The turn of the centuries roughly bisects the dramatic career of Shakespeare. In the first half he had written many comedies and a few tragedies; in the second he was to write many tragedies with a few plays which, on account of the happy ending and other traits, may be assigned to the opposite class. But beyond these recognised and legitimate subdivisions of the Romantic Drama, he had also before 1600 busied himself with that characteristic product of the Elizabethan Age, the Historical Play dealing with the national annals. In this kind, indeed, he had been hardly less abundant than in comedy, the proportions being nine of the one to eleven of the other. Then suddenly he leaves it aside, and returns to it only at the close in Henry VIII., which moreover is but partially his handiwork.

Thus, while the tragic note is not inaudible in the earlier period of his activity nor the comic note in the later, the third, that sounded so loud in the sixteenth century, utterly or all but utterly dies away in the seventeenth.

Why this should be so it is impossible to say. It may be that the patriotic self-consciousness stirred by the defeat of the Armada and the triumph of England waned with the growing sense of internal grievances and the loss of external prestige, and that the national story no longer inspired such curiosity and delight. It may be that Shakespeare had exhausted the episodes which had a special attraction for contemporaries and himself. It may be that he found in the records of other lands themes that gave his genius freer scope and more fully satisfied the requirements of his art. Or all these considerations may have co-operated.

For the last of them there is at any rate this much to say, that, though the play on native history virtually disappears, the Historical Play as such survives and wins new triumphs. The Roman group resembles the English group in many ways, and, where they differ, it has excellences of its own.

What are the main points in which respectively they diverge or coincide?

(1) There is no doubt that it was patriotic enthusiasm that called into existence the Chronicle Histories so numerous in Elizabeth’s reign, of which the best in Shakespeare’s series are only the consummate flower. The pride in the present and confidence in the future of England found vent, too, in occupation with England’s past, and since the general appetite could not be satisfied by the histories of every sort and size that issued from the press, the vigorous young drama seized the opportunity of extending its operations, and stepped in to supply the demand. Probably with a more definite theory of its aims, methods, and sphere there might have been less readiness to undertake the new department. But in the popular conception the play was little else than a narrative presented in scenes. The only requirement was that it should interest the spectators, and few troubled themselves about classic rule and precedent, or even about connected structure and arrangement. And when by and by the Elizabethan Tragedy and Comedy became more organic and vertebrate, the Historic Play had secured recognition, and was able to persist in what was dramatically a more rudimentary phase and develop without regard to more exacting standards. Shakespeare’s later Histories, precisely the superlative specimens of the whole species, illustrate this with conspicuous force. The subject of Henry IV., if presented in summary, must seem comparatively commonplace; the ‘argument’ of both parts, if analysed, is loose and straggling; the second part to a great extent repeats at a lower pitch the motifs of the first; yet it is hardly if at all less excellent than its predecessor, and together they represent Shakespeare’s grand achievement in this kind. In Henry V., which has merits that make it at least one of the most popular pieces that Shakespeare ever wrote, the distinctively narrative wins the day against the distinctively dramatic. Not only are some of the essential links supplied only in the story of the chorus, but there is no dramatic collision of ideas, no conflict in the soul of the hero, except in the scenes preliminary to Agincourt, not even much of the excitement of suspense. It is a plain straightforward history, admirably conveyed in scene and speech, all the episodes significant and picturesque, all the persons vividly characterised, bound to stir and inspire by its sane and healthy patriotism; but in the notes that are considered to make up the differentia of a drama, whether ancient or modern, it is undoubtedly defective.

