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It was not, therefore, a matter of accident, or as a result of deliberate artistic prevision, that, about 1601, Shakespeare began to write tragedies, and continued for seven or eight years to deal with the most perplexing and sombre problems of character and of life. He had passed through an emotional experience which had evidently stirred his spirit to the depths; the atmosphere in which he lived was disturbed by bitter controversies; men whom he honoured and loved had become the victims of a tragic fate; and the age was troubled with forebodings of coming strife. The poet was entering into the anguish of suffering and sharing the universal experience of loss, surrender, denial, and death. He had buried his only son, Hamnet, in the summer of 1596; in the autumn of 1601 his father, in whose fortunes he had manifested a deep interest, died at Stratford, and was buried in the quiet churchyard beside the Avon. The poet had learned much of life; he was now to learn much of death also.

CHAPTER XIII

THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES

THE order of the appearance of the Tragedies has not been definitely settled; they were written, however, 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 strenuously; 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 days 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 marvellous 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 theatregoers 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 marvellous 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 66 the pasturage of great minds."

Sir Thomas North's English version of "The Lives of the Noble Grecians, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer Plutarke, of Chæronia, 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 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 it 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 contributions to Elizabethan literature. Plutarch is not only the foremost biographer in the history of Letters, he had the further good fortune to attract a 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 honours that he was the chief feeder of Shakespeare's imagination during the period when his genius touched his 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 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 market-place, 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."

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

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