No less clear than the interest in tragic themes which attracted the London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the shifting of popular approval towards a new form of drama about 1608.
This was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which puts a theme of sentimental interest into events and situations that come close to the tragic. Shakespeare"s plays of this type are often called romances, since they tell a story of the same type found in romantic novels of the time. His plays contain rather less of the tragic, and more of fanciful and playful humor than do the plays of the other famous masters in this type, Beaumont and Fletcher; his characters are rather more lifelike and appealing.
While the tragi-comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, which were written from 1609 to 1611, have been shown to have influenced Shakespeare in his romances, yet in several ways they are very different. The work of Beaumont and Fletcher tells of court intrigue and exaggerated pa.s.sions of hatred, envy, and l.u.s.t; Shakespeare"s plays tell of out-of-door adventures, and the restoration and reconciliation of families and friends parted by misfortune. Fletcher contrives {197} well-constructed plots, depending, indeed, rather too much on incident and situation for effect; Shakespeare chooses for his plots stories which possess only slight unity of theme, and depends upon character and atmosphere for his appeal. Thus the romances of Shakespeare stand out as a strongly marked part of his work, different in treatment from the plays of his rivals which perhaps suggested his use of this form.
Here, as everywhere, Shakespeare exhibits complete mastery of the form in which he works.
In addition to the romances of this period, Shakespeare had some share in the undramatic and belated chronicle play, _The Life of Henry the Eighth_, most of which is a.s.signed to John Fletcher. In looseness of construction, in the emphasis on character in distress, and in the introduction of a masque, as well as in other ways, this play resembles the tragi-comedies of the period rather than any earlier chronicle.
Thus the term "romantic tragi-comedy" may be properly used to describe all the work of the Fourth Period.
+Pericles, Prince of Tyre+, was probably the earliest, as it is certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances. But the story was one of the most popular in all fiction, and _Pericles_ was, no doubt, in its time what its first t.i.tle-page claimed for it, a "much-admired play." Its hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by storm and misfortune from one sh.o.r.e to another. The five acts which tell his adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great surges of good and ill luck. The significance of his daughter"s name, Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea is not only her birthplace, but is the {198} symbol throughout of Fortune and Romance. From the polluted coast of Antioch, where Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where he a.s.sists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis, where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand of the Princess Thasa, the waves of chance carry the Prince. They overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thasa safely to land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene. Here, upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter; and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind influence of Diana, their G.o.ddess. We are never far from the sound of the sh.o.r.e, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."
_Pericles_ in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a dramatic romance. The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective. To help out the stage action, Shakespeare"s collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts. He was supplemented, when his affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw clutched at by the desperate playwright. But at the beginning of Act III the master"s music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles speaks to the storm at sea:--
{199}
"Thou G.o.d of this great vast, rebuke these surges Which wash both heaven and h.e.l.l; and thou that hast Upon the winds command, bind them in bra.s.s, Having call"d them from the deep! ...
The seaman"s whistle Is as a whisper in the ears of death, Unheard."
In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which antic.i.p.ate the similar scene in _The Tempest_; in the character of Marina, girlish and fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are scarcely less potent than Prospero"s; in the grieving Pericles, who, like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the dramatic romances which are to follow. Throughout all this Shakespeare is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina"s misery in Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina"s speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of her character.
+Authorship and Date+.--The play was entered to Edward Blount in the Stationers" Register, May 20, 1608. It was probably written but little before. Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was not included among Shakespeare"s works until the Third Folio (1664).
The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the printing rights. The former of these hypotheses is generally favored, since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play. In 1608 a novel was {200} published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower." The author was George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability. He is generally accepted as Shakespeare"s collaborator. The claims of William Rowley for a share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.
Source.--Shakespeare used Gower"s _Confessio Amantis_, and the version in Laurence Twine"s _Pattern of Painful Adventures_, 1606. The tale is also in the _Gesta Romanorum_.
+Cymbeline+.--"A father cruel, and a step-dame false, A foolish suitor to a wedded lady, That hath her husband banish"d."
Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline, king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the story. The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her fidelity under this affliction. Neither her father"s anger, nor the stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base l.u.s.t of her brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous Italian Iachimo, her husband"s friend; nor even the knowledge of her own husband"s sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her slain, shake in the least degree her true affection. Such constancy cannot fail of its reward, and in the end Imogen wins back both father and husband.
In such a story, where virtue"s self is made to shine, other characters must of necessity suffer. Posthumus, Imogen"s husband, appears weak and impulsive, foolish in making his wife"s constancy a matter for wagers, and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her. His weakness is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant fight in defense of his native Britain, and by his {201} outburst of genuine shame and remorse when perception of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him.