In proportion then as Shakespeare realised the requirements of the Chronicle History, and succeeded in producing his masterpieces in this domain, he deviated from the course that he pursued in his other plays. And this necessarily followed from the end he had in view. He wished to give, and his audience wished to get, passages from the history of their country set forth on the stage as pregnantly and attractively as possible; but the history was the first and chief thing, and in it the whole species had its raison d’être. History delivered the material and prescribed the treatment, and even the selection of the episodes treated was determined less perhaps by their natural fitness for dramatic form, than by the influence of certain contemporary historic interests. For the points which the average Elizabethan had most at heart were—(1) The unity of the country under the strong and orderly government of securely succeeding sovereigns, who should preserve it from the long remembered evils of Civil War; (2) Its rejection of Papal domination, with which there might be, but more frequently among the play-going classes, there was not associated the desire for a more radical reconstruction of the Church; (3) The power, safety and prestige of England, which Englishmen believed to be the inevitable consequence of her unity and independence. So whatever in bygone times bore on these matters and could be made to illustrate them, whether by parallel or contrast, was sure of a sympathetic hearing. And in this as in other points Shakespeare seems to have felt with his fellow-men and shared their presuppositions. At least all the ten plays on English history in which he is known to have had a hand deal with rivalry for the throne, the struggle with Rome, the success or failure in France accordingly as the prescribed postulates are fulfilled or violated. It may have been his engrossment in these concerns that sometimes led him to choose subjects which the mere artist would have rejected as of small dramatic promise.

When he turned to the records of antiquity, the conditions were very different. Doubtless to a man of the Renaissance classical history in its appeal came only second, if even second, to the history of his own land; doubtless also to the man who was not a technical scholar, the history of Rome had far more familiar charm than the history of Greece. When, therefore, Shakespeare went outside his own England in search for historical themes, he was still addressing the general heart, and showed himself in closer accord with popular taste than, e.g. Chapman, whose French plays are perhaps next to his own among the best Elizabethan examples of the historical drama. But we may be sure that Ambois and Biron and Chabot were much less interesting persons to the ordinary Londoner than Caesar and Antony and Coriolanus. Not merely in treatment, but in selection of the material—which cannot fail to influence the treatment—Shakespeare was in touch with common feeling and popular taste.

All the same a great deal more was now required than in the case of the English series. In that the story of a reign or the section of a reign, the chronicle of a flimsy conspiracy or a foreign campaign might furnish the framework for a production that would delight the audience. It was otherwise when dramatist and spectators alike knew the history only in its mass, and were impressed only by the outstanding features. Just as with individuals so with nations, many things become significant and important in those of our familiar circle that would seem trivial in mere strangers and acquaintances. If the Roman plays were to be popular as the English ones had been, Shakespeare was bound to select episodes of more salient interest and more catholic appeal than such as had hitherto sometimes served his turn. In the best of the English plays we constantly wonder that Shakespeare could get such results from stories that we should have thought in advance to be quite unfit for the stage. But the fall of Caesar and the fate of those who sought to strangle the infant empire, the shock of opposing forces in Augustus and Antony and the loss of the world for Cleopatra’s love, the triumph and destruction of the glorious renegade from whose wrath the young republic escaped as by fire—that there are tragic possibilities in themes like these is patent to a casual glance. It is significant that, while of the subjects handled in the English histories only the episode of Joan of Arc and the story of Richard III. have attracted the attention of foreign dramatists, all the Roman plays have European congeners. One of the reasons may be, that though the events described in the national series are dramatic enough for national purposes, they do not like the others satisfy the severer international test.

And to a difference in the character of the material corresponds a difference in the character of the treatment. The best of the English plays, as we have seen, are precisely those that it would be hardest to describe in terms of the ordinary drama. The juvenile Richard III. is the only one that could nowadays without objection be included in a list of Shakespeare’s tragedies. But with the Roman plays it is quite the reverse. In the main lines of construction they are of tragic build; there is invariably a tragic problem in the hero’s career; and it reaches a tragic solution in his self-caused ruin. So they are always ranked with the Tragedies, and though here and there they may show a variation from Shakespeare’s usual tragic technique, it would occur to no one to alter the arrangement.

(2) Yet these little variations may remind us that after all they were not produced under quite the same presuppositions as plays like Hamlet and Othello, or even King Lear and Macbeth. In a sense they remain Histories, as truly histories as any of their English analogues. The political vicissitudes and public catastrophes do not indeed contribute the chief elements of interest. Here as everywhere Shakespeare is above all occupied with the career of individuals, with the interaction of persons and persons, and of persons and circumstances. Nevertheless in these plays the characters are always exhibited in relation to the great mutations in the State. Not merely the background but the environment and atmosphere are supplied by the large life of affairs. It is not so in Lear, where the legend offered no tangible history on which the imagination could take hold; it is only partially so in Macbeth, where Shakespeare knew practically nothing of the actual local conditions; nor, had it been otherwise, was there anything in these traditions of prerogative importance for later times. But in the Roman plays the main facts were accredited and known, and of infinite significance for the history of the world. They could not be overlooked, they had to be taken into account.

