Later Plays.
Returning to the plays, we find, between 1597 and 1601, Shakespeare in his second period, with "Henry IV," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Henry V," "Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," "Twelfth Night," and "Julius Cæsar". Such was the astonishing harvest of five years. Probably "Henry IV" is the play which we would retain, could we keep but one, so delightful is Falstaff, the fat knight, the embodiment of the richest humour. He "has given us medicines to make us love him," and even the delightful characters of Hotspur, the Mercutio of the history, and of Lady Percy, take a far lower place. We would banish all, and keep honest Jack. Many cannot bear to see Falstaff have much the worse of the jest, as in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," said to have been composed in a fortnight, at the desire of Elizabeth, who wished to see that impossibility, Falstaff in love. The characters of Shallow, Slender, Sir Hugh, even the transient Anne Page, and all the broad humours of life in an English country town, do not console us for the defeat of the hero.
It is in "Henry V" that Shakespeare not only emphasizes his love of England, nobly expressed by John of Gaunt in "Richard II," but makes it the mainspring of the drama. The yeomen soldiers in the play frankly tell the disguised king that they doubt the justice of his cause—and well they may, for no man ever had a worse, and Shakespeare must have known it,—but "our country, right or wrong," must be the motto of the playwright, and he puts into Henry's mouth the speeches that still stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet. Much has been written on Henry's hardness to Falstaff, whose heart he broke,—but Henry at least acts in accordance with his actual character, a brave, able, ruthless, and hard man, always convinced of his own righteousness. Pistol's braggart humour is as good as ever, and that learned man of the sword, Fluellen, is a forerunner of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty.
"Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," and "Twelfth Night" (1599-1600) are the three central stars in the crown of Shakespeare's comic Muse. More humorous than "Henry IV" they cannot be, but in them is no admixture of history, and the women in the three are ladies, whereas in "Henry IV" Lady Percy is the chief contrast with Falstaff's Mrs. Quickly, and her crew. Shakespeare cannot, we may suppose, have lived in the intimate society of the ladies of Elizabeth's Court; he must have divined and created Beatrice ("a star danced, and under that was she born") and Hero, sweetly bearing the accusations of her intolerable lover, Claudio:—
I have marked
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand shames
In angel whiteness beat away these blushes,
And in her eye there hath appeared a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.
The mirth and high spirit of Beatrice, the humours of Benedick, endear the comedy to every reader, yet the end is "huddled up," like the ends of many of the plays; Claudio is lightly taken back into favour, with Shakespeare's almost limitless tolerance. He can scarcely ever bring himself to punish one of his rogues, such as Lucio and Parolles, and is as clement to the less deserving Claudio.
The mirth of "Twelfth Night" might border on the farcical, if Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the rest of the light people, were not so delightfully human and living, like their butt, Malvolio; and did not Viola and Olivia lend their exquisite grace. Meanwhile, in "As You Like It," we fleet our time carelessly as they did in the golden world, under the greenwood tree, in the enchanted company of Rosalind, Touchstone, the greatest of Shakespeare's clowns, and the melancholy and humorous Jaques, the contemplator.
Returning to historical drama, and using North's translation of Plutarch as his material, fusing North's prose into blank verse, he now produced "Julius Cæsar," in which the chief personages are Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and the Roman populace. Brutus appears as the virtuous and irresolute man, slave to a pedantic conscience which pushes him on to the slaying of great Cæsar. All readers note Shakespeare's way of placing a man of nature more or less noble, but irresolute, in a crisis which demands decision. Hamlet, Brutus, and Macbeth are the great examples. It does not follow that Shakespeare himself was irresolute, and that, when he thought of a man who is obliged to take a constant part, he felt that, had he been that man, he would have wavered. He simply, chose to illustrate that tragedy of a soul. Where would be the interest in a play of Hamlet had the prince gone straight to his mark and slain the king "at sight"? There would have been no play! How could we endure a Brutus who, in his relations with Cæsar, mobbed and stabbed the greatest of mortals, in a forthright business manner, with no hesitations? If there were not enough of nobility in Macbeth to unman him, he would be a vulgar usurper. When he chose, Shakespeare could design men as true to their single aim as Richard III and Iago. Tragedy requires in the chief sufferer, as the Greeks saw, greatness with a fatal blemish; this idea runs through their poetry from Achilles to the Aias and Œdipus of Sophocles. The purpose of Brutus, a deed, to reverse his own words, "to make whole men sick," when in contemplation, would not let him eat, nor talk, nor sleep; but, once resolved, his heart is steeled, nor does the ghost of Cæsar fright him, as the spectres of his fancy appal Macbeth.
The other great character is the fickle Roman crowd, played on by the rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare was not hostile to the people, but the mob he knew, and drew it relentlessly again and again.
"Hamlet" (1602) is believed to have been based on a lost drama of 1589, perhaps by Kyd; the original source is the "History of the Danes" by Saxo Grammaticus, and there was a French version by Belleforest. Of Shakespeare's play there are three versions, a hopelessly imperfect text in a pirated quarto of 1603; abetter, "enlarged to almost as much again" (1604); and the Folio edition of 1623. None of these is good, as a text; and the inconsistencies of the play may in part be due to an admixture of the old piece, and to tamperings with the manuscript.