(We have seen how at the close of the 16th century, Shakespeare was occupied with indescribable activity, and was seized with an overweening desire for satisfying his creative genius. The cheerfulness, the assurance, the copiousness, with which we saw him work at the close of the second period, continued in the first few years of the third, or rather increased. In the six years which elapsed between 1598 and 1603, Shakespeare wrote on the average at least two plays a year. Subsequently his works become more scanty; from the years 1604 to 1612 there is on the average only one play a year,) and this alone contradicts the notice of Ward, that Shakespeare in his older days, when he lived at Stratford, furnished two pieces annually for the stage. It is much more probable, that from the year 1612, when the poet took up his abode in Stratford, he not only sought to free himself from his outward connection with the stage, but also concluded his dramatic and poetical

career.

Looking over Shakespeare's dramas of the third period in comparison with those of the second, the most striking difference is,) as we before intimated, that from the beginning of the new century the tragedy and the serious tragic drama extraordinarily predominate. Previous to 1600, if we set aside the seven pieces of the first period, there are twelve comedies and merry plays to four real tragedies; but after the group of comedies last discussed there now follow eight tragedies of the gravest purport, and really no more comedies. For the drama's (Cymbeline, Measure for Measure, the Tempest, and the Winter's Tale,) have all more or less a tragic colouring, and even in Troilus and Cressida, the seriousness and thoughtfulness of the poet in his work

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prevent a sensation of mirth; the merry humourists, the comical female characters, the shallow figures of his romantic comedies, wholly cease from this time. If we have found the poet occupied in the pieces of the second period with those reflections upon the contrast of outward show and inward reality, of the actual and the conventional worth of things, a theme capable of the most manifold poetical representation, another system of thought of a character throughout serious, elegiac, and tragic, appears predominant in a great series of the creations of the last period; in their matter we see a new moral relation in the foreground, which returns ever and again under various modifications, and seems to chain the poet's reflection and consideration with the same interest as the previous subject in the works ✅ of the middle period. The unnatural dissolving of natural bonds, oppression, falsehood, treachery and ingratitude towards benefactors, friends, and relatives, towards those to whom the most sacred duties should be dedicated, this is the new tragical conception, which now most powerfully and profoundly occupies the poet in the most various works of this epoch of his life. Thus in Julius Cæsar, Brutus' defection is represented as an act of faithlessness and ingratitude, which the spirit of the murdered friend resents and retaliates. In Henry VIII., Wolsey's self-seeking plans, in opposition to his royal patron, express a like thankless faithlessness. Macbeth's treason towards his benefactor Duncan displays the same ingratitude in a still higher degree. And as in Lear, this ingratitude and faithlessness advance by gradual progress, through friends, princes, benefactors, and relations, to the highest pitch of vice, in the profligate alienation of children from their

father, in the rebellion of kindred blood in the bosom of the family; we find here also in Lear and Cymbeline the pure contrast of unshaken fidelity set before us in the child, the subject, the servant, and the wife. In Troilus the same theme is continued in the faithlessness of Cressida and the leaguebreaking of the Greeks. In Antony, the faithless rupture of old and newly formed political, friendly, and nuptial ties, in order to keep faith with an unworthy paramour, is represented as the catastrophe in the fate of the hero. Coriolanus' defection from his country, falls more remotely under the same category. On the other hand, the subjects of Timon and the Tempest, the disgraceful ingratitude and the faithless alienation of the false friends in the one, and the usurpation of brother against brother in the other, rank entirely under this head.

Whether the striking constant recurrence of the poet to such instances of injured confidence, broken obligations, evident ingratitude, and breach of natural ties, can be accounted for by any personal and sorrowful experiences which would at once explain why he dwelt more on these dark pictures, than on the opposite bright ones of fidelity,this, unfortunately we do not know; nay, that which in Shakespeare's life might have perhaps corresponded with his inclination to the tragic, we should hardly be able to guess, if from outward facts, and from probable grounds and causes we were to trace his more serious, more gloomy frame of mind. We have heard from his sonnets, that at the zenith of his friendship with that favourite youth, some adverse fate befel him, which cast him into affliction and melancholy. This unhappiness which overtook him, we can refer to nothing unless it be to the death of his son Hamlet in the

year 1596. A heavy blow also to his heart was indisputably the rebellion of the Earl of Essex in the year 1601, in which Southampton was involved; as well as the conspiracy in 1603, which cost the lives of Watson and Clarke. Essex was beheaded in February 1601; Southampton remained in confinement during the reign of Elizabeth; in 1603, began the lengthy imprisonment of the famous Raleigh, who certainly stood high in Shakespeare's esteem, if not in closer relation to him. It is possible enough, that Julius Cæsar was written just about 1601 or 1602, not without reference to these conspirators and independent spirits. We have seen from the prologue to Henry V., what a sympathizing delight Shakespeare manifested in Essex, and still later in Macbeth; Steevens has conjectured, that in the account of the death of the Thane of Cawdor he had in view the behaviour of the Earl at his execution. Much importance cannot, however, be placed on these allusions; those misfortunes too do not appear sufficient to call forth such an important change in the tone of his life, as is to be found in Shakespeare's works after the year 1600. Much more essential to the explanation of this change must be those inner experiences of the poet, amid which he had even earlier confessed himself to his friend as refined and purified in a transformation of his nature. The hour seemed to have come to him also, as he had so often represented it in his humorous characters, in which he renounced the frivolous. practices of the world; age advanced upon him, he acquired an extended knowledge of history and an increasing experience of life, which dispose no men with any depth of character and cultivation to be more merry, frivolous, and shallow as years go on. If we take into account his aversion

to his profession, and the impression which the degeneracy of stage-poetry may have made upon him, the crudeness of the age so repugnant to him in many of its features, the capricious and not rarely bloody arbitrariness of the government, we have motives sufficient to incite the poet to descend still deeper into the recesses of human nature, to roll back the page of history further than he had hitherto done, to search after passions of still greater force in the traditions of the past, and to trace still deeper furrows on the brow from the more profound contemplation of the world and of humanity. It is however striking, that the very play, the hero of which bears the name of Shakespeare's deceased son, may be regarded as a vehicle for the elegiac humour of the poet. Hamlet is the only piece of this later period, in which one might conjecture a pathological interest on the part of the poet; we might perceive, that he had treated the hero as a counterpart to Prince Henry, and in both together we might feel that Shakespeare displayed the various points of his own nature in greater fulness, than had been possible in one alone. In one of the sonnets the melancholy feature in Hamlet's character is so prefigured, that one is tempted to believe that the plan of this poem was projected by Shakespeare since the period in which "the world was bent to cross his deeds". We may call to mind in Hamlet's famous soliloquy, the motives which led him to draw the idea of self-murder from the consideration of the course of this world, the weariness at the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns of merit, and we shall read a similar soliloquy in the 66th sonnet, which the poet addressed like all