Romeo and Juliet
The limits and difficulties of the sonnet held back a soaring imagination, and Shakespeare must have taken great pleasure in using flowing blank verse, while still young and ardent, to make one of the great love poems. The tale of Romeo and Juliet came from the stories of Masuccio and Bandello and was spread in England; Arthur Brooke put it into verse in 1562, and Shakespeare, following Brooke and perhaps another play, staged it in 1595. Its style carries many conceits, perhaps a result of his sonnet writing, and it is full of metaphor. Romeo is rather feebly drawn beside the fiery Mercutio, and the end of the play is a run of nonsense. Yet who that remembers his youth does not still feel a dream deep in his soul, and, hearing that sweet love poetry, is not drawn eagerly at the poet's command into a world made of hasty heat, trembling longing and tuneful death?
The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare met with success in the theatre almost every year. On 7 June 1594 Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish physician to the queen, was executed on a charge of accepting a bribe to poison her. The proof was not conclusive and Elizabeth long hesitated to sign the order, but the London crowd took his guilt for certain, and feeling against Jews ran high in the city's taverns. Perhaps Shakespeare was stirred too, or was commissioned to try his pen on the subject in The Merchant of Venice (1596). He shared to a degree the feelings of his audience and presented Shylock as a comic figure in odd dress and a big false nose. He also vied with Marlowe in showing the moneylender's hatred and greed, but he gave Shylock human qualities that grieved the ignorant, and put in his mouth so strong a plea on behalf of the Jews that able critics still debate whether Shylock should be counted a persecutor or a victim. Here above all Shakespeare proved his skill in weaving varied material from the East and Italy, and he gave the newly converted Jessica, Shylock's daughter, such passionate verse that only the most sensitive hearers could take it in.
The comedies and Falstaff
For some five years Shakespeare busied himself mainly with comedy; perhaps he had understood that people burdened by life pay the best rewards to those who amuse them or give them pleasant fancies. In the book's judgment, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a piece of nonsense, though Mendelssohn gave it beauty and grace; All's Well That Ends Well is not rescued from Helena's scheming; Much Ado About Nothing is true to its title; Twelfth Night is tolerable only because Viola is so charming; and The Taming of the Shrew is hard to believe, since shrews are never tamed. (These are the book's opinions, not necessarily the reader's.) All these plays were written for profit, to catch the common people's attention, fill the theatre and put money aside for a rainy day.
But with the two parts of Henry IV (1597-1598) the great magician showed his mastery again, mixing clowns with princes, Falstaff and Pistol with Hotspur and Prince Hal, with a skill that would have amazed Sidney. Londoners enjoyed hearing the history of kings mixed with the tale of rogues and shrewish women. Shakespeare went on to Henry V (1599), in which at once he moved and amused the audience with the dying Falstaff, who 'babbled of green fields', stirred their feelings with the battle of Agincourt, and delighted them with the courtship of Princess Katharine by the unbeatable king, who spoke two languages. If we believe Rowe, the queen did not want Falstaff to die, and ordered the author to bring him back and show him in love; John Dennis (1702) tells the same tale and adds that she wanted the miracle done in a fortnight. If this is true, The Merry Wives of Windsor was a very funny play: although it is full of coarse jests and puns, Falstaff appears in it at the height of his talent and power, and is in the end thrown in a basket of dirty linen into the river. The queen is said to have been delighted. (These are anecdotes and cannot be confirmed.)
As You Like It and the shadow behind it
It is surprising that in a single season (1599-1600) the dramatist could write a trifle like that play and a lovely romance such as As You Like It. Perhaps he imitated Lodge's Rosalind; there is a refining tone in it, and although it has a few dry and flat jests, its feeling is delicate and its talk lively. There is a charming friendship between Celia and Rosalind; Orlando carves Rosalind's name on tree bark, hanging odes on the bushes and elegies on the wild brambles. Immortal phrases appear on every page, and songs that millions have hummed: 'Under the greenwood tree', 'Blow, blow, thou winter wind' and 'It was a lover and his lass'. All this overflow has a delightful drollery and a feeling matched in no other nation's literature.
But melancholy Jaques adds a bitter fruit to all this sweetness. He declares that the wide stage of the world shows sadder spectacles than the one he plays, that nothing is certain but death, and that comes after the toothless, eyeless, tasteless years of old age. From hour to hour we ripen, and from hour to hour we rot, and there hangs a tale. So the swan of Stratford (that is, Shakespeare) was warning that As You Like It was his last cheerful work, and that until further notice he meant to lift the mask from the face of life and show us its bloody truth, adding bitter gall to his heavenly feast (his poetry).
Julius Caesar
In 1579 Sir Thomas North published his translation of Plutarch's Lives. Shakespeare found a treasury of drama in it and made three of its stories into the tragedy Julius Caesar (1599). Finding the translation so spirited, he turned several passages word for word into blank verse. Antony's speech over Caesar's body, however, was the poet's own invention, a masterpiece of rhetoric and subtlety, and the only defense of Caesar he permits. His praise of Southampton, Pembroke and the young Essex may have led Shakespeare to look at Caesar's murder from the viewpoint of the conspiring nobles who felt themselves in danger, and so Brutus becomes the center of the play. We who have Mommsen's account of the corruption of 'democracy' that Caesar overthrew feel more pity for Caesar, and wonder to see the chief figure of the drama killed at the start of the third act. Later ages change the past as they please.
Hamlet
Like Julius Caesar, Hamlet (1600) was written with the help and inspiration of an earlier play. Six years before, a play called Hamlet had been staged in London, but we do not know how much Shakespeare used that lost tragedy, or François de Belleforest's Tragical Histories, or the History of the Danes by the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus. It is also unclear whether he read the book on melancholic diseases, an English version of a medical work by Du Laurens. We hesitate, with patience, before any effort to turn Shakespeare's plays into his personal biography; yet we may ask whether some private blow, besides the lesson of the age, shaped the pessimism of Hamlet and deepened it in later plays. Did the first arrest of Essex (5 June 1600), the failure of Essex's rising, the arrest of Essex and Southampton, or Essex's execution play a part? Perhaps those events touched the soul of a sensitive poet who in the prologue to the last act of Henry V had praised Essex and in the dedication of Lucrece had declared lasting loyalty to Southampton. Whatever the case, Shakespeare's greatest plays were written during these troubles or after them. They surpass the earlier plays in delicacy of subject, depth of meaning and eloquence, and complain of the times more than any other literary work. Hamlet's wavering will and almost 'noble and sovereign reason' are overturned by the discovery of a foul family secret and the poison of revenge, until he himself is caught in a hard cruelty; Ophelia he sends not to a convent but to madness and death. In the end everyone is killed. Only Horatio, too simple-minded to be like the mad, remains.
A new king, and Othello
Meanwhile Elizabeth had found her final rest, and James VI of Scotland had taken the English throne as James I. He soon confirmed the privileges of Shakespeare's company and called it the 'King's Servants' (the King's Men). Shakespeare's plays were regularly performed before the king and pleased him. The three seasons between 1604 and 1607 brought the poet to the full height of his genius and gave him a sufficient taste of life's bitterness. Othello (dated 1602 in the book; scholars usually place it a year or two later) is as powerful as it is hard to believe. Audiences are moved by the devotion and death of Desdemona and bewitched by the clever malice of Iago; but in giving a man such pure and motiveless evil, Shakespeare repeats Marlowe's mistake of creating rare types, and even Othello, general though he is, and foolish, lacks the mixture of elements that makes Hamlet and Lear, Brutus and Antony human beings.