Complete Plays, The (81 page)

In addition to the romances of this period, Shakespeare had some share in the undramatic and belated chronicle play,
The Life of Henry the Eighth
, most of which is assigned to John Fletcher. In looseness of construction, in the emphasis on character in distress, and in the introduction of a masque, as well as in other ways, this play resembles the tragi-comedies of the period rather than any earlier chronicle. Thus the term "romantic tragi-comedy" may be properly used to describe all the work of the Fourth Period.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre
, was probably the earliest, as it is certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances. But the story was one of the most popular in all fiction, and
Pericles
was, no doubt, in its time what its first title-page claimed for it, a 'much-admired play.' Its hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by storm and misfortune from one shore to another. The five acts which tell his adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great surges of good and ill luck. The significance of his daughter's name, Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea is not only her birthplace, but is the  symbol throughout of Fortune and Romance. From the polluted coast of Antioch, where Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis, where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand of the Princess Thaïsa, the waves of chance carry the Prince. They overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thaïsa safely to land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene. Here, upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter; and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind influence of Diana, their goddess. We are never far from the sound of the shore, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."

Pericles
in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a dramatic romance. The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective. To help out the stage action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts. He was supplemented, when his affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw clutched at by the desperate playwright. But at the beginning of Act III the master's music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles speaks to the storm at sea:— 

"Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having call'd them from the deep! ...
The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard."

In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which anticipate the similar scene in
The Tempest
; in the character of Marina, girlish and fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are scarcely less potent than Prospero's; in the grieving Pericles, who, like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the dramatic romances which are to follow. Throughout all this Shakespeare is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina's misery in Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of her character.

Authorship and Date
.—The play was entered to Edward Blount in the Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608. It was probably written but little before. Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was not included among Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio (1664). The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the printing rights. The former of these hypotheses is generally favored, since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play. In 1608 a novel was  published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower." The author was George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability. He is generally accepted as Shakespeare's collaborator. The claims of William Rowley for a share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.

Source.—Shakespeare used Gower's
Confessio Amantis
, and the version in Laurence Twine's
Pattern of Painful Adventures
, 1606. The tale is also in the
Gesta Romanorum
.

Cymbeline
.—"A father cruel, and a step-dame false,
A foolish suitor to a wedded lady,
That hath her husband banish'd."

Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline, king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the story. The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her fidelity under this affliction. Neither her father's anger, nor the stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her slain, shake in the least degree her true affection. Such constancy cannot fail of its reward, and in the end Imogen wins back both father and husband.

In such a story, where virtue's self is made to shine, other characters must of necessity suffer. Posthumus, Imogen's husband, appears weak and impulsive, foolish in making his wife's constancy a matter for wagers, and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her. His weakness is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant fight in defense of his native Britain, and by his  outburst of genuine shame and remorse when perception of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him. Cymbeline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, with none of his tenderness. The wicked Queen and her son are purely wicked. Only the faithful servant, Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in this court group.

But in the exiled noble Belarius, and the two sons of Cymbeline whom he has stolen in infancy and brought up with him in a wild life in the mountains, single-hearted nobility rules. When Imogen, disguised as a page, in her flight from the court to Posthumus comes upon them, there is the instant sympathy of noble minds, and there is a brief respite from her misfortunes. They rid her of the troublesome Cloten, and their victory over Rome brings to book the intriguing Iachimo and accomplishes her final recovery of love and honor. A reading of the play leaves as the brightest picture upon the memory their joy at meeting Imogen, and their grief when the potion she drinks robs them of her. In them we find expressed that noble simplicity which romanticists have always associated with true children of nature.

To Imogen, who has a far longer part to play than any other of Shakespeare's heroines, the poet has also given a completer characterization, in which every charm of the highest type of woman is delineated. The one trait which a too censorious audience might criticize, that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes Chaucer's patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to modern readers, is in Imogen completely redeemed by her resolution in the face of danger, and by a certain  imperiousness which well becomes the daughter of a king.

Authorship
.—Some later hand probably made up the vision of Posthumus (V, iv, 30-90), where a series of irregular stanzas of inferior poetical merit are inserted to form "an apparition."

Date
.—Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 1611, describes the performance of
Cymbeline
at which he was present. The entry occurs between those telling of
Macbeth
(April 20, 1610) and
The Winter's Tale
(May 15, 1611). The tests of verse assign it also to this period. The first print was that of the First Folio, 1623.

