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all Bacon’s work is brought to nothing. The accompanying love story of Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, for Margaret of Fressingfield, a keeper’s daughter and a delightful romantic heroine, is managed with freshness and charm. The touch is a light one, and Greene is at his best. We are in the reign of Henry III and Friar Bacon’s closing prophecy foresees the golden age of England’s peace and prosperity under the queen whose ‘brightness shall deface proud Phoebus’ flower’, Elizabeth.
Greene’s satire, A Looking Glass for London, has its setting in Nineveh. Pictures of corruption are interspersed with moral exhortations from Oseas, who acts as chorus and pricks the conscience of Londoners. Finally the prophet Jonas arrives and persuades court and city to a general repentance. The play’s lesson is pressed home in a series of extravagant spectacles requiring elaborate stage machinery. One character is struck dead by lightning, another swallowed into the earth by fire; a prophet descends from the sky; and a hand issues from a cloud, gripping a flaming sword. There is neater workmanship in James IV. The Scottish king is married to Dorothea, daughter of Henry VII, but his wayward passion for Ida, daughter of the Countess of Arran, is fanned by the villainous Ateukin (another disciple of Machiavel). The Queen remains faithful and devoted even after an attempt on her life. Ida is chaste against royal pressure and marries Eustace for love. The two firm and attractive women are finely portrayed. The blank verse is more disciplined and, at suitable points, veers into tidy couplets.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was the son of a Stratford-on- Avon tradesman important enough to hold the highest municipal office. He was probably educated at Stratford Grammar School, and at the age of eighteen married Anne Hathaway, a young woman of twenty-six. They had three children of whom one (Hamnet) died in childhood. Shakespeare had made his name in London by 1592 when Greene attacked him, parodying a line from the first act of Henry VI Part 3 (‘O tiger’s heart, wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’). Nashe, in the same year, plainly seems to allude to the popularity of Henry VI Part 1 when he speaks (in Pierce Pennilesse) of ‘ten thousand spectators at least (at several times)’ beholding the scenes of Talbot’s death. Shakespeare joined the theatrical company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and in 1599 he and others from this company built the Globe Theatre and made it the outstanding theatre of the day. The company became the King’s Men in 1603 and continued to

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dominate theatrical life. Meanwhile his share in this company and its theatre had made Shakespeare affluent, and he bought a fine house in Stratford. The King’s Men took over a further theatre, Blackfriars, in 1608, but Shakespeare retired to Stratford in 1611, where he died five years later.
Shakespeare’s attachment to a particular company in which he had a financial interest supplied him with the kind of opportunity and motive which stimulate a writer. The Shakespearian phenomenon is not solely a matter of individual genius. Commercial and technical conditions were congenial. Moreover the form (the drama) had got through its teething stages and was ripe for high fulfilments, and the medium (the English language) was at a point of rich potential in terms of its historical development. We shall consider, in order, Shakespeare’s early and mature comedies, his histories, his tragedies and problem plays, and his last romances.
The four early comedies, belonging to the years 1592 to 1595, only fitfully foreshadow the achievement of the mature comedies that followed in the subsequent five years. The Comedy of Errors is an adaptation of Plautus’s Menaechmi and his Amphitruo. Searching for lost and separated twin sons, with their respective lost and separated twin servants, while the pairs are in the same city of Ephesus, has farcical possibilities that are fully exploited in the comic entanglements, though the whole is contained within the grave framework of a threat hanging over the seeker. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the King of Navarre and three nobles pledge themselves to live without women for three years, turning the court into ‘a little Academe/Still and contemplative in living art’. A royal feminine embassy arrives from France, and the young men quickly learn that young blood ‘doth not obey an old decree’. They must needs lose their oaths to find themselves, or lose themselves to keep their oaths. Nor is their education complete when they have understood that withdrawal and book-learning are not the route to all knowledge. The visiting Princess hears of her father’s death: there is a change of tone and the young lovers are submitted to a twelve-month probationary test of their love. The need for education by experience is the unifying theme. There is plenty of wit and much charming rhymed verse, and there is no dearth of topicality. Contemporary affectations of speech come in for some hearty parody. There is less verbal brilliance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: it is more like a character play. Proteus,

