which Shakespeare never lost for a moment, even when dealing with the greatest themes or creating works of pure imagination.

To this period, in its final form, at least, belongs the play of " All's Well that Ends Well," to which Meres, in his "Palladio Tamia," probably refers when he includes among the plays ascribed to Shakespeare "Love's Labour's Won." It was probably sketched and perhaps fully written at a much earlier date than its final revision. The plot is derived from a group of stories in Boccaccio's "Decameron," which narrate the fortunes of lovers who surmount obstacles and gain the rewards of love only after great or persistent effort; a phase of experience which is beyond doubt the keynote of the play. The story was translated by Paynter and appeared in English in "The Palace of Pleasure in 1566 or 1567. Shakespeare departed widely from the story in its earlier form by the greater prominence given to the part of Helena and the singular sweetness and devotion which irradiate her whole course. Coleridge thought her Shakespeare's loveliest creation. The portraiture of her character is touched throughout with exquisite delicacy and skill. Helena suffers, however, from the atmosphere of the play, which is distinctly repellent; it is difficult to resist the feeling that, conceding all that the play demands in concentration of interest upon the single end to be achieved, Helena cheapens the love she finally wins by a sacrifice greater than love could ask or could afford to receive. And when the sacrifice is made and the end secured, the victory of love is purely external;

there is no inward and deathless unity of passion between the lovers like that which united Posthumus and Imogen in life and Romeo and Juliet in death.

The play must be interpreted broadly in the light of Shakespeare's entire work; in this light it finds its place as the expression of a passing mood of deep and almost cynical distrust; it is full of that searching irony which from time to time finds utterance in the poet's work and was inevitable in a mind of such range of vision. It is well to remember, also, that in this play the poet, for the sake of throwing a single quality into the highest relief, secured entire concentration of attention by disregarding or ignoring other qualities and relations of equal importance and authority. This was what Browning did in his much misunderstood poem "The Statue and the Bust." is always a perilous experiment, because it involves so much intelligent coöperation on the part of the reader. It is a triumph of Shakespeare's art that Helena's purity not only survives the dangers to which she exposes it, but takes on a kind of saintly whiteness in the corruption in which she plays her perilous part.

It

CHAPTER XIV

THE LATER TRAGEDIES

SHAKESPEARE was now in the depths of the deep stirring of his spirit which has left its record in the Tragedies. The darkest mood was on him, apparently, when "Hamlet" and the three succeeding plays were written, the mood in which the sense of evil in the world almost overpowered his belief in the essential soundness of life, and the mystery of evil pressed upon the imagination with such intensity that he was tempted to take refuge in fundamental cynicism. It is in the plays of this period that Shakespeare gives place to the deep-going irony which pervaded the Greek drama, and which at times obscures the essential freedom and shaping power of personality. In his darkest mood, however, the sanity and largeness of the poet's mind asserted themselves and kept the balance against the temptation to narrow the vision by tingeing the world with the colour of a mood, or by substituting for clear, direct, dispassionate play of the mind on the facts of life the easy process of reading universal history in the light of personal experience.

How completely Shakespeare escaped a danger which would have been fatal to him is seen in the changes he wrought in the story which forms the

basis of "Measure for Measure." This play, like "All's Well that Ends Well" and "Troilus and Cressida," is painful and repellent; it is tinged with an irony which has a corrosive quality; it is touched with a bitterness of feeling which seems foreign to Shakespeare. The evil of life was evidently pressing upon his imagination so heavily that it had become a burden on his heart. In "Hamlet" he had portrayed a rotten society; in "Measure for Measure" he depicted a state full of iniquity and a group of men corrupted by the very air they breathed; in "Troilus and Cressida" the same vileness was personified in the most loathsome characters.

In the great Tragedies we breathe an air which is charged with fate, and feel ourselves involved in vast calamities which we are powerless to control; in the plays which have been named we breathe an atmosphere which is fetid and impure, and human nature becomes unspeakably mean and repulsive. This is, perhaps, the effect of the terrible strain of the tragic mood on Shakespeare's spirit; and these plays are to be accepted as expressions of a mood of depression verging upon despair. They are often classed with the Comedies, but they belong with the Tragedies, not only in temper, but in time.

Even in this blackness of thick darkness the poet's sanity is never lost. In a dull play by George Whetstone, published in 1587, called "Promos and Cassandra" and based on an Italian novel by Cinthio, who also worked it into a tragedy, Shakespeare found the plot of "Measure for Measure"; the story was

told in prose by Whetstone four years later in a collection of tales which he called “ Heptameron of Civil Discourses." In the title of the play the earlier dramatist affirmed that it showed in the first part "the unsufferable abuse of a lewd magistrate; the virtuous behaviour of a chaste lady; the uncontrolled lewdness of a favoured courtesan ; and the undeserved estimation of a pernicious parasite." Shakespeare's modifications of the plot are highly significant: in the older versions Isabella surrenders her virtue as the price of her brother's life ; in "Measure for Measure" her impregnable purity gives the whole play a saving sweetness. To Shakespeare's imagination is due also the romantic episode of the moated grange and the pathetic figure of Mariana. In the murky atmosphere of this painful drama Isabella's stainless and incorruptible chastity invests purity with a kind of radiancy, and she finds her place in the little company of adorable women in whom Shakespeare's creative imagination realized and personified the eternal feminine qualities.

"Measure for Measure" was probably produced about 1603, and "Troilus and Cressida" belongs, in its final form, to the same year. The problems presented by the different versions are not more difficult than those presented by the play itself, which has been described as 66 a history in which historical verisimilitude is openly set at naught, a comedy without genuine laughter, a tragedy without pathos." The editors of the First Folio were so uncertain about its essential character that they evaded the necessity of classi