As in all Shakespeare's greater plays, a justice brings evil upon the vow breaker. Curses called down in the solemn moment come home to roost when the solemnity is forgotten or thrust aside. Clarence, who broke his oath to the House of Lancaster, is done to death by his brother. Anne, cursing the killer of her husband, curses the woman who shall marry him, is, herself, that woman, and dies wretchedly. Grey, Rivers, Dorset, Buckingham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call down curses on him that breaks them, themselves break them, and die wretchedly. Richard, too wise to make oaths, too strong to curse, dies, as his mother foretells, "by G.o.d's just ordinance," when the measure of the blood of his victims becomes too great, and when his victims' curses, after wandering from heart to heart, get them into human bodies and walk the world, executing justice.

All through the play there are warnings against human certainty. Of all the dangerous p.r.o.nouncements of man that to the fountain, "Fountain, of thy water I will never drink," is one of the most dangerous. There are terrible examples of certainty betrayed. Richard is certain as only fine intellect can be that he will triumph. It is a part of his tragedy that it is not intellect that triumphs in this world, but a stupid, though a righteous something, incapable of understanding intellect. Rivers and Grey are certain that Richard is friendly to them. They are hurried to Pomfret and put to death. Hastings "Knows his state secure," and "goes triumphant." He is rushed out of life at a moment's notice, one hour a lord, giving his opinion at a council, the next a corpse in its grave.

Buckingham thinks himself secure. A moment's nicety of conscience sends him flying to death. The little Princes lay down to sleep--

"girdling one another Within their innocent alabaster arms.

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk Which in their summer beauty kissed each other"--

when their waking time came they were stamped down under the stones at the stair foot.

The poetry of this play is that of great and high spiritual invention.

There is much that stays in the mind as exquisitely said and beautifully felt. But the wonder of the work is in the greatness of the conception.

That is truly great, both as poetry and as drama. The big and burning imaginings do not please, they haunt.

The dream of Clarence, the wooing of the Lady Anne, the scene in Baynard's Castle, and the ghost scene in the tents at Bosworth, have been praised and re-praised. They are in Shakespeare's normal mood, neither greater nor less than twenty other scenes in the mature plays.

The really grand scene of the calling down of the curses (Act I, sc.

iii), when the man's mind, after brooding on this event for months, sees it all, for a glowing hour, as the just G.o.d sees it, is the wonderful achievement. Think of this scene, and think of the scenes played nightly now in the English theatres, and ask whether all is well with the nation's soul.

There are many superb Shakespearean openings. No poet in history opens a play with a more magnificent certainty. The opening of this play--

"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York,"

is one of the most splendid of all. There is no need to pick out fragments from the rest of the play, but the march of the line--

"Your fire-new stamp of honour is scarce current"--

the lines--

"then came wandering by A shadow like an angel, with bright hair Dabbled in blood; and he squeaked out aloud, 'Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury'"--

the exquisitely tender lines--

"And there the little souls of Edward's children Whisper the spirits"--

and the orders of Richard in the last act, for white Surrey to be saddled, ink and paper to be brought, and a bowl of wine to be filled, show that the poet's great confident manner was formed, on all the four sides of its perfection. The years only brought it to a deeper glow.

_The Merchant of Venice._

_Written._ (?)

_Published._ 1600.

_Source of the Plot._ The ancient story of the merciless Jew is told in the _Gesta Romanorum_, and re-told, with delicate grace, by Giovanni Fiorentino, a fourteenth-century Italian writer, in his _Il Pecorone_ (the simpleton), a collection of novels, or, as we should call them, short stories. The story of the three caskets is also told in the _Gesta Romanorum_. Other incidents in the play are taken from other sources, possibly from other plays. It is thought by some that the character of Shylock was suggested by the case of the Spanish Jew, Lopez, who was hanged, perhaps unjustly, for plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth, in 1594. The main source of the dramatic fable is Fiorentino's story.

_The Fable._ Portia, the lady of Belmont, has three caskets, one of gold, one of silver, one of lead. She is vowed to marry the man who, on viewing the caskets, guesses which of them contains her portrait. Various attempting suitors fail to guess rightly.

Ba.s.sanio, eager to try the hazard, obtains money from his friend Antonio, to equip him. Antonio borrows the money from the Jew, Shylock, on condition that, should he fail to repay the debt by a fixed day, a pound of his flesh shall be forfeit to the Jew.

Ba.s.sanio guesses rightly and weds Portia.

Antonio fails to repay the debt, and is lodged in prison. Ba.s.sanio hears of his friend's disaster. Portia bids him fly to Antonio with money enough to pay the debt threefold. Shylock refuses the offer.

He clamours for his pound of flesh. The case comes to trial.

