the three preceding plays, it is nothing less
than "very heaven" to find and feel ourselves again in the midmost
Paradise, the central Eden, of Shakespeare's divine discovery--of his
last sweet living invention. Here again is air as pure blowing over
fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or Milton saw Proserpine
gathering each as deathless flowers. We still have here to disentwine or
disentangle his own from the weeds of glorious and of other than glorious
feature with which Fletcher has thought fit to interweave them; even in
the close of the last scene of all we can say to a line, to a letter,
where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher begins. That scene is opened by
Shakespeare in his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse,
pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by direct and absolute
aptitude to the immediate sentiment and situation of the speaker and of
no man else: then either Fletcher strikes in for a moment with a touch of
somewhat more Shakespearean tone than usual, or possibly we have a
survival of some lines' length, not unretouched by Fletcher, from
Shakespeare's first sketch for a conclusion of the somewhat calamitous
and cumbrous underplot, which in any case was ultimately left for
Fletcher to expand into such a shape and bring by such means to such an
end as we may safely swear that Shakespeare would never have admitted:
then with the entrance and ensuing narrative of Pirithous we have none
but Shakespeare before us again, though it be Shakespeare undoubtedly in
the rough, and not as he might have chosen to present himself after due
revision, with rejection (we may well suppose) of this point and
readjustment of that: then upon the arrival of the dying Arcite with his
escort there follows a grievous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patched
by Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst and weakest in
Palamon's appeal to his kinsman for a last word, "if his heart, _his
worthy, manly heart_" (an exact and typical example of Fletcher's
tragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of incurable commonplace),
"be yet unbroken," and in the flaccid and futile answer which fails so
signally to supply the place of the most famous and pathetic passage in
all the masterpiece of Chaucer; a passage to which even Shakespeare could
have added but some depth and grandeur of his own giving, since neither
he nor Dante's very self nor any other among the divinest of men could
have done more or bette