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day of payment, the Jew may cut from his breast, nearest the heart, a pound of flesh. Antonio expects ships home a month before the day, and signs. While Shylock is feeding at the Christian's expense, Lorenzo runs away with sweet Jessica, his dark-eyed daughter, and sundry bags of ducats and jewels. Bassanio is off to Belmont. Portia is to be won by him who, out of three caskets,

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—of gold, silver, and lead, respectively,— shall choose that containing her portrait. Bassanio makes the right choice. But at once comes word that blanches his cheeks: all of Antonio's ships are reported lost at sea; his day of payment has passed, and Shylock clamors for his dreadful forfeit. Bassanio, and his follower Gratiano, only tarry to be married, the one to Portia, and the other to her maid Nerissa; and then, with money furnished by Portia, they speed away toward Venice. Portia follows, diguised as a young doctor-at-law, and Nerissa as her clerk. Arrived in Venice, they are ushered into court, where Shylock, fell as a famished tiger, is snapping out fierce calls for justice and his pound of flesh, Antonio pale and hopeless, and Bassanio in vain offering him thrice the value of his bond. Portia, too, in vain pleads with him for mercy. Well, says Portia, the law must take its course. Then, "A Daniel come to judgment!» cries the Jew; «Come, prepare, prepare.» Stop, says the young doctor, your bond gives you flesh, but no blood; if you shed one drop of blood you die, and your lands and goods are confiscate to the State. The Jew cringes, and offers to accept Bassanio's offer of thrice the value of the bond in cash; but learns that for plotting against the life of a citizen of Venice all his property is forfeited, half to Antonio and half to the State. As the play closes, the little band of friends are grouped on Portia's lawn in the moonlight, under the vast blue dome of stars. The poet, however, excites our pity for the baited Jew.

KING JOHN, a drama, the source of which is an older play published in 1591. The date of the action is 1200 A. D. John is on the throne of England, but without right; his brother, Richard the Lion-Hearted, had made his nephew Arthur of Bretagne his heir. Arthur is a pure and amiable lad of fourteen, the pride and hope of his mother Constance. The maternal affec

tion and the sorrows of this lady form a central feature of the drama. Ar. thur's father Geoffrey has long beer dead, but his mother has enlisted in his behalf the kings of Austria and of France. Their forces engage King John's army under the walls of Angiers. While the day is still undecided, peace is made, and a match formed between Lewis, dauphin of France, and John's niece Blanche. The young couple are scarcely married when the pope's legate causes the league to be broken. The armies again clash in arms, and John is victorious, and carries off Prince Arthur to England, where he is confined in a castle and confided to one Hubert. John secretly gives a written warrant to Hubert to put him to death. The scene in which the executioners appear with red-hot irons to put out the boy's eyes, and his innocent and affectionate prattle with Hubert, reminding him how he had watched by him when ill, is one of the most famous and pathetic in all the Shakespearian historical dramas. Hubert relents; but the frightened boy disguises himself as a sailor lad, and leaping down from the walls of the castle, is killed. Many of the powerful lords of England are so infuriated by this pitiful event (virtually a murder, and really thought to be such by them), that they join the Dauphin, who has landed to claim England's crown in the name of his wife. King John meets him on the battle-field, but is taken ill, and forced to retire to Swinstead Abbey. He has been poisoned by a monk, and dies in the orchard of the abbey in great agony. His right-hand man in his wars and in counsel has been a bastard son of Richard I., by Lady Faulconbridge. The bastard figures conspicuously in the play as braggart and ranter; yet he is withal brave and patriotic to the last. Lewis, the dauphin, it should be said, makes peace and retires to France.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM was written previous to 1598; the poet drawing for materials on Plutarch, Ovid, and Chaucer. The roguish sprite Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is a sort of halfbrother of Ariel, and obeys Oberon as Ariel obeys Prospero. The theme of this joyous comedy is love and marriage. Duke Theseus is about to wed the fair Hippolyta. Lysander is in love with Hermia, and so is Demetrius; though

