The wheel has swung full circle: Timon is almost as weak as “Titus Andronicus”; the pen falls from the nerveless hand. Shakespeare wrote nothing for some time. Even the critics make a break after “Timon,” which closes what they are pleased to call his third period; but they do not seem to see that the break was really a breakdown in health. In “Lear” he had brooded and raged to madness; in “Timon” he had spent himself in futile, feeble cursings. His nerves had gone to pieces. He was now forty-five years of age, the forces of youth and growth had left him. He was prematurely old and feeble.

His recovery, it seems certain, was very slow, and he never again, if I am right, regained vigorous health, I am almost certain he went down to Stratford at this crisis and spent some time there, probably a couple of years, trying, no doubt, to staunch the wound in his heart, and win back again to life. The fear of madness had frightened him from brooding: he made up his mind to let the dead past bury its dead; he would try to forget and live sanely. After all, life is better than death.

It was probably his daughter who led him back from the brink of the grave. Almost all his latest works show the same figure of a young girl. He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal grace of abstract beauty. In “Pericles” she is Marina; in “The Winter's Tale” Perdita; in “The Tempest” Miranda. It is probable when one comes to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent his “elder years” in Stratford; he was too broken to have taken up his life in London again.

The assertion that Shakespeare broke down in health, and never won back to vigorous life, will be scorned as my imagining. The critics who have agreed to regard “Cymbeline,” “The Winter's Tale,” and “The Tempest” as his finest works are all against me on this point, and they will call for “Proofs, proofs. Give us proofs,” they will cry, “that the man who went mad and raved with Lear, and screamed and cursed in “Timon” did really break down, and was not imagining madness and despair.” The proofs are to be found in these works themselves, plain for all men to read.

The three chief works of his last period are romances and are all copies; he was too tired to invent or even to annex; his own story is the only one that interests him. The plot of “The Winter's Tale” is the plot of “Much Ado about Nothing.” Hero is Hermione. Another phase of “Much Ado About Nothing” is written out at length in “Cymbeline”; Imogen suffers like Hero and Hermione, under unfounded accusation. It is Shakespeare's own history turned from this world to fairyland: what would have happened, he asks, if the woman whom I believed false, had been true? This, the theme of “Much Ado,” is the theme also of “The Winter's Tale” and of “Cymbeline.” The idealism of the man is inveterate: he will not see that it was his own sensuality which gave him up to suffering, and not Mary Fitton's faithlessness. “The Tempest” is the story of “As you Like it.” We have again the two dukes, the exiled good Duke, who is Shakespeare, and the bad usurping Duke, Shakespeare's rival, Chapman, who has conquered for a time. Shakespeare is no longer able or willing to discover a new play: he can only copy himself, and in one of the scenes which he wrote into “Henry VIII.” the copy is slavish.

I allude to the third scene in the second act; the dialogue between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady is extraordinarily reminiscent. When Anne Bullen says—

I am reminded of Henry VI. And the contention between Anne Bullen and the Old Lady, in which Anne Bullen declares that she would not be a queen, and the Old Lady scorns her:

is much the same contention, and is handled in the same way as the contention between Desdemona and Emilia in “Othello.”

There are many other proofs of Shakespeare's weakness of hand throughout this last period, if further proofs were needed. The chief characteristics of Shakespeare's health are his humour, his gaiety, and wit—his love of life. A correlative characteristic is that all his women are sensuous and indulge in coarse expressions in and out of season. This is said to be a fault of his time; but only professors could use an argument which shows such ignorance of life. Homer was clean enough, and Sophocles, Spenser, too; sensuality is a quality of the individual man. Still another characteristic of Shakespeare's maturity is that his characters, in spite of being idealized, live for us a vigorous, pulsing life.

