect a base alliance. They arrange to marry the Dauphin to Elinor's niece, Blanch of Castile. In the third act, before the fury of the constant has died down upon this treachery, the French King adds another falseness. He breaks away from the newly-made alliance at the bidding of the Pope's legate. The newly-married Dauphin treacherously breaks with his wife's party. In the welter of war that follows, the constant, human and beautiful figures come to heartbreak and death. The common people of England begin to betray their genius for obedience by preparing to rise against the man in power.

The fourth act begins with the famous scene in which Hubert fails to blind Prince Arthur. Even in the act of mercy he is treacherous. He breaks faith with King John, to whom he has vowed to kill the Prince. Later in the act, King John, thinking that the murder has been done, breaks faith with Hubert, by driving him from his presence. In the last act, the English nobles, who have been treacherous to John, betray their new master, the French King. King John is a broken man, unable to make head against misfortune. He betrays his great kingly idea, that the Pope shall not rule here, by begging the Legate to make peace. At this point death sets a term to treachery. A monk treacherously poisons John at a moment when his affairs look brighter. The play ends with the Bastard's well-known brag about England—

"Naught shall make us rueIf England to itself do rest but true."

This thought is one among many thoughts taken by Shakespeare from the play ofThe Troublesome Raigne, and taken by the author of that play direct from Holinshed'sChronicles.

Comedy deals with character and accident; tragedy with passionate moods of the soul in conflict with fate. In this play, as in nearly all poetical plays, the characters that are most minutely articulated are those commoner, more earthy characters, perceived by the daily mind, not uplifted, by brooding, into the rare state of passionate intellectual vision. These characters are triumphant creations; but they come from the commoner qualities in Shakespeare's mind. He did them easily, with his daily nature. What he did on his knees, with contest and bloody sweat, are his great things. The great scheme of the play is the great achievement, not the buxom boor who flouts the Duke of Austria, and takes the national view of his mother's dishonour.

Shakespeare, like other sensitive, intelligent men, saw that our distinctive products, the characters that we set most store by, are very strange. That beautiful kindness, high courage, and devoted service should go so oftenwith real animal boorishness and the incapacity to see more than one thing at a time (mistaken for stupidity by stupid people) puzzled him, as it puzzles the un-English mind to-day. A reader feels that in the figure of the Bastard he set down what he found most significant in the common English character. With the exceptions of Sir Toby Belch and Justice Shallow, the Bastard is the most English figure in the plays. He is the Englishman neither at his best nor at his worst, but at his commonest. The Englishman was never so seen before, nor since. An entirely honest, robust, hearty person, contemptuous of the weak, glad to be a king's bastard, making friends with women (his own mother one of them) with a trusty, good-humoured frankness, fond of fighting, extremely able when told what to do, fond of plain measures—the plainer the better, an honest servant, easily impressed by intellect when found in high place on his own side, but utterly incapable of perceiving intellect in a foreigner, fond of those sorts of humour which generally leadto blows, extremely just, very kind when not fighting, fond of the words "fair play," and nobly and exquisitely moved to deep, true poetical feeling by a cruel act done to something helpless and little. The completeness of the portrait is best seen in the suggestion of the man's wisdom in affairs. The Bastard is trying to find out whether Hubert killed Arthur, whose little body lies close beside them. He says that he suspects Hubert "very grievously." Hubert protests. The Bastard tests the protest with one sentence: "Go bear him in thine arms." He utters the commonplace lines—

"I am amaz'd, methinks, and lose my wayAmong the thorns and dangers of the world"—

while he watches Hubert's face. Hubert stands the test (the emotional test that none but an Englishman would apply), he picks up the body. Instantly the Bastard is touched to a tenderness that lifts Hubert to a spiritual comradeship with him—

"How easy dost thou take all England up."

This tragedy of the death of a child causes nearly all that is nobly poetical in the play.

All the passionately-felt scenes are about Arthur or his mother. Some have thought that Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596, shortly after the death of his little son Hamnet, aged eleven. The supposition accuses Shakespeare of a want of heart, of a want of imagination, or of both wants together. He wrote like every other writer, from his sense of what was fitting in an imagined situation. It was no more necessary for him to delay the writing of Prince Arthur till his son had died than it was for Dickens to wait till he had killed a real Little Dorrit by slow poison.