in the end, Demetrius by the aid of Oberon, is led back to his first love Helena. The scene lies chiefly in the enchanted wood near the duke's palace in Athens. In this wood Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena, wander all night and meet with strange adventures at the hands of Puck and the tiny fairies of Queen Titania's train. Like her namesake in All's Well,' Helena is here the wooer: "Apollo flies and Daphne leads the chase.» Oberon pities her, and sprinkling the juice of the magic flower love-in-idleness in Demetrius's eyes, restores his love for her; but not before Puck, by a mistake in anointing the wrong man's eyes, has caused a train of woes and perplexities to attend the footsteps of the wandering lovers. Puck, for fun, claps an ass's head on to weaver Bottom's shoulders, who thereupon calls for oats and a bottle of hay. By the same flower juice, sprinkled in her eyes, Oberon leads Titania to dote on Bottom, whose hairy head she has garlanded with flowers, and stuck musk roses behind his ears. Everybody seems to dream: Titania, in her bower carpeted with violets and canopied with honeysuckle and sweet-briar, dreamed she was enamored of an ass, and Bottom dared not say aloud what he dreamed he was; while in the fresh morning the lovers felt the fumes of the sleepy enchantment still about them.

But we must introduce the immortal players of Pyramus and Thisbe.' Bottom is a first cousin of Dogberry, his drollery the richer for being partly selfconscious. With good strings to their beards and new ribbons for their pumps, he and his men meet at the palace, "on the duke's wedding-day at night." Snout presents Wall; in one hand he holds some lime, some plaster and a stone, and with the open fingers of the other makes a cranny through which the lovers whisper. A fellow with lantern and thorn-bush stands for Moon. The actors kindly and in detail explain to the audience what each one personates; and the lion bids them not to be afeard, for he is only Snug the joiner, who roars extempore. The master of the revels laughs at the delicious humor till the tears run down his cheeks (and you don't wonder), and the lords and ladies keep up the fun by a running fire of witticisms when they can keep their faces straight. Theseus is an idealized

English gentleman, large-molded, gra. cious, and wise. His greatness is shown in his genuine kindness to the poor players in their attempt to please him.

RICHARD II. (Compare Henry VL) This drama (based on Holinshed's 'Chronicle') tells the story of the supplanting, on the throne of England, of the handsome and sweet-natured, but weak-willed Richard II., by the politic Bolingbroke (Henry IV.). The land is impoverished by Richard's extrava gances. He is surrounded by flatterers and boon companions (Bushy, Bagot. and Green), and has lost the good-will of his people. The central idea of 'Richard II.' is that the kingly office cannot be maintained without strength of brain and hand. Old John of Gaunt (or Ghent) is loyal to Richard; but on his death-bed sermons him severely, and dying, prophesies of England, — "this seat of Mars,»

This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world."

Richard lets him talk; but no sooner is the breath out of his body than he seizes all his movable or personal wealth and that of his banished son Boling. broke, to get money for his Irish wars. This step costs Richard his throne. While absent in Ireland Bolingbroke lands with a French force, to regain his property and legal rights as a nobleman and open the purple testament of bleeding war. The country rises to welcome him. Even a force in Wales, tired of waiting for Richard, who was detained by contrary winds, disperses just a day before he landed. Entirely destitute of troops, he humbly submits, and in London a little later gives up his crown to Henry IV. Richard is imprisoned at Pomfret Castle. Here, one day, he is visited by a man who was formerly a poor groom of his stable, and who tells him how it irked him to see his roan Barbary with Bolingbroke on his back on coronation day, stepping along as if proud of his new master. Just then one Exton appears, in obedience to a hint from Henry IV., with men armed to kill. Richard at last (but too late) shows a manly spirit; and snatching a weapon from one of the assassins, kills him and then another, but is at once struck dead by Exton. Henry IV. lamented this bloody deed to the day of

