there is no inward and deathless unity of passion between the lovers like that which united Posthumus and Imogen in life and Romeo and Juliet in death. The play must be interpreted broadly in the light of Shakespeare's entire work; in this light it finds its place as the expression of a passing mood of deep and almost cynical distrust; it is full of that searching irony which from time to time finds utterance in the poet's work and was inevitable in a mind of such range of vision. It is well to remember, also, that in this play the poet, for the sake of throwing a single quality into the highest relief, secured entire concentration of attention by disregarding or ignoring other qualities and relations of equal importance and authority. This was what Browning did in his much misunderstood poem "The Statue and the Bust." is always a perilous experiment, because it involves so much intelligent coöperation on the part of the reader. It is a triumph of Shakespeare's art that Helena's purity not only survives the dangers to which she exposes it, but takes on a kind of saintly whiteness in the corruption in which she plays her perilous part. It CHAPTER XIV THE LATER TRAGEDIES SHAKESPEARE 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 colour 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 Shakespeare. 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 which 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, 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 naught, 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 classi fying it by placing it between the Histories and the 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 and 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 Shakespeare'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 |