melancholy of Jaques is the first touch we have of the older Shakespeare who had gained his experience, and whose experience had made him sad.' And yet it was but a touch; Twelfth Night shows no trace of it, though the play that followed, All's Well That Ends Well, again strikes a sadder note. We find this sadness fully grown in the later sonnets, which are said to have been finished about 1602. They were published in 1609. "Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind changed with it. He had grown wealthy during this period, and famous, and was loved by society. He was the friend of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and of William Herbert, Lord Pembroke. The queen patronized him; all the best literary society was his own. He had rescued his father from poverty, bought the best house in Stratford and much land, and was a man of wealth and comfort. Suddenly all his life seems to have grown dark. His best friends fell into ruin, Essex perished on the scaffold, Southampton went to the Tower, Pembroke was banished from the Court; he may himself, as some have thought, have been concerned in the rising of Essex. Added to this, we may conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry of the sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been betrayed in his love by a dear friend. Disgust of his profession as an actor, and public and private ill weighed heavily on him, and in darkness of spirit, though still clinging to the business of the theatre, he passed from comedy to write of the sterner side of the world, to tell the tragedy of mankind. "His Third Period, 1602–1608, begins with the last days of Queen Elizabeth. It contains all the great tragedies, and opens with the fate of Hamlet, who felt, like the poet himself, that 'the time was out of joint.' Hamlet, the dreamer, may well represent Shakespeare, as he stood aside from the crash that overwhelmed his friends, and thought on the changing world. The tragi-comedy of Measure for Measure was next written, and is tragic in thought throughout. Julius Cæsar, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus and Cressida (finished from an incomplete work of his youth), Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon (only in part his own) were all written in these. five years. The darker sins of men, the unpitying fate which slowly gathers round and falls on men, the avenging wrath of conscience, the cruelty and punishment of weakness, the treachery, lust, jealousy, ingratitude, madness of men, the follies of the great, and the fickleness of the mob, are all, with a thousand other varying moods and passions, painted, and felt as his own while he painted them, during this stern time. "His Fourth Period, 1608-1613.As Shakespeare wrote of these things, he passed out of them, and his last days are full of the gentle and loving calm of one who has known sin and sorrow and fate, but has risen above them into peaceful victory. Like his great contemporary, Bacon, he left the world and his own evil time behind him, and with the same quiet dignity sought the innocence and stillness of country life. The country breathes through all the dramas of this time. The flowers Perdita gathers in Winter's Tale, and the frolic of the sheep-shearing he may have seen in the Stratford meadows; the song of Fidele in Cymbeline is written by one who already feared no more the frown of the great, nor slander nor censure rash, and was looking forward to the time when men should say of him. "Quiet consummation have; And renowned be thy grave!' "Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived in the house he had bought at Stratford-on-Avon. He was reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays he writes speak of domestic peace and forgiveness. The story of Marina, which he left unfinished, and which two later writers expanded into the play of Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas. The Two Noble Kinsmen of Fletcher, a great part of which is now, on doubtful grounds, I think, attributed to Shakespeare, and in which the poet sought the inspiration of Chaucer, would belong to this period. Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and the Tempest bring his history up to 1612, and in the next year he closed his poetic life by writing, with Fletcher, Henry VIII. For three years he kept silence, and then, on the 23d of April, 1616, the day he reached the age of fifty-two, as is supposed, he died. “His Work. — We can only guess with regard to Shakespeare's life; we can only guess with regard to his character. It has been tried to find out what he was from his sonnets and from his plays, but every attempt seems to. be a failure. We cannot lay our hand on anything and say for certain that it was spoken by Shakespeare out of his own character. The most personal thing in all his writings is one that has scarcely been noticed. It is the Epilogue to the Tempest; and if it be, as is most probable, the last thing he ever wrote, then its cry for forgiveness, its tale of inward sorrow, only to be relieved by prayer, give us some dim insight into how the silence of those three years was passed; while its declaration of his aim in writing, 'which was to please,' — the true definition of an artist's aim,—should make us very cautious in our efforts to define his character from his works. Shakespeare made men and women whose dramatic action on each other, and towards a catastrophe, was intended to please the public, not to reveal himself. 66 'No commentary on his writings, no guesses about his life or character, are worth much which do not rest on this canon as their foundation: What he did, thought, learned, and felt, he did, thought, learned, and felt as an artist. And he was never less the artist, through all the changes of the time. Fully influenced, as we see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and more philosophic cast of thought of the later time of Elizabeth; passing on into the reign of James I., when pedantry took the place of gayety, and sensual the place of imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the place of that art which itself is nature; he preserves to the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, the sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Elizabethan poetry. The Winter's Tale is as lovely a love story as Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest is more instinct with imagination than the Midsummer Night's Dream, and as great in fancy, and yet there are fully twenty years between them. The only change is in the increase of power, and in a closer and graver grasp of human nature. Around him the whole tone and manner of the drama altered for the worse as his life went on, but his work grew to the close in strength and beauty." - STOPFORD BROOKE. HISTORY OF THE PLAY "1. The first known edition of Hamlet appeared in 1603. It bore the following title-page: THE Tragicall Historie of HAMLET By William Shake-speare. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere At London printed for N. L. and John Trundell. 1603. "The second quarto appeared in the following year, with a title-page much altered: THE Tragicall Historie of Prince of Denmarke By William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much Coppie. Printed by I. R. for N. L., and are to be sold at his Fleetstreet 1604. |