EPILOGUE

Spoken by Prospero

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint:

(Not promising, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, to do better next time if you will but pardon the faults of this.)

now, 'tis true,

I must be here confin'd by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

MAN'S RELATIONS TO MAN AS SHOWN IN
"MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM," "HAMLET,"
AND "THE TEMPEST"

IN the last lecture we examined these three plays with reference to the ideas of man's relations to the supernatural which appear in the lines and between the lines of them. We found such a clear and notable advance from the conscienceless Pucks and Oberons and tricksy chances which rule the world. in A Midsummer Night's Dream, through the weak and ineffective belief of belief in Hamlet, to the large and cleareyed reliance upon the goodness and the ultimate purpose of things in The Tempest, as seems to argue that infinite widening of Shakspere's spiritual range and scope which lands him here fairly in that wished-for state of every fervent artist- the state which beholds with unfilmy and unglozing eye all the contradictions of this life, but which is nevertheless not compelled by them to look upon life as a mere Midsummer Night's Dream of grotesque mishaps and crisscrosses and absurdities; but regards it more as a Tempest raised by a conscientious power for a gentle

purpose, and guided by that power to an end which developes forgiveness, large behaviour, love, and all the better qualities of the Prosperos, the Alonsos, the Antonios and the Sebastians of this world. We are now to study these same plays for the purpose of seeing whether they show any corresponding enlargement in Shakspere's conceptions of man's relations to his fellow-men and of man's relations to physical nature.

And first, of man's relations to his fellow-men. These plays are so exuberantly filled with indications of Shakspere's greatly widening perceptions upon this matter as he successively emerged from the Dream Period and the Hamlet Period that I scarcely know when I have ever been more perplexed by the embarrassment of riches than in selecting the special matters to which I might most profitably ask your notice. The immense enlargement of Shakspere's horizon as to the right behaviour of man towards man in The Tempest as compared with A Midsummer Night's Dream might be developed from so many texts out of these plays, and from as many points of comparative view, as to fill many volumes. But only mentioning this embarrassment of riches as explaining the very limited presentation which can be made in any one lecture I have determined to confine the investigation here to the three very interesting plays-within-plays, or anti-masques, which appear in these three works of Shakspere's. You all remember, of course, that, framed in all the gorgeous and and grotesque and filmy tracery of this dream, we have the play of Pyramus and Thisbe within the play of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Then we have the terrible play of the murderer pouring poison into the King's ear and getting the love of his wife, acted before Hamlet's uncle and mother- the play which, when the King asks, What do you call this play? Hamlet

answers, The Mouse-trap. And finally we have that exquisite masque of the gods — Juno and Ceres and their train which the wise and potent Prospero arrays before his two young lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda. Now note by way of a preliminary outline the aim, or groundmotive, of each of these anti-masques. Here we have Bottom and Snug the joiner and Starveling the tailor and the other clowns performing the tedious-brief tragical comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe to grace the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, and the manner in which the poetic speeches of the actors travesty real speeches shows clearly that Shakspere is having his good-humoured laugh at somebody; so that we may say the ostensible motive of the anti-masque is a light and playful amusement for a great warrior and his bride, while the underlying thought is a gentle fun over somebody's play-writing; that is to say, the ground-motive is Ridicule.

Here in Hamlet the motive of the anti-masque is quite as clear: it is to entrap the King's conscience into a clear betrayal of his guilt in murdering his brother and usurping Denmark; that is to say, the ground-motive of this anti-masque is Revenge. Here, lastly, in The Tempest, Prospero, a student of nature, a physicist,— who is nevertheless also a man with man's delights and passions, and an artist,- brings about the anti-masque of Juno and Ceres in grateful and exuberant delight over the happy issues of his own working, before the eyes of the two whom he most loves, to bless their marriage; in short, the underlying motive here is Blessing. We may then write Ridicule, Revenge, Blessing as mnemonic words which embody the prominent ideas that remain when we strip away the unessential accessories of these three antimasques.

But now let us look a little more closely at these

plays-within-plays, and put some flesh upon the bones of this outline. In considering the anti-masque of Pyramus and Thisbe, here, I have thought that perhaps I could make this necessarily dry analysis somewhat more interesting to you by hinging it upon an inquiry as to who was the person satirised if we may use so harsh a term for such hilarious ridicule as this in the figure of Bottom, the Ass, and in the thunderous lines of Pyramus and Thisbe. It so happens that since the last lecture in which we were comparing these plays, in recalling certain passages from one of Gabriel Harvey's letters written in 1592, and from a work of Robert Greene's a little earlier, I was struck with the reëmergence in my mind of several hints or thoughts from those passages as I read again this mock-play of Pyramus and Thisbe; and with my mind thus directed I eagerly took up a search which has quite satisfied me that in this figure of Bottom, the Ass, and of Snug, the joiner, and in these absurd speeches of Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakspere is laughing at the one man whom history has ever acquainted us with as his enemy — I mean at Robert Greene. The instant I started in this direction, every moment yielded a fresh evidence. In arraying some of these evidences before you, as I now proceed to do, we shall find at every step glimpse after glimpse upon Shakspere's ideas of the proper behaviour of man to his fellow-man-which is the final aim of our research to-day.

Permit me to recall to you two very famous literary quarrels of Shakspere's time, which will, I think, put us at the very status of thought and frame of mind in which Shakspere wrote the Midsummer Night's Dream. One of these quarrels shows us the figures of Robert Greene, Shakspere, and Henry Chettle in certain relations to each other; the other shows us Robert Greene, Shak