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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Introduction to Shakespeare, by 
+H. N. MacCracken and F. E. Pierce and W. H. Durham
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Introduction to Shakespeare
+
+Author: H. N. MacCracken
+        F. E. Pierce
+        W. H. Durham
+
+Release Date: January 16, 2010 [EBook #30982]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST FOLIO, 1628 The first collected
+edition of Shakespeare's Plays (From the copy in the New York Public
+Library)]
+
+
+
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+BY
+
+  H. N. MacCRACKEN, PH.D.
+  F. E. PIERCE, PH.D.
+
+AND
+
+  W. H. DURHAM, PH.D.
+
+
+OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
+
+THE SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF
+
+YALE UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+New York
+
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+1925
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1910,
+
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+Set up and electrotyped.  Published September, 1910.  Reprinted April,
+December, 1911; September, 1912; July, 1913; July, 1914; December,
+1915; November, 1916; May, 1918; July, 1919; November, 1920; September,
+1921; June, 1923; January, 1925.
+
+
+
+Norwood Press
+
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+{v}
+
+PREFACE
+
+The advances made in Shakespearean scholarship within the last
+half-dozen years seem to justify the writing of another manual for
+school and college use.  The studies of Wallace in the life-records, of
+Lounsbury in the history of editions, of Pollard and Greg in early
+quartos, of Lee upon the First Folio, of Albright and others upon the
+Elizabethan Theater, as well as valuable monographs on individual plays
+have all appeared since the last Shakespeare manual was prepared.  This
+little volume aims to present what may be necessary for the majority of
+classes, as a background upon which may be begun the study and reading
+of the plays.  Critical comment on individual plays has been added, in
+the hope that it may stimulate interest in other plays than those
+assigned for study.
+
+Chapters I, VIII, IX, X, and XIII are the work of Professor MacCracken;
+chapters V, VI, VII, XII, and XIV are by Professor Pierce; and chapters
+II, III, IV, and XI are by Dr. Durham.  The authors have, however,
+united in the criticism and the revision of every chapter.
+
+
+
+
+{vii}
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+                                                                PAGE
+
+AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    20
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    35
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ELIZABETHAN LONDON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    51
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    60
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS  . . . . . . . . . . . . .    73
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST . . . . . . . . . . .    85
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CHIEF SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS . . . . . . . . . . .   105
+
+
+{viii}
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   113
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD--IMITATION AND EXPERIMENT  . . .   131
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD--COMEDY AND HISTORY . . . . . .   153
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD--TRAGEDY . . . . . . . . . . . .   172
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD--ROMANCE  . . . . . . . . . . .   196
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SOME FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE . . . . .   210
+
+
+
+
+{1}
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
+
++Our Knowledge of Shakespeare+.--No one in Shakespeare's day seems to
+have been interested in learning about the private lives of the
+dramatists.  The profession of play writing had scarcely begun to be
+distinguished from that of play acting, and the times were not wholly
+gone by when all actors had been classed in public estimation as
+vagabonds.  While the London citizens were constant theatergoers, and
+immensely proud of their fine plays, they were content to learn of the
+writers of plays merely from town gossip, which passed from lip to lip
+and found no resting place in memoirs.  There were other lives which
+made far more exciting reading.  English sea-men were penetrating every
+ocean, and bringing back wonderful tales.  English soldiers were aiding
+the Dutch nation towards freedom, and coming back full of stories of
+heroic deeds.  At home great political, religious, and scientific
+movements engaged the attention of the more serious readers and
+thinkers.  It is not strange, therefore, that the writers of plays,
+whose {2} most exciting incidents were tavern brawls or imprisonment
+for rash satire of the government, found no biographer.  After
+Shakespeare's death, moreover, the theater rapidly fell into disrepute,
+and many a good story of the playhouse fell under the ban of polite
+conversation, and was lost.
+
+Under such conditions we cannot wonder that we know so little of
+Shakespeare, and that we must go to town records, cases at law, and
+book registers for our knowledge.  Thanks to the diligence of modern
+scholars, however, we know much more of Shakespeare than of most of his
+fellow-actors and playwrights.  The life of Christopher Marlowe,
+Shakespeare's great predecessor, is almost unknown; and of John
+Fletcher, Shakespeare's great contemporary and successor, it is not
+even known whether he was married, or when he began to write plays.
+Yet his father was Bishop of London, and in high favor with Queen
+Elizabeth.  We ought rather to wonder at the good fortune which has
+preserved for us, however scanty in details or lacking in the authority
+of its traditions, a continuous record of the life of William
+Shakespeare from birth to death.
+
++Stratford+.--The notice of baptism on April 26, 1564, of William, son
+of John Shakespeare, appears in the church records of Stratford-on-Avon
+in Warwickshire.  Stratford was then a market town of about fifteen
+hundred souls.  Under Stratford Market Cross the farmers of northern
+Warwickshire and of the near-lying portions of Worcestershire,
+Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire carried on a brisk trade with the
+thrifty townspeople.  The citizens were accustomed to boast {3} of
+their beautiful church by the river, and of the fine Guildhall, where
+sometimes plays were given by traveling companies.  Many of their
+gable-roofed houses of timber, or timber and plaster, are still to be
+found on the pleasant old streets.  The river Avon winds round the town
+in a broad reach under the many-arched bridge to the ancient church.
+Beyond it the rich pasture land rises up to green wooded hills.  Not
+far away is the famous Warwick Castle, and a little beyond it
+Kenilworth, where Queen Elizabeth was entertained by the Earl of
+Leicester with great festivities in 1575.  Coventry and Rugby are the
+nearest towns.
+
++Birth and Parentage+.--The record of baptism of April 26, 1564, is the
+only evidence we possess of the date of Shakespeare's birth.  It is
+probable that the child was baptized when only two or three days old.
+The poet's tomb states that Shakespeare was in his fifty-second year
+when he died, April 23, 1616.  Accepting this as strictly true, we
+cannot place the poet's birthday earlier than April 23, 1564.  There is
+a tradition, with no authority, that the poet died upon his birthday.
+
+John Shakespeare, the poet's father, sold the products of near-by farms
+to his fellow-townsmen.  He is sometimes described as a glover,
+sometimes as a butcher; very likely he was both.  A single reference,
+half a century later than his day, preserves for us a picture of John
+Shakespeare.  The note reads: "He [William Shakespeare] was a glover's
+son.  Sir John Mennes saw once his old father in his shop, a
+merry-cheekt old man, that said, 'Will was a good honest {4} fellow,
+but he durst have crackt a jesst with him att any time.'"[1]
+
+John Shakespeare's father, Richard Shakespeare, was a tenant farmer,
+who was in 1550 renting his little farm at Snitterfield, four miles
+north of Stratford, from another farmer, Robert Arden of Wilmcote.
+John Shakespeare married Mary Arden, the daughter of his father's rich
+landlord, probably in 1557.  He had for over five years been a
+middleman at Stratford, dealing in the produce of his father's farm and
+other farms in the neighborhood.  In April, 1552, we first hear of him
+in Stratford records, though only as being fined a shilling for not
+keeping his yard clean.  Between 1557 and 1561 he rose to be ale tester
+(inspector of bread and malt), burgess (petty constable), affeeror
+(adjuster of fines), and finally city chamberlain (treasurer).
+
+Eight children were born to him, the two eldest, both daughters, dying
+in infancy.  William Shakespeare was the third child, and eldest of
+those who reached maturity.  During his childhood his father was
+probably in comfortable circumstances, but not long before the son left
+Stratford for London, John Shakespeare was practically a bankrupt, and
+had lost by mortgage farms in Snitterfield and Ashbies, near by,
+inherited in 1556 by his wife.
+
++Education+.--William Shakespeare probably went to the Stratford
+Grammar School, where he and his {5} brothers as the sons of a town
+councilor were entitled to free tuition.  His masters, no doubt, taught
+him Lilly's Latin Grammar and the Latin classics,--Virgil, Horace,
+Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, and the rest,--and very little else.  If
+Shakespeare ever knew French or Italian, he picked it up in London
+life, where he picked up most of his amazing stock of information on
+all subjects.  Besides Latin, he must have read and memorized a good
+deal of the English Bible.
+
++Marriage+.--In the autumn of 1582 the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare
+married a young woman of twenty-six.  On November 28, of that year two
+farmers of Shottery, near Stratford, signed what we should call a
+guarantee bond, agreeing to pay to the Bishop's Court £40, in case the
+marriage proposed between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway should
+turn out to be contrary to the canon--or Church--law, and so invalid.
+This guarantee bond, no doubt, was issued to facilitate and hasten the
+wedding.  On May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was
+baptized.  His only other children, his son Hamnet and a twin daughter
+Judith, were baptized February 2, 1584-5[2].  It is probable that soon
+after this date Shakespeare went to London and began his career as
+actor, and afterwards as writer of plays and owner of theaters.
+
+{6}
+
+Anne Hathaway, as we have said, was eight years older than her husband.
+She was the daughter of a small farmer at Shottery, a little out of
+Stratford, whose house is still an object of pilgrimage for Shakespeare
+lovers.  We have really no just ground for inferring, from the poet's
+early departure for London, that his  married life was unhappy.  The
+Duke in _Twelfth Night_ (IV, iii) advises Viola against women's
+marrying men younger than themselves, it is true; but such advice is
+conventional.  No one can tell how much the dramatist really felt of
+the thoughts which his characters utter.  Who would guess from any
+words in _I Henry IV_, for instance, a play containing some of his
+richest humor and freest joy in life, that, in the very year of its
+composition, Shakespeare was mourning the death of his little son
+Hamnet, and that his hopes of founding a family were at an end?
+Another piece of evidence, far more important, is the fact that
+Shakespeare does not mention his wife at all in  his will, except by an
+interlined bequest of his "second-best bedroom set."  But here, again,
+it is easy to misread the motives of the man who makes a will.  Such
+omissions have been made when no slight was intended, sometimes because
+of previous private settlements, sometimes because a wife is always
+entitled to her dower rights.  The evidence is thus too slight to be of
+value.
+
+Some other motive, then, than unhappiness in married life ought to be
+assigned for Shakespeare's departure to London.  No doubt, the fact
+that his father was now a discredited bankrupt, against whom suits were
+pending, had something to do with his {7} decision to better his family
+fortunes in another town.  Traveling companies of players may have told
+him of London life.  Possibly some scrape, like that preserved in the
+deer-stealing tradition and the resultant persecution, made the young
+man, now only twenty-one, restive and eager to be gone.
+
++The Tradition concerning Deer Stealing+.--Nicholas Howe, in 1709, in
+his edition of Shakespeare says: "He had by a misfortune common enough
+to young fellows fallen into bad company, and among them, some that
+made a frequent practice of deer stealing, engaged him with them more
+than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of
+Charlecote near Stratford.  For this he was persecuted by that
+gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to
+revenge that ill-usage, he made a parody upon him; and though this,
+probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have
+been so very bitter that he was obliged to leave his business and
+family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London."  Archdeacon
+Davies of Saperton, Gloucestershire, in the late seventeenth century
+testifies independently to the same tradition.  Justice Shallow in the
+_Merry Wives of Windsor_ is on this latter authority to be identified
+with Sir Thomas Lucy.  He is represented in the play as having come
+from Gloucester to Windsor.  He "will make a Star Chamber matter of it"
+that Sir John Falstaff has "defied my men, killed my deer, and broke
+open my lodge."  He bears on his "old coat" (of arms) a "dozen white
+luces" (small fishes), and there is a lot of chatter about "quartering"
+this coat, which is without point unless a pun is intended.  {8} Now
+"three luces Hauriant argent" were the arms of the Charlecote Lucys, it
+is certain.  There is some reason then, for connecting Shallow with Sir
+Thomas Lucy, and an apparent basis for the deer-stealing tradition,
+although the incident in the play may, of course, have suggested the
+myth.  Davies goes on to say that Shakespeare was whipped and
+imprisoned; for this there is no other evidence.
+
++Early Life in London+.--The earliest known reference to Shakespeare in
+the world of London is contained in a sarcastic allusion from the pen
+of Robert Greene, the poet and play writer, who died in 1592.  Greene
+was furiously jealous of the rapidly increasing fame of the newcomer.
+In a most extravagant style he warns his contemporaries (Marlowe, Nash,
+and Peele, probably) to beware of young men that seek fame by thieving
+from their masters.  They, too, like himself, will suffer from such
+thieves.  "Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified
+with our feathers that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide,
+supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of
+you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit
+the onely Shakescene in a countrie ... but it is pittie men of such
+rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude grooms."  The
+reference to "Shakescene" and the "Tygers heart," which is a quotation
+from _III Henry VI_,[3] makes it almost certain that Shakespeare and
+his play are referred to.  Greene's attack was, however, an instance of
+what Shakespeare would {9} have called "spleen," and not to be taken as
+a general opinion.  His hint of "Johannes Factotum"
+(Jack-of-all-Trades) probably means that Shakespeare was willing to
+undertake any sort of dramatic work.  Later on in the same letter (_A
+Groatsworth of Witte Bought with a Million of Repentance_)[4] he calls
+the "upstart crow" and his like "Buckram gentlemen," and "peasants."
+
+Henry Chettle, a friend of Greene's, either in December, 1592, or early
+in 1593,[5] published an address as a preface to his _Kind-Harts
+Dreame_, making a public apology to Shakespeare for allowing Greene's
+letter to come out with this insulting attack.  He says: "With neither
+of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care
+not if I never be.  The other [generally taken to be Shakespeare] whome
+at one time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that, as
+I have moderated the heate of living writers, and might have usde my
+owne discretion--especially in such a case, the author beeing
+dead,--that I did not I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene
+my fault, because myself have seene his demeanor no lesse civill, than
+he exelent in the qualitie he professes;--besides divers of worship
+have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and
+his facetious grace in writing, that aprooves his art...."
+
+There is, then, testimony from two sources that by 1592 Shakespeare was
+an excellent actor, a graceful poet, and a writer of plays that aroused
+the envy of {10} one of the best dramatists of his day.  Obviously, all
+this could not have happened in a few months, and we are therefore
+justified in believing that Shakespeare came to London soon after 1585,
+very likely in 1586.
+
++Later Allusions+.--In 1593 the title-page of _Venus and Adonis_ shows
+that a great English earl and patron of the arts was willing to be
+godfather "to the first heyre" of Shakespeare's "invention," his first
+published poem.  In 1594 Shakespeare also dedicated to Southampton his
+_Lucrece_, in terms of greater intimacy, though no less respect.  On
+December 27, 1595, Edmund Spenser's _Colin Clout's Come Home Againe_
+contained a reference which is now generally believed to allude to
+Shakespeare.
+
+  "And there, though last not least, is Aetion;
+  A gentler shepheard may nowhere be found;
+  Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention,
+  Doth like himselfe heroically sound."
+
+The next important reference is from _Palladis Tamia_, by Francis Meres
+(1598):--
+
+"As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the
+sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued
+Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred
+Sonnets among his private friends &c.  As Plautus and Seneca are
+accounted the best for comedy and Tragedy among the Latines, so
+Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for
+the stage; for comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his
+Loves Labors Lost, his Love Labours Wonne, his Midsummer Night Dreame,
+and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard the 2., Richard the
+3., Henry the 4., {11} King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and
+Juliet.  As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus
+tongue, if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak
+with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.  And
+as Horace saith of his; Exegi monumentu_m_ aere perennius, Regaliq_ue_
+situ pyramidum altius.
+
+"Quod non imber edax: Non Aquilo impotius possit diruere: aut
+innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum: so say I severally of
+Sir Philip Sidneys Spencers Daniels Draytons Shakespeares and Warners
+workes."
+
+This is the earliest claim for the supremacy of Shakespeare in the
+English theater, a claim never seriously disputed from that day to
+this.  The numerous other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare's fame,
+which fill the _Shakespeare Allusion Book_,[6] add nothing to our
+purpose; but merely confirm the statement that throughout his life his
+readers knew and admitted his worth.  The chorus of praise continued
+from people of all classes.  John Weever, the epigrammatist, and
+Richard Camden, the antiquarian, praised Shakespeare highly, and
+Michael Drayton, the poet, called him "perfection in a man."  Finally,
+Ben Jonson, his most famous competitor for public applause, crowned our
+poet's fame with his poem, prefixed to the first collected edition of
+Shakespeare's famous First Folio of 1623: "To the Memory of my beloved,
+the author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.
+
+{12}
+
+"He was not of an age, but for all time!"
+
++Shakespeare as an Actor+.--The allusion quoted above of Henry Chettle
+praises Shakespeare's excellence "in the qualitie he professes."
+Stronger evidence is afforded by some of the title-pages of plays
+printed during the poet's life.  Thus Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his
+Humour_ says on its title-page: "_Every One in his Umor_.  This comedie
+was first Acted in the yeere 1598 by the then L. Chamberleyne his
+servants.  The principal comedians were Will. Shakespeare, Aug.
+Philips, Hen. Condel, Will. Slye, Will. Kempe, Ric. Burbadge, Joh.
+Hemings, Tho. Pope, Chr. Beeston, Joh. Dyke, withe the allowance of the
+Master of Reuells."
+
+Before this his name had appeared between those of Kemp and Burbage
+(named in the above list), the one the chief comedian, the other the
+chief tragedian of the time, in comedies which were acted before the
+Queen on December 27 and 28, 1594, at Greenwich Palace.  The titles of
+these comedies are not given in the Treasurer's Accounts of the
+Chamber, from which we take the list of players.
+
+In 1603, Shakespeare shared with Burbage the headline of the list of
+actors in Ben Jonson's tragedy _Sejanus_.  That he thoroughly
+understood the technique of his art and was interested in it, is
+evident from Hamlet's advice to the players.  Throughout his life in
+London, Shakespeare was a member of the company usually known as the
+Lord Chamberlain's Company.[7]
+
+{13}
+
++Shakespeare and the Mountjoys+.--The most important addition of recent
+years to the life records of Shakespeare is that made by an American
+scholar, Professor Charles William Wallace.  He has unearthed in the
+Public Record Office at London a notable bundle of
+documents--twenty-six in all.  They concern a lawsuit in which the
+family of Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord in London, was
+engaged; and in which the poet himself appeared as a witness.
+Mountjoy, it appears, was a prosperous wigmaker and hairdresser, and,
+no doubt, had good custom from the London actors.  Shakespeare had
+lodgings in Mountjoy's house in the year 1604, and at Madame Mountjoy's
+request acted as intermediary in proposing to young Stephen Bellott, a
+young French apprentice of Mountjoy's, that if he should marry his
+master's daughter Mary, he would receive £50 as dowry and "certain
+household stuff" in addition.  The marriage took place, and the quarrel
+which led to the lawsuit in 1612 was chiefly about the fulfillment--or
+non-fulfillment--of the marriage settlements.  Shakespeare's testimony
+on the matter is clear enough in regard to his services as the friend
+of both parties; but his memory leaves him when specific information is
+required touching the exact terms of the dowry.  Evidently he had no
+mind that his old landlord should suffer from the claims of his unruly
+son-in-law.
+
+Mountjoy's house was situated in an ancient and most respectable
+neighborhood in Cripplegate ward, on the corner of Silver Street and
+Mugwell, or Muggle Street.  Near by dwelt many of Shakespeare's
+fellow-actors and dramatists.  St. Paul's Cathedral, the heart {14} of
+London, lay five minutes' walk to the southwest.  The length of
+Shakespeare's residence with the worthy Huguenot family is not to be
+learned from the recent discoveries; but his testimony to Bellott's
+faithful service as apprentice throughout the years of
+apprenticeship--1598-1604--makes it strongly probable that during these
+years, when the poet was writing his greatest plays, he lodged with
+Mountjoy.  In 1612 Mountjoy, according to another witness, had a
+lodger--a "sojourner"--in his house; this may mean that Shakespeare was
+still in possession of his rooms in the house on Silver Street.  If it
+be so, no spot in the world has been the birthplace of a greater number
+of masterpieces.
+
+It is interesting to note, in passing, that the various witnesses in
+the Mountjoy lawsuit who have occasion to speak of Shakespeare always
+refer to him most respectfully.  The poet was evidently high in the
+esteem of his neighbors.
+
++Shakespeare's Income and Business Transactions+.--Shakespeare was a
+shrewd and sensible man of business.  He amassed during his career in
+London a property nearly, if not quite, as great as any made by his
+profession at the time.  In addition to profits from the sale of his
+plays to managers (he probably derived no income from their
+publication), and his salary as an actor, Shakespeare enjoyed an ample
+income from his shares in the Blackfriars and Globe theaters, of which
+he became joint owner with the Burbage brothers and other fellow-actors
+in 1597 and 1599.  Professor Wallace has discovered a document which
+helps, though very slightly, to enable us to judge what his income {15}
+from these sources may have been.[8]  In 1615-1616 the widow of one of
+the proprietors of the two theaters, whose share, like Shakespeare's,
+was one-seventh of the Blackfriars, one-fourteenth of the Globe,
+brought suit against her father.  She asked for £600 damages for her
+father's wrongful detention of her year's income, amounting to £300
+from each theater.
+
+But damages asked in court are always high, and include fees of lawyers
+and other items.  The probability is that Shakespeare's yearly income
+from these sources was never over £500.  To this, though the figures
+cannot be ascertained with any degree of certainty, we might add £100
+for salary and £25 for plays yearly.  The total would amount to fully
+£600 a year from 1599 on till 1611, about which date Shakespeare
+probably retired to Stratford.  If we reckon by what money will buy in
+our days, we may say that Shakespeare's yearly income at the height of
+success was $25,000, in round numbers.  This is certainly a low
+estimate, and does not include extra court performances and the like,
+from which he must certainly have profited.
+
++Shakespeare's Life in London+.--What with the composition of two plays
+a year, continual rehearsals, and performances of his own and other
+plays, Shakespeare's life must have been a busy one.  Tradition,
+however, accords him an easy enjoyment of the pleasures of the time;
+and his own sarcastic remarks against Puritans in his plays may
+indicate a hatred of puritanical restraint.  He must have joined in
+many a merry feast with the other actors and writers of the day, and
+with court gallants.  The inventory of property left by him {16} at his
+death indicates that while he had accumulated a good estate, he had
+also lived generously.
+
++Stratford Affairs and Shakespeare's Return+.--While William
+Shakespeare was thus employed in London in building up name and fortune
+for himself, his father was in financial straits.  As early as January,
+1586, John Shakespeare had no property on which a creditor could place
+a lien.  In September of the same year, he was deprived of his
+alderman's gown for lack of attention to town business.  During the
+next year he was sued for debt, and had to produce a writ of _habeas
+corpus_ to keep himself out of jail.  In 1899 he tried to recover his
+wife's mortgaged property of Ashbies from the mortgagee's heir, John
+Lambert, but the suit was not tried till eight years later.  Soon after
+this the son must have begun to send to Stratford substantial support.
+In 1592 John Shakespeare was made an appraiser of the property of Henry
+Field, a fellow-townsman.  Henry Field's son Richard published _Venus
+and Adonis_ for Shakespeare in 1593, from his shop in St. Paul's
+Churchyard.  From this time John Shakespeare seems to have lived in
+comfort.  His ambition to secure the grant of a coat of arms was almost
+successful at his first application for one in October, 1596; three
+years later the grant was made, and his son and he were now "Gentlemen."
+
+In May, 1597, William Shakespeare bought New Place, a handsome house in
+the heart of Stratford, and at once became an influential citizen.
+From that time to his death he is continually mentioned in the town
+records.  His purchases included 107 acres in {17} Old Stratford (May
+1, 1602), for £320; the right to farm the Stratford tithes (July 24,
+1605), for £440; an estate of the Combe family (April 13, 1610), and
+minor properties.  In all his dealings, so far as we can tell, he seems
+to have been shrewd and business-like.
+
+Little is known of Shakespeare's children during these years.  Hamnet,
+his only son, was buried August 11, 1596.  Susanna, the eldest
+daughter, married a physician, Dr. John Hall, of Stratford, June 5,
+1607; Judith married Thomas Quiney, son of an old Stratford friend of
+Shakespeare's, February 10, 1616, two months before her father's death.
+Shakespeare's father had died long before this, in September, 1601.
+
+Shakespeare's retirement from London to his native town is thought to
+have taken place about 1611, though there is no real evidence for this
+belief, except that his play writing probably ceased about this date.
+In 1614 a Puritan preacher stopped at New Place and was entertained
+there by the poet's family.  It is certain that Shakespeare visited
+London from time to time after 1611.  One such visit is recorded in the
+diary of his lawyer, Thomas Greene, of Stratford.  As late as March 24,
+1613, there occurs an entry in the accounts of the Earl of Rutland of a
+payment to Shakespeare and Richard Burbage of 44 shillings each in gold
+for getting up a dramatic entertainment for the Earl of Rutland.
+
+In 1616 Shakespeare's health failed.  On January 25, a copy of his will
+was drawn, which was executed March 25.  On April 23, 1616, he died,
+and two days later was buried in the chancel of Stratford church.
+
+
+{18}
+
++Shakespeare's Portraits, Tomb, and Descendants+.--Two portraits, the
+"Ely Palace" and the "Flower" portraits, so called from former
+possessors, are thought to have better claims to authenticity than
+others.  New discoveries are announced, periodically, of Shakespeare's
+portrait; but these turn out usually to be forgeries.  The engraving by
+Martin Droeshout prefixed to the First and later Folios, though to us
+it seems unanimated and unnatural, is still the only likeness vouched
+for by contemporaries.  It is thought by many to be a copy of the
+"Flower" portrait, which bears the date 1609, and which it certainly
+very closely resembles.  If the Stratford bust which was placed in a
+niche above Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford church before 1623 was
+accurately reproduced in Dugdale's _Warwickshire_, then the present
+bust is a later substitution, since it shows differences in detail from
+that sketch.  It is coming to be believed that the eighteenth-century
+restoration so altered the bust as to make it quite unlike its former
+appearance.
+
+Shakespeare's grave is in the chancel of Stratford church.  A dark,
+flat tombstone bears the inscription, which early tradition ascribes to
+the poet:--
+
+  "Good frend, for Iesvs sake forbeare
+  To digg the dvst enclosed heare:
+  Bleste be y^e man y^t spares thes stones,
+  And curst be he y^t moves my bones."
+
+The monument to Shakespeare, with the bust on the north wall, is facing
+the tomb.
+
+In his will, Shakespeare provided that much the larger portion of his
+estate should go to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall and John Hall,
+Gent., her husband, including New Place, Henley Street and Blackfriars
+houses, and his tithes in Stratford and near-by villages.  This was in
+accordance with custom.  To Judith, his younger daughter, the wife of
+Thomas Quiney, he left three hundred pounds, one hundred as a marriage
+portion, fifty more on her release of her right in a Stratford
+tenement, and the rest to be paid in three years, the principal to be
+invested, the interest paid to her, and the principal to be divided at
+her death.
+
+{19}
+
+Shakespeare left his sister, Joan Hart, £20 and his wearing apparel,
+and her house in Stratford rent-free till her death, at a shilling a
+year.  His plate he divided between his daughters.  The minor bequests,
+which include £10 to the Stratford poor, are chiefly notable for the
+bequest of money (26s. 8d.) for rings to "my fellowes, John Hemynges,
+Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell."  These were fellow-actors in the
+Lord Chamberlain's Company.
+
+Within half a century Shakespeare's line was extinct.  His wife died
+August 6, 1623.  His daughter Susanna left one daughter, Elizabeth, who
+married, April 22, 1626, Thomas Nashe, who died April 4, 1647.  On June
+5, 1649, she married John Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire,
+afterwards knighted.  She left no children by either marriage.  Her
+burial was recorded February 17, 1669-70.  Shakespeare's daughter
+Judith had three sons,--Shakespeare, baptized November 23, 1616, buried
+May 8, 1617; Richard, baptized February 9, 1617-8, buried February 16,
+1638-9; Thomas, baptized January 23, 1619-20, buried January 1638-9.
+Judith Shakespeare survived them all, and was buried February 9,
+1661-2.  Shakespeare's sister, Joan Hart, left descendants who owned
+the Henley Street House up to the time of its purchase, in 1847, by the
+nation.
+
+The best books on the life of Shakespeare: J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps,
+_Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_, tenth edition, London, 1898 (the
+greatest collection of sources and documents); Sidney Lee, _A Life of
+William Shakespeare_ (New York, Macmillan, 1909), (the best extended
+life, especially valuable for its study of the biographical value of
+the sonnets); Professor Wallace's articles referred to in the text.
+
+
+
+[1] This reference was discovered among the Plume Mss. (1657-1663) of
+Maldon, Essex, by Dr. Andrew Clark, in October, 1904.  Sir John Mennes
+was, however, not a contemporary of John Shakespeare, but doubtless
+merely passed on the description from some eyewitness.
+
+[2] The dates between January 1 and March 25, previous to 1752, are
+always thus written.  In 1752 England and its colonies decided to begin
+the year with January 1 instead of March 25, as formerly.  Thus for
+periods before that date between January 1 and March 25, we give two
+figures to indicate that the people of that time called it one year and
+we call it a year later.  Thus, Judith Shakespeare would have said she
+was baptized in 1584, while by our reckoning her baptism came in 1585.
+
+[3] "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide."  This line is also in
+the source of Shakespeare's play.  See p. 133.
+
+[4] Printed first in 1596, but written shortly before Greene's death in
+1592.
+
+[5] Registered Dec., 1592, but printed without date.
+
+[6] These may be seen, as well as all others up to 1700, in the
+re-edited _Shakespeare Allusion Book_, ed. J. Munro, London, 1909.
+
+[7] See p. 48.
+
+[8] See the _New York Times_ for October 3, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+{20}
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE
+
+The history of the drama includes two periods of supreme achievement,
+that of fifth-century Greece and that of Elizabethan England.  Between
+these peaks lies a broad valley, the bottom of which is formed by the
+centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ.  From its
+culmination in the tragedies of Ęschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and
+in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the
+brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical
+tragedies of the Roman Seneca.  The decay of culture, the barbarian
+invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater
+decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were
+kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, the drama, as a
+literary form, had practically disappeared from western Europe before
+the middle of the sixth century.  For this reason the modern drama is
+commonly regarded as a new birth, as an independent creation entirely
+distinct from the art which had preceded it.  A new birth and an
+independent growth there certainly was, but it must not be forgotten
+that the love of the dramatic did not disappear with the literary
+drama, that the entertainment of mediaeval {21} minstrels were not
+without dramatic elements, that dialogues continued to be written if
+not acted, and that the classical drama of Rome, eagerly studied by the
+enthusiasts of the Renaissance, had no slight influence upon the course
+which the modern drama took.  If we make these qualifications, we may
+fairly say that the old drama died and that a new drama was born.
+
++The Beginnings of Modern Drama+.--When we search for the origin of the
+modern drama, we find it, strangely enough, in the very institution
+which had done so much to suppress it as an invention of the devil; for
+it made its first appearance in the services of the Church.  From a
+very early period, the worship of the Church had possessed a certain
+dramatic character.  The service of the Mass recalled and represented
+by symbols, which became more and more definite and elaborate, the
+great sacrifice of Christ.  And this tendency manifested itself in
+other ways, such as the letting fall, on Good Friday, of the veil which
+had concealed the sanctuary since the first Sunday in Lent, thus
+recalling the veil of the Jewish temple rent in twain at the death of
+Christ.  But all this was rather the soil in which the drama could grow
+than the beginning itself.  The latter came in the ninth century, when
+an addition was made to the Mass which was slight in itself, but which
+was to have momentous consequences.  Among the words fitted to certain
+newly introduced melodies were those of which the following is a
+translation:--
+
+  "Whom seek ye, O Christians, in the sepulcher?
+  Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O ye dwellers in Heaven.
+  He is not here; he is risen as he foretold.
+  Go and carry the tidings that he is risen from the sepulcher."
+
+
+{22}
+
+At first these words were sung responsively by the choir, but before
+the end of the tenth century they were put into the mouths of monks or
+clergy representing the Maries and the angel.  By this time the
+dialogue had been removed to the first services of Easter morning, and
+had been connected with the ceremonies of the Easter sepulcher.  In
+many churches it was then customary on Good Friday to carry a crucifix
+to a representation of a sepulcher which  had previously been prepared
+somewhere in the church, whence the crucifix was secretly removed
+before Easter morning.  Then, at the first Easter service, the empty
+sepulcher was solemnly visited, and this dialogue was sung.[1]  The
+participants wore ecclesiastical vestments, and the acting was of the
+simplest character, but the amount of dialogue increased as time went
+on, and new bits of action were added; so that before the end of the
+twelfth century some churches presented what may fairly be called a
+short one-act play.  Meanwhile, around the services of Good Friday and
+the Christmas season, other dramatic ceremonies and short dialogues had
+been growing up, which gave rise to tiny plays dealing with the birth
+of Christ, the visits of the shepherds and the Wise Men, and the Old
+Testament prophecies of {23} Christ's coming.  Although the elaboration
+of individual plays continued, the evolution of the drama as part of
+the Church's liturgy was practically complete by the middle of the
+thirteenth century.
+
++The Earlier Miracle Plays+.--The next hundred years brought a number
+of important changes: the gradual substitution of English for Latin,
+the removal from the church to the churchyard or market-place, and the
+welding together of the single plays into great groups or cycles.  The
+removal from the church was made possible by the growth of the plays in
+length and dramatic interest, which rendered them independent of the
+rest of the service; and it was made inevitable by the enormous
+popularity of the plays and by the more elaborate staging which the
+developed plays required.  The formation of more or less unified cycles
+was the result of a natural tendency to supply the missing links
+between the plays already in existence, and to write new plays
+describing the events which led up to those already treated.  Just as
+Wagner in our day after writing his drama on _The Death of Siegfried_
+felt himself compelled to write other plays dealing with his hero's
+birth and the events which led to this birth, so the unknown authors of
+the great English cycles were led to write play after play until they
+had covered the significant events of Biblical history from the
+creation of the world to the Last Judgment.  This joining together of
+isolated plays necessitated taking them away from the particular
+festivals with which they had originally been connected and presenting
+them all together on a single day, or, in the case of the longer
+cycles, on successive days.  After 1264, {24} when the festival of
+Corpus Christi was established in honor of the sacrament of Holy
+Communion, this day was the favorite time of presentation.  Coming as
+it did in early summer on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, it was
+well suited for out-of-door performances, besides being a festival
+which the Church especially delighted to honor.