There is a great change in the manner of the poetical passages. The poetry of theHenry VIplays is mostly in bright, sweetly running groups of rhetorical lines. InKing Johnit is either built up elaborately into an effect of harmony several lines long, or it is put into a single line or couplet.

The rhetoric is compressed—

"That shakes the rotten carcase of old Death,"

and

"O death, made proud with pure and princely beauty,"

and

"Old Time the clock-setter, that bald sexton Time."

The finest poetry is intensely compressed—

"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,For grief is proud,"

and

"I have heard you say,That we shall see and know our friends in heaven.If that be true, I shall see my boy again,"

and

"When I shall meet him in the court of heavenI shall not know him."

The characters in this truly noble play daunt the reader with a sense of their creator'spower. It is difficult to know intimately any human soul, even with love as a lamp. Shakespeare's mind goes nobly into these souls, bearing his great light. It is very wonderful that the mind who saw man clearest should see him with such exaltation.

King Richard II.

Written.(?)Published.1597.Source of the Plot. The lives of King Richard II and King Henry IV in Raphael Holinshed'sChronicles.The Fable.I. The Duke of Gloucester, uncle of King Richard, has died under suspicious circumstances at Calais, after an accusation of treachery. Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, the King's cousin, accuses Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, of treachery to the King and of the murder of the Duke of Gloucester. The King appoints a day on which the two disputants may try their cause by combat. On their arrival at the lists he banishes them both, Bolingbroke for six years, Mowbray for ever. After they have gone to fulfil their sentence, the King plans to subdue the rebels in Ireland. He prays that the death of his uncle, John of Gaunt, the wisest man about him, may occur, so that he may take his money to equip soldiers.II. Gaunt dies. Richard seizes his estate (lawfully the property of Bolingbroke) and proceeds upon his Irish war. Bolingbroke lands from exile to claim his father's estate and title. Richard's Welsh forces grow weary of waiting for their king. They disband themselves.III. Bolingbroke's party prospers. Richard is taken and deposed.IV. Bolingbroke makes himself king.V. Richard, after sorrowing alone, and inspiring a hopeless attempt at restoration, is killed, desperately fighting, at Pomfret.

Written.(?)

Published.1597.

Source of the Plot. The lives of King Richard II and King Henry IV in Raphael Holinshed'sChronicles.

The Fable.I. The Duke of Gloucester, uncle of King Richard, has died under suspicious circumstances at Calais, after an accusation of treachery. Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, the King's cousin, accuses Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, of treachery to the King and of the murder of the Duke of Gloucester. The King appoints a day on which the two disputants may try their cause by combat. On their arrival at the lists he banishes them both, Bolingbroke for six years, Mowbray for ever. After they have gone to fulfil their sentence, the King plans to subdue the rebels in Ireland. He prays that the death of his uncle, John of Gaunt, the wisest man about him, may occur, so that he may take his money to equip soldiers.

II. Gaunt dies. Richard seizes his estate (lawfully the property of Bolingbroke) and proceeds upon his Irish war. Bolingbroke lands from exile to claim his father's estate and title. Richard's Welsh forces grow weary of waiting for their king. They disband themselves.

III. Bolingbroke's party prospers. Richard is taken and deposed.

IV. Bolingbroke makes himself king.

V. Richard, after sorrowing alone, and inspiring a hopeless attempt at restoration, is killed, desperately fighting, at Pomfret.

Treachery in some form is at the root of all Shakespearean tragedy. In this play it takes many forms, among which two are principal, the treachery of a king to his duty as a king, and the treachery of a subject to his duty as a subject. As usual in Shakespearean tragedy, the play is filled full by the abundant mind of the author with illustrations of his idea. The apricocks at Langley are like King Richard, the sprays of the trees like Bolingbroke, the weeds like the King's friends. Everybody in the play (even the horse in the last act) is in passionate relation to the central idea.

