moval. In another sense, the hero is not Cæsar, but Brutus, in whom the poet saw a political idealist and generous dreamer, used as a tool by selfish men, who bring overwhelming disaster upon the state by their murder of the only man strong enough to save it. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare showed the character of a great Roman general, crumbling before the breath of Eastern luxury and sensuality, personified in Cleopatra, the "worm of old Nile." In Troilus and Cressida he drew a picture of faithlessness in love, a picture so cynical, so fierce in its bitterness, that it is almost impossible to think of it as the work of the hand which drew Juliet, Portia and Rosalind; and at the same time he deformed the heroic figures of Homeric legend with savage burlesque.

The Great Tragedies: "Hamlet."-In Hamlet, the first of the four great tragedies which form the "captain jewels in the carcanet" of the master's work, we have the spectacle of a sensitive and highly intellectual youth, endowed with all the gifts which make for greatness of living, suddenly confronted with the knowledge that his father has been murdered, and that his mother has married the murderer. Even before the revelation comes, Hamlet feels himself to be living in an alien moral world, and is haunted by dark misgivings. When his father's ghost appears to him, with its imperative injunction to revenge, Hamlet takes his resolution instantly. His feigned madness, an element of the drama retained by Shakespeare from the old story whence he drew the plot, is the first device which Hamlet hits upon to aid him in his dangerous duty. He gives up his love for Ophelia because he cannot take her with him into the dark pass which he is compelled to enter; and the scathing satire which he pours out upon her when he fancies her in league with Polonius and the king to play the spy upon him, gathers its force from the greatness of the renunciation he has made. His scheme for proving the king's guilt beyond a peradventure, by means of the strolling players, is carried through with ingenious skill. His dealings with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are those of a gifted man of action. Yet it is not wholly without reason that Hamlet has come to stand in most minds for a type of irresolution.

The exaltation of excitement in him causes his mind to play with feverish brilliancy over the questions of man's life and death. His throbbing, white-hot imagination becomes a meeting-place for grotesque and extravagant fancies. Again and again he loses hold of his enterprise in the intellectual excitement which possesses him, showing itself in bursts of fitful eloquence, in swift flashes of wit, in contemptuous irony and biting satire. From the first we feel that Hamlet is doomed irrevocably to ruin in the moral chaos where the "cursed spite" of his destiny has thrown him.

"Othello."--Othello has a certain likeness to Hamlet in that here also the hero's soul is thrown into violent perturbation by the discovery of evil poisoning the very sources of his life. In Othello's case the pathos and the tragedy are heightened by the fact that the evil exists only in the hero's imagination, into which we see the demon-like Iago pouring, drop by drop, the poison of suspicion. Othello is not by nature jealous. Desdemona, in answer to Emilia's question, "Is he not jealous?" says,

"Who, he? I think the sun, where he was born
Drew all such humors from him,"

and he everywhere shows himself "of an open and free nature," incapable of petty suspicion. When Iago, working cautiously, with diabolic skill, has at last convinced him that Desdemona is false, the fatal rage which seizes him derives its force from the very greatness of his love. The real centre of the play is Iago, with his "honest" manners, his blunt speech, his plausible zeal in his master's service; underneath all which his nature lies coiled like a snake, waiting for a chance to sting.

"Macbeth." In Macbeth, Shakespeare depicted the passion of ambition working in a nature morally weak, but endowed with an intense poetic imagination. Macbeth is a dreamer and a sentimentalist, capable of conceiving vividly the goal of his evil desires, but incapable either of resolute action in attaining them, or of a ruthless enjoyment of them when attained. By the murder of the king, Macbeth is

plunged into a series of crimes, in which he persists with a kind of faltering desperation, until he falls before the accumulated vengeance, material and ghostly, raised up to punish him. As, in Antony and Cleopatra, we are shown the slow degeneration of the hero's character under the slavery of sense, so here we behold the break-up of a soul under the torture of its own sick imagination. The ghost of Banquo, shaking its gory locks at Macbeth from its seat at the banquet table, is a symbol of the spiritual sickness which results from the working of a strong fancy upon a nature morally weak. The witch-hags who meet Macbeth on the heath are embodiments of the powers of evil, summoned from the four corners of the air by affinity with the evil heart of the schemer. Shakespeare did not, of course, consciously strive after symbolism in these things. It is not impossible that he believed in ghosts and witches, as did the great mass of men in his day, from King James down. It is certain that he was interested in his story, here and elsewhere, as a piece of life rather than as a moral symbol; his work is full of types and symbols simply because life itself is full of them.

