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THE AMERICAN FOUNTAIN AND CLOCK-TOWER, STRATFORD

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

By

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

Copyright, 1900, Hamilton W. Mabie. All rights reserved.

Part XII. The Earlier Tragedies

T

HE order of the appearance of the Tragedies has not been definitely settled; they were written, how ever, in the same period, and that period began about 1601 and ended about 1609. The poet was at work on these masterpieces during the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth and the early years of the reign of James First. While he was meditating upon or writing " Julius Cæsar," Essex and Southampton had embarked upon their ill-planned conspiracy, and one had gone to the block and the other was lying in the Tower; soon after finishing "Coriolanus" the poet left London and returned to Stratford. The first decade of the seventeenth century was, therefore, his "storm and stress" period. Its chief interest lies in its artistic product, but the possible and probable relations of his artistic activity to his personal experience have been indicated. Those relations must not be insisted upon too strenu

ously; in a sense they are unimportant; the important aspect of the work of this decade lies in the continuity of mood and of themes which it represents, and in the mastery of the dramatic art which it illustrates.

During these years Shakespeare dealt continuously with the deepest problems of character with the clearest insight and the most complete command of the resources of the dramatic art. It is significant of the marvelous harmony of the expert craftsman with the poet of superb imagination that the plays of this period have been at the same time the most popular of all the Shakespearean dramas with theater-goers and the most deeply studied by critical lovers of the poet in all parts of the world.

Shakespeare had read Holinshed and

Hall with an insight into historic incident

and character quite as marvelous in its power of laying bare the sources of action

and of vitalizing half-forgotten actors in the drama of life as the play of the faculty of invention, and far more fruitful; he now opened the pages of one of the most fascinating and stimulating biographers in the whole range of literature. It is doubtful if any other recorder of men's lives has touched the imagination and influenced the character of so many readers as Plutarch, to whom the modern world owes much of its intimate and vital knowledge of the men who not only shaped the destinies of Greece and Rome, but created the traditions of culture which influenced Shakespeare's age and contemporaries so deeply. Part of Plutarch's extraordinary influence has been due to the inexhaustible interest of his material and part to the charm of his personality. He was and will remain one of the great interpreters of the classical to the modern world; a biographer who breathed the life of feeling and infused the insight of the imagination into his compact narratives. It has well been said of his work that it has been "most sovereign in its dominion over the minds of great men in all ages;" and the same thought has been suggested in another form in the description of that work. as "the pasturage of great minds."

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English by Thomas North," was published in 1579, while Shakespeare was coming to the end of his school-days in the Grammar School at Stratford, and forms one of that group of translations, including Chapman's "Homer," Florio's "Montaigne," and Fairfax's "Tasso," which, in their influence, must be ranked as original

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bethan literature. Plutarch is not only the foremost biographer in the history of letters; he had the further good fortune to attract reader who, more than any other, has disclosed the faculty of grasping the potential content of a narrative, as well as mastering its record of fact. It is one of Plutarch's greatest honors that he was the chief feeder of Shakespeare's imagination during the period when his genius touched its highest mark of achievement; for it was in Plutarch that the poet found the material for three of the greatest of the Tragedies, "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Coriolanus," and, in part, for "Timon of Athens." Not only did he find his material in Plutarch, but he found passages SO nobly phrased, whole dialogues sustained at such a height of dignity, force, or eloquence, that he incorporated them into his work with essentially minor changes. Holinshed furnished only the bare outlines of movement for "Richard II." and "Richard III.," but Plutarch supplied traits, hints, suggestions, phrases, and actions so complete in themselves that the poet needed to do little but turn upon the biographer's prose his vitalizing and organizing imagination. The difference between the prose biographer and the

LADY MACBETH

From the Gower Monument.

Sir Thomas North's English version of The Lives of the Noble Grecians, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer Plutarke, of Charonea, translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot, Abbot of Belloxane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the King's Privy Council, and great Amner of France, and now out of French into

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SHAKESPEARE'S dramatist remains, however, a difference of quality so radical as to constitute a difference of kind. The nature and extent of Shakespeare's indebtedness to the works upon which he drew for material may be most clearly shown by placing in juxtaposition Mark Antony's famous oration over Cæsar's body as Shakespeare found it and as he left it: "When Cæsar's body," writes Plutarch, "was brought into the marketplace, Antonius making his funeral oration in praise of the dead, according to the ancient custom of Rome, and perceiving that his words moved the common people to compassion, he framed his eloquence to make their hearts yearn the more, and taking Cæsar's gown all bloudy in his hand, he layed it open to the sight of them all, shewing what a number of cuts and holes it had in it. Therewith all the people fell presently into such a rage and mutinie that there was no more order kept among the common people."

