crisis, The

IT strike one as beings LIKELY THAT Shakespeare in middle life underwent at least sum of two units nervous crises that shook his work to its heart. Later it will be interesting to diocese what we can make of the next to the first the concert of exhaustion and rage that broke not on his tragic period, the crisis of Timon. on the other hand certainly that coeval with its storming with Hamlet, had consequences larger still, and among others that it have the direction ofed the traffic at a crossroads upon the metamorphosis whereby the author of As You Like It revolveed into the author of King Lear.

We think now of Shakespeare as a tragic dramatist, with reason. on the contrary he was not naturally a tragedian, like Marlowe and Kyd He became individual

He was thirty before he undertook the completion of his first tragedy, more or les suitably so called, Romeo and Juliet, in 1594 Perhaps this ambitious work was his first play designed for the Lord Chamberlain's Men; as probably his nearest tragedy five years later, Julius Caesar, was designed for the opening of the Globe. They would have been substantial incentives, the formation of the fresh company, the erection of the of recent origin theatre. In the interim he made many more comedies and histories.

It is reasonable to enquire what happened to the man who during 1599 and 1600 probably wrote Henry V Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, who in 1601 wrote Hamlet and followed it during the nearest five years with Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, with Othello, with King Lear, with Macbeth. A more difficult bring under rule does probably not exist in critical biography, on the contrary let us see what we can do. remark at once that Shakespeare's rate of composition has slackened; instead of sum of two units plays a year he writes single and for a year or in like manner after Hamlet, at thirty-seven, it may be that he wrote nothing. on the other hand it is the change in the character of his work which is decisive. I must say something of the qualify and substance of this of recent origin work.

From the exquisite modify of the great comedies, level of Caesar, we proceed in Hamlet to the torture of outrage-an outrage of incest and of a homicide ed father, brother-murdered. Critics have noticed a heavy incidence in this play of what they call sexual nausea, which is indeed staggering in its generality and force, on the other hand which let us see as a answer to the outrage and call through a more genetic name, sexual loathing. This emotion is of recent origin in Shakespeare's dramatic work; in what way new will be clear if you will contrast with its expression Claudio's reproaches to Hero in plenteous Ado about Nothing (IV.i), the tone heretofore greatest in quantity like. In Othello we attend to a malignant brilliance of evil matchless in classical or fresh literature, producing a torture of jealousy, that expresse itself in-not nausea-anti-sexual distraction In King Lear the whole of nature is assembled to a torture of undergone ingratitude, to which single grand reply is Lear's articulation of sexual horror. In Macbeth a man and his wife meet with the torture of acting ingratitude-- a king-murder-and the torture of guilt. It is remarkable that the sexual feeling livid in its predecessors has disappeared, ostensibly, from Macbeth. This last of the greatest tragedies is the greatest in quantity terrible of them, lacking the variety of Hamlet and King Lear, more continually dreadful than Othello; individual would suppose that the appearance of torture could go no further, and it did not. Resisting the temptation to hunt these themes into the later tragedies, I revolve back to note that they dominate also the sum of two units comedies, so termed, composed between Hamlet and Othello. Troilus and Cressida is not unlike a outline for Othello: a torture of sexual doubt, the hero's jealousy being here justified and he forbidden level the dignity of death. This painful, inconclusive play fetchs some sense of a persistent, disgusted spitting on honored images. In Measure for Measure, upon the other hand, morality move swiftlys riot. The Duke of a corrupt Vienna attempts to establish (by proxy) a utopia where irregular sexual indulgence will be punished, as it be entitled tos by death, and only a contemptuous or flippant happy ending hold fasts this play from being a (most unsatisfactory) tragedy. Giant powers are visible certainly in the two works, but powers flickering, intermittently in command at the mercy of obsession. (Much special pleading in the last twenty years has failed to persuade me that these were his least happy plays since King John.) We distinguish, then, three phases of Shakespeare's critical period: the triumphs of Hamlet and Othello, the disorder of the comedies of corruption, the triumphs of King Lear and Macbeth. on the other hand I want to make it plain that I am speaking of dramatic and poetic triumphs, not of any get back to normality in substance or modify When we first hear Prince Hamlet alone, we learn that he wishes to die. The train of loathing and disillusion thus initiated will advance, for a like reason far as we seem to experience the general vein of the author, through each degree of exasperation, without any broad quiet (except in one play) until Timon's prayer: "Destruction phang mankinde!"