At the same time as these plays were being written, he carried to its highest point the thronicle history. From "Rich ard II." (1595) he went on to the two parts of "Henry IV." (1597-8), glorified by the scenes which gather round Sir John Falstaff, the greatest of comic crea tions. In "Henry V." (1599) he pro duced a play abounding in national spirit, and made of the King the embodiment of the English heroic ideal.
The third period is mainly occupied by tragedy. It opens with the most famous of his works, "Hamlet" (1602-3). With no abatement in constructive skill, he concentrates his power on the delineation of the prince, and gives us a picture per haps unparalleled in its combination of subtlety and sympathetic appeal. No single work has so roused the interest of men, and about none has so much been written, with the possible exception of Goethe's "Faust." The level reached in "Hamlet" is all but maintained through out the tragedies which followed. In "Othello" (1604) he took a sordid Italian tale and raised it to a high level of pity and terror; in "King Lear" (1605-6) the most terrible of his plays, the forces of nature form a lurid background to a spec tacle of ultimate human suffering, folly, and wickedness; and in "Macbeth" (1606) a fragment of a Scottish chronicle is made to yield an appalling picture of the degradation of a human soul which sur renders to unlawful ambition. The trans lation of Plutarch's "Lives," which sup plied material for "Julius Caesar," was drawn on again in "Anthony and Cleo patra" (1607-8), in some respects the most amazing of his plays in its brilliance and daring and the splendor of its style, and in "Coriolanus" (1609) the somber tragedy of the downfall of a powerful leader through patrician arrogance. "Timon of Athens" (1607), from the same source, is only Shakespeare's in part, but is not lacking in passages of grandeur.
The so-called comedies of this period lack the gaiety of their predecessors. "Troilus and Cressida" (1601-2) is weighed down by a cynical humor, and "All's Well That Ends Well" (1602?) suffers from its plot, in which a capable woman pursues and wins a worthless and unworthy youth. "Measure for Measure"
(1603) and "Pericles" (1607-8) both con tain backgrounds of a debauched society against which are placed in relief two of the finest and purest of Shakespeare's female creations. "Pericles," like "Ti mon," is in part by another hand.
The fourth and last period contains an historical play, "Henry VIII." (1612), written in collaboratior with John Flet cher, and three "dramatic romances," serious comedies in which crime and sepa ration are followed by forgiveness and reunion. They lack the high spirits of the plays of the great period of comedy, but are full of noble poetry and lofty wisdom. "Cymbeline" (1610) is in plot a combination of a story from Boccaccio and a fragment of British history; "The Winter's Tale" (1611) is based on an English novel; and "The Tempest" is fab ricated from elements of familiar folk tales of princesses, magicians, and en chanted islands. This, probably the last play Shakespeare wrote alone, and his first comedy, "Love's Labour's Lost," are apparently his only dramas of which the plot is not borrowed—so careless was the greatest of English imaginative artists of mere inventive originality.
This enumeration, in the order in which modern scholarship has arranged them on a great variety of kinds of evidence as to date, gives some idea of the im mense body of work of the highest class produced by Shakespeare; and gives a basis for the study of his development as an artist. No short statement can do justice to the manysidedness of his achievement, the musical quality of his verse, his mastery of language, the bril liance of his dialogue, the variety and profundity of his knowledge of human nature as exhibited in his characters. His work stands unsurpassed among the few greatest expressions of the genius of the race.