All these characteristics are lacking in the works after “Timon.” There is practically no humour, no wit, the clowns even are merely boorish-stupid with the solitary exception of Autolycus, who is a pale reflex of one or two characteristics of Falstaff. Shakespeare's humour has disappeared, or is so faint as scarcely to be called humour; all the heroines, too, are now vowed away from sensuality: Marina passes through the brothel unsoiled; Perdita might have milk in her veins, and not blood, and Miranda is but another name for Perdita. Imogen, too, has no trace of natural passion in her: she is a mere washing-list, so to speak, of sexless perfections. In this last period Shakespeare will have nothing to do with sensuality, and his characters, and not the female characters alone, are hardly more than abstractions; they lack the blood of emotion; there is not one of them could cast a shadow. How is it that the critics have mistaken these pale, bloodless silhouettes for Shakespeare's masterpieces?

In his earliest works he was compelled, as we have seen, to use his own experiences perpetually, not having had any experience of life, and in these, his latest plays, he also uses when he can his own experiences to give his pictures of the world from which he had withdrawn, some sense of vivid life. For example, in “Winter's Tale” his account of the death of the boy Mamillius is evidently a reflex of his own emotion when he lost his son, Hamnet, an emotion which at the time he pictured deathlessly in Arthur and the grief of the Queen-mother Constance. Similarly, in “Cymbeline,” the joy of the brothers in finding the sister is an echo of his own pleasure in getting to know his daughter.

I have an idea about the genesis of these last three plays as regards their order which may be wholly false, though true, I am sure, to Shakespeare's character. I imagine he was asked by the author to touch up “Pericles.” On reading the play, he saw the opportunity of giving expression to the new emotion which had been awakened in him by the serious sweet charm of his young daughter, and accordingly he wrote the scenes in which Marina figures. Judith's modesty was a perpetual wonder to him.

His success induced him to sketch out “The Winter's Tale,” in which tale he played sadly with what might have been if his accused love, Mary Fitton, had been guiltless instead of guilty. I imagine he saw that the play was not a success, or supreme critic as he was, that his hand had grown weak, and seeking for the cause he probably came to the conclusion that the comparative failure was due to the fact that he did not put himself into “The Winter's Tale,” and so he determined in the next play to draw a full-length portrait of himself again, as he had done in “Hamlet,” and accordingly he sketched Posthumus, a staider, older, idealized Hamlet, with lymph in his veins, instead of blood. In the same idealizing spirit, he pictured his rose of womanhood for us in Imogen, who is, however, not a living woman at all, any more than his earliest ideal, Juliet, was a woman. The contrast between these two sketches is the contrast between Shakespeare's strength and his weakness. Here is how the fourteen-year-old Juliet talks of love:

And here what Posthumus says of Imogen:

Neither of these statements is very generally true: but the second is out of character. When Shakespeare praises restraint in love he must have been very weak; in full manhood he prayed for excess of it, and regarded a surfeit as the only rational cure.

I think Shakespeare liked Posthumus and Imogen; but he could not have thought “Cymbeline” a great work, and so he pulled himself together for a masterpiece. He seems to have said to himself, “All that fighting of Posthumus is wrong; men do not fight at forty-eight; I will paint myself simply in the qualities I possess now; I will tell the truth about myself so far as I can.” The result is the portrait of Prospero in “The Tempest.”

Let me just say before I begin to study Prospero that I find the introduction of the Masque in the fourth act extraordinarily interesting. Ben Jonson had written classic masques for this and that occasion; masques which were very successful, we are told; they had “caught on,” in fact, to use our modern slang. Shakespeare will now show us that he, too, can write a masque with classic deities in it, and better Jonson's example. It is pitiful, and goes to prove, I think, that Shakespeare was but little esteemed by his generation.

Jonson answered him conceitedly, as Jonson would, in the Introduction to his “Bartholomew Fair” (1612-14), “If there be never a Servant monster i' the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques. He is loth to make nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries.”