his death, and it cost him dear in the censures of his people.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is a play, the story of which came to the poet from Boccaccio, through Paynter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' although he introduces variations. It tells how Helen de Narbon, a physician's daughter, and orphaned, forced her love on a handsome and birth-proud young French nobleman, Bertram de Rousillon, with whom she had been brought up from childhood. It is a tale of husband-catching by a curious kind of trick. To most men the play is repellent. Yet Shakespeare has treated the theme again in Twelfth Night' (Olivia), and in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (Helena). Many women woo in courtship-by word, glance, or gesture at least; and among the lower orders the courting is quite undisguised. Shakespeare endows Helena with such virtues that we excuse and applaud. All's well that ends well. She heals the king with her father's receipt, asks for and accepts Bertram as her reward, and is married. But the proud boy flies to the Florentine wars on his wedding-day, leaving his marriage unconsummated. Helen returns sorrowfully to Rousillon; and finds there a letter from her husband, to the effect that when she gets his ring upon her finger and shows him a child begotten of his body, then he will acknowledge her as his wife. She undertakes to outwit him and reclaim him. Leaving Rousillon on pretense of a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Jacques le Grand, she presently contrives to have it thought she is dead. In reality she goes to Italy, and becomes Bertram's wife in fact and not mere name, by the secret substitution of herself for the pretty Diana, with whom he has an assignation arranged. There is an entanglement of petty accidents and incidents connected with an exchange of rings, etc. But, finally, Helen makes good before the King her claim of having fulfilled Bertram's conditions; and she having vowed obedience, he takes her to his heart, and we may suppose they live happily together "till there comes to them the destroyer of delights and the sunderer of societies. » One's heart warms to the noble old Countess of Rousillon, who loves Helen as her own daughter. She is wise and ware in worldly matters, and yet full of sympathy, remembering her own youth. Parolles is a cross between

Thersites and Pistol,- a volte-faced scoundrel who has to pull the devil by the tail for a living. His pretense of fetch ing off his drum, and his trial blindfolded before the soldiers, raises a laugh; but the humor is much inferior to that of (Henry IV.)

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, partly by Shakespeare and partly by an unknown hand, is a witty comedy of intrigue, founded on an old play about "the taming of the shrew" and on Ariosto's 'I Suppositi'; and is preceded by another briefer bit of dramatic fun (the "induction") on a different topic,-i. e., how a drunken tinker, picked up on a heath before an alehouse by a lord and his huntsmen, is carried unconscious to the castle, and put to bed, and waited on by obsequious servants, treated to sumptuous fare, and music, and perfumes, and told that for many years he has been out of his head, and imagining that he was a poor tinker. "What! am I not Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton Heath? ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not. At length this Sancho Panza, who still retains his fondness for small ale, sits down to see the laughter-moving comedy The Taming of the Shrew,' enacted for his sole benefit by some strolling players. The brainless sot found its delicious humor dull; not so the public. Baptista, a rich old gentleman of Padua, has two daughters. The fair Katharina has a bit of a devil in her, is curst with a shrewish temper; but this is partly due to envy of the good fortune of the mincing artificial beauty, Bianca, her sister, whose demure gentle ways make the men mad over her. Yet Kate, when "tamed," proves after all to be the best wife. The other gallants will none of her; but the whimsical Petruchio of Verona has come "to wive it wealthily in Padua," and nothing daunted, wooes and wives the young shrew in astonishing fashion. The law of the time made the wife the chattel of her husband, otherwise even Petruchio might have failed. His method was to conquer her will, "to kill her in her own humor.» He comes very late to the wedding, clothed like a scarecrow, an old rusty sword by his side, and riding a sunken-backed spavined horse with rotten saddle and bridle. His waggish man Grumio is similarly accoutred. At the altar he gives the priest a terrible