Cymbeline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, with none of his tenderness. The wicked Queen and her son are purely wicked.
Only the faithful servant, Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in this court group.
But in the exiled n.o.ble Belarius, and the two sons of Cymbeline whom he has stolen in infancy and brought up with him in a wild life in the mountains, single-hearted n.o.bility rules. When Imogen, disguised as a page, in her flight from the court to Posthumus comes upon them, there is the instant sympathy of n.o.ble minds, and there is a brief respite from her misfortunes. They rid her of the troublesome Cloten, and their victory over Rome brings to book the intriguing Iachimo and accomplishes her final recovery of love and honor. A reading of the play leaves as the brightest picture upon the memory their joy at meeting Imogen, and their grief when the potion she drinks robs them of her. In them we find expressed that n.o.ble simplicity which romanticists have always a.s.sociated with true children of nature.
To Imogen, who has a far longer part to play than any other of Shakespeare"s heroines, the poet has also given a completer characterization, in which every charm of the highest type of woman is delineated. The one trait which a too censorious audience might criticize, that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes Chaucer"s patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to modern readers, is in Imogen completely redeemed by her resolution in the face of danger, and by a certain {202} imperiousness which well becomes the daughter of a king.
+Authorship+.--Some later hand probably made up the vision of Posthumus (V, iv, 30-90), where a series of irregular stanzas of inferior poetical merit are inserted to form "an apparition."
+Date+.--Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 1611, describes the performance of _Cymbeline_ at which he was present. The entry occurs between those telling of _Macbeth_ (April 20, 1610) and _The Winter"s Tale_ (May 15, 1611). The tests of verse a.s.sign it also to this period. The first print was that of the First Folio, 1623.
+Source+.--From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual historical fact in the play, that one Cun.o.belinus was an ancient king of Britain. Cymbeline"s two sons are likewise from Holinshed, as is the rout of an army by a countryman and his two sons; but the two stories are separate. The ninth novel of the second day of the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio tells a story much resembling the part of the play which concerns Posthumus. The play called _The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune_ (1589) contains certain characters not unlike Imogen, Posthumus, Belarius, and Cloten. Fidelia, Imogen"s name in disguise, is the heroine"s name. But direct borrowing cannot be proved.
+The Winter"s Tale+.--Nowhere is Shakespeare more lavish of his powers of characterization and of poetic treatment of life than in this play.
He found for his plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband"s friend, dies of grief at the death of her son, while her infant daughter, abandoned to the seas in a boat, grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the king of whom her father had been jealous. Disregarding the essentially undramatic nature of the story, as well as its improbabilities, he achieved a signal {203} triumph of his art in the creation of his two heroines, and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh, joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of convention.
In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme portrait of woman"s fort.i.tude. Hermione is brave, not by nature, but inspired by high resolve for her honor and for her children. n.o.bly indignant at the slanders uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the slanderer in pity for the blindness of unreason which has caused his action.
Shakespeare"s dramatic instinct made him alter Hermione"s death in the earlier story to life in secret, with poetic justice in store.
Artificial as the long period of waiting seems, before the final reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the magnificent appeal of the mother"s love when the lost daughter kneels in joy before her.
In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, depicted the true daughter of such a mother. Although her nature at first seems all innocence, beauty, youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king"s son, and that his father has discovered it, her courage rises with the danger, and her words echo her mother"s resolution:--
"I think affliction may subdue the cheek, But not take in the mind."
In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English sheepshearing, with its merrymaking, a pair of honest English country fellows in the old shepherd and his son, the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved vagabonds {204} in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff"s, are more lovable than other people"s virtues. Fortune, which will not suffer him to be honest, makes his thieveries, in her extremity of whim, to be but benefits for others.
Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita"s lover, is that rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real n.o.bility of soul. Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty and devotion. Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in the violence of his jealousy. As the study of a mind overborne by an obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.
+Date+.--Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the Globe Theater, May 16, 1611. It was probably written about this time.
Jonson"s _Masque of Oberon_, produced January 1, 1611, contains an antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance in IV, iv, 331 ff. The First Folio contains the earliest print of the play.
+Source+.--The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the source of _The Winter"s Tale_, was Robert Greene"s _Pandosto: The Triumph of Time_, sometimes called by its later t.i.tle, _The History of Dorastus and Fawnia_. Fourteen editions followed one another from its appearance in 1588. Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia, and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily. In _The Winter"s Tale_ two kingdoms are interchanged. Nevertheless the "seacoast of Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare"s stage direction, is found in Greene"s story. Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive, instead of dying in grief for her son"s death, to be restored again in the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita; and the complications of {205} Dorastus"s (Florizel"s) destiny as the prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto"s (Leontes"s) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted. The characters of Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare"s own invention.
