_Othello_ was a monograph. _Lear_ is a world-picture. Shakespeare turns from _Othello_ to _Lear_ in virtue of the artist's need to supplement himself, to follow up every creation with its counterpart or foil. _Lear_ is the greatest problem Shakespeare had yet proposed to himself, all the agonies and horrors of the world compressed into five short acts. The impression of _Lear_ may be summed up in the words: a world-catastrophe. Shakespeare is no longer minded to depict anything else. What is echoing in his ears, what is filling his mind, is the crash of a ruining world. This becomes even clearer in his next play, _Antony and Cleopatra._ This subject enabled him to set new words to the music within him. In the history of Mark Antony he saw the deep downfall of the old world-republic--the might of Rome, austere and rigorous, collapsing at the touch of Eastern luxury. By the time Shakespeare had written _Antony and Cleopatra,_ his melancholy had deepened into pessimism. Contempt becomes his abiding mood, an all-embracing scorn for mankind, which impregnates every drop of blood in his veins, but a potent and creative scorn, which hurls forth thunderbolt after thunderbolt. _Troilus and Cressida_ strikes at the relation of the sexes, _Coriolanus_ at political life; until all that, in these years, Shakespeare has endured and experienced, thought and suffered, is concentrated into the one great despairing figure of Timon of Athens, "misanthropos," whose savage rhetoric is like a dark secretion of clotted blood and gall, drawn off to assuage pain. BOOK SECOND I _INTRODUCTION--THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH IN SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH_ Everything had flourished in the England of Elizabeth while Shakespeare was young. The sense of belonging to a people which, with great memories and achievements behind it, was now making a decisive and irresistible new departure--the consciousness of living in an age when the glorious culture of antiquity was being resuscitated, and when great personalities were vindicating for England a lofty and assured position, alike in the practical and in the intellectual departments of life--these feelings mingled in his breast with the vernal glow of youth itself. He saw the star of his fatherland ascending, with his own star in its train.