Beside Macbeth Shakespeare has placed a woman who possesses all the masculine qualities which the hero lacks, but who is nevertheless intensely feminine in her devotion to her lord's interest, and in her inability to endure the strain of a criminal life after his support has been withdrawn from her. Her will, though majestic when in the prosperous service of her husband's ambition, collapses in sudden ruin when he fails to rise to the responsibilities of their grim situation. Macbeth's feebler moral substance crumbles piecemeal; but the firm structure of his wife's spirit, as soon as its natural foundation is destroyed, falls by instant overthrow.

King Lear."-King Lear is often put at the apex of Shakespeare's achievement, and by many judges at the head of the dramatic literature of the world. The story was as old as Geoffrey of Monmouth (see Chap. III), and, like so many of the themes which Shakespeare handled, had already been made the subject of a play, a crude effort by some nameless playwright during the experimental stage of Elizabethan drama. As was his constant custom, Shakespeare followed

the main lines of the story given him, and incorporated into his grand edifice every bit of usable material from the building of his predecessor. Lear is an imperious nature, wayward by temperament, and made more incapable of self-government by long indulgence of its passionate whims. At the opening of the play, we see him striving to find a refuge from himself by surrendering all his wealth and power in exchange for absolute love. He demands love not only in the spirit but in the letter, and thrusts his youngest daughter Cordelia from him with cruel brusqueness, when she refuses to use extravagant terms to describe her affection. Shakespeare has made the same brusque and hasty spirit of the king precipitate upon his old head the enmity of his remaining daughters, Goneril and Regan. Before he has recovered from the shock of Cordelia's loss, this awful pair of daughters lay bare, little by little, their monstrous souls to their father's gaze. As in Othello, the result of the revelation is to unhinge for the sufferer the very order of nature. As if in sympathy with the chaos in Lear's soul, the elements break loose; and in the pauses of the blast we hear the noise of violent crimes, curses, heart-broken jesting, the chatter of idiocy, and the wandering tongue of madness. The sentimentalist's phrase, "poetic justice," has no meaning for Shakespeare. The ruin wrought in the old king's heart and brain is irreparable, and the tornado which whirls him to his doom carries with it the just and the unjust. The little golden pause of peace, when Lear and Cordelia are united, is followed by the intolerably piercing scene in which he bears her dead body out of the prison, muttering that they have hanged his "poor fool."

The "Period of Reconciliation": Last Plays. The plays which mark the closing period of Shakespeare's life are pure romances, conceived in a spirit of deep and lovely serenity, and characterized by a silvery delicacy, a tender musing touch, which is new in the poet's work. The new mood finds beautiful expression in the pastoral under-play of A Winter's Tale, where Prince Florizel woos Perdita, the wild-flower maid. It shines out full-orbed in The Tempest, where Prospero sways with his magic the elements and the wills of men to his bidding, in the service of his daughter's happiness.

In this play all the powers of the master meet together; the grace that had created the fairy world of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the lyric passion that had breathed through Juliet's lips on her bridal morning, the drollery and wit that had set the laughter of centuries billowing about Falstaff, the titanic might that had sent a world crashing on the head of Lear-all meet together here, but curbed, softened, silvered down into exquisite harmony.

The Tempest is believed to have been written for the wedding ceremonies of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I., and Prince Frederick, the Elector Palatine, in 1613. If this is true, The Tempest was Shakespeare's farewell to his art. When scarcely fifty years of age, with his genius at its ripest, and every faculty of his mind in full play, he laid down his pen forever, as Prospero, at the end, abjures his magic, breaks his wand, and drowns his book "deeper than did ever plummet sound." One is tempted to indulge the fanciful parallel still further, and to think of Ariel, the delicate and potent sprite whom Prospero sets free, as the spirit of Imagination, now released from its long labors in the master's service.

Appreciation of Shakespeare in His Day.-The common opinion that Shakespeare was unappreciated by his own generation, is only partly true. If other evidence were lacking to prove the esteem in which he was held, his material prosperity would be sufficient to show at least his high popularity with the theatre-going public. But there is other witness that his genius was here and there recognized. His great rival, Ben Jonson, whose burly good sense was not prone to exaggeration, and who perhaps never quite conquered a feeling of jealousy toward Shakespeare, wrote for the first collective edition of the plays a eulogy full of deep, in places even passionate, admiration; and afterward said of him in a passage of moving sincerity, "I did love and honor him, on this side idolatry, as much as any." The most significant hint we have of his personal charm is in the adjective which is constantly applied to him by his friends, "gentle," a word also often used to describe his art, in allusion evidently to its humanity and poetic grace.