According to the present judgment of Shakespeare, no one any longer perceives that the exercise of his wit was any worse than the wit itself. If he polished little in isolated passages and in separate lines, (on which indeed with friendly actors little depended in works only written for representation,) we know well, that he undertook very essential improvements on a large scale, sometimes even completely remodelling his pieces. But the "break", which Ben Jonson wished to lay upon Shakespeare, might have transformed Shakespeare into Ben Jonson. Rather will we have the man with all his faults, if they will point them out to us! For the verse quoted, even if it once did stand thus written, a pedant may consider nonsense, but certainly no Cæsarian statesman or warrior would do so. Besides where the growth is so luxuriant, redundancy is not merely pardonable, not merely unavoidable, but it belongs to the man and to his nature, it can never interfere with our love for these wonderful creations. This every reader will experience, who impresses upon himself the wise counsel, expressed by Shakespeare's friends in the preface to his works (1623): "Read him therefore; and again and again; and if then you do not like him, surely, you are in some manifest danger not to understand him!"

Shakespeare died in the year 1616, on the 23rd April. It appears that he had been ill for a long time and had for this reason made his will. The report, therefore, which Mr. Ward noted in his journal, is not very credible, that Shakespeare had caroused too much at a visit from his friends Ben Jonson and Drayton and had on account of this died of a fever. The mere similarity besides of the tradition of Greene's death makes it suspicious. The poet had lived

to see the marriage of his two daughters; at 45 years of age he had already become a grandfather; he left his family well provided for.

After his death, his bust was placed in Stratford as a memorial, the opinion of which by competent judges is that the face was copied after death. The editors of his plays in 1623, added another picture of the poet to his works, which is thinner, more intellectual and not so bloated as the bust. Shakespeare's contemporaries call him a fine, well-formed man, and with this the high brow and the. large, bright, and calm eyes of this picture well accord. Ben Jonson praised the likeness, and it gave rise to a thousand improved copies. For in itself it is a very imperfect drawing, from which we can only just conclude, that this man so normal in mind was regular also in his physical form, to render which in drawing without being lifeless and insipid, is ever notoriously difficult.

We will now follow the poet through the series of the works of his later years, and endeavour in conclusion in looking back upon the results of our reflections, to gather together his poetical, moral, and intellectual qualities in one complete picture, which will bring most expressively before us the inner characteristics of this great mind.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

The vein of deep thought, which so strikingly distinguishes the works of Shakespeare's latter period, beats in its fullest pulse in Measure for Measure, the drama most closely linked to the comedies last discussed. It was performed in the year 1604; and probably not written much earlier. The basis of the piece is an Italian tale in Giraldi Cinthio's Hekatomithi (8. 5.), translated in Whetstone's Heptameron of Civil Discourses. 1582. The cruel and painful purport of this tale is briefly this. The Emperor's deputy in Inspruck, Juriste by name, who is enjoined to be guilty of nothing contrary to justice during his prince's absence, passes sentence of death upon a youth on account of the crime, which Claudio commits in Measure for Measure; by the double promise of marriage and the release of her brother, he seduces the pleading sister (Exitia) into the same crime, for which he had sentenced her brother, and orders him then notwithstanding to be put to death and the corpse to be sent to his sister's house. The Emperor sentences his deputy to marry Exitia and then to be beheaded. At her intercession his life is spared, and she retains him as her husband.

The same Whetstone, who translated this tale, had before (1578) published a piece in ten acts upon this subject, entitled Promos and Cassandra, which was never performed. Even he felt the necessity of moderating the repulsive tenor of the narrative. As the piece from its happy conclusion was to be a comedy, he interspersed the ✔ serious action with burlesque interludes, which caricature the meaning, and thus offer a counter-balance to the painful impression. The sinning brother, as in Shakespeare, is not put to death; the gaoler sets him free, and carries the sister the head of a dead man instead of that of her brother. For the rest the details are similar to those in the novel.

Shakespeare has on his part in his Measure for Measure still more moderated and purified the story by carrying out still further Whetstone's track. With him, the head of the dead man is not brought to the sister, but with a more natural and less cruel object, to the judge. The sister's fall is avoided by the introduction and substitution of Angelo's former affianced one, and thus a change is effected in that part of the story which is the most offensive, because the marriage with the murderer of her brother, or with him who at least ordered the sentence of death to be executed, has in it something extraordinarily degrading to the woman.

After all these improvements, however, in the feeling of most readers in the present day, all that is offensive in the tenor of the piece, is not yet quite removed. We are not inclined to pardon the poet for having brought upon the stage the cruel subjects of the Italian novelists both here, in All's Well that Ends Well, and in Cymbeline, and

us,

for having demanded from that we should look with the more sensitive eye on the representation of that which in narration falls less forcibly on the blunter ear. Measure for Measure indeed is performed even to this day in moral England, and that without abridgment or alteration, and the experience can thus be made, that the representation itself softens much which appears repugnant to us in the piece. Notwithstanding the play found little favour with most English critics, Hunter, Knight, and others; even an admirer, like Coleridge, called this play the most painful or rather the only painful work among Shakespeare's dramas. He considered the comic and tragic parts alike bordering on the detestable, the one disgusting, the other terrible; he called the pardon and marriage of Angelo degrading to the female character and not in conformity with the demands of severe, indignant justice; for cruelty combined with lust and infamous baseness could not be forgiven, because we could not consider them heartily repented of. These objections would be indisputable, were we convinced from the course of action and the nature of the actors, that a sincere repentance was indeed unimaginable in Angelo, and were we to admit that "severe indignant justice" is the only true justice, a justice in this instance well employed. To form a correct judgment on these passions, it is necessary, that we should as usual go back to the motives of action, and discover their psychological connection.

A novel, taken from Shakespeare's play, furnished with all his characteristic touches and with his representation of circumstances, and placed by the side of the original source or by the side of Whetstone's play, would evidence in the

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