With less direct quotation it would hardly have been possible to define the generalities which attempted to name some of the leading personal traits of Shakspere, as they appear in the Sonnets. Nor without much quotation could another of his characteristic traits have been made clear. The deep depression, the acute suffering, the fierce passion which should normally result from what we have seen, Shakspere seems fully to have known. Instead of expressing it, however, in such wild outbursts as one might naturally expect, he displays throughout a power of self-mastery, which gives his every utterance, no matter how passionate, the beauty of restrained and mastered artistic form. A form not in itself beautiful, one grows to feel, must, for its very want of beauty, have been inadequate to phrase the full emotion which such a nature felt. The Sonnets, then, alter any conception of Shakspere's individuality which might spring from the plays we have read. Even though they tell nothing of the facts of his life, the Sonnets imply very much concerning the inner truth of it. No one, surely, could have written these poems without a temperament in every sense artistic, and a consciously mastered art. Nor could any one have expressed such emotion and such passion as underlie the Sonnets without a knowledge of suffering which no sane poise could lighten, like that of the chronicle-histories; nor any such cheerful sanity, or such robust irony as the comedies express; nor any such sentimental sense of tragedy as makes Romeo and Juliet perennially lovely. Whoever wrote the Sonnets must have known the depths of spiritual suffering; nor yet have known how to emerge from them. Such a Shakspere, unlike what we have known hitherto, is not unlike the Shakspere who will reveal himself in the plays to come. IX THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM JULIUS CÆSAR TO CORIOLANUS I. THE plays to be discussed in this chapter differ from what have preceded somewhat as the plays from the Midsummer Night's Dream to Twelfth Night differed from the plays discussed before them. This first group, from Titus Andronicus to the Two Gentlemen of Verona, - which probably occupied the first six years of Shakspere's professional life, were chiefly experimental. The second group, which probably occupied the next seven years of his professional life, were all more or less alive with the surging forces of artistic impulse and creative imagination; none of them, however, necessarily implied profound spiritual experience. The group to which we now come, which probably occupied the years between 1600 and 1608, mark a distinct development in Shakspere's artistic character. That the development which we are trying to follow is rather artistic than personal, however, we cannot too strenuously keep in mind. The details of Shakspere's private life, quite undiscoverable nowadays, are, after all, no one's business. For the rest, nobody familiar with the literature and the stage of his time can very seriously believe that in writing his plays he generally meant to be philosophic, ethical, didactic. Like any other playwright, he made plays for audiences. He differed from other playwrights chiefly in the fervid depth of his artistic nature. The circumstances of his life, meanwhile, made the stage his normal vehicle of artistic expression, the vent for such emotional disturbance as unexpressed would have become intolerable. The subjects which he chose, or which were given him, in short, connecting themselves with the fruit of his actual experience, were bound to throw him into specific emotional moods. These moods he was forced, by the laws of his nature, to infuse into the plays which he was writing, just as Marlowe had more simply and more instantly infused imaginative feeling into his tragedies ten years before. What marks the personal development of Shakspere as an artist, then, is that his emotional motives suggest a deepening knowledge of life. A writer who had never dreamed of such sentiments as underlie the Sonnets, might conceivably have written all the plays we have considered hitherto; he could not have written the plays which are to come. A study of Julius Caesar will serve to define these generalizations. II. JULIUS CÆSAR. [Julius Caesar was neither entered in the Stationers' Register nor published until the folio of 1623. Its source is certainly North's Plutarch, which was published in 1579; the general substance of the speech of Antony over Cæsar's body may have been suggested by a translation of Appian's Chronicle of the Roman Wars, published in 1578. Not mentioned by Meres in 1598, Julius Cæsar is distinctly alluded to in the following stanza from Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, published in 1601: "The many-headed multitude were drawne By Brutus speech, that Cæsar was ambitious, As Mr. Fleay suggests, thereby as usual throwing light on the essentially theatrical nature of even Shakspere's most masterly work, the speech of Polonius,2 : — "I did enact Julius Cæsar: I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me," probably indicates that Julius Cæsar had been acted shortly before Hamlet, and that the audience would recognize in Polonius the actor who had played Cæsar, The conjectural date generally assigned to Julius Cæsar is from 1600 to 1601.] At first sight Julius Caesar impresses you as a chronicle-history, differing from what have preceded chiefly in the fact that its subject is not English, but Roman. Even though when the conspirators appear,3 "Their hats are pluck'd about their ears, And half their faces buried in their cloaks," 1 Life, p. 214. 2 Hamlet, III. ii. 108-9. 8 II. i. 73. |