At the very end, the creator of Hamlet, the finest mind in the world, was eager to show that he could write as well in any style as the author of “Every Man in his Humour.” To me the bare fact is full of interest, and most pitiful.

Let us now turn to “The Tempest,” and see how our poet figures in it. It is Shakespeare's last work, and one of his very greatest; his testament to the English people; in wisdom and high poetry a miracle.

The portrait of Shakespeare we get in Prospero is astonishingly faithful and ingenuous, in spite of its idealization. His life's day is waning to the end; shadows of the night are drawing in upon him, yet he is the same bookish, melancholy student, the lover of all courtesies and generosities, whom we met first as Biron in “Love's Labour's Lost.” The gaiety is gone and the sensuality; the spiritual outlook is infinitely sadder—that is what the years have done with our gentle Shakespeare.

Prospero's first appearance in the second scene of the first act is as a loving father and magician; he says to Miranda:

He asks Miranda what she can remember of her early life, and reaches magical words:

Miranda is only fifteen years of age. Shakespeare turned Juliet, it will be remembered, from a girl of sixteen into one of fourteen; now, though the sensuality has left him, he makes Miranda only fifteen; clearly he is the same admirer of girlish youth at forty-eight as he was twenty years before. Then Prospero tells Miranda of himself and his brother, the “perfidious” Duke:

He will not only be a Prince now, but a master “without a parallel” in the liberal arts. He must explain, too, at undue length, how he allowed himself to be supplanted by his false brother, and speaks about himself in Shakespeare's very words:

Shakespeare, too, “neglecting worldly ends,” had dedicated himself to “bettering of his mind,” we may be sure. Prospero goes on to tell us explicitly how Shakespeare loved books, which we were only able to infer from his earlier plays:

And again, Gonzalo (another name for Kent and Flavius) having given him some books, he says:

His daughter grieves lest she had been a trouble to him: forthwith Shakespeare-Prospero answers:

But why should the magician weep or groan under a burden? had he no confidence in his miraculous powers? All this is Shakespeare's confession. Every word is true; his daughter did indeed “preserve” Shakespeare, and enable him to bear up under the burden of life's betrayals.

No wonder Prospero begins to apologize for this long-winded confession, which indeed is “most impertinent” to the play, as he admits, though most interesting to him and to us, for he is simply Shakespeare telling us his own feelings at the time. The gentle magician then hears from Ariel how the shipwreck has been conducted without harming a hair of anyone.

The whole scene is an extraordinarily faithful and detailed picture of Shakespeare's soul. I find significance even in the fact that Ariel wants his freedom “a full year” before the term Prospero had originally proposed. Shakespeare finished “The Tempest,” I believe, and therewith set the seal on his life's work a full year earlier than he had intended; he feared lest death might surprise him before he had put the pinnacle on his work. Ariel's torment, too, is full of meaning for me; for Ariel is Shakespeare's “shaping spirit of imagination,” who was once the slave of “a foul witch,” and by her “imprisoned painfully” for “a dozen years.”

That “dozen years” is to me astonishingly true and interesting: it shows that my reading of the duration of his passion-torture was absolutely correct—Shakespeare's “delicate spirit” and best powers bound to Mary Fitton's “earthy” service from 1597 to 1608.

We can perhaps fix this latter date with some assurance. Mistress Fitton married for the second time a Captain or Mr. Polwhele late in 1607, or some short time before March, 1608, when the fact of her recent marriage was recorded in the will of her great uncle. It seems to me probable, or at least possible, that this event marks her complete separation from Shakespeare; she may very likely have left the Court and London on ceasing to be a Maid of Honour.

