old type, based on the story of a bad man scattering crime and bloodshed as he goes!

But the thoughtfulness of Coriolanus is out of all proportion to its concrete sensational interest, and its appeal to the judgment similarly out of proportion to its play upon the sympathies. Hence, though by no means wanting in effective scenes, it was doomed to be comparatively forgotten. There is no evidence of any popularity in its own time, and our time feels little affection for it either as drama or social philosophy. No doubt we should count it a very great play if it were not for the so much greater ones that went before. In the presence of the majestic strength and sadness of the five tragedies from Hamlet to Antony, the other tragic works of Shakespeare, as of the whole modern world, pale their ineffectual fires.

F

CHAPTER VII

THE TRAGI-COMEDIES

ROM about 1603 to the end of Shakespeare's career there are commonly dated a number of plays which refuse satisfactory classification under any of the three types which we have been engaged in considering. The editors of the First Folio found it possible to put each of these dramas among either the comedies or the tragedies, and they have been followed (with some variations in the grouping) by many of their successors; but no careful reader can have failed to note the difficulties to which such a classification gives rise. In some instances, and especially in the plays of the earlier part of the period in question, the difficulty is simply a matter of mood or emotional effect, and is often met by describing the plays as comedies of a dark, severe, bitter, or ironic character. In others, and conspicuously in those associated with the final period of Shakespeare's work, the structure and whole dramatic method seem to change, and the difference is expressed by the use of type-names admittedly vague or ambiguous, such as "tragi-comedy" or "dramatic romance."

By tragi-comedy one may mean any one of a number of things. John Fletcher, following an Italian source, said that such a play "is not so called in respect to mirth and

killing," that is, because of the mixture of comic matter with a tragic plot, to which the term came often to be applied, "but in respect it wants [i.e. lacks] deaths. .. yet brings some near it."" In other words, it develops a situation of mortal peril, from which the characters eventually escape. This we have already found approximated by Shakespeare in such comedies as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado, where we paused to ask ourselves whether they could be called examples of true comedy, in view of the serious situations and emotions involved; and one may frankly admit that the line between these plays and certain of those reserved for this chapter is rather insubstantial. At this point, then, tragi-comedy is very close to romance. For it is of the nature of romance to represent perilous adventure and deliverance, to thrill with uncertainty and surprise by fortunate escape, and in general to interest us much more in what happens to its characters than in what they are in themselves or accomplish because of what they are. If the story is in dramatic form, the difference between romance and comedy is only relative, a matter of emphasis rather than of material. Plays of this more romantic and less dramatic kind became increasingly popular during the closing years of Shakespeare's activity, and he experimented with them as he had done with almost every other fashion of the stage.

But there is another blend of tragic and comic which is not concerned with happenings; it is primarily a matter of mood. The sterner or more ironic side of the comic spirit may treat of the follies of human life-its blunders, illusions, and hypocrisies-with a seriousness which stifles

1 Preface to The Faithful Shepherdess.

the very laughter to which it gives birth. The story is absurd, but it cuts too deep to be disposed of by Puck's merry philosophy of "What fools these mortals be!" If the dramatist keeps it technically outside the field of tragedy by refusing to carry through the sinister course of the action to a logical catastrophe, we nevertheless feel that the "happy ending" is lacking in happiness, and that a mixed type of art and of appreciation has resulted. One sees all this much more clearly in certain modern dramas, such as An Enemy of the People or Pillars of Society, than in anything which the Elizabethans produced. But Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, sometimes approached similar effects. We have seen them in the caustic wit and mocking humor of Hamlet, though in that case subordinated to the "high seriousness" and the tragic matter of the greater part of the play, and they reappear in some of the minor pieces of the same period and a little later, with no truly tragic seriousness or nobility to obscure them. Either kind of tragi-comedy will be likely to fail of the finest effects of the purer types: the romantic kind diminishes the emphasis on character, and on the major laws of cause and effect, of which drama is the supreme exponent in art; and the other sort is likely to produce much of the painfulness of tragedy without the nobility of its passions or the satisfying inevitableness of its catastrophes. The strength of unromantic tragi-comedy lies as with the plays of Ibsen mentioned above-in the elements of intense veracity and acute social criticism, and in these the Elizabethans were not interested. The strength of romantic tragi-comedy lies in its free return to the happy irrationality of childhood, which Shakespeare

perfectly accomplished in his one masterpiece in the mixed type, The Tempest.

Troilus and Cressida, apparently the earliest of the tragicomedies, is the most difficult of all the Shakespearean plays to classify, as it is the most difficult to explain. Everything about its history conspires to add to its puzzling character. The quarto title-page called it a "history"; the writer of the publisher's preface spoke of it as a comedy; the folio editors classified it as a tragedy. There is evidence of its having been performed by Shakespeare's company, yet the preface just referred to claimed that it "was never staled with the stage." Incidentally there was trouble with the copyright; and when the folio was being printed it appears that this play was temporarily omitted, being eventually restored in a different place in the volume from that originally assigned to it, with a resulting disturbance of pagination and other details. Dark suspicions that it figured in the quarrels of the theatrical companies, and that the character of Ajax was intended to parody Ben Jonson, have added to the difficulties of discussing it. Regarding this latter point it may be said at once that the more it is investigated the less foundation for the suspicion appears. For present purposes all these accessory problems can be dismissed; but the play itself still leaves quite enough to perplex us.

To its contemporaries Troilus and Cressida was what the quarto called it, a history-play, dealing with the familiar story of the Trojan War. Probably not long before its appearance, the versatile Heywood had produced a popular success on the same subject, The Iron Age, and the theme had been abundantly used in other literature,