King Richard is of a type very interesting to Shakespeare. He is wilful, complex, passionate, with a beauty almost childish and a love of pleasure that makes him greedy of all gay, light, glittering things. He loves the music that does not trouble with passionand the thought not touched with the world. He loves that kind of false, delicate beauty which is made in societies where life is too easy. There is much that is beautiful in him. He has all the charm of those whom the world calls the worthless. His love is a woman, as beautiful and unreal as himself. He fails because, like other rare things, he is not common. The world cares little for the rare and the interesting. The world calls for the rough and common virtue that guides a plough in a furrow, and sergeantly chaffs by the camp fires. The soul that suffers more than other souls is little regarded here. The tragedy of the sensitive soul, always acute, becomes terrible when that soul is made king here by one of the accidents of life. As a king, Richard neglects his duties with that kind of wilfulness which the world never fails to punish. The wilfulness takes the form of a shutting of the eyes to all that is truly kingly. He rebukes devotion to duty by banishing Bolingbroke, who tries to rid him of a traitor. He rebukes old age and wisdomin the truly great person of old John of Gaunt. Worst, and most unkingly of all, he is incapable of seeing and rewarding the large generosity of mind that makes sacrifices for an idea. Richard, who likes beautiful things, cannot see the beauty of old, rough, dying Gaunt, who condemns his own son to exile rather than betray his idea of justice. Bolingbroke, who cares intensely for nothing but justice (and could not give even that caring a name, if questioned), is deeply and nobly generous to York, who would condemn his own son, and to the Bishop of Carlisle, who would die rather than not speak his mind. Men who sacrifice themselves are a king's only props. Richard allies himself with men who prefer to sacrifice the country.

It is a proof of the greatness of Shakespeare's vision, that Richard is presented to us both as the traitor and the betrayed. He is the anointed king false to his coronation oaths; he is the anointed king deposed by traitors. He is not fitted for kingship, but life has made him a king. Life, quite as muchas temperament, is to blame for his tragedy. When life and temperament have thrust him from kingship, this wilful, passionate man, so greedy and heady in his hurry to be unjust, is unlike the monster that office made him. He is no monster then, but a man, not even a man like ourselves, but a man of singular delicacy of mind, sensitive, strangely winning, who wrings our hearts with pity by his sense of his tragedy—

"And here have I the daintiness of earTo check time broke in a disorder'd string;But for the concord of my state and timeHad not an ear to hear my true time broke."

Part of his tragedy is due to his being too late. Had he landed from Ireland one day earlier he would have found a force of Welshmen ready to fight for him. At the end of the play he discovers, too late, that he is weary of patience. He strikes out like a man, when he has no longer a friend to strike with him. He is killed by a man who finds, too late, that the murder was not Bolingbroke's intention.

As in all the tragedies, there is much noble poetry. John of Gaunt's speech about England is often quoted. Shakespeare's mind is our triumph, not a dozen lines of rhetoric. Less well known are the couplets—

"My inch of taper will be burnt and done,And blindfold death not let me see my son."

and

"... let him not come there,To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere."

Those scenes in the last acts which display the mind of the deposed king are all exquisite, though their beauty is not obvious to the many. There is a kind of intensity of the soul, so intense that it is obscure to the many till it is interpreted. Writers of plays know well how tamely words intensely felt may read. They know, too, how like fire upon many souls those words will be when the voice and the action give them their interpretation.Richard II, like other plays of spiritual tragedy, needs interpretation. When he wrote it, Shakespeare had not wholly the power thatafterwards he achieved, of himself interpreting his vision by many-coloured images. It is not one of the beloved plays.

Bolingbroke has been praised as a manly Englishman, who is not "weak" like Richard, but "strong" and a man of deeds. In Act IV he shows his English kindness of mind and love of justice by a temperate wisdom in the trying of a cause and by saying that he will call back from exile his old enemy Norfolk. The Bishop of Carlisle tells him that that cannot be. Norfolk having worn himself out in the wars in Palestine has retired himself to Italy, and there, at Venice, given

"His body to that pleasant country's earth,And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,Under whose colours he had fought so long."

It is instructive to note how Bolingbroke takes the news—

Bol.Why, bishop, is Norfolk dead?Carl.As surely as I live, my lord.Bol.Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosomOf good old Abraham. Lords appellants,Your differences, etc.

Bol.Why, bishop, is Norfolk dead?

Carl.As surely as I live, my lord.

Bol.Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosomOf good old Abraham. Lords appellants,Your differences, etc.

The feeling that the poet's mind saw the clash as the clash between the common and the uncommon man is strengthened by the Queen's speech to Richard as he is led to prison—

"thou most beauteous inn,Why should hard-favour'd grief be lodged in thee,When triumph is become an alehouse guest?"

