steeped in melancholy. It is commonly said that the sending to the block of Essex, the imprisonment in the Tower of London of Southampton, the death of his father in 1601, and loss of other friends, causing the poet to see the sadder side of life, led him to tragedy. This may be true, but one may ask why when his only son, Hamnet, the boy upon whom Shakspere must have looked as the only hope of perpetuating the family name and estate, died in 1596, Shakspere could write The Taming of the Shrew, create Falstaff, write Much Ado, and frolic with Touchstone in the Forest of Arden. It may be that in this third period Shakspere is writing tragedy because the public taste had tired of comedy. At any rate, we have the tragedies, the most colossal achievement of English literature, perhaps of all literatures. Hamlet is discursive and loose in plot, but rich in variety and philosophic insight--to many it is the greatest of all plays; Othello is considered his masterpiece in plot structure; King Lear has an elemental largeness that makes it the most severe test of an actor's power; Macbeth is terrific with concentrated energy. The Fourth Period. This is the last period, and includes the plays written after 1608-1609. The Tempest, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale are the plays that mark this period as the Period of Reconciliation. The story no longer moves onward to an inevitable catastrophe; the gentle spirit of forgiveness averts the tragic end. There is lacking the rollicking fun of the earlier comedies; in its stead we have the refined tenderness of a more mature dramatist. Pericles and Henry VIII also belong to this period, but they are partly the work of hands other than Shakspere's. The Tempest is the most popular of the plays of this period. Its poetic imagery, philosophic insight, inventiveness, and subtle delineation of character show that the mature poet had lost none of his power. He was never more original than in his creation of the characters of Ariel, Caliban, Prospero, and Miranda. Some read in the following lines of the play Shakspere's personal abdication of the throne of dramatic writing: The Bacon Controversy.- In 1856 Miss Delia Bacon wrote an article for Putnam's Monthly, in which she tried to prove that the plays were written by Francis Bacon. The idea was not altogether new, but she gave the skepticism greater publicity. Since then the field of controversy has been entered by doubters and enthusiasts of all grades of intelligence and scholarship, neither side having exclusive possession of the unfair and hot-headed. The doubters no longer believe that Bacon was the author of the plays, for they have been driven from their original contention to the more general statement that it was a person other than Shakspere. This is a more wary position to occupy, but it is unsatisfying. As Judge Webb, professor of law in the University of Dublin, one of the advocates of this theory, confessed, "But the only thing that will satisfy the world that he was not the author of the plays is a demonstration that another was." When Spedding, the eminent biographer of Bacon, was asked by Judge Holmes, who had written a book trying to prove the claims of the Baconians, as to his opinion, he replied: "I have read your book on the authorship of Shakespeare to the end, and . . . I must declare myself not only unconvinced but undisturbed. To ask me to believe that Bacon was the author of these dramas is like asking me to believe that Lord Brougham was the author of not only Dickens' novels, but of Thackeray's also, and of Tennyson's poems besides. I deny that a prima facie case is made out of questioning Shakespeare's title. But if there were any reason for supposing that somebody else was the real author, I think I am in a condition to say that whoever it was, it was not Bacon." One of the commonest arguments is that based on the supposed erudition displayed in the plays. It is said the plays display much learning; Shakspere was not a learned man, there fore the plays could not have been written by Shakspere. But modern scholars do not say that the plays contain evidences of scholarship. Judge Allen, of the Supreme Bench of Massachusetts, has shown that Shakspere's knowledge of law was inaccurate. Any reader of Shakspere's sources, such as Holinshed, can readily understand where Shakspere got his knowledge of history. His plays are not learned in the sense in which Paradise Lost and the plays of Jonson are learned. In his Roman plays his characters are men and women with English customs. He makes many mistakes in allusion, in history, in geography, in classical reference. Had he been a scholar like Bacon or Jonson, he would "not have introduced clocks into the Rome of Julius Caesar, nor would he have made Hector quote Aristotle, nor Hamlet study at the University of Wittenberg, founded five hundred years after Hamlet's time; nor would he have put pistols into the age of Henry IV, nor cannon into the age of King John." On this point Dr. Hiram Corson strikingly writes in his An Introduction to Shakespeare: "Learning indeed! If Shakespeare hadn't possessed something infinitely better than learning (and, I would add, something infinitely better than a great analytic, inductive, deductive, and classifying intellect, such as that possessed by Lord Bacon), we should not now be enjoying such a noble dramatic heritage as we are. The plays bear more emphatic testimony than do any other masterpieces of genius, to the fact that great creative power may be triumphantly exercised without learning (I mean the learning of the Schools). But the knowledge and the wisdom with which they are gloriously illuminated, are the greatest possible which man has yet, in his whole history, shown himself capable of possessing-just that kind of knowledge and wisdom which Shakespeare, assuming the requisite constitutional receptivity, was most favorably circumstanced to acquire." Shakspere is one of the wisest and profoundest of men, but he is not learned. The literature on this subject is already large; some of it is a striking illustration of misused ability and wasted energy. George Brandes characterizes the advocates of the theory in forceful criticism: "It is well known that in recent years a troop of less than halfeducated people have put forth the doctrine that Shakespere lent his name to a body of poetry with which he had really nothing to do.” And the authors of An Introduction to Shakespeare say, "their writings, taken as a whole, form one of the strangest medleys of garbled facts and fallacious reasonings which has ever imposed on an honest and intelligent but uninformed public." References Books: An Introduction to Shakespeare, MACCRACKEN, PIERCE, and Durham. Life of Shakespeare. LEE. Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS. Shakespeare. RALEIGH. Shakespeare: Life, Art, and Characters. HUDSON. William Shakespeare, A Critical Study. BRANDES. Shakspere, A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. DOWDEN. Shakspere and his Predecessors. Boas. Shakespearean Tragedy. BRADLEY. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Ed. by FURness. William Shakespeare. HUGO. The Facts about Shakespeare. NEILSON and THORNDIKE. Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare. COLERIDGE. Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. by SMITH. The Text of Shakespeare. LOUNSBURY. The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist. BAKER. The Shakespearean Stage. Albright. On Ten Plays of Shakespeare. BROOKE. The Shakespearian Drama, a Commentary. SNIDER. Notes on the Bacon-Shakespeare Question. ALLEN. Magazines: Bacon-Shakespeare Craze. WHITE. Atl., vol. 51, p. 507. Worship of Shakespeare. FROTHINGHAM. Cent., vol. 7, p. 780. As You Like It. LANG. Harper, vol. 82, p. 3. Richard III. LOWELL. Atl., vol. 68, p. 816. Merchant of Venice. LANG. Harper, vol. 80, p. 655. Merry Wives of Windsor. LANG. Harper, vol. 80, p. 3. Midsummer Night's Dream. LANG. Harper, vol. 91, p. 327. Hamlet and his Castle. MABIE. Bookman, vol. 23, p. 418. Shakespeare's Money Interest in the Globe Theater. WALLACE. Cent., vol. 80, p. 500. New Shakespeare Discoveries. WALLACE. Harper, vol. 120, p. 489. |