from Holinshed, with a bye-plot of his own invention dealing with the banishment of Belarius and his adoption of his foster-sons. Nowhere is Shakespeare's chronology more hopelessly at sea than when he makes the ancient British courtiers jest with one another in the Calvinistic terms of "election" and "grace." But the romantic element in the drama covers many historical discrepancies, and the political dénouement is no less in the "happy-ever-after" spirit of a fairy-tale. "So quixotic a surrender," remarks Mr. Boas, "of the fruits of a hard-fought campaign, is a fitting close to a work whose fantastic remoteness from ordinary experience gives it much of its peculiar charm." The introduction of Celtic Britain links Cymbeline, on the one hand, to Lear, and a considerable part of the last three acts may well have been written at the same time as that tragedy, about the year 1606. But the main interest of the drama, as a study of a husband's unworthy jealousy of a noble wife, links it backwards to Othello and forwards to A Winter's Tale. The villainous Iachimo obtains Imogen's ring and bracelet from her hand at night, and uses them, as Iago uses Desdemona's handkerchief, to flaunt before an easily duped husband as proofs of her unfaithfulness. Posthumus falls even more readily than Othello into the snare, and entirely forfeits our sympathies by his brutal plotting of Imogen's punishment-engaging agents to put her to death. The "vision" in Act V., Sc. 4, which reveals the tissue of errors and brings the action to a climax, is condemned by Mr. Lee and others as a "pitiful mummery" and probably spurious. It may have

been inserted, like the "visions" in Pericles and King Henry VIII., and possibly the Masque in the Tempest, with a view to performance at court. But there can be no doubt of the genuineness of the splendid lyric that occurs in this play-"Fear no more the heat o' the sun."

But more ignoble, and less excusable, than the jealousy of Othello, or of Posthumus even, is the jealousy of Leontes in A Winter's Tale. In a mature man, the husband of a wife and mother universally honoured and beloved, it strikes us as an almost inconceivable piece of spoilt-childishness, and only the rare dignity and beauty of Hermione and the loyalty of Paulina save it from making the drama irredeemably grotesque. Compared with the desolate anguish of Othello, the passion of Leontes is a gross personal resentment; and when, at last, he realises the blunder that provoked it, we feel, as in many similar situations created by Shakespeare, that the forgiveness of a generous and long-suffering woman is all too easily won. But forgiveness and reconciliation are the dominant notes of the three romantic comedies that close Shakespeare's imaginative work. Imogen, Hermione, and Prospero stand out as types of gracious, beneficent, and atoning powers.

There is a certain irony in the derivation of A Winter's Tale from a popular novel called The Triumph of Time, by the same Robert Greene, who, from his death-bed, in 1592, had sneered at the young Shakespeare as an upstart crow beautified with our feathers." This work, which was also called Pandosto, or Dorastus and Faunia, was a curious blend of the Euphuistic style with the

pastoralism made fashionable by Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. It violates all structural principles of art, and is made up of two wholly dissimilar and unconnected tales, to which not even Shakespeare's dramatic genius could give any unity of motive or action. In A Winter's Tale, Shakespeare altered the names and places, added the characters of Paulina, Antigonus, and Autolycus, gave fresh and more convincing form to the scene in which Leontes consults the oracle, and greatly ennobled the figure and action of Hermione. But the play remains a medley of scenes and times; Delphos is an island, an Italian sculptor carves the statue of a Russian Emperor's daughter; the oracles of Greece flourish side by side with Warwickshire Whitsun pastorals; and Bohemia is given a sea-coast-an oft-quoted geographical error which Shakespeare merely copied from Greene. For freshness of pastoral incident, it has been placed at the head of all Shakespeare's presentations of country life; and we notice, throughout this last group of plays, a new tenderness and delicacy in his treatment of youth; a transfiguring touch that lifts Ferdinand and Miranda, Florizel and Perdita, and the boy companions of Belarius, quite above the precocious and slightly priggish young people of the earlier dramas.

Mr. Gollancz, noticing the Greek element in Shakespeare's naming of his characters, calls attention also to the Alcestis motive of the closing scene of A Winter's Tale, and compares this with the ending of the tragi-comedy of Euripides. It culminates almost in the words of Admetus:

"O form and feature of my dearest wife, Against all hope thou once again art mine!"

Alcestis dares not speak to Admetus for three days, and similarly Hermione keeps silence at first towards her reconciled lord. Shakespeare probably took Autolycus from Ovid's Metamorphoses; but a slight sketch of him, as a dweller on Parnassus and the grandfather of Ulysses, is given in Homer's Odyssey, Book XIX. A Winter's Tale was first printed in the Folio of 1623, but it is alluded to in the Office-book of Sir Henry Herbert at that date as "an old play formerly allowed of Sir George Buck," who became Master of the Revels in 1610. Dr. Simon Forman, in his Book of Plaies and Notes thereof, gives an account of its performance at the "Globe" on May 15, 1611, and it was acted at court on November 5.

Prospero, the benign magician of The Tempest, has often been claimed as Shakespeare's highest type of man. He certainly is unsurpassed in the strength and sweetness of a mature nature, tempered by the experience which has brought him through pain and discipline to perfect selfpossession. He knows when to act greatly and when to refrain from action; how to renounce power, as well as how to use it. When the hour for the miracle is past, he is content to take up once more the common life of humanity, counting it an unworthy thing to seek vengeance or compensation for himself through agencies which he holds in trust for the universal good.

The Tempest was acted at Court at the beginning of the year 1613; possibly, to celebrate the marriage

of the Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine. Dr. Garnett traces a delicate compliment to them in the story—the foreign prince comes oversea to the island princess who has never left her home, and in the end Prospero gains a son, as James I. gained one in the Palatine after having recently lost one by death. The masque may have been specially written and inserted for this performance. But the drama itself was clearly founded, either on Die Schöne Sidea, by Jacob Ayrer, a notary of Nürenberg, who died in 1605, and who wrote many adaptations of plays brought to Germany by English strolling players in Shakespeare's youth, or-as is more likely-on some lost play which was the source of both. Many references to travellers' tales may have been inspired by Raleigh's narrative of his voyage to Guiana, but the most striking parallels may be traced in Silvester Jourdain's story of the wreck of Sir George Somers's ship, the "Sea-Venture," off the Bermudas in July, 1609. Prospero's incantation, "Ye ayres and windes," resembles, in many phrases, Golding's translation of Medea's incantation in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Certain of the names are also found in Thomas's Historye of Italye, 1561, and others, such as Setebos, in Eden's History of Travayle, 1577. Ariel may have been taken from Heywood's Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, where the name is traced to a Hebrew source, meaning lord of the earth. The speech of Gonzalo on his ideal commonwealth is taken directly from Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays published in 1603, of which Shakespeare's own autograph copy is still preserved. The great indebtedness of