King Richard III.

Written.1594 (?)Published.1597.Source of the Plot.The play is founded on the lives of Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III, as given (on the authorities of Edward Hall and Sir Thomas More) in Holinshed'sChronicles. Shakespeare may have seen a worthless play (The True Tragedy of Richard III) which was published in 1594, by an unknown author.The Fable.Act I. The play begins in the last days of King Edward IV, when the King's two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, are debating who shall succeed to the throne when the King dies. In the first scene Clarence is led to the Tower under suspicion of plotting to succeed. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the cause of the committal, pretends to grieve for him, but hastens to compass his death. In the next scene Richard woos the Lady Anne (widow of the dead son of Henry VI, and daughterof the Earl of Warwick), who is likely to be useful to him for the moment as an ally (she being of the house of Lancaster). The third scene displays the passionate quarrelling of the Court factions. The Queen, her brothers and Richard's party, are cursed by Margaret of Anjou. In the fourth scene Clarence is murdered in the Tower.Act II. King Edward IV dies, having patched up a seeming truce between the factions. His son is to succeed him. Before this can happen, Richard strikes down the leaders of the Queen's party, and lays a deep scheme to secure the crown for himself.Act III. There is a deeply tragical scene in which the unsuspecting Hastings, who is faithful to Edward's memory, is hurried out of life. Afterwards, through the management of Buckingham, Richard is proclaimed King.Act IV. Richard makes himself sure by casting off Buckingham and causing the murder of Edward's sons in the Tower. He plots to marry Edward's daughter. But by this time the land is in upheaval against him. Buckingham and Richmond lead forces against him.Act V. Buckingham is taken and put to death; but Richmond's forces gather head. Richard leads his army to oppose them. The armies front each other at Bosworth Field near Leicester. The night before the battle the ghosts of the many slain during the progress of the Wars of the Roses menace Richard and promise victory to Richmond. In the battle that follows Richard is slain. Richmond takes oath to end the Wars of the Roses by marrying Edward's daughter, so that the two royal houses may at last be joined.

Written.1594 (?)

Published.1597.

Source of the Plot.The play is founded on the lives of Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III, as given (on the authorities of Edward Hall and Sir Thomas More) in Holinshed'sChronicles. Shakespeare may have seen a worthless play (The True Tragedy of Richard III) which was published in 1594, by an unknown author.

The Fable.Act I. The play begins in the last days of King Edward IV, when the King's two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, are debating who shall succeed to the throne when the King dies. In the first scene Clarence is led to the Tower under suspicion of plotting to succeed. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the cause of the committal, pretends to grieve for him, but hastens to compass his death. In the next scene Richard woos the Lady Anne (widow of the dead son of Henry VI, and daughterof the Earl of Warwick), who is likely to be useful to him for the moment as an ally (she being of the house of Lancaster). The third scene displays the passionate quarrelling of the Court factions. The Queen, her brothers and Richard's party, are cursed by Margaret of Anjou. In the fourth scene Clarence is murdered in the Tower.

Act II. King Edward IV dies, having patched up a seeming truce between the factions. His son is to succeed him. Before this can happen, Richard strikes down the leaders of the Queen's party, and lays a deep scheme to secure the crown for himself.

Act III. There is a deeply tragical scene in which the unsuspecting Hastings, who is faithful to Edward's memory, is hurried out of life. Afterwards, through the management of Buckingham, Richard is proclaimed King.

Act IV. Richard makes himself sure by casting off Buckingham and causing the murder of Edward's sons in the Tower. He plots to marry Edward's daughter. But by this time the land is in upheaval against him. Buckingham and Richmond lead forces against him.

Act V. Buckingham is taken and put to death; but Richmond's forces gather head. Richard leads his army to oppose them. The armies front each other at Bosworth Field near Leicester. The night before the battle the ghosts of the many slain during the progress of the Wars of the Roses menace Richard and promise victory to Richmond. In the battle that follows Richard is slain. Richmond takes oath to end the Wars of the Roses by marrying Edward's daughter, so that the two royal houses may at last be joined.

Richard IIIis the last of the great historicalplaysabout the Wars of the Roses. The subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare'smind for many months. He had traced them from their beginning in the long ago to their end among the dead at Bosworth. All that bloodiness of misery was due to a forgotten marriage and the chance that Edward III had seven sons, the eldest of whom died before his father. In this great tragic vision Shakespeare saw the wheel come full circle, with that giving of justice which life renders at last, though it may be to the dead, or the mad, or the broken.