+
++The Great English Cycles+.--Of the great cycles of miracle plays, only
+four have come down to us: those given at York and at Chester, that in
+the Towneley collection (probably given at or near Wakefield), and the
+cycle called the Ludus Coventriae or Hegge plays, of which the place of
+presentation is uncertain.  The surviving fragments of lost cycles,
+however, taken together with the records of performances, show that
+religious plays were given with more or less regularity in at least one
+hundred and twenty-five places in England.  The cycle which has been
+most completely preserved is that of York, forty-eight plays of which
+still exist.  It originally included fifty-seven plays, while the
+number of Biblical incidents known to have been treated in plays
+belonging to one cycle or another includes twenty-one based on the Old
+Testament or on legends, and sixty-eight based on the New Testament.
+
+Even while the religious plays were still a part of the Church
+services, they contained humorous elements, such as the realistically
+comic figure of the merchant who sold spices and ointment to the Maries
+on their way to the tomb of Christ.  In the later plays these
+interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce.  When Herod
+learned of the escape of the Wise Men, he would rage violently about
+the stage and even among {25} the spectators.  Noah's wife, in the
+Chester play of _The Deluge_, refuses point-blank to go into the Ark,
+and has to be put in by main force.  The _Second Shepherds' Play_ of
+the Towneley cycle contains an episode of sheep stealing which is a
+complete and perfect little farce.  Nor were the scenes of pathos less
+effective.  The scene in the Brome play of _Abraham and Isaac_ where
+the little lad pleads for his life has not lost its pathetic appeal
+with the passage of centuries.  While many of the miracle plays seem to
+us stiff and perfunctory, the best of them possess literary merit of a
+very high order.
+
+As the development of the plays called for an increasing number of
+actors, the clergy had to call upon the laity for help, so that the
+acting fell more and more into the hands of the latter, until finally
+the whole work of presenting the plays was taken over, in most cases,
+by the guilds, organizations of the various trades which corresponded
+roughly to our modern trades unions.  Each guild had its own play of
+which it bore the expense and for which it furnished the actors.  Thus
+the shipwrights would present _The Building of the Ark_, the
+goldsmiths, _The Adoration of the Wise Men_.  Sometimes the plays would
+be presented on a number of tiny stages or scaffolds grouped in a
+rectangle or a circle; more often they were acted on floats, called
+pageants, which were dragged through the streets and stopped for
+performances at several of the larger squares.  These pageants were
+usually of two stories, the lower used for a dressing-room, the upper
+for a stage.  The localities represented were indicated in various
+ways--Heaven, for instance, by a beautiful {26} pavilion; Hell, by the
+mouth of a huge dragon.  The costumes of the actors were often
+elaborate and costly, and there was some attempt at imitating reality,
+such as putting the devils into costumes of yellow and black, which
+typified the flames and darkness of Hell.
+
+Fairly complete cycles were in existence as early as 1300; they reached
+the height of their perfection and popularity in the later fourteenth
+and in the fifteenth centuries; and they began to decline in the
+sixteenth century.  After 1550 the performances became more and more
+irregular, until, at the accession of King James I, they had
+practically ceased.
+
++The Moralities+.--Of somewhat later origin than the miracle plays, but
+existing contemporaneously with them, were the moralities.  In a
+twelfth-century miracle play characters had been introduced which were
+not the figures of Biblical story, but personified abstractions, such
+as Hypocrisy, Heresy, Pity.  By the end of the fourteenth century there
+had come into existence plays of which all the characters were of this
+type.  These, however, were probably not direct descendants of the
+miracles; but rather the application of the newly learned dramatic
+methods to another sort of subject matter, the allegory, a literary
+type much used by poets and preachers of the time.  Such plays were
+called 'moral plays' or 'moralities.'  Unlike the miracle plays, these
+remained independent of each other, and showed no tendency to grow
+together into cycles.  The most beautiful of them, written at the end
+of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, is that
+called _The Summoning of Everyman_.  It represents a typical man
+compelled to enter upon the long, {27} inevitable journey of death.
+Kindred and Wealth abandon him, but long-neglected Good-deeds, revived
+by Knowledge, comes to his aid.  At the edge of the grave Everyman is
+deserted by Beauty, Strength, and the Five Senses, while Good-deeds
+alone goes with him to the end.  Moralities of this type aimed at the
+cultivation of virtue in the spectators, just as the miracle plays had
+aimed at the strengthening of their faith.  Another type of morality
+dealt with controversial questions.  In one of these, _King Johan_,
+written about 1538, historical personages are put side by side with the
+allegorical abstractions, thus foreshadowing the later historical
+plays, such as Shakespeare's _King John_.  Another comparatively late
+type of morality sought to teach an ethical lesson by showing the
+effect of vice and  virtue upon  the lives of men and women.  _Nice
+Wanton_ (c. 1550), for instance, represents the consequence of good and
+evil living, not only by the use of such allegorical characters as
+Iniquity  and Worldly Shame, but also by means of the human beings,
+Barnabas and Ishmael and their sister Dalila.  Thus, although the more
+abstract moralities persisted until late in the sixteenth century,
+these other types at the same time helped lead the way to the drama
+which depicts actual life.
+
++The Interlude+.--Both miracle play and morality were written with a
+definite purpose, the teaching of a lesson, religious, moral, or
+political; the interlude, on the other hand, was a short play intended
+simply to interest or to amuse.  The original meaning of the word
+"interlude" is a matter of controversy.  It may have meant a short play
+introduced between other {28} things, such as the courses of a banquet,
+or it may have meant simply a dialogue.  Be that as it may, the
+interlude seems to have had its origin in the dramatic character of
+minstrel entertainments and in the dramatic character of popular games,
+such as those, especially beloved of our English ancestors, which
+celebrated the memory of Robin Hood and his fellow-outlaws of Sherwood
+forest.  The miracle plays set the example of dramatic composition, an
+example soon followed in the interlude, which put into dramatic forms
+that became more and more elaborate popular stories and episodes, both
+serious and comic.  Although there had been comic episodes in miracle
+plays and moralities, it was as interludes that the amusing skit and
+the tiny farce achieved an independent existence.  The first real
+interlude which has come down to us is that called _De Clerico et
+Puella_, _Of the Cleric and the Maiden_, which was written not later
+than the early fourteenth century.  This is little more than a dialogue
+depicting the attempted seduction of a maiden by a wanton cleric.  The
+only other surviving fourteenth-century interlude, that of _Dux
+Maraud_, is, on the other hand, the dramatization of a tragic tale of
+incest and murder.  This is, however, somewhat exceptional, and may
+perhaps be regarded as belonging rather to a type of miracle play not
+common in England, in which the intervention of some heavenly power
+affects the lives of men.  At any rate, it is probable that the
+interlude was not often so serious an affair, and it developed rapidly
+in a way that gave us, in the sixteenth century, the interludes of John
+Heywood (1497-1577), which are really short farces, {29} and no bad
+ones at that.  By reason of its character and the small number of
+actors which it required, the interlude was usually given by
+professional entertainers, who were either kept by persons of high
+rank, or traveled from town to town.  We find, therefore, in the acting
+of interludes the conditions which gave rise to modern comedy and to
+the modern traveling company.
+
++Classical Influences+.--In the preceding paragraphs we have considered
+the early modern drama as an independent growth, but the influence of
+the classical drama, particularly the Latin tragedies of Seneca and the
+Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, showed itself in the later
+moralities and interludes, and was to appear again and again in the
+later course of English drama.  That great revival of interest in
+classical learning which gave the Renaissance its name, was a mighty
+force in the current of English thought throughout the sixteenth
+century.  The old Latin tragedies and comedies were revived and were
+produced in the original and in translation at schools and colleges.
+It was an easy step from this to the writing of English comedies after
+Latin models.  The earliest of such attempts which we know is the
+comedy of _Ralph Roister Doister_, written by Nicholas Udall for Eton
+boys at some time between 1534 and 1541.  This, commonly called the
+first English comedy, is little more than a clever adaptation of
+Plautus to English manners and customs; but a comedy written soon
+after, _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, is really an Interlude cast in the
+Plautean mold.  The first English tragedy, _Gorboduc_, closely
+imitative of Seneca, but on {30} a mythical British subject and written
+in English blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quarter of
+a century later.  Seneca's tragedies had little action, slight
+characterization, and many extremely long speeches, which often
+display, however, much brilliant rhetoric.  _Gorboduc_ has all these
+qualities except the brilliance.  The history, the third of the types
+into which the editors of the First Folio were to divide Shakespeare's
+plays, was also affected by Senecan influence.  We have already seen
+how the historical figure of King John appeared in a morality, one
+which shows little trace of classical tradition; and the history, with
+its general formlessness and its mixture of the comic with the serious,
+remained a peculiarly English product.  Nevertheless, in the second
+half of the sixteenth century, subjects from English history were
+treated after the manner of Latin tragedy, and the long, rhetorical
+speeches of the later historical plays are more suggestive of Seneca
+than are most Elizabethan tragedies.
+
+The classical type of drama, with its strict observance of the three
+unities,[2] was not congenial to the {31} English temperament.  Its
+fetters were soon thrown off, and, with the notable exception of Ben
+Jonson (1573-1637), few Elizabethan playwrights conformed to its rules.
+Its influence, however, was not confined to its imitators.  From the
+classical drama the Elizabethans gained a sense for form and for the
+value of dramatic technique, which did much to make the Elizabethan
+drama what it was.
+
++Three Predecessors of Shakespeare+.--The development of the English
+drama from the first attempts at comedy, tragedy, and history was
+extremely rapid.  When Shakespeare came to London, he found there
+dramatists who were far on the road toward mastery of dramatic form,
+and who were putting into that form both great poetry and a profound
+knowledge of human nature.  A complete list of these dramatists would
+include a number of names which have a permanent place in the history
+of English literature, such as those of Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nash,
+George Peele, and Robert Greene.  Among these names three deserve
+especial prominence, not only because of the great achievements of
+these men, but because of their influence on Shakespeare.  These men
+were Marlowe, Kyd, and Lyly.
+
+It was Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) who first gave to English blank
+verse those qualities which make it an extraordinarily perfect medium
+of expression.  Before him, blank verse had no advantages to offer in
+compensation for the abandonment of rime.  It was stiff, monotonous,
+and cold.  Marlowe began to vary the position of the pauses within the
+line, and to do away with the pause at the end of some lines by {32}
+placing the breaks in thought elsewhere.  Thus he gave to his verse
+ease, flexibility, and movement, and he put into it the warmth and
+vividness of his own personality.  Upon such verse as this Shakespeare
+could hardly improve.  But this by no means sums up his debt to
+Marlowe.  His characterization of Richard III, for instance, was
+distinctly affected by that of Marlowe's hero Tamburlaine, a character
+to which the poet had given a passionate life and an energy that made
+him more than human.  In other ways less easy to define, Shakespeare
+must have been stimulated by Marlowe's fire.  The latter's greatest
+tragedies, _Tamburlaine_, _Dr. Faustus_, and _Edward II_, contain
+poetry so beautiful, feeling so intense, and a promise of future
+achievement so remarkable, that his early death may fairly be said to
+have deprived English literature of a genius worthy of comparison with
+that of Shakespeare himself.
+
+Although Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) was far from the equal of Marlowe, he
+was a playwright of real ability and one whose tragedies were unusually
+popular.  Influenced greatly by Seneca, he brought to its climax the
+'tragedy of blood'--a type of drama in which ungovernable passions of
+lust and revenge lead to atrocious crimes and end in gruesome and
+appalling murders.  His famous _Spanish Tragedy_ was the forerunner of
+many similar plays, of which _Titus Andronicus_ was one.  He probably
+wrote the original play of _Hamlet_, which was elevated by Shakespeare
+out of its atmosphere of blood and horror into the highest realms of
+thought and poetry.
+
+John Lyly (c. 1554-1606) was a master in an {33} entirely different
+field, that of highly artificial comedy.  He brought court comedy to a
+hitherto unattained perfection of form and style, and in his best work,
+_Endymion_, he displayed a lovely delicacy of thought and expression
+which has kept his reputation secure.  He is best known, however, for
+his prose romance, _Euphues_, which gave its name to the style of which
+it was the climax.  Euphuism is a manner of writing marked by elaborate
+antithesis and alliteration, and ornamented by fantastic similes drawn
+from a mass of legendary lore concerning plants and animals.[3] This
+style, which nowadays seems labored and inartistic, was excessively
+admired by the Elizabethans.  Shakespeare imitated it to some extent in
+_Love's Labour's Lost_, and parodied it in Falstaff's speech to Prince
+Hal, _I Henry IV_, II, iv.  Several of Shakespeare's earlier comedies
+show Lyly's influence for good and ill--ill, in that it made for
+artificiality and strained conceits; good, in that it made for
+perfection of dramatic form and refinement of expression.
+
++The Masque+.--Somewhat apart from the main current of dramatic
+evolution is the development of the masque, which became extremely
+popular in the reign of James I.  The English masque was an
+entertainment, dramatic in character, made up of songs, dialogue, and
+dances.  It originated in masked balls given by the nobility or at
+court.  To John Lydgate, working about 1430, is probably due the credit
+for introducing into such {34} disguisings a literary element, while
+the later course of the masque owes much to Italy.  In the developed
+masque there were two classes of participants: noble amateurs, who wore
+elaborate costumes and danced either among themselves or with the
+spectators; and professional entertainers, who spoke and sang.  The
+later masques had elaborate scenery and costumes, with just as much
+plot as would serve to string together the lyrics and dances.
+Sometimes an anti-masque of grotesque figures was introduced to serve
+as contrast to the beautiful figures of the masque.  The masques were
+produced with the utmost lavishness, the most extravagant one of which
+we know costing over £20,000.  Some of them, such as those written by
+Ben Jonson, contain charming poetry; but their chief interest to the
+student of Shakespeare lies in the fact that their great popularity
+caused Shakespeare to introduce short masques into some of his plays,
+notably _Henry VIII_, _The Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_.  In
+similar allegorical dances often given between the acts of Italian
+plays, has been sought the origin of the 'dumb-show,' which was
+occasionally introduced into English tragedies, and which appears in
+the Mouse-Trap given in _Hamlet_.
+
+
+The most useful general histories of this period are: F. E. Schelling,
+_Elizabethan Drama_ (Houghton Mifflin, 1908); E. K. Chambers, _The
+Mediaeval Stage_ (Oxford, 1903); and Creizenach, _Geschichte des
+neueren Dramas_ (Halle, 1893-1909, and not yet complete).  Some of the
+best Miracles, Moralities, and Interludes are easily accessible in
+_Everyman with other Interludes_ (Everyman's Library) and J. M. Manly's
+_Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama_ (Ginn & Co., 1897).
+
+
+
+[1] An extract from the Concordia Regularis, a tenth-century appendix
+to the monastic "rule" of St. Benedict, describes this ceremony.
+"While the third respond is chanted, let the remaining three follow
+[one of the brethren, vested in an alb, had before this quietly taken
+his place at the sepulcher], and let them all, vested in copes, and
+bearing in their hands thuribles with incense, and stepping delicately,
+as those who seek something, approach the sepulcher.  These things are
+done in imitation of the angel sitting in the monument, and the women
+with spices coming to anoint the body of Jesus."
+
+[2] The three unities of action, place, and time are usually believed
+to have been formulated by Aristotle, who is supposed to have said that
+a tragedy should have but a single plot and that the action should be
+confined to a single day and a single place.  As a matter of fact,
+Aristotle is responsible for only the first of these, and this he
+presented as an observation on the actual condition which prevailed in
+Greek tragedy rather than as a dramatic principle for all time.  The
+other principles, which were later deduced from the general practice of
+the Greeks,--a practice arising from the manner in which their plays
+were staged,--were, together with the first, elevated by the Romans to
+the dignity of fixed dramatic laws.
+
+[3] The following quotation from Euphues (ed. Bond, i, 289) illustrates
+this style: "Hee that seeketh ye depth of knowledge is as it were in a
+Laborinth, in which the farther he goeth, the farther he is from the
+end: or like the bird in the limebush which the more she striveth to
+get out, ye faster she sticketh in."  With this cf. _Hamlet_, III, iii,
+69; _I Henry IV_, II, iv, 441.
+
+
+
+
+{35}
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER
+
+In 1575 London had no theaters; that is, no building especially
+designed for the acting of plays.  By 1600 there were at least six,
+among which were some so large and beautiful as to arouse the
+unqualified admiration of travelers from the continent.  It is the
+purpose of this chapter to give in outline the history of this rapid
+development of a new type of building; to describe, as accurately as
+may be, the general features of these theaters; and to indicate the
+influence which these features exerted upon the Shakespearean drama.
+But before doing this it is necessary to point out the causes which
+made the first Elizabethan theater what it was.
+
++The Predecessors of the Elizabethan Theater+.[1]--Of these, the most
+important was the innyard.  As soon as the acting of plays ceased to be
+merely a local affair, as soon as there were companies of actors which
+traveled from town to town, it became necessary to find some place for
+the public presentation of plays other than the pageants of the guilds
+or the temporary scaffolds sometimes erected for miracle plays.  Such a
+place was offered by the courtyard of an inn.  The larger inns of {36}
+this period were, for the most part, built in the form of a quadrangle
+surrounding an open court.  Opening directly off this court were the
+stables, the kitchen, and other offices of the inn; above these were
+from one to three stories of bedrooms and sitting rooms, entered from
+galleries running all round the court.  When such a courtyard was used
+for theatrical performances, the actors erected a platform at one end
+to serve as a stage; the space back of this, shut off by a curtain,
+they used as a dressing-room; and the part of the gallery immediately
+over it they employed as a second stage which could represent the walls
+of a city or the balcony of a house.  In the courtyard the poorer class
+of spectators stood; in the galleries the more wealthy sat at their
+ease.  These conditions made the innyards much better places for play
+acting than were the city squares, while they were given still another
+advantage from the actors' point of view by the fact that the easily
+controlled entrance gave an opportunity for charging a regular
+admission fee--a fee which varied with the desirability of the various
+parts of the house.  Thus the innyards made no bad playhouses, and they
+continued to be used as such even after theaters were built.
+
+They had, however, one obvious disadvantage; their long, narrow shape
+made a large number of the seats and a large proportion of the spaces
+available for standing room distinctly bad places from which to see
+what was happening on the stage.  To remedy this defect, the builders
+of the theaters took a suggestion from the bull-baiting and
+bear-baiting rings.  These rings, of which a considerable number
+already existed {37} in the outskirts of London, had been built for
+fights between dogs and bulls or bears, sports vastly enjoyed by the
+Elizabethans.  The rings, like the innyards, had galleries in which
+spectators could sit and an open yard in which they could stand, and
+they possessed the added merit of being round.  Very possibly these
+rings, like the Cornish rings used for miracle plays, originated in the
+stone amphitheaters built by the Romans during their occupation of
+Britain, buildings occasionally used, even in the sixteenth century,
+for the performance of plays.  It is hardly necessary, nevertheless, to
+look farther than the bear ring to find the cause which determined the
+shape of the Elizabethan public theater.
+
++The History of the Public Theaters+.--With such models, then, James
+Burbage--the father of Richard Burbage, later the great actor manager
+of Shakespeare's company--built the first London theater in 1576.  It
+was erected not far outside the northern walls of the city, and was
+called simply the Theater.  Not far away, a second theater, the
+Curtain, was soon put up, so called not from any curtain on the stage,
+but from the name of the estate on which it was built.  The next
+theater, the Rose, was situated in another quarter, on the Surrey side
+of the Thames, where the bear-baiting rings were.  This was
+constructed, probably in 1587, by Philip Henslowe, a prominent
+theatrical manager.  Some time after 1594, a second theater, the Swan,
+was put up in this same region, commonly called the Bankside.  The
+suitability of the Bankside as a location for theaters is still further
+attested by the removal thither of the Theater in the winter of
+1598-1599.  The owner of the land on which the Theater had originally
+been {38} built had merely leased it to Burbage--who had since
+died,--and, when the lease expired, he attempted to raise the rent,
+probably believing that the Burbage heirs were receiving large profits
+from the building.  Being unwilling to pay this increased rent, the
+Burbages took down the building, and reėrected it on the Bankside, this
+time calling it the Globe.  The last to be built of the great public
+theaters was the Fortune, which Henslowe erected in 1600.  The
+situation of the Fortune outside Cripplegate, although a considerable
+distance west of the Curtain, was, roughly, that of the earlier
+theaters, the northern suburbs of the city.
+
+This list does not include all the theaters built or altered between
+1576 and 1600, nor did such building stop at the latter date,--the
+Globe, for instance, was burnt and again rebuilt in 1613,--but the
+sketch is complete enough for our purposes.  By the end of 1600 all the
+more important public theaters were open, and after that date, so far
+as we know, no important changes in construction were made.  The next
+real step--which was to do away altogether with this type of
+theater--did not come until after the Restoration.
+
++The Buildings+.--Before describing the buildings themselves, it is
+necessary to make one qualification.  It is impossible to speak of the
+'Elizabethan theaters' or of the 'Elizabethan stage' as if there were
+one type to which all theaters and stages conformed.  The Fortune was
+undoubtedly a great improvement over the Theater, the outcome of an
+evolution which could be traced through the other theaters if we had
+the necessary documents.  If the various theaters did not differ from
+each other as some of our modern theaters do, they {39} still did
+differ in important points.  For example, while the Globe and the
+Curtain were round, other theaters were hexagonal or octagonal, and the
+Fortune was square.  Likewise, there were certainly differences in
+size.  In spite of these facts, it is, however, still possible to
+describe the theaters, in general terms which are sufficiently accurate
+for our present purpose.
+
+An Elizabethan theater was a three-story building of wooden or
+half-timber construction.  The three stories formed three galleries for
+spectators.  The first of these was raised a little above the level of
+the ground, while the yard, or 'pit,' in which the lower class of
+spectators stood, seems to have been somewhat sunken.  The galleries
+were supported by oaken columns, often handsomely carved and
+ornamented.  They were roofed and ceiled, but the yard was open to the
+weather.  Although we know that the Fortune was eighty feet square
+outside, and that the yard within was fifty-five feet square, we are
+left in uncertainty about the seating capacity.  From fifteen hundred
+to eighteen hundred is, however, the most convincing estimate.  There
+were two boxes, or 'gentlemen's rooms,' presumably in the first balcony
+on either side of the stage.  Besides these, there were other, cheaper
+boxes, and the rest of the balcony space was filled with seats.  The
+better seats were most comfortably cushioned, and the whole theater
+anything but the bare rude place which people often imagine it.
+Coryat, a widely traveled Englishman of the period, writes of the
+theaters which he saw in Venice that they were "bare and beggarly in
+comparison of our stately playhouses in England; neither can their
+actors compare with us for stately apparel, {40} shows, or music."
+That this was no mere British prejudice is shown by the similar
+statements of foreigners traveling in England.
+
+The most striking difference between Elizabethan and modern theaters
+was in the position of the stage, which was not back of a great
+proscenium frame, but was built out as a platform into the middle of
+the yard.  At the Fortune, the stage was forty-three feet wide,--wider,
+that is, than most modern stages.[2]  Jutting out from the level of the
+top gallery, and extending perhaps ten feet over the stage, was a
+square structure called the 'hut,' which rose above the level of the
+outside walls.  Built out from the bottom of this, a roof, or 'shadow,'
+extended forward over a large part of the stage.  The front of this
+'shadow' was borne, in the better theaters, on two columns.  The shadow
+and the hut, taken together, are often referred to as the 'heavens.'
+
++The Stage+.--When we turn from these general features of the theaters
+to the stage, we shall find it convenient to speak of a front and a
+rear stage, but this does not imply any permanent line of demarcation
+between the two, or that they were not often used together as a single
+field of action.  The rear stage is simply that part of the stage which
+could be shut off from the spectators by curtains; the other, that part
+which lay in front of the curtains.  In other words, the front stage is
+that portion of the stage which was built out into the yard, for the
+curtains continued the line made around the rest of the house by the
+front {41} of the galleries.  In both front and rear stages were traps
+out of which ghosts or apparitions could rise and into which such
+properties as the caldron in _Macbeth_ could sink.  From the 'heavens,'
+actors representing gods or spirits--as Jupiter in _Cymbeline_ or Ariel
+in _The Tempest_--could be lowered by means of a mechanical contrivance.
+
+======================================================================
+
+[Illustration: TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 4.  OUTER SCENE.
+
+  _Trumpets sound.  Enter Alcibiades with his
+    Powers before Athens._
+
+  _Alc_.  "Sound to this Coward, and lascivious
+          Towne.  Our terrible approach."
+
+  _Sounds a parly.  The Senators appeare upon the Wals._
+
+Reproduced from _The Shakespearean Stage_, by V. E. Albright, through
+the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.]
+
+======================================================================
+
+The arrangement of the rear stage may have differed considerably in the
+various theaters, but the typical form may best be described as an
+alcove in front of which curtains could be drawn.  This alcove was by
+no means so small as the word may seem to imply, but must have been
+about half as wide as the front stage and perhaps a quarter as deep.
+In its rear wall was a door through which the actors could enter
+without being seen when the curtains were drawn, and it seems to have
+had side doors as well.  To the right and left of it were doors for
+such entrances to the front stage as could not properly be made through
+the curtains.  This part of the stage was used for such scenes as the
+caves in _Cymbeline_ or _The Tempest_, for the tomb in _Romeo and
+Juliet_, and for scenes in which characters concealed themselves behind
+the arras, as in _I Henry IV_ or _Hamlet_.  Since the front stage could
+not be concealed from the spectators, most heavy properties were placed
+on the back stage, so that this part of the stage was generally used
+for scenes which required such properties.  For many of these scenes,
+however, both parts of the stage were used, the actors spreading out
+over the front stage soon after the beginning of the scene.
+
+The space between the top of the back stage and the {42} heavens formed
+a balcony, like the balcony already described as part of the stage as
+arranged in the inn-yards.  This balcony could also be curtained off
+when occasion required.  To the right and left of it, over the doors
+leading to the front stage, some of the theaters had window-like
+openings, which were probably not in line with the balcony, but, like
+the doors below them, projected at an oblique angle.  At one of these
+windows Jessica appeared in the second act of _The Merchant of Venice_;
+from the balcony Romeo took leave of Juliet.  Thus the Elizabethan
+dramatist had three fields of action--a front, rear, and upper
+stage--which he could use singly, together, or in various combinations.
+
++Settings and Costumes+.--In order to understand the way in which this
+stage was utilized, the student must dismiss from his mind two
+widespread errors.  The Elizabethan stage was by no means a bare,
+unfurnished platform, nor did the managers substitute for a setting
+placards reading "This is a Forest," or "This is a Bedroom."  The
+difference between that age and this is not one between no settings and
+good ones; it is even possible to doubt whether Shakespeare's plays
+were not put on more effectively then than in most of our modern
+theaters.  The difference is one of principle, and even this difference
+may easily be exaggerated.  When we say that Elizabethan stagings were
+'symbolic,' whereas ours are pictorial, we mean that on the former the
+presence of a few selected objects suggested to the mind of the
+spectator all the others which go to make up the kind of scene
+presented.  When a few trees were placed upon the stage, the audience
+supplied in {43} imagination the other objects that belong in a forest;
+when a throne was there, they saw with the mind's eye a room of state
+in a palace.  But our modern stage also demands the help of the
+imagination.  It is very far from presenting a completely realistic
+picture.  We see three sides of a room and accept the room as complete,
+although none of us live in rooms which lack a side.  We see a great
+cathedral painted on a back drop, and are hardly disturbed by the fact
+that an actor standing near it is twice as high as one of the doors.
+The difference between the two stages really simmers down to this: our
+symbols are of painted canvas, the Elizabethans' were of another sort.
+It is extremely unlikely that the Elizabethans used painted scenes in
+their public theaters.  If they ever did, such 'painted cloths' were of
+the simplest sort, and not pictures painted in perspective.  Instead,
+they relied for their effects upon solid properties--sometimes quite
+elaborate ones--such as trees, tombs, wells, beds, thrones, etc.
+These, as has been said, were usually set on the rear stage, although
+some of them, such as couches and banquet tables, were occasionally
+brought forward during the course of a scene.
+
+There were, however, scenes which were acted without any setting.  The
+Elizabethans did not feel it necessary to have every scene definitely
+localized.  Consequently, many scenes which are described in our modern
+editions of Shakespeare as 'A Street,' 'A Place before the Castle,'
+etc., were not definitely assigned to any place, and were usually acted
+without settings on the front stage before the closed curtains.  In
+order that no time should be lost while properties were {44} being
+changed, such scenes were commonly inserted between scenes requiring
+properties, so that a certain alternation between set and unset scenes
+resulted.  The fourth act of the _Merchant of Venice_, for example,
+begins with the court-room scene, which demanded the whole stage, the
+properties for the court-room being set on the back stage, with perhaps
+some moved toward the front.  The fifth act takes place in Portia's
+garden, which also took up the whole stage, with garden properties set
+on the rear stage.  Between these two scenes comes the one in the
+street, which was acted before the closed curtains and required no
+properties.  The arrangement is somewhat like that followed in many
+modern melodramas, where a scene not requiring properties is acted in
+front of a drop scene while scenery is being set behind.  The raising
+of the drop--which corresponds to the opening of the Elizabethan
+curtains--not only reveals the setting behind, but also makes the whole
+stage, including that part which was in front of the drop, the scene of
+the action which follows.[3]
+
+======================================================================
+
+[Illustration: TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 3.  INNER SCENE.
+
+_Enter a Souldier in the Woods, seeking Timon._
+
+"_Sol_.--Timon is dead, who hath out-stretcht his span,
+         Some Beast reade this; There do's not live a Man.
+         Dead sure, and this his Grave, what's on this Tomb."
+
+Reproduced from _The Shakespearean Stage_, by V. E. Albright, through
+the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.]
+
+======================================================================
+
+The costumes on Shakespeare's stage were very elaborate, but there was
+no desire to make them characteristic of any historical period.
+Indeed, the striving after historical accuracy of costume is so much a
+modern notion that it was nearly two centuries later when Macbeth and
+Julius Caesar began to appear in costumes appropriate to their
+respective periods.  On the other hand, there probably was some attempt
+to distinguish the dress of different nationalities.  Some notion of
+how elaborate the costumes of Elizabethan actors were is given by the
+fact that Henslowe's {45} diary[4] has an entry of £4 14s. paid for a
+pair of hose, and £20 for a cloak.  In connection with this it must be
+remembered that money was worth then about eight times what it is now,
+and that a playwright of the time rarely received more than £8 for a
+play.  Another indication is given in Henslowe's list of the costumes
+belonging to the Lord Admiral's men, which included some eighty-seven
+garments, for the most part of silk or satin, ornamented with fringe
+and gold lace.
+
++The Private Theater+.--In the preceding sections the type of theater
+described has been referred to as 'public.'  This has been done to
+distinguish it from the 'private' theater, a type which, although
+similar in so far as the general principles of staging employed are
+concerned, differed from the public theater in important particulars.
+The private theater is so called because it originated in the
+performances given before the invited guests of royalty, the nobility,
+or the universities.  Since these performances were given in great
+halls, the type of theater which resulted was completely roofed, was
+lighted by candles, and had seats in the pit as well as in the
+galleries--when there were galleries.  As soon as such theaters were
+built, admission was, of course, no longer by invitation, but the
+prices were so much higher than those of the public theaters that the
+audiences remained much more select.  The first of these theaters was
+the Blackfriars, the remodeled hall of the former monastery of the
+Blackfriars, done over by Burbage in 1596.  Others {46} were those in
+which the 'Children of Paul's' acted, the Cockpit, and the Salisbury
+Court.  The Blackfriars was at first under royal patronage, the actors
+being the 'Children of the Chapel Royal.'  These choir boys were
+carefully trained in acting and dancing as well as singing, and were
+subsidized by royalty, so that their performances tended to be much
+more spectacular than those of the public theaters.  The performances
+at the Blackfriars seem to have retained this characteristic even after
+1608, when Shakespeare's company took over the theater.  Probably
+because of the patronage and interest of royalty, it was in the private
+theaters that painted scenes, already used in court masques, were first
+introduced.  Thus these roofed theaters are really the forerunners, so
+far as England is concerned, of our modern playhouses.
+
++Effect of Stage Conditions on the Drama+.--When studied in the light
+of Elizabethan stage conditions, many characteristics of the plays
+written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries cease to be surprising or
+puzzling.  A complete conception of all the effects which these
+conditions had upon the drama can only be gained by a careful study of
+all the plays.  Here, moreover, we are obliged to pass over many points
+of more general character, such as the impossibility of representing
+night by darkness when the performances were given by daylight in a
+theater open to the sun.  Two or three are, however, especially
+important.  For instance, since it was possible to leave many scenes
+indefinitely localized, and since there was no necessity of long pauses
+for the change of heavy scenery, the dramatists were not limited as
+ours are to a {47} comparatively small number of scenes.  This was an
+advantage in that it gave great freedom and variety to the action; but
+it was also a disadvantage in that it led to a scattering of effect and
+to looseness of construction.  So in _Antony and Cleopatra_ there are
+forty-two scenes, some of which are only a few lines long, and in
+consequence the play loses the intense, unified effect which it might
+otherwise have produced.  Again, the absence of a front curtain made it
+impossible to end an act or play with a grand climax or an impressive
+tableau.  Instead, the scenes gradually die away; the actors leave the
+stage one by one, or go off in procession.  Whether this was gain or
+loss is a debatable question.  At any rate, this caused the Elizabethan
+plays to leave on the spectator an impression totally different from
+that left by ours.  Finally, the absence of pictorial scenery forced
+the dramatists to use verbal description far more than is customary
+to-day.  To this fact we owe some passages of poetry which are among
+the most beautiful in all dramatic literature.