box on the ear, refuses to stay to the wedding dinner, and on the way to his country-house acts like a madman. Arrived home, he storms at and beats the servants, allows Kate not a morsel of food for two days, preaches continence to her, throws the pillows around the chamber, and raises Cain a-nights generally so that she can get no sleep, denies her the bonnet and dress the tailor has brought, and so manages things as to seem to do all out of love to her and regard for her health, and without once losing his good-humor. In short he subdues her, breaks her will, and makes his supreme; so that at the end she makes a speech to the other wives about the duty of obedience, that would make the "new woman" of our time smile in scorn. Of Bianca's three suitors the youngest, Lucentio, gets the prize by a series of smart tricks. Disguised as a tutor of languages he gets her love as they study, while his rivals, "like a gemini of baboons,» blow their nails out in the cold and whistle. Lucentio at the very start gets his servant Tranio to personate himself, and an old pedant is hired to stand for his father; and while Baptista, the father of Bianca, is gone to arrange for the dower with this precious pair of humbugs, Lucentio and his sweetheart run off to church and get married. The arrival of the real father of Lucentio makes the plot verily crackle with life and sensation.

KING HENRY IV., PART i., stands at the head of all Shakespeare's historical comedies, as Falstaff is by far his best humorous character. The two parts of the drama were first published in 1598 and 1600 respectively, the sourcetexts for both being Holinshed's 'Chronicles' and the old play, "The famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.' The contrasted portraits of the impetuous Hotspur (Henry Percy) and the chivalric Prince Henry in Part i., are masterly done. King Henry, with the crime of Richard II.'s death on his conscience, was going on a crusade, to divert attention from himself; but Glendower and Hotspur give him his hands full at home. Hotspur has refused to deliver up certain prisoners taken Holmedon field: "My liege, I did deny no prisoners," he says in the well-known speech painting to the life the perfumed dandy on the field of battle. However,

on

the Percys revolt from the too haughty monarch; and at Shrewsbury the Hotspur faction, greatly outnumbered by the King's glittering host, is defeated, and Percy himself slain by Prince Harry. For the humorous portions we have first the broad talk of the carriers in the inn-yard at Rochester; then the night robbery at Gadshill, where old Jack frets like a gummed varlet, and lards the earth with perspiration as he seeks his horse hidden by Bardolph behind a hedge. Prince Hal and Poins rob the robbers. Falstaff and his men hack their swords, and tickle their noses with grass to make them bleed. Then after supper, at the Boar's Head, in slink the disappointed Falstaffians, and Jack regales the Prince and Poins with his amusing whoppers about the dozen or so of rogues in Kendal green that set upon them at Gadshill. Hal puts him down with a plain tale. Great hilarity all around. Hal and Jack are in the midst of a mutual mock-judicial examination when the sheriff knocks at the door. The fat knight falls asleep behind the arras, and has his pockets picked by the Prince. Next day the latter has the money paid back, and he and Falstaff set off for the seat of war, Jack marching by Coventry with his regiment of tattered prodigals. Attacked by Douglas in the battle, Falstaff falls, feigning death. He sees the Prince kill Hotspur, and afterwards rises, gives the corpse a fresh stab, lugs it off on his back, and swears he and Hotspur fought a good hour by Shrewsbury clock, and that he himself killed him. The prince magnanimously agrees to gild the lie with the happiest terms he has, if it will do his old friend any grace.

KING HENRY IV., PART ii., forms dramatic whole with the preceding. The serious parts are more of the nature of dramatized chronicle; but the humorous scenes are fully as delightful and varied as in the first part. Hotspur is dead, and King Henry is afflicted with insomnia and nearing his end. « Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," he says in the fine apostrophe to sleep. At Gaultree Forest his son Prince John tricks his enemies into surrender, and sends the leaders to execution. The death-bed speeches of the King and Prince Henry are deservedly famous. All the low-comedy characters reappear

