assume the necessary attitude; it is but an unpleasant moment to pass, and he tries to inure himself by practising beforehand : What must I say?— "I pray, sir,”—Plague upon't! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace:-"Look, sir,-my wounds!— I got them in my country's service, when Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran The tribunes of the people, anxious at the prospect of military despotism, have an easy task. They come in with their high-sounding words, the usual words: Menenius advises delay, but he is suspected of "moderantism." "Sir," says one of the tribunes, those cold ways, That seem like prudent helps, are very poisonous And the leaders of the people continue playing their parts, inflating their voice, refusing now, with the kind of logic that is sure to take on such occasions, a regular trial. No delay, death at once, without more ado: "He dies to-night": He is a disease that must be cut away. We'll hear no more. Pursue him to his house, and pluck him thence; Lest his infection, being of catching nature, He is, however, only exiled; 'tis better than nothing, the people rejoice: "He is gone, hoo! hoo!" He returns as a foe, at the head of the Volsces; the popular leaders long deny the news, and they imprison the messenger as a propagator of seditious rumours. The people are in a state of consternation; nobody acknowledges any more having voted the banishment. Not one favourable trait comes to relieve the darkness of this picture of popular vanity and ferocity; not even valour before the enemy, nor the defence of the frontiers against the foreign invader; the poet's gift is at fault, and this relentless severity betrays a prejudiced mind.1 With "Antony and Cleopatra "2 begins again the study of diseases of the will, a favourite one with the Shakespeare of this period. Antony continues the series to which belong Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear (weakness and violence of the senile age), and even Brutus (vacillations of a conscientious thinker). Antony has been marvellously endowed by nature: valiant, handsome, open-minded, full of resources, possessed, moreover, of a strong and sound will. He was not, like Hamlet, hampered from his birth by having but an average will, just sufficient for the common tasks of ordinary life, and which a great and unexpected burden would paralyse. Another agent of This is shown also by his adding to many admirable traits of nature others passing the limit of probability and changing the portrait into a caricature: "And though we willingly consented to his banishment, yet it was against our will" (iv. 6). * Performed about 1606-7, entered in the "Stationers' Registers" in 1608, in view of a publication which the troupe succeeded in preventing; 1st ed. the folio of 1623; source, North's Plutarch. destruction is at work in him, he is sensual and cannot resist the allurements of pleasure; a slow and continual decay of the body, of the nerves and of the will goes on within him: His captain's heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The mind remains lucid, as with Hamlet; he sees with painful certitude his increasing weakness and his shame; he exhausts himself in efforts, brief and violent, to break his chain, and he falls back lower each time, having ever present, to augment his grief, the memory of what he was and the sense of the abjection into which he has sunk. The play is but the history of his vain attempts.* His nerves no longer obey; he weeps easily; he takes, on the sudden, contradictory resolutions; he talks vacantly; an incurable spell attaches him to his "serpent of old Nile." His peers possess the world, and he Cleopatra. To increase the horror of the fall, Shakespeare has made of the Egyptian a low courtesan who knows the secrets of her trade and nothing else, who speaks its language, who has neither heart, nor mind, nor intellect, In the first scene, pointing to Cleopatra, he says: Let Rome in Tyber melt! and the wide arch In the second scene: These strong Egyptian fetters I must break. He breaks but ties them again; Cleopatra Hath nodded him to her. (iii. 6.) nor poetry who is but flesh, and has no other instincts but those of her profession: If you find him sad, Say, I am dancing; if in mirth, report That I am sudden sick. But, her attendant remonstrates, ought you not rather "give him way, cross him in nothing?" ... -Thou teach'st, like a fool, the way to lose him, answers the queen, a woman of experience and who knows best. She has, withal, when displeased, the brutalities of those who, like her, "trade in love"; she threatens to break the teeth of her waiting-woman, she strikes down a bearer of bad news: "Strikes him again hales him up and down," crying, "I'll unhair thy head." Antony rolls towards the abyss, his eyes open; he knows the treacheries and wiles of Cleopatra: "Triple-turned whore!" says he of his royal friend; but he is used to the poison of her carnal beauty and can no longer do without it; he dies of it. This is again a sombre drama; the lower instincts have conquered, and the tragedy closes on the abasement and destruction of a Roman hero. VIII. About 1610, although he was then only forty-six, and was at the height of his success, Shakespeare deemed that the hour had come to realise the dream of his life. He returned to his native town, and settled in his fine house, called "New Place." At that time his father, his mother, and his son Hamnet were dead, but he still "August 11, Hamnet filius William Shakspere." Entry of the burial, in 1596, of the poet's only son; parochial registers of Stratford; fac-simile in S. Lee's "Life," illustrated edition, 1899, p. 149. "Mr. Johannes had his brothers Gilbert and Richard, his sister Joan, married to William Hart, hatter (who kept a shop in the house now called the "Birthplace"), his own wife, and his two daughters, Susanna and Judith. With the practical good sense which the well-to-do " Mr. Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Gent.," applied to all things, he married his daughters in his own town, to people of their own class, the eldest, in 1607, to John Hall, an honest physician who reached a certain reputation in Stratford. and the surrounding country; the second, in 1616, to Thomas Quiney, a vintner, of Bridge Street, member of a family with which the Shakespeares had long had friendly intercourse. Neither of the poet's daughters seems to have received an education superior to that approved of by Molière's old Chrysale for plain citizens' daughters. Judith Shakespeare could, if need was, sign her name; but, like her grandfather, she occasionally saved herself the trouble by making a cross. From time to time the poet would return to London. Although intending to give up the theatre entirely, he continued, nevertheless, his relations with his former troupe, went to see his friends the poets and actors, allowed himself still to be tempted by the demon of the stage, and wrote his last works. With the exception of " Henry VIII.,"2 an historical play Shakespere," the poet's father, had been buried in 1601; Mary Arden, his mother, in 1608. ' John Shakespeare had had, it will be remembered, four sons: William, the great poet, 1564-1616; Gilbert, b. 1566, possibly survived William ; Richard, b. 1574, died at Stratford in 1613; lastly, Edmund, born in 1580, who became an actor, did not attain celebrity, and died at Southwark in 1607. On the identification of Gilbert with the "Gilbertus Shakespeare" who died in 1612 (but who may, according to Lee, p. 463, have been in reality a son of Shakespeare's brother), and on the fact that Gilbert was not a mercer in London, as has often been said, see the letters of Mrs. Stopes, Athenæum, December 29, 1900, and her "Shakespeare's Family," 1901. * Performed in 1613, perhaps one or two years earlier; Ist ed. the folio of 1623; source: Holinshed and, especially for the last act, Foxe's "Actes |