13477.35 HARVARD COLLEGE MAR 28 1917 Gift of Copyright, 1903, by Copyright, 1904, by Doubleday, Page & Company THE fame achieved by Shakespeare in the prime of life remained unchallenged through his closing years. He had not the embitterment of seeing his star wane at the zenith, or his personal credit suffer eclipse. He did not fall as Greene and Marlowe fell-as fell, one by one, his greatest contemporaries in literature and at court. Leicester, Essex, Raleigh, Spencer, Bacon, and Ben Jonson-all passed sooner or later into the obscurity of poverty, failure, or social disgrace. Shakespeare remained the laureate of his generation. It was not until the Elizabethans-the audiences he had created, the men who had worked with him and acted on the same boards-had passed away, and the crowning tribute had been paid him by his fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, in the publication of the First Folio of 1623, that the tide of favour turned against him, and a change came over the scholars' estimate of his genius. Voltaire described Shakespeare as "a writer of monstrous farces called tragedies," and his poetry as "the fruit of the imagination of an intoxicated savage. Another and now forgotten critic, Edwards by name, ruled that "poor Shakespeare" must be excluded from the number of good tragedians, "yet as Homer from the Republic of Plato, with marks of distinction and veneration." Pope, voicing the apologetic stage that followed the condemnatory, argued that his "wrong choice of subjects, wrong conduct of incidents, false thoughts, and forced expressions, are the result of having to please the lowest of the people and keep the worst of company." Dr. Johnson, with the sweeping remark that "Shakespeare seems to be without moral purpose," goes over his plays, one by one, and dismisses each (as Hallam puts it) “like a school-boy's exercise." Lessing, in Germany, and Coleridge, in England, struck the first notes of a true appreciation of Shakespeare, but not until his plays had been subjected to all kinds of indignities by Restoration dramatists, from Dryden downwards, who mangled, "bowdlerized," and re-adapted them without scruple, for what they were pleased to consider more cultured ears. The "polite version" of The Tempest, produced by Dryden and Davenant in 1667, was one of the most flagrant instances of this. But the process went on through another century. In 1748, Nahum Tate-of the "Tate and Brady" partners, at whose door lies the perpetration of the metrical version of the Psalms-re-adapted "the droll of Lear and his three daughters, an obscure piece recommended to his notice by a friend "; and it was played in a booth on the bowling-green behind Mermaid Court, Southwark, not far from Tate's own house in the Mint. As late as 1793, the Sonnets were contemptuously rejected by critics of the best repute. That Shakespeare smarted under the popularity of the baser kinds of shows in theatres, which forced him often to buy the favour of audiences with realistic incident and comic relief, is shown in unmistakable hints scattered throughout his writings, from the oft-quoted plaint in the Sonnets about the "dyer's hand subdued to what it works in," to Trinculo's allusion in The Tempest to the "holiday fools" of England, where "any strange beast makes a man;-when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Sir Philip Sidney complained bitterly of the Elizabethan clown "thrust in by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion." But the clown served as a compromise with those Bankside merrymakers who have told us in letters and diaries of the period how they beat Sackerson, the favourite bear of Paris Garden, "till the blood ran down," and were "mightily entertained" thereby. The production of Cymbeline, in 1610 or early in 1611, is recorded, without an exact date, by Dr. Simon Forman, an astrologer of King James's reign and an ardent play-goer, whose diary gives many interesting notes of Shakespearean performThe position of this play at the end of the First Folio has caused some critics to regard its insertion rather as an afterthought; and its imperfect text certainly inclines us to think it was printed from rough notes awaiting Shakespeare's final revision. But there is no lack of finish in the ances. structure of the plot, which is a skilful combination of three separate narrative-threads. Nor is the characterization less subtle, less masterly, than in the dramas to which it is akin; with the exception, perhaps, of the presentation of Cloten, who is shown us first as a fool merely, but afterwards as a more responsible and, therefore, more contemptible thing. Imogen has always been one of the most beloved of Shakespeare's heroines. Mr. Sidney Lee calls her "the crown and flower of his conception of tender and artless womanhood," and adds, "her husband, Posthumus, her rejected lover Cloten, and her would-be seducer Iachimo, are contrasted with her and with each other with consummate ingenuity." The main plot is the love-story of Posthumus and Imogen, based on a tale in Boccaccio's Decameron (Day II., Novel 9), describing "how Bernabo of Genoa, duped by Ambrogiuolo, loseth his good, and commandeth that his innocent wife be put to death. She escapeth and serveth the Soldan in a man's habit. Here she lighteth upon the deceiver of her husband and bringeth the latter to Alexandria, where, her traducer being punished, she resumeth woman's apparel and returneth with her husband, rich." The story of this heroine, Ginevra, the Imogen of Cymbeline, is also told in a collection of stories called Westward for Smelts, which Shakespeare had already drawn upon in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and which is said to have been published, under the name of Kinde Kit of Kingston, in 1603, though no edition earlier than 1620 has been found. For the setting of the drama, Shakespeare freely adapted a fragment of early British history, taken |