According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1 ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in Robert Wilson"s _Three Ladies of London_ (1584).
+The Tempest+, probably the last complete drama from Shakespeare"s pen, differs from the other "romances" in possessing a singular unity. It comes, indeed closer than any play, save the _Comedy of Errors_, to fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and place. This may be due to the fact that the poet is here making up his own plot, not, as in other cases, dramatizing a novel of extended adventure.
The central theme of _The Tempest_ is, like that of the other romances, restoration of those exiled and reconciliation of those at enmity; but the treatment of the story could not be more different. Where the chance of fortune has. .h.i.therto brought about the happy ending, here magic and the supernatural in control of man are the means employed.
Those who had plotted or connived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of Milan, and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his infant daughter and his books for company, are wrecked through his art upon the island of which he has become the master. Ariel, the spirit who serves Prospero, a mysterious, ever changing form, now fire, now a Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a Harpy, striking guilt into the conscience (and yet apparently not interested in either vice or virtue, but {206} longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prospero"s cave, and receives freedom for his toil. His spirit pervades every scene, whether we view the king"s son Ferdinand loving innocent Miranda, or the silent king mourning his son"s loss, or the guilty conspirators plotting the king"s death, or the drunken steward and jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the overthrow of Prospero. All of them are led, by the wisdom of Prospero acting through Ariel, away from their own wrong impulses, and into reconcilement and peace. How much of _The Tempest_ Shakespeare meant as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.
There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare"s own voice. In one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and compares life itself to the transitory play. In the other, Prospero bids farewell to his magic art. These are often interpreted as Shakespeare"s own farewell to the stage and to his art,--with what justification every reader must decide for himself.
In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty. The falling in love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,--all these are the work of {207} a genius still in the full pride of power.
Shakespeare"s dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in the evening."
+Date+.--Edmund Malone"s word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611. The play certainly is later than the wreck of Somers"s ship, in 1609. It was acted during the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other plays were revived.
+Sources+.--Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in 1609. From these Shakespeare drew for many details. His island, however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land. Other details have been traced from various sources. Ariel is a name of a spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne"s _Essays_, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo"s imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a devil-G.o.d of the Patagonians in Eden"s _History of Travaile_ (1577).
The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably Shakespeare"s own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from some old folk tale; since a German play, _Die Schone Sidea_, by Jakob Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details. The relations, if any, between the two plays are remote.
+The Life of Henry the Eighth+, the last of the historical plays, in date of composition as in the history it pictures, suffers from the very fact that it boasts in its second t.i.tle, _All is True_. The play might have been built around any one of the half-dozen persons which in turn claim our chief interest,--Buckingham, Queen Katherine, Anne Bullen; the King, Wolsey, or {208} Cranmer; but fidelity to history, while it did not hinder some slight alteration of incident and time, required that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to be given. The result was a complete abandonment of anything like unity of theme.
It is, of course, a disappointment to one who has just read _I Henry IV_. On the other hand, this play may be regarded as a kind of pageant, as the word is used nowadays in England and America. It presents, in the manner of a modern pageant, a series of brilliant scenes telling of Buckingham"s fall, of Wolsey"s triumph and ruin, of Katherine"s trial and death, of Anne Bullen"s coronation, and of Cranmer"s advancement, joined together by the well-drawn character of the King, powerful, masterful, selfish, and vindictive, but not without a suggestion of better qualities. The gayety of the Masque, in the first act, where King Henry first meets Anne Bullen, is also in perfect harmony with the modern pageant, which always employs music and dancing as aids to the picture.
In Queen Katherine we have a suffering and wronged woman, gifted with queenly grace and dignity, and with strong sympathies and a keen sense of justice. From her first entrance, when she ventures, Esther-like, into the presence of the king to intercede for an oppressed people, through all her vain struggle against the King"s wayward inclination and the Cardinal"s wiles, up to the very moment when she is stricken with mortal illness, she holds our sympathy. If in her great trial scene she is weaker and more impulsive than Hermione in hers, yet the circ.u.mstances are {209} different; she is not keyed up to so high an endeavor as that lady, nor in so much danger for herself or her children.
+Authorship+.--Differences in style and meter, and the fragmentary quality of the whole play have long confirmed the theory that Shakespeare in _Henry VIII_ engaged in a very loose sort of collaboration. Only the Buckingham scene (I, i,), the scenes of Katherine"s entrance and trial (I, ii, II, iv), a brief scene of Anne Bullen (II, iii), and the first half of the scene in which Wolsey"s schemes are exposed and Henry alienated from him (III, i, 1-203) are confidently ascribed to Shakespeare. The rest of the play fits best the style and metrical habit of John Fletcher, at this time one of the most popular dramatists of London.