Yet there can be no doubt that it is this combination of charming heroines and happy endings which has blinded the eyes of modern critics to everything else.  Iachimo, and Leontes, and even Caliban, are to be left out of account, as if, because in the end they repent or are forgiven, words need not be wasted on such reconciled and harmonious fiends.  It is true they are grotesque; it is true that such personages never could have lived; but who, one would like to know, has ever met Miranda, or become acquainted with Prince Florizel of Bohemia?  In this land of faery, is it right to neglect the goblins?  In this world of dreams, are we justified in ignoring the nightmares?  Is it fair to say that Shakespeare was in ’a gentle, lofty spirit, a peaceful, tranquil mood,’ when he was creating the Queen in Cymbeline, or writing the first two acts of The Winter’s Tale?

Attention has never been sufficiently drawn to one other characteristic of these plays, though it is touched upon both by Professor Dowden and Dr. Brandes—­the singular carelessness with which great parts of them were obviously written.  Could anything drag more wretchedly than the denouement of Cymbeline?  And with what perversity is the great pastoral scene in The Winter’s Tale interspersed with long-winded intrigues, and disguises, and homilies!  For these blemishes are unlike the blemishes which enrich rather than lessen the beauty of the earlier plays; they are not, like them, interesting or delightful in themselves; they are usually merely necessary to explain the action, and they are sometimes purely irrelevant.  One is, it cannot be denied, often bored, and occasionally irritated, by Polixenes and Camillo and Sebastian and Gonzalo and Belarius; these personages have not even the life of ghosts; they are hardly more than speaking names, that give patient utterance to involution upon involution.  What a contrast to the minor characters of Shakespeare’s earlier works!

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that he was getting bored himself.  Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams.  He is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric, or a new, unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech.  In this mood he must have written his share in The Two Noble Kinsmen, leaving the plot and characters to Fletcher to deal with as he pleased, and reserving to himself only the opportunities for pompous verse.  In this mood he must have broken off half-way through the tedious history of Henry VIII.; and in this mood he must have completed, with all the resources of his rhetoric, the miserable archaic fragment of Pericles.

Is it not thus, then, that we should imagine him in the last years of his life?  Half enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half bored to death; on the one side inspired by a soaring fancy to the singing of ethereal songs, and on the other urged by a general disgust to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech?  If we are to learn anything of his mind from his last works, it is surely this.