+
++Theatrical Companies+.--During Shakespeare's lifetime there were in
+existence more or less continuously some twenty theatrical companies,
+at least four or five of which, during the greater part of this period,
+played contemporaneously in London.  We have already seen how great
+nobles, before the end of the fifteenth century, maintained small
+companies of men as players of Interludes.  When not wanted by their
+patrons, these men traveled about the country, and their example was
+followed by other groups whose legal position was a much less certain
+quantity.  As a result, a law was passed in 1572 which required that
+{48} all companies of actors should be under the definite protection of
+some noble.  As time went on, this relation became one of merely
+nominal patronage, but the companies continued to be known by the name
+of their patron.  Thus the company to which Shakespeare belonged was
+known successively as Lord Strange's, the Earl of Derby's, first and
+second Lord Hunsdon's (or, because of the office which the Hunsdons
+held, as the Lord Chamberlain's), and as the King's company.  At
+various times it appeared at the Theater, the Curtain, the Globe, and
+the Blackfriars, its greatest triumphs being associated with the Globe.
+By 1608, if not before, it was unquestionably the most successful
+company in London.  It had the patronage of King James, and it
+controlled and acted in what were respectively the most popular public
+and private theaters, the Globe and the Blackfriars.  When not acting
+in London, it made tours to other cities.  Its number included several
+actors of well-known ability, among them Richard Burbage, the greatest
+tragic actor of the time.
+
+The most formidable rivals to this company were the Admiral's men and
+the children's companies.  The former company was managed by Richard
+Henslowe; had, after 1600, a permanent home in the Fortune theater; and
+included among its number Edward Alleyn, next to Burbage the most
+famous Elizabethan actor.  The two great children's companies were
+those made up of the choir boys of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's.
+The former had begun to give dramatic performances as early as 1506.
+They were well trained, had the advantage of royal patronage, and were
+{49} extraordinarily popular, becoming very serious rivals of the men's
+companies.  The performances of the Children of the Chapel Royal at the
+Blackfriars between 1596 and 1608 were the most fashionable in London.
+The children's companies were finally suppressed about 1609.
+
+The members of the men's companies were divided into four classes:
+those who had shares in the house and in the company, those who had
+shares only in the company, hired actors, and apprentices.  The third
+of these classes received a fixed salary, the last were cared for by
+the individual actors to whom they were apprenticed.  The profits of
+the theaters were derived from entrance money and the additional fees
+received for the better seats.  All of the first and half of the second
+was divided between the members of the first and second classes of
+shareholders.  The members of the first received in addition shares in
+the other half of the additional fees.[5]
+
+Because female parts were always taken by men or boys, it is sometimes
+assumed that Elizabethan acting must have been crude.  On the contrary,
+we have every reason to believe that most parts, particularly the less
+important ones, were acted better than they are usually acted to-day.
+Some of the actors, such as Burbage and Alleyn, were undoubtedly men of
+great genius.  All of them had the advantage of regular and consistent
+training--a thing only too often lacking in these days when an actor of
+ability is almost immediately made a 'star,' although he frequently
+knows pitifully little of the art of acting.  One of the most
+interesting testimonies to the ability of Elizabethan actors is Ben
+{50} Jonson's tribute to the memory of the boy actor, Salathiel Pavy:--
+
+  "Weep with me, all you that read
+              This little story;
+  And know, for whom a tear you shed
+              Death's self is sorry.
+  'Twas a child that so did thrive
+              In grace and feature,
+  As Heaven and Nature seem'd to strive
+              Which owned the creature.
+  Years he number'd scarce thirteen
+              When Fates turn'd cruel,
+  Yet three fill'd zodiacs had he been
+              The stage's jewel;
+  And did act (what now we moan)
+              Old men so duly,
+  As sooth the Parcae thought him one,
+              He play'd so truly.
+  So, by error, to his fate
+              They all consented;
+  But, viewing him since, alas, too late!
+              They have repented;
+  And have sought, to give new birth,
+              In baths to steep him;
+  But, being so much too good for earth,
+              Heaven vows to keep him."
+
+
+Many of the points discussed in this chapter are still the subject of
+controversy.  The theories of the stage adopted here are, in general,
+those of V. E. Albright, _The Shakespearean Stage_ (Macmillan, 1909).
+Among the numerous books and articles on these topics, the most useful
+are: G. F. Reynolds, _Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging_ (_Modern
+Philology_, Vols. 3 and 4); Brodmeier, _Die Shakespeare Bühne_ (Weimar,
+1904); Fleay, _Chronicle History of the London Stage_ (London, 1890);
+Henslowe's _Diary_, ed. by W. Greg (London, 1904); and the works of
+Creizenach and Schelling referred to in the preceding chapter.
+
+
+
+[1] Another predecessor, the great hall of a noble or a university, is
+mentioned in the section on the private theaters.
+
+[2] In at least some of the theaters, the stage seems to have narrowed
+toward the front.
+
+[3] With this whole paragraph, cf. Albright, pp. 81 ff., and 104-105.
+
+[4] This memorandum book of Philip Henslowe, the great manager, is one
+of our chief sources of information about the Elizabethan theater.
+
+[5] For Shakespeare's share, cf. p. 15.
+
+
+
+
+{51}
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ELIZABETHAN LONDON
+
+Shortly after Shakespeare came to London, England demonstrated her new
+greatness to an astonished world; by the defeat of Spain's greatest
+fleet, the "invincible Armada," England showed herself as no longer a
+small island nation, but as Mistress of the Sea.  In this victory
+culminated the growth which had begun under Henry VII, first of Tudor
+sovereigns.  Naval supremacy was, however, but a sign of a much greater
+and more far-reaching transformation--a transformation which had
+affected science, literature, and religion, and one which filled the
+men of Shakespeare's time with such enthusiasm for the past, such
+confidence in the present, and such hope for the future, as has hardly
+been paralleled in the world's history.
+
+During the century which had elapsed since 1485, Copernicus's discovery
+that the sun and not the earth was the center of our universe, had
+revolutionized the map of the heavens, as Columbus's discovery of
+America had revolutionized the map of the world.  Thus stimulated,
+scientific investigation started afresh, working in accordance with the
+modern methods formulated by Francis Bacon, while voyage quickly
+followed voyage, each new discovery adding fuel to the fire of
+enthusiasm.  Wonderful tales of new lands and unimagined wealth spread
+from mouth to mouth.  The voyages {52} of Martin Frobisher, Anthony
+Hawkins, and Francis Drake opened new worlds, not only to English
+imagination, but also to English trade.  It was they and men like them
+who gave to England her unexpected naval and commercial supremacy.
+
+The latter was partly a result of the former.  Elizabeth's victories
+over foreign enemies strengthened her power at home, and assured that
+freedom from internal discord which is essential to commercial
+prosperity.  No sovereign distracted by danger from without could have
+mastered the factions which had sprung up within.  The great religious
+movement known as the Protestant Reformation had not stopped in England
+with the separation of the English from the Roman Church under Henry
+VIII.  It had brought into existence the Puritan, austere, bigoted,
+opposed to beauty of church and ceremonial, yet filled with superb
+moral and religious enthusiasm.  It had brought about the persecution
+of Catholics and the still more merciless persecution of Protestants
+during the Catholic reaction under Queen Mary.  Its successes, which
+began again with Elizabeth's reign, gave occasion for continual
+intrigues of Catholic emissaries.  It all but plunged the nation into
+civil war, a war averted only by the victory over Spain and by the
+statesmanship of Elizabeth.  Freed from the fear of war, however,
+Puritan and Churchman, each in his own way, could apply his enthusiasm
+to the works of peace.
+
+With the return of peace and security, moreover, England first felt the
+full effect of the literary Renaissance.  The revival of classical
+learning had already transformed the art and literature of the
+continent, {53} especially that of Italy.  When, therefore, England
+turned again to the classics, it turned also to the Italian culture and
+literature to which the Renaissance had given birth, and from these
+sources English literature received new beauty of thought and form.
+
+It was, then, in a new England that Shakespeare lived, an England
+intensely proud of the past which had made the present possible, an
+England rich enough and secure enough to have leisure and interest for
+literature, an England so vigorous, so confident, that it could not
+fail to bring out all that was latent in its greatest genius.
+
++The City of London+.--All this enthusiasm and activity reached its
+highest point in London.  Even more then than now, London was the
+center of influence, the place to which the greatest abilities were
+irresistibly attracted, and in which their greatest work was done.  But
+the London of Shakespeare's time was vastly different from the London
+of to-day.  On all sides, except that washed by the Thames, the
+mediaeval walls were still standing and served as the city's actual
+boundary.  Outside them were several important suburbs, but where now
+houses extend for miles in unbroken ranks, there were then open fields
+and pleasant woods.  The total population of the city hardly exceeded a
+hundred thousand, while that of the suburbs, including the many guests
+of the numerous inns, amounted to perhaps a hundred thousand more.
+Hence, although there undoubtedly was crowding in the poorer quarters,
+London was a much more open city than it is to-day.  The great houses
+all had their gardens, and a few minutes walk in any direction brought
+one to open country.
+
+{54}
+
+Westminster, now well within the greater London, was then only the most
+important suburb.  Here was the Hall in which Parliament met, and, not
+far away, Whitehall, the favorite London residence of the Queen.
+Attracted by the presence of royalty, many of the great nobles had
+built their houses in this quarter, so that the north bank of the
+Thames from Westminster to the City was lined with stately buildings.
+
+The Thames was London's pleasantest highway.  It was then a clear,
+beautiful river spanned by a single bridge.  If one wished to go from
+the City to Westminster, or even eastward or westward within the City
+itself, one could go most easily by boat.  The Queen in her royal barge
+was often to be seen on the river.  The great merchant companies had
+their splendid barges, in which they made stately progresses.  One went
+by boat to the bear gardens and theaters on the south bank.  Below the
+bridge, the river was crowded with shipping.  At one of the wharves lay
+an object of universal interest, the _Golden Hind_, the ship in which
+Drake had made his famous voyage round the world.
+
+Within the city, most of the streets were narrow, poorly paved, and
+worse lighted.  Those who went about by night had their servants carry
+torches, called "links," before them, or hired boys to light them home.
+Such sanitation as existed was wretched, so that plagues and other
+diseases spread rapidly and carried off an appalling number of victims.
+The ignorance and inefficiency of the police is rather portrayed than
+satirized in Shakespeare's Dogberry and Verges.  Such evils were common
+to all seventeenth-century cities, but these cities had their
+compensations in a freedom {55} and picturesqueness which have
+disappeared from our modern towns.
+
++The Citizens+.--In Elizabethan London, as in every city, the men who
+represented extremes of wealth and poverty, the courtiers and their
+imitators, the beggars and the sharpers, are those of whom we hear
+most; but the greater part of the population, that which controlled the
+city government, was of the middle class, sober, self-respecting
+tradespeople, inclined towards Puritanism, and jealous of their
+independence.  Such people naturally distrusted and disliked the actors
+and their class, and used against them, as far as they could, the great
+authority of the city.  In spite of court favor, the actors were
+compelled by city ordinances to build their theaters outside the city
+limits or on ground which the city did not control.  Several attempts
+were made to suppress play acting altogether, ostensibly because of the
+danger that crowded audiences would spread the plague when it became
+epidemic.  In spite of this official opposition, however, the sober
+citizens formed a goodly part of theater audiences until after the
+accession of King James, when the rising tide of Puritanism led to
+increased austerity.  At no time were the majority of the citizens
+entirely free from a love for worldly pleasures.  They swelled the
+crowds at the taverns, and their wives often vied with the great ladies
+of court in extravagance of dress.
+
++St. Paul's+.--The great meeting place of London was, oddly enough, the
+nave of St. Paul's Cathedral.  This superb Gothic church, later
+destroyed by the Great Fire, was used as a common passageway, as a
+place for doing business and for meeting friends.  In {56} the late
+morning hours, the men-about-town promenaded there, displaying their
+gorgeous clothes and hailing those whom they wished to have known as
+their acquaintances.  If a gallant's cash were at low ebb, he loitered
+there, hoping for an invitation to dinner.  If he had had a dinner, he
+often came back for another stroll in the afternoon.  At one pillar he
+would find lawyers standing; at another, serving men seeking
+employment; at still another, public secretaries.  Here one could learn
+anything from the latest fashion to the latest political scandal.
+Meanwhile, divine worship might be going on in the chancel, unobserved
+unless some fop wished to make himself conspicuous by joking with the
+choir boys.  Thus St. Paul's was a school of life invaluable to the
+dramatist.  We know that Ben Jonson learned much there, and we can
+hardly doubt that Shakespeare did likewise.
+
++The Taverns+.--Another center of London life was the tavern.  The man
+who would now lunch at his club then dined at an 'ordinary,' a _table
+d'hōte_ in some tavern.  Men dined at noon, and then sat on over their
+wine, smoking or playing at cards or dice.  In the evening one could
+always find there music and good company.  One tradition of Shakespeare
+tells of his evenings at the Mermaid tavern.  "Many were the
+wit-combates," writes Fuller, "betwixt him [Shakespeare] and Ben
+Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great gallion, and an English
+man of War; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in
+Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances.  Shake-spear, with the
+English man-of-War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn
+with all tides, {57} tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the
+quickness of his Wit and Invention."  Francis Beaumont, the dramatist,
+wrote the following verses to Ben Jonson:--
+
+                "What things have we seen
+  Done at the Mermaid, heard words that have been
+  So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
+  As if everyone from whence they came
+  Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
+  And had resolved to live a fool the rest
+  Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown
+  Wit able enough to justify the town
+  For three days past; wit that might warrant be
+  For the whole city to talk foolishly
+  Till that were cancelled; and when that was gone,
+  We left an air behind us, which alone
+  Was able to make the two next companies
+  (Right witty, though but downright fools) more wise."
+
+
++At the Theater+.--Having dined, the Elizabethan gentleman often
+visited one of the numerous bookshops, or else went to the theater,
+perhaps to the Globe.  In the latter case, since this theater was on
+the south bank of the Thames, he was most likely to cross the river by
+boat.  A flag, floating from a turret over the theater, announced a
+performance there.  The prices paid for admission varied, but the
+regular price for entrance to the Globe seems to have been a penny
+(about fifteen cents in the money of to-day).  This, however, gave one
+only the right to stand in the pit or, perhaps, to sit in the top
+gallery.  For a box the price was probably a shilling (equivalent to
+two dollars), the poorer seats costing less.  At the aristocratic
+Blackfriars, sixpence (one dollar) was the {58} lowest price.  At this
+theater, the most fashionable occupied seats on the stage, where they
+were at once extremely conspicuous and in the way of the actors; but
+this custom probably did not spread to the Globe before 1603.  At the
+Blackfriars, too, one could have a seat in the pit, while at the Globe
+the pit was filled with a standing, jostling crowd of apprentices and
+riffraff.  In the theater every one was talking, laughing, smoking,
+buying oranges, nuts, wine, or cheap books from shouting venders, just
+as is done in some music halls to-day.  Once the trumpet had sounded
+for the third time, indicating the beginning of the performance, a
+reasonable degree of quiet was restored, until a pause in the action
+let the uproar burst forth anew.  At an Elizabethan theater there were
+no pauses for shifting scenes.  Consequently the few introduced were
+determined either by convention or by breaks in the action.  At the
+Blackfriars and more aristocratic theaters, there was music between the
+acts, but at the Globe this was not customary until a comparatively
+late date, if ever.
+
+An audience like that at the Globe, made up of all sorts and conditions
+of men from the highest nobility to the lowest criminal, was, quite
+naturally, not easy to please as a whole.  Yet, after all, the
+Elizabethans were less critical in some respects than we are.  Although
+many comparatively cheap books were published, reading had not then
+become a habit, and a good plot was not the less appreciated because it
+was old.  The audiences did, however, demand constant variety, so that
+plays had short runs, and most dramatists were forced to pay more
+attention to quantity {59} than to quality of production.  The
+playwrights had, nevertheless, one great advantage over ours.  Since
+the performances were given in the afternoon, and since theaters like
+the Globe were open to the weather, these men wrote for audiences which
+were fresh and wide-awake, ready to receive the best which the
+dramatist had to give.
+
+It was under such conditions as these that Shakespeare worked.  He
+wrote for all classes of people, men bound together, nevertheless, by a
+common enthusiasm for England's past and a common confidence in
+England's future; men who were constantly coming in contact with
+persons from all parts of Europe, with sailors and travelers who had
+seen the wonders of the New World and the Old; men so stimulated by new
+discoveries, by new achievements of every sort, that hardly anything,
+even the supernatural, seemed for them impossible.  Outside of ancient
+Athens, no dramatist has had a more favorable environment.
+
+
+The best books on this subject for the general reader: Sir Walter
+Besant, _London in the Time of the Tudors_ (London, 1904); H. T.
+Stephenson, _Shakespeare's London_ (Henry Holt, 1905); T. F. Ordish,
+_Shakespeare's London_ (The Temple Shakespeare Manuals, 1897).
+
+
+
+
+{60}
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS
+
+We shall later trace Shakespeare's development as a writer of plays.
+We must first, however, turn back to discuss some early productions of
+his, which were composed before most of his dramas, and which are
+wholly distinct from these in character.
+
+Every young author who mixes with men notices what kinds of work other
+writers are producing, and is tempted to try his hand at every kind in
+turn.  Later he learns that he is fitted for one particular kind of
+work; and, leaving other forms of writing to other men, devotes the
+rest of his life to his chosen field.  So it was with Shakespeare.
+While a young man, he tried several different forms of poetry in
+imitation of contemporary versifiers, and thus produced the poems which
+we are to discuss in this chapter.  Later he came to realize that his
+special genius was in the field of the drama, and abandoned other types
+of poetry to turn his whole energy toward the production of plays.
+Although unquestionably inferior to the author's greatest comedies and
+tragedies, these early poems are, in their kind, masterpieces of
+literature.
+
++Venus and Adonis+.--The first of these poems, a verse narrative of
+some 1204 lines, called _Venus and Adonis_, was printed in the spring
+of 1593 when the {61} author was about twenty-nine years old.  As far
+as we have evidence, it was the first of all Shakespeare's works to
+appear in print;[1] but it is possible that some early plays were
+composed before it although printed after it.
+
+Other poets of the day had been interested in retelling in their own
+way old stories of Greek and Roman literature, and Shakespeare, in
+_Venus and Adonis_, was engaged in the same task.  The outline of the
+poem is taken (either directly or through an imitation of previous
+borrowers) from the Latin poet Ovid,[2] who lived in the time of
+Christ.  Venus, the goddess of love, is enamored of a beautiful boy,
+called Adonis, and tries in vain by every device to win his affection.
+He repulses all her advances, and finally runs away to go hunting, and
+is killed by a wild boar.  Venus mourns over his dead body, and causes
+a flower (the anemone or wind flower) to spring from his blood.
+Shakespeare's handling of the story shows both the virtues and the
+defects of a young writer.  It is more diffuse, more wordy, than his
+later work, and written for the taste of another time than ours; but,
+on the other hand, it is full of vivid, picturesque language of
+melodious rhythm, and of charming little touches of country life.
+
+Like most of Shakespeare's verse, it is written in iambic
+pentameter.[3]  The poem is divided into stanzas {62} of six lines
+each, in which the first and third lines rime, the second and fourth,
+and the fifth and sixth.  We represent this arrangement of rimes by
+saying that the rime scheme of the stanza is _a, b, a, b, c, c,_ where
+the same letter represents the same riming sound at the ends of lines.
+As a specimen stanza, the following, often quoted because of the vivid
+picture it presents, is given.  It describes a mettlesome horse.
+
+  "Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,      (_a-)
+  Round breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,       (_b-)
+  High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,  (_a_)
+  Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:         (_b_)
+    Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,          (_c_)
+    Save a proud rider on so proud a back."                  (_c_)
+
+
++The Rape of Lucrece+.--A year later, in 1594, when Shakespeare was
+thirty, he published another narrative poem, _The Rape of Lucrece_.
+The story of Lucrece had also come down from Ovid.[4]  This poem is
+about 1800 lines in length.  It tells the old legend, found at the
+beginning of all Roman histories, how Sextus Tarquin ravished Lucrece,
+the pure and beautiful wife of Collatine, one of the Roman nobles; how
+she killed herself rather than survive her shame; and how her husband
+and friends swore in revenge to dethrone the whole Tarquin family.
+This poem, as compared with _Venus and Adonis_, shows some traces of
+increasing maturity.  The author does more serious and concentrated
+thinking as he writes.  Whether or not it is a better poem is a
+question which every man must settle for himself.  Its best passages
+are probably more impressive, its poorest ones more dull.
+
+{63}
+
+The form of stanza used here is known as "rime royal," which had become
+famous two centuries before as a favorite meter of the first great
+English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.  This stanza contains seven lines
+instead of six: the rime-scheme is as follows: _a, b, a, b, b, c, c_.
+The following is a specimen stanza from the poem:--
+
+  "Now stole upon the time the dead of night,            (_a_)
+  When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes.            (_b_)
+  No comfortable star did lend his light,                (_a_)
+  No noise but owls' and wolves' death-boding cries;     (_b_)
+  Now serves the season that they may surprise           (_b_)
+    The silly lambs.  Pure thoughts are dead and still,  (_c_)
+    While lust and murder wakes to stain and kill."      (_c_)
+
+
+A significant fact about both of these poems is that they were
+dedicated to Henry Wriothesley (pronounced Wrisley or Rot'-es-ly), Earl
+of Southampton, who has already been mentioned as a friend and patron
+of Shakespeare.  The dedication at the beginning of _Venus and Adonis_
+is conventional and almost timid in tone; that prefixed to the Lucrece
+seems to indicate a closer and more confident friendship which had
+grown up during the intervening year.  Dedications to some prominent
+man were frequently prefixed to books by Elizabethan authors, either as
+a mark of love and respect to the person addressed, or in hopes that a
+little pecuniary help would result from this acceptable form of
+flattery.  In Shakespeare's case it may possibly have fulfilled both of
+these purposes.
+
++The Sonnets+.--Besides these two narrative poems Shakespeare wrote
+numerous sonnets.  In order to {64} understand his accomplishment in
+this form of poetry, some account of the type is necessary.
+
+The sonnet may be briefly defined as a rimed poem in iambic pentameter,
+containing fourteen lines, divided into the octave of eight lines and
+the sextet of six.
+
+The sonnet originated in southern Europe, and reached its highest stage
+of development in the hands of the great Italian poet Petrarch, who
+lived some two centuries before Shakespeare.  As written by him it was
+characterized by a complicated rime scheme,[5] {65} which gave each one
+of these short poems an atmosphere of unusual elegance and polish.
+
+Sonnets were often written in groups on a single theme.  These were
+called sonnet sequences.  Each separate poem was like a single facet of
+a diamond, illuminating the subject from a new point of view.
+
+In the hands of Petrarch and other great writers of his own and later
+times, the sonnet became one of the most popular forms of verse in
+Europe.  Such popularity for any particular type of literature never
+arises without a reason.  The aim of the sonnet is to embody one single
+idea or emotion, one deep thought or wave of strong feeling, to
+concentrate the reader's whole mind on this one central idea, and to
+clinch it at the end by some epigrammatic phrase which will fasten it
+firmly in the reader's memory.  For instance, in Milton's sonnet _On
+his Blindness_, the central idea is the glory of patience; and the last
+line drives this main idea home in words so pithily adapted that they
+have become almost proverbial.
+
+During the sixteenth century, rich young Englishmen were in the habit
+of traveling in Italy for education and general culture.  They brought
+home with them a great deal that they saw in this brilliant and highly
+educated country; and among other things they imported into England the
+Italian habit of writing sonnets.  The first men who composed sonnets
+in English after the Italian models were two young noblemen, Sir Thomas
+Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who wrote just before Shakespeare was
+born.  Their work called out a crowd of imitators; and in a few years
+the writing of sonnets became the fashion.
+
+{66}
+
+As a young man, Shakespeare found himself among a crowd of authors,
+with whom sonnetteering was a literary craze; and it is not surprising
+that he should follow the fashion.  Most of these were probably
+composed about 1594, when the poet was thirty years old; but in regard
+to this there is some uncertainty.  A few were certainly later.  They
+were not printed in a complete volume until 1609;[6] and then they were
+issued by a piratical publisher, apparently without the author's
+consent.
+
+In the Shakespearean sonnet the complicated rime scheme of its Italian
+original has become very much simplified, being reduced to the
+following form: _a, b, a, b; c, d, c, d_; _e, f, e, f_; _g, g_.  This
+is merely three four-line stanzas with alternate rimes, plus a final
+couplet.  Such a simplified form had already been used by other English
+authors, from whom our poet borrowed it.
+
+Shakespeare's sonnets, apart from some scattered ones in his plays, are
+154[7] in number.  They are usually divided into two groups or
+sequences.  The first sequence consists of numbers 1-126 (according to
+the original edition); and most of them are unquestionably addressed to
+a man.  The second sequence contains numbers 127-154, and the majority
+of these are clearly written to a woman.  There are a few in both
+groups which do not show clearly the sex of the person addressed, and
+also a few which are not addressed to any one.
+
+{67}
+
+Beyond some vague guesses, we have no idea as to the identity of the
+"dark lady" who inspired most of the last twenty-eight sonnets.
+Somewhat less uncertainty surrounds the man to whom the poet speaks in
+the first sequence.  A not improbable theory is that he was the Earl of
+Southampton already mentioned, although this cannot be considered as
+proved.[8]  The chief arguments which point to Southampton are: (_a_)
+That Shakespeare had already dedicated _Venus and Adonis_ and _Lucrece_
+to him; (_b_) that he was regarded at that time as a patron of poets;
+(_c_) that the statements about this unnamed friend, his reluctance to
+marry, his fair complexion and personal beauty, his mixture of virtues
+and faults, fit Southampton better than any other man of that period
+whom we have any cause to associate with Shakespeare; and (_d_) that he
+was the only patron of Shakespeare's early years known to us, and was
+warmly interested in the poet.
+
+The literary value of the different sonnets varies considerably.  When
+an author is writing a fashionable {68} form of verse, he is apt to
+become more or less imitative and artificial at times, saying things
+merely because it is the vogue to say them; and Shakespeare here cannot
+be wholly acquitted of this fault.  But at other times he speaks from
+heart to heart with a depth of real emotion and wealth of vivid
+expression which has given us some of the noblest poetry in the
+language.
+
+Another question, more difficult to settle than the literary value of
+these poems, is their value as a revelation of Shakespeare's own life.
+If we could take in earnest everything which is said in the sonnets, we
+should learn a great many facts about the man who wrote them.  But
+modern scholarship seems to feel more and more that we cannot take all
+their statements literally.  We must remember here again that
+Shakespeare says many things because it was the fashion in his day for
+sonnetteers to say them.  For example, he gives some eloquent
+descriptions of the woes of old age; but we know that contemporary
+poets lamented about old age when they had not yet reached years of
+discretion; and consequently we are not at all convinced that
+Shakespeare was either really old or prematurely aged.  Such
+considerations need not interfere with our enjoyment of the poetry, for
+the author's imagination may have made a poetical fancy seem real to
+him as he wrote; but they certainly do not lessen our doubts in regard
+to the value of the sonnets as autobiography.  The majority of the
+sonnets, at least, cannot be said to throw any light on Shakespeare's
+life.
+
+There are, however, six sonnets, connected with each other in subject,
+which, more definitely than any of {69} the others, shadow forth a real
+event in the poet's life.  These are numbers XL, XLI, XLII, CXXXIII,
+CXXXIV, CXLIV.  They seem to show that a woman whom the poet loved had
+forsaken him for the man to whom the sonnets are written; and that the
+poet submits to this, owing to his deep friendship for the man.  Two of
+these sonnets are given below.
+
+
+SONNET CXLIV
+
+  "Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
+    Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
+  The better angel is a man right fair,
+    The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
+  To win me soon to hell, my female evil
+    Tempteth my better angel from my side,
+  And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
+    Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
+  And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
+    Suspect I may, yet not directly tell:
+  But being both from me, both to each friend,
+    I guess one angel in another's hell:
+  Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
+  Till my bad angel fire my good one out."
+
+SONNET XLI
+
+  "These pretty wrongs that liberty commits,
+    When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
+  Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
+    For still temptation follows where thou art.
+  Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
+    Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
+  And when a woman woos, what woman's son
+    Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?
+  Ay me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,
+    And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
+  Who lead thee in their riot even there
+
+{70}
+
+    Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth,
+  Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
+  Thine, by thy beauty being false to me."
+
+
+Again, in Sonnet CX, we find an allusion to the distasteful nature of
+the actor's profession which seems to ring sincere.  Thus in a few
+cases Shakespeare may be giving us glimpses into his real heart; but in
+general the sentiments expressed in his sonnets could be explained as
+due to the literary conventions of this time.
+
++Other Poems+.--The two narrative poems and the sonnets make up most of
+Shakespeare's nondramatic poetry.  A word may be added about some other
+scattered bits of verse which are connected with his name.  In 1599 an
+unscrupulous publisher, named William Jaggard, brought out a book of
+miscellaneous poems by various authors, called _The Passionate
+Pilgrim_.  Since Shakespeare was a popular writer, his name was sure to
+increase the sale of any book; so Jaggard, with an advertising instinct
+worthy of a later age, coolly printed the whole thing as the work of
+Shakespeare.  As a matter of fact, only a few short pieces were by him;
+and were probably stolen from some private manuscript.
+
+In 1601 a poem, _The Phoenix and the Turtle_, was also printed as his
+in an appendix to a longer poem by another man.  We cannot trust the
+printer when he signs it with Shakespeare's name, and we have no other
+evidence about its authorship; but the majority of scholars believe it
+to be genuine.  Another poem, _A Lover's Complaint_, which was printed
+in the same volume with the sonnets in 1609, is of distinctly less
+merit and probably spurious.
+
+{71}
+
+Lastly, the short poems incorporated in the plays deserve brief notice.
+In a way they are part of the plots in which they are embedded; but
+they may also be considered as separate lyrics.  Several sonnets and
+verses in stanza form occur in _Romeo and Juliet_ and in the early
+comedies.  Three of these were printed as separate poems in _The
+Passionate Pilgrim_.  Far more important than the above, however, are
+the songs which are scattered through all the plays early and late.
+Their merit is of a supreme quality; some of the most famous musical
+composers, inspired by his works, have graced them with admirable
+music.  One of the most attractive features in his lyrics is their
+spontaneous ease of expression.  They seem to lilt into music of their
+own accord, as naturally as birds sing.  The best of these are found in
+the comedies of the Second Period and in the romantic plays of the
+Fourth.  "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more" in _Much Ado About
+Nothing_; "Blow, blow, thou winter wind" in _As You Like it_; "Hark,
+hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings" in _Cymbeline_; and "Full fathom
+five thy father lies" in _The Tempest_,--these and others like them
+show that the author, though primarily a dramatist, could be among the
+greatest of song writers when he tried.
+
+The following lines taken from the little-read play, _The Two Gentlemen
+of Verona_, may serve to illustrate the perfection of the Shakespearean
+lyric.
+
+  SONG
+
+  Who is Sylvia? what is she,
+    That all our swains commend her?
+  Holy, fair, and wise is she;
+    The heaven such grace did lend her,
+  That she might admired be.
+
+{72}
+
+  Is she kind as she is fair?
+    For beauty lives with kindness:
+  Love doth to her eyes repair
+    To help him of his blindness,
+  And being helped, inhabits there.
+
+  Then to Sylvia let us sing,
+    That Sylvia is excelling;
+  She excels each mortal thing
+    Upon the dull earth dwelling;
+  To her let us garlands bring.
+
+
+Such are Shakespeare's nondramatic writings.  Two narrative poems with
+the faults of youth but with many redeeming virtues; one hundred and
+fifty-four sonnets, very unequal in merit but touching at their best
+the high-water mark of English verse; a few stray fragments of disputed
+authorship and doubtful value; and finally a handful of scattered
+songs, short, but almost perfect of their kind,--this is what we have
+outside of the plays.  Neither in quantity nor quality can this work
+compare with the poetic value of the great dramas; but had it been
+written by any other man, we should have thought it wonderful enough.
+
+
+On the sonnets, the appendix to Mr. Sidney Lee's book, _A Life of
+William Shakespeare_, 1909, is particularly valuable.
+
+
+
+[1] Shakespeare in his dedication calls it "the first heir of my
+invention"; but opinions differ as to what he meant by this.
+
+[2] Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, Book X.
+
+[3] That is, the common, or standard, line has ten syllables with an
+accent on every even syllable, as in the following line:--
+
+    1   +2+  3  +4+ 5  +6+ 7   +8+   9  +10+
+   The NIGHT of SORrow NOW is TURN'D to DAY.
+
+[4] From his _Fasti_.
+
+[5] The rime scheme of the Italian type divided each sonnet into two
+parts, the first one of eight lines, the second of six.  In the first
+eight lines the rimes usually went a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a; but
+sometimes _a, b, a, b, a, b, a, b_: in both cases using only two rimes
+for the eight lines.  In the second or six-line part there were several
+different arrangements, of which the following were the most common:
+(1) _c, d, e, c, d, e_; (2) _c, d, c, d, c, d_; (3) _c, d, e, d, c, e_.
+All of these rime-schemes alike were intended, by their constant
+repetition and interlocking of the same rimes, to give the whole poem
+an air of exquisite workmanship, like that of a finely modeled vase.
