Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/386

 derived a part of their story from Painter's ‘Palace of Pleasure,’ and the rest from Plutarch's ‘Life of Marc Antony’ and perhaps a dialogue of Lucian entitled ‘Timon,’ which Boiardo had previously converted into a comedy under the name of ‘Il Timone.’ Internal evidence makes it clear that Shakespeare's coadjutor was responsible for nearly the whole of acts iii. and v. But the character of Timon himself and all the scenes which he dominates are from Shakespeare's pen. Timon is cast in the mould of Lear.

There seems some ground for the belief that Shakespeare's coadjutor in ‘Timon’ was George Wilkins [q. v.], who, in ‘The Miseries of Enforced Marriage’ (1607), first treated the story that afterwards served for the plot of ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy.’ At any rate, Wilkins may safely be credited with portions of ‘Pericles,’ a romantic play which can be referred to the same year as ‘Timon.’ Shakespeare contributed only acts iii. and v. and parts of iv., which together form a self-contained whole, and do not combine satisfactorily with the remaining scenes. The presence of a third hand, of even inferior merit to Wilkins, has been suspected, and to this collaborator (perhaps William Rowley) may be best assigned the three scenes of purposeless coarseness which take place in or before a brothel (iv. 2, 5, and 6). From so distributed a responsibility the piece naturally suffers. It lacks homogeneity, and the story is helped out by dumb shows and prologues. But a matured felicity of expression characterises Shakespeare's own contributions, which charmingly narrate the romantic quest of Pericles for his daughter Marina, who was born and abandoned in a shipwreck. At many points he here anticipated his latest dramatic effects. The shipwreck is depicted (act iv. 1) as impressively as in the ‘Tempest,’ and Marina and her mother Thaisa enjoy many experiences in common with Perdita and Hermione in the ‘Winter's Tale.’ The prologues, which were not by Shakespeare, were spoken by an actor representing the mediæval poet John Gower, who versified the story under the title of ‘Apollonius of Tyre’ in his ‘Confessio Amantis.’ It is also found in a prose translation (from the French), which was printed in Lawrence Twyne's ‘Patterne of Painfull Adventures’ in 1576, and again in 1607. After the play was produced George Wilkins, one of the alleged coadjutors, based on it a novel called ‘The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre, being the True History of the Play of Pericles as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet, John Gower’ (1608). The play was issued as by William Shakespeare in a mangled form in 1608, and again in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was not included in Shakespeare's collected works till 1664.

In May 1608 Edward Blount [q. v.] entered in the ‘Stationers' Registers,’ by the authority of Sir George Buc, the licenser of plays, ‘a booke called “Anthony and Cleopatra.”’ No copy of this date is known, and once again the company probably hindered the publication. It was first printed in the folio of 1623. The source of the play is the life of Antonius in North's ‘Plutarch,’ and Shakespeare closely followed the historical narrative. But he breathed into the characters even more than his wonted fire, and invested the whole theme with a dramatic grandeur which lifts even Cleopatra's moral worthlessness into sublimity. The ‘happy valiancy’ of the style, too—to use Coleridge's admirable phrase—sets the tragedy very near the zenith of his achievement.

‘Coriolanus’ (first printed in 1623) similarly owes its origin to North's ‘Plutarch,’ although Shakespeare may have read the story in Painter's ‘Palace of Pleasure’ (No. iv.). He adhered to the text of Plutarch with the utmost literalness. The metrical characteristics prove the play to have been written at the same period, probably in the same year as ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (1608). In its austere temper it contrasts at all points with its predecessor. The courageous self-reliance of Coriolanus's mother, Volumnia, is severely contrasted with the submissive gentleness of Virgilia, Coriolanus's wife. The hero falls a victim to unchecked pride of caste, but for the rabble, who procure Coriolanus's overthrow, Shakespeare shows ironical contempt.

In ‘Cymbeline,’ ‘Winter's Tale,’ and ‘Tempest,’ the three latest plays that came from Shakespeare's unaided pen, he dealt with romantic themes which all end happily, but he instilled into them a pathos which sets them in a category of their own apart alike from comedy and tragedy. The placidity of tone conspicuous in these three plays has been often contrasted with the storm and stress of the great tragedies that preceded them. But the commonly accepted theory that traces in this change of tone a corresponding development in the author's own emotions ignores the objectivity of Shakespeare's dramatic work. Every phase of feeling lay within the scope of his intuition, and the successive order in which he approached them bore no explicable relation to the course of his private life or experience.