V.

Cloten.

Life at court is beset with treacherous quicksands. The king is stupid, passionate, perpetually misguided; the queen is a wily murderess; and between them stands her son, Cloten, one of Shakespeare's most original figures, a true creation of genius, without a rival in all the Poet's long gallery of fools and dullards. His stupid inefficiency and undisguised malignity have nothing in common with his mother's hypocritical and supple craft; he takes after her in worthlessness alone. For the sake of an inartistic stage effect, Shakespeare has endowed him with a bodily frame indistinguishable from that of the handsome Posthumus, leaving it to his head alone to express the world-wide difference between them. But how admirably has the Poet characterised the dolt and boor by making him shoot forth his words with an explosive stammer! With profound humour and delicate observation, he has endowed him with the loftiest notions of his own dignity, and given him no shadow of doubt as to his rights. There are no bounds to his vanity, his coarseness, his bestiality. If words could do it, not a word of his but would wound others to the quick. And not only his words, but his intents are of the most malignant; he would outrage Imogen at Milford Haven and spurn her home" to her father. His stupidity, fortunately, renders him less dangerous, and with delicate art Shakespeare has managed to make him from first to last produce a comic effect, thereby softening the painful impression of the portraiture. We take pleasure in him as in Caliban, whom he foreshadows, and who had the same designs upon Miranda as he upon Imogen. We might even describe Caliban as Cloten developed into a type, a symbol.

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BRANDES: William Shakespeare.

VI.

The Royal Pair.

The Queen-whose guilty machinations threaten to be the ruin of Posthumus, who holds the reins of government in her own hands, and has the intention of directing the fortunes of all, in accordance with her own resolves-lives to see all her plans thwarted, and in the end herself falls a victim to the destructive power of her own wickedness. Cymbeline, the husband, father and king-who is more or less directly affected by the complications in the lives of all the others, hence as it were, the point where all the radii of the wide circle meet, and from which they in the first instance proceed, and upon whom everything turns although he himself appears the least active-forms the quiescent centre of the action, and in his undutiful lassitude and passiveness regulates the fortunes of all, but is ultimately obliged to take all their fortunes upon himself. The drama, therefore, very justly bears his name.

ULRICI: Shakspeare's Dramatic Art.

VII.

Iachimo and Pisanio.

The part of Iachimo illustrates, though not on a very large scale, Shakespeare's peculiar science and learned dealing in the moral constitution of man. At our first meeting with Iachimo, he is in just that stage of moral sickness, that he must be worse before he can be better; and in his sharp practice on the wager his disease reaches the extreme point which, even because it is extreme, starts a process of moral revolution within him; setting him to a hard diet of remorse and repentance, and conducting him through these to renovation and health. So that his treachery is one of those large

overdoses of crime which sometimes have the effect of purging off men's criminality. Such is the cunning leechcraft of nature: out of men's vices she hatches scorpions to lash and sting them into virtue.

Those who think poetry dwells more in the palace than the cottage, and that Shakespeare is apt to postpone the rights of untitled manhood in favour of conventional aristocracy, may be sent to school to Pisanio; who is, socially, the humblest person in the drama, yet his being is "all compact" of essential heroism. His action shows not one self-regarding thought or purpose; he alone seems to live and breathe purely for others. And what shrewdness, what forecast, what fertility of beneficence there is in him! His character is lifted into the highest region of poetry by his oblivion of self; and even those whom he serves derive much of their poetry from his self-forgetting, incorruptible loyalty to them. HUDSON: The Works of Shakespeare.

VIII.

Guiderius and Arviragus.

The two Princes, Guiderius and Arviragus, both educated in the wilds, form a noble contrast to Miranda and Perdita. Shakspeare is fond of showing the superiority of the natural over the artificial. Over the art which enriches nature, he somewhere says, there is a higher art created by nature herself. As Miranda's un

conscious and unstudied sweetness is more pleasing than those charms which endeavour to captivate us by the brilliant embellishments of a refined cultivation, so in these two youths, to whom the chase has given vigour and hardihood, but who are ignorant of their high destination, and have been brought up apart from human society, we are equally enchanted by a naïve heroism which leads them to anticipate and to dream of deeds of valour, till an occasion is offered which they are

irresistibly compelled to embrace. When Imogen comes in disguise to their cave; when, with all the innocence of childhood, Guiderius and Arviragus form an impassioned friendship for the tender boy, in whom they neither suspect a female nor their own sister; when, on their return from the chase, they find her dead, then "sing her to the ground," and cover the grave with flowers: these scenes might give to the most deadened imagination a new life for poetry. If a tragical event is only apparent in such case, whether the spectators are already aware of it or ought merely to suspect it, Shakspeare always knows how to mitigate the impression without weakening it: he makes the mourning musical, that it may gain in solemnity what it loses in serious

ness.

SCHLEGEL: Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature.

IX.

Elements and Construction.

If Cymbeline is deliberately detached from history, his queen and their children transport us into manifest faerie. The evil stepmother, with her malign beauty, culling the poison-flowers "while yet the dew's on the ground," is a witch manquée, a Medea not quite perfect in her part; her clownish son is a Caliban made slightly more human and considerably more vulgar; Imogen, with all her added wealth of mind and heart, yet clearly betrays the lineaments of the peerless princess whom the malign stepmother pursues and good fairies defend; while the whole episode of her life in the cave with her unknown brothers, her seeming death and burial, differs from the Märchen of Schneewittchen ("Little Snowwhite") only as the poetry which moves wholly within the human sphere and is wrought out in dramatic detail and imaginative phrase differs from the naïve poetry of the fairy tale. The evil stepmother provides her

"poison" by the aid of a physician; the kindly dwarfs become valiant young hunters, and Schneewittchen's crystal coffin becomes a woodland bed of flowers and moss lightly sprinkled on the face of the seeming dead.

It can hardly be denied that these several elements of story are not quite faultlessly wrought together. The complex mechanism of the plot is lubricated by a free use of happy coincidences and fortuities, and explained by conversations and soliloquies which serve merely to explain it. It is even possible to maintain that the motley contrast of the interwoven motives has here and there infected the characters;-that Cloten, more particularly, as he appears in the council of war, is a person of more distinction than the clownish wooer of Imogen and butt of the court wits. As in all the plays of this latest group, mechanical coherence of plot is treated with apparent nonchalance, even character is displayed rather in detached moments than with that subtle power of exhibiting its gradual evolution or decay which contributes so much to the fascination of Hamlet or Othello or Antony and Cleopatra; but these moments are illuminated with a dramatic vision so intense and a poetry so poignantly beautiful, that the less intrinsic movements of the play sink into a subordination of effect in which their incoherences are lost sight of. In the subject-matter with which they deal we cannot sharply divide the so-called Romances from the Tragedies; they all deal with tragic harms; both Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale sound several chords of the theme of Othello. But, in the first place, the tragic action is briefer and simpler, less desperate in its outlook, less harrowing in its course; and, in the second, there open out of it vistas of a reposeful and healing seclusion on the one side, of remorse and atonement on the other, which finally converge in scenes of reconciliation and forgiveness.

HERFORD: The Eversley Shakespeare.