+Here is an English sonnet of Milton's, imitating the form of Petrarch's
+and illustrating its rime scheme:--
+
+  "When I consider how my light is spent                       (_a_)
+          Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,        (_b_)
+          And that one talent which is death to hide           (_b_)
+  Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent             (_a_)
+  To serve therewith my Maker, and present                     (_a_)
+          My true account, lest He returning chide,            (_b_)
+          Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?             (_b_)
+  I fondly ask.  But Patience, to prevent                      (_a_)
+  That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need                 (_c_)
+          Either man's work or his own gifts.  Who best        (_d_)
+        Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best.  His state    (_e_)
+  Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,                   (_c_)
+          And post o'er land and ocean without rest;           (_d_)
+        They also serve who only stand and wait."              (_e_)
+
+[6] See p. 113.
+
+[7] Including at least three which do not have in all respects the
+regular sonnet form.
+
+[8] Southampton's chief rival for this position in the opinion of
+scholars has been William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.  One point in his
+favor has been that the initials W. H. (supposed to stand for William
+Herbert) are given as those of the person to whom the dedication of the
+volume was addressed by its publisher.  Mr. Sidney Lee thinks, however,
+that this is a dedication by the printer to the printer's friend, not
+by Shakespeare to Shakespeare's friend,--a possible, though not wholly
+convincing, explanation.  The First Folio was dedicated to Herbert
+after Shakespeare's death, but we have no evidence that the two men
+were intimate friends while living.  Meres mentions the sonnets of
+Shakespeare in 1598, so part of them at least must have been written
+before that year; but Herbert did not have a permanent residence in
+London until 1598, and was then only eighteen years old.
+
+
+
+
+{73}
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE's PLAYS
+
+The most profitable method of studying any writer is to take up his
+works in the order in which they were written.  More and more this
+method is being adopted toward all authors, ancient and modern, Virgil
+or Milton, Dante or Tennyson.  We are thus enabled to trace the gradual
+growth of the poet's mind from one production to another,--his constant
+increase in skill, in judgment, in knowledge of mankind.  The great
+characteristic of the genius is, not simply that he knows more than
+other men at first, but that he has in him such vast possibilities of
+growth, of improving with time, and learning by his own mistakes.
+Consequently, it is very important to know that a certain play or poem
+is faulty because it was its author's first crude attempt; that a
+second is better because it was written five years later in the light
+of added experience; and that a third is better still because it came
+ten years after the second, at the climax of the writer's powers.
+
+Besides showing the author's growth, this method also shows his
+relation to the great literary movements of his time.  As fashions in
+dress and sports keep shifting, fashions in literature are changing
+just as constantly, and the dominant type may alter two or {74} three
+times during one man's life.  If an author changes to meet these
+demands, it is important to know that one of his plays was merry comedy
+because written at a time when merry comedies filled all the
+playhouses; and that another is sober tragedy because composed while
+most of the theaters were acting and demanding sober tragedy.
+
+Now Shakespeare not only improved a great deal while composing his
+plays, but also conformed, to some extent at least, to the different
+tastes of his audience at different periods of his life.  Hence, a
+knowledge of the order in which his plays were written is very
+valuable, and should form the first step in a careful study of his
+writings.
+
+Unfortunately, when we attempt to arrange Shakespeare's plays in
+chronological order, we encounter many practical difficulties in
+finding just what this order is.  We know that Tennyson developed a
+great deal as a poet between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three; and
+we can show this by pointing to four successive volumes of his poems,
+published respectively at the ages of eighteen, twenty-one,
+twenty-three, and thirty-three, and each rising in merit above the one
+before it.  We know definitely in what order these volumes come, for we
+find on the title-page of each the date when it was printed.  But
+scarcely half of Shakespeare's plays were printed in this way during
+his life.  The others, some twenty in all, are found only in one big
+folio volume which gives no hint of their proper order or year of
+composition, and which bears on its title-page the date of the
+printing, 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died.  Many plays, too,
+published {75} early, were written some years before publication, so
+that the date of printing on the flyleaf of the quarto, even where a
+quarto exists, simply shows that the play was written sometime before
+that year but does not tell at all _how long_ before.  How, then, are
+we to trace Shakespeare's growth from year to year, through his
+successive dramas, when the quartos help us so little and when the
+majority of these dramas are piled before us in one volume by the
+editors of the First Folio, without a word of explanation as to which
+plays are early attempts and which mature work?
+
+At first sight the above problem seems almost hopeless.  The researches
+of scholars for over a century, however, have gathered together a mass
+of evidence which determines pretty accurately the order in which these
+different plays were written.
+
+This evidence is of two kinds, external and internal.  By external
+evidence we mean that found _outside_ of the play, references to it in
+other books of the time, and similar material.  By internal evidence we
+mean that found _inside_ of the play itself.
+
++External Evidence+.--This is of several kinds.  In the first place,
+every play which was to be printed had to be entered in the Stationers'
+Register, and all these entries are dated.  Hence we know that certain
+plays were prepared for publication by the time mentioned.  For
+instance, "A Book called Antony and Cleopatra" was entered May 20,
+1608; and although apparently the book was not finally printed at that
+time, and although our only copy of _Antony and Cleopatra_ is that in
+the Folio of 1623, yet we feel reasonably certain from this entry that
+this play must have been written either {76} in 1608 or earlier.  In
+addition to the record of the Stationers' Register, we have the dates
+on the title-pages of such plays as appeared in Quarto.  These
+evidences, it must be remembered, determine only the latest possible
+date for the play, as many were written long before they were printed,
+or even entered.
+
+Again, other men sometimes used in their books expressions borrowed
+from Shakespeare or remarks which sound like allusions to something of
+his.  Here, if we know the date of the other man's book, we learn that
+the play of Shakespeare from which he borrowed must have been in
+existence before that date.  Thus, when the poet Barksted prints a poem
+in 1607 and borrows a passage in it from _Measure for Measure_, we
+conclude that _Measure for Measure_ must have been produced before
+1607, or Barksted could not have copied from it.  This form of evidence
+has its dangers, since occasionally we cannot tell whether Shakespeare
+borrowed from the other man or the other man from him; nevertheless it
+is often valuable.
+
+Furthermore, we sometimes find in contemporary books or papers, which
+are dated, an account of the acting of some play.  A law student named
+John Manningham left a diary in which he records that on February 2,
+1602 he saw a play called _Twelfth Night or What You Will_ in the Hall
+of the Middle Temple; and his account of the play shows that it was
+Shakespeare's.  Dr. Simon Forman, in a similar diary, describes the
+performance of three Shakespearean plays, two of the accounts being
+dated.  Still more important in this class is the famous allusion,
+already quoted, by Francis Meres in his _Palladis Tamia_, a {77} book
+published in 1598.  In this he mentions with high praise six comedies
+of Shakespeare: _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _The Comedy of Errors_,
+_Love's Labour's Lost_, _Love's Labour's Won_,[1] _A Midsummer Night's
+Dream_, and _The Merchant of Venice_; and six "tragedies": _Richard
+II_, _Richard III_, _Henry IV_, _King John_, _Titus Andronicus_, and
+_Romeo and Juliet_.[2] Hence, we know that all these plays were written
+and acted somewhere before 1598, although three of them did not appear
+in print until 1623.
+
+The above list does not exhaust all the forms of external evidence, but
+merely shows its general nature.  External evidence, as can be seen, is
+not something mysterious and peculiar, but simply an application of
+common sense to the problem in hand.
+
+Frequently two pieces of external evidence will accomplish what neither
+one could do alone.  Often one fact will show that a play came
+somewhere before a certain date, but not show how long before, and
+another will prove that the play came after another date, without
+telling how long after.  For example, _King Lear_ was written before
+1606, for we have a definite statement that it was performed then.  It
+was written after 1603, for it borrowed material from a book printed in
+that year.  This method of hemming in a play between its earliest and
+its latest possible date is common and useful, both with Shakespeare
+and with other writers.
+
++Internal Evidence+.--By the above methods a few plays have been dated
+quite accurately, and many others confined between limits only two or
+three years {78} apart.  But many plays are still dated very vaguely,
+and some are not dated at all.  For further results we must fall back
+on internal evidence.  The first, though by no means the most
+important, form of this consists of allusions _within the play to
+contemporary events_.  If a boy should read in an old diary of his
+grandmother's that she had just heard of the fight at Gettysburg, he
+would feel certain that the words were written a few days after that
+great battle, even if there were no date anywhere in the manuscript.
+In the same way, when the Prologue of Shakespeare's _Henry V_ alludes
+to the fact that Elizabeth's general (the Earl of Essex) is in Ireland
+quelling a rebellion, we know that this was written between April and
+September of 1599, the period during which Essex actually was in
+Ireland.  Similarly, certain details in _The Tempest_ appear to have
+been borrowed from accounts of the wreck of Sir George Somers's ship in
+1609.  As Shakespeare could not have borrowed from these accounts
+before they existed, he must have written his comedy sometime after
+1609.[3]
+
+But the main form of internal evidence, what is usually meant by that
+term, is the testimony in the character and style of the plays
+themselves as to the maturity of the man who wrote them.  Just as the
+stump of a tree sawn across shows its age by its successive rings of
+growth, so a poem, if carefully {79} examined, shows the rings of
+growth in the author's style of thought and expression.
+
+The simplest and most tangible form of this evidence is that which is
+found in meter.  If we read in order of composition those plays which
+we have already succeeded in dating, we shall find certain habits of
+versification steadily growing on the author, as play succeeded play.
+
+In the first place, most of the lines in the early plays are
+'end-stopped'; that is, the sense halts at the close of each line with
+a resulting pause in reading.  In the later plays the sense frequently
+runs over from one line into another, producing what is called a
+'run-on' line instead of an 'end-stopped' one.  By comparing the
+following passages, the first of which contains nothing but end-stopped
+lines and the second several run-on lines, the reader can easily see
+the difference.
+
+
+(_a_) From an early play:--
+
+  "I from my mistress come to you in post:
+  If I return, I shall be post indeed,
+  For she will score your fault upon my pate.
+  Methinks your maw, like mine, should be your clock,
+  And strike you home without a messenger."
+          --_Comedy of Errors_, I, ii, 63-67.
+
+
+(_b_) From a late play:--
+
+  "Mark your divorce, young sir,  [end-stopped]
+  Whom son I dare not call.  Thou art too base  [run-on]
+  To be acknowledg'd.  Thou, a sceptre's heir,  [end-stopped]
+  That thus affects a sheep-hook!  Thou old traitor,  [end-stopped]
+
+{80}
+
+  I am sorry that by hanging thee I can  [run-on]
+  But shorten your life one week.  And thou, fresh piece  [run-on]
+  Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know  [end-stopped]
+  The royal fool thou cop'st with...--"
+          --_Winter's Tale_, IV, iv, 427-434.
+
+
+Since Shakespeare keeps constantly increasing his use of run-on lines
+in plays for which dates are known, it seems reasonable to assume that
+he did this in all his work, that it was a habit which grew on him from
+year to year.  Hence, if we sort out his plays in order, putting those
+with the fewest run-on lines first and those with the greatest number
+last, we shall have good reason for believing that this represents
+roughly the order in which they were written.
+
+A second form of metrical evidence is found in the proportion of
+'masculine' and 'feminine' endings in the verse.  A line has a
+masculine ending when its last syllable is stressed; when it ends, for
+example, on words or phrases like _behold'_, _control'_, _no more'_,
+_begone'_.  On the other hand, if the last stressed syllable of the
+line is followed by an unstressed one, the two together are called a
+feminine ending.  Instances of this would be lines ending in such words
+or phrases as, _unho'/ly_, _forgive' /me_, _benight'/ed_.  Notice the
+difference between them in the following passage:--
+
+  "Our revels now are ended.  These our actors  [feminine]
+  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and  [masculine]
+  Are melted into air, into thin air;  [masculine]
+  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,  [feminine]
+  The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,  [feminine]
+
+{81}
+
+  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  [masculine]
+  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,  [masculine]
+  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,  [feminine]
+  Leave not a rack behind."
+          --_Tempest_, IV, i, 147-166.
+
+
+In the main, although with some exceptions, the number of feminine
+endings, like the number of run-on lines, increases as the plays become
+later in date.
+
+A third form of ending, which practically does not appear at all in the
+early plays, and which recurs with increasing frequency in the later
+ones, is what is called a 'weak ending.'[4]  This occurs whenever a
+run-on line ends in a word which according to the meter needs to be
+stressed, and according to the sense ought not to be.  Here there is a
+clash between meter and meaning, and the reader compromises by making a
+pause before the last syllable instead of emphasizing the syllable
+itself.  Below are two examples of weak endings:--
+
+  "It should the good ship so have swallowed, and
+  The fraughting souls within her."
+
+              "I will rend an oak
+  And peg thee in his knotty entrails _till_
+  Thou hast howled away twelve winters."
+
+
+Lastly, we have the evidence of rime.  Run-on lines, feminine endings,
+and weak endings constantly increase as Shakespeare grows older.  Rime,
+on the other hand, in general decreases.  The early plays are {82} full
+of it; the later ones have very little.  It does not follow that the
+chronological order of the individual plays could be exactly determined
+by their percentage of riming lines, for subject matter makes a great
+difference.  In a staged fairy story, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
+the poet would naturally fall into couplets.  But, other things being
+equal, a large amount of rime is always a sign of early work.  This is
+especially true when the rimes occur, not in pairs, but in quatrains or
+sonnet forms, or (as they sometimes do in the first comedies) in scraps
+of sing-song doggerel.
+
+Such is the internal evidence from the various changes in
+versification.  Its value, as must always be remembered, lies in the
+fact that the results of these different tests in the main agree with
+each other and with such external evidence as we have.
+
+Then, wholly aside from metrical details, there is a large amount of
+internal evidence of other kinds,--evidence which cannot be measured by
+the rule of thumb, but which every intelligent reader must notice.  We
+feel instinctively that one play mirrors the views and emotions of
+youth, another those of middle age.  A man's face does not change more
+between twenty-five and forty than his mind changes during the same
+interval; and the difference between his thoughts at those periods is
+as distinct often as the difference between the rounded lines of youth
+and the stern features of middle age.  This is a subject which will be
+better understood in the light of the next chapter.
+
++The Order of the Plays+.--Upon such evidence as has been described, a
+list of Shakespeare's plays in their {83} chronological order can now
+be presented.  The details of evidence on date may be found in the
+account of the plays which appears in Chapters X-XIII.
+
+  Love's Labour's Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1591
+  The Comedy of Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1591
+  II and III Henry VI  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1592
+  Richard III  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592-1593
+  Two Gentlemen of Verona  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592
+  King John  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592-1593
+  Richard II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1594
+  Titus Andronicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1594
+  Midsummer Night's Dream  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1596
+  Romeo and Juliet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1591, revised 1597
+  The Merchant of Venice . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1594-1596
+  The Taming of the Shrew  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1596-1597
+  I Henry IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1597
+  II Henry IV  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1598
+  Henry V  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+  Merry Wives of Windsor . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+  Much Ado about Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+  As You Like It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599-1600
+  Julius Caesar  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1699-1601
+  Twelfth Night  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1601
+  Troilus and Cressida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1602
+  All's Well That Ends Well  . . . . . . . . . . . .  1602
+  Hamlet . . . . . . . . . . .  1602, 1603-1604 (two versions).
+  Measure for Measure  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1603
+  Othello  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1604
+  King Lear  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1604-1605
+  Macbeth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1605-1606
+  Antony and Cleopatra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1607-1608
+  Timon of Athens  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1607-1608
+  Pericles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1608
+  Coriolanus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1609
+  Cymbeline  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1610
+  The Winter's Tale  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1610-1611
+
+{84}
+
+  The Tempest  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1611
+  King Henry the Eighth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1612-1613
+
+
+Among the many books and articles on the subject of this chapter, the
+following may be mentioned: _Shakespeare Manual_ by F. L. Fleay
+(Macmillan and Co., London, 1876); _Shakspere_, by E. Dowden (American
+Book Co., New York); _Cartae Shakespeariante_ by D. Sambert.
+
+
+
+[1] This play is either lost, or preserved under another title.
+
+[2] Quoted in full in Chapter I, p. 10.
+
+[3] This form of evidence is usually weak and unreliable.  Most of the
+supposed allusions are much more vague than the two given.  Where there
+have been similar events in history, the allusion might be to one which
+we had forgotten when we thought it was to a similar one which we knew.
+
+[4] Mr. Ingram makes a distinction between "light" and "weak" endings.
+Both are classed together as weak endings above.  The distinction seems
+to us too subtle for any but professional students.
+
+
+
+
+{85}
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST
+
+As the reader will remember, our main aim in attempting to date
+Shakespeare's plays was to trace through them his development as a
+dramatist and poet.  Just as the successive chambers of the nautilus
+shell show the stages of growth of its dead and vanished tenant, so the
+plays of Shakespeare show how
+
+  "Each new temple, nobler than the last,
+  Shut him from heaven with a dome more vast."
+
+The great thing which distinguishes the genius from the ordinary man,
+we repeat, is his power of constant improvement; and we can trace this
+improvement here from achievements less than those of many a modern
+writer up to the noblest masterpieces of all time.
+
+Much of the material connected with this development has already been
+discussed in another connection under Internal Evidence.  Internal
+evidence, however, that one play is later than another, is nothing else
+than the marks of intellectual growth in the poet's mind between those
+two dates.  We arrange the plays in order according to indications of
+intellectual growth, just as one could fit together again the broken
+fragments of a nautilus shell, guided by the relative size of the ever
+expanding chambers.  So, in {86} discussing Shakespeare's development,
+we must bring up much old material, examining it from a different point
+of view.
+
++Meter+.--In the first place, the poet develops wonderfully in the
+command of his medium of expression; that is, in his mastery of meter.
+What is meant by the fact that as Shakespeare grew older, wiser, more
+experienced, he used more run-on lines, more weak endings, more
+feminine endings?  Simply this, that by means of these devices he
+gained more variety and expressiveness in his verse.  A passage from
+his early work (in spite of much that is fine) with every ending alike
+masculine and strong, and with every line end-stopped, harps away
+tediously in the same swing, like one lonely instrument on one
+monotonous note.  His later verse, on the other hand, with masculine
+and feminine endings, weak ones and strong, end-stopped and run-on
+lines, continually relieving each other, is like the blended music of a
+great orchestra, continually varying, now stern, now soft, in harmony
+with the thought it expresses.  Below are given two passages, the first
+from an early play, the second from a late one.  In print one may look
+as well as the other; but if one reads them aloud, he will see in a
+moment how much more variety and expressiveness there is in the second,
+especially for the purposes of acting.
+
+  "Urge not my father's anger, Eglamour,
+  But think upon my grief, a lady's grief,
+  And on the justice of my flying hence,
+  To keep me from a most unholy match,
+  Which heaven and fortune still rewards with plagues.
+  I do desire thee, even from a heart.
+
+{87}
+
+  As full of sorrows as the sea of sands,
+  To bear me company and go with me;
+  If not, to hide what I have said to thee,
+  That I may venture to depart alone."
+            --_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, IV, iii, 27-36.
+
+              "By whose aid,
+  Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
+  The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
+  And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
+  Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
+  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
+  With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory
+  Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
+  The pine and cedar; graves at my command
+  Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth
+  By my so potent art.  But this rough magic
+  I here abjure, and, when I have requir'd
+  Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
+  To work mine end upon their senses that
+  This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
+  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
+  And deeper than did ever plummet sound
+  I'll drown my book."
+            --_Tempest_, V, i, 40-57.
+
+The same reason shows why Shakespeare used less and less rime as his
+taste and experience ripened.  Rime is a valuable ornament for songs
+and lyric poetry generally; but from poetry which is actually to be
+acted on the English stage it takes away the most indispensable of all
+qualities, the natural, life-like tone of real speech.  Notice this in
+the difference between the two extracts below.  Observe how stilted and
+artificial the first one seems; and see how the second combines the
+melody and dignity of poetry with the simple naturalness of living
+language.
+
+{88}
+
+  "This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease,
+  And utters it again when God doth please.
+  He is wit's pedler, and retails his wares
+  At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs;
+  And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know,
+  Have not the grace to grace it with such show.
+  This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve;
+  Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve."
+            --_Love's Labour's Lost_, V, ii, 315-321
+
+  "I was not much afeard; for once or twice
+  I was about to speak and tell him plainly
+  The self-same sun that shines upon his court
+  Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
+  Looks on all alike.  Will't please you, sir, be gone?
+  I told you what would come of this.  Beseech you,
+  Of your own state take care.  This dream of mine--
+  Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,
+  But milk my ewes and weep."
+            --_Winter's Tale_, IV, iv, 452-400.
+
+
+I do not mean to imply by the above that Shakespeare's early verse is
+poor according to ordinary standards.  It is not; it contains much that
+is fine.  But it is far inferior to his later work, and it is inferior
+in those very details which time and experience alone can teach.
+
+An important point to remember is that while Shakespeare was growing in
+metrical skill, he was not growing alone.  A crowd of other authors
+around him were developing in a similar way; and he was learning from
+them and they from him.  The use of blank verse in English when
+Shakespeare began to write was a comparatively new practice, and, like
+all new inventions, for a time it was only imperfectly understood.  Men
+{89} had to learn by experiments and by each other's successes and
+failures, just as men in recent years have learned to fly.  Shakespeare
+surpassed all the others, as the Wright brothers in their first years
+surpassed all their fellow-aeronauts; but like the Wright brothers he
+was only part of a general movement.  No other man changed as much as
+he in one lifetime, but the whole system of dramatic versification was
+changing.
+
++Taste+.--But wholly aside from questions of meter, Shakespeare
+improved greatly in taste and judgment between the beginning and middle
+of his career.  This is shown especially in his humor.  To the young
+man humor means nothing but the cause for a temporary laugh; to a more
+developed mind it becomes a pleasant sunshine that lingers in the
+memory long after reading, and interprets all life in a manner more
+cheerful, sympathetic, and sane.  The early comedies give us nothing
+but the temporary laugh; and even this is produced chiefly by fantastic
+situations or plays on words, clever but far-fetched, puns and conceits
+so overworked that their very cleverness jars at times.  On the other
+hand, in the great humorous characters of his middle period, like
+Falstaff and Beatrice, the poet is opening up to us new vistas of
+quiet, lasting amusement and indulgent knowledge of our imperfect but
+lovable fellow-men.
+
+The same growth of taste is shown in the dramatist's increasing
+tendency to tone down all revolting details and avoid flowery,
+overwrought rhetoric.  Nobody knows whether Shakespeare wrote all of
+_Titus Andronicus_ entire or simply revised it; but we feel sure that
+the older Shakespeare would have been unwilling, even as {90} a
+reviser, to squander so much that is beautiful on such an orgy of blood
+and violence.  _Romeo and Juliet_ is full of beautiful poetry; but even
+here occasional lapses show the undeveloped taste of the young writer.
+Notice the flowery and fantastic imagery in the following passage,
+where Lady Capulet is praising Paris, her daughter's intended husband:--
+
+  "Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face
+  And find delight writ there with beauty's pen;
+  Examine every married lineament
+  And see how one another lends content,
+  And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies
+  Find written in the margent of his eyes.
+  This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
+  To beautify him, only lacks a cover.
+  The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride
+  For fair without the fair within to hide.
+  That book in many's eyes doth share the glory,
+  That in gold clasps locks in the golden story."
+            --_Romeo and Juliet_, I, iii, 81-92.
+
+If we try to picture to ourselves the post-wedlock edition of Paris
+described above, we shall see how a young man's imagination may run
+away with his judgment.  There are passages in this play as good,
+perhaps, as anything which the author ever wrote; but if we compare
+such fantastic imagery with the uniform excellence of the later
+masterpieces, we shall see how much Shakespeare unlearned and outgrew.
+
++Character Study+.--Still more significant is the poet's development in
+the conception of character.  In no other way, probably, does an
+observant mind change and expand so much as in this.  For the infant
+all men fall into two very simple categories:--people whom he likes
+{91} and people whom he doesn't.  The boy of ten has increased these
+two classes to six or eight.  The young man of twenty finds a few more,
+and begins to suspect that men who act alike may not have the same
+motives and emotions.  But as the keen-eyed observer nears middle age,
+he begins to realize that no two souls are exact duplicates of each
+other; and that behind every human eye there lies an undiscovered
+country, as mysterious, as fascinating, as that which Alice found
+behind the looking-glass,--a country like, and yet unlike, the one we
+know, where dreams grow beautiful as tropic plants, and passions crouch
+like wild beasts in the jungle.
+
+Great as he was, Shakespeare had to learn this lesson like other men;
+but he learned it much better.  In _Love's Labour's Lost_, generally
+considered his earliest play, he has not led us into the inner selves
+of his men and women at all, has not seemed to realize that they
+possess inner selves.  At the conclusion we know precisely as much of
+them as we should if we had met them at a formal reception, and no
+more.  The princess is pretty and clever on dress parade; but how does
+the real princess feel when parade is over and she is alone in her
+chamber?  The later Shakespeare might have told us, did tell us, in
+regard to more than one other princess; but the young Shakespeare has
+nothing to tell.
+
+_Richard III_, which is supposed to have come some three years later,
+is a marked advance in characterization, but still far short of the
+goal.  Here the dramatist attempts, indeed, to analyze the tyrant's
+motives and emotions; but he does not yet understand what {92} he is
+trying to explain, and for that reason the being whom he creates is
+portentous, but not human.  To understand this, you need only compare
+Richard with Macbeth.  In Macbeth we have a host of different
+forces--ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacillation,
+affection, despair--all struggling together as they might in you or me;
+and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize
+that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like
+ourselves.  But in Richard there is no human complexity.  His is the
+fearful simplicity of the lightning, the battering-ram, the earthquake,
+forces whose achievements are terrible and whose inner existence a
+blank.  Richard hammers his bloody way through life like the legendary
+Iron Man with his flail, awe-inspiring as a destructive agency, not as
+a human being.
+
+Two or three years later we find Shakespeare in his conception of
+Shylock capable of greater things as a student of character.  In this
+pathetic, lonely, vindictive figure, exiled forever from the warm
+fireside of human friendship by those inherent faults which he can no
+more change than the tiger can change his claws, the long tragedy which
+accompanies the survival of the fittest finds a voice.  Yet even in
+Shylock the dramatist has not reached his highest achievement in
+character study.  The old Jew is drawn splendidly to the life, but he
+is a comparatively easy character to draw, a man with a few simple and
+prominent traits.  Depicting such a man is like drawing a pronounced
+Roman profile, less difficult to do, and less satisfactory when done,
+than tracing the subdued curves of a more evenly rounded face.  Still
+greater will be the triumph {93} when Shakespeare can draw equally true
+to life a many-sided man or woman, in whose single heart all our
+different experiences find a sympathetic echo.
+
+And this final triumph is not long in coming.  Between his
+thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth years, in Falstaff and Hamlet the poet
+produced the greatest comic and the greatest tragic character of
+dramatic history.  The man who has read _Hamlet_ understandingly has
+found in the young prince a lifelong companion.  Has he been unjustly
+treated?  Hamlet, too, had suffered and hated.  Has he loved?  So had
+Hamlet.  Has he had a bosom friend?  The most sacred and beautiful of
+college friendships was that between Hamlet and Horatio.  Has he been
+bored by some stupid old adviser?  So had Hamlet by Polonius and
+similar "tedious old fools."  Has he been thrilled by some beautiful
+landscape?  Hamlet, too, had admired "this goodly frame, the earth" and
+the sky, "that majestical roof fretted with golden fire."  Has he had a
+parent whom he loved and admired?  So had Hamlet in his father.  Has he
+had a friend for whom his love was mixed with shame?  So felt Hamlet
+toward his mother.  Has he felt the pride of a great deed bravely
+accomplished?  So did Hamlet in dying.  Has he felt the shame and
+remorse of a duty unperformed?  So did Hamlet while his father was
+still unrevenged.  Has he shuddered at the mystery of death?  So had
+Hamlet shuddered at "that undiscovered country."  Or has he been
+racked, as all good men are in practical life, by the doubt as to what
+is his duty?  So had Hamlet been racked by the same terrible
+responsibility.  And thus we might go on indefinitely.  The {94}
+experience of a lifetime is packed into this play.  Shakespeare never
+surpassed _Hamlet_, though he wrote for nine or ten years after; but
+when he had once reached this high level, he maintained it, with only
+occasional lapses, to the end.
+
++Dramatic Technique+.--Lastly, Shakespeare developed greatly in
+dramatic technique.  By dramatic technique we mean the method in which
+the machinery of the story is handled.  The dramatist, to do his duty
+properly, must accomplish at least five things at once.  He must make
+his play lifelike and natural; he must keep his hearers well informed
+as to what is happening; he must bring in different events after each
+other in rapid succession to hold the interest of his audience; he must
+make the different characters influence each other so that the whole
+becomes one connected story, not several unrelated ones; and he must
+make the audience feel that the play is working toward a certain
+inevitable end, must bring it to that end, and must then stop.  The
+lack of any one of these factors may make a play either dull or
+disappointing.  It takes ability to get any one of these alone.  It
+takes years of training before even a born genius can work them all in
+together.  Of course, these details are much easier to handle in
+dramatizing some subjects than others; and we find Shakespeare
+succeeding comparatively early in easy subjects and making mistakes
+later in harder ones; but, on the whole, in dramatic technique as in
+other things, his history is one of increasing power and judgment.
+
+Here, again, as in his metrical development, Shakespeare was merely one
+leading figure in a popular {95} movement.  Through a long evolution
+the English drama had just come into existence when he began to write.
+There were no settled theories about this new art, no results of long
+experience such as lie at the service of the modern dramatist.  All men
+were experimenting, and Shakespeare among the rest.
+
+His early play of _Love's Labour's Lost_ has already been used to
+illustrate lack of characterization.  In technique, also, in spite of
+many marks of natural brilliance, it shows the faults of the beginner.
+The story in the first three acts does not move on fast enough; there
+is a lack of that rapid series of connected events which we mentioned
+above and which adds so much to the interest of the later plays, like
+_Macbeth_.  Likewise, the characters in the prose underplot (except
+Costard) have too little connection with the story of the king and his
+friends.  In very badly constructed plays this lack of connection
+sometimes goes so far that the main and under plots seem like two
+separate serial stories in a magazine, in which the reader alternates
+from one to the other, but never thinks of them as one.  This obviously
+is bad, for just when the reader is most interested in one, he is
+interrupted and has to lay it aside for the other.  No play of
+Shakespeare's errs so far as that; but the defect in _Love's Labour's
+Lost_ is similar in a very modified form.  Neither is this comedy as
+successful as the author's later plays in preparing us for a certain
+ending as the inevitable outcome and then placing that ending before
+us.  We are led to expect that all four love affairs must be
+successful, and shall feel disappointed if the sympathetic dreams which
+we have woven around that idea {96} are not satisfied.  Yet the play
+ends hurriedly in a way which leaves us all in doubt, and disappointed,
+like guests who have been invited to a wedding and find it indefinitely
+postponed.  There is a wonderful amount of clever dialogue in this
+comedy, but its structure shows how much the author had yet to learn.
+
+_The Two Gentleman of Verona_, probably written a little later, shows
+improvement, but by no means perfect mastery.  The first two acts still
+drag, although the play moves more rapidly when it is under way.  The
+inability to lead up naturally to an inevitable end still persists.
+The young author, well as he has managed the middle of the play, does
+not wait for events to take their logical course.  He winds up
+everything abruptly like a man who has just changed his mind or become
+tired of his task, and marries the most lovable girl in the play to a
+rascal who is scarcely given time for even a pretense of reformation.
+
+_The Merchant of Venice_, two or three years later, shows a great
+advance in technique as in other ways.  Notice how skillfully the
+dramatist makes the different characters all influence each other's
+lives, so that the interest in one becomes the interest in all.  There
+is one story in the relations of Shylock and Antonio, another in the
+love affair of Lorenzo and Jessica, and a third in Bassanio's courtship
+of Portia.  There is also a fourth, a sequel to Bassanio's courtship,
+in the trick which his wife plays on him with regard to the rings after
+they are married.  Yet we never feel an unpleasant interruption when we
+are stopped in one story and started in one of the others, because the
+interest of the first lives on in the second, {97} owing to the
+interrelation of the people taking part in both.  We leave Shylock's
+story to take up Jessica's, but Jessica is Shylock's child, and our
+interest in the fate of his ducats and his daughter, which began in his
+story, goes on in hers.  We leave Antonio's story to take up
+Bassanio's; but Antonio's story was that of sacrifice for a friend, and
+in Bassanio's we see the fruit of that sacrifice in his friend's joy.
+Moreover, all four of the above threads of action are knotted together
+in one scene where Bassanio chooses the right casket.  Of the swift
+succession of exciting scenes of the natural way in which these lead up
+to the final end, of the lifelike truthfulness with which each little
+event is made to work itself out, there is no need to speak here.
+
+Though Shakespeare was not a third through his literary career when he
+wrote _The Merchant of Venice_, he had by this time mastered the
+technique of comedy; and we need trace his course in it no farther.
+_Much Ado_ and _Twelfth Night_ somewhat later, and _The Tempest_ long
+years after, are simply repetitions so far as technique is concerned,
+of this early triumph.  Let us turn now from comedy to those plays
+which deal with the sterner side of life.  Here the development in
+technical skill is similar, but much slower, requiring nearly a
+lifetime before it reaches perfection, for the poet is grappling with a
+problem so difficult that it taxed all the resources of his great
+genius.
+
+Before 1599 nearly all Shakespeare's plays which were not comedies were
+histories.  By a history or chronicle play we mean a play which
+pictures some epoch in the past of the English nation.  In one sense
+{98} of the word, most of them are tragedies, since they frequently
+result in death and disaster; but they are always separated as a class
+from tragedy proper, because they represent some great event in English
+national life centering around some king or leader; while tragedy
+proper deals with the misfortunes of some one man in any country, and
+regards him as an individual rather than as a national figure.  They
+differ also in purpose, since the chronicle play was intended to appeal
+to Anglo-Saxon patriotism, the tragedy to our sympathy with human
+suffering in general.
