a new and favourite piece. This is corroborated, also, by a passage in Ben Jonson's' Bartholomew Fair,' which was played for the first time in 1614; he there ridicules such poets as exhibit 'servant-monsters' and produce tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries.' What is most probable, therefore, is that The Tempest' must be assigned. to the year 1611.*

*M. Carrière (No. 2 of his explanations to W. v. Kaulbach s Shakspeare-galerie, Berlin, 1857) in his ingenious description of Shakspeare's Seelenleben und Geistesgeschichte, establishes an hypothesis both profound and interesting (which Campbell had already incidentally brought forward), that The Tempest is Shakspeare's last dramatic work, and that he wrote the play, at all events, somewhat with the intention of offering it to his country as his farewell, a legacy of the mind and spirit in which he had conceived and poetically described life and history. Carrière illustrates and explains the piece in the spirit of this hypothesis, and in doing so, I am glad to say, agrees with my interpretation in all essential points. I, on my part, would be inclined to share so pleasing an hypothesis, were it not that the data we possess regarding the origin of Henry VIII. (which I shall speak of when discussing the piece) force us to assume that Henry VIII. was written one year later.

CHAPTER IV.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

1. LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

'Love's Labour's Lost' is directly connected with 'Twelfth Night,' that is, if we consider the latter as standing midway between Shakspeare's comedies of Fancy and his comedies of Intrigue. The fantastic element is decidedly prominent. Caprice and accident, whimsical freaks, strange fantastico-comic characters and situations carry on their game, but intrigue predominates, inasmuch as the little action there is in the play turns upon the plots and counter-plots of the two contending parties in the sphere of love. This play accordingly forms the beginning of a series of pieces which may be termed the Comedies of Intrigue.

The young King of Navarre with three of his knightly companions form the strange resolution of devoting three years to study and philosophy in strict seclusion from the world and especially from all female society. They have bound themselves by an oath to keep this engagement. Their resolution, however, is soon thwarted by the arrival of the beautiful Princess of France accompanied by her ladies, who seeks an interview on urgent affairs of state, and therefore cannot be refused. All the champions of philosophy and seclusion fall in love with these ladies, who are as lovable as they are mischievous. Hereupon ensues a lively combat of wit and caprice, in which the knights either taunt and ridicule one another on account of their broken vow-trying at the same time to justify themselves, or seek to win their ladies' hearts; the latter, however, cleverly manage to defend themselves, outdo wit by wit, and satisfactorily punish the gentlemen for

breaking a vow, as quickly renounced as it was foolishly made, and for their affectation of superior wisdom. Interwoven with this, in an amusing contrast, are the comic scenes between two absurd learned pedants and an absurd knightly pedant, a young and saucy page and a privileged fool. This glittering fabric is suddenly torn to pieces by the announcement of the death of the father of the Princess, an infirm old man, and the piece closes with a moral expressed in a jocose manner, but in reality very serious in character: what the King and his companions had engaged to do in whimsical. arrogant caprice is forced upon them-though in a somewhat modified form-by their ladies. A song between Spring and Winter (cuckoo and owl) forms a graceful epilogue which, in a poetical chiaro-scuro, alludes to the meaning and purport

of the whole.

The inner and ideal centre upon which this graceful piece turns-in the light, playful movement of its humour -is the significant contrast between the fresh reality of life which ever renews its youth, and the abstract, dry and dead, study of philosophy. This contrast, when, in absolute strictness, it completely separates the two sides that belong to one another, at once contains an untruth which equally affects both sides, deprives both of their claim of right, and leads them into folly and into contradiction with themselves. That philosophy which disregards all reality and seeks to bury itself within itself, either succeeds in entombing itself in the barren sand of a shallow, absurd and pedantic learning, or else—overcome by the fascinations of youthful life—it becomes untrue to itself, turns into its opposite, and is justly derided as mere affectation and empty pretence. One of these results is exhibited here in the case of the learned Curate Sir Nathaniel, and the Schoolmaster Holofernes, two starched representatives of the retailers of learned trifles, and in the pompous, bombastic Spanish Knight, a very Don Quixote in high-flown phraseology; the other is exhibited in the fate of the King and his associates. Owing to their capricious endeavour to gain knowledge and to study philosophy, by living an entirely secluded life, they at once fall into all the frivolities and follies of love; in

