Jonson's reference in Bartholomew Fair. Contrast with earlier work. 1623, where the text is in an exceptionally accurate condition. The popularity of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest is further attested by a satirical allusion in the Induction to Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, which was first produced in 1614:— If there be never a servant-monster in the Fair, who can help it, he [i. e., Jonson] says, nor a nest of antics? He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries, to mix his head with other men's heels; let the concupiscence of jigs and dances reign as strong as it will amongst you: yet if the puppets will please anybody, they shall be entreated to come in. The reference here to Caliban and the harpies in Taking the three plays of this final period together, and comparing them with the productions of the years of inner storm that had preceded, we find a marked contrast. There is little or no return to the mood and manner of the 1590's, to which the great comedies belong. Comedy of the richest vintage there is, to be sure; never, even in the days of Bottom and Falstaff, had their creator's heart been more over-brimming with fun and with the unbought joy of life than when he poured out his soul in the rogueries of Autolycus and the Bacchic fooling of Stephano and Trinculo. There is tragedy, too: the woes of Posthumus and Imogen, the self-originated agony of Leontes and the sixteen years' death-in-life of Hermione; the life of Prospero, shipwrecked in a tempest which is over long before the play begins; the superfluous but none the less shattering sorrow of Alonzo for the son he counts as lost; - all this, while it lasts, is evil enough, though not to be compared with the doom of Macbeth and Lear. But we have passed into a new world from that A new spirearlier one of irresponsible jollity, where happy end- itual world ings were ensured by undesigned coincidence; a new world, too, from that of inexorable doom and bloody revenge, where the death of the victims is their only possible approach to happiness. This new world is—may we not say?—one of of romantic romantic realism, where sins may be atoned for, realism, injuries forgiven, and errors set right. No man here is saved by chance; but here salvation is not impossible, and in each of these plays it is attained where exbefore the end. Yet the endings are not "happy " piation of in the sentimental sense. The characters live and ror is posgrow and change before our eyes; they are mellowed by experience, made humaner by sorrow and repentance; and the end is peace. Another noteworthy difference between these plays and those of fifteen years earlier is the fact that Shakespeare now looks with other eyes upon the creatures, young and old, of his imagination. Formerly he had presented the young lovers and frolickers as his contemporaries, or, more strictly (if the too pedantic term may be allowed), as his coetaneans. In Love's Labour's Lost he is of an age with Biron and Longaville, and looks with their eyes upon their lady-loves. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he sees Sylvia as Valentine saw her, and the lights and shadows of the world betray the valuations of a young man's fancy. In his first tragedy, the undying tale of the star-crossed lovers, he weighs all issues in the balances of Romeo, and betrays the instinctive hostility of youth towards what youth needs must sin and er sible. Shakespeare now writes as an older man. Raleigh's Shakespeare, chap. ii, p. 60-61. He now treats of parents as one of them, think the heartless and ungenerous prudence of age. He is on the side of Juliet and her beloved - not upon principle, but instinctively. A detailed comparison of these early heroes and heroines with Posthumus and Imogen, Florizel and Perdita, and Ferdinand and Miranda, would make an interesting study. The hint for this has been given to us by Sir Walter Raleigh, who, speaking of the romantic dramas of Shakespeare's last period, makes these discriminating observations: A new type of character meets us in these plays; a girl, innocent, frank, dutiful, and wise, cherished and watched over by her devoted father, or restored to him after long separation. It is impossible to escape the thought that we are indebted to Judith Shakespeare for something of the beauty and simplicity which appear in Miranda and Perdita, and in the earlier sketch of Marina. In his will Shakespeare bequeaths to Judith a "broad silver-gilt bowl,"-doubtless the bride-cup that was used at her wedding. There were many other girls within reach of his observation, but (such are the limitations of humanity) there were few so likely as his own daughter to exercise him in disinterested sympathy and insight, or to touch him with a sense of the pathos of youth. Professor Raleigh is not oblivious of the danger of carrying such speculations too far-as some may think he has already done in the foregoing passage; but his verdict on the changed attitude in the latest plays is incontestable. The other aspect of that new attitude is the fact that, whereas in the earlier plays the older people are viewed from the standpoint of rebellious youth, in the later ones Shakespeare identifies himself much more with the parents and guardians. You cannot read Romeo and Juliet without feeling that old Mon tague and Capulet are the natural enemies of the youthful poet, as well as of his hero and heroine and of each other. Despite his ripening judgment, moreover, he portrays the abduction of Jessica by Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice as one of those glorious larks in which the spirit of youth, self-justified by its desires, triumphs over crabbed age. In all the earlier works there is an elusive but unmistakable suggestion that age, merely as such, and irrespective of individual character, has about it something alien, repellent, and slightly ridiculous. But in The Tempest Shakespeare is obviously identified by sympathy with Prospero rather than with Ferdinand. He looks on Miranda with a father's, not with a lover's eye. In The Winter's Tale, despite the prominence of the young couple, the poet's heart is with the parents-with Polixenes and Hermione. To put the point briefly, the poet when young is primarily concerned that his lovers shall attain their happiness; in his maturer years, his first anxiety is that they shall deserve it. Had we none but internal evidence, we could not fail to date the final trilogy at the point where the existing external evidence confirms us in placing it. The general effect of the three plays is most happily summed up by Dowden in the following sentences: and Over the beauty of youth and the love of youth there is shed, in these plays of Shakespeare's final period, a clear yet tender luminousness not elsewhere to be perceived in his writings. In his earlier plays, Shakespeare writes concerning young men maidens, their loves, their mirth, their griefs, as one who is among them, who has a lively, personal interest in their concerns, who can make merry with them, treat them familiarly, and, if need be, can mock them into good sense. There is nothing in these early plays Two plays dealing with lost children. Source: Greene's novel. wonderful, strangely beautiful, pathetic about youth plays the beautiful, pathetic light is always present. . . In each of these plays we can see Shakespeare, as it were, bending tenderly over the joys and sorrows of youth. We recognize this rather through the total characterization, and through a feeling and a presence, than through definite incident or statement. The similarity of thesis between Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale is worthy of consideration. Both these romances are pivoted upon the adventures of lost children, who are brought up in obscurity. In the former play it is the tyrannous cruelty of King Cymbeline in banishing the worthy Belarius that robs him of his two boys. In The Winter's Tale it is the groundless jealousy of Leontes that causes the death of Mamillius, the concealment of Hermione and the loss of Perdita. As regards its subject-matter, The Winter's Tale is little more than a free dramatization of a novel by Shakespeare's quondam enemy, Robert Greenethe man who on his deathbed, in 1592, had launched against the unlearned “upstart” a jealous and vindictive denunciation, which, by one of the happiest of time's revenges, has come to serve as a precious datum for the study of the master-artist's career. It is, indeed, the earliest reference to Shakespeare in contemporary literature, and serves (by its malicious paraphrase of a line in the Third Part of King Henry VI) to prove that Shakespeare was then already known, at least to the inner theatrical circle, |