+
+The first and crudest of Shakespeare's histories written at about the
+same time as his first comedy is the triple play of _Henry VI_.[1]  We
+should hesitate to judge him by this, since he wrote it only in part;
+but it is a woefully rambling production in which we no sooner become
+interested in one character than we lose him, and are asked to transfer
+our sympathies to another.  _Richard III_ is a great step forward in
+this respect; for the excitement and interest focuses uninterruptedly
+on the one central figure; and his influence on other men and theirs on
+him bind all the events of the drama into one coherent whole.  Also, it
+moves straight on to a definite end which we know and wish and are
+prepared for beforehand.  We feel, even in the midst of his success,
+that such a bloody tyrant cannot be tolerated forever; and like men in
+a tiger hunt we thrill beforehand at the dramatic catastrophe which we
+know is coming.  _Richard III_, though, a powerful play, is {99} still
+crude in many details.  The scenes where Margaret curses her enemies,
+though strong as poetry, lack action as drama.  In a wholly different
+way, they clog the onward movement of the story almost as much as some
+scenes in _Love's Labour's Lost_.  Then again, one of the most
+important requirements for good technique is that everything shall be
+true to life.  When Anne, for the sake of a little bare-faced flattery,
+marries a man whom she loathes, we feel that no real woman would have
+done this.  From that moment Anne becomes a mere paper automaton to us,
+and we can no longer be interested in her as we would in a living
+woman.  The motivation, as it is called, the art of showing adequately
+why every person should act as he or she does, is sadly lacking.
+
+Moving onward a few years, we find marked improvement in _I Henry IV_.
+It is indeed not technically perfect,--in fact, Shakespeare in the
+chronicle play never attained what seems to modern students technical
+perfection,--but its minor defects are thrown into shadow by its
+splendid virtues.  The three stories of Hotspur, the King, and the
+Falstaff group, though partially united by their common connection with
+Prince Hal, do not blend together as perfectly as the different plots
+in _The Merchant of Venice_, and there is some truth in the idea that
+the play has four heroes instead of one.  But in spite of this, its
+general impression as a great panorama of English life is remarkably
+clear and delightful; and it improves on _Richard III_ in its swift
+succession of incident, and vastly surpasses it in the lifelike truth
+of its motivation.
+
+In the middle of his career Shakespeare dropped {100} the chronicle
+play, and instead began the writing of tragedies proper.  He carried
+into this, however, the lessons learned from his experience with
+histories, and continued to improve.  _Julius Caesar_ marks the
+transition from chronicle play to tragedy.  The lack of close
+connection between the third and fourth acts and the absence of one
+central hero are characteristic defects of the chronicle play which the
+dramatist had not yet outgrown.  _Hamlet_, coming next, has shaken off
+all the lingering relics of the older type.  Of its general excellence
+there is no need to speak.  Yet even in _Hamlet_ the action at times
+halts and becomes disjointed.  _Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are great plays,
+the latter, perhaps, the greatest of all plays; but, transfigured as
+they are by genius, they show that in the difficult problem of tragic
+technique the author was learning still.  At the age of forty,
+approximately, and a year or two after _Hamlet_, Shakespeare produced
+_Othello_, the most perfect, although not necessarily the greatest, of
+all his great tragedies.  It is less profoundly reflective than
+_Hamlet_ and less passionately imaginative than _King Lear_ or
+_Macbeth_; but no other of his masterpieces shows such perfect balance
+of taste and judgment, or is so free from any jarring note.  Hence,
+through the histories and tragedies taken together, we see the same
+growth in technical skill which we have already found in his comedies,
+save that it took longer here because the poet was working in a more
+difficult field.  It would not be true to say that each play up to
+_Othello_ is superior to its immediate predecessor in technique, still
+less that it is so in absolute merit; but the general upward tendency
+is there.
+
+{101}
+
++The Four Periods+.--Such was Shakespeare's development in meter, in
+taste, in conception of character, and in dramatic technique.  In line
+with this development, it has been customary to divide his literary
+career into four periods and his plays into four corresponding groups.
+These groups or periods are characterized partly by their different
+degrees of maturity, but more by the difference in the character of the
+plays during these intervals.
+
+The First Period includes all plays which there is good reason for
+dating before 1595.  In this the great dramatist was serving his
+literary apprenticeship, learning the difficult art of play writing,
+and learning it by experiments and mistakes.  In the course of his
+experiments, he tried many different types, tragedies, histories,
+comedies, and rewrote old plays either alone or with a more experienced
+playwright to help him.  Nearly all of this work is full of promise;
+most of it is also full of faults.  Here belong the early comedies
+mentioned above--_Love's Labour's Lost_ and _The Two Gentlemen of
+Verona_.  Here is the crude but powerful _Richard III_, and _Romeo and
+Juliet_, the early faults of which are redeemed by such a wealth of
+youthful poetic fire.
+
+The Second Period extends roughly from 1595 to 1600.  The poet has
+learned his profession now, is no longer a beginner but a master,
+though hardly yet at the summit of his powers.  Here are included three
+chronicle plays, the two parts of _King Henry IV_ and _King Henry V_,
+and six comedies.  One of the earliest of these comedies was _The
+Merchant of Venice_, already mentioned.  Three others, a little
+later,--_Much Ado, Twelfth {102} Night_, and _As You Like It_,--are
+usually regarded as Shakespeare's crowning achievement in the world of
+mirth and humor.  In this group of plays, whether history or comedy,
+the author is depicting chiefly the cheerful, energetic side of life.
+
+The Third Period really begins about 1599, for this and the second
+overlap; and it continues to about 1608.  In the plays of this group
+the poet becomes interested in a wholly new set of themes.  The aspects
+of life which he interprets are no longer bright and cheerful, but
+stern and sad.  Here come the great tragedies, several of which we have
+mentioned above--_Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
+Antony and Cleopatra_.  Shakespeare is now at the height of his power,
+for his greatest masterpieces are included in the above list.  Mixed in
+with this wealth of splendid tragedy (though inferior to it in merit),
+there are also three comedies.  But even the comedies share in the
+somber gloom which absorbed the poet's attention during this period.
+The comedies before 1600 had been full of sunshine, brimming with
+kindly, good-natured mirth, overflowing with the genial laughter which
+makes us love the very men at whom we are laughing.  But the three
+comedies of this Third Period are bitter and sarcastic in their wit,
+making us despise the people who furnish us fun, and leaving an
+unpleasant taste in the mouth after the laugh is over.  Some have
+assumed that the dark tinge of this period was due to an unknown sorrow
+in the poet's own life, but there seems to be no need of any such
+assumption.  We may become interested in reading cheerful books one
+year and sad ones the next without being more cheerful or {103} more
+sad in one year than in the other; and what is true of the reader might
+reasonably be true of the writer.  But whatever the cause which
+influenced Shakespeare, the tragedies of this group are the saddest as
+well as the greatest of all his plays.
+
+The Fourth and last Period contains plays written after 1608-1609.
+There are only five of these, and since _Pericles_ and _Henry VII_ are
+in large part by other hands, our interest focuses chiefly on the
+remaining three--_The Tempest, Cymbeline_, and _The Winter's Tale_.
+All the plays of this period end happily and are wholly free from the
+bitterness of the Third Period comedy.  Nevertheless, they have little
+of the rollicking, uproarious fun of the earlier comedies.  Their charm
+lies rather in a subdued cheerfulness, a quiet, pure, sympathetic
+serenity of tone, less strenuous, but even more poetic, than what had
+gone before.  In some ways they are hardly equal to the great tragedies
+just mentioned, for the poet is growing older now, and the fiery vigor
+of _Macbeth_ is fading out of his verse.  But in loftiness of thought
+and tenderness of feeling these later romances are equal to anything
+that the author ever gave us.
+
+Whether other causes influenced him or not, Shakespeare was doubtless
+in these four periods conforming to some extent to the literary
+tendencies of the hour.  The writings of his contemporaries also show a
+larger percentage of comedies between 1595-1600 than between 1590-1595.
+Many other dramatists, too, were writing histories while he was, and
+dropped them at about the same time.  Likewise during his Fourth Period
+three-quarters of all the plays written by other men were comedies, the
+most successful of them in a similar {104} romantic tone.  On the
+whole, too, other writers produced a rather larger percentage of
+tragedies during 1601-1607 than at any other time while Shakespeare was
+writing, although the change was not nearly as marked in them as in
+him.  But whether the influence of contemporaries was great or small,
+these periods exist; and the individual plays can be better understood
+if read in the light of the groups to which they belong.
+
+
+Perhaps the best book on Shakespeare's development as a dramatist is:
+_The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist_ by G. P. Baker (The
+Macmillan Co., New York, 1907).
+
+
+
+[1] These plays are throughout designated as _I_, _II_, and _III_ Henry
+VI.
+
+
+
+
+{105}
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CHIEF SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS
+
++Shakespeare and Plagiarism+.--Among the curious alterations in public
+sentiment that have come in the last century or two, none is more
+striking than the change of attitude in regard to what is called
+"plagiarism."  Plagiarism may be defined as the appropriation for one's
+own use of the literary ideas of another.  The laws of patent and of
+copyright have led us into thinking that the ideas of a play must not
+be borrowed in any degree, but must originate in every detail with the
+writer.  This is as if we should say to an inventor, "Yes, you may have
+invented a safety trigger for revolvers, but you must not apply it to
+revolvers until you have invented a completely new type of revolver
+from the original matchlock."
+
+But the playwright of to-day cannot help plagiarizing his technique,
+many of his situations, and even his plots from earlier plays;
+consequently, he tries to conceal his borrowings, to placate public
+opinion by changing the names and the environment of his characters.
+
+The Elizabethan audiences were less exacting.  If a play about King
+Lear were written and acted with some success, they thought it
+perfectly honest for another dramatist to use this material in building
+up a new and better play on the story of King Lear.  They cared {106}
+even less when the dramatist went to other dramas for hints on minor
+details.  The modern audience, if not the modern world at large, holds
+the same view.  So long as the mind of the borrower transforms and
+makes his own whatever he borrows, so long will his work be applauded
+by his audience, whatever be the existing state of the copyright laws
+or of public fastidiousness.
+
+Hence we do not to-day hunt up the sources of Shakespeare's plots and
+characters in order to prove plagiarism, but in order to understand
+just how great was the power of his genius in transmuting common
+elements into his fine gold.
+
+It is customary to say: "Shakespeare did not invent his plots.  He was
+not interested in plots."  So far is this from the truth that the
+amount of pains and skill spent by him in working over any one of his
+best comedies or tragedies would more than suffice for the construction
+of a very good modern plot.  It is more true to say of most of his
+work, "Shakespeare did not waste his time in inventing stories.[1]  He
+took stories where he found them, realized their dramatic
+possibilities, and spent infinite pains in weaving them together into a
+harmonious whole."
+
+There is one other point to remember.  The sources of Shakespeare's
+plays were no better literary material than the sources of most
+Elizabethan plays.  Shakespeare's practice in adapting older plays was
+{107} the common practice of the time.  We can measure, therefore, the
+greatness of Shakespeare's achievement by a comparison with what others
+have made out of similar material.
+
+Just as Shakespeare's plays fall into the groups of history, tragedy,
+and comedy, so his chief sources are three in number: biography, as
+found in the _Chronicle_ of Holinshed and Plutarch's _Lives_; romance,
+as found in the novels of the period, which were most of them
+translations from Italian _novelle_; and dramatic material from other
+plays.
+
++Holinshed+.--Raphael Holinshed (died 1580?) published in 1578 a
+history of England, Scotland, and Ireland, usually known as Holinshed's
+_Chronicle_.  The two immense folio volumes contain an account of
+Britain "from its first inhabiting" up to his own day, largely made up
+by combining the works of previous historians.  The _Chronicle_ bears
+evidence, however, of enormous and painstaking research which makes it
+valuable even now.  Holinshed's style was clear, but not possessed of
+any distinctly literary quality.  Much of what Shakespeare used was
+indeed but a paraphrase of an earlier chronicler, Edward Hall.
+Holinshed was uncritical, too, since he made no attempt to separate the
+legendary from the truly historical material.  So far as drama is
+concerned, however, this was rather a help than a hindrance, since
+legend often crystallizes most truly the spirit of a career in an act
+or a saying which never had basis in fact.  The work is notable chiefly
+for its patriotic tone, of which there is certainly more than an echo
+in Shakespeare's historical plays.  But the effects of {108} steadfast
+continuity of national purpose, of a belief in the greatness of
+England, and of an insistent appeal to patriotism, which are such
+important elements in Shakespeare's histories, are totally wanting in
+Holinshed.
+
+Not only are all of the histories of Shakespeare based either directly
+or through the medium of other plays upon Holinshed, but his two great
+tragedies, _Macbeth_ and _King Lear_ (the latter through an earlier
+play), and his comedy _Cymbeline_ are also chiefly indebted to it.  The
+work was, moreover, the source of many plays by other dramatists.
+
++Plutarch+.--Plutarch of Chaeronea, a Greek author of the first century
+A.D., wrote forty-six "parallel" Lives, of famous Greeks and Romans.
+Each famous Greek was contrasted with a famous Roman whose career was
+somewhat similar to his own.  The _Lives_ have been ever since among
+the most popular of the classics, for they are more than mere
+biographies.  They are the interpretation of two worlds, with all their
+tragic history, by one who felt the fatal force of a resistless destiny.
+
+A scholarly French translation of Plutarch's _Lives_ was published in
+1559 by Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Bellozane.  Twenty years after (1579)
+Thomas North, later Sir Thomas, published his magnificent English
+version.[2]  The vigor and spirit which he flung into his work can only
+be compared to that of William Tyndale in his translation of the New
+Testament.  Here was very different material for drama from the {109}
+dry bones of history offered by Holinshed.  Shakespeare paid North the
+sincerest compliment by borrowing, particularly in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, and _Coriolanus_, not only the general story, but whole
+speeches with only those changes necessary for making blank verse out
+of prose.  The last speeches of Antony and Cleopatra are indeed nearly
+as impressive in North's narrative form as in Shakespeare's play.
+
+In addition to the tragedies already named, _Julius Caesar_ and almost
+certainly the suggestion of _Timon of Athens_, though not the play as a
+whole, were taken from Plutarch's _Lives_.  Other Elizabethans were not
+slow to avail themselves of this unequaled treasure-house of story.
+
++Italian and Other Fiction+.--Except for Geoffrey Chaucer (1338-1400),
+whose _Troilus and Criseyde_ Shakespeare dramatized, and John Gower
+(died 1408), whose _Confessio Amantis_ is one of the books out of which
+the plot of _Pericles_ may have come, there was little good English
+fiction read in the Elizabethan period.  Educated people read, instead,
+Italian _novelle_, or short tales, which were usually gathered into
+some collection of a hundred or so.  Many of these were translated into
+English before Shakespeare's time; and a number of similar collections
+had been made by English authors, who had translated good stories
+whenever they found them.
+
+One of these was _Gli Heccatommithi_, 1565 (The Hundred Tales), by
+Giovanni Giraldi, surnamed Cinthio, which was later translated into
+French and was the source of _Measure for Measure_ and _Othello_.
+Another collection was that of Matteo Bandello, whose {110} _Tales_,
+1554-1573, translated into French by Belleforest, furnished the sources
+of _Much Ado About Nothing_, and perhaps _Twelfth Night_.  The greatest
+of these collections was the _Decameron_, c. 1353, by Giovanni
+Boccaccio, one of whose stories, translated by William Painter in his
+_Palace of Pleasure_, 1564, furnished the source of _All's Well That
+Ends Well_.  Another story of the _Decameron_ was probably the source
+of the romantic part of the plot of _Cymbeline_.  The _Merry Wives of
+Windsor_ had a plot like the story in Straparola's _Tredici Piacevole
+Notte_ (1550), _Thirteen Pleasant Evenings_; and _The Merchant of
+Venice_ borrows its chief plot from Giovanni Florentine's _Il Pecorone_.
+
+Two of Shakespeare's plays are based on English novels written somewhat
+after the Italian manner--_As You Like It_ on Thomas Lodge's
+novel-poem, _Rosalynde_, and _The Winter's Tale_ from Robert Greene's
+_Pandosto_.  The _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ is from a Spanish story in
+the Italian style, the _Diana_ of Jorge de Montemayor.  The _Comedy of
+Errors_ from Plautus is his only play based on classical sources.
+
+The Italian _novelle_ emphasized situation, but had little natural
+dialogue and still less characterization.  The Elizabethan dramatists
+used them only for their plots.  Never did works of higher genius
+spring from less inspired sources.
+
++The Plays used by Shakespeare+.--Although Shakespeare made up one of
+his plots, the _Comedy of Errors_, from two plays of Plautus (254-184
+B.C.), the _Menaechmi_ and _Amphitruo_, the rest of the plays he used
+for material were contemporary work.  He borrowed from them plots and
+situations, and {111} occasionally even lines.  With the exception,
+however, of one of the early histories, the plays he made use of are in
+themselves of no value as literature.  Their sole claim to notice is
+that they served the need of the great playwright.  None but the
+student will ever read them.  In practically every case Shakespeare so
+developed the story that the fiction became essentially his own; while
+the poetic quality of the verse, the development of character, and the
+heightening of dramatic effect, which he built upon it, left no more of
+the old play in sight than the statue shows of the bare metal rods upon
+which the sculptor molds his clay.
+
+Seven histories go back to the earlier plays on the kings of England.
+The Second and Third Parts of _Henry VI_ are taken from two earlier
+plays often called the _First and Second Contentions_ (between the two
+noble houses of York and Lancaster).  The First and Second parts of
+_Henry IV_, and _Henry V_, are all three an expansion of a cruder
+production, the _Famous Victories of Henry V_.  _Richard III_ is based
+upon the _True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York; King John upon the
+Troublesome Reigne of John, King of England_, the latter undoubtedly
+the best of the sources of Shakespeare's Histories.
+
+_King Leir and His Daughters_ is the only extant play which is known to
+have formed the basis of a Shakespearean tragedy.  Shakespeare made
+additions in this case from other sources, borrowing Gloucester's story
+from Sidney's _Arcadia_.  The earlier play of _Hamlet_, which it is
+believed Shakespeare used, is not now in existence.
+
+Among the comedies, the _Taming of the Shrew_ is {112} directly based
+upon the _Taming of a Shrew_.  _Measure for Measure_ is less direct,
+borrowing from George Whetstone's play in two parts, _Promos and
+Cassandra_ (written before 1578).
+
+The existence of versions in German and Dutch of plays which present
+plots similar in structure to Shakespeare's, but less highly developed,
+leads scholars to advance the theory that several lost plays may have
+been sources for some of his dramas.  Entries or mentions of plays,
+with details like Shakespeare's, dated earlier than his own plays could
+have been in existence, are also used to further the same view.  The
+_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, the _Merchant of Venice_, _Romeo and
+Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and, with less reason, _Timon of Athens_, and
+_Twelfth Night_, are thought to have been based more or less on earlier
+lost plays.
+
+Finally, a number of plays perhaps suggested details in Shakespeare's
+plays.  Of plays so influenced, _Cymbeline_, _The Winter's Tale_, and
+_Henry VIII_ are the chief.  But the debt is negligible at best, so far
+as the general student is concerned.
+
+To conclude, what Shakespeare borrowed was the raw material of drama.
+What he gave to this material was life and art.  No better way of
+appreciating the dramatist at his full worth could be pursued than a
+patient perusal and comparison of the sources of his plays with
+Shakespeare's own work.
+
+
+The best books on this subject are: H. E. D. Anders, _Shakespeare's
+Books_ (Berlin, 1904); _Shakespeare's Library_, ed. J. P. Collier and
+W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1875); and the new _Shakespeare Library_ now
+being published by Chatto and Windus, of which several volumes are out.
+
+
+
+[1] There are two plays at least which have plots probably original
+with Shakespeare--_Love's Labour's Lost_ and _The Tempest_.  Both of
+these draw largely, however, from contemporary history and adventure,
+and the central idea is directly borrowed from actual events.
+
+[2] It is not unlikely that it was the second edition published in 1595
+by Richard Field (Shakespeare's printer) that the poet read.
+
+
+
+
+{113}
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT
+
+The Elizabethan audiences who filled to overflowing the theaters on the
+Bankside possessed a far purer text of Shakespeare than we of this
+later day can boast.  In order to understand our own editions of
+Shakespeare, it is necessary to understand something, at least, of the
+conditions of publishing in Shakespeare's day and of the relations of
+the playhouses with the publishers.
+
+The printing of Shakespeare's poems is an easy tale, _Venus and Adonis_
+in 1593, and _The Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, were first printed in
+quarto by Richard Field, a native of Stratford, who had come to London.
+In each case a dedication accompanying the text was signed by
+Shakespeare, so that we may guess that the poet not only consented to
+the printing, but took care that the printing should be accurate.
+Twelve editions of one, eight of the other, were issued before 1660.
+The other volume of poetry, the Sonnets, was printed in 1609 by Thomas
+Thorpe, without Shakespeare's consent.  Two of them, numbers 138 and
+144, had appeared in the collection known as _The Passionate Pilgrim_,
+a pirated volume printed by W. Jaggard in 1599.  No reėdition of the
+Sonnets appeared till 1640.
+
+With regard to the plays it is different.  It is first {114} to be said
+that in no volume containing a play or plays of Shakespeare in
+existence to-day is there any evidence that Shakespeare saw it through
+the press.  All we can do is to satisfy ourselves as to how the copy of
+Shakespeare's plays may have got into the hands of the publishers, and
+as to how far that copy represents what Shakespeare must have written.
+
+The editions of Shakespearean plays may be divided into two
+groups,--the separate plays which were printed in quarto[1] volumes
+before 1623, and the First Folio of Shakespeare, which was printed in
+1623, a collected edition of all his plays save _Pericles_.  Our text
+of Shakespeare, whatever one we read, is made up, either from the First
+Folio text, or in certain cases from the quarto volumes of certain
+plays which preceded the Folio; together with the attempts to restore
+to faulty places what Shakespeare must have written--a task which has
+engaged a long line of diligent scholars from early in the eighteenth
+century up to our own day.
+
++The Stationers' Company+.--In the early period of English printing,
+which began about 1480 and lasted up to 1557, there was very little
+supervision over the publishing of books, and as a result the
+competition was unscrupulous.  There was a guild of publishers, called
+{115} the Stationers' Company, in existence, but its efforts to control
+its members were only of a general character.  In 1557, however, Philip
+and Mary granted a charter to the Stationers' Company under which no
+one not a member of the Stationers' Company could legally possess a
+printing press.  Queen Mary was, of course, interested in controlling
+the press directly through the Crown.  Throughout the Elizabethan
+period the printing of books was directly under the supervision of Her
+Majesty's Government, and not under the law courts.  Every book had to
+be licensed by the company.  The Wardens of the company acted as
+licensers in ordinary cases, and in doubtful cases the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or some other dignitary appointed for
+the purpose.  When the license was granted, the permission to print was
+entered upon the Register of the company, and it is from these records
+that much important knowledge about the dates of Shakespeare's plays is
+gained.
+
+The Stationers' Company was interested only in protecting its members
+from prosecution and from competition.  The author was not considered
+by them in the legal side of the transaction.  How the printer got his
+manuscript to print was his own affair, not theirs.
+
+Many authors were at that time paid by printers for the privilege of
+using their manuscript; but it was not considered proper that a
+gentleman should be paid for literary work.  Robert Greene, the
+playwright and novelist, wrote regularly in the employ of printers.  On
+the other hand, Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary {116} of
+Shakespeare's, did not allow any of his writings to be printed during
+his lifetime.  Francis Bacon published his essays only in order to
+forestall an unauthorized edition, and others of the time took the same
+course.  Bacon says in his preface that to prevent their being printed
+would have been a troublesome procedure.  It was possible for an author
+to prevent the publication by prosecution, but it was scarcely a wise
+thing to do, in view of the legal difficulties in the way.
+Nevertheless, fear of the law probably acted as some sort of a check on
+unscrupulous publishers.
+
+The author of a play was, however, really less interested than the
+manager who had bought it.  The manager of a theater seems, from what
+evidence we possess, to have believed that the printing of a play
+injured the chances of success upon the stage.  The play was sold by
+the author directly to the manager, whose property it became.  Copies
+of it might be sold to some printer by some of the players in the
+company, by the manager himself, or, in rarer cases, by some
+unscrupulous copyist taking down the play in shorthand at the
+performance.  When a play had got out of date, it would be more apt to
+be sold than while it was still on the stage.  In some cases, however,
+the printing might have no bad effect upon the attendance at its
+performances.
+
+During the years before 1623, seventeen of Shakespeare's plays were
+published in quarto.  Two of these, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_,
+were printed in two very different versions, so that we have nineteen
+texts of Shakespeare's plays altogether published before the First
+Folio.  A complete table of these {117} plays with the dates in which
+the quartos appeared follows:--
+
+  1594.  Titus Andronicus.  Later quartos in 1600 and 1611.
+  1597.  Richard II.  Later quartos in 1598, 1608, and 1615.
+  1597.  Richard III.  Later quartos in 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612,
+         and 1622.
+  1597.  Romeo and Juliet.  Later quartos in 1599 (corrected
+         edition) and 1609.
+  1598.  I Henry IV.  Later quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613,
+         and 1622.
+  1598.  Love's Labour's Lost.
+  1600.  Merchant of Venice.  Later quarto in 1619.  (Copying
+         on the title-page the original date of 1600, however.)
+  1600.  Henry V.  Later quartos in 1602 and 1619.  (Dated on
+         the title-page, 1608.)
+  1600.  Henry IV, Part II.
+  1600.  Midsummer Night's Dream.  Later quarto in 1619.
+         (Dated, however, 1600.)
+  1602.  Merry Wives of Windsor.  Later quarto in 1619.
+  1603.  Hamlet.
+  1604.  Second edition of Hamlet.  Later quartos in 1605 and 1611.
+  1608.  King Lear.  Later quarto in 1619.  (Title-page date, 1608.)
+  1608.  Pericles.  Later quartos in 1609, 1611, and 1619.
+  1609.  Troilus and Cressida.  A second quarto in 1609.
+  1622.  Othello.
+
+
+These are all the known quartos of Shakespeare's plays printed before
+the Folio.  They represent two distinct classes.  The first class
+(comprising fourteen texts) of the quartos contains good texts of the
+plays and is of great assistance to editors.  The second (comprising
+five texts), the first _Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives_, the
+first _Hamlet_, and _Pericles_, {118} is composed of thoroughly bad
+copies.  Two of this class were not entered on the Stationers' Register
+at all, but were pure piracies.  Two others were entered by one firm,
+but were printed by another.  The fifth was entered and transferred on
+the same day.  Of the fourteen good texts, twelve were regularly
+entered on the Stationers' Register, and the other two were evidently
+intended to take the place of a bad text.  It is evident, therefore,
+that registry upon the books of the Stationers' Company was a safeguard
+to an author in getting before the public a good text of his writings.
+It also indicates that the good copies were obtained by printers in a
+legal manner, and so probably purchased directly from the theaters,
+whether from the copy which the prompter had, or from some transcript
+of the play.  The notion that all plays were printed in Shakespeare's
+time by a process of piracy is thus not borne out by these facts.
+
+The five bad quartos deserve a moment's attention.  The first of these,
+_Romeo and Juliet_, printed and published by John Danter in 1597, omits
+over seven hundred lines of the play, and the stage directions are
+descriptions rather than definite instructions.  The book is printed in
+two kinds of type, a fact due probably to its being printed from two
+presses at once.  Danter got into trouble later on with other books
+from his dishonest ways.  The second poor quarto, _Henry V_, printed in
+1600, was less than half as long as the Folio text, and was probably
+carelessly copied by an ignorant person at a performance of the play.
+The third, the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, was pirated through the
+publisher of _Henry V_, John Busby, who assigned his {119} part to
+another printer on the same day.  As in the case of _Romeo and Juliet_,
+the stage directions are mere descriptions.  No play of Shakespeare's
+was more cruelly bungled by an unscrupulous copyist.  The first edition
+of _Hamlet_ in 1603 was the work of Valentine Sims.  While the copying
+is full of blunders, this quarto is considered important, as indicating
+that the play was acted at first in a much shorter and less artistic
+version than the one which we now read.  For eight months of 1603-1604
+the theaters of London were closed on account of the plague, and
+Shakespeare's revision of _Hamlet_ may have been made during this time.
+At any rate, the later version appeared about the end of 1604.  The
+last of these pirated quartos, _Pericles_, was probably taken down in
+shorthand at the theater.  Here, unfortunately, as this play was not
+included in the First Folio, and as all later quartos were based on the
+First Quarto, we have to-day what is really a corrupt and difficult
+text.  Luckily, Shakespeare's share in this play is small.
+
+The title-pages of the quartos of Shakespeare bear convincing
+testimony, not only to the genuineness of his plays, but also to his
+rise in reputation.  Only six of his plays were printed in quartos not
+bearing his name.  Of these, two--_Romeo and Juliet_ and _Henry
+V_--began with pirated editions not bearing the author's name.
+Three--_Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV_--were all followed by
+quartos with the poet's name upon them.  The sixth play, _Titus
+Andronicus_, was one of his earliest works, and its authorship is even
+now not absolutely certain.
+
+Since the name of a popular dramatist on the {120} title-page was a
+distinct source of revenue to the publisher after 1598, it was to be
+expected that anonymous plays should be ascribed in some cases to
+William Shakespeare by an unscrupulous or a misinformed printer.  Here
+arose the Shakespeare 'apocrypha,' which is discussed in a following
+chapter.
+
+A new problem in the history of Shakespearean quartos has been
+presented since 1903 by a study of the quartos of 1619.  Briefly
+summarized, the theory which is best defended at the present time is,
+that in that year Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard, two printers of
+London, decided at first to get up a collected quarto edition of
+Shakespeare's plays, but on giving up this idea, they issued nine plays
+in a uniform size and on paper bearing identical watermarks, which were
+either at that time or later bound up together as a collected set of
+Shakespeare's plays in a single volume.[2]  These plays are the _Whole
+Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of Lancaster and York_,
+"printed for T. P."; _A Yorkshire Tragedie_, "printed for T. P., 1619";
+_Pericles_, "printed for T. P. 1619"; _Merry Wives_, "printed for
+Arthur Johnson, 1619"; _Sir John Oldcastle_, "printed for T. P., 1600";
+_Henry V_, "printed for T. P., 1608"; _Merchant of Venice_, "printed by
+J. Roberts, 1600"; _King Lear_, "printed for  Nathaniel Butter, 1608";
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_, "printed for Thomas Fisher, 1600."
+
+Of these plays, the _Whole Contention_, the _Yorkshire {121} Tragedie_,
+and _Sir John Oldcastle_ are spurious, but had been attributed to
+Shakespeare in earlier quartos.  The five plays dated 1600 or 1608 in
+each case duplicated a quarto actually printed in the year claimed by
+the Pavier reprint; so that this earlier dating was an attempt to
+deceive the public into believing they were purchasing the original
+editions.
+
+Under the date of the 8th of November, 1623, Edward Blount and Isaac
+Jaggard entered for their copy in the Stationers' Register "Mr. William
+Shakspeers Comedyes, Histories and Tragedyes, soe manie of the said
+copyes as are not formerly entred to other men viz^t, Comedyes, The
+Tempest.  The two gentlemen of Verona.  Measure for Measure.  The
+Comedy of Errors.  As you like it.  All's well that ends well.  Twelfth
+Night.  The winter's tale.  Histories The third parte of Henry the
+sixth.  Henry the eight.  Tragedies.  Coriolanus.  Timon of Athens.
+Julius Caesar.  Mackbeth.  Anthonie and Cleopatra.  Cymbeline."  This
+entry preluded the publication of the First Folio.  Associated with
+Blount and Jaggard were Jaggard's son Isaac, who had the contract for
+the printing of the book, I. Smethwick, and W. A. Aspley.  Smethwick
+owned at this time the rights of _Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and
+Juliet_, and _Hamlet_, and also the _Taming of a Shrew_, which latter
+right apparently carried with it the right to print Shakespeare's
+adaptation of it, the _Taming of the Shrew_.  Aspley owned the rights
+to _Much Ado About Nothing_, and to _II Henry IV_.  These four
+printers, making arrangements with other printers, such as Law, who
+apparently had the rights of _I Henry IV, Richard II_, {122} and
+_Richard III_, and others, were thus able to bring out an apparently
+complete edition of Shakespeare's plays.  One play, _Troilus and
+Cressida_, was evidently secured only at the last moment and printed
+very irregularly.[3]  Blount and Jaggard apparently got the manuscripts
+of the sixteen plays on the Register from members of Shakespeare's
+company, two of whom, John Hemings and Henry Condell, affixed their
+names to the Address to the Reader which was prefixed to the volume.
+It will be remembered that these men received by Shakespeare's bequest
+a gold ring as a token of friendship.  Their intimacy with the
+dramatist must have been both strong and lasting.  Their actual share
+in the editing of the volume cannot be ascertained.  It may be that all
+the claims are true which are made above their names in the Address to
+the Reader as to their care and pains in collecting and publishing his
+works "so to have publish'd them as where before you were abused with
+diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed, the
+stealthes of injurious copyists, we expos'd them; even those are now
+offer'd to your view, crude and bereft of their limbes, and of the rest
+absolutely in their parts as he conceived them who as he was a happie
+imitator of nature was a most gentle expresser of it.  His mind and
+hand went together and what he thought he told with that easinesse that
+wee have scarse received from him a {123} blot in his papers."  On the
+other hand, scholarship has discovered more in the life of Edward
+Blount to justify his claim to the chief work of editing this volume.
+Whoever they were, the editors' claim to diligent care in their work
+was sincere.  Throughout the volume there are proofs that they employed
+the best text which they could get, even when others were in print.
