"A Winter's Tale" account for some metrical peculiarities. We pass, therefore, to the ripest fruit of Shakespeare's maturity, Coriolanus. As the poet in Cymbeline, so here the statesman is most prominent; and the date of 1610, defensible on other grounds, is rendered more probable by the political excitement of that year arising from the dissensions between King and Parliament. This view has been condemned as fanciful. We subscribe, nevertheless, to Sarrazin's opinion that "We are continually discovering that the great dramatist wrote more for his time and from his time than we have been accustomed to think." Nothing could move him more sensibly than this contest between Crown and Commons, King's servant as he was, under special obligation to his sovereign, and entirely conservative in his views of society and politics. He had already poured withering scorn upon the English mob in his picture of Cade and his rabble followers, and upon the Roman mob in the scenes attending Cæsar's funeral; Coriolanus gave him an opportunity of striking not merely at the multitude but at their leaders, for the Tribunes correspond to the refractory members of the lower House. The opportunity is used unsparingly, but at the same time the play is kept from degenerating into a party manifesto, not by extenuating the faults of the populace, but by pointing out equal faults in the aristocracy represented by Coriolanus. Shakespeare has merely to follow the narrative of Plutarch, which shows how the pride of a high-minded man, over-conscious of his real worth, begets haughtiness, and haughtiness insolence, and insolence unpopularity, and unpopularity banishment, and banishment treason, and how treason would have begotten infamy if, yielding to his better inspired mother and spouse, he had not at the last moment redeemed his honour at the sacrifice of his life. The admirable construction of the play is perhaps rather due to Plutarch than to Shakespeare; the characters, unsurpassable for force and truth, are mainly modelled after his hints; but Shakespeare, who never saw a Roman, has assimilated the Roman spirit far more perfectly than Plutarch, who lived under the sway of Rome. Menenius, Virgilia, Volumnia, are not moderns in classical masquerade, but Romans come to England. No play of Shakespeare's is more replete with pithy wisdom; but this is sometimes impaired by contorted obscurity of expression. He has in general such power of delivering himself as he wishes that he has become impatient and resentful of difficulties, and when they arise coerces language in an imperious fashion neither consistent with elegance nor with perspicuity. A Winter's Tale had probably not been long upon the stage when Simon Forman saw it in May 1611. All the new features of style and versification conspicuous in Cymbeline and Coriolanus are developed in this play to a still further extent. In borrowing his plot from Greene's Pandosto, Shakespeare appears to us to have for the first time built upon a sandy foundation. The interval of time in the middle, making virtually two dramas, is unfortunate; but the main defect is the utter unreasonableness of the jealousy of Leontes, which makes the foundation of the action. In such cases sympathy should be excited for the misguided offender as well as for the injured innocents. "A WINTER'S TALE" 249 Shakespeare has achieved this for Othello and Posthumus, but with Leontes even his art fails; the case is too flagrant. It may be granted that, psychologically, the character is a splendid study of monomania, of obsession by one fixed idea, but the exhibition of such unreason begets a feeling of angry impatience in the spectator, which cannot be allayed even by the nobility of Hermione, or the marvellous vigour and truth of the portrait of Paulina. The last two acts, on the other hand, revive the Shakespeare of As You Like It, who has written nothing more truly delectable than this rural idyll, the charm of which is enhanced by the consideration that he is himself a part of it, now that he is living in the country and depicting the life around him. In Perdita and her successor Miranda he displays An art Which does mend nature-change it rather, but The art itself is nature. All his preceding heroines have been carefully and substantially painted, and we well know why we admire them. They "have titles manifold." Perdita and Miranda are beautiful visions, ethereal impersonations of ideal loveliness; they do nothing, for they have nothing to do; and yet we have as clear a mental picture of them as of any of their forerunners, and are as entirely in love with them as their own swains can be. This is especially the case with Miranda; something more of substantiality is communicated to Perdita by the outbreak of pride and spirit in the midst of her humiliation, so delicately introduced to indicate that, though she knows it not, her veins run with royal blood: I was not much afeard for once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which Shakespeare is thought to have co- "The Two operated with Fletcher, may be probably assigned to 1611. The theory men" of the joint authorship has the support of the two writers' alliance in Henry VIII. two years later, and of the publication of the play with both. their names in 1634. It further fits in well with the tradition of Shakespeare's obligation to furnish two plays annually at a time when he was becoming Noble Kins "The Tempest" more and more absorbed in the details of country life, and less and less inclined to write for the stage. His hand is most discernible in the first and fifth acts. "All the passages," says Mr. Lee, "for which he can on any showing be held responsible develop the main plot, which is drawn from Chaucer's Knight's Tale." The omission of the play from the Folio is not a proof that Shakespeare had no share in it, for the editors left out Pericles, and, as Mr. Fleay makes probable, were on the point of omitting Timon. After Hamlet, The Tempest has the most personal interest of any of Shakespeare's works, for as his last important production it gives his latest views on life and mankind. It follows out the same tendency as has been remarked in Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, to large and liberal views of life, serene tranquillity, contented acquiescence in the lot of man, tolerance of imper The Inscription on the grave of Shakespeare's Wife in Stratford Church fections and forgiveness of injuries. All these precepts are impersonated in Prospero, whose situation as a person raised above common humanity by his transcendent knowledge and his sway over the unseen world enables him to announce them with the authoritative solemnity of a messenger from heaven. That they represent Shakespeare's ultimate conclusions cannot be doubted, for the play, which bears every token of Shakespeare's latest manner, cannot have been written until after the appearance of Sylvester Jourdain's account of the tempest at the " Bermoothes," published in October 1610. There is not the least reason to suppose that Shakespeare immediately founded a drama upon this pamphlet. The improbability of his having done so is shown by the likelihood that A Winter's Tale, brought out in the late winter or early spring of 1611, was then in preparation. Shakespeare would not take up another theme till this was off his hands. The Tempest, then, can in no case be earlier than 1611, and the present writer thinks he has almost proved it to have been written in 1612-1613 for performance at Court on occasion of the nuptials of James's daughter Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine, a view |