_All's Well that Ends Well._

_Written._ (?)

_Published._ 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The story of Helena's love for Bertram is found in the _Decamerone_ of Boccaccio (giorn. 3, nov. 9).

Shakespeare may have read it in the _Palace of Pleasure_.

_The Fable._ Helena, orphan daughter of a physician, has been brought up, as a dependant, in the house of the Countess of Rousillon. She falls in love with Bertram, the son of the Countess and the King's ward.

Bertram goes to the French Court, on his way to the wars. He finds the King dangerously ill. Helena, hearing of the King's illness, comes to the Court as a physician. She offers to cure the King with one of her father's remedies, on condition that, when cured, he will give her in marriage the man of her choice. The King accepts these conditions; she cures him; she chooses for her husband Bertram.

Bertram, the King's ward, has to do the King's bidding. He grudgingly accepts her; they are married. He leaves her, and goes to the wars in the service of the Duke of Florence, designing to see her no more. Helena withdraws from the Countess's house, and comes to Florence disguised.

Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her, receives her unsuspecting husband at night, takes from him a ring, and gives, in exchange, a ring given to her by the King of France.

At the end of the war, Bertram, hearing that Helena is dead, returns to France, wearing the ring. The King sees it and challenges it. Bertram can give no just account of how he got it.

Helena, quick with child by him, confronts him, with the ring that he left with her at Florence. Diana, the Florentine maid, gives evidence that Helena impersonated her on the night of Bertram's visit at Florence. Bertram accepts Helena as his wife, and the play ends happily.

This play (whenever written) was extensively revised during the ruthless mood that gave birth to _Measure for Measure_. The alterations were made in a mood so much deeper than the mood of its first composition that they make the play uneven. Something, perhaps some trick of health, that made the mind clearer than the imagination, gave to Shakespeare for a short time another (and pitiless) view of human obsessions.

It was a part of his belief that treachery is generally caused by blindness, blindness generally by some obsession of pa.s.sion. In this play he treats of the removal of an obsession by making plain to the obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the treachery it causes.

Bertram is a young man fresh from home. He does not want to marry. He is eager to see the world and to win honour. He has been accustomed to look down on Helena as a poor dependant. He does not like her, and he does not like being ordered. He is suddenly ordered to marry her. He has been trapped by a woman's underhand trick. He sees himself brought into bondage with all the plumes of his youth clipped close. There is no way of escape; he has to marry her; but the King's order cannot quench his rage against the woman who has so snared him. His rage burns inward into a brooding, rankling ill-humour that becomes an obsession. It is one of the tragedies of life that an evil obsession blinds the judgment on more sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. A way of destruction may be as narrow as a way of virtue; but all the other ways of destruction run into it. Bertram in blinkers to the good in Helena is blind to the faults in himself and in Parolles his friend. Wilfully, as the sullen do, he thinks himself justified in doing evil because evil has been done to him. Hot blood is running in him. Temptation, never far from youth, is always near the unbalanced. He takes an unworthy confidant, as the obsessed do, and goes in over the ears. His sin is the giving of salutation to sportive blood, it is love, it is "natural rebellion," it is young man's pastime. But looked at coldly and judicially, with the nature of the confidant laid bare, and the lies of the sinner made plain, it is an ugly thing. Pa.s.sion is sweet enough to seem truth, the only truth. Let the eyes be opened a little, and it will blast the heart with horror. What man thought true is then seen to be this, this thing, this devil of falseness who gives man this kind of friend, makes him tell this kind of lie, and brands him with this kind of shame.

Shakespeare is just to Bertram. The treachery of a woman is often the cause of a man's treachery to womanhood. Helena's obsession of love makes her blind to the results of her actions. She twice puts the man whom she loves into an intolerable position, which nothing but a king can end. The fantasy is not made so real that we can believe in the possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised as one of the n.o.blest of Shakespeare's women. Shakespeare saw her more clearly than any man who has ever lived. He saw her as a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art's sake, nor for charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end. He saw her put a man into a position of ignominy quite unbearable, and then plot with other women to keep him in that position. Lastly, he saw her beloved all the time by the conventionally minded of both s.e.xes.

The play is full of effective theatrical situations. It contains much fine poetry. Besides the poetry there are startling moments of insight--

"My mother told me just how he would woo As if she sat in's heart...."

"Now, G.o.d delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves, What things are we! Merely our own traitors."

"I would gladly have him see his company anatomised, That he might take a measure of his own judgments."

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."

"Our rash faults Make trivial price of serious things we have, Not knowing them until we know their grave: Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust, Destroy our friends and after weep their dust."

_Julius Caesar._

_Written._ 1601 (?)

_Produced._ (?)

_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius Caesar in Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_.

A tragedy of Julius Caesar, now lost, was performed by Shakespeare's company in 1594. Shakespeare must have known this play.

_The Fable._ Ca.s.sius, fearing that Julius Caesar is about to extinguish all trace of Republican rule in Rome, persuades Brutus and others to plot a change. They decide to murder Caesar.

On the morning chosen for the murder, Caesar is warned by many omens not to stir abroad. He is persuaded to ignore the omens. He goes to the Senate House, and is there killed. Mark Antony, his friend, obtains leave from the murderers to make a public oration over the corpse.

In his speech he so inflames the populace against the murderers that they are compelled to leave Rome.

Joining himself to Octavius, he takes the field against Brutus and Ca.s.sius, and helps to defeat them at Philippi.

Ca.s.sius is killed by his servant when he sees that all is lost.

Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills himself.

