SHAKESPEARE 369 SHAKESPEARE — history, tragedy, and comedy, not hesi- tating to make use of what he could learn from predecessors like Marlowe, Greene, and Kyd. The second period of his dramatic ac- tivity may be regarded as extending from 1594 to 1601, and in it he carried to the height his achievement in history and comedy. The only tragedies are "Romeo and Juliet," at the beginning of the pe- riod, and "Julius Caesar" at the end. The former has much in common with his comedies, and in it he rises to a height of lyric fervor hardly equalled elsewhere. The latter is in comparison lacking in passion, but from the point of view of characterization, is one of his great plays. The comedies of this period begin with the poetic "Midsummer Night's Dream" (1594-5) with its tangled love plot and abundance of delightful fancy and hu- mor; followed by "The Merchant of Ven- ice" (1595-6), in which the building of the plot, the drawing of the characters, and the richness of the dialogue show for the first time almost equal mastery. "The Taming of the Shrew" (1596-7), is a hilarious farce based on an older play. In "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (1598) he deals with English provincial middle- class life for the only time in his come- dies, and uses as the central figure the Falstaff of the historical plays. In the three comedies written between 1599 and 1601, "Much Ado About Nothing," "As You Like It," and "Twelfth Night," Eng- lish romantic comedy is found in its most brilliant and delightful form. It is hard to find in any literature so high a tech- nical mastery of verse and characteriza- tion yielding so much imaginative and intellectual pleasure. At the same time as these plays were being written, he carried to its highest point the chronicle history. From "Rich- ard II." (1595) he went on to the two parts of "Henry IV." (1597-8), glorified by the scenes which gather round Sir John Falstaff, the greatest of comic crea- tions. In "Henry V." (1599) he pro- duced a play abounding in national spirit, and made of the King the embodiment of the English heroic ideal. The third period is mainly occupied by tragedy. It opens with the most famous of his works, "Hamlet" (1602-3). With no abatement in constructive skill, he concentrates his power on the delineation of the prince, and gives us a picture per- haps unparalleled in its combination of subtlety and sympathetic appeal. No single work has so roused the interest of men, and about none has so much been written, with the possible exception of Goethe's "Faust." The level reached in "Hamlet" is all but maintained through- out the traeredies which followed. In "Othello" (1604) he took a sordid Italian tale and raised it to a high level of pity and terror; in "King Lear" (1605-6) the most terrible of his plays, the forces of nature form a lurid background to a spec- tacle of ultimate human suffering, folly, and wickedness; and in "Macbeth" (1606) a fragment of a Scottish chronicle is made to yield an appalling picture of the degradation of a human soul which sur- renders to unlawful ambition. The trans- lation of Plutarch's "Lives," which sup- plied material for "Julius Caesar," was drawn on again in "Anthony and Cleo- patra" (1607-8), in some respects the most amazing of his plays in its brilliance and daring and the splendor of its style, and in "Coriolanus" (1609) the somber tragedy of the downfall of a powerful leader through patrician arrogance. "Timon of Athens" (1607), from tho same source, is only Shakespeare's in part, but is not lacking in passages of grandeur. The so-called comedies of this period lack the gaiety of their predecessors. "Troilus and Cressida" (1601-2) is weighed down by a cynical humor, and "All's Well That Ends Well" (1602?) suffers from its plot, in which a capable woman pursues and wins a worthless and unworthy youth. "Measure for Measure" (1603) and "Pericles" (1607-8) both con- tain backgrounds of a debauched society against which are placed in relief two oi the finest and purest of Shakespeare's female creations. "Pericles," like "Ti- mon," is in part by another hand. The fourth and last period contains an historical play, "Henry VIII." (1612), written in collaborator with John Flet- cher, and three "dramatic romances," serious comedies in which crime and sepa- ration are followed by forgiveness and reunion. They lack the high spirits of the plays of the great period of comedy, but are full of noble poetry and lofty wisdom. "Cymbeline" (1610) is in plot a combination of a story from Boccaccio and a fragment of British history; "The Winter's Tale" (1611) is based on an English novel; and "The Tempest" is fab- ricated from elements of familiar folk- tales of princesses, magicians, and en- chanted islands. This, probably the last play Shakespeare wrote alone, and his first comedy, "Love's Labour's Lost," are apparently his only dramas of which the plot is not borrowed — so careless was the greatest of English imaginative artists of mere inventive originality. This enumeration, in the order in which modern scholarship has arranged them on a great variety of kinds of evidence as to date, gives some idea of the im- mense body of work of the highest class produced by Shakespeare; and gives a
