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By Root 20536 0

(perhaps William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays who could show capacity on occasion) are best assigned the three scenes of purposeless coarseness which take place in or before a brothel (IV. ii., v. and vi.) From so distributed a responsibility the piece naturally suffers. It lacks homogeneity, and the story is helped out by dumb shows and prologues. But a matured felicity of expression characterises Shakespeare’s own contributions, narrating the romantic quest of Pericles for his daughter Marina, who was born and abandoned in a shipwreck. At many points he here anticipated his latest dramatic effects. The shipwreck is depicted (IV. i.) as impressively as in the ‘Tempest,’ and Marina and her mother Thaisa enjoy many experiences in common with Perdita and Hermione in the ‘Winter’s Tale.’ The prologues, which were not by Shakespeare, were spoken by an actor representing the mediæval poet John Gower, who in the fourteenth century had versified Pericles’s story in his ‘Confessio Amantis’ under the title of ‘Apollonius of Tyre.’ It is also found in a prose translation (from the French), which was printed in Lawrence Twyne’s ‘Patterne of Painfull Adventures’ in 1576, and again in 1607. After the play was produced, George Wilkins, one of the alleged coadjutors, based on it a novel called ‘The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre, being the True History of the Play of Pericles as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet, John Gower’ (1608). The play was issued as by William Shakespeare in a mangled form in 1608, and again in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was not included in Shakespeare’s collected works till 1664.

‘Antony and Cleopatra.’

In May 1608 Edward Blount entered in the ‘Stationers’ Registers,’ by the authority of Sir George Buc, the licenser of plays, ‘a booke called “Anthony and Cleopatra.”’ No copy of this date is known, and once again the company probably hindered the publication. The play was first printed in the folio of 1623. The source of the tragedy is the life of Antonius in North’s ‘Plutarch.’ Shakespeare closely followed the historical narrative, and assimilated not merely its temper, but, in the first three acts, much of its phraseology. A few short scenes are original, but there is no detail in such a passage, for example, as Enobarbus’s gorgeous description of the pageant of Cleopatra’s voyage up the Cydnus to meet Antony (II. ii. 194 seq.), which is not to be matched in Plutarch. In the fourth and fifth acts Shakespeare’s method changes and he expands his material with magnificent freedom. The whole theme is in his hands instinct with a dramatic grandeur which lifts into sublimity even Cleopatra’s moral worthlessness and Antony’s criminal infatuation. The terse and caustic comments which Antony’s level-headed friend Enobarbus, in the rôle of chorus, passes on the action accentuate its significance. Into the smallest as into the greatest personages Shakespeare breathed all his vitalising fire. The ‘happy valiancy’ of the style, too—to use Coleridge’s admirable phrase—sets the tragedy very near the zenith of Shakespeare’s achievement, and while differentiating it from ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Lear,’ renders it a very formidable rival.

‘Coriolanus.’

‘Coriolanus’ (first printed from a singularly bad text in 1623) similarly owes its origin to the biography of the hero in North’s ‘Plutarch,’ although Shakespeare may have first met the story in Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure’ (No. iv.) He again adhered to the text of Plutarch with the utmost literalness, and at times—even in the great crises of the action—repeated North’s translation word for word. But the humorous scenes are wholly of Shakespeare’s invention, and the course of the narrative was at times slightly changed for purposes of dramatic effect. The metrical characteristics prove the play to have been written about the same period as ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ probably in 1609. In its austere temper it contrasts at all points with its predecessor. The courageous self-reliance of Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, is severely