+
+It is owing to this volume, in all probability, that we possess twenty
+of the best of Shakespeare's plays and the best texts of a number of
+the others.  We are therefore glad to hear that the edition was a
+success and was considered worth reprinting within nine years.  It is
+not improbable that this edition ran to five hundred copies.  Among the
+most interesting work of the editors of the volume was the prefixing of
+the Droeshout engraved portrait on the title-page, and an attempt to
+improve the stage directions, as well as the division of most of the
+plays, either in whole or in part, into acts and scenes.
+
+The twenty plays which appeared in print for the first time in the
+First Folio were taken in all probability directly from copies in the
+possession of Shakespeare's company.  Their texts are, upon the whole,
+excellent.  In the case of the sixteen other plays the editors
+substituted for eight of the plays already in print in quartos,
+independent texts from better manuscripts.  This act must have involved
+considerable expense and difficulty, and deserves the highest praise.
+Five of the printed quartos were used with additions and corrections.
+In the case of _Titus Andronicus_ a whole scene was added.  In three
+cases only {124} of the sixteen plays already printed did the editors
+follow a quarto text without correcting it from a later theatrical
+copy.  This conscientious effort to give posterity the best text of
+Shakespeare deserves our gratitude.
+
+The Second Folio, 1632, was a reprint of the First; the Third Folio,
+1663, a reprint of the Second; the Fourth Folio, 1685, a reprint of the
+Third.  This practice of copying the latest accessible edition has been
+adopted by editors down to a very late period.  Between 1629 and 1632
+six quartos of Shakespearean plays were printed,--a fact which
+indicates that the First Folio edition had been exhausted and that
+there was a continued market.  A man named Thomas Cotes acquired
+through one Richard Cotes the printing rights of the Jaggards, and
+added to them other rights derived from Pavier.  The old publishers,
+Smethwick and Aspley, were still living and were associated with him in
+publishing the Second Folio.  Robert Allott, June 26, 1629, had bought
+up Blount's title to the plays first registered in 1623, and was thus
+also concerned in the publication, while Richard Hawkins and Richard
+Meighen, who owned the rights of _Othello_ and _Merry Wives_, were
+allowed to take shares.  The editors of the Second Folio made only such
+alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to
+make it more "correct."  The vast majority of the changes are
+unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously right,
+others as obviously wrong.
+
+Five more Shakespearean quartos followed between 1634 and 1639.
+Between 1652 and 1655 two other {125} quartos were published.  The
+Third Folio, 1664, was published by Philip Chetwind, who had married
+the widow of Robert Allott and thus got most of the rights in the
+Second Folio.  Chetwind's Folio is famous, not only for the addition of
+_Pericles_, which alone it was his first intention to include, but also
+for the addition of six spurious plays--_Sir John Oldcastle, The
+Yorkshire Tragedie, A London Prodigall, The Tragedie of Locrine,
+Thomas, Lord Cromwell_, and _The Puritaine_, or _The Widdow of Watling
+Streete_.  Chetwind's reason for thus adding these plays was that they
+had passed under Shakespeare's name or initials in their earliest
+prints.  The Fourth Folio, 1685, is a mere reprint of the Third.
+
+With the Fourth Folio ends the early history of how Shakespeare got
+into print.  From that time to this a long line of famous and obscure
+men, at first mostly men of letters, but afterwards, and especially in
+our own times, trained specialists in their profession, have devoted
+much of their lives to the editing of Shakespeare.  Their ideal has
+been, usually, to give readers the text of his poems and plays in their
+presumed primitive integrity.  Constant study of his works, and of
+other Elizabethan writers, has given them a certain knowledge of the
+words and grammatical usages of that day which go far to make
+Elizabethan English a foreign tongue to us.  On the other hand, more
+knowledge about the conditions of printing in Shakespeare's time has
+helped the editors very greatly in their attempts to set right a
+passage which was misprinted in the earliest printed text, or a line of
+which two early texts give different versions.
+
+{126}
+
+An example of the difficulties that still confront editors may be given
+from _II Henry IV_, IV, i, 94-96:--
+
+"_Archbishop_.  My brother general, the commonwealth,
+                To brother born, an household cruelty.
+                I make my quarrel in particular."
+
+Nobody knows what Shakespeare meant to say in this passage, and no
+satisfactory guess has ever been made as to what has happened to these
+lines.
+
+A knowledge of Elizabethan English has cleared up the following passage
+perfectly.  According to the First Folio, the only early print, Antony
+calls Lepidus, in _Julius Caesar_, IV, i, 36-37:--
+
+  "A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds
+  On objects, arts, and imitations...."
+
+This has been corrected to read in the second line
+
+  "On abjects, orts, and imitations."
+
+Abjects here means outcasts, and orts, scraps, or leavings; but no one
+unfamiliar with the language of that time could have solved the puzzle.
+
+A different sort of problem is offered by such plays as _King Lear_, of
+which the quartos furnish three hundred lines not in the Folio, while
+the Folio has one hundred lines not in the quartos, and is, on the
+whole, much more carefully copied.  The modern editor gives all the
+lines in both versions, so that we read a _King Lear_ which is probably
+longer than Shakespeare's countrymen read or ever saw acted.  The
+modern editor selects, however, when Folio and quartos differ, the
+reading which seems best.
+
+{127}
+
+FOLIO.  "Cordelia.        Was this a face
+        To be opposed against the _jarring_ winds?"
+
+QUARTOS.                 "Was this a face
+        To be opposed against the _warring_ winds?"
+
+
+In such a difference as this, the personal taste of the editor is apt
+to govern his text.
+
+We cannot here go farther in explaining the problems of the Shakespeare
+text.  To those who would know more of them, the _Variorum_ edition of
+Dr. H. H. Furness offers a full history.  In the light of the knowledge
+which he and other scholars have thrown upon textual criticism, it is
+unlikely that there will ever be poor texts of Shakespeare reprinted.
+The work of the Shakespeare scholars has not been in vain.
+
+
++Later Editions+.--Nicholas Rowe in 1709 produced the first edition in
+the modern sense.  He modernized the spelling frankly, repunctuated,
+corrected the grammar, made out lists of the dramatis personae,
+arranged the verse which was in disorder, and made a number of good
+emendations in difficult places.  He added also exits and entrances,
+which in earlier prints were only inserted occasionally.  Further, he
+completed the division of the plays into acts and scenes.  Perhaps his
+most important work was writing a full life of Shakespeare in which
+several valuable traditions are preserved.  The poems were not included
+in the edition, but were published in 1716 from the edition of 1640.
+He followed the Third and Fourth Folios in reprinting the spurious
+plays.  The edition was reprinted in 1714, 1725, and 1728.
+
+In 1726 Alexander Pope published his famous edition of Shakespeare.
+Pope possessed a splendid lot of the old quartos and the first two
+folios, but his edition was wantonly careless.  He did, indeed, use
+some sense in excluding the seven spurious plays as well as _Pericles_
+from his edition, and he undoubtedly {128} worked hard on the text.  He
+subdivided the scenes more minutely than Rowe after the fashion of the
+French stage division,--where a new scene begins with every new
+character instead of after the stage has been cleared.  Pope's
+explanations of the words which appeared difficult in Shakespeare's
+text were often laughably far from the truth.  The word 'foison,'
+meaning 'plenty,' Pope defined as the 'natural juice of grass.'  The
+word 'neif,' meaning 'fist,' Pope thought meant 'woman.'  Pistol is
+thus made to say, "Thy woman will I take."  Phrases that appeared to be
+vulgar or unpoetical he simply dropped out, or altered without notice.
+He rearranged the lines in order to give them the studied smoothness
+characteristic of the eighteenth century.  In fact, he tried to make
+Shakespeare as near like Pope's poetry as he could.
+
+In 1726 Lewis Theobald published _Shakespeare Restored_, with many
+corrections of Pope's errors.  In this little pamphlet most of the
+material was devoted to _Hamlet_.  Theobald's corrections were taken by
+Pope in very bad part; and the latter tried to destroy Theobald's
+reputation by writing satires against him and by injuring him in every
+possible way in print.  The first of these publications, _The Dunciad_,
+appeared in 1728; and this, the greatest satire in the English
+language, was so effective as to have obscured Theobald's real merit
+until our own day.  Theobald's edition of Shakespeare followed in 1734,
+and was reprinted in 1740.  It is famous for his corrections and
+improvements of the text, many of which are followed by all later
+editors of Shakespeare.  The most notable of these is Mrs. Quickly's
+remark in Falstaff's deathbed scene, "His nose was as sharp as a pen
+and a' babbled of green fields."  The previous texts had given "and a
+table of green fields."  Pope had said that this nonsense crept in from
+the name of the property man who was named Greenfield, and thus there
+must have been a stage direction here,--"Bring in a table of
+Greenfield's."
+
+Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by Thomes Hanmer's edition in
+six volumes.  Hanmer was a country gentleman, but not much of a scholar.
+
+Warburton's edition followed in 1747.  In 1765 appeared {129} Samuel
+Johnson's long-delayed edition in eight volumes.  Aside from a few
+common-sense explanations, the edition is not of much merit.
+
+Tyrwhitt's edition in 1766 was followed by a reprint of twenty of the
+early quartos by George Steevens in the same year.  Two years later
+came the edition of Edward Capell, the greatest scholarly work since
+Theobald's.  In this edition was the first rigorous comparison between
+the readings of the folios and the quartos.  His quartos, now in the
+British Museum, are of the greatest value to Shakespeare scholars.
+With his edition begins the tendency to get back to the earliest form
+of the text and not to try to improve Shakespeare to the ideal of what
+the editor thinks Shakespeare should have said.
+
+In 1773 Johnson's edition was revised by Steevens, and _Pericles_ was
+readmitted.  This was a valuable but crotchety edition.  In 1790 Edmund
+Malone published his famous edition in ten volumes.  No Shakespearean
+scholar ranks higher than he in reputation.  Numerous editions followed
+up to 1865, of which the most important is James Boswell's so-called
+Third _Variorum_ in twenty-one volumes.  In 1855-1861 was published J.
+O. Halliwell's edition in fifteen volumes, which contains enormous
+masses of antiquarian material.
+
+In 1853 appeared the forgeries of J. P. Collier, to which reference is
+made elsewhere.
+
+In 1854-1861 appeared the edition in Germany of N. Delius.  The Leopold
+Shakespeare, 1876, used Delius's text.
+
+In 1857-1865 appeared the first good American edition of R. G. White.
+It contained many original suggestions.  Between 1863 and 1866 appeared
+the edition of Clark and Wright, known as the Cambridge edition.  Mr.
+W. Aldis Wright, now the dean of living Shakespearean scholars, is
+chiefly responsible for this text.  It was reprinted with a few changes
+into the Globe edition, and is still the chief popular text.
+
+Prof. W. A. Neilson's single volume in the Cambridge series, 1906, is
+the latest scholarly edition in America.  It follows in most cases the
+positions taken by Clark and Wright.
+
+Within the last few years there has been an enormous {130} stimulus to
+Shakespeare study.  The chief work of modern Shakespearean scholarship
+is the still incomplete _Variorum_ edition of Dr. H. H. Furness and his
+son.
+
+Other aids to study are reprints of the books used by Shakespeare,
+facsimile reprints of the original quartos of the plays, and, perhaps
+as useful as any one thing, the facsimile reproduction of the First
+Folio.  The few perplexing problems that the scholar still finds in the
+text of Shakespeare will probably never be solved.
+
+On the subject of this chapter, consult A. W. Pollard, _Shakespeare
+Folios and Quartos_, Methuen, London, 1910; Sidney Lee, Introduction to
+the facsimile reproduction of the First Folio by the Oxford University
+Press; T. R. Lounsbury, _The Text of Shakespeare_, New York, Scribners,
+1906.  For the remarks of critics and editors, the _Variorum_ edition
+of Dr. H. H. Furness is invaluable.
+
+
+
+[1] A quarto volume, or quarto, is a book which is the size of a fourth
+of a sheet of printing paper.  The sheets are folded twice to make four
+leaves or eight pages, and the usual size is about 6x9 in.  A folio is
+a volume of the size of a half sheet of printing paper.  The paper is
+folded once and bound in the middle, the usual size being about 9 x 12
+in.  The divisions of the book made by thus folding sheets of paper are
+called quires, and may consist of four or eight leaves.
+
+[2] This view of the Pavier-Jaggard collection is held by A. W. Pollard
+of the British Museum and W. W. Greg of Trinity College Library,
+Cambridge.  The writers of this volume incline to accord it complete
+recognition.
+
+[3] It was evidently designed to fit in between _Romeo and Juliet_ and
+_Julius Caesar_; but the owner of the publishing rights holding out
+till that part of the book was ready, the editors "ran in" _Timon of
+Athens_ to fill up.  When _Troilus and Cressida_ was finally arranged
+for, it had to be inserted between the Histories and Tragedies.
+
+
+
+
+{131}
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD--IMITATION AND EXPERIMENT
+
+1587 (?)-1594
+
+The first period of Shakespeare's work carries him from the youthful
+efforts at dramatic construction to such mastery of dramatic technique
+and of original portrayal of life as raise him, when aided by his
+supreme poetic art, above all other living dramatists.  It was chiefly
+a period in which the young poet, full of ambition, curious of his own
+talents, and eager for success, was feeling his way among the different
+types of drama which he saw reaching success on the London stage.
+
+The longest period of experiment was in the writing of chronicle
+histories.  The experience acquired in these six plays, all derived in
+some measure from earlier work by others, made Shakespeare a master of
+this type.  Next in importance was comedy, chiefly romantic with four
+plays of widely different aim and merit.  These two types are brought
+to the highest development in the dramatist's second period.  Tragedy
+was to wait for a fuller and riper experience.  What the complete
+earlier version of _Romeo and Juliet_ was like, we have only a faint
+idea; it was obviously, while {132} intensely appealing, the work of a
+young and immature poet.  _Titus Andronicus_ led nowhere in development.
+
+Christopher Marlowe remained Shakespeare's master in the drama
+throughout the chronicle plays of the period.  John Lyly's court
+comedies contained most of the types of character which are to be found
+in _Love's Labour's Lost_.  Throughout the period Shakespeare grows in
+mastery of plot and of his dramatic verse; but his chief growth is away
+from this imitation of others into his own creative portraiture of
+character.  The growth from the bluff soldier, Talbot, in _Henry VI_ to
+the weak but appealing Richard II is no less marked than is that from
+the fantastic Armado in _Love's Labour's Lost_ to the unconsciously
+ridiculous Bottom.
+
+Shakespeare's greatest achievements in this period, aside from _Romeo
+and Juliet_ in the unknown first draft, are the characters of Richard
+II and Richard III, the former a portrait of vanity and vacillation
+mingled with more agreeable traits, lovable gentleness and traces at
+least of kingliness, the latter a Titanic figure possessed by an
+overmastering passion.
+
+It is impossible to draw a satisfactory line of division between the
+experimental period of Shakespeare's work and the period of comedy
+which follows.  Two plays, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _The
+Merchant of Venice_, lie really between the two.  The chief arguments
+for an early grouping seem to be that the former is in some measure an
+artificial court comedy, and is full of riming speech and end-stopped
+lines; the latter derives some help from Marlowe's treatment of _The
+Jew of Malta_.  But, on the other hand, the {133} mastery of original
+characterization in such groups as the delicate fairies of the _Dream_,
+or those who gather at the trial of _The Merchant_, might justify their
+position in the second period rather than in the first.  On the whole,
+it is perhaps wisest to let metrical differences govern, and so to put
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_, at the end of Imitation and Experiment;
+while _The Merchant of Venice_ may safely usher in the great period of
+comedy.
+
+The three plays known as _The Three Parts of Henry VI_, together with
+_Richard the Third_, constitute the history of the Wars of the Roses,
+in which the House of York fought the House of Lancaster through the
+best part of the fifteenth century, and lost the fight and the English
+crown in 1485, a hundred years before Shakespeare came to London.
+Although these plays have but slight appeal to us as readers, they must
+have been highly popular among Elizabethan playgoers.
+
++The First Part of Henry the Sixth+ deals chiefly with the wars of
+England and France which center about the figures of Talbot, the
+English commander, and Joan of Arc, called Joan la Pucelle (the
+maiden).  The former is a hero of battle, who dies fighting for
+England.  The latter is painted according to the traditional English
+view, which lasted long after Shakespeare's time, as a wicked and
+impure woman, in league with devils, who fight for her against the
+righteous power of England.  We are glad to think that while the Talbot
+scenes are probably Shakespeare's, the portrait of La Pucelle is not
+from his hand, as we shall see.  The deaths of these protagonists
+prepares the way for the peace which Suffolk concludes, and the
+marriage {134} which he arranges between Margaret of Anjou and King
+Henry.
+
++The Second Part of Henry the Sixth+ concerns the outbreak of strife
+between York and Lancaster, but chiefly the overthrow of the uncle of
+the king, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, as Protector of the Realm, and
+the destruction of his opponent, the Duke of Suffolk, in his turn.  The
+play ends with the first battle of St. Albans (1455), resulting in the
+complete triumph of Duke Richard of York, in open rebellion against
+King Henry.
+
++The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth+ tells of the further wars of
+York and Lancaster, in the course of which Richard of York is murdered,
+and his sons, Edward and Richard, keep up the struggle, while Warwick,
+styled the "Kingmaker," transfers his power to Lancaster.  In the end
+York is triumphant; and while Henry VI and his son are murdered, and
+Warwick slain in battle at Barnet, Edward is crowned as Edward IV, and
+Richard becomes the Duke of Gloucester.
+
+
++Authorship+.--The Three Parts of _Henry the Sixth_ were first printed
+in the First Folio, 1623.  Two earlier plays, _The First Part of the
+Contention between the two Noble Houses of York and Lancaster_
+(sometimes called _1 Contention_), and _The True Tragedy of Richard,
+Duke of York... with the whole Contention between the two Houses of
+Lancaster and York_ (2 _Contention_), appeared in quarto in 1594 and
+1595 respectively.  These are to be regarded as earlier versions of
+_II_ and _III Henry VI_.[1] For the _First Part of Henry VI_ no
+dramatic source exists.  The ultimate source is, of course, Holinshed's
+_Chronicles_.
+
+The authorship of these plays is not ascribed to any dramatist, until
+1623, although, as we have seen,[2] Robert Greene accuses {135}
+Shakespeare of authorship in a stolen play, by applying to him a line
+from _III Henry VI_ which had appeared earlier in 2 _Contention_.
+Internal study of the three plays, however, has reduced the problem to
+about this state:--
+
+_The First Part of Henry VI_ is thought to have been written by Greene,
+with George Peele and Marlowe to help.  To this Shakespeare was allowed
+to add a few scenes on a later revival of the play.  Some critics give
+to him the Talbot scenes and the quarrel in the Temple; but Professor
+Neilson warns us that the grounds for this and other assignments of
+authorship in the play "are in the highest degree precarious."
+
+The two _Contentions_ are thought to have been chiefly the work of
+Marlowe, with Greene to help him.  Others are suggested as assistants,
+such as Lodge, Peele, and Shakespeare.  In the revival of the two
+_Contentions_, Shakespeare's work amounted to a close revision, though
+the older material remained in larger part, both in text and plot.  In
+this revision, Marlowe is thought to have aided, and Greene's bitter
+attack on Shakespeare may have been caused by the fact that Shakespeare
+had so supplanted him as collaborator with Marlowe, then the greatest
+dramatist of England.  It hardly seems likely that this attack would
+have been made if Shakespeare had had any share in the first versions,
+_The Contentions_.
+
++Date+.--_The First Part of Henry VI_ is thought to have been the play
+at the Rose Theatre on March 3, 1591-1692, by Lord Strange's company,
+since a reference by Nash about this time refers to Talbot as a stage
+figure.  The _Second and Third Parts_ have no evidence other than that
+of style, but are usually assigned to the period 1590-1592.
+
+
++Richard the Third+ is best treated at this point, although in the date
+of composition _King John_ may intervene between it and _III Henry VI_.
+It is the tale of a tyrant, who, by murdering everybody who stands in
+his way, including his two nephews, his brother, and his friend, wins
+the crown of England, only to be swept by {136} irresistible popular
+wrath into ruin and death on Bosworth Field.  This tyrant is scarcely
+human, but rather the impersonation  of  a great  passion of ambition.
+In this respect, as well as in lack of humor, lack of development of
+character, and in other ways less easy to grasp, Shakespeare is here
+distinctly imitative of Marlowe's method in plays like _Tamburlaine_.
+
+
++Date+.--_Richard the Third_ was very popular among Elizabethans, for
+quartos appeared in 1597, 1598 (then first ascribed to Shakespeare),
+1602, 1605, 1612, 1629, 1622, and 1634.  The First Folio version is
+quite different in detail from the Quarto, and is thought to have been
+a good copy of an acting version.  The date of writing can hardly be
+later than 1598.
+
++Source+.--An anonymous play called _The True Tragedie of Richard III_
+had appeared before Shakespeare's; just when is uncertain.  A still
+earlier play, a tragedy in Latin called _Richardus Tertius_, also told
+the story.  Shakespeare's chief source was, however, Holinshed's
+_Chronicles_, which learned the tradition of Richard's wickedness from
+a life of that king written in Henry VII's time, and ascribed to Sir
+Thomas More.  In the _Chronicles_ was but a bare outline of the
+character which the dramatist so powerfully developed.
+
+
++King John+, so far as its central theme may be said to exist, portrays
+the ineffectual struggles of a crafty and unscrupulous coward to stick
+to England's slippery throne.  At first King John is successful.
+Bribed with the rich dowry of Blanch, niece of England, as a bride for
+his son the Dauphin, King Philip of France ceases his war upon England
+in behalf of Prince Arthur, John's nephew and rival.  When the Church
+turns against John for his refusal to obey the Pope, and France and
+Austria continue the war, John is victorious, and captures Prince
+Arthur.  At this point begins his {137} downfall.  His cruel treatment
+of the young prince, while not actually ending in the murder he had
+planned, drives the boy to attempted escape and to death.  The nobles
+rise and welcome the Dauphin, whose invasion of England proves
+fruitless, it is true, but the victory is not won by John, and the king
+dies ignobly at Swinstead Abbey.
+
+Two characters rise above the rest in this drama of unworthy
+schemes,--Constance, the passionately devoted mother of Prince Arthur,
+who fights for her son with almost tigress-like ferocity, and
+Faulconbridge, the loyal lieutenant of King John, cynical and fond of
+bragging, but brave and patriotic, and gifted with a saving grace of
+rough humor, much needed in the sordid atmosphere he breathes.  One
+single scene contains a note of pathos otherwise foreign to the
+play,--that in which John's emissary Hubert begins his cruel task of
+blinding poor Prince Arthur, but yields to pity and forbears.
+
+
++Date+.--_The Troublesome Raigne_ was published in 1591, and probably
+written about that time.  Shakespeare's play did not appear in print
+until the First Folio, 1623.  Meres mentions it, however, in 1598, and
+internal evidence of meter and style, as well as of dramatic structure,
+puts the play between _Richard III_ and _Richard II_, or at any rate
+close to them.  The three plays have been arranged in every order by
+critics of authority.  Perhaps 1592-1593 is a safe date.
+
++Source+.--The only source was the two parts of _The Troublesome Raigne
+of John, King of England_, a play which appeared anonymously in quarto
+in 1591.  Shakespeare compressed the two parts into one, gaining
+obvious advantages thereby, but losing also some incidents without
+which the later play is unmotivated.  The hatred felt by Faulconbridge
+for Austria was due in the earlier version to the legendary belief that
+{138} Richard Coeur-de-Lion, his father, met death at Austria's hands.
+No reference to this is made by Shakespeare, but the hatred remains as
+a motive.  In the opening scene between the Bastard and his mother,
+Shakespeare's condensation has injured the story somewhat.  But most of
+his changes are improvements.  He cut out the pandering to religious
+prejudice which in the earlier play made John a Protestant hero to suit
+Elizabethan opinion.  He improved the exits and entrances, divided the
+scenes in more effective ways, and built up the element of comic relief
+in Faulconbridge's red-blooded humor.
+
+The numerous alterations from historical fact, such as the youth of
+Arthur, the widowhood of Constance, the character of Faulconbridge, are
+all from the earlier version, as is the suppression of the baron's wars
+and Magna Charta.  Shakespeare added practically nothing to the action
+in his source.
+
+A still earlier play, _Kynge Johan_ by Bishop John Bale (c. 1650), had
+nothing to do with later versions.
+
+
++Richard the Second+, unlike _Richard the Third_, is not simply the
+story of one man.  While Richard III is on the stage during more than
+two-thirds of the latter play, Richard II appears during almost exactly
+half of the action.  Richard III dominates his play throughout; Richard
+II in only two or three scenes.  Richard's two uncles, John of Gaunt
+and the Duke of York, and his two cousins, Hereford (Bolingbroke, later
+Henry IV) and Aumerle, claim almost as much of our attention as does
+the central figure of the play, the light, vain, and thoughtless king.
+
+And yet with all this improvement in the adjustment of the leading role
+to the whole picture, Shakespeare drew a far more real and complete
+character in Richard II than any he had yet portrayed in historical
+drama.  It is a character seen in many lights.  At first we are
+disappointed with Richard's love of the {139} spectacular when he
+allows Bolingbroke's challenge to Mowbray to go as far as the actual
+sounding of the trumpets in the lists before he casts down his warder
+and decrees the banishment of both.  A little later we see with disgust
+his greedy thoughtlessness, when he insults the last hour of John of
+Gaunt by his importunate visit, and without a word of regret lays hold
+of his dead uncle's property to help on his own Irish wars.  Nor does
+our respect for him rise at all when in the critical moment, upon the
+return of Bolingbroke to England, Richard's weak will vacillates
+between action and unmanly lament, and all the while his vanity
+delights to paint his misery in full-mouth'd rhetoric.  Vanity is again
+the note of his abdication, when he calls for a mirror in which to
+behold the face that has borne such sorrow as his, and then in a fit of
+almost childish rage dashes the glass upon the ground.  His whole life,
+like that one act, has been impulsive and futile.
+
+But now that misfortune and degradation have come upon King Richard,
+Shakespeare compels us to turn from disgust to pity, and finally almost
+to admiration.  We realize that after all Richard is a king, and that
+his wretched state demands compassion.  Moreover, a nobler side of
+Richard's character is portrayed.  His deeply touching farewell to his
+loving Queen, as he goes to his solitary confinement, though tinged
+with almost unmanly meekness of spirit, is yet poignant with true
+grief.  And the last scene of all, in which he dies, vainly yet bravely
+resisting his murderers, is a gallant end to a life so full of
+indecision.
+
+{140}
+
+In strong contrast with this weak and still absorbing figure are the
+two high-minded and patriotic uncles of King Richard, and the masterful
+though unscrupulous Henry.  The famous prophetic speech of dying John
+of Gaunt is committed to memory by every English schoolboy, as the
+expression of the highest patriotism in the noblest poetry.  And just
+as our attitude towards Richard changes from contempt to pity and even
+admiration, so our admiration for Henry, the man of action and, as he
+calls himself, "the true-borne Englishman," turns into indignation at
+his usurpation of the throne and his connivance, to use no stronger
+term, at the murder of his sovereign.  Throughout the play, however,
+Shakespeare makes us feel that the national cause demands Henry's
+triumph.
+
+
++Date+.--Marlowe's _Edward II_ is usually dated 1593; and Shakespeare's
+_Richard II_ is dated the year following, in order to accommodate facts
+to theory.  The frequency of rime points to an earlier date, the
+absence of prose to a later date.  Our only certain date is 1597, when
+a quarto appeared.  Others followed in 1598, 1608, and 1615.
+
+A play "of the deposing of Richard II" was performed by wish of the
+Earl of Essex in London streets in 1601, on the eve of his attempted
+revolt against the queen.  If this was our play, then Essex failed as
+signally in understanding the real theme of the play as he did in
+interpreting the attitude of Englishmen toward him.  Both the one and
+the other condemned usurpation in the strongest terms.
+
++Source+.--Holinshed's _Chronicles_ furnished Shakespeare with but the
+bare historical outline.  It is usual to suggest that Marlowe's
+portrayal of a similarly weak figure with a similarly tragic end
+suggested Shakespeare's play; and this may be, though there is nothing
+to indicate direct influence.
+
+{141}
+
++Titus Andronicus+ has a plot so revolting to modern readers that many
+critics like to follow the seventeenth-century tradition, which tells,
+according to a writer who wanted to justify his own tinkering, that
+Shakespeare added "some master-touches to one or two of the principal
+characters," and nothing more.  But unfortunately not only the
+phraseology and the meter, but the more important external evidences
+point to Shakespeare, and, however we might wish it, we cannot find
+grounds to dismiss the theory that Shakespeare was at least responsible
+for the rewriting of an older play.
+
+No play better deserves the type name of 'tragedy of blood.'  The
+crimes which disfigure its scenes seem to us unnecessarily wanton.
+Briefly, the struggle is between Titus, conqueror of the Goths, and
+Tamora, their captive queen, who marries the Roman emperor, and who
+would revenge Titus's sacrifice of her son to the shades of his own
+slain sons.  From the first five minutes, during which a noble Goth is
+hacked to pieces--off stage, mercifully--to the last minute of carnage,
+when the entire company go hands all round in murder, fifteen persons
+are slain, and other crimes no less horrible perpetrated.  Every one at
+some time gets his revenge; and the play is entirely made up of
+plotting, killing, gloating, and counterplotting.  The inhumanly brutal
+Aaron, the blackamoor lover of Tamora, is arch villain in all this; but
+the ungovernable passions of Titus render him scarcely more attractive.
+
+The pity of it is that the young Shakespeare apparently wasted upon
+this slaughtering much genuine {142} poetic art, and no little
+elaboration of plot.  But he was writing what the public of that day
+enjoyed.  Developed by such real artists as Kyd, the tragedy of blood,
+like the modern "thriller," had about 1590 an enormous success.  It is
+well for us to remember, too, that out of one of these tragedies of
+revenge and blood sprang the great tragedy of _Hamlet_.
+
+
++Date+.--The most recent authorities put the play as written not long
+before the publication of the First Quarto, 1594.  The Stationers'
+Register records it on February 6, 1593-4.  Second and Third Quartos
+followed in 1600 and 1611.  None of these ascribe the play to
+Shakespeare.  It is, however, included in the First Folio.
+
++Authorship and Source+.--Richard Henslowe, the manager, recorded in
+his Diary, April 11, 1591, the performance of a new play _Tittus and
+Vespacia_.  In a German version, _Tito Andronico_, printed in a
+collection of 1620, Lucius is called Vespasian; and thus we have a
+slight ground for belief that the entry of Henslowe refers to an early
+play about our Titus.  A Dutch version, _Aran en Titus_, appeared in
+1641.  This appears to have been based on another relation of the
+story, earlier and cruder than Shakespeare's.  The Shakespearean
+version probably came from these two earlier plays, with considerable
+additions in plot.
+
+The two latest students of the play, Dr. Fuller and Mr. Robertson,
+differ as far as they well can on the question of authorship.  The
+former believes Shakespeare wrote every line of the present play; the
+latter that he wrote none of it, and that Greene and Peele had their
+full share.  Kyd and Marlowe are assigned as authors by others.  One
+fact stands clear, that in the face of the evidence of the First Folio
+and of Meres, no conclusive internal evidence has disposed of the
+theory of Shakespearean authorship.  The play was enormously popular,
+if we may judge by contemporary references to it, and a mistake in
+attribution by Meres would therefore have been the more {143}
+remarkable.  Incredible, too, as it may seem, the earlier versions must
+have been more revolting than Shakespeare's; so that there is really a
+lift into higher drama.
+
+
++Romeo and Juliet+ stands out from the other great tragedies of
+Shakespeare, not only in point of time, but in its central theme.  It
+deals with the power of nature in awaking youth to full manhood and
+womanhood through the sudden coming of pure and supreme love; with the
+danger which always attends the precipitate call of this awakening; and
+with the sudden storm which overcasts the brilliant day of passion.
+The enmity of the rival houses of Montague and Capulet, to which Romeo
+and Juliet belong, is but a concrete form of this danger that ever
+waits when nature prompts.  Romeo's fancied love for another disappears
+like a drop of water on a stone in the sun, when his glance meets
+Juliet's at the Capulet's ball.  Love takes equally sudden hold of her.
+Worldly and religious caution seek to stem the flood of passion, or at
+least to direct it.  The lovers are married at Friar Laurence's cell;
+but in the sudden whirl of events that follow the friar's amiable
+schemes, one slight error on his part wastes all that glorious passion
+and youth have won.  It was not his fault, after all; such is the
+eternal tragedy when Youth meets Love, and Nature leads them
+unrestrained to peril.
+
+In perfection of dramatic technique parts of this play rank with the
+very best of Shakespeare's work.  When to this is added the
+extraordinary beauty and fire of the poetry, and the brilliancy of
+color and stage picture afforded by the setting in old Verona, it is no
+wonder that to-day no mouthing of the words, no {144} tawdriness of
+setting, and no wretchedness of acting can hinder the supreme appeal of
+this play to audiences all over the world.  The chief characters are
+well contrasted by the dramatist.  Romeo, affecting sadness, but in
+reality merry by nature, becomes grave when the realization of love
+comes upon him.  Juliet, when love comes, rises gladly to meet its full
+claim.  She is the one who plans and dares, and Romeo the one who
+listens.  Contrasted with Romeo is his friend, Mercutio, gay and
+daring, loving and light-hearted; contrasted with Juliet is her old
+nurse, devoted, like the family cat, but unscrupulous, vain, and
+worldly,--a great comic figure.
+
+
++Date+.--There is throughout the play, but chiefly in the rimed
+passages in the earlier parts, a great deal of verbal conceit and
+playing upon words, which mark immaturity.  The use of sonnets in two
+places, and the abundance of rime, point also to early work; but the
+dramatic technique and the development of character equal the work of
+later periods.