Largely, this play deals with the coming of that justice. Much that is most wonderful in the play comes from the faith that blood cruelly or unjustly spilt cries from the ground, and that the human soul, wrought to an ecstasy, has power, as the blood has power, to draw God's hand upon the guilty. But Shakespeare's mind was also occupied with the knowledge that self-confident intellect is terrible and tragical. One of the truths of the play is the very sad one that being certain is in itself a kind of sin, sure to be avenged by life. The obsession of self-confidence betraysperson after person, to misery or death. All the heads that lift themselves proudly go bloody to the dust or bow in anguish. Only one man moves by other light than his own. He is the only one who achieves quiet triumph. Nothing in the play is more impressive than the speech in which the intellect that has ended the bloodshed prays humbly that God may bless and help England with peace.

It was said of Napoleon that he was as great as a man can be without virtue. The intellect of Richard III is like that of Napoleon. It is restless, swift, and sure of its power. It is sure, too, that the world stays as it is from something stupid in the milky human feelings. Richard is a "bloody dog" let loose in a sheep-fold. It is a part of the tragedy that he is nobler than the sheep that he destroys. His is the one great intellect in the play. Intellect is always rare. In kings it is very rare. When a great intellect is made bitter by being cased in deformity one has the tragedy of intellect turned upon itself. Had Richard been born without his deformed shoulder hecould have known human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse he goes gloating, clutching himself, biting his lip, muttering at the twist in his shadow. This warped, starved mind knows himself stronger than the minds near him. It is tragical to be deformed, it is tragical to have an intellect too great for people to understand. But the deformed and bitter intellect would suffer tragedy indeed if he, the one constant Yorkist, were to be ruled by a gentle, half-witted Lancastrian saint like Henry VI, or by Clarence the perjurer, or by the upstart Woodville, a commoner made noble because his sister took the King's fancy, or by the Queen herself, the housewife who caused great Warwick's death, or by one of her sons, who are pert to the man who had spilt his blood to make their father king. The snarling intellect bites rather than suffer that. It is very terrible, but how if he had not bitten? The vision of all this bloodiness is less terrible than that vision of the sheep triumphing, so dear to us moderns—

"Strength by limping sway disabled,And art made tongue-tied by authority,And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill."

As in all Shakespeare's greater plays, a justice brings evil upon the vow breaker. Curses called down in the solemn moment come home to roost when the solemnity is forgotten or thrust aside. Clarence, who broke his oath to the House of Lancaster, is done to death by his brother. Anne, cursing the killer of her husband, curses the woman who shall marry him, is, herself, that woman, and dies wretchedly. Grey, Rivers, Dorset, Buckingham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call down curses on him that breaks them, themselves break them, and die wretchedly. Richard, too wise to make oaths, too strong to curse, dies, as his mother foretells, "by God's just ordinance," when the measure of the blood of his victims becomes too great, and when his victims' curses, after wandering from heart to heart, get them into human bodies and walk the world, executing justice.

All through the play there are warningsagainst human certainty. Of all the dangerous pronouncements of man that to the fountain, "Fountain, of thy water I will never drink," is one of the most dangerous. There are terrible examples of certainty betrayed. Richard is certain as only fine intellect can be that he will triumph. It is a part of his tragedy that it is not intellect that triumphs in this world, but a stupid, though a righteous something, incapable of understanding intellect. Rivers and Grey are certain that Richard is friendly to them. They are hurried to Pomfret and put to death. Hastings "Knows his state secure," and "goes triumphant." He is rushed out of life at a moment's notice, one hour a lord, giving his opinion at a council, the next a corpse in its grave. Buckingham thinks himself secure. A moment's nicety of conscience sends him flying to death. The little Princes lay down to sleep—

"girdling one anotherWithin their innocent alabaster arms.Their lips were four red roses on a stalkWhich in their summer beauty kissed each other"—

when their waking time came they were stamped down under the stones at the stair foot.

The poetry of this play is that of great and high spiritual invention. There is much that stays in the mind as exquisitely said and beautifully felt. But the wonder of the work is in the greatness of the conception. That is truly great, both as poetry and as drama. The big and burning imaginings do not please, they haunt.

