SHAKESPEARE 



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SHAKESPEARE 



were comedies, too, so called, but they deserve 

 me name only because they have not a tragic 

 ending; for All's Well That Ends Well, Measure 

 for Measure and Troilus and Cressida are to 

 the full as dark and as bitter as the tragedies. 



Fourth Period (1608-1611). After the storm 

 came a season of sunshine and of a glad se- 

 renity which brightens his last plays. These 

 were The Tempest, The Winter's Tale and 

 Cymbeline. They are not the greatest of 

 Shakespeare's plays in some ways they show a 

 falling off in his powers; but they are wonder- 

 fully pleasing in their genial, benignant attitude 

 toward human nature. 



Sources of the Plays. Shakespeare did not 

 invent his plots, but took them from any old 

 chronicle, romance, play or biography that con- 

 tained the proper dramatic elements. Thus 

 Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, 

 and Ireland furnished him with the material for 

 Macbeth and King Lear, Plutarch's Lives was 

 the source of Julius Caesar and Antony and 

 Cleopatra, some old Italian romances were the 

 basis of Romeo and Juliet, and a popular ac- 

 count of an actual shipwreck led to the writing 

 of The Tempest. 



But he did not merely borrow, he re-created. 

 To the old lifeless, dry-as-dust tales he gave a 

 new vitality, and he made the actors in those 

 dead dramas live as truly as the men about 

 him on the streets. He had the most truly 

 creative imagination of any man who ever 

 wrote, and the fact that he found his plots 

 ready-made in no wise lessens the truth of this 

 statement. 



The Judgment of Time. Why is it that read- 

 ers, not only in his own country but in others 

 as well, have acclaimed Shakespeare the world's 

 supreme genius? Anyone who will read his 

 plays carefully will find the answer to this 

 question without difficulty. First of all, he is 

 the universal poet; he wrote not for one race 

 and time, but for all, because he dealt not 

 with transient phases of life and thought but 

 with the deep, underlying truths. No one can 

 read his works without finding set forth there 

 the problems, fears and hopes that make up 

 his own emotional life. No one can read his 

 plays without finding his outlook on life broad- 

 ened and his insight into human existence made 

 keener. 



In addition, he is the greatest master of the 

 English language, using more than twice as 

 many words as the second greatest writer; 

 while the variety of his style is as remarkable 

 as his command of words. His sailors talk like 



sailors, his kings talk like kings; and the fact 

 that he can present in most realistic style the 

 very dregs of society does not prevent his rising 

 at times to the very heights of pure poetry. 



The Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy. It was 

 the very excellence of Shakespeare's work which 

 led certain writers about the middle of the 

 nineteenth century to advance the theory that 

 he was not really the author of the plays that 



SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL, THEATER 

 Erected by private donations on the river bank 

 at Stratford, in 1879. Each year since then per- 

 formances of Shakespeare's plays have been given 

 here. 



were credited to him. A comparatively unedu- 

 cated man could not, they argued, have pro- 

 duced works displaying such genius and learn- 

 ing. The idea caught the public fancy, and 

 book after book appeared, championing one 

 side or the other of the question. For the 

 most part, those who denied Shakespeare's 

 authorship fixed upon Francis Bacon as the 

 real author of the plays, and supported their 

 theory by means of some mysterious ciphers 

 which they believed themselves to have dis- 

 covered in the plays. Up to the present day 

 the controversy has raged, and some very in- 

 telligent men have supported the Bacon claim ; 

 but practically every scholar who has been 

 trained to judgment on such questions has re- 

 jected the evidence of the Baconians and has 

 expressed himself as thoroughly convinced that 

 Shakespeare and no other wrote the great 

 dramas. A.MC c. 



Consult Hudson's Shakespeare: Life and Art; 

 Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare; Corson's Intro- 

 duction to the Study of Shakespeare; Rolfe's 

 Life of William Shakespeare. 



