HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIB Part XIII.-The Later S HAKESPEARE was now in the depths of the deep stirring of his spirit which has left its record in the tragedies. The darkest mood was on him, apparently, when "Hamlet" and the three succeeding plays were written; the mood in which the sense of evil in the world. almost overpowered his belief in the essential soundness of life, and the mystery of evil pressed upon the imagination with. such intensity that he was tempted to take refuge in fundamental cynicism. It is in the plays of this period that Shakespeare gives place to the deep-going irony which pervaded the Greek drama, and which at times obscures the essential freedom and shaping power of personality. In his darkest mood, however, the sanity and largeness of the poet's mind asserted themselves and kept the balance against the temptation to narrow the vision by tingeing the world with the color of a mood, or by substituting for clear, direct, dispassionate play of the mind on the facts of life the easy process of reading universal history in the light of personal experience. How completely Shakespeare escaped a danger which would have been fatal to him is seen in the changes he wrought in the story which forms the basis of "Measure for Measure." This play, like "All's Well that Ends Well" and "Troilus and Cressida," is painful and repellent; it is tinged with an irony which has a corrosive quality; it is touched with a bitterness of feeling which seems foreign to Shake Later Tragedies speare. The evil of life was evidently pressing upon his imagination so heavily that it had become a burden on his heart. In "Hamlet" he had portrayed a rotten society; in "Measure for Measure" he depicted a State full of iniquity and a group of men corrupted by the very air they breathed; in "Troilus and Cressida " the same vileness was personified in the most loathsome characters. In the great Tragedies we breathe an air which is charged with fate, and feel ourselves involved in vast calamities which we are powerless to control; in the plays which have been named we breathe an atmosphere that is fetid and impure, and human nature becomes unspeakably mean and repulsive. This is, perhaps, the effect of the terrible strain of the tragic mood on Shakespeare's spirit; and these plays are to be accepted as expressions of a mood of depression verging upon despair. They are often classed with the Comedies, but they belong with the Tragedies, not only in temper, but in time. Even in this blackness of thick darkness the poet's sanity is never lost. In a dull play by George Whetstone, published in 1587, and called "Promos and Cassandra," and based on an Italian novel by Cinthio, who also worked it into a tragedy, Shakespeare found the plot of "Measure for Measure;" the story was told in prose by Whetstone four years later in a collection of tales which he called "Heptameron of Civil Discourses." In the title of the play the earlier dramatist affirmed that it showed in the first part "the unsufferable abuse of a lewd magistrate; the virtuous behaviour of a chaste lady; the uncontrolled lewdness of a favoured courtesan ; and the undeserved estimation of a pernicious parasite." Shakespeare's modifications of the plot are highly significant: in the older versions Isabella surrenders her virtue as the price of her brother's life; in "Measure for Measure" her impregnable purity gives the whole play a saving sweetness. To Shakespeare's imagination is due also the romantic episode of the moated grange and the pathetic figure of Mariana. In the murky atmosphere of this painful drama Isabella's stainless and incorruptible chastity invests purity with a kind of radiancy, and she finds her place in the little company of adorable women in whom Shakespeare's creative imagination realized and personified the eternal feminine qualities. "Measure for Measure" was probably produced about 1603, and "Troilus and Cressida " belongs, in its final form, to the same year. The problems presented by the different versions are not more difficult than those presented by the play itself, which has been described as "a history in which historical verisimilitude is openly set at nought, a comedy without genuine laughter, a tragedy without pathos." The editors of the First Folio were so uncertain about its essential character that they evaded the necessity of classifying it by placing it between the Histories and the From an engraving by W. Linden, after the original by Mytens, in the collection of the Duke of Dorset. Tragedies. In temper, spirit, and probably in time, it belongs with the Tragedies, where it is now generally printed. It is the only play in which Shakespeare drew upon the greatest stream of ancient story, the materials for which he found in many forms in the literature of his time. Chief among these was Chaucer's noble rendering of the ancient romance in the "Canterbury Tales," to which may be added Chapman's "Homer," Lydgate's Troy Book," and probably Robert Greene's version of the story which appeared in 1587. In this play Shakespeare was dealing with material which had generally been regarded as heroic and which was rich in heroic qualities; his treatment is, however, essentially satirical, with touches of unmistakable cynicism. This attitude was not, however, entirely new to Shake speare's auditors; the great Homeric story had already been handled with a freedom which bordered on levity. Shakespeare shows little regard for the proprieties of classical tradition; this satirical attitude did not, however, blur his insight into the nature of the men whom he portrayed. The drama brings into clear light the irony of human fate; but it is not a blind fate which the dramatist invokes as the shaping power in the drama; it is a fate set in motion by the fundamental qualities or defects of the chief actors. The special aspect of irony which the play presents is the confusion brought into private and public affairs by lawless or fatuous love. Thersites goes to the heart of the matter when, with brutal directness, he characterizes the struggle as a "war for a placket." Helen, A pearl, Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, involves Greece and Troy in measureless disaster, while Cressida's cheap duplicity makes Troilus the fool of fortune. This play, it will be remembered, has been regarded by some critics as a contribution to the "war of the theaters," and as containing direct references, not only to the matters at issue, but to the characteristics and works of the chief combatants. Mr. Fleay has made a thorough study of the play from this point of view, and has presented his case with great acumen and skillful arrangement of facts and inferences. It is difficult to find in the play, in its present form, adequate basis for the supposition that it was written as an attack on Jonson, or that one of Shakespeare's contemporaries is portrayed in Thersites. Shakespeare may have touched humorously on some of the extravagances of that bloodless but vociferous combat; but the drama must have had a deeper root. Unsatisfactory and repellent as it is in some aspects, "Troilus and Cressida " has very great interest as a document in Shakespeare's history as a thinker and an artist. It is remarkable for its range of style, reproducing as it does his earlier manner side by side with his later manner. It is notable also for its knowledge of life, expressed in a great number of sententious and condensed phrases; for its setting aside of the dramatic mask and direct statement of the truth which the dramatist means to convey. And it is supremely interesting because in the person of Ulysses, the real hero of the drama, Shakespeare seems to present his own view of life. The ripest wisdom of the dramatist speaks through the lips of this typical man of experience, whose insight has been corrected by the widest contact with affairs, whose long familiarity with the world has made him a master of its diseases, and whose speech has the touch of universality in its dispassionateness, |