lanus. Its general mood, too, is colder, more cynical, darker even than that. The misanthropy which underlies Timon, indeed, is savage enough to suggest the more masterly misanthropy of Swift. If Timon be the darkest of all the plays, though, it is likewise the most impotent as yet.

In impotence, however, Pericles perhaps outstrips it. Pericles, too, has other symptoms of decline. Among Shakspere's plays it is unique for monstrosity of motive; and even though its most monstrous passages occur in the first act, which is thought to be by another hand, Shakspere probably accepted them as part of the scheme into which his own work should fit. Such monstrosity of motive is a frequent symptom of artistic transition. Aware that creative energy is exhausted, an artist is apt to grow reckless; and, if he be addressing a popular audience, he is tempted to supply his lack of imagination by shocking or monstrous devices. Some such phenomenon marks the decay of many schools of art, and of none more distinctly than the Elizabethan drama. In motive, then, even more than in impotence, Pericles is a play of the Elizabethan decadence.

The impotence shown in Pericles, however, differs essentially from that of Timon. Here the weakness is not so much of exhaustion as of experiment. The word "experiment," to be sure, recalls Shakspere's earliest plays, which are very unlike this. There is nothing in Pericles to remind one of Titus Andronicus, or of Henry VI., or of Love's Labour's Lost, or of the

Comedy of Errors, or of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. Like them, however, Pericles may fairly be regarded as preliminary to what shall follow. The difference between this experiment and the old ones is that while those were formal, this, which now and again reveals disdainful mastery of mere form, tries to express a kind of motive whose substance is new to Shakspere.

Unlike Timon, and all the plays we have considered since Twelfth Night, Pericles is in no sense a tragedy; it is a romance, which carries its story through a period of dismay and confusion to a serene close. In this respect, to be sure, we might group it with many of the earlier plays, — with the Merchant of Venice, for example, and Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; or even in some degree with All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. From all of these, however, it may be distinguished by at least two traits which group it with the three great romances still to come, Cymbeline, the Tempest, and the Winter's Tale: in the first place, it attempts within the limits of a single performance to deal with the events of a whole lifetime, in much such manner as Sidney's Defence of Poesy ridiculed. In the second place, the ultimate serenity comes not after a short, concentrated period of disaster, but only after a long and seemingly tragic experience of the rudest buffets of life. Underlying such a conception as this is a new artistic mood: the world still seems evil, to be sure; but wait long enough, and even in this world the evil shall pass.

In this aspect, which some critics, deeming Shakspere more moralist than artist, take to involve a deliberate preaching of reconciliation, Pericles foreshadows the three romances to come. In more than one detail, too, it suggests them. The shipwreck, for example, reminds one a little of Twelfth Night and the Comedy of Errors, but far more of the Tempest.1 The story of Marina has something in common with that of Miranda, and more with that of Perdita. The recovery of the priestess Thaisa, recalling that of Æmilia in the Comedy of Errors, is still more like that of Hermione in the Winter's Tale. Clearly enough, Pericles bears to the coming romances a relation very like that borne to the great comedies by the experimental. Just as this second period of experiment is shorter, and its fruit less ripe than was the case before, however, so the foreshadowing of what is to come is less complete. In reviving, after eight years of passionate gloom, a fresh gleam of romantic feeling, Pericles is perhaps most noteworthy.

In Timon, then, we have the definite close of the period of passionate gloom, a mood of which in Coriolanus we observed traces of exhaustion. In Timon, too, we have such paralysis of creative power as normally belongs to a period of artistic transition. In Pericles, we have the feeble, experimental beginning of Shakspere's final period. During this period, though it is short and its production less ideally finished than that of either the artistic period or the

1 Cf. C. of E. I. i. 63 seq.; T. N. I. ii.; Per. III. i.; Temp. I. i.

passionate, we shall find something like a fusion, in lifelong romances, of all the moods which have preceded, of the darkness of tragedy, the gayety of comedy, the serenity of romance. Though of little intrinsic worth, then, Timon and Pericles, considered in relation to Shakspere's development, may be regarded as deeply significant.

ΧΙ

THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE FROM CYMBELINE

TO HENRY VIII

I.

WHILE by common consent, Cymbeline, the Tempest, and the Winter's Tale are thought to have been written after the plays we have already considered, and before Henry VIII., there is nothing but verse-tests to fix their order. The order in which we shall consider them, then, is little better than arbitrary. Any line of development which we may be tempted to trace within the series must be even more conjectural than usual. Keeping this in mind, however, we may suggestively compare these plays with each other; and, with fair confidence in our chronology, we may compare them with anything which we have considered. hitherto.

II. CYMBELINE.

[Cymbeline is first mentioned in the note-book of Dr. Forman. His note about it is undated, but as his note of Macbeth is dated April 20th, 1610, and that of the Winter's Tale is dated May 15th, 1611, it probably belongs to about the same period. As Forman died in September, 1611, that year is the latest possible for his note. Cymbeline was entered in 1623, and published in the folio.

The historical parts of Cymbeline are based on Holinshed; the story of Imogen, including both the trunk-scene and the disguise, is based on