was built in 1599. In the comedies he wrote for it, Shakespeare turned to write of love again, not to touch its deeper passion as before but to play with it in all its lighter phases. The flashing dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was followed by the far-off forest world of As You Like It, where the time fleets carelessly,' and Rosalind's character is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in a new element, and the 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.' As 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.

6

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 recon

ciled, 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.

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."

NOTE. "The dates and arrangement of Shakespeare's plays given above are only tentative. They are so placed by the conjectures of the latest criticism, and the conjectures wait for proof. Julius Cæsar, e.g., is now dated 1601."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS.-Clarendon Press Ed.; Mieklejohn's Ed.; J. P. Collier's Ed.; Leopold Shakespeare Ed., with an Int. by F. J. Furnivall; Knight's Ed.; H. H. Furness's New Variorum Ed.; H. N. Hudson's Ed.; Rolfe's Ed.; R. G. White's Ed.; G. C. Verplanck's Ed; Dyce's Ed.; and others.

BIOGRAPHIES AND CRITICAL STUDIES IN.-H. N. Hudson's Lectures on Shak, and his Life, Art, and Characters of; S. T. Coleridge's Notes and Lectures upon Shak.; Dowden's Critical Study of Mind and Art of Shak.; T. Carlyle's Hero as Poet; R W. Emerson's Shakespeare, or the Poet, in Rep. Men; Gervinus' Shak. Commentaries; H. Giles' Human Life in Shak.; R. G. White's Memoirs of, with an Essay toward the Expression of the Genius of; J. Weiss' Wit, Humor, and Shak.; J. R. Lowell's Among my Books; Whipple's Lit. of Age of Eliz.; C. & M. C. Clarke's The Shak. Key; E. A. Abbott's Shak. Grammar; H. Reed's Lectures on Eng. Hist. and Tragic Po. as illustrated by Shak.; Minto's Characteristics of Eng. Poets.

READING.-It is impossible to quote from Shakespeare as much as is needed, and so we quote nothing. His plays, admirably annotated, are published separately, and can easily be procured. We suggest that a Comedy, As You Like It, or Much Ado About Nothing, for instance; a Tragedy, Macbeth. King Lear, Othello, or Hamlet; and a Historical play, Hen. IV., Part II., or Hen. V., be read. If possible, these should be read (1) till the pupils can give the plot of the play, (2) till they fairly understand the characters, and can point out the influence of each upon the others and his agency in the development of the play, (3) till they can quote the notable passages and tell who uttered them, and (4) till they have acquired some mastery of Shakespeare's language, imagery, and thought.

LESSON 26.

BEN JONSON." The Decay of the Drama begins while Shakespeare is alive. At first one can scarcely call it decay, it was so magnificent. For it began with 'rare BEN JONSON,' who was born in 1573. His first play, in its very title, Every Man in his Humor, 1596-98, enables us to say in what the first step of this decay consisted.

The drama in Shakespeare's hands had been the painting of the whole of human nature, the painting of characters as they were built up by their natural bent, and by the play of circumstance upon them. The drama in Ben Jonson's hands was the painting of that particular human nature which he saw in his own age; and his characters are not men and women as they are, but as they may become when they are mastered. by a special bias of the mind, or HUMOR. The Manners, now called Humors, feed the Stage,' says Jonson himself. Every Man in his Humor was followed by Every Man out of his Humor, and by Cynthia's Revels, written to satirize the courtiers. The fierce satire of these plays brought the town down upon him, and he replied to their 'noise' in the Poetaster, in which Dekker and Marston were satirized. Dekker answered with the Satiro-Mastix, a bitter parody on the Poetaster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily defects. The staring Leviathan, as he calls Jonson, is not a very untrue description. Silent then for two years, he reappeared with the tragedy of Sejanus, and shortly after produced three splendid comedies in James I.'s reign, Volpone the Fox, The Silent Woman, and The Alchemist, 1605-9-10.

The first is the finest thing he ever did, as great in power as it is in the interest and skill of its plot; the second is chiefly valuable as a picture of English life in high society; the third is full to weariness of Jonson's obscure learning, but its character of Sir Epicure Mammon redeems it. In 1611 his Cati