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radiates from the dramatic portions of his works: his thirtyfive or thirty-seven well-authenticated plays. These are usually divided into three divisions: comedies, historical, and tragedies. By whom this division was first made we know not. It is not, we think, the happiest arrangement that might have been devised. It is not a sufficiently discriminating one. There are histories that are also tragedies, and tragedies in which the soberest facts of history are mixed with comic elements of the broadest kind. The idea of the framer of this plan seems to have been that a play in which the events issue happily for the principal characters, must, for that reason, be regarded as a comedy, whereas a play the events of which come to a calamitous issue must, therefore, be regarded as a tragedy. In like manner, one in which the events happen in chronological order must be historical, though it might not be distinct from either tragedy or comedy. In noticing these divisions we will reverse the order in which they have been nained.

The thirteen tragedies are to be distinguished from the other plays by their continuous sublimity and massive grandeur. Of these tragedies, ten are associated with countries which, so far as is known, Shakespeare never visited. Two of these, "King Lear" and "Cymbeline," belong to English history, and one, "Macbeth," has its scenes in Scotland. In "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Othello," and "King Lear," we have an illustration of Shakespeare's power in unveiling and depicting the baser, the most unlovable, of human passions.

In "King Lear," Taine tells us, "we have curses more than sufficient for all the madmen in an asylum and for all the oppressed of earth. Lear was the subject of ungrateful, savage, and diabolical cruelty in an age when vice reigned with lawless and gigantic power. He is a picture of human misery that has never been surpassed, and as an illustration of disordered reason, a portraiture beyond all reach of rivalry."

The dreaded suspicion that he was becoming insane dawns upon him in the midst of a dreadful tempest. Kent finds him on the heath in front of a hovel:

Kent. Here is the place, my lord; good my lord, enter: The tyranny of the open night's too rough

For nature to endure.

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Kent. Good my lord, enter here.

Lear.

Wilt break my heart?

Kent. I'd rather break mine own.

Good my lord, enter.

Lear. Thou think'st 't is much that this contentious storm

Invades us to the skin; so 't is to thee;

But where the greater malady is fix'd

The lesser is scarce felt. Thou 'dst shun a bear;

But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea,

Thou 'dst meet the bear i' the mouth.

When the mind's free

The body's delicate; the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else,
Save what beats there.

He then curses the ingratitude of his daughters, and exclaims:

But I will punish home:

No, I will weep no more. In such a night

To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure:

In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!

Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,

O, that way madness lies! let me shun that;

No more of that! *

"Troilus and Cressida," "Julius Cæsar," "Coriolanus," "Timon of Athens," and "Pericles" are based upon Greek and Roman histories, as is "Antony and Cleopatra." The characters included in these plays have been limned by Plutarch and Homer; but in neither case do they bear the slightest comparison with the same characters as drawn by Shakespeare. He individualizes them as neither the historian or poet had the ability to do. This is remarkably apparent in the play of "Julius Cæsar." We feel that Cassius, Brutus, Cæsar, and Antony are living men. They stand and speak in our presence as only real men can. The play is intended to be an artistic development of the motives that influenced Brutus to aid in the assassination of Cæsar, and of the result of that action. "Brutus is," says Swinburne, "the very noblest figure of a typical republican in all the literature of the world."

As in "Julius Cæsar" so in "Coriolanus." The principal character is not of Plutarch's painting. Plutarch makes Coriolanus to have been a cold, haughty patrician. Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a coarse soldier, a man of the people. He is an

*"King Lear," Act iii, Scene iv. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXV.-4

athlete. He has a voice like a trumpet. He is proud and terrible. A lion's soul in the body of a steer.* He fights and drinks, and drinks and fights again. His military prowess is unrivaled. His character is severely sublime. He has an undisguised contempt for every thing base, vulgar, pusillanimous.

It has been affirmed that "Macbeth" is the greatest effort of the poet's genius, and that it is the most sublime and imposing drama the world has ever seen. In the opinion of the profoundest critics, Macbeth is represented as being too great and good to fall under common temptations; hence supernatural agencies are employed to subvert him. He is exposed to the suggestions of hell on the one side, and to those of his fiendlike wife on the other. Originally brave, magnanimous, gentle, he falls a prey to the idea of FATE. This was first suggested by the weird sisters. To this suggestion was added the ferocious and sarcastic eloquence of Lady Macbeth. She clothes with splendor the issue of the deed; she taunts him with cowardice and irresolution; and, maddened, he rushes into the snare. As soon as the deed is done, conscience awakes. It accuses and condemns him. Horrified, he becomes the victim of agonizing remorse. He feels that he is deserted by God

and man.