At the hearing of the case in the Duke's court, Portia, disguised as a judge, gives sentence, that Shylock may have his pound of flesh; but that if he shed Christian blood in the taking of it, his life will be forfeit. Shylock is confounded further by a charge of endangering a Christian's life. He is fined and humbled. Portia, still in disguise, asks as her fee a ring that she has given to Ba.s.sanio. Ba.s.sanio, hesitating, at last gives the ring, and returns home without it. Portia's pretended indignation at the loss of the ring ends the last act with comedy.

The play resolves itself into a simple form. It ill.u.s.trates the clash between the emotional and the intellectual characters, the man of heart and the man of brain. The man of heart, Antonio, is obsessed by a tenderness for his friend. The man of brain is obsessed by a l.u.s.t to uphold intellect in a thoughtless world that makes intellect bitter in every age. Shylock is a man of intellect, born into a despised race. It is his tragedy that the generous Gentiles about him can be generous to everything except to intellect and Jewish blood. Intellect and Jewish blood are too proud to attempt to understand the Gentiles who cannot understand.

Shylock is a proud man. The Gentiles, who are neither proud nor intellectual, spit upon him and flout him. One of them beguiles his daughter and teaches her to rob him. Another of them signs a mad bond to help an extravagant friend to live in idleness. Bitter, lonely brooding upon these things strengthen the Jew's obsession, till the words, "I can cut out the heart of my enemy," become the message of his entire nature.

Half the evils in life come from the partial vision of people in states of obsession. Shylock's obsession grows till he is in the Duke's court, whetting his knife upon his shoe, before what Pistol calls "incision."

Portia has been much praised during two centuries of criticism. She is one of the smiling things created in the large and gentle mood that moved Shakespeare to comedy. The scene in the fifth act, where the two women, coming home from Venice by night, see the candle burning in the hall, as they draw near, is full of a naturalness that makes beauty quick in the heart. Shakespeare enjoyed the writing of this play. The construction of the last two acts shows that his great happy mind was at its happiest in the saving of these creatures of the sun from something real.

_The Taming of the Shrew._

_Written._ (?)

_Published._ 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The induction and that part of the play which treats of Petruchio and Katharina is based upon a play, published in 1594, under the t.i.tle _The Taming of A Shrew_, author not known.

The other part is based on _The Supposes_ of George Gascoigne, a comedy adapted from Ariosto's _I Suppositi_.

_The Fable._ Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on waking, as a n.o.bleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the performance of this play before him.

The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames the shrew Katharina; in the other, Katharina's sister Bianca is wooed by lovers in disguise. The two plots have little connection with each other. That which relates to Petruchio and Katharina is certainly by Shakespeare. The other seems to be by a dull man who did not know his craft as a dramatist.

In the Induction, and in the speech of Biondello (in Act III) Shakespeare enters a mood of memory of the country. In the song at the end of _Love's Labour's Lost_ he showed a matchless sense of country life. That sense, at once robust and sweet, now gives life to a few scenes in the plays. These scenes are mostly in prose; but they have the rightness of poetry. In writing them, he wrought with his daily nature, from something intimately known, or inbred in him, during childhood. Man can only write happily from a perfect understanding. All men can describe with point and colour what they knew as children. These country scenes in Shakespeare are happier than anything else in the plays because they come, not from anything read or heard, but from the large, genial nature made by years of life among the farms and sheep-walks at the western end of the Cotswolds.

_Sly._ Y' are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore _paucas pallabris_; let the world slide: _Sessa!_

_Hostess._ You will not pay for the gla.s.ses you have burst?

_Sly._ No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.

In the third act, Biondello's description of the appearance of Petruchio's horse has the abundance of the great mind.

" ... possessed with the glanders and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampa.s.s, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten; near legged before and with a half-cheeked bit and a headstall of sheep's leather."

It is something no longer possible in a city theatre. Neither the dramatist nor the audience of to-day knows a horse as the Elizabethan had to know him. The speech sets one wondering at the art of the unknown Elizabethan actor who first spoke hurriedly this speech of strange words full of sibilants.

Shakespeare's share in the play (the scenes in which the shrew and her tamer appear) is farce with ironic philosophical intention. He indicates the tragedy that occurs when a manly spirit is born into a woman's body.

Katharina is vexed and plagued by forced submission to a father who cannot see her merit, and by jealousy of a gentle, useless sister. She, who is entirely honest, sees the brainless Bianca, whom no amount of schooling will make even pa.s.sably honest, preferred before her. Lastly, she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor who cares only for his own will, her flesh, and her money. In a page and a half of melancholy claptrap broken Katharina endeavours to persuade us that

"Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband."

Perhaps it is the way of the world. Women betray womanhood as much by mildness as by wiles. Meanwhile, what duty does a man owe to a fine, free, fearless spirit dragged down to his by commercial bargain with a father who is also a fool?

_King Henry IV, Part I._