The dream of Clarence, the wooing of the Lady Anne, the scene in Baynard's Castle, and the ghost scene in the tents at Bosworth, have been praised and re-praised. They are in Shakespeare's normal mood, neither greater nor less than twenty other scenes in the mature plays. The really grand scene of the calling down of the curses (Act I, sc. iii), when the man's mind, after brooding on this event for months, sees it all, for a glowinghour, as the just God sees it, is the wonderful achievement. Think of this scene, and think of the scenes played nightly now in the English theatres, and ask whether all is well with the nation's soul.

There are many superb Shakespearean openings. No poet in history opens a play with a more magnificent certainty. The opening of this play—

"Now is the winter of our discontentMade glorious summer by this sun of York,"

is one of the most splendid of all. There is no need to pick out fragments from the rest of the play, but the march of the line—

"Your fire-new stamp of honour is scarce current"—

the lines—

"then came wandering byA shadow like an angel, with bright hairDabbled in blood; and he squeaked out aloud,'Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury'"—

the exquisitely tender lines—

"And there the little souls of Edward's childrenWhisper the spirits"—

and the orders of Richard in the last act, for white Surrey to be saddled, ink and paper to be brought, and a bowl of wine to be filled, show that the poet's great confident manner was formed, on all the four sides of its perfection. The years only brought it to a deeper glow.

The Merchant of Venice.

Written.(?)Published.1600.Source of the Plot.The ancient story of the merciless Jew is told in theGesta Romanorum, and re-told, with delicate grace, by Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-century Italian writer, in hisIl Pecorone(the simpleton), a collection of novels, or, as we should call them, short stories. The story of the three caskets is also told in theGesta Romanorum. Other incidents in the play are taken from other sources, possibly from other plays. It is thought by some that the character of Shylock was suggested by the case of the Spanish Jew, Lopez, who was hanged, perhaps unjustly, for plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth, in 1594. The main source of the dramatic fable is Fiorentino's story.The Fable.Portia, the lady of Belmont, has three caskets, one of gold, one of silver, one of lead. She isvowed to marry the man who, on viewing the caskets, guesses which of them contains her portrait. Various attempting suitors fail to guess rightly.Bassanio, eager to try the hazard, obtains money from his friend Antonio, to equip him. Antonio borrows the money from the Jew, Shylock, on condition that, should he fail to repay the debt by a fixed day, a pound of his flesh shall be forfeit to the Jew.Bassanio guesses rightly and weds Portia.Antonio fails to repay the debt, and is lodged in prison. Bassanio hears of his friend's disaster. Portia bids him fly to Antonio with money enough to pay the debt threefold. Shylock refuses the offer. He clamours for his pound of flesh. The case comes to trial.At the hearing of the case in the Duke's court, Portia, disguised as a judge, gives sentence, that Shylock may have his pound of flesh; but that if he shed Christian blood in the taking of it, his life will be forfeit. Shylock is confounded further by a charge of endangering a Christian's life. He is fined and humbled. Portia, still in disguise, asks as her fee a ring that she has given to Bassanio. Bassanio, hesitating, at last gives the ring, and returns home without it. Portia's pretended indignation at the loss of the ring ends the last act with comedy.

Written.(?)

Published.1600.

Source of the Plot.The ancient story of the merciless Jew is told in theGesta Romanorum, and re-told, with delicate grace, by Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-century Italian writer, in hisIl Pecorone(the simpleton), a collection of novels, or, as we should call them, short stories. The story of the three caskets is also told in theGesta Romanorum. Other incidents in the play are taken from other sources, possibly from other plays. It is thought by some that the character of Shylock was suggested by the case of the Spanish Jew, Lopez, who was hanged, perhaps unjustly, for plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth, in 1594. The main source of the dramatic fable is Fiorentino's story.

The Fable.Portia, the lady of Belmont, has three caskets, one of gold, one of silver, one of lead. She isvowed to marry the man who, on viewing the caskets, guesses which of them contains her portrait. Various attempting suitors fail to guess rightly.

Bassanio, eager to try the hazard, obtains money from his friend Antonio, to equip him. Antonio borrows the money from the Jew, Shylock, on condition that, should he fail to repay the debt by a fixed day, a pound of his flesh shall be forfeit to the Jew.