Source
.—From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual historical fact in the play, that one Cunobelinus was an ancient king of Britain. Cymbeline's two sons are likewise from Holinshed, as is the rout of an army by a countryman and his two sons; but the two stories are separate. The ninth novel of the second day of the
Decameron
of Boccaccio tells a story much resembling the part of the play which concerns Posthumus. The play called
The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune
(1589) contains certain characters not unlike Imogen, Posthumus, Belarius, and Cloten. Fidelia, Imogen's name in disguise, is the heroine's name. But direct borrowing cannot be proved.

The Winter's Tale
.—Nowhere is Shakespeare more lavish of his powers of characterization and of poetic treatment of life than in this play. He found for his plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband's friend, dies of grief at the death of her son, while her infant daughter, abandoned to the seas in a boat, grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the king of whom her father had been jealous. Disregarding the essentially undramatic nature of the story, as well as its improbabilities, he achieved a signal  triumph of his art in the creation of his two heroines, and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh, joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of convention.

In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme portrait of woman's fortitude. Hermione is brave, not by nature, but inspired by high resolve for her honor and for her children. Nobly indignant at the slanders uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the slanderer in pity for the blindness of unreason which has caused his action. Shakespeare's dramatic instinct made him alter Hermione's death in the earlier story to life in secret, with poetic justice in store. Artificial as the long period of waiting seems, before the final reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the magnificent appeal of the mother's love when the lost daughter kneels in joy before her.

In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, depicted the true daughter of such a mother. Although her nature at first seems all innocence, beauty, youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king's son, and that his father has discovered it, her courage rises with the danger, and her words echo her mother's resolution:—

"I think affliction may subdue the cheek,
But not take in the mind."

In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English sheepshearing, with its merrymaking, a pair of honest English country fellows in the old shepherd and his son, the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved vagabonds  in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff's, are more lovable than other people's virtues. Fortune, which will not suffer him to be honest, makes his thieveries, in her extremity of whim, to be but benefits for others.

Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita's lover, is that rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of soul. Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty and devotion. Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in the violence of his jealousy. As the study of a mind overborne by an obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.

Date
.—Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the Globe Theater, May 16, 1611. It was probably written about this time. Jonson's
Masque of Oberon
, produced January 1, 1611, contains an antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance in IV, iv, 331 ff. The First Folio contains the earliest print of the play.

Source
.—The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the source of
The Winter's Tale
, was Robert Greene's
Pandosto: The Triumph of Time
, sometimes called by its later title,
The History of Dorastus and Fawnia
. Fourteen editions followed one another from its appearance in 1588. Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia, and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily. In
The Winter's Tale
two kingdoms are interchanged. Nevertheless the "seacoast of Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, is found in Greene's story. Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive, instead of dying in grief for her son's death, to be restored again in the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita; and the complications of  Dorastus's (Florizel's) destiny as the prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's (Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted. The characters of Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own invention.

According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1 ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in Robert Wilson's
Three Ladies of London
(1584).

The Tempest
, probably the last complete drama from Shakespeare's pen, differs from the other "romances" in possessing a singular unity. It comes, indeed closer than any play, save the
Comedy of Errors
, to fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and place. This may be due to the fact that the poet is here making up his own plot, not, as in other cases, dramatizing a novel of extended adventure.

The central theme of
The Tempest
is, like that of the other romances, restoration of those exiled and reconciliation of those at enmity; but the treatment of the story could not be more different. Where the chance of fortune has hitherto brought about the happy ending, here magic and the supernatural in control of man are the means employed. Those who had plotted or connived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of Milan, and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his infant daughter and his books for company, are wrecked through his art upon the island of which he has become the master. Ariel, the spirit who serves Prospero, a mysterious, ever changing form, now fire, now a Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a Harpy, striking guilt into the conscience (and yet apparently not interested in either vice or virtue, but  longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prospero's cave, and receives freedom for his toil. His spirit pervades every scene, whether we view the king's son Ferdinand loving innocent Miranda, or the silent king mourning his son's loss, or the guilty conspirators plotting the king's death, or the drunken steward and jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the overthrow of Prospero. All of them are led, by the wisdom of Prospero acting through Ariel, away from their own wrong impulses, and into reconcilement and peace. How much of
The Tempest
Shakespeare meant as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.