elevates the tone of The Tempest. In A MidsummerNight's Dream the dénouement consists in the unravelling of the transient misfortunes of lovers: in The Tempest a way is found out of a tangled web of suffering woven by deceit, treachery, and ingratitude. A sense of guilt and remorse finds utterance in the mouths of the human actors forgiveness of injuries is the last word of the solution brought about by the delicate machinery of the supernatural dramatis persona. Even the underplot has in it a touch of tragedy, and the drunken buffooneries of Trinculo and Stephano are rendered dangerous by their association with the murderous brutishness of Caliban. In other respects the play, like A Midsummer-Night's Dream, shows a marvellous advance in creative power since the poet's first attempt at ideal invention in the Induction to The Taming of A Shrew. Alike in the evolution of the plot and in the grouping of the characters, everything is now in perfect harmony with the ideal conditions of time and place. The enchanted island (possibly suggested to Shakespeare's imagination, as Mr. Hunter conjectures, by travellers' tales of Lampedusa), with its tradition of the sorceries of the foul witch, Sycorax; the noble figure of Prospero, potent over the spirits of the air, and standing in beautiful contrast, as well to the ignorance and purity of Miranda as to the unteachable bestiality of Caliban; the relations of these almost superhuman beings to the mixed crew of shipwrecked courtiers, servants, and sailors, so finely represented in their varied gradations of chivalry, guilty self-seeking, and clownish stupidity;—perhaps in no mortal work is the divine power of poetry in fusing the conflicting elements of imagination into an organic whole so conspicuously manifested. Not less admirable is the mature skill with which Shakespeare has employed in due degree the artistic devices he learned from his predecessors. In the nature of the plot we still feel the influence of the New Comedy; but, in the manner of unfolding it, Shakespeare shoots far beyond the art of Plautus; Lyly's influence is evident in the superhuman surroundings of the action, but these are irradiated with a poetry of which Lyly was incapable: the conversation of the courtiers and the oddities of the persons of low life are modelled on the dialogue of the older poet in his Court comedies; but what was there mechanical and artificial is now made instinct with life; the painful verbal quibbling is discarded, and the humour seems to spring naturally out of the character and the situation. The Tempest is the crown of that portion of Shakespeare's comic work which is most directly inspired by the genius of the Middle Ages,—his Comedies of Illusion, as opposed to his Comedies of Romance. With these Comedies of Illusion must be classed the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Some critics, adopting the suggestion of Tyrwhitt, have supposed this play to have been written as early as 1591, because of the nurse's allusion 'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years; 1 the date of that event in England having been 1580. But this hypothesis involves an artistic impossibility (at least if we assume the text of 1591 to have been substantially identical with that of 1597); since we should have to suppose the whole character of Mercutio, his speech about Queen Mab, the smart euphuistic dialogue between him and Romeo, and the garrulous babble of the nurse, to have preceded such immature writing as we find in the Contention between the Houses of York and Lancaster and the True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York. It is evident, to any one who reflects, that the play is the production of a period when Shakespeare was developing the style of Lyly, and when his fancy was deeply coloured with the imagery of fairy mythology; it is therefore reasonable to place the date of its composition not far from A MidsummerNight's Dream; a conjecture which is corroborated by the fact that the date of the first quarto containing the text of the play is 1597. The nurse is, in all proba1 Romeo and Juliet, Act i. Sc. 3. bility, alluding to the great earthquake near Verona in 1570, of which Shakespeare may well have heard without troubling himself more about the exact interval of time than was convenient for the scansion of his verse. Romeo and Juliet marks the half-way stage between the tragic style which Shakespeare imitated from Marlowe, exhibiting the operation of virtù, and the later tragedies, marked by a strong ethical tendency, such as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. The power of the human will in this play counts for little; it is swept away by the tide of passion and fate. An image of the world. is presented to us as a whole, and in the vein of reflection pervading the prologue to the play, the chorus before the second act, and the occasional speeches of Friar Laurence, we observe the Greek tragic doctrine of moral necessity blended with the medieval doctrine of human vanity. The fable is taken from one of those old-world stories which, first appearing in the Greek novels, gradually detached themselves and emerged in new shapes in the oral or written tales of the mediæval trouvères. Thus we trace its progress from the episode of the potion given to Anthia in Xenophon's Love Adventures of Abrocomas and Anthia, and her entombment, to the similar incidents reported in the Roman de Cligés of Chrestien de Troyes; thence it passes into the tales of Luigi da Porto, Bandello, and Belleforest in the sixteenth century, from which it once more migrates to England into Paynter's prose translation from Boisteau in The Palace of Pleasure, and into Arthur Brooke's poem (taken from the version of Bandello) published in 1562. Brooke says he had seen it "set forth on the stage with much more commendation than he could look for," and it seems by no means impossible that a fragment of the play he alludes to, a Latin one, still survives in MS.2 It contains the characters of the nurse, Friar Laurence, Benvolio (Philophilus), and Tybalt, but not of Paris; and it has a chorus to moralise on the 1 Shakespeare's Library, Part 1, vol. i. p. 66. 2 It is among the Sloane MSS. in the British Museum (No. 1775). See Hunter's New Illustrations of Shakespeare, vol. ii. p. 130. progress of events. Brooke, very probably, took from this drama some ideas for his metrical story; Shakespeare certainly took the framework of his tragedy from the poem of Brooke. In this, as in the Latin play, we have a sketch of the Friar, learned in natural science, and of the character of the nurse, which, in the hands of the Latin dramatist, was of course an imitation of the nurse of Phædra, whether in the play of Euripides or Seneca. The character of Mercutio in Brooke is curious; he is represented as having "an icy hand," which Juliet contrasts with Romeo's; and he has none of the wit with which Shakespeare endows him: with these exceptions Shakespeare follows Brooke closely. In no other of his plays, except in King Lear, are we left with such an impression of the overmastering power of destiny; nevertheless, Romeo and Juliet is not wanting in a consolatory moral, which is set forth in the prologue : Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, Do with their death bury their parents' strife. How closely tragedy and comedy, in the subject of love, ran together in Shakespeare's imagination may be seen from a comparison between these lines and a passage in A Midsummer-Night's Dream: LYSANDER. Ay me! for aught that I could ever read, HERMIA. Lys. HER. Lys. HER. Lys. The course of true love never did run smooth; But, either it was different in blood,— O cross! too high to be enthralled to low. |