CHAPTER XIII. THE PROBLEM-PLAYS. THE opening of the seventeenth century coincides almost exactly with a sharp turning-point in Shakspere's dramatic career. On one side of the year 1601 lie comedies of matchless charm and radiance, and histories which are half comedies. On the other appear plays, in which historical matter is given a tragic setting, or in which comedy for the most part takes the grim form of dramatic satire. The change has been compared to the passage from a sunny charming landscape to a wild mountain district whose highest peaks are shrouded in thick mist. The causes of this startling alteration in the poet's mood are, as has been shown, in great measure obscure. He was in the full tide of outward prosperity, and though his father died in 1601, this event could not have brought a keener pang than the loss of his only son in 1596, which seems to have left no shadow on his work. The Sonnets, with their record of mental anguish and disillusion, give a partial clue, but it must be acknowledged that the evidences of date tend to place the estrangement between Shakspeare and Will during the period of the brightest comedies, and their reconciliation just before the production of the graver plays. Another cause that has been suggested for the dramatist's change from gaiety to gloom, is the failure of the conspiracy of Essex, followed by the execution of the Earl and the imprisonment of Shakspere's friend Southampton. To this we might find a parallel in Spenser's Complaints, whose pes simistic tone is largely due to his grief at the death of Sidney and Leicester. It can scarcely be a mere coincidence that Julius Caesar immediately follows the Earl's tragic end, and it is remarkable that most of the plays which with more or less warrant may be assigned to the last three years of Elizabeth's reign, contain painful studies of the weakness, levity, and unbridled passion of young men. This is especially the case with All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. The last-named play is, of course, distinguished from the others by its tragic ending, but it is akin to them in its general temper and atmosphere. All these dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civilization is ripe unto rottenness. Amidst such media abnormal conditions of brain and of emotion are generated, and intricate cases of conscience demand a solution by unprecedented methods. Thus throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome, even when, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, the complications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth act. In Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet no such partial settlement of difficulties takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best we may. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them together as Shakspere's problem-plays. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is probably the earliest of this group', and may be conjecturally dated about 1601-2. The 1 The play first appears in the folio, and we have only internal evidences to go on. The percentage of double endings (20) points to the date mentioned above, as do a number of minor resemblances to Hamlet (e. g. the Countess' precepts to her son on his departure to Paris recall those of Polonius to Laertes; Hamlet calls Denmark a prison,' Parolles calls France a stable,' a 'dog-hole.') The only feature that seems to suggest an earlier date is the occurrence in the dialogue of numerous rhymed passages, some of them of considerable length, e.g. I i. 231-244; II. i. 133-213; and II. iii. 78-111 and 132-151. On the strength of such passages, and some minor links with Love's Labour's Lost, many critics have source of the play is Boccaccio's novel of Giglietta di Nerbona, which had been translated by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure. Here, as in other cases, notably The Merchant of Venice, Shakspere seems to have been attracted by the problem of working back from a traditional plot, full of anomalous incidents, to the motives that would render such incidents possible, or even probable. This he accomplishes in two ways: by giving to the puppet-like figures of the original story the special type of heart and brain from which certain actions necessarily flow, and by adding new characters who stand in some vital relation, whether of analogy or of contrast, to the central theme. Thus in the play before us, the hero, the heroine, and the King of France are taken from Boccaccio's tale, while the Countess of Roussillon, Parolles, Lafeu, and the Clown are inventions of the poet. It was in the character of Helena, or Giglietta, as she is called in the romance, that Shakspere, as Elze has well brought out, found the chief temptation to dramatize the story. From his conception of this leading figure everything else springs by strict psychological necessity. The problem was to turn a woman, who in the novel is merely an adventuress, into an ideal of feminine strength and devotion, capable of saving the man she loves from the consequences of a nature at once stubborn and volatile. Thus Shakspere here treats the same supposed that All's Well is a recast of an earlier play, probably Love's Labour's Won, mentioned by Meres in 1598. This theory has been stated in its most positive form by Fleay (New Shaks Soc. Trans. 1874). But Hertzberg, in his introduction to the German Shakspere Society's edition of Schlegel and Tieck's translation, contends that this view is false. He identifies (as already stated) Love's Labour's Won with The Taming of the Shrew, and argues that All's Well was entirely written at one period, sometime between 1600 and 1603. He shows with great force that the rhyming lines, like the rest of the play, have often the break in the sense in the middle of the verse, instead of at the end, and that their frequently harsh rhythm and elliptical construction are quite different from the smooth, transparent couplets of the early comedies. He might have added that the rhyming lines occur chiefly, according to a familiar usage in Shakspere, in passages of sententious reflection, or of interchange of repartee, as between Helena and the king. Another consideration which deserves more weight than is generally given to it, is that Shakspere, in his first joyous period, would scarcely have handled a theme with such sombre features as the plot of All's Well. I therefore incline to Hertzberg's view, while admitting that the question has not been quite conclusively settled. Elze, in his interesting essay on the play, gives up all attempt to fix the date. subject as in The Taming of the Shrew, but with the parts reversed. There the man of firm will by heroic remedies forms a wayward girl into a devoted wife: here a woman of similar mould by remedies still more heroic shapes a husband of potential excellence out of a headstrong youth. In the one case we have a wellnigh burlesque handling of the natural relation between the sexes: in the other an abnormal relation is prevented from becoming repulsive by being elevated almost into the tragic sphere. Helena in the drama, as in the novel, is the child of Gerard de Narbon, physician to the Count of Roussillon, who on her father's death had reared her as a foster-daughter along with his own son Bertram. The Count has himself just died, and Bertram, who is now left in ward to the French king, is setting forth for the Court at Paris. Of the tears shed at his departure, the bitterest flow from the eyes of Helena, who has formed a deep, silent love for her early playmate. This love is rooted in humility. The poor dependant-for Shakspere has rightly made Helena poor instead of rich, as in the novel-looks up to the scion of the great feudal house as a being of another sphere: 'It were all one That I should love a bright particular star The imagery that she uses in speaking of their relation is borrowed from the most abject forms of worship: 'Now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy and again, 'Indian-like Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more.' Similarly she compares herself to the hind that would be mated to the lion, and whose fate is to die for love. The very existence of her passion needs an apology, 'It hurts not him that he is loved of me.' Her highest gratification has been the bitter-sweet indulgence of gazing constantly upon her heart's 'Twas pretty, idol- —so near her and yet so infinitely removed. 'My master, my dear lord he is and I But the dramatist has hit upon a device for convincing us of Helena's single-mindedness far more effective than any sentiments from her own lips. A mother has proverbially the quickest eye for spying out a design against her son's happiness, and is the severest critic of any claimant to the love that has hitherto been hers alone. Thus our sympathies are warmly aroused in Helena's favour when we find that she is loved by the Countess of Rousillon, as if she were her own child. The Countess, who is purely a creation of Shakspere, is the most engaging type of French character that he has drawn. She is, in the very best sense, a grande dame of the ancien régime. She has the aristocratic virtues without their defects. Her rich experience of life has taught her valuable lessons, in which she schools her son before he plunges into the temptations of the Court. To a high-bred graciousness of speech and bearing, she unites that dislike of outward emotional display, that repose of manner which stamps her caste. She has felt too many 'quirks of joy and grief' to be readily demonstrative, but her sympathies are wonderfully keen and alert; she is one of the women who never break with the memory of their own past, and who thus, with the silvered hair and the faded cheek, preserve the secret of perpetual youth. She had long half |