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who is faithless to his mistress Julia, faithless in wooing his dear friend Valentine’s beloved, Silvia, and faithless in betraying Valentine to Silvia’s father, is, happily, faithless to his own villainy at the end in timely repentance and re-conversion to love of constant Julia. (Julia does her stint as a disguised pageboy in Proteus’s service.) The balanced exploration of love and friendship is expeditiously contrived, and not on one social level alone. Masculine fidelity is touchingly evident in the devotion of Proteus’s ‘clownish servant’ Launce to his pet dog Crab, a sour, dumb partner in much drollery. (‘I have sat in the stocks for puddings he hath eaten: otherwise he had been executed.’)
Petruchio is the energetic and resourceful gentleman who brings the termagant Katherina to heel in The Taming of the Shrew, an anti- feminist tract to delight the male heart. Katherina has some psychological basis for her tantrums in the masculine competition for the hand of her attractive younger sister, Bianca (‘She is your treasure, she must have a husband’). The crudity of the methods employed to humiliate the woman who is ‘renowned in Padua for her scolding tongue’ is somewhat offset by Petruchio’s masterful irony— first in pretending to find her a gentle creature, later in irresistibly denying her food and clothes on the grounds that they are not good enough for her, and making a noble virtue out of it:
Well, come, my Kate; we will unto your father’s, Even in these honest mean habiliments:
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor, For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich.
Thus handled, ‘Katherina the curst’ is fully subjugated. And she is also established in the family hierarchy as daughter number one.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream marks the change to maturity. The workmanship is deft, the poetry almost unfailing. Three strands of action are skilfully woven together, the first a crossed pattern of love between two pairs of lovers who are brought together in a wood at night. Here their story is interwoven with that of the fairy king Oberon and his queen Titania, who are quarrelling. A misapplied fairy love-juice complicates the entanglement of the human lovers further. The third strand in the plot is supplied by Bottom and his fellow tradesmen who are rehearsing a play for the wedding of the

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Duke of Athens. Shakespeare gives the love plot an appropriate semi- stylized flavour by his use of rhymed couplets. The neat coincidences and contrived conflicts of affection are worked out with the formal musical structure of a ballet. Thus handled, they tone in well with the fantasy world of fairies, charms and potions. A greater contrast is provided by Bottom and his fellow mechanicals, whose performance of the play ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is hilarious. The simple-minded, managerial Bottom reflects a close, compassionate, yet wryly humorous study of the working man.
The very different fantastic element in The Merchant of Venice requires us to accept a world where a suitor may win or lose a wealthy bride by opening the right casket, or one of two wrong ones—the three made of lead, silver and gold respectively. We are also asked to accept that a Jewish moneylender is a fit object for Christian contempt, and that if his daughter runs away with a Christian lover and takes her father’s moneybags with her, she is to be congratulated on both counts. We know from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta that the Jew was a fit target for the groundlings’ hostility; and the implication of the Portuguese Jew, Roderigo Lopez, in a plot to poison Queen Elizabeth, gave a fillip to anti-Jewish themes for a time. But the play performs convincingly: the stereotyped ‘wicked Jew’ of literature is perhaps no more offensive to Semites than the stereotyped ‘wicked stepmother’ of fairy stories is damaging to second wives; and Shakespeare of course made Shylock more complex than that. He is not only the repellently vengeful moneylender who can relish the prospect of having a pound of his debtor’s flesh in lieu of payment; he is also the victim of anti-Semite contempt who can cry out in protest that the Jew has eyes and hands, senses and passions, like other men, is ‘fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons...warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is’.
The three comedies, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, give astonishing proof of Shakespeare’s now established virtuosity. In the first the device by which Beatrice and Benedick, arch-enemies of each other and of marriage, are tricked into believing in each other’s devotion, and then led to acceptance of each other, is managed with courtly adroitness and high spirits. The other plot, whereby an arch-villain deceives Claudio into believing his beloved Hero unfaithful even on the eve of her wedding (he displays a night tryst in which she is impersonated by her maid), leads