+
+The First Quarto is a garbled copy taken down in the theater.  It was
+printed in 1597.  Its title claims that "it hath been often (with great
+applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon
+his servants."  The company in which Shakespeare acted was so called
+from July, 1596, to April, 1597.  The Second Quarto, "newly corrected,
+augmented, and amended," appeared in 1599, and is the basis of all
+later texts.  Three others followed--1609, one undated, and 1637.
+
+It is generally held that Shakespeare wrote much, perhaps all, of the
+play in the early nineties, and that he revised it for production about
+1597.  The play is therefore a stepping-stone between the first and
+second periods of his work.
+
++Source+.--The development of the story has been traced from Luigi da
+Porto's history of _Romeo and Giulietta_ (pr. 1530 at Venice) through
+Bandello, Boisteau, and Painter's _Palace of {145} Pleasure_, to Arthur
+Brooke's poem _Romeus and Juliet_ (1562), and to a lost English play
+which Brooke says in his address "To the Reader" he had seen on the
+stage, but is now known only through a Dutch play of 1630 based upon it.
+
+The part in which Shakespeare altered the action most notably is the
+first scene, one of the most masterly expositions of a dramatic
+situation ever written.  The nurse is borrowed from Brooke, the death
+of Mercutio from the old play.  The whole is, however, completely
+transfused by the welding fire of genius.
+
+
++Love's Labour's Lost+.--Obviously imitative of the comedies of John
+Lyly, _Love's Labour's Lost_ is a light, pleasant court comedy, with
+but a slight thread of plot.  The king of Navarre and three of his
+nobles forswear for three years the society of ladies in order to
+pursue study.  This plan is interrupted by the Princess of France, who
+with three ladies comes on an embassy to Navarre.  The inevitable
+happens; the gentlemen fall in love with the ladies, and, after
+ineffectual struggles to keep their oaths, give up the pursuit of
+learning for that of love.  This runs on merrily enough in courtly
+fashion till the announcement of the death of the king of France ends
+the embassy, and the lovers are put on a year's probation of constancy.
+In the subplot, or minor story, the play is notable for the burlesquing
+of two types of character--a pompous pedantic schoolmaster, and a
+braggart who always speaks in high-flown metaphor.  These two, happily
+contrasted with a country curate, a court page, and a country clown
+with his lass, make much good sport.
+
+It is often said, but as we believe without sufficient proof, that the
+wit combats of the lords and ladies, {146} and the artificial speech of
+the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque.  These
+elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention
+of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed
+this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of
+courtly repartee.  In this fashion, as well as in the handling of the
+low-comedy figures, and in other ways, Shakespeare followed in the
+steps of John Lyly, the author of the novel _Euphues_ and of the seven
+court comedies written in the decade before _Love's Labour's Lost_.
+Shakespeare's play, however, far surpasses those which it imitated.
+
+
++Date+.--The date of _Love's Labour's Lost_ is entirely a matter of
+conjecture.  It may well have been the very earliest of Shakespeare's
+comedies.  Most scholars agree that the characteristics of style to
+which we have referred, together with the great use of rime (see p. 81)
+and the immaturity of the play as a whole, must indicate a very early
+date, and therefore put the play not later than 1591.
+
+A quarto was published in 1598, "newly corrected and augmented by W.
+Shakespere."  The corrections, from certain mistakes of the printer,
+appear to be in the speeches of the wittiest of the lords and ladies,
+Biron and Rosaline.  The play next appeared in the Folio.
+
++Source+.--No direct source has been discovered.  In 1586, Catherine
+de' Medici, accompanied by her ladies, visited the court of Henry of
+Navarre, and attempted to settle the disputes between that prince and
+her son, Henry III.  Other hints may also have come from French
+history.  The masque of Muscovites may have been based on the joke
+played on a Russian ambassador in York Gardens in 1582, when the
+ambassador was hoping to get a lady of Elizabeth's court as a wife for
+the Czar.  A mocking presentation of this lady was made with much
+ceremony.
+
+
+{147}
+
++The Comedy of Errors+.--Mistaken identity (which the Elizabethans
+called "Error") is nearly always amusing, whether on the stage or in
+actual life.  _The Comedy of Errors_ is a play in which this situation
+is developed to the extreme of improbability; but we lose sight of this
+in the roaring fun which results.  Nowadays we should call a play of
+this type a farce, since most of the fun comes in this way from
+situations which are improbable, and since the play depends on these
+for success rather than on characterization or dialogue.
+
+A merchant of Syracuse has had twin sons, and bought twin servants for
+them.  His wife with one twin son and his twin slave has been lost by
+shipwreck and has come to live in Ephesus.  The other son and slave,
+when grown, have started out to find their brothers, and the father,
+some years later, starts out to find him.  They come to Ephesus, and an
+amusing series of errors at once begins.  The wife takes the wrong twin
+for her husband, the master beats the wrong slave, the wrong son
+disowns his father, the twin at Ephesus is arrested instead of his
+brother, and the twin slave Dromio of Syracuse is claimed as a husband
+by a black kitchen girl of Ephesus.  The situation gets more and more
+mixed, until at last the real identity of the strangers from Syracuse
+is established, and all ends happily.
+
+
++Date+.--There is much wordplay of a rather cheap kind, much doggerel,
+and much jingling rime in this play.  All these things point to early
+work.  A reference (III, ii, 125-127) to France "making war against her
+heir" admits the play to the period 1585-1594, when Henry of Navarre
+was received as king {148} of France.  The play was probably written
+not later than 1591.  The play was first printed in the First Folio.
+
++Source+.--Shakespeare borrowed most of his plot from the _Menaechmi_
+of Plautus.  Shakespeare added to Plautus's story the second twin-slave
+and the parents, together with the girl whom the elder twin meets and
+loves in Syracuse.  This elaboration of the plot adds much to the
+attractiveness of the whole story.  From the _Amphitruo_ of Plautus,
+Shakespeare derived the doubling of slaves, and the scene in which the
+younger twin and his slave are shut out of their own home.
+
+
++The Two Gentlemen of Verona+ is the first of the series of
+Shakespeare's romantic comedies.  Our interest in this play turns upon
+the purely romantic characters; two friends, one true, the other
+recreant; the true friend exiled to an outlaw's life in a forest, the
+false in favor at court; two loving girls, one fair and radiant, the
+other dark and slighted, and following her lover in boy's dress; two
+clowns, Speed and Lance, one a mere word tosser, the other of rare
+humor.  The plot is of slighter importance; a discovered elopement, and
+a maiden rescued from rude, uncivil hands, are the only incidents of
+account.  All ends happily as in romance, and the recreant friend is
+forgiven.
+
+_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ was an experiment along certain
+directions which were later to repay the dramatist most richly.  Here
+first an exquisite lyric interprets the romantic note in the play; here
+first the production of a troth-plight ring confounds the faithless
+lover, and here we first meet one of the charming group of loving
+ladies in disguise.
+
+But as a whole the play is disappointing.  The plot is too fantastic;
+Proteus too much of a cad; Julia, though brave and modest, is yet too
+faithful; Valentine {149} too easy a friend.  The illusion of romance
+throws a transitory glamour over the scene, but, save in the
+development of character, the play seems immature, when compared with
+the greater comedies that followed it.
+
+
++Date+.--The first mention of the play is by Meres (1598); the first
+print that in the First Folio (1623).  The presence of alternate riming
+sonnets and doggerel rime on the one hand, and of a number of double
+endings on the other, render 1592 a reasonable date.  In its
+development of character it marks a great advance over the other two
+comedies of this period.
+
++Source+.--The chief source was a story of a shepherdess, an episode in
+the Spanish novel, _Diana Enamorada_, by Jorge de Montemayor (1592).
+Shakespeare probably read it in an English translation by B. Yonge,
+which had been in Ms. about ten years.  This story gives Julia's part
+of the play, but contains no Valentine.  The Silvia of the story,
+Celia, falls in love instead with the disguised Felismena, and when
+rejected kills herself.  Whether it was Shakespeare who felt the need
+of a Valentine to support the tale, or whether this was done in the
+lost play of _Felix and Philiomena_, acted in 1584, cannot be told.
+The Valentine element may have been borrowed from another play, of
+which a German version exists (1620).
+
+
++Midsummer Night's Dream+ is Shakespeare's experiment in the fairy
+play.  Four lovers, two young Athenians of high birth and their
+sweethearts, are almost inextricably tangled by careless Robin
+Goodfellow, who has dropped the juice of love-in-idleness upon the eyes
+of the wrong lovers.  King Oberon tricks his capricious and resentful
+little queen, by the aid of the same juice, into the absurdest
+infatuation for a clownish weaver, who has come out with his mates to
+rehearse a play to celebrate Theseus's wedding, but has fallen asleep
+and {150} wakened to find an ass's head planted upon him.  All comes
+right, as it ever must in fairyland; the true lovers are reunited; the
+faithful unloved lady gets her faithless lover; Titania repents and is
+forgiven; and Theseus's wedding is graced by the "mirthfullest tragedy
+that ever was seen."
+
+We have in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ three distinct groups of
+characters--the lovers, the city clowns rehearsing for the play, and
+the fairies.  These three diverse groups are combined in the most
+skillful way by an intricate interweaving of plot and by the final
+appearance of all three groups at the wedding festivities of the Duke
+of Athens and his Amazon bride Hypolita.  The characterization, light
+but delicate throughout, the mastery of the intricate story, the
+perfection of the comic parts, and the unsurpassed lyrical power of the
+poetry, are all the evidence we need that Shakespeare is now his own
+master in the drama, and can pass on to the supreme heights of his art.
+He has learned his trade for good and all.
+
+It is not a bad way of placing the last of the comedies in the first
+period of Shakespeare's production, to say that it is the counterpart
+in comedy of _Romeo and Juliet_.  Like Romeo, Lysander has made love to
+Hermia, has sung at her window by moonlight, and has won her heart,
+while her father has promised her hand to another.  Like the lovers in
+the tragedy, Lysander and Hermia plan flight, and an error in this plan
+would have been as fatal as it was in Romeo and Juliet, but for the
+kind interposition of the fairies.  Again, the "tedious brief scene" of
+Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the rustics at the close of the play,
+is {151} nothing but a delightful parody on the very theme of Romeo and
+Juliet, even to the mistaken death, and the suicide of the heroine upon
+realization of the truth.  At the end of the parody, as if in mockery
+of the Capulets and Montagues, Bottom starts up to tell us that "the
+wall is down that parted their fathers."  Finally, the whole fairy
+story is the creation of Shakespeare in a Mercutio mood.
+
+In the diversity of its metrical form, _Midsummer Night's Dream_ is
+also the counterpart of _Romeo and Juliet_.  The abundance of rimed
+couplet, combined wherever there is intensity of feeling with a perfect
+form of blank verse, is reminiscent of the earlier play.  Passages of
+equally splendid poetic power meet us all through, while at the same
+time we feel the very charm of youthful fervor in expression that the
+tragedy displayed.
+
+
++Date+.--There is nothing certain to guide us in assigning a date to
+the play, except the mention of it in Meres's list, in 1598.  The
+absence of a uniform structure of verse, the large proportion of rime
+(partly due, of course, to the nature of the play), the unequal measure
+of characterization, and the number of passages of purely lyric beauty
+argue an earlier date than students who notice only the skillful plot
+structure are willing to assign.  Perhaps 1593-5 would indicate this
+variation in authorities.  Some evidence, of the slightest kind, is
+advanced for 1594.  A quarto was printed in 1600, another with the
+spurious date 1600, really in 1619.
+
++Source+.--The plot of the lovers has no known direct source.  The
+_Diana Enamorada_ has a love potion with an effect similar to that of
+Oberon's.  The wedding of Theseus and the Amazon queen is the opening
+theme of Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and some minor details may also
+have been borrowed from that story.  No doubt, Shakespeare had also
+read for details North's {152} account of Theseus in his translation of
+Plutarch.  Pyramus and Thisbe came originally from Ovid's
+_Metamorphoses_, which had been translated into English before this
+time.  Chaucer tells the same story in his _Legend of Good Women_.
+
+The fairies are almost entirely Shakespeare's creation.  Titania was
+one of Ovid's names for Diana; Oberon was a common name for the fairy
+king, both in the _Faerie Queene_ and elsewhere.  Robin Goodfellow was
+a favorite character among the common folks.  But fairies, as we all
+know them, are like the Twins in _Through the Looking-glass_, things of
+the fancy of one man, and that man Shakespeare.
+
+There is the atmosphere of a wedding about the whole play, and this
+fact has led most scholars to think that the play was written for some
+particular wedding,--just whose has never been settled.  The flattery
+of the virgin Queen (II, i, 157 f.) and other references to purity
+might show that Queen Elizabeth was one of the wedding guests.
+
+
+
+[1] Schelling, _Elizabethan Drama_ I, 264.
+
+[2] See p. 8.
+
+
+
+
+{153}
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD--COMEDY AND HISTORY
+
+It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that Shakespeare was ever
+less than the greatest dramatist of his time, to think of him as the
+pupil and imitator of other dramatists.  He did, indeed, pass through
+this stage of his development with extraordinary rapidity, so that its
+traces are barely perceptible in the later plays of his First Period.
+In the plays of his Second Period even these traces disappear.  If his
+portrayal of Shylock shows the influence of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, it
+is in no sense derivative, and it is the last appearance in
+Shakespeare's work of characterization clearly dependent upon the plays
+of his predecessors.  However much Shakespeare's choice of themes may
+have been determined by the public taste or by the work of his fellows,
+in the creation of character he is henceforth his own master.  Having
+acquired this mastery, he uses it to depict life in its most joyous
+aspect.  For the time being he dwells little upon men's failures and
+sorrows.  He does not ignore life's darker side,--he loved life too
+well for that,--but he uses it merely as a background for pictures of
+youth and happiness and success.  Although among the comedies of this
+period he wrote also three historical plays, they {154} have not the
+tragic character of the earlier histories.  They deal with youth and
+hope instead of crime, weakness, and failure.  In the two parts of
+_Henry IV_ there is quite as much comedy as there is history; in _Henry
+V_, even though the comic interest is slighter, the theme is still one
+of youth and joy as personified in the figure of the vigorous,
+successful young king.  For convenience' sake, however, we may separate
+the histories from the comedies.  To do this we shall have to depart
+somewhat from chronological order, and, since there are fewer
+histories, we shall consider them first.
+
++Henry IV, Part I+.--To the development of Henry V from the wayward
+prince to one of England's most beloved heroes, Shakespeare devoted
+three plays, _Henry IV_, _Parts I_ and _II_, and _Henry V_.  The
+historical event around which the first of these centers is the
+rebellion of the Percies, which culminated in the defeat and death of
+Harry Percy, 'Hotspur,' on Shrewsbury field.  In _Richard II_,
+Shakespeare had foreshadowed what was to come.  The deposed king had
+prophesied that his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, crowned as Henry IV,
+would fall out with the great Percy family which had put him on the
+throne; that the Percies would never be satisfied with what Henry would
+do for them; and that Henry would hate and distrust them on the ground
+that those who had made a king could unmake one as well.  And this
+prophecy was fulfilled.  Uniting with the Scots under Douglas, with the
+Archbishop of York, with Glendower, who was seeking to reėstablish the
+independence of Wales, and with Mortimer, the natural successor of
+Richard, {155} the Percies raised the standard of revolt.  What might
+have happened had all things gone as they were planned, we can never
+know; but Northumberland, the head of the family, feigned sickness;
+Glendower and Mortimer were kept away; the Archbishop dallied; and
+failure was the result.  This situation gave Shakespeare an opportunity
+to paint a number of remarkable portraits; but the scheming, crafty
+Worcester, the vacillating Northumberland, the mystic Glendower, are
+all overshadowed by the figure of Hotspur, wrong-headed, impulsive, yet
+so aflame with young life and enthusiasm, so ready to dare all for
+honor's sake, that he is almost more attractive than the Prince
+himself.  Over against the older leaders of the rebellion stands the
+lonely figure of Henry IV, misunderstood and little loved by his sons,
+who has centered his whole existence upon getting and keeping the
+throne of England.  To this one end he bends every energy of his
+shrewd, strong, hard nature.  Such a man could never understand a
+personality like that of his older son, nor could the son understand
+the father.  Prince Hal, loving life in all its manifestations, joy in
+all its forms, could find small satisfaction in the rigid etiquette of
+a loveless court so long as it offered him an opportunity for little
+more than formal activity.  When the rebellion of the Percies showed
+him that he could do the state real service, he seized his opportunity
+gladly, gayly, modestly.  On his father's cause he centered the
+energies which he had previously scattered.  With this new demand to
+meet, he no longer had time for his old companions.  His old life was
+thrown off like a coat discarded under stress of work.  {156} Even
+before that time came, however, Hal was not one who could enjoy
+ordinary low company; but the friends which had distracted him were far
+from ordinary.  In Falstaff, the leader of the riotous group,
+Shakespeare created one of the greatest comic figures in all
+literature.  Never at a loss, Falstaff masters alike sack,
+difficulties, and companions.  He is an incarnation of joy for whom
+moral laws do not exist.  Because he will not fight when he sees no
+chance of victory, he has been called a coward, but no coward ever had
+such superb coolness in the face of danger.  Falstaff's conduct in a
+fight is explained by his contempt for all conventions which bring no
+joy--a standard which reduces honor to a mere word.  So full of joy was
+he that he inspired it in his companions.  To be with him was to be
+merry.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, and a quarto
+was printed in 1598.  Meres mentions the play without indicating
+whether he meant one part or both.  The evidence of meter and style
+point to a date much earlier than Meres's entry, so that 1597 is the
+year to which Part I is commonly assigned.
+
++Source+.--For the serious plot of this play, Shakespeare drew upon
+Holinshed.  He had no scruples, however, against altering history for
+dramatic purposes.  Thus he brings within a much shorter period of time
+the battles in Wales and Scotland, makes Hal and Hotspur of
+approximately the same age, and unites two people in the character of
+Mortimer.  The situations in the scenes which show Hal with Falstaff
+and his fellows are largely borrowed from an old play called _The
+Famous Victories of Henry V_, but this source furnished only the barest
+and crudest outlines, and gave practically no hint of the characters as
+Shakespeare conceived them.  The reference in Act I, Sc. ii, to
+Falstaff as the 'old lad of the castle' shows that his name was
+originally {157} Oldcastle, as in _The Famous Victories_.  Oldcastle
+was a historical personage quite unlike Falstaff, and it is supposed
+that the change was made to spare the feeling of Oldcastle's
+descendants.
+
+
++Henry IV, Part II+.--This part is less a play than a series of loosely
+connected scenes.  The final suppression of the rebellion, which had
+been continued by the Archbishop of York, the sickness and death of
+Henry IV, and the accession of Prince Hal as Henry V, are matters
+essentially undramatic and incapable of unified treatment, while the
+growing separation of Hal and Falstaff deprived the underplot of that
+close connection with the main action which it had in the preceding
+play.  Feeling the weakness of the main plot, Shakespeare reduced it to
+a subordinate position, making it little more than a series of
+historical pictures inserted between the scenes in which Falstaff and
+his companions figure.  He enriched this part of the play, on the other
+hand, by the introduction of a number of superbly poetical speeches,
+the best known of which is that beginning, "O Sleep, O gentle Sleep."
+To the comic groups Shakespeare added a number of new figures, among
+them the braggart Pistol, whose speech bristles with the high-sounding
+terms he has borrowed from the theater, and old Justice Shallow, so
+fond of recalling the gay nights and days which are as much figments of
+his imagination as is his assumed familiarity with the great John of
+Gaunt.  By placing more stress upon the evil and less pleasing sides of
+Falstaff's nature, Shakespeare evidently intended to prepare his
+readers' minds for the definite break between old Jack and the new
+king; but in this wonderful man he had created a character so
+fascinating that he could not spoil it; and {158} the king's public
+rejection of Falstaff comes as a painful shock which, impresses one as
+much with the coldly calculating side of the Bolingbroke nature as it
+does with the sad inevitability of the rupture.
+
+
++Source and Date+.--The sources for this play are the same as those of
+its predecessor.  Although the first and only quarto was not printed
+until 1600, there is a reference to this part in Jonson's _Every Man
+Out of his Humour_, which was produced in 1599.  It must, therefore,
+have been written shortly after Part I, and it is accordingly dated
+1598.
+
+
++Henry V+.--In this, which is really the third play of a trilogy,
+Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment quite unlike that which
+characterizes the other two.  _Henry V_ is really a dramatized epic, an
+almost lyric rhapsody cast in the form of dialogue.  Falstaff has
+disappeared from view, and is recalled only by the affecting story of
+his death.  This episode, however, brief as it is, reveals the love
+which the old knight evoked from his companions, while the narrative of
+his last hours is the more pathetic for being put in the mouth of the
+comic figure of Dame Quickly.  Falstaff's place was one which could not
+be filled, and the comic scenes become comparatively insignificant,
+although the quarrels of Pistol and the Welshman Fluellen have a
+distinctive humor.  A figure which replaces the classic chorus connects
+the scattered historical scenes by means of superb narrative verse.
+Each episode glorifies a new aspect of Henry's character.  We see him
+as the valiant soldier; as the leader rising superior to tremendous
+odds; as the democratic king who, concealing his rank, talks and jests
+with a common soldier; and {159} as the bluff, hearty suitor of a
+foreign bride.  In thus seeing him, moreover, we see not only the
+individual man; we see him as an ideal Englishman, as the embodiment of
+the type which the men of Shakespeare's day--and of ours, too, for that
+matter--loved and admired and honored.  In celebrating Henry's
+victories, Shakespeare was also celebrating England's more recent
+victories over her enemies abroad, so that the play is a great national
+paean, the song of heroic, triumphant England.
+
+
++Date and Source+.--Like its predecessors, _Henry V_ is founded on
+Holinshed, with some additions taken from the Famous Victories.  The
+allusion in the chorus which precedes Act V to the Irish expedition of
+the Earl of Essex fixes the date of composition between April 14 and
+September 28, 1599.  A quarto, almost certainly pirated, was printed in
+1600 and reprinted in 1602, 1608, and 1619 (in the latter with the
+false date of 1608).  The text of these quartos is, therefore, much
+inferior to that of the Folio.
+
+
++The Merchant of Venice+.--As usually presented on the modern stage,
+_The Merchant of Venice_ appears to be a comedy, which is overshadowed
+by one tragic figure, that of the Jew Shylock, the representative of a
+down-trodden people, deprived of his money by a tricky lawyer and
+deprived of his daughter by a tricky Christian.  Students, on the other
+hand, have maintained that to the Elizabethans Shylock was merely a
+comic figure, the defeat of whose vile plot to get the life of his
+Christian debtor, Antonio, by taking a pound of his flesh in place of
+the unpaid gold, was greeted with shouts of delighted laughter.  As a
+matter of fact, Shylock, then as now, was a human being, and by virtue
+{160} of that fact both ridiculous and pathetic.  In any case, whatever
+the dominant note of his character, he is not the dominant figure of
+the play.  If he were, the fifth act, which ends the play with
+moonlight and music and the laughter of happy lovers, would be
+distinctly out of place.  Yet it is in reality the absence of such
+defects of taste, the ability to bring everything into its proper
+place, to make a harmonious whole out of the most various tones, which
+best characterizes the Shakespearean comedy of this period.  Instead of
+being a play in which one great character is set in relief against a
+number of lesser ones, _The Merchant of Venice_ is a comedy in which
+there is an unusually large number of characters of nearly equal
+importance and an unusually large number of plots of nearly equal
+interest.  There is the plot which has to do with Portia's marriage, in
+which the right lover wins this gracious merry lady by choosing the
+proper one of three locked caskets.  There is the plot which deals with
+the elopement of the Jew's daughter, Jessica.  There is the plot which
+relates the story of the bond given by Antonio to the Jew in return for
+the loan which enables Antonio's friend, Bassanio, to carry on his suit
+for Portia's hand, the bond, which, when forfeited, would have cost
+Antonio his life had not Portia, disguised as a lawyer, defeated
+Shylock's treacherous design.  There is the plot which tells how
+Bassanio and his friend Gratiano give their wedding rings as rewards to
+the pretended lawyer and his assistant, really their wives Portia and
+Nerissa in disguise,--an act which gives the wives a chance to make
+much trouble for their lords.  And all these plots are worked out with
+an abundance of {161} interesting detail, and are so perfectly
+interwoven that the play has all of the wonderful harmony of a Turkish
+rug, as well as its brilliant variety.  No play of Shakespeare's
+depends more for its effect on plot, on the sheer interest of the
+stories, and no one has, consequently, situations which are more
+effective on the stage.  It is, perhaps, an inevitable result that the
+individual characters have a somewhat less permanent, less deeply
+satisfying charm than do those of the comedies which follow.  None of
+these successors, however, presents a larger or more varied group of
+delightful men and women.
+
+
++Date+.--The later limit of the date is settled by the mention of this
+play in Meres's catalogue, and by its entry in the Stationers' Register
+of that same year.  Basing their opinion on extremely unsubstantial
+internal evidence, some scholars have dated the play as early as 1594,
+but the evidence of style and construction make a date before 1596
+unlikely.  Two quartos were printed, one in 1600; the other, though
+copying the date 1600 upon its title-page, was probably printed in 1619.
+
++Source+.--The story of the pound of flesh and that of the choice of
+caskets are extremely ancient.  The former is combined with that of the
+wedding rings in Fiorentino's _Il Pecorone_ (the first novel of the
+fourth day), a story which Shakespeare probably knew and may have used.
+Alexander Silvayn's _The Orator_, printed in English translation in
+1596, has, in connection with a bond episode, speeches made by a Jew
+which may be the source of some of Shylock's lines.  The combination of
+these plots with those of Jessica and Nerissa is, so far as we can yet
+prove, original with Shakespeare; but we cannot be certain how much
+_The Merchant of Venice_ resembles a lost play of the Jew mentioned in
+Gosson's _School of Abuse_ (1579), "representing the greediness of
+worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of Usurers."
+
+
++The Taming of the Shrew+.--_The Taming of the Shrew_ is only in part
+the work of Shakespeare.  Just how {162} much he had to do with making
+over the underplot, we shall probably never know; but, in any case, he
+did not write the dialogue of this part of the play, and its
+construction is not particularly remarkable.  The winning of a girl by
+a suitor disguised as a teacher is a conventional theme of comedy, as
+is the disguising of a stranger to take the place of an absent father
+in order to confirm a young lover's suit.  The main plot Shakespeare
+certainly left as he found it.  It tells how an ungovernable, willful
+girl was made into a submissive wife by a husband who assumed for the
+purpose a manner even wilder than her own, so wild that not even she
+could endure it.  This story is presented in scenes of uproarious farce
+in which there is little opportunity for subtle characterization or the
+higher sort of comedy.  What Shakespeare did was to give to the hero
+and heroine, Petruchio and Katherine, a semblance of reality, and to
+add enormously to the life and movement of the scenes in which they
+appear.  Some of these scenes are very effective on the stage, but they
+are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities.  The
+induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite
+another matter.  The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately
+omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece.  A
+nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor
+before an inn.  The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has
+him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants who make him
+believe that he is really a lord, and finally has the play performed
+before him.  The outline of this induction was in the old play which
+Shakespeare revised; but {163} he developed the crude work of his
+predecessor into scenes so delightfully realistic, into
+characterization so richly humorous, that this induction takes its
+place among the great comic episodes of literature.
+
+
++Date+.--No certain evidence for the date of this play exists, even the
+metrical tests failing us because of the collaboration.  It is commonly
+assigned to the years 1596-7, but this is little more than a guess.
+
++Source+.--As has already been indicated, this play is the revision of
+an older play entitled _The Taming of a Shrew_.  The latter was
+probably written by a disciple of Marlowe, and was first printed in
+quarto in 1594.  The chief change which the revision made in the plot
+was that which gave Katherine one sister instead of two and added the
+interest of rival suitors for this sister's hand.  Stories concerning
+the taming of a shrewish woman are both ancient and common, but no
+direct antecedent of the older play has been discovered, although some
+incidents seem to have been borrowed from Gascoigue's _Supposes_, a
+translation from the Italian of Ariosto.
+
++Authorship+.--The identity of Shakespeare's collaborator is unknown,
+nor is it possible to define exactly the limits of his work.  It is
+practically certain, however, that Shakespeare wrote the Induction; II,
+i, 169-326; III, ii, with the possible exception of 130-150; IV, i,
+iii, and v; V, ii, at least as far as 175.
+
+
++The Merry Wives of Windsor+.--_The Merry Wives_ is the only comedy in
+which Shakespeare avowedly presents the middle-class people of an
+English town.  In other comedies English characters and customs appear
+through the thin disguise of Italian names; in the histories there are
+comic scenes drawn from English life; but only here does Shakespeare
+desert the city and the country for the small town and draw the larger
+number of his characters from the great middle class.  {164} A
+tradition has come down to us, one which is supported by the nature of
+the play, that Queen Elizabeth was so fascinated by the character of
+Falstaff as he appeared in _Henry IV_ that she requested Shakespeare to
+show Falstaff in love, and that Shakespeare, in obedience to this
+command, wrote the play within a fortnight.  Unless this tradition be
+true, it is difficult to explain why Shakespeare should have written a
+comedy which is, in comparison with his other work of this period, at
+once conventional and mediocre.  The subject--the intrigues of Falstaff
+with two married women, and the wooing of a commonplace girl by two
+foolish suitors and another as commonplace as herself--gave Shakespeare
+little opportunity for poetry and none for the portrayal of the types
+of character most congenial to his temperament.  The greatest blemish
+on the play, however, from the standpoint of a student of Shakespeare,
+is that the man called Falstaff is not Falstaff at all, that this
+Falstaff bears only an outward resemblance to the Falstaff of the
+historical plays.  If we may misquote the poet, Falstaff died a martyr,
+and this is not the man.  The real Falstaff would never have stooped to
+the weak devices adopted by the man who bears his name, would never
+have been three times the dupe of transparent tricks.  The task
+demanded of Shakespeare was one impossible of performance.  Falstaff
+could not have fallen in love in the way which the queen desired.  Nor
+is there much to compensate for this degradation of the greatest comic
+figure in literature.  Falstaff's companions share, although to a
+lesser degree, in their leader's fall, while the two comic figures
+which are original with this play are {165} comparatively unsuccessful
+studies in French and Welsh dialect.  Judged by Shakespeare's own
+standard, this work is as middle-class as its characters; judged by any
+other, it is an amusing comedy of intrigue, realistic in type and
+abounding in comic situations which approach the borderland of farce.
+
+
++Date+.--This play was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company
+January 18, 1602.  It was certainly written after the two parts of
+_Henry IV_, and if, as is most probable, the character of Nym is a
+revival and not an imperfect first sketch, the play must have succeeded
+_Henry V_.  On these grounds the play is best assigned to 1599.  It was
+first printed in quarto in 1602, but this version is extremely faulty,
+besides being considerably shorter than that of the First Folio.  The
+quarto seems to have been printed from a stenographic report of an
+acting version of the play, made by an unskillful reporter for a
+piratical publisher.
+
++Source+.--The main plot resembles a story derived from an Italian
+source which is found in Tarlton's _News out of Purgatorie_.  For the
+underplot and a number of details in the working out of the main plot,
+no source is known.
+
+
++Much Ado About Nothing+.--In this play, as nowhere else, Shakespeare
+has given us the boon of laughter--not the smile, not the uncontrolled
+guffaw, but rippling, melodious laughter.  From the beginning to the
+end this is the dominant note.  If the great trio of which this was the
+first be classified as romantic comedies, we may perhaps say that in
+speaking of the others we should lay the stress on the word 'romantic,'
+in this, on the word 'comedy.'  As regards the main plot, _Much Ado_
+is, to be sure, the most serious of the three.  When the machinations
+of the villainous Prince John lead Claudio to believe his intended
+bride {166} unfaithful, and to reject this pure-scaled Hero with
+violence and contumely at the very steps of the altar, we have a
+situation which borders on the tragic.  The mingled doubt, rage, and
+despair of Hero's father is, moreover, undoubtedly affecting.
+Nevertheless, powerful as these scenes are, they are so girt about with
+laughter that they cannot destroy our good spirits.  Even at their
+height, the manifestations of human wickedness, credulity, and weakness
+seem but the illusions of a moment, soon to be dissipated by the power
+of radiant mirth.  It is not without significance that the deep-laid
+plot should be defeated through the agency of the immortal Dogberry,
+most deliciously foolish of constables.  Nor is it mere chance that
+Hero and Claudio are so constantly accompanied by Beatrice and
+Benedick, that amazing pair to whom life is one long jest.  In the
+merry war which is constantly raging between these two, their shafts
+never fail of their mark, but neither is once wounded.  Like magnesium
+lights, their minds send forth showers of brilliant sparks which hit,
+but do not wound.  But their wit is something more than empty sparkle.
+It is the effervescence of abounding life, a life too sound and perfect
+to be devoid of feeling.  Their brilliancy does not conceal emptiness,
+but adorns abundance.  When such an occasion as Hero's undeserved
+rejection called for it, the true affection of Beatrice and the true
+manliness of Benedick appeared.  Hence, although both seem duped by the
+trick which forms the underplot, the ruse which was to make each think
+the other to be the lovelorn one, it is really they who win the day.
+Their feelings are not altered by this merry plot; they {167} are
+merely given a chance to drop the mask of banter and to express without
+confusion the love which had long been theirs.  Thus the play which
+began with the silvery laughter of Beatrice ends in general mirth which
+is yet more joyous.
+
+
++Date+.--Since _Much Ado_ is not mentioned by Meres, it can hardly have
+been written before 1598.  Entries in the Stationers' Register for
+August 4 and 24, 1600, and the appearance of a quarto edition in this
+same year limit the possibilities at the other end.  Since the
+title-page of the quarto asserts that this play had been "sundry times
+publicly acted," we may assign the date 1599 with considerable
+confidence.