For the same reason they must no more be tampered with than the accepted facts of English History. The two historical series are again alike in this, that they treat their sources with much more reverence than either the Comedies or the other Tragedies show for theirs. Even in Lear the dramatist has no scruple about altering the traditional close; even in Macbeth he has no scruple about blending the stories of two reigns. But in dealing with the professedly authentic records whether of England or Rome, Shakespeare felt that he had to do with the actual, with what definitely had been; and he did not conceive himself free to give invention the rein, as when with a light heart he reshaped the caprices of a novel or the perversions of a legend. As historical dramatist he was subordinated to his subject much in the same way as the portrait painter. He could choose his point of view, and manage the lights and shades, and determine the pose. He could emphasize details, or slur them over, or even leave them out. He could interpret and reveal, so far as in him lay, the meaning and spirit of history. But he had his marching orders and could no more depart from them to take a more attractive way of his own, than the portrait painter can correct the defects of his sitter to make him an Apollo. It cannot always have been easy to keep true to this self-denying ordinance. Despite the suitability of the subject in general suggestion and even in many particular incidents there must have been a recalcitrance to treatment here and there; and traces of this may be detected, if the Roman plays are compared with the tragedies in which the genius of Shakespeare had quite unimpeded sway. To some of the chief of these traces Mr. Bradley has called attention. Thus there is in the middle of Antony and Cleopatra, owing to the undramatic nature of the historic material, an excessive number of brief scenes “in which the dramatis personae are frequently changed, as though a novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in which he flitted from one group of his characters to another.” In Coriolanus, “if Shakespeare had made the hero persist and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome, awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on himself ... that would merely have been an ending more strictly tragic[72] than the close of Shakespeare’s play.” In Julius Caesar the “famous and wonderful” quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius is “an episode the removal of which would not affect the actual sequence of events (unless we may hold that but for the emotion caused by the quarrel and reconciliation Cassius would not have allowed Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering battle at Philippi).” Mr. Bradley discusses this in another connection, and here, as we shall see, Shakespeare only partially adheres to his authority. In the same play, however, we have the episode of the poet Cinna’s murder which, however useful in illustrating the temper of the mob and suggestive in other respects, is nevertheless a somewhat crude intrusion of history, for it leads to nothing and in no way helps on the action. But Shakespeare will put up with an occasional awkwardness in the mechanism rather than fail to give what he considers a faithful picture. As in the best English Histories he omits, he compresses, he even regroups; but he never consciously alters the sense, and to bring out the sense he utilises material that puts a little strain on his art.

Yet of course this does not mean that in the Roman any more than in the English plays he attempts an accurate reconstruction of the past. It may even be doubted whether such an attempt would have been intelligible to him or to any save one or two of his contemporaries. To the average Elizabethan (and in this respect Shakespeare was an average Elizabethan, with infinitely clearer vision certainly, but with the same outlook and horizon) the past differed from the present chiefly by its distance and dimness; and distinctive contrasts in manners and customs were but scantily recognised. A generation later French audiences could view the perruques and patches of Corneille’s Romans without any sense of incongruity, and the assimilation of the ancient to the modern was in some respects much more thorough-going in Shakespeare’s England. In all his classical pieces the impression of historic actuality and the genuine antique cachet is only produced when there is a kind of inner kinship between the circumstances to be represented and the English life that he knew. There was a good deal of such correspondence between Elizabethan life and Roman life, so the Roman Tragedies have a breath of historic verisimilitude and even a faint suggestion of local colour. There was much less between Elizabethan life and Greek life, so Timon and Troilus and Cressida, though true as human documents, have almost nothing Hellenic about them. But even in the Roman plays, so soon as there is anything that involves a distinctive difference between Rome and London Shakespeare is sure to miss it. Anachronisms in detail are of course abundantly unimportant, though a formidable list of them could be computed. In Julius Caesar there are clocks that strike, and the crowd throw up their sweaty nightcaps. The arrangements of the Elizabethan stage furnish Cleopatra and Comminius with similes. Menenius is familiar with funeral knells and batteries and Galen’s prescriptions.

