and there is a searching irony in the emphasis laid on the ignoble
temper of the rabble, who procure his overthrow. By way of foil, the
speeches of Menenius give dignified expression to the maturest political
wisdom. The dramatic interest throughout is as single and as
unflaggingly sustained as in 'Othello.'

XV--THE LATEST PLAYS

The latest plays.

In 'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest,' the three latest
plays that came from his unaided pen, Shakespeare dealt with romantic
themes which all end happily, but he instilled into them a pathos which
sets them in a category of their own apart alike from comedy and tragedy.
The placidity of tone conspicuous in these three plays (none of which was
published in his lifetime) has been often contrasted with the storm and
stress of the great tragedies that preceded them. But the commonly
accepted theory that traces in this change of tone a corresponding
development in the author's own emotions ignores the objectivity of
Shakespeare's dramatic work. All phases of feeling lay within the scope
of his intuition, and the successive order in which he approached them
bore no explicable relation to substantive incident in his private life
or experience. In middle life, his temperament, like that of other men,
acquired a larger measure of gravity and his thought took a profounder
cast than characterised it in youth. The highest topics of tragedy were
naturally more congenial to him, and were certain of a surer handling
when he was nearing his fortieth birthday than at an earlier age. The
serenity of meditative romance was more in harmony with the fifth decade
of his years than with the second or third. But no more direct or
definite connection can be discerned between the progressive stages of
his work and the progressive stages of his life. To seek in his
biography for a chain of events which should be calculated to stir in his
own soul all or any of the tempestuous passions that animate his greatest
plays is to under-estimate and to misapprehend the resistless might of
his creative genius.

'Cymbeline.'

In 'Cymbeline' Shakespeare freely adapted a fragment of British history
taken from Holinshed, interweaving with it a story from Boccaccio's
'Decameron' (day 2, novel ix.) Ginevra, whose falsely suspected chastity
is the theme of the Italian novel, corresponds to Shakespeare's Imogen.
Her story is also told in the tract called 'Westward for Sm