Bassanio guesses rightly and weds Portia.

Antonio fails to repay the debt, and is lodged in prison. Bassanio hears of his friend's disaster. Portia bids him fly to Antonio with money enough to pay the debt threefold. Shylock refuses the offer. He clamours for his pound of flesh. The case comes to trial.

At the hearing of the case in the Duke's court, Portia, disguised as a judge, gives sentence, that Shylock may have his pound of flesh; but that if he shed Christian blood in the taking of it, his life will be forfeit. Shylock is confounded further by a charge of endangering a Christian's life. He is fined and humbled. Portia, still in disguise, asks as her fee a ring that she has given to Bassanio. Bassanio, hesitating, at last gives the ring, and returns home without it. Portia's pretended indignation at the loss of the ring ends the last act with comedy.

The play resolves itself into a simple form. It illustrates the clash between the emotional and the intellectual characters, the man of heart and the man of brain. The man of heart, Antonio, is obsessed by a tenderness for his friend. The man of brain is obsessed by a lust to uphold intellect in a thoughtlessworld that makes intellect bitter in every age. Shylock is a man of intellect, born into a despised race. It is his tragedy that the generous Gentiles about him can be generous to everything except to intellect and Jewish blood. Intellect and Jewish blood are too proud to attempt to understand the Gentiles who cannot understand.

Shylock is a proud man. The Gentiles, who are neither proud nor intellectual, spit upon him and flout him. One of them beguiles his daughter and teaches her to rob him. Another of them signs a mad bond to help an extravagant friend to live in idleness. Bitter, lonely brooding upon these things strengthen the Jew's obsession, till the words, "I can cut out the heart of my enemy," become the message of his entire nature. Half the evils in life come from the partial vision of people in states of obsession. Shylock's obsession grows till he is in the Duke's court, whetting his knife upon his shoe, before what Pistol calls "incision."

Portia has been much praised during twocenturies of criticism. She is one of the smiling things created in the large and gentle mood that moved Shakespeare to comedy. The scene in the fifth act, where the two women, coming home from Venice by night, see the candle burning in the hall, as they draw near, is full of a naturalness that makes beauty quick in the heart. Shakespeare enjoyed the writing of this play. The construction of the last two acts shows that his great happy mind was at its happiest in the saving of these creatures of the sun from something real.

The Taming of the Shrew.

Written.(?)Published.1623.Source of the Plot.The induction and that part of the play which treats of Petruchio and Katharina is based upon a play, published in 1594, under the titleThe Taming of A Shrew, author not known. The other part is based onThe Supposesof George Gascoigne, a comedy adapted from Ariosto'sI Suppositi.The Fable.Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the performance of this play before him.The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames the shrew Katharina; in the other, Katharina's sister Bianca iswooed by lovers in disguise. The two plots have little connection with each other. That which relates to Petruchio and Katharina is certainly by Shakespeare. The other seems to be by a dull man who did not know his craft as a dramatist.

Written.(?)

Published.1623.

Source of the Plot.The induction and that part of the play which treats of Petruchio and Katharina is based upon a play, published in 1594, under the titleThe Taming of A Shrew, author not known. The other part is based onThe Supposesof George Gascoigne, a comedy adapted from Ariosto'sI Suppositi.

The Fable.Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the performance of this play before him.

The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames the shrew Katharina; in the other, Katharina's sister Bianca iswooed by lovers in disguise. The two plots have little connection with each other. That which relates to Petruchio and Katharina is certainly by Shakespeare. The other seems to be by a dull man who did not know his craft as a dramatist.

In the Induction, and in the speech of Biondello (in Act III) Shakespeare enters a mood of memory of the country. In the song at the end ofLove's Labour's Losthe showed a matchless sense of country life. That sense, at once robust and sweet, now gives life to a few scenes in the plays. These scenes are mostly in prose; but they have the rightness of poetry. In writing them, he wrought with his daily nature, from something intimately known, or inbred in him, during childhood. Man can only write happily from a perfect understanding. All men can describe with point and colour what they knew as children. These country scenes in Shakespeare are happier than anything else in the plays because they come, not from anything read or heard, but from the large, genial nature made by years of life amongthe farms and sheep-walks at the western end of the Cotswolds.

Sly.Y' are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Thereforepaucas pallabris; let the world slide:Sessa!Hostess.You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?Sly.No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.

