eight of thought; the
dialogue ranges from the lightest irony to heart-rending pathos and
intolerable denunciation; the characters lose all semblance of
artificial creations and challenge criticism and analysis like any
personage in history; the action is pregnant with the profoundest
significance. Hardly, if at all, less powerful are the later tragedies
of the Roman group. _Antony and Cleopatra_ is unsurpassed for the
intensity of its picture of passion, for its superb mastery of language,
for its relentless truth. The more somber scenes of _Coriolanus_ convey
a tragedy which either on its personal or its political side scarcely
yields to its predecessors in poignancy and gloom. Whatever else he may
have written in these years, here is surely the period of tragedy.

Nor do the plays classed as comedies and falling in the first three
years of the new century seriously modify this impression of the
prevailing tone of the period. _Troilus and Cressida_, _All's Well that
Ends Well_, and _Measure for Measure_ present a marked contrast to the
romantic comedy of the preceding stage. The love-story of the first
deals with a coquette and ends sordidly; while in the political plot,
though it gives occasion for speeches full of weighty thinking, jealousy
and intrigue overwhelm the heroic element. The second, alone of
Shakespeare's comedies, has a hero who is a rake; and, skilful as is the
delineation of Helena, it needs all the dramatist's power to hold our
sympathy and to force us to an unwilling assent to the title. _Measure
for Measure_ has its scene laid in a city seething in moral corruption:
out of this rises the central situation of the play; and the presence of
the most idealistic of Shakespeare's heroines does not avail to
counterbalance the atmosphere of sin and death that mocks the
conventional happy ending, and makes this play, even more than the two
others, seem more in place among the tragedies than among the comedies.

[Page Heading: Fourth Period]

The plays of the last period are, in the Folio, classed with comedies,
and such no doubt they are if judged merely by the nature of their
denouements. But if we consider their characteristic note, and the fact
that through the greater part of each play the forces and passions
involved are rather those operative in tragedy than in comedy, we easily
perceive why they have been classed as tragi-comedies or dramatic
romances. _Pericles_ in many respects stands apart from