Shakespeare is so filled with himself in this last play, so certain that he is the most important person in the world, that this scene is more charged with intimate self-revealing than any other in all his works. And when Ferdinand comes upon the stage Shakespeare lends him, too, his own peculiar qualities. His puppets no longer interest him; he is careless of characterization. Ferdinand says:

Music, it will be remembered, had precisely the same peculiar effect upon Duke Orsino in “Twelfth Night.” Ferdinand, too, is extraordinarily conceited:

Shakespeare's natural aristocratic pride as a Prince reinforced by his understanding of his own real importance. Ferdinand then declares he will be content with a prison if he can see Miranda in it:

Which is Hamlet's:

The second act, with its foiled conspiracy, is wretchedly bad, and the meeting of Caliban and Trinculo with Stephanie does not improve it much, Shakespeare has little interest now in anything outside himself: age and greatness are as self-centred as youth.

In the third act the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda is pretty, but hardly more. Ferdinand is bloodless, thin, and Miranda swears “by her modesty,” as the jewel in her dower, which takes away a little from the charming confession of girl-love:

The comic relief which follows is unspeakably dull; but the words of Ariel, warning the King of Naples and the usurping Duke that the wrong they have done Prospero is certain to be avenged unless blotted out by “heart-sorrow and a clear life ensuing,” are most characteristic and memorable.

In the fourth act Prospero preaches, as we have seen, self-restraint to Ferdinand in words which, in their very extravagance, show how deeply he regretted his own fault with his wife before marriage. I shall consider the whole passage when treating of Shakespeare's marriage as an incident in his life. Afterwards comes the masque, and the marvellous speech of Prospero, which touches the highest height of poetry:

I have given the verses to the very end, for I find the insistence on his age and weakness (which are not in keeping with the character of a magician), a confession of Shakespeare himself: the words “beating mind” are extraordinarily characteristic, proving as they do that his thoughts and emotions were too strong for his frail body.

In the fifth act Shakespeare-Prospero shows himself to us at his noblest: he will forgive his enemies:

In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” we saw how Shakespeare-Valentine forgave his faithless friend as soon as he repented: here is the same creed touched to nobler expression.

And then, with all his wishes satisfied, his heart's desire accomplished, Prospero is ready to set out for Milan again and home. We all expect some expression of joy from him, but this is what we get:

The despair is wholly unexpected and out of place, as was the story of his weakness and infirmity, his “beating mind.” It is evidently Shakespeare's own confession. After writing “The Tempest” he intends to retire to Stratford, where “every third thought shall be my grave.”

I have purposely drawn special attention to Shakespeare's weakness and despair at this time, because the sad, rhymed Epilogue which has to be spoken by Prospero has been attributed to another hand by a good many scholars. It is manifestly Shakespeare's, out of Shakespeare's very heart indeed; though Mr. Israel Gollancz follows his leaders in saying that the “Epilogue to the play is evidently by some other hand than Shakespeare's”: “evidently” is good. Here it is:

From youth to age Shakespeare occupied himself with the deepest problems of human existence; again and again we find him trying to pierce the darkness that enshrouds life. Is there indeed nothing beyond the grave—nothing? Is the noble fabric of human thought, achievement and endeavour to fade into nothingness and pass away like the pageant of a dream? He will not cheat himself with unfounded hopes, nor delude himself into belief; he resigns himself with a sigh—it is the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns. But Shakespeare always believed in repentance and forgiveness, and now, world-weary, old and weak, he turns to prayer, {Footnote: Hamlet, too, after speaking with his father's ghost, cries: “I'll go pray."} prayer that—

Poor, broken Shakespeare! “My ending is despair”: the sadness of it, and the pity, lie deeper than tears.

What a man! to produce a masterpiece in spite of such weakness. What a play is this “Tempest”! At length Shakespeare sees himself as he is, a monarch without a country; but master of a very “potent art,” a great magician, with imagination as an attendant spirit, that can conjure up shipwrecks, or enslave enemies, or create lovers at will; and all his powers are used in gentle kindness. Ariel is a higher creation, more spiritual and charming than any other poet has ever attempted; and Caliban, the earth-born, half-beast, half-man—these are the poles of Shakespeare's genius.