Sly.Y' are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Thereforepaucas pallabris; let the world slide:Sessa!

Hostess.You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?

Sly.No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.

In the third act, Biondello's description of the appearance of Petruchio's horse has the abundance of the great mind.

" ... possessed with the glanders and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten; near legged before and with a half-cheeked bit and a headstall of sheep's leather."

It is something no longer possible in a city theatre. Neither the dramatist nor the audience of to-day knows a horse as the Elizabethan had to know him. The speech sets one wondering at the art of the unknown Elizabethan actor who first spoke hurriedly this speech of strange words full of sibilants.

Shakespeare's share in the play (the scenes in which the shrew and her tamer appear) is farce with ironic philosophical intention. He indicates the tragedy that occurs when a manly spirit is born into a woman's body. Katharina is vexed and plagued by forced submission to a father who cannot see her merit, and by jealousy of a gentle, useless sister. She, who is entirely honest, sees the brainless Bianca, whom no amount of schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly, she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor who cares only for his own will, her flesh, and her money. In a page and a half of melancholy claptrap broken Katharina endeavours to persuade us that

"Such duty as the subject owes the prince,Even such a woman oweth to her husband."

Perhaps it is the way of the world. Women betray womanhood as much by mildness as by wiles. Meanwhile, what duty does a man owe to a fine, free, fearless spirit dragged down to his by commercial bargain with a father who is also a fool?

King Henry IV, Part I.

Written.(?)Published.1598.Source of the Plot.Most of the comic scenes are the fruit of Shakespeare's invention. A very popular play,The Famous Victories of Henry V, by an unknown hand, gave him the suggestion for an effective comic scene. In the historical scenes he follows closely theChroniclesof Holinshed.The Fable.The play treats of the rising of Henry Hotspur, Lord Percy, against Henry IV of England, and of the turning of the mind of Henry, Prince of Wales, from low things to things more worthy his birth. It ends with the killing of Hotspur, by the Prince of Wales, on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. Hotspur is an uncommon man, whose uncommonness is unsupported by his father at a critical moment. Henry, Prince of Wales, is a common man, whose commonness props his father, and helps him to conquer. The play is about a son too brilliant to be understood, and a son too common to understand.

Written.(?)

Published.1598.

Source of the Plot.Most of the comic scenes are the fruit of Shakespeare's invention. A very popular play,The Famous Victories of Henry V, by an unknown hand, gave him the suggestion for an effective comic scene. In the historical scenes he follows closely theChroniclesof Holinshed.

The Fable.The play treats of the rising of Henry Hotspur, Lord Percy, against Henry IV of England, and of the turning of the mind of Henry, Prince of Wales, from low things to things more worthy his birth. It ends with the killing of Hotspur, by the Prince of Wales, on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. Hotspur is an uncommon man, whose uncommonness is unsupported by his father at a critical moment. Henry, Prince of Wales, is a common man, whose commonness props his father, and helps him to conquer. The play is about a son too brilliant to be understood, and a son too common to understand.

The play treats of a period some four years after the killing of King Richard II. Itopens at a time when the oaths of Henry Bolingbroke, to do justice, have been broken on all sides, lest the injustice of his assumption of kingship should be recognised and punished by those over whom he usurps power. The King is no longer the just, rather kind, man of affairs who takes power in the earlier, much finer play. He is a swollen, soured, bullying man, with all the ingratitude of a king and all the baseness of one who knows his cause to be wrong. Opposed to him is a passionate, quick-tempered man, ready to speak his mind, on the instant, to any whom he believes to be unjust or false.

This quick-tempered man, Lord Percy, has done the King a signal service. Instead of asking for reward he tries to persuade the King to be just to a man who has suffered wounds and defeat for him. The King calls him a liar for his pains.

Percy, stung to the quick, rebels. Others rebel with him, among them some who are too wise to be profitable on a council of war. War does not call for wisdom, but for swiftness in striking. Percy, who is framed for swiftness in striking, loses half of his slender chance because his friends are too wise to advise desperate measures. Nevertheless, his troops shake the King's troops. The desperate battle of Shrewsbury is very nearly a triumph for him. Then the Prince meets him and kills him. He learns too late that a passionate longing to right the wrong goes down before the rough and stupid something that makes up the bulk of the world. He learns that

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