classification mis-names comedies. In these plays as a group Shakspere sets
himself to grapple with the deepest and darkest problems of human character
and life; but it is only very uncertain inference that he was himself
passing at this time through a period of bitterness and disillusion.
'Julius Casar' presents the material failure of an unpractical idealist
(Brutus); 'Hamlet' the struggle of a perplexed and divided soul; 'Othello'
the ruin of a noble life by an evil one through the terrible power of
jealousy; 'King Lear' unnatural ingratitude working its hateful will and
yet thwarted at the end by its own excess and by faithful love; and
'Macbeth' the destruction of a large nature by material ambition. Without
doubt this is the greatest continuous group of plays ever wrought out by a
human mind, and they are followed by 'Antony and Cleopatra,' which
magnificently portrays the emptiness of a sensual passion against the
background of a decaying civilization.

Shakspere did not solve the insoluble problems of life, but having
presented them as powerfully, perhaps, as is possible for human
intelligence, he turned in his last period, of only two or three years, to
the expression of the serene philosophy of life in which he himself must
have now taken refuge. The noble and beautiful romance-comedies,
'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest,' suggest that men do
best to forget what is painful and center their attention on the pleasing
and encouraging things in a world where there is at least an inexhaustible
store of beauty and goodness and delight.

Shakspere may now well have felt, as his retirement to Stratford suggests,
that in his nearly forty plays he had fully expressed himself and had
earned the right to a long and peaceful old age. The latter, as we have
seen, was denied him; but seven years after his death two of his
fellow-managers assured the preservation of the plays whose unique