CHAPTER XV. THE PLUTARCH SERIES OF PLAYS. It is characteristic of Shakspere that the problem-plays and the three tragedies, in which his genius had taken its most unfettered flights, should be flanked on either side by dramas which clung, with unexampled fidelity, to historical tradition. In 1579 Sir Thomas North had translated into English Amyot's French version of Plutarch's Lives. We do not know when North's book first fell into Shakspere's hands, but he did not make use of it for dramatic purposes till after 1600, when he had finished his group of plays dealing with the English Civil Wars. About 1601 he wrote Julius Caesar which, as Digges testifies, was very successful on the stage, but, instead of at once taking other subjects from Roman history, he went elsewhere for plots. It may be, as Dowden suggests, that the historical connexion was now a connexion too external and too material to carry Shakspere on from subject to subject, as it had sufficed to do while he was engaged upon his series of English historical plays. Thus, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus were not written till about six or seven years afterwards, and hence they differ greatly in style from their forerunner. But, in spite of this, the three plays are alike in their unique relation to the text upon which they are based, and in their mode of handling themes borrowed from antiquity. We have seen that Shakspere, in dramatizing Holinshed's narrative of the Civil Wars, kept loyally to the main lines of the Chronicle, and took care that his humorous additions should not distort what he accepted as historical truth. His treatment of Plutarch was even more scrupulous, and not without reason. For while Holinshed was a mere annalist, whose work was chiefly an unpretentious record of tradition, the Greek historian was a literary artist of a high order, with a method that specially fitted his writings to become a dramatic storehouse. Imperfectly acquainted with the political issues of the epochs which he describes, he had a keen eye for character in its multifarious varieties, and the incidents which specially attracted him were those which threw light upon some notable personality. Thus, as he tells us, he seeks 'the distinctive marks of the soul in the smallest facts, in witty answers and lively off-hand remarks, which often show a man's character more clearly than murderous combats, or great battles, or the taking of towns'.' This psychological method of interpreting history, equally removed from that which simply records occurrences and that which investigates complex social phenomena, is the one most fruitful for dramatic purposes. The playwright finds that the historian has come half-way to meet him by singling out precisely those episodes which are the distinctive marks of the soul. Thus, while Holinshed supplied rough ore which had to be carefully sifted and refined, Plutarch's material had already gone through these processes, and only needed the crowning embellishment of poetic handling. Hence page after page out of the 'lives' of Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus is, with curiously slight modifications, transposed by Shak pere into dramatic form. His genius finds its scope not in invention, but in animating Plutarch's narrative with the vivid life and play of dialogue. As illustrative of the magical change produced by a fresh setting of the same incident, contrast Plutarch's bald account of the portents that heralded Caesar's death with the impassioned interview by night between Casca and Cassius when, with the tempest roaring overhead and an answering tumult in their own breasts, they breathlessly debate the meaning of these prodigies. Similar examples of marvellously heightened effects may be found in the dialogue between Caesar and 1 See Stapfer's Shakspere and Classical Antiquity, chapter 16. I owe several suggestions in this chapter to this interesting book. Decius Brutus regarding Calpurnia's dream, and in the episode of Portia's suspense on the day of the murder. In the quarrelscene between Brutus and Cassius the dramatist achieved a yet more signal triumph, for here he combined into one profoundly moving episode a number of hints scattered through Plutarch's narrative. The chief passages for which he is not indebted to the biographer are the great speeches of Brutus and Antony to the citizens, the death-bed dialogue between Cleopatra and her waiting-women, and the witticisms of Menenius Agrippa. But the qualities of Plutarch's work that made it so invaluable as a dramatic treasury prevented it from being an accurate picture of the Republic in its later, and still less in its earlier, days. The moralizing Greek, who looked on Italian affairs with the eyes of a foreigner, sentimentally prejudiced in favour of republican heroes, was not a first-rate authority upon classical antiquity. Nor was his account, such as it was, accessible to Shakspere in the original; it was known only at third-hand, through a translation of a translation. As has been seen, the dramatist's Latin reading did not include much historical matter, so that his knowledge of Roman annals was not supplemented to any great degree from other sources. It is therefore only natural that he should go entirely astray in his conception of some leading features of ancient civic life. It is not merely that, as is his custom, he arrays his characters in the