in this sequel. Dame Quickly appears, with officers Snare and Fang, to arrest Falstaff, who has put all her substance into that great belly of his. In Part i. we found him already in her debt: for one thing, she had bought him a dozen of shirts to his back. Further, sitting in the Dolphin chamber by a sea-coal fire, had he not sworn upon a parcel-gilt goblet to marry her? But the merry old villain deludes her still more, and she now pawns her plate and tapestry for him. Now enter Prince Hal and Poins from the wars, and ribald and coarse are the scenes unveiled. Dame Quickly has deteriorated: in the last act of this play she is shown being dragged to prison with Doll Tearsheet, to answer the death of a man at her inn. The accounts of the trull Doll, and her billingsgate talk with Pistol, are too unsavory to be entirely pleasant reading; and one gladly turns from the atmosphere of the slums to the fresh country air of Gloucestershire, where, at Justice Shallow's mause, Falstaff is "pricking down» his new recruits, Mouldy, Feeble, Wart, etc. Shallow is like a forked radish with a beard carved on it, or a man made out of a cheese-paring. He is given to telling big stories about what a wild rake he was at Clement's Inn in his youth. Sir John swindles the poor fellow out of a thousand pounds. But listen to Shallow: "Let me see, Davy; let me see, Davy; let me see.” "Sow the headland with red wheat, Davy;» «Let the smith's note for shoeing and plough-irons be cast and paid.» «Nay, Sir John, you shall see my orchard, where, in an arbor, we shall eat a last year's pippin of my own graffing, with a dish of caraways and so forth.» Amid right merry chaffing and drinking enters Pistol with news of the crowning of Henry V. "Away, Bardolph! saddle my horse; we'll ride all night; boot, boot, Master Shallow, I know the King is sick for me," shouts old Jack. Alas for his hopes! he and his companions are banished the new King's presence, although provided with the means to live.

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR (printed 1602) is a play written at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see Falstaff in love. With its air of village domesticity and out-o'-doorness is united the quintessential spirit of fun and waggery. Its gay humor never fails, and its readers always wish it five times as

long as it is. The figures on this rich old tapestry resolve themselves, on inspection, into groups: The jolly ranter and bottle-rinser, mine host of the Garter Inn, with Sir John Falstaff and his men, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol; the merry wives, Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page, and their families; then Shallow (the country justice), with his cousin of the "wee little face and little yellow beard» (Slender), and the latter's man Simple; further Dr. Caius, the French physician, who speaks broken English, as does Parson Hugh Evans, the Welshman; lastly Dame Quickly (the doctor's housekeeper), and Master Fenton, in love with sweet Anne Page. Shallow has a grievance against Sir John for killing his deer; and Slender has matter in his head against him, for Sir John broke it. But Falstaff and his men outface the two cheese-parings, and they forget their "pribbles and prabbles» in the parson's scheme of marrying Slender to Anne Page. But the irascible doctor has looked that way too, and sends a "shallenge" to Evans. Mine host fools them both by sending each to a separate place for the duel. They make friends, and avenge themselves on the Boniface by getting his horses run off with. Falstaff sends identically worded love-letters to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page, hoping to replenish his purse from their husbands gold. But Pistol and Nym, in revenge for dismissal, peach to said husbands. The jealous Ford visits Falstaff under the name of Brook, and offers him a bag of gold if he will seduce Mrs. Ford for him. Jack assures him that he has an appointment with her that very day. And so he has. But the two wives punish him badly, and he gets nothing from them but a cast out of a buck-basket into a dirty ditch, and a sound beating from Ford, The midnight scene in Windsor Park, where Falstaff, disguised as Herne the Hunter, with stag-horns on his head, is guyed by the wives and their husbands and pinched and burned by the fairies' tapers, is most amusing. During the fairies' song Fenton steals away Anne Page and marries her. The doctor, by previous arrangement with mother Ford, leads away a fairy in green to a priest, only to discover that he has married a boy. And Slender barely escapes the same fate; for he leads off to Eton Church another "great lubberly boy,” dressed in white as

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