With what wonderful dramatic power does Shakespeare depict the beginning of Macbeth's misery. As soon as the murder was committed, Macbeth rushes into the presence of Lady Macbeth, and falters out:

Macbeth. I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?
Lady Macbeth. I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?

Macbeth. This is a sorry sight. (Looking on his hands.)
Lady Macbeth. A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.

Macbeth. There's one did laugh in's sleep, and one cried, "Murther!"

That they did wake each other. I stood and heard them :
But they did their
say

Again to sleep.

prayers,

and address'd them

Lady Macbeth. There are two lodg'd together.

Macbeth. One cried "God bless us!" and "Amen" the other; as they had seen me with these hangman's hands,

Listening their fear. I could not say "Amen,"

When they did say, "God bless us !"

*Taine.

Lady Macbeth. Consider it not so deeply.
Macbeth. But wherefore could not I pronounce

I had most need of blessing, and "Amen
Stuck in my throat.

"Amen"?

After reproaches from Lady Macbeth, and her departure, he hears a knocking, and thus:

Macbeth. Whence is that knocking?

How is't with me, when every noise appals me?

What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.*

After this Macbeth becomes distrustful, treacherous, cruel. He sweeps away all those whose talents, virtues, sufferings, pretentions, endanger his life. He hourly becomes more and more desperate and wretched.

In no other of Shakespeare's characters do we see so clearly the debilitating effect of a fear-creating conscience.

In "Timon of Athens" we have a most admirable satire on the folly and ingratitude of mankind. Timon, in thoughtless profusion, scatters his gifts on poets, painters, warriors, statesmen, only to find that men may buy flattery but not friendship. In the hour of trial his flatterers desert him, and he becomes misanthropic. Apemantus taunts him, and he replies: I am sick of this false world; and will love nought But even the mere necessities upon it. Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave; Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat Thy grave-stone daily make thine epitaph, That death in me at other's lives may laugh.

The historical plays commence with "King John," and end with "Henry the Eighth." These plays give evidence of an almost inspired insight into human character. We have in them a subtle analysis of the motives which control men in every possible position. Taking the dramatic incidents of any reign, Shakespeare crowds them together, and, regardless of the unities, he makes us to see and understand the political and social state of the people.t

Macbeth," Act ii, Scene 11.

Drake, Hudson, Rolfe. All the critics, in fine.

The fourteen comedies are, and ever will be, the best known of all the poet has ever written. No man could have uttered them who had not a marvelous familiarity with nature, or who did not tenderly, sweetly, appreciate it in all its varied phases. They display, also, a power to paint the weaknesses and follies of men-such as all other men have aspired to in vain.

The necessity for quotation is here so great, that this paper can be kept within reasonable bounds only by exercising a heroic self-denial. It is in this division of his plays that Shakespeare gives us Falstaff, Mercutio, Touchstone, Jaques, Bassanio, Puck, Caliban, the Gobbos, and a hundred others all akin. For wit, imagination, and vividness of description, these are the most wonderful creations of which human genius can boast. If space would allow, we would quote the feats of the fairy Oberon, Mercutio's description of Queen Mab; Clarence's dream; the gossip babble of the nurse in "Romeo and Juliet" Biondella's description of Petruchio's horse; Falstaff's personification of Prince Hal's father; the same worthy's interview with his page on the occasion of his visit to the doctor and the haberdasher Dombledon; his wonderful description of Bardolph's nose; his still more wonderful description of himself and his soldiers when about to march through Coventry; nor would we omit, but for the reason named, Dogberry's oration on the failure of the sexton to "write him down an ass." These plays bring into view and describe with inimitable fidelity over nine hundred characters, all wonderful, some of them not only unsurpassed, but unequaled, in literature.

No question is so often put to those who are supposed to have studied Shakespeare, as a specialty, than the one which usually is formulated on this wise-" Which of the plays do you regard as Shakespeare's greatest, and which is the most striking passage in that play?" Some say that "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Richard the Third," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Julius Cæsar" are all equally great. Taine says that the most powerful passage in all Shakespeare's works is the scene between the three queens in "Richard the Third." If we would go with the multitude we must make our choice out of the well-known passages commencing: "The quality of mercy is not strained; "All the world's a stage;" "To be or not to be," etc. We choose to elect to the highest honor the beautiful paraphrase

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