spite of their oaths and vows of fraternity, nature and living reality assert themselves and win an easy victory. And yet the victory of false wisdom is in reality nothing more than a victory of folly over folly. For nature and reality, taken by themselves are only changing pictures, transient phenomena to interpret which correctly is the task of the inquiring mind. When they are not rightly understood, when the ethical relations forming their substance are not recognised, then life itself degenerates into a mere semblance, all the activity and pleasure in life become mere play and frivolity; without the seriousness of this recognition, love is mere tinsel, while talent, intelligence and culture become mere vain wit and an empty play of thoughts. This recognition is not, however, attained by communities for philosophical study and discussions, but by serious self-examination, by the exercise of self-control and the curbing of one's own lusts and desires, by seclusion only in this sense and for this end. This, therefore, is imposed upon the Prince and his companions by their ladies as a punishment for their arrogance. The fine and ever correct judgment of noble women, is here as triumphant as their great talent for social wit and refined intrigue. The moral of the piece may be said to be contained in the speech of the Princess where she condemns the King to a twelvemonth's fast and strict seclusion, in the sense intimated above, and again in the words of Rosaline, in which she makes it a condition to the vain Biron-a man who boasts of the power of his mind and wit in social intercourse-that, to win her love he shall for a twelvemonth from day to day visit the speechless sick' and 'converse with groaning wretches,' and, in order to exercise all the powers of his wit, demands of him to force the pained impotent to smile.' The end of the comedy thus, to a certain extent, returns to where it began: both sides of the contrast out of which it arose prove themselves untenable in their one-sided exclusiveness; the highest delight and pleasure of existence, all wit and all talents are mere vanity without the earnestness and depth of the thoughtful mind which apprehends the essence of life; but study and philosophy, also, are pure folly when kept quite apart

from real life. It is the same contrast as that between Spring and Winter (cuckoo and owl): if separate from one another they would lead either to excessive luxuriousness or to a deadly state of torpidity; but they are not separate and are not intended to be separate, their constant change in rising out of and passing over one into the other, in short, their mutual inter-action produces true life.

This deeper significance of the merry piece, with its fine irony and harmless satire, is, of course, not expressed in didactic breadth, but only intimated in a playful manner. Shakspeare was too well aware that it was not the business of the drama to preach morals, and that to give pedantic emphasis to the serious ethical relations would not only injure the effect of the comic, but absolutely destroy it. And yet it is only the above-described contrast from which the whole is conceived, and upon which its deeper significance rests, that explains why Shakspeare furnished the main action-the bearers of which are the King and the Princess with their knights and ladies—with the ludicrous subordinate figures of Sir Nathaniel, Holofernes, Don Armado and Dull, etc., and with a series of intermezzos which apparently stand in no sort of connection with it. These obviously form an essential part of the whole, and the addition of the satirical element is, at the same time, intended to place its significance in a still clearer light. For there can scarcely be any doubt that the piece contains a satirical tendency, even though it be only as a secondary motive. Further, it was doubtless intended to parody the pretentious, pedantic learning (which, as we have already seen, at first combatted the popular theatre, or contemptuously turned its back upon it), as well as the want of taste with which, not only John Lilly, but even his learned predecessors, and still more so his servile imitators, did their best to corrupt the English language by coquetting with points, antitheses, alliterations, etymologies and orthographical improvements, and by the perpetual introduction of Latin phrases and learned allusions, images and similies.* The

* Holofernes is supposed-by Warburton and Farmer-to represent John Florio, a teacher of Italian. See Drake i. 474; ii. 493. Knight, Shakspere Studies, p. 122 f.