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to a painful rejection before the altar of a finely presented woman, and a tragic note is sounded. Beatrice and Benedick are at once united in the conviction that Hero has been wronged, and that alliance helps to make the transformation of their relationship plausible. The parallelism between the plot to deceive a light-hearted couple (Beatrice and Benedick) into love and happiness, and the plot to deceive an earnest couple out of happiness, is balanced by the parallelism between the ready assumption of each other’s enmity that so long divides Beatrice from Benedick, and the ready credence given to Hero’s infidelity that so long divides Hero from Claudio. Dogberry and Verges, a blundering constable and his colleague, are a delightful answer to the technical question of how to bring the deception of the hero to light. Dogberry’s heavy-footed, heavy-worded helpfulness and obtuseness leave us wondering why we do not call a malapropism a dogberryism.
As You Like It and Twelfth Night represent the peak of Shakespeare’s achievement in pure comedy. Most of the action of the former takes place in the Forest of Arden, another idealized woodland, inhabited by a banished Duke who holds court there ‘like the old Robin Hood of England’. Hither come those who have good reason to flee the world’s injustices: Orlando, brutally done out of his due inheritance by his elder brother; Rosalind (the Duke’s daughter), invidiously cast out by the usurper, her uncle; and Celia, her cousin, determined to share her fate. Orlando and Rosalind are in love, and Rosalind escapes to the forest in the disguise of a young man, Ganymede. As such, she encourages Orlando to find solace in treating her as his lost lady, Rosalind. The situation thus contrived is the extreme instance of Shakespearian multiple irony in exploiting female impersonation by boy actors. A boy actor impersonates a girl (Rosalind) who impersonates a boy (Ganymede) who impersonates a girl (‘You must call me Rosalind’). The complications and dénouements are managed by wilful and playful human contrivances with some help from ‘an old religious man’ who, in the nick of time, converts the wicked uncle ‘from his enterprise (i.e. vengeance) and from the world’. Shakespeare took his material from Lodge’s Rosalynde, but the two characters who spice the play with melancholy disillusionment and caustic humour, Jaques and Touchstone, are Shakespeare’s inventions.
What makes As You Like It and Twelfth Night outstanding is the

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prevailing imaginative control of word and idea by which everything is contained within a single living whole. We spoke of Shakespeare’s success in weaving diverse themes together in earlier comedies. ‘Interweaving’ would be an inadequate word to use of the artistry that makes a harmony of the variety of these two plays: rather there is fusion. In Twelfth Night the theme of identities confused in separated twins (Sebastian and Viola) recalls The Comedy of Errors just as the theme of a girl in male disguise (Viola as Cesario) harks back to The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Twelfth Night touches such themes with a new freshness. Duke Orsino uses faithful ‘Cesario’ (Viola, who loves him deeply) to press his suit with the unresponsive Olivia, and Olivia falls in love with the go-between. The discovery of the genuinely masculine twin, Sebastian, enables both Orsino and Olivia to be happily partnered at the end. We see Shakespeare’s comic characterization at full maturity in the persons of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Malvolio; and this is the play where Feste, the clown, sings ‘O mistress mine’ and ‘Come away, death’. It is packed with riches.
To read Shakespeare’s histories in chronological sequence enables the reader to get a bird’s eye view of political history (as seen through Elizabethan eyes) from the time of the composition of The Canterbury Tales to the reign of Henry VIII. But Shakespeare composed the ‘later’ cycle (Henry VI and Richard III) before the ‘earlier’ and much superior cycle (Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V). Moreover there is some dispute about the authorship of Henry VI and the extent to which other hands than Shakespeare’s were involved in its composition. Two plays stand apart from these two tetralogies, King John and Henry VIII. King John has nothing to do with Magna Carta, but a good deal to do with John’s right to the throne, over against the claim of Arthur, his nephew. The French are an additional external threat. Two forceful mothers, Queen Elinor and Constance, are powerful contenders for their respective sons, the king and the king’s nephew. Unforgettable elements in the play are the tender feeling for gentle Prince Arthur’s suffering and the bold wit of Philip Faulconbridge, bastard son of Cœur de Lion. Henry VIII, in which Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher, is memorable for the dignity in distress of Queen Katharine and for Wolsey’s bearing at his fall. He has ventured like a swimming boy ‘many summers in a sea of glory’ far beyond his depth. But the man that hangs on princes’ favours—