dress of his own time, but he throws a misleading light upon the social and political conditions of Rome. The plebs becomes a rabble, after the fashion of an Elizabethan mob; the tribunes are turned into demagogues of the modern type, and the Senate into an assembly of 'greybeards' with very indefinite functions. If nevertheless Shakspere's pictures of classical life do not jar violently upon the historical sense, this is due largely to the kinship between Roman and English types of character, and to certain parallel features in the epochs of Caesar and Elizabeth. By the Thames, as by the Tiber, a centralizing despotism resting upon popular sympathies was in conflict with the inherited rights of an aristocracy and an elective assembly. The fashionable life of the old capital and the new had much in common, while Puritanism offered to serious and introspective minds the refuge supplied by Stoicism in the last days of the Republic. If Ascham and Gosson had bewailed the pernicious influence of Italy upon English morals, did not this exactly correspond to the corruption of antique civic simplicity by Oriental luxury and vice? That the steadfast integrity of the ideal Roman type of character had deeply impressed Shakspere is shown by allusions outside the Plutarch group of plays. It is Antonio's highest praise that in him 'the ancient Roman honour' is perpetuated, and Horatio is extolled as more an antique Roman, than a Dane.' Hence the most genuinely classical attribute of Shakspere's 'classical' plays—at least of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus—is the large simplicity of so much of the portraiture, united to a corresponding simplicity in the sweep of the plot, and to a diction suitably bare of all rhetorical ornament. The most perfect of the Roman plays is JULIUS CAESAR, the earliest of the three. It first appeared in the folio of 1623, but several converging lines of evidence fix its date with practical certainty as 1600 or 1601. In Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, 1601, are the lines: 'The many-headed multitude were drawne By Brutus' speech that Caesar was ambitious; His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious?' This refers to the orations of Brutus and Antony, which are not found in Plutarch, and only occur, as far as we know, in Shakspere's play. It exactly tallies too with Digges' account of the 'drawing' quality of the speeches in the piece, and it makes 1601 the downward limit. On the other hand the play cannot be put much earlier. It is not mentioned by Meres, and it is not likely to have been written till the English historical series was finished. The use of eternal' for 'infernal' in the phrase the eternal devil' (Act i. 2) may be paralleled after 1600, but not before. The frequent references to Caesar in Hamlet indicate that Shakspere had recently been dwelling on the dictator's career, and the kinship of character between the Danish Prince and Brutus suggests that they were created about the same time. The style of the drama is similar to that of the best comedies and English history-plays. Thought and expression are adjusted with exquisite nicety, and the lines run with a full yet liquid music that captivates the ear. The conceits of the early days have fallen away, and the pregnant obscurity of the final period is still to come. There is little rhyme, and a very small proportion of weak and double endings. Thus 1600-1601 may be confidently accepted as the date. It is a paradox that this drama, so limpid in style, so symmetrical in plot, and so clear-cut in portraiture, should yet present, at first sight, an amazing enigma which reminds us that it belongs to the period of the problem-plays. Allusions elsewhere to the great dictator as 'mightiest Julius' and 'broad-fronted Caesar' prove that Shakspere did not under-estimate the man whose place in the sphere of action is perhaps the closest parallel to his own in the sphere of intellect. Yet when we open the drama, of which he is the titular hero, we find that he appears in only three scenes, and that he is killed before the play is half over. The plot covers almost three years, from February, 44 B.C., to the battle of Philippi in the latter part of 42 B.C., but during only the first month of this period was Caesar alive. Moreover, on the few occasions when he does appear, he is shown in an unfavourable or, at least, an equivocal light. We see him first on the way to the festival of the Lupercalia, superstitiously bidding Antony touch Calpurnia in his holy chase as a cure for barrenness. Yet arrogantly indifferent to auguries of ill concerning himself, he dismisses as a dreamer the soothsayer, who bids him 'beware the Ides of March.' His speech has the imperious tone of a Sultan, whose lightest word is law, and he constantly talks of himself in the third person, as Caesar, 'as of some power above and behind his consciousness.' He is already, it is clear, an uncrowned king, and at the Lupercalia Antony presses upon him the crown itself, which he reluctantly puts by from fear of popular indignation. According to Casca's mocking account of the episode he could not endure the foul breath of the hooting rabblement, but fell down in the market-place and foamed at mouth. Nor is this falling-sickness his only infirmity. He had never, even in his best days, had the wiry physical endurance of Cassius, as the anecdote of the |