These are minutiae on which students like Bacon or Ben Jonson might set store, but in regard to which Shakespeare was quite untroubled and careless. Perhaps they deserve notice only because they add one little item to the mass of proof that the plays were written by a man of merely ordinary information, not by a trained scholar. But for themselves they may be disregarded. It is not such trifles that interfere with fidelity to antiquity. But in weightier matters, too, Shakespeare shows an inevitable limitation in reproducing a civilisation that was in some aspects very different from his own, and for which he had no parallel in his own experience. He shows a precisely analogous limitation when he deals with themes from English History that were partly alien to the spirit of the time. Of this King John furnishes the grand example. We all know why that troublesome reign is memorable now, not merely to the constitutional historian, but to the man in the street and the child on the school bench. Yet Shakespeare makes no mention of Runnymede or the Great Charter; and we may assume that he, like most Elizabethans, if interested in such matters at all, would have been unsympathetic to a movement that extorted liberties by civil strife. To him the significant points are the disputed succession, the struggle with the Pope, the initial invasion of France by England when the Kingdom is of one accord, and the subsequent invasion of England by France, when it is divided against itself. So King John, though very true to human nature and even to certain aspects of the period, pays no heed to the aspect which other generations have considered the most important of all, and one which on any estimate is not to be overlooked. But if Shakespeare thus misses a conspicuous feature in a set of occurrences that took place among his own people less than four hundred years before, we need not wonder if he failed to detect the peculiar features of ancient Rome as it existed at a further distance of twelve or sixteen centuries. His approximation to the actual or alleged conditions varies indeed in the different plays. It is closest in Antony and Cleopatra. In that there is hardly a personage or circumstance for which he had not some sort of a clue. He knew about soldiers of fortune like Enobarbus and pirate-adventurers like Menas; a ruler like Henry VII. had in him a touch of Octavius, there were not a few notabilities in Europe who carried a suggestion of Mark Antony, the orgies of Cleopatra’s court in Egypt were analogous to those of many an Italian or French court at the Renaissance. It is all native ground to Shakespeare and he would feel himself at home. On the other hand, he is least capable of seeing eye to eye the primitive republican life which on Plutarch’s evidence he has to depict in Coriolanus. The shrewd, resolute, law-abiding Commons, whom some of the traditions that Plutarch worked up seem meant to exalt; the plebs that might secede to the Holy Mount, but would not rise in armed revolt; that secured the tribunate as its constitutional lever with which it was by and by to shift the political centre of gravity, this was like nothing that he knew or that anybody else knew about till half a century had elapsed. He could only represent it in terms of a contemporary city mob; and the consequence is that though he has given a splendid picture that satisfies the imagination and even realises some of Plutarch’s hints, it is not true to the whole situation as envisaged by Plutarch.[73] Julius Caesar occupies a kind of intermediate position, and for that reason illustrates his method most completely. He could understand a good deal of the political crisis in Rome on which that story turns, from the existing conditions or recent memories of his own country. In both a period of civil turmoil had ended in the establishment of a strong government. In both there were nobles who from principle or interest were opposed to the change, so he could enter into the feelings of the conspirators. In both the centralisation of authority was the urgent need, so he could appreciate the indispensableness of the Empire, the ‘spirit of Caesar.’ But of zeal for the republican theory as such he knows nothing, and therefore his Brutus is only in part the Brutus of Plutarch.