A magical change has been wrought in this narrative when it reappears in Shakespeare's verse in one of his noblest passages:

You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Cæsar put it on;
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii :

Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through;
See what a rent the envious Casca made;
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd;
And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Cæsar follow'd it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly knock'd, or no;
For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar's angel:

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This was the most unkindest cut of all; For when the noble Cæsar saw him stab, Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms, Quite vanquish'd him: then burst his mighty And, in his mantle muffling up his face, heart; Even at the base of Pompey's statua, Which all the while ran blood, great Cæsar fell. "Julius Cæsar" probably appeared in 1601. Many facts point to this date, among them the oft-quoted passage from Weever's " Mirror of Martyrs," which was printed in that year:

The many-headed multitude were drawn

By Brutus' speech, that Cæsar was ambitious. When eloquent Mark Antonie had shewn His virtues, who but Brutus then was vicious?

A little later, in a still greater play, Polonius, recalling his life at the University, said:

I did enact Julius Cæsar: I was killed i' the
Capitol:
Brutus killed me.

The story, like many others with which Shakespeare dealt, was popular, and had been presented on the stage at an earlier date. Shakespeare's rendering was so obviously superior to all its predecessors experiments with the same theme. that it practically put an end to further

In the English historical plays the dramatist never entirely broke with the traditional form and spirit of the Chronicle play; in his first dealing with a Roman subject he took the final step from the

earlier drama to the tragedy. "Julius Cæsar" is not, it is true, dominated by a single great character, as are the later Tragedies, but it reveals a rigorous selection of incidents with reference to their dramatic value, and a masterly unfolding of their significance in the story. The drama was not misnamed; although Cæsar dies at the beginning of the dramatic movement, his spirit dominates it to the very end. At every turn he confronts the conspirators in the new order which he personified, and of which he was the organizing genius. Cassius dies with this recognition on his lips:

Cæsar, thou art revenged,

Even with the sword that kill'd thee.
And when Brutus looks on the face of the
dead Cassius, he, too, bears testimony to a
spirit which is more potent than the arms
of Octavius and Antony:

O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.

This new order in the Roman world, personified by Cæsar, is the shaping force of the tragedy; Octavius represents without fully understanding it, and Brutus and Cassius array themselves against it without recognizing that they are contending with the inevitable and the irresistible. At a later day, the eloquent and captivating Antony, a man of genius, enthusiasm, and personal devotion, but without the co-ordinating power of character, flings himself against this new order in the same blank inability to recognize a new force in the world, and dies as much a victim of his lack of vision as Brutus and Cassius. Nowhere else is Shakespeare's sense of reality, his ability to give facts their full weight, more clearly revealed than in "Julius Cæsar." Brutus is one of the noblest and most consistent of Shakespearean creations; a man far above all self-seeking and capable of the loftiest patriotism; in whose whole bearing, as in his deepest nature, virtue wears her noblest aspect. But Brutus is an idealist, with a touch of the doctrinaire; his purposes are of the highest, but the means he employs to give those purposes effect are utterly inadequate; in a lofty spirit he embarks on an enterprise doomed to failure by the very temper and pressure of the age. "Julius Cæsar" is the tragedy of the conflict between a great

nature, denied the sense of reality, with the world-spirit. Brutus is not only crushed, but recognizes that there was no other issue of his untimely endeavor.

The affinity between Hamlet and Brutus has often been pointed out. The poet was brooding over the story of the Danish prince probably before he became interested in Roman history; certainly before he wrote the Roman plays. The chief actors in both dramas were men upon whom was laid the same fatal necessity; both were idealists forced to act in great crises, when issues of appalling magnitude hung on their actions. Their circumstances were widely different, but a common doom was on both; they were driven to do that which was against their natures.

In point of style "Julius Cæsar " marks the culmination of Shakespeare's art as a dramatic writer. The ingenuity of the earlier plays ripened in a rich and pellucid flexibility; the excess of imagery gave place to a noble richness of speech; there is deep-going coherence of structure and illustration; constructive instinct has passed on into the ultimate skill which is born of complete identification of thought with speech, of passion with utterance, of action with character. The long popularity of the play was predicted by Shakespeare in the words of Cassius : How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

The great impression made by "Julius Cæsar" in a field which Jonson regarded as his own probably led to the writing of "Sejanus," which appeared two years later, and of "Catiline," which was produced in 1611. A comparison of these plays dealing with Roman history brings into clear relief the vitalizing power of Shakespeare's imagination in contrast with the conscientious and scholarly craftsmanship of Jonson. In "Sejanus" almost every incident and speech, as dent and speech, as Mr. Knight has pointed out, is derived from ancient authorities, and the dramatist's own edition of the play was packed with references like a text-book. The characters speak with admirable correctness after the manner of their time; but they do not live. Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Portia, on the other hand, talk and act like living creatures, and the play is saturated with the spirit and enveloped in the atmosphere of Rome.

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