ABSTRACT
Of Shakespeare's skill in the creation of individual character I think we may agree that Pericles contains no indications whatever, nothing therefore of his best excellence, but in this respect it is not much inferior to the Comedy of Errors and it is perhaps not more destitute than that play of the effusions of his vein of impassioned and fanciful poesy. Still the play has characteristics which have led critics, without exception, to recognize the hand of Shakespeare, and these have been found in style and execution, and principally in the fifth act. With this verdict I cannot disagree, and I do not know that I can give the grounds of it more definite expression than they have hitherto found. But the indications are quite as distinct of a different pen or at least of the same at a different time, and perhaps the choice between these alternatives is the most difficult problem connected with the play. Speaking from impression, I am disposed to think that Shakespeare remodeled a play of another writer from beginning to end, and that the discrepancies we observe are due to his sometimes contenting himself with lopping and abridging, sometimes taking the trouble to alter and insert words and lines, and sometimes recasting speeches, and perhaps scenes, entirely. We do not meet in the play with the doggerel verses that are so frequent in his known earlier plays, and what rhymed couplets occur are scarcely introduced with the judgment and system that are observable where he even is most lavish of them, but they seem rather interspersed and scattered like vestiges of an earlier half and only half obliterated creation. Again, the play is quite free from his youthful tendency to redundancy, and various and manifold as are its materials and incidents, its characters and combinations, its scenes and speeches have, to my mind, little of the goutiness, so to speak, and unwieldiness that are so contrasted with the
correctness and sweep of outline, the cleanness of limb and mastery of the articulations that were realized by his pencil in his finished works. The style of the play is indeed remarkable for elliptical expressions that may in some instances have been the necessities of another writer in his metrical difficulties, but in others appear to result front a ruling feeling for conciseness sometimes carried to an extreme, terseness defying grammar in reliance on energy of thought. Looking, therefore, at those parts of the play where the hand of Shakespeare declares itself most markedly, I find that of all other of his plays The Winter's Tale is called most forcibly to my mind, by the combined effect of style, metrical tendencies and principle of versification, and the current of association generally. The Winter's Tale we have seen reason to date about 1610-11, and if there be any value in the appreciation of their points of resemblance, this is a matter of internal evidence which corroborates what we have seen of the presumption from external sources, that Pericles, Prince of Tyre, was a new play in 1609.