Thus Shakespeare in his picture of Rome and Romans, does not give the notes that mark off Roman from every other civilisation, but rather those that it possessed in common with the rest, and especially with his own. He even puts into it, without any consciousness of the discrepancy, qualities that are characteristic of Elizabethan rather than of Roman life. And the whole result, the quickening of the antique material with modern feeling in so far as that is also antique, and occasionally when it is not quite antique, is due to the thorough realisation of the subject in Shakespeare’s own mind from his own point of view, with all the powers not only of his reason, but of his imagination, emotion, passion, and experience. Hence his delineations are in point of fact more truly antique than those of many much more scholarly poets, who can reproduce the minute peculiarities, but not, what is more central and essential, the living energy and principle of it all. This was felt by contemporaries. We have the express testimony of the erudite Leonard Digges, who after graduating as Bachelor in Oxford, continued his studies for many years in several foreign universities, and consequently was promoted on his return to the honorary degree of Master, a man who, with his academic training and academic status, would not be apt to undervalue literal accuracy. But he writes:

Ben Jonson in Sejanus and Catiline tried to restore antiquity in its exclusive and exceptional traits. Shakespeare approached it on its more catholic and human side, interpreted it by those qualities in modern life that face towards the classical ideal, and even went the length of using at unawares some that were more typical of his new world. And Jonson’s Roman plays were felt to be well-laboured and irksome, while his filled the spectators with ravishment and wonder.

In both series then, English and Roman alike, Shakespeare on the one hand loyally accepted his authorities and never deviated from them on their main route, but on the other he treated them unquestioningly from his own point of view, and probably never even suspected that their own might be different. This is the double characteristic of his attitude to his documents, and it combines pious regard for the assumed facts of History with complete indifference to critical research. He is as far as possible from submitting to the dead hand of the past, but he is also as far as possible from allowing himself a free hand in its manipulation. His method, in short, implies and includes two principles, which, if separated, may easily become antagonistic, and which, in point of fact, have led later schools of the historic drama in quite opposite directions. A short examination of these contrasted tendencies may perhaps help to throw a clearer light on Shakespeare’s own position.

The one that lays stress on the artist’s right to take counsel with his own ideas has been explained by Lessing in a famous passage of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, which is all the more interesting for the present purpose, that throughout it tacitly or expressly appeals to the practice of Shakespeare. Lessing starts with Aristotle’s doctrine that poetry is more pregnant than history, and asks why, when this is so, the poet does not keep within the kingdom of his imagination, why more especially the dramatist descends to the lower artistic level of the historian to trespass on the domain of prosaic fact. And he answers that it is merely a matter of convenience. There is advantage to be gained from illustrious position and impressive associations; and moreover the playwright finds it helpful that the audience should already have some idea of the story to be told, that they should, as it were, meet him half way, and bring to the understanding of his piece some general knowledge of the persons. He gains his purpose if he employs famous names which appear in a nimbus of associations, and saves time in describing their characters and circumstances; and thus they attune our minds for what is to come and serve as so many labels by means of which, when we see a new play, we may inform ourselves what it is all about. The initial familiarity and the prestige it implies are fulcra for moving the interest of the beholders. The historical dramatist, therefore, must be careful not to alter the current conceptions of character; but, with that proviso, he has almost unlimited powers, and may omit or recast or invent incidents, or forge an entirely new story, just as he pleases, so long, that is, as he leaves the character intact and does not interfere with our idea of the hero. In that case the historic label would be more of a hindrance than a help to our enjoyment.

Lessing’s view of the Historic Drama (and there is no doubt that he thought he was describing the method of Shakespeare) is therefore that it is a free work of fiction woven around characters that are fairly well known. He was certainly wrong about Shakespeare, and his theory strikes us nowadays as strangely inadequate, but it had very important results. It directly influenced the dramatic art of Germany, and it would be hard to overestimate the share it had in determining Schiller’s methods of composition. It was in the air at the time of the Romantic Movement in France, and is really the principle on which Hugo constructs his more important plays in this kind. Schiller’s treatment of history is very free; he invents scenes that have no shadow of foundation in fact, and yet are of crucial importance in his idealised narrative; he invents subordinate persons who are hardly less conspicuous than the authentic principals, and who vitally affect the plot and action. All his plays contain these licenses. Such episodes as the interview between Mary and Elizabeth, of Jeanne Darc’s indulgence of her pity illustrate the first, such figures as Mortimer or Max and Thekla illustrate the second; but what would Mary Stuart or the Maid of Orleans or Wallenstein be without them? And with Victor Hugo this emancipation from authority is pushed to even greater lengths. Plays like Le Roi s’amuse or Marion de Lorme might recall the vagaries of early Elizabethan experiments like Greene’s James IV., were it not that they are works of incomparably higher genius. Hugo has accepted the traditional view of a French king and a French court, but all the rest is sheer romance on which just here and there we detect the trail of an old mémoire.