The modern play climbs to its culmination by a series of interruptions or crises. The modern playwright tries to end his acts at an arresting or splendid moment, artfully delayed, and carefully prepared. He tries to end his play by a gradual knitting together of all the energies of his characters into a situation, happier or more haunting, than any that has preceded it in the course of the action. The art by which this is done, when it is done, is called dramatic construction. There are many kind of dramatic construction. Each age tends to form a new one. Each writer uses many. In art a subject can only be expressed in the form most fitting to it. In the art of the theatre a mistake in the choice of the form, or in the right handling of it when chosen leads infallibly to the irritation of the audience and the failure of the play. When a play is badly constructed the actors cannot so interpret the author's emotion that it will dominate the collective emotion in the audience.

It is often said, by those who ought to know better (it was said to Racine by Frenchmen), that dramatic construction cannot matter, if the pa.s.sion or spirit with which the author writes, be abundant and sincere.

The powder in a cartridge may be abundant and the bullet at the end may be sincerely meant, yet neither will do execution till they are put properly into the proper weapon, rightly aimed, and judgingly fired. So with pa.s.sion in the arts. Without art, inspiration is breath and a feeding of the wind. In the theatre, inspiration without art is as a sounding bra.s.s and as a tinkling cymbal.

It is sometimes maintained in print, by those saddened or maddened by bad modern performances of the plays, that Shakespeare "could not construct," that he is constantly "rambling," "chaotic," or "intolerable," and that he is only played to-day because of his "poetry." Those who maintain these things forget that an Elizabethan play was constructed for a theatre much unlike the modern theatre, and performed in a manner suited to that theatre, but less well suited to the theatre of our times. Shakespeare's plays were constructed closely and carefully to be effective on the Elizabethan stage. On that stage they were highly and n.o.bly effective. On the modern stage, produced in the modern manner, they are less effective. There are many reasons why they should be less effective on the modern stage. During the last thirty years there has been a tendency towards naturalism in the theatre. Modern audiences have learned not to care for poetry on the stage unless it is made "natural" by realistic scenery. Modern audiences are accustomed to the modern forms of dramatic construction, which are unlike the Elizabethan forms. They know that modern playwrights put a strong scene at the end of an act and a great scene at the end of the play. They have learned to expect a play to be arranged in that manner, and to count as ill constructed the play not so arranged. As it is frequently said that the last acts of _Julius Caesar_ make anti-climax and spoil the play, it is necessary to consider Shakespeare's constructive practice in this and in some other plays.

The Greek tragic poets ended the action of their plays in the modern manner, at the great scene, but, unlike us, they delayed the departure of the audience for some minutes more, generally by a chorus of men and women who expounded the moral value of the action in n.o.ble verse. The audience came away calmed. If a Greek had constructed _Julius Caesar_, he would have ended the action at the murder. A chorus of senators would then have chanted something n.o.ble about the results of pride, the vanity of human glory, and the strangeness of the ways of the G.o.ds. A modern writer would have caused the curtain to fall at the murder, for to-day, when the brains are out the play dies and there an end. Shakespeare carries on his play for two acts after Caesar is dead. In _Macbeth_ he constructs the last half of his play in much the same manner.

In both plays he is considering the conception, the doing, and the results of a violent act. In both plays this act is the murder of the head of a State. In neither case is he deeply interested in the victim.

Duncan, in _Macbeth_, is a generous gentleman; Caesar, in this play, is a touchy man of affairs whose head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination broods on the fact that the killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases the killers show base personal ingrat.i.tude and treachery. In both plays, an avenging justice makes even the scales. The mind of the poet follows them from the moment when the guilty thought is prompted, through the agony and exultation of dreadful acts, to the unhappiness that dogs the treacherous, till Fate's just sword falls in vengeance. His imagination is most keenly stirred just as ours is, by the great event, the murder of the victim: but his subject is not the murder, nor yet the tragical end of a ruler. His subject in both plays is the working of Fate who prompts to murder, uses the murderer, and then destroys him. We are interested in crisis and in topic. The Elizabethans, with a wider vision, could not detach an act from its place in the pageant of history. In a modern play the heroine is put into an unpleasant position, or an evil is exposed, or our faults are made visible and laughable. The point of view is that of the sympathiser, reformer, and moralist looking on from the window near by. The field of vision is restricted and the object brought near. In this great play, as in _Macbeth_, Shakespeare strove to present a violent act and its consequences from the point of view of a great just spirit outside life.

The play is generally considered to be the earliest of the supreme plays. Little more can be said of it at this time than that it is supreme. There is a majesty in the conception that makes it like gathering and breaking storm. The cause of the murder is a great personal treachery inspired by an unselfish idea. Though it seems inevitable, it is a very little thing that makes it possible. Both Caesar's murder and Brutus' downfall are almost prevented. A hand stretches out to save both of them. A little domestic treachery inspired by a selfish idea puts aside the interposing hand in both instances.

Caesar will not listen to his wife because he is sure of himself. Brutus will not answer his wife for the same reason. They go on to the magnificent hour which makes the one fine soul in the play a haunted and unhappy soul till he s.n.a.t.c.hes at Death at Philippi.

The verse is calm, like the n.o.ble art that shapes the scenes. It is full of majesty. Lines occur in which single unusual words are charged with an incalculable power of meaning.

"Against the Capitol I met a lion, Who glazed upon me and went surly by."

"It is the bright day that brings forth the adder."

Shakespeare's intensest and most solemn thought, the Law that directed the creation of some of his greatest work, is spoken by Brutus--

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection."

_Hamlet, Prince of Denmark._

_Written._ 1601-2.

_Published_, in an imperfect form, 1603; more perfectly, 1604.

_Source of the Plot._ A play upon the subject of Hamlet, now lost, seems to have been popular in London during the last decades of the sixteenth century. Some think that it was an early work of Shakespeare's. No evidence supports this theory. He probably knew the play, and may have acted in it.

The story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his _Historia Danica_.