One other complete play, however, and one other fragment, do resemble in some degree these works of the final period; for, immediately preceding them in date, they show clear traces of the beginnings of the new method, and they are themselves curiously different from the plays they immediately succeed—­that great series of tragedies which began with Hamlet in 1601 and ended in 1608 with Antony and Cleopatra.  In the latter year, indeed, Shakespeare’s entire method underwent an astonishing change.  For six years he had been persistently occupied with a kind of writing which he had himself not only invented but brought to the highest point of excellence—­the tragedy of character.  Every one of his masterpieces has for its theme the action of tragic situation upon character; and, without those stupendous creations in character, his greatest tragedies would obviously have lost the precise thing that has made them what they are.  Yet, after Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare deliberately turned his back upon the dramatic methods of all his past career.  There seems no reason why he should not have continued, year after year, to produce Othellos, Hamlets, and Macbeths; instead, he turned over a new leaf, and wrote Coriolanus.

Coriolanus is certainly a remarkable, and perhaps an intolerable play:  remarkable, because it shows the sudden first appearance of the Shakespeare of the final period; intolerable, because it is impossible to forget how much better it might have been.  The subject is thick with situations; the conflicts of patriotism and pride, the effects of sudden disgrace following upon the very height of fortune, the struggles between family affection on the one hand and every interest of revenge and egotism on the other—­these would have made a tragic and tremendous setting for some character worthy to rank with Shakespeare’s best.  But it pleased him to ignore completely all these opportunities; and, in the play he has given us, the situations, mutilated and degraded, serve merely as miserable props for the gorgeous clothing of his rhetoric.  For rhetoric, enormously magnificent and extraordinarily elaborate, is the beginning and the middle and the end of Coriolanus.  The hero is not a human being at all; he is the statue of a demi-god cast in bronze, which roars its perfect periods, to use a phrase of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, through a melodious megaphone.  The vigour of the presentment is, it is true, amazing; but it is a presentment of decoration, not of life.  So far and so quickly had Shakespeare already wandered from the subtleties of Cleopatra.  The transformation is indeed astonishing; one wonders, as one beholds it, what will happen next.

At about the same time, some of the scenes in Timon of Athens were in all probability composed:  scenes which resemble Coriolanus in their lack of characterisation and abundance of rhetoric, but differ from it in the peculiar grossness of their tone.  For sheer virulence of foul-mouthed abuse, some of the speeches in Timon are probably unsurpassed in any literature; an outraged drayman would speak so, if draymen were in the habit of talking poetry.  From this whirlwind of furious ejaculation, this splendid storm of nastiness, Shakespeare, we are confidently told, passed in a moment to tranquillity and joy, to blue skies, to young ladies, and to general forgiveness.