Now, some of the extreme examples suggest a two-fold objection to Lessing’s account as a quite satisfactory explanation of the species.

In the first place, when the poet carries his privilege of independence so far, why should he not go a step further and invent his entire drama, names and all? As it is, we either know something of the real history or we do not. If we do not, what is the advantage of appealing to it? If we do, will not such lordly disregard of facts stir up the same recalcitrance as disregard of traditional character, and shall we not be rather perplexed than aided by the conflict between our reminiscences and the statements of the play?

And, in the second place, is the portrayer of human nature to take his historical persons as once for all given and fixed, so that he must leave the accepted estimate of them intact without attempting to modify it? Surely that would be to deprive the dramatist of his greater privilege and the drama of its greatest opportunity. For then we should only see a well-known character illustrated or described anew, displaying its various traits in this or that set of novel surroundings. But there would be little room for the sort of work that the historic drama is specially fitted to do, viz. the exposition of ambiguous or problematic natures, which will give us a different conception of them from the one we have hitherto had.

Hence there arose in Germany a view directly opposed to that of Lessing, and Lotze does not hesitate to recommend the most painstaking investigation and observance of the real facts. The poet, he thinks, will find scope enough in giving a new interpretation of the career and individuality of the hero, after he has used all the means in his power to bring home to his imagination the actual circumstances from which they emerged. Probably little was known in England of this theory of Lotze’s, though utterances to the same effect occur in Carlyle, especially in his remarks on Shakespeare’s English Histories; yet it seems to give a correct account of the way in which most English historical dramas were constructed in the nineteenth century. Sir Henry Taylor, while calling Philip van Artevelde “a dramatic romance,” is careful to state that “historic truth is preserved in it, as far as the material events are concerned.” Mr. Swinburne, in his trilogy on Mary Stuart, versifies whole pages of contemporary writers (e.g. in the interview of Mary and Knox taken almost verbatim from Knox’s History of the Reformation), and in his prose essay seems specially to value himself on his exact delineation of her career, and his solution of the problem of her strange nature. But the prerogative instance is furnished by Tennyson. In his dedication of Harold, he writes to Lord Lytton: “After old-world records like the Bayeux Tapestry and the Roman de Rou, Edward Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest and your father’s historical romance treating of the same theme have been mainly helpful to me in writing this drama.” He puts his antiquarian researches first, his use of the best modern critical authorities second, and only in the third place an historical romance, to which for the rest Freeman has said that he owes something himself. Nor would it be difficult to show that in Queen Mary and Becket he has followed the same lines. And on such lines it is clear that the historical dramatist’s only aim must be to present in accurate though artistic form a selection of the incidents and circumstances of the hero’s life and times, and place them in such mutual relation that they throw new light on the nature and destiny of the man.

But from this point of view the functions of the poet and the historian will tend to coalesce, and it is just this that at first sight rouses suspicion. After all can we so reproduce the past as to give it real immediate truth? It is hardly possible by antiquarian knowledge quickened by ever so much poetic power to galvanise into life a state of things that once for all is dead and gone. And meanwhile the mere effort to do so is apt to make the drama a little frigid, as Tennyson’s dramas are. We are seldom carried away on a spontaneous stream of passion; for after all the methods of the historian and the poet are radically different, and the painful mosaic work of the one is almost directly opposed to the complete vision, the creation in one jet, which may be rightly expected of the other.

