manner of the player king hardly differs more from that of Hamlet's soliloquies than do these couplets from the great soliloquy of Helen at the close of iii. 2.:

Poor lord is 't I

That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event

Of the none-sparing war? and is it I

That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou
Wast shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark
Of smoky muskets? O you leaden messengers,
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim; move the still-piecing air,
That sings with piercing; do not touch my lord.
No, come thou home, Rousillon,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all: I will be gone;

My being here it is that holds thee hence:
Shall I stay here to do 't? no, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house

And angels officed all. . . .

Not only the verse but many parallel thoughts, and much in the working out of character, connect the play with the Hamlet period. Helen has been

described as a kind of antithesis to Hamlet, in her clear purpose and resolute will; her quiet intensity and absence of humour associate her with Isabel, the device which restores her wedded rights, with Mariana. The marks of early date thus attach themselves to scenes which form the very framework of the plot.

Nothing is known of an earlier form of the play under the same title; but it is plausibly supposed that this may have been the 'Love's Labour's Wonne,' mentioned by Meres in 1598 among the best comedies of Shakespeare. The only serious competitor for this honour is The Taming of the Shrew, whose claims have been well urged by Hertzberg. 113

VOL. III

I

In that play there are certainly labours,' and that labours are 'won'; but it is marital authority that labours and wins, not love.

The plot was founded upon Boccaccio's tale of Giletta (Giglietta) of Narbonne (Decameron, iii. 9), as translated in Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566-7).1 Giletta, unlike Helen, is rich, and many seek her hand. She burns for love of young Beltramo, her childish playfellow, now at the French king's court, but cannot escape the strict surveillance of her relatives. Then she hears of the king's incurable disease and is 'wonderfully glad.' She goes to Paris, and the first thing she went about when she came thither was to see the Count Beltramo. She then makes her bargain with the king. On his cure she promptly names her choice. The king is 'very loth' to grant him to her, but will not break his promise. Beltramo goes through the form of marriage, and then hurries away to the Florentine wars, with a mocking intimation of the conditions on which she may be his wife. She fulfils the conditions, as in the play. Beltramo returns to Rousillon. Giletta, upon the birth of her twin sons, proceeds with them thither, presents them to her husband, with the ring, and is by him at length accepted as his lawful wife.

Like the other Tales of the Third Day, this was designed to tell of one 'who gained by exertion something he desired.' It is a story of hard-won love, with the usual parts inverted. Giletta is the bold and resolute lover, who succeeds in spite of all obstacles in winning the hand of her chosen bridegroom.

Such a conception was reconcilable enough with the conventional types of womanhood which Shake1 That Shakespeare worked from his using Painter's French from the translation appears term Senois' for the Siennese.

speare represented, in the Midsummer-Night's Dream or The Two Gentlemen, pursuing a reluctant or faithless lover. The original Helena was probably sketched with the same facile reliance upon romantic convention as the Athenian Helena and the Veronese Julia. But the closer study of refined women from the life, which becomes apparent in Portia, shook the credit of this favourite device. In Twelfth Night he simply eliminates the motif of pursuit, which he found in the story of Silla and Apollonius, and makes Viola love the duke only after having taken service with him, instead of taking service that she may prosecute her love. In the present play he undertook a far more difficult problem: that of keeping the romantic story in all essential circumstances intact, and yet making it plausible as the action of a noble, refined woman of the modern world.

This was effected, in the finished play, by a subtle elaboration of the characters which affect Helen's career and create the atmosphere in which she moves, quite as much as by the exquisite portrayal of Helen herself. The Countess, Lafeu, Parolles, the Steward, and the Clown, are all original additions. Shakespeare has rarely dwelt upon those class antagonisms of noble and bourgeois which enter so largely into modern fiction; as rarely the relation between mother and daughter. His Countess ignores the one and assumes the other,—a silent tribute to Helen's distinction of character, as to her own. Lafeu is an aristocrat of the same genial type, who betrays only indignant wonder when the young nobles of the court appear to refuse the proffered hand of the poor physician's daughter. The king himself instead of being very loth' at Helen's choice, accepts it with cordial alacrity, and checks Bertram's scorn by a frankly democratic speech which saps the basis of

In a society which thus forgets its aristocratic prejudices under the spell of her personality, the outward obstacles to Helen's shy ambition melt away of themselves: she is rather drawn forward than repelled. The tribute to her power and charm is the more marked since she is not like Giletta, rich.

The general enlightenment gives to Bertram's resistance an air of stolid obstinacy. And Shakespeare has been at no pains to qualify the impression. Helen's idol is still less worthy than Giletta's of the love he inspires.

The complications of the final scene which Shakespeare has substituted for the simple solution of the novel, serve not only to sustain the suspense to the close but to bring into glaring relief the moral worthlessness of Bertram. This is effected mainly by the device of the second ring, which Helen puts upon Bertram's finger at Florence. Confronted

gradually with the evidence, Bertram lies and boggles pitiably, and comes out of the inquisition acquitted of crime but steeped in dishonour. His fatuity is emphasised by the companionship of Parolles. The original Parolles may be surmised to have been a humorous attendant of the type variously represented in the earlier Comedies by Speed and Launce, the Dromios, Moth, and Launcelot Gobbo. But in his final form comic effect has all but vanished under the stress of a scorn too mordant for laughter. He is a fellow of Pistol and of Thersites, a wordy pre

tender to valour who suffers a still more elaborate and cruel exposure than Fluellen and Margarelon inflict upon them. The 'insupportable vexations' to which Lafeu subjects him in atonement for having thought him, 'for two ordinaries, a pretty wise fellow' (ii. 3), hardly come nearer to comic mirth. Bertram's solitary blindness to the vices of the man of words (paroles) serves to explain his solitary blindness to the nobility of the woman of quiet resolve.

But these traits, which go to render the story plausible, confessedly fail to render it pleasing. Boccaccio's bold adventuress, who plays her game for a man of the world and wins it, is a far less attractive figure than the pure and exquisite Helena of Shakespeare, but she touches less jarring chords. Or their dissonance is less felt because her whole character is less finely tuned. Shakespeare's best women commonly love a man of meaner worth than their own; Romeo, Bassanio, Orlando, Benedick, the Duke (in Twelfth Night) are all, on a mere comparison of merit, fortunate in the wives they win: but he had never yet pictured the tragic perversion of a maiden passion, as he does here. It, is a picture characteristic of the years when, in Julius Cæsar and in Hamlet, he was laying bare, with deepening irony, the fatalities which lie in wait for the weaknesses of noble characters. The issues are here less grave, but the irony is even more pronounced, in so far as Helen's passion for Bertram seems to spring not from any flaw in her clear and penetrating mind, but from something fundamentally irrational in the nature of love itself. Christian idealism sees the peculiar glory of love in its power of transcending and ignoring distinctions of merit, and pouring itself forth on the mean and lowly. Modern Romanticism, from a kindred but distinct point of view, has delighted to