But it is noteworthy that though the two schools which we have just discussed, make appeal to Shakespeare, his own procedure does not precisely agree with that of one or other. He is too much of the heaven-born poet for the latter; he has too genuine a delight in facts for the former. He has points of contact with both, but in a way he is more naïf and simple-minded than either. He at the same time accepts the current conception of character with Lessing, and respects the allegations of history with Carlyle. But though he begins with the ordinary impression produced by his hero, he does not stop there. Such an impression is bound to be incoherent and vague. Shakespeare probes and defines it; he tests it in relation to the assumed facts on which it is based; he discovers the latent difficulties, faces them, and solves them, and, starting with a conventional type, leaves us with an individual man. In doing this he treats the facts as a means, not as an end, but he does not sophisticate them. We hardly ever find fictitious persons and scenes in Schiller’s style, and when we do the exception proves the rule, for they have not the same function as in Schiller’s theatre. Falstaff plays his part aside, as it were, from the official history, he belongs to the private life of Prince Hal, and is impotent to affect the march of public events. People like Lucius in Julius Caesar, or Nicanor in Coriolanus, or Silius in Antony and Cleopatra do not interfere in the political story; they are present to make or to hear comments, or at most to assist the inward interpretation. No unhistorical person has historical work to do, and no unhistorical episode affects the historical action.[74] Yet he quite escapes from the chill and closeness of the book-room. He engages in no critical investigations to sift out the genuine facts. He does not study old tapestry or early texts. Unhampered by the learned apparatus of the scholar, undistracted by the need of pausing to verify or correct, he speeds along on the flood-tide of his own inspiration, which takes the same course with the interests of the nation. For it is the reward of the intimate sympathy which exists between him and his countrymen, that he goes to work, his personal genius fortified and enlarged by the popular enthusiasms, patriotic or cosmopolitan. And nothing can withstand the speed and volume of the current. There is a great contrast between the broad free sweep of his Histories, English or Roman, that lift us from our feet and carry us away, and the little artificial channels of the antiquarian dramas, on the margin of which we stand at ease to criticise the purity of the distilled water. Yet none the less he is in a sense more obedient to his authorities than any writer of the antiquarian school. Just because, while desiring to give the truth as he knows it, he is careless to examine the accuracy or estimate the value of the documents he consults; and just because, while determined to give a faithful narrative, he spares himself all labour of comparison and research and takes a statement of Holinshed or Plutarch as guaranteeing itself, he is far more in the hands of the guide he follows than a later dramatist would be. He takes the text of his author, and often he has not more than one: he accepts it implicitly and will not willingly distort it: he reads it in the light of his own insight and the spirit of the age, and tries to recreate the agents and the story from the more or less adequate hints that he finds.

Now, proceeding in this way it is clear that while in every case Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his historical sources must be great, it will vary greatly in quality and degree according to the material delivered to him. The situations may be more or less dramatic, the narrative more or less firmly conceived. And among his sources Plutarch occupies quite an exceptional place. From no one else has he ‘conveyed’ so much, and no one else has he altered so little. And the reason is, that save Chaucer and Homer, on whom he drew for Troilus and Cressida, but from whom he could assimilate little that suited his own different ideas, no other writer contained so much that was of final and permanent excellence. To put it shortly, in Plutarch’s Lives Shakespeare for the first and almost the only time was rehandling the masterpieces of a genius who stood at the summit of his art. It was not so in the English Histories. One does not like to say a word in disparagement of the Elizabethan chronicles, especially Holinshed’s, on which the maturer plays are based. They are good reading and deserve to be read independently of the dramatist’s use of them. But they are not works of phenomenal ability, and they betray the infancy of historical writing, not only in scientific method, which in the present connection would hardly matter, but in narrative art as well. Cowley in his Chronicle, i.e. the imaginary record of his love affairs, breaks off with a simile and jest at their expense. If, he says, I were to give the details,

Their intention is good, and they often realise it so as to interest and impress, but the introduction of such-like trifles as Cowley mentions, without much relevance or significance, may give us the measure of their technical skill. Again, though in the second and third part of Henry VI. Shakespeare was dealing with the work of Marlowe, we have to remember, first, that his originals were composite pieces not by Marlowe alone, and, further, that even Marlowe could not altogether escape the disabilities of a pioneer.

In Plutarch, however, Shakespeare levied toll on no petty vassal like the compilers of the Chronicles, or innovating conqueror like the author of Tamburlaine, but on the king by right divine of a long-established realm. And the result is that he appropriates more, and that more of greater value, than from any other tributary.