+
++Source+.--The main plot was derived originally from the twentieth
+novel of Bandello, but there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare
+used either this or its French translation in Belleforest.  In this
+story Benedick and Beatrice do not appear; there is no public rejection
+of Hero; there is no discovery of the plot by Dogberry and his fellows;
+and the deception of Claudio is differently managed.  Shakespeare's
+treatment of this last detail has its source in an episode of the fifth
+book of Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, a work several times done into
+English before Shakespeare's play was written.  There is considerable
+reason for assuming the existence of a lost original for _Much Ado_ in
+the shape of a play, known only by title, called _Benedicke and
+Betteris_; but it is, of course, impossible to say how much Shakespeare
+may have owed to this hypothetical predecessor.
+
+
++As You Like It+.--Of this most idyllic of all Shakespeare's comedies,
+the Forest of Arden is not merely the setting; it is the central force
+of the play, the power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony
+out of discord.  It reminds us of Sherwood forest, the home of Robin
+Hood and his merry men; but it is more than this.  Not only does it
+harbor beasts and trees never found on English soil, but its shadowy
+{168} glades foster a life so free from care and trouble that it
+becomes to us a symbol of Nature's healing, sweetening influence.  Here
+an exiled Duke and his faithful followers have found a refuge where,
+free from the envy and bickerings of court, they "fleet the time
+carelessly, as they did in the Golden Age."  To them comes the youth
+Orlando, fleeing from the treachery of a wicked elder brother and from
+the malice of the usurping Duke.  To them comes Rosalind, daughter of
+the exiled Duke, who has lived at the usurper's court, but has, in her
+turn, been exiled, and who brings with her Celia, the usurper's
+daughter, and Touchstone, the lovable court fool.  And through these
+newcomers the Duke and his friends are brought into contact with a
+shepherd and shepherdess as unreal and as charming as those of Dresden
+china, and with other country folk who smack more strongly of the soil.
+In the forest, Rosalind, who has for safety's sake assumed man's
+attire, again meets Orlando, and the love between them, born of their
+first meeting at court, becomes stronger and truer amid scenes of
+delicate comedy and merry laughter.  Once in Arden, Orlando ceases to
+brood morosely over the wrongs done him; Rosalind's wit becomes sweeter
+while losing none of its keenness; and Touchstone feels himself no
+longer a plaything, but a man.  So we are not surprised when Oliver,
+the wicked brother, lost in the forest and rescued from mortal danger
+by the lad he has always sought to injure, awakens to his better self;
+nor when the usurping Duke, leading an armed expedition against the man
+he has deposed, is converted at the forest's edge by an old hermit,
+abandons the throne to {169} its rightful occupant, and enters upon the
+religious life.  Thus the old Duke comes into his own again, wiser and
+better than before; and if, among the many marriages which fill the
+last act with the chiming of marriage bells, there are some which seem
+little likely to bring lasting happiness, the magic of the woods does
+much to dissipate our doubts.  Only Jaques, the melancholy philosopher,
+fails to share in the general rejoicing and the glad return.  He has
+been too hardened by the pursuit of his own pleasure and is too shut in
+by his delightfully cynical philosophy to feel quickly the forest's
+touch.  Yet not even his brilliant perversities can sadden the joyous
+atmosphere; it is only made the more enjoyable by force of contrast.
+Since Jaques wishes no joy for himself, we wish none for him, and with
+little regret we leave him as he has lived, a lonely, fascinating
+figure.
+
+
++Date+.--Like _Much Ado_, _As You Like It_ is not mentioned by Meres,
+and was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4, 1600.  Some
+critics have placed this play before _Much Ado_, but, although there is
+little evidence on either side, the style and tone of the play incline
+us to place it after, dating it 1599-1600.
+
++Source+.--_As You Like It_ is a dramatization of Lodge's pastoral
+novel entitled _Rosalynde_, which was founded in its turn on the _Tale
+of Gamelyn_, incorrectly ascribed to Chaucer.  Shakespeare condensed
+his original to great advantage, leaving out many episodes and so
+changing others as to give the subject a new and higher unity.  The
+atmosphere of the forest is all of his creation, as are many of the
+characters, including Jaques and Touchstone.
+
+
++Twelfth Night, or What You Will+.--In _Twelfth Night_ romance and
+comedy are less perfectly fused than in {170} the comedy which preceded
+it.  Here there are two distinct groups of characters, on the one hand
+riotous old Sir Toby and his crew leading the Puritanical steward
+Malvolio into the trap baited by his own egotism; on the other, the
+dreaming Duke, in love with love rather than with the beautiful Olivia
+whom he woos in vain, and ardently loved by Viola, whose gentle nature
+is in touching contrast with the doublet and hose which misfortune has
+compelled her to assume.  There is, however, no lack of dramatic unity.
+In Olivia the two groups meet, for Toby is Olivia's uncle, Malvolio her
+steward, the Duke her lover, Viola--later happily supplanted by her
+twin brother Sebastian--the one she loves.  Thus the romantic and comic
+forces act and react upon each other.  Yet this play, by reason of its
+setting, the court of Illyria, was bound to lack the magical atmosphere
+of the forest, which inspired kindly humor in the serious and gentle
+seriousness in the merry.  If Peste is as witty as Touchstone, he is
+less of a man; if Viola is more appealing than Rosalind, she has a less
+sparkling humor.  Here the love story is more passionate, the fun more
+uproarious.  Toby is not Falstaff; he is overcome by wine and
+difficulties as that amazing knight never was; but it is a sad soul
+which does not roar with Toby in his revels; shout with laughter over
+the duel which he arranges between the shrinking Viola and the foolish,
+vain Sir Andrew; and shake in sympathy with his glee over Malvolio's
+plight when that unlucky man is beguiled into thinking Olivia loves
+him, and into appearing before her cross-gartered and wreathed in the
+smiles {171} which accord so ill with his sour visage.  All the more
+affecting in contrast to this boisterous merriment is the frail figure
+of Viola, who knows so well "what love women to men may owe."  Amid the
+perfume of flowers and the sob of violins the Duke learns to love this
+seeming boy better than he knows, and easily forgets the romantic
+melancholy which was never much more than an agreeable pose.
+
+
++Date+.--In the diary of John Manningham for February 2, 1602, is a
+record of a performance of _Twelfth Night_ in the Middle Temple.  The
+absence of the name from Meres's list again limits the date at the
+other end.  The internal evidence, aside from that of style and meter,
+is negligible, while the latter confirms the usually accepted date of
+1601.
+
++Source+.--The principal source of the plot was probably _Apolonius and
+Silla_, a story by Barnabe Riche, apparently an adaptation of
+Belleforest's translation of the twenty-eighth novel of Bandello.
+There was also an Italian play, _Gl' Ingannati_, acted in Latin
+translation at Cambridge in 1590 and 1598, which has a similar plot.  A
+German  play on the same subject, apparently closely connected with
+Riche, has given rise to the hypothesis that a lost English play
+preceded _Twelfth Night_; but this is only conjectural, and there is
+some evidence that Shakespeare was familiar with Riche's story.  If
+this be the original, Shakespeare improved on it as much as he did on
+_Rosalynde_, condensing the beginning,  knitting together the loose
+strands at the end, and introducing the whole of the underplot with its
+rich variety of characters.  The only hint for this known is a slight
+suggestion for Malvolio's madness found in another story of Riche's
+volume.
+
+
+
+
+{172}
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD--TRAGEDY
+
+The Second and Third periods slightly overlap; for _Julius Caesar_, the
+first play of the later group, was probably written before _Twelfth
+Night_ and _As You Like It_.  But the change in the character of the
+plays in these two periods is sharp and decisive, like the change from
+day to night.  Shakespeare has studied the sunlight of human
+cheerfulness and found it a most interesting problem; now in the
+mysterious starlight and shadow of human suffering he finds a problem
+more interesting still.
+
+The three comedies of this period, partly on account of their bitter
+and sarcastic tone, are not widely read nor usually very much admired;
+but the great tragedies are the poet's finest work and scarcely equaled
+in the history of the world.
+
++Troilus and Cressida+.--Here the story centers around the siege of
+ancient Troy by the Greeks.  Its hero, Troilus, is a young son of
+Priam, high-spirited and enthusiastic, who is in love with Cressida,
+daughter of a Trojan priest.  Pandarus, Cressida's uncle, acts as
+go-between for the lovers.  Just as the suit of Troilus is crowned with
+success, Cressida, from motives of policy, is forced to join her father
+Calchas, who is in the camp of the besieging Greeks.  Here her fickle
+and sensuous nature reveals itself rapidly.  She yields to {173} the
+love of the Greek commander Diomed and promises to become his mistress.
+Troilus learns of this, consigns her to oblivion, and attempts, but
+unsuccessfully, to take revenge on Diomed.
+
+While this love story is progressing, meetings are going on between the
+Greek and Trojan warriors; a vivid picture is given of conditions in
+the Greek camp during the truce, and particularly of the insolent pride
+of Achilles.  The story ends with the resumption of hostilities, the
+slaying of Hector by Achilles, and the resolution of Troilus to revenge
+his brother's death.
+
+It is very difficult to understand what Shakespeare meant by this play.
+If it is a tragedy, why do the hero and heroine meet with no special
+disaster at the end, and why do we feel so little sympathy for the
+misfortunes of any one in the play?  If it is a comedy, why is its
+sarcastic mirth made more bitter than tears, and why does it end with
+the death of its noblest minor character and with the violation of all
+poetic justice?  From beginning to end it is the story of disillusion,
+for it sorts all humanity into two great classes, fools who are cheated
+and knaves who cheat.  Some people think that Shakespeare wrote it in a
+gloomy, pessimistic mood, with the sardonic laughter of a disappointed,
+world-wearied man.  Others, on rather doubtful grounds, believe it a
+covert satire on some of Shakespeare's fellow dramatists.
+
+
++Authorship+.--It is generally agreed that a small part of this play is
+by another author.  The Prologue and most of the Fifth Act are usually
+considered non-Shakespearean.  They differ from the rest of the play in
+many details of vocabulary, meter, and style.
+
+{174}
+
++Date+.--_Troilus and Cressida_ must have been written before 1603, for
+in the spring of that year an entry in regard to it was made in the
+Stationers' Register.  It must have been written after 1601, for it
+alludes (Prologue, ll. 23-25) to the Prologue of Jonson's _Poetaster_,
+a play published in that year.  Hence the date of composition would
+fall during or slightly before 1602.  The First Quarto was not
+published until 1609.
+
++Sources+.--The main source of this drama was the narrative poem
+_Troilus and Criseyde_ by Chaucer.  Contrary to his custom, Shakespeare
+has degraded the characters of his original, instead of ennobling them.
+The camp scenes are adapted from Caxton's _Recuyell of the Historyes of
+Troye_; and the challenge of Hector was taken from some translation of
+Homer, probably that by Chapman.  An earlier lost play on this subject
+by Dekker and Chettle is mentioned in contemporary reference.  We do
+not know whether Shakespeare drew anything from it or not.  Scattered
+hints were probably taken from other sources, as the story of Troy was
+very popular in the Middle Ages.
+
+
++All's Well That Ends Well+.--When a beautiful and noble-minded young
+woman falls in love with a contemptible scoundrel, forgives his
+rebuffs, compromises her own dignity to win his affection, and finally
+persuades him to let her throw herself away on him,--is the result a
+romance or a tragedy?  This is a nice question; and by the answer to it
+we must determine whether _All's Well That Ends Well_ is a romantic
+comedy like _Twelfth Night_ or a satirical comedy bitter as tragedy,
+like _Troilus and Cressida_.
+
+Helena, a poor orphan girl, has been brought up by the kindly old
+Countess of Rousillon, and cherishes a deep affection for the
+Countess's son Bertram, though he neither suspects it nor returns it.
+She saves the life of the French king, and he in gratitude allows her
+{175} to choose her husband from among the noblest young lords of
+France.  Her choice falls on Bertram.  Being too politic to offend the
+king, he reluctantly marries her, but forsakes her on their wedding day
+to go to the wars.  At parting he tells her that he will never accept
+her as a wife until she can show him his ring on her finger and has a
+child by him.  By disguising herself as a young woman whom Bertram is
+attempting to seduce, Helena subsequently fulfills the terms of his
+hard condition.  Later, before the king of France she reminds him of
+his promise, shows his ring in her possession, and states that she is
+with child by him.  The count, outwitted, and in fear of the king's
+wrath, repentantly accepts her as his wife; and at the end Helena is
+expected to live happily forever after.
+
+Disagreeable as the plot is when told in outline, it is redeemed in the
+actual play by the beautiful character given to the heroine.  But this,
+while it vastly tones down the disgusting side of the story, only
+increases the bitter pathos which is latent there.  The more lovely and
+admirable Helena is, the more she is unfitted for the unworthy part
+which she is forced to act and the man with whom she is doomed to end
+her days.  A modern thinker could easily read into this "comedy" the
+world-old bitterness of pearls before swine.
+
+
++Date+.--No quarto of this comedy exists, nor is there any mention of
+such a play as _All's Well That Ends Well_ before the publication of
+the First Folio in 1623.  A play of Shakespeare's called _Love's
+Labour's Won_ is mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598; and many think
+that this was the present comedy under another name.  However, the
+meter, style, and mood of most of the play seem to indicate a later
+date.  The {176} most common theory is that a first version was written
+before 1598, and that this was rewritten in the early part of the
+author's third period.  This would put the date of the play in its
+present form somewhere around 1602.
+
++Sources+.--The story is taken from Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (ninth
+novel of the third day).  It was translated into English by Painter in
+his _Palace of Pleasure_, where our author probably read it.
+Shakespeare has added the Countess, Parolles, and one or two minor
+characters.  The conception of the heroine has been greatly ennobled.
+It is a question whether the bitter tone of the play is due to the
+dramatist's intention or is the unforeseen result of reducing
+Boccaccio's improbable story to a living possibility.
+
+
++Measure for Measure+.--When Hamlet told his guilty mother that he
+would set her up a glass where she might see the inmost part of her, he
+was doing for his mother what Shakespeare in _Measure for Measure_ is
+doing for the lust-spotted world.  The play is a trenchant satire on
+the evils of society.  Such realistic pictures of the things that are,
+but should not be, have always jarred on our aesthetic sense from
+Aristophanes to Zola, and _Measure for Measure_ is one of the most
+disagreeable of Shakespeare's plays.  But no one can deny its power.
+
+Here, as in _All's Well That Ends Well_, we have one beautiful
+character, that of Isabella, like a light shining in corruption.  Here,
+too, the wronged Mariana, in order to win back the faithless Angelo, is
+forced to resort to the same device to which Helena had to stoop.  But
+this play is darker and more savage than its predecessor.  Angelo, as a
+governor, sentencing men to death for the very sin which he as a
+private man is trying to commit, is contemptible on a huger {177} and
+more devilish scale than Bertram.  Lucio, if not more base than
+Parolles, is at least more malignant.  And Claudio, attempting to save
+his life by his sister's shame, is an incarnation of the healthy animal
+joy of life almost wholly divested of the ideals of manhood.  In a way,
+the play ends happily; but it is about as cheerful as the red gleam of
+sunset which shoots athwart a retreating thunderstorm.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was first published in the Folio of 1623.  It is
+generally believed, however, that it was written about 1603.  In the
+first place, the verse tests and general character of the play seem to
+fit that date; secondly, there are two passages, I, i, 68-73 and II,
+iv, 27-30, which are usually interpreted as allusions to the attitude
+of James I toward the people after he came to the throne in 1603; and,
+thirdly, there are many turns of phrase which remind one of _Hamlet_
+and which seem to indicate that the two plays were written near
+together.  Barksted's _Myrrha_ (1607) contains a passage apparently
+borrowed from this comedy, which helps in determining the latest
+possible date of composition.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare borrowed his material from a writer named
+George Whetstone, who in 1578 printed a play, _Promos and Cassandra_,
+containing most of the story of _Measure for Measure_.  In 1582 the
+same author published a prose version of the story in his _Heptameron
+of Civil Discourses_.  Whetstone in turn borrowed his material, which
+came originally from the _Hecatommithi_ of Giraldi Cinthio.
+Shakespeare ennobled the underlying thought as far as he could, and
+added the character of Mariana.
+
+
++Julius Caesar+.--The interest in _Julius Caesar_ does not focus on any
+one person as completely as in the other great tragedies.  Like the
+chronicle plays which had preceded it, it gives rather a grand panorama
+of history than the fate of any particular hero.  This {178} explains
+its title.  It is not the story of Julius Caesar the man, but of that
+great political upheaval of which Caesar was cause and center.  That
+upheaval begins with his attempt at despotism and the crown; it reaches
+its climax in his death, which disturbs the political equilibrium of
+the whole nation; and at last subsides with the decline and downfall of
+Caesar's enemies.  Shakespeare has departed from history in drawing the
+character of the great conqueror, making it more weak, vain, and
+pompous than that of the real man.  Yet even in the play "the mightiest
+Julius" is an impressive figure.  Alive, he
+
+          "doth bestride the narrow world
+  Like a Colossus";
+
+and his influence, like an unseen force, shapes the fates of the living
+after he himself is dead.
+
+In so far as the tragedy has any individual hero, that hero is Brutus
+rather than Caesar himself.  Brutus is a man of noble character, but
+deficient in practical judgment and knowledge of men.  With the best of
+motives he allows Cassius to hoodwink him and draw him into the
+conspiracy against Caesar.  Through the same short-sighted generosity
+he allows his enemy Antony to address the crowd after Caesar's death,
+with the result that Antony rouses the people against him and drives
+him and his fellow conspirators out of Rome.  Then when he and Cassius
+gather an army in Asia to fight with Antony, we find him too
+impractically scrupulous to raise money by the usual means; and for
+that reason short of cash and drawn into a quarrel with his brother
+general.  His subsequent {179} death at Philippi is the logical outcome
+of his own nature, too good for so evil an age, too short-sighted for
+so critical a position.
+
+Most of the old Roman heroes inspire respect rather than love; and
+something of their stern impressiveness lingers in the atmosphere of
+this Roman play.  Here and there it has very touching scenes, such as
+that between Brutus and his page (IV, iii); but in the main it is
+great, not through its power to elicit sympathetic tears, but through
+its dignity and grandeur.  It is one of the stateliest of tragedies,
+lofty in language, majestic in movement, logical and cogent in thought.
+We can never mourn for Brutus and Portia as we do for Romeo and Juliet,
+or for Lear and Cordelia; but we feel that we have breathed in their
+company an air which is keen and bracing, and have caught a glimpse of
+
+  "The grandeur that was Rome."
+
+
++Date+.--We have no printed copy of Julius Caesar earlier than that of
+the First Folio.  Since it was not mentioned by Meres in 1598 and was
+alluded to in 1601 in John Weever's _Mirrour of Martyrs_, it probably
+appeared between those two dates.  Weever says in his dedication that
+his work "some two years ago was made fit for the print."  This
+apparently means that he wrote the allusion to _Julius Caesar_ in 1599
+and that consequently the play had been produced by then.  There is a
+possible reference to it in Ben Jonson's _Every Man Out of His Humour_,
+which came out in 1599.  Metrical tests and the general character of
+the play agree with these conclusions.  Hence we can put the date
+between 1599-1601, with a preference for the former year.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare drew his material from North's _Plutarch_,
+using the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony.  He has {180} enlarged
+the parts of Casca and Lepidus, and made Brutus much nobler than in the
+original.  This last change was a dramatic necessity in order to give
+the play a hero with whom we could sympathize.
+
+
++Hamlet+.--On the surface the story of Hamlet is a comparatively simple
+one.  The young prince is heart-broken over the recent death of his
+father, and his mother's scandalously hasty marriage to Hamlet's uncle,
+the usurping sovereign.  In this mood he is brought face to face with
+his father's spirit, told that his uncle was his father's murderer, and
+given as a sacred duty the task of revenging the crime.  To this object
+he sacrifices all other aims in life--pleasure, ambition, and love.
+But this savage task is the last one on earth for which his
+fine-grained nature was fitted.  He wastes his energy in feverish
+efforts which fail to accomplish his purpose, just as many a man wavers
+helplessly in trying to do something for which nature never intended
+him.  Partly to deceive his enemies, partly to provide a freer
+expression for his pent-up emotions than the normal conditions of life
+would justify, he acts the role of one who is mentally deranged.
+Finally, more by chance than any plan of his own, he achieves his
+revenge on the king, but not until he himself is mortally wounded.  His
+story is the tragedy of a sensitive, refined, imaginative nature which
+is required to perform a brutal task in a brutal world.
+
+But around this story as a framework Shakespeare has woven such a
+wealth of poetry and philosophy that the play has been called the
+"tragedy of thought."  It is in Hamlet's brain that the great action of
+the drama {181} takes place; the other characters are mere accessories
+and foils.  Here we are brought face to face with the fear and mystery
+of the future life and the deepest problems of this.  It is hardly true
+to say that Hamlet himself is a philosopher.  He gives some very wise
+advice to the players; but in the main he is grappling problems without
+solving them, peering into the dark, but bringing from it no definite
+addition to our knowledge.  He represents rather the eternal
+questioning of the human heart when face to face with the great
+mysteries of existence; and perhaps this accounts largely for the wide
+and lasting popularity of the play.  Side by side with this
+deep-souled, earnest man, moving in the shadow of the unseen, with his
+terrible duties and haunting fears, Shakespeare has placed in
+intentional mockery the old dotard Polonius, the incarnation of shallow
+worldly wisdom.
+
+No other play of Shakespeare's has called forth such a mass of comment
+as this or so many varied interpretations.  Neither has any other
+roused a deeper interest in its readers.  The spell which it casts over
+old and young alike is due partly to the character of the young prince
+himself, partly to the suggestive mystery with which it invests all
+problems of life and sorrow.
+
+
++Date+.--'A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett' was entered in the
+Stationers' Register July, 1602.  Consequently, Shakespeare's
+Preliminary version, as represented by the First Quarto, though not
+printed until 1603, must have been written in or before the spring
+months of 1602; the second version 1603-1604.
+
++Sources+.--The plot came originally from the _Historia Danica_, a
+history of Denmark in Latin, written in the twelfth century {182} by
+Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar.  About 1570 the story was retold in
+French in Belleforest's _Histoires Tragiques_.  Besides his debt to
+Belleforest, it seems almost certain that Shakespeare drew from an
+earlier English tragedy of Hamlet by another man.  This earlier play is
+lost; but Nash, a contemporary writer, alludes to it as early as 1589,
+and Henslowe's Diary records its performance in 1494.  Somewhat before
+1590, an early dramatist, Thomas Kyd, had written a play called _The
+Spanish Tragedy_, which, though far inferior to Shakespeare's _Hamlet_,
+resembled it in many ways.  This likeness has caused scholars to
+suspect that Kyd wrote the early Hamlet; and their suspicions are
+strengthened by an ambiguous and apparently punning allusion to Ęsop's
+_Kidde_ in the passage by Nash mentioned above.  A crude and brutal
+German play on the subject has been discovered, which is believed by
+many to be a translation of Kyd's original tragedy.  If this is true,
+it shows how enormously Shakespeare improved on his source.
+
++Editions+.--A very badly garbled and crude form of this play was
+printed in 1603, and is known as the First Quarto.  A much better one,
+which contained most of the tragedy as we read it, appeared in 1604,
+and is called the Second Quarto.  Several other quartos followed, for
+the play was exceedingly popular.  The Folio omits certain passages
+found in the Second Quarto, and introduces certain new ones.  Both the
+new passages and the omitted ones are included in modern editions; so
+that, as has often been said, our modern _Hamlet_ is longer than any
+_Hamlet_ which Shakespeare left us.  The First Quarto is generally
+regarded as a pirated copy of Shakespeare's scenario, or first rough
+draft, of the play.
+
+
++Othello+.--This play has often been called the tragedy of jealousy,
+but that is a misleading statement.  Othello, as Coleridge pointed out,
+is not a constitutionally jealous man, such as Leontes in _The Winter's
+Tale_.  His distrust of his wife is the natural suspicion of a man lost
+amid new and inexplicable surroundings.  {183} Women are proverbially
+suspicious in business, not because nature made them so, but because,
+as they are in utter ignorance of standards by which to judge, they
+feel their helplessness in the face of deceit.  Othello feels the same
+helplessness.  Trained up in wars from his cradle, he could tell a true
+soldier from a traitor at a glance, with the calm confidence of a
+veteran; but women and their motives are to him an uncharted sea.
+Suddenly a beautiful young heiress falls in love with him, and leaves
+home and friends to marry him.  He stands on the threshold of a new
+realm, happy but bewildered.  Then comes Iago, his trusted subordinate,
+--who, as Othello knows, possesses that knowledge of women and of
+civilian life which he himself lacks,--and whispers in his ear that his
+bride is false to him; that under this fair veneer lurks the eternal
+feminine as they had seen it in the common creatures of the camp; that
+she has fooled her husband as these women have so often fooled his
+soldiers; and that the rough-and-ready justice of the camp should be
+her reward.  Had Othello any knowledge or experience in such matters to
+fall back on, he might anchor to that, and become definitely either the
+trusting husband or the Spartan judge.  But as it is, he is whirled
+back and forth in a maelstrom of agonized doubt, until compass,
+bearings, and wisdom lost, he ends all in universal shipwreck.
+
+The character of Iago is one of the subtlest studies of intelligent
+depravity ever created by man.  Ostensibly his motive is revenge; but
+in reality his wickedness seems due rather to a perverted mental
+activity, unbalanced by heart or conscience.  As Napoleon enjoyed
+manoeuvring armies or Lasker studying chess, so {184} Iago enjoys the
+sense of his own mental power in handling his human pawns, in feeling
+himself master of the situation.  If he ever had natural affections,
+they have been atrophied in the pursuit of this devilish game.
+
+With Desdemona the feminine element, which had been negligible in
+_Julius Caesar_ and thrown into the background in _Hamlet_, becomes a
+prominent feature, and remains so through the later tragedies.  There
+is a pathetic contrast between the beautiful character of Desdemona and
+her undeserved fate, just as there is between the real nobility of
+Othello and the mad act by which he ruins his own happiness.  For that
+reason this is perhaps the most touching of all Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was certainly published after 1601, for it contains
+several allusions to Holland's translation of the Latin author Pliny,
+which appeared in that year.  Malone, one of the early editors of
+Shakespeare, says that _Othello_ was acted at Hallowmas, 1604.  We not
+know on what evidence he based this assertion; but since the metrical
+tests all point to the same date, his statement is generally accepted.
+The First Quarto did not appear until 1622, six years after Shakespeare
+died and one year before the appearance of the First Folio.  This was
+the only play published in quarto between Shakespeare's death and 1623.
+There are frequent oaths in the Quarto which have been very much
+modified in the Folio, and this strengthens our belief that the
+manuscript from which the Quarto was printed was written about 1604,
+for shortly after that date an act was passed against the use of
+profanity in plays.
+
++Sources+.--The plot was taken from Giraldi Cinthio's _Hecatommithi_
+(seventh novel of the third decade).  A French translation of the
+Italian was made in 1583-1584, and this Shakespeare may have used.  We
+know of no English translation until {185} years after Shakespeare
+died.  Many details are changed in the play, and the whole story is
+raised to a far nobler plane.  In the original the heroine is beaten to
+death with a stocking filled with sand; Othello is tortured, but
+refuses to confess, and later is murdered by his wife's revengeful
+kinsmen.  This crude, bloody, and long-drawn-out story is in striking
+contrast with the masterly ending of the tragedy.
+
+
++King Lear+.--As _Romeo and Juliet_ shows the tragedy of youth, so
+_Lear_ shows the tragedy of old age.  King Lear has probably been a
+good and able man in his day; but now time has impaired his judgment,
+and he is made to suffer fearfully for those errors for which nature,
+and not he, is to blame.  Duped by the hypocritical smoothness of his
+two elder daughters, he gives them all his lands and power; while his
+youngest daughter Cordelia, who truly loves him, is turned away because
+she is too honest to humor an old man's whim.  The result is what might
+have been expected.  Lear has put himself absolutely into the power of
+his two older daughters, who are the very incarnation of heartlessness
+and ingratitude.  By their inhuman treatment he is driven out into the
+night and storm, exposing his white head to a tempest so fierce that
+even the wild beasts refuse to face it.  As a result of exposure and
+mental suffering, his mind becomes unhinged.  At last his daughter
+Cordelia finds him, gives him refuge, and nurses him back to reason and
+hope.  But this momentary gleam of light only makes darker by contrast
+the end which closely follows, where Cordelia is killed by treachery
+and Lear dies broken-hearted.
+
+The fate of Lear finds a parallel in that of {186} Gloucester in the
+underplot.  Like his king, this nobleman has proved an unwise father,
+favoring the treacherous child and disowning the true.  He also is made
+to pay a fearful penalty for his mistakes, ending in his death.  But he
+is represented as more justly punished, less excusable through the
+weaknesses of age; and for this reason his grief appeals to us as an
+intensifying reflection of Lear's misery rather than as a rival for
+that in our sympathy.  The character of Edmund shows some likeness to
+that of Richard III; and a comparison of the two will show how
+Shakespeare has developed in the interval.  Both are stern, able, and
+heartless; but Edmund unites to these more complex feelings known only
+to the close student of life.  Weakness and passion mingle in his love;
+superstition and some faint, abortive motion of conscience unite to
+torment him when dying.
+
+There is a strangely lyric element about this great tragedy, an element
+of heart-broken emotion hovering on the edge of passionate song.  It is
+like a great chorus in which the victims of treachery and ingratitude
+blend their denouncing cries.  The tremulous voice of Lear rises
+terrible above all the others; and to his helpless curses the plaintive
+satire of the fool answers like a mocking echo in halls of former
+enjoyment.  Thunder and lightning are the fearful accompaniment of the
+song; and like faint antiphonal responses from the underplot come the
+voices of the wronged Edgar and the outraged Gloucester.
+
+
++Date+.--The date of _King Lear_ lies between 1603 and 1606.  In 1603
+appeared a book (Harsnett's _Declaration of Egregious Popish
+Impostures_) from which Shakespeare afterward drew {187} the names of
+the devils in the pretended ravings of Edgar, together with similar
+details.  In 1606, as we know from an entry in the Stationers'
+Register, the play was performed at Whitehall at Christmas.  A late
+edition of the old _King Leir_ (not Shakespeare's) was entered on the
+Register May 8, 1605; and it is very plausible that Shakespeare's
+tragedy was then having a successful run and that the old play was
+revived to take advantage of an occasion when its story was popular.
+Hence the date usually given for the composition of _King Lear_ is
+1604-5.  A quarto, with a poor text, and carelessly printed, appeared
+in 1608; another, (bearing the assumed date of 1608) in 1619.  The
+First Folio text is much the best.  Three hundred lines lacking in it
+are made up for by a hundred lines absent from the quartos.
+
++Sources+.--The story of Lear in some form or another had appeared in
+many writers before Shakespeare.  The sources from which he drew
+chiefly were probably the early accounts by Geoffrey of Moumouth, a
+composite poem called _The Mirrour for Magistrates_, Holinshed's
+_Chronicles_, Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, and lastly an old play of
+_King Leir_, supposed to be the one acted in 1594.  This old play ended
+happily; Shakespeare first introduced the tragic ending.  He also
+invented Lear's madness, the banishment and disguise of Kent, and the
+characters of Burgundy and the fool.  The underplot he drew from the
+story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in _Arcadia_, a long, rambling
+novel of adventure by Sir Philip Sidney.
+
+
++Macbeth+.--Macbeth, one of the great Scottish nobles of early times,
+is led, partly by his own ambition, partly by the instigation of evil
+supernatural powers, to murder King Duncan and usurp his place on the
+throne of Scotland.  In this bloody task he is aided and encouraged by
+his wife, a woman of powerful character, whose conscience is
+temporarily smothered by her frantic desire to advance her husband's
+career.  We are forced to sympathize with this guilty pair, wicked as
+they {188} are, because we are made to feel that they are not naturally
+criminals, that they are swept into crime by the misdirection of
+energies which, if directed along happier lines, might have been
+praiseworthy.  Macbeth, vigorous and imaginative, has a poet's or
+conqueror's yearning toward a larger fullness of life, experience, joy.
+It is the woeful misdirection of this splendid energy through unlawful
+channels which makes him a murderer, not the callous, animal
+indifference of the born criminal.  Similarly, his wife is a woman of
+great executive ability, reaching out instinctively for a field large
+enough in which to make that ability gain its maximum of
+accomplishment.  Nature meant her for a queen; and it is the
+instinctive effort to find her natural sphere of action,--an effort
+common to all humanity--which blinds her conscience at the fatal
+moment.  Once entered on their career of evil, they find no chance for
+turning back.  Suspicions are aroused, and Macbeth feels himself forced
+to guard himself from the effects of the first.  The ghosts of his
+victims haunt his guilty conscience; his wife dies heart-broken with
+remorse which comes too late; and he himself is killed in battle by his
+own rebellious countrymen.
+
+Between the characters of Macbeth and his wife the dramatist has drawn
+a subtle but vital distinction.  Macbeth is an unprincipled but
+imaginative man, with a strong tincture of reverence and awe.  Hitherto
+he has been restrained in the straight path of an upright life by his
+respect for conventions.  When once that barrier is broken down, he has
+no purely moral check in his own nature to replace it, and rushes like
+a flood, with ever growing impetus, from, crime to crime.  His {189}
+wife, on the other hand, has a conscience; and conscience, unlike awe
+for conventions, can be temporarily suppressed, but not destroyed.  It
+reawakes when the first great crime is over, drives the unhappy queen
+from her sleepless couch night after night, and hounds her at last to
+death.
+
+This is the shortest of all Shakespeare's plays in actual number of
+lines; and no other work of his reveals such condensation and
+lightning-like rapidity of movement.  It is the tragedy of eager
+ambition, which allows a man no respite after the first fatal mistake,
+but hurries him on irresistibly through crime after crime to the final
+disaster.  Over all, like a dark cloud above a landscape, hovers the
+presence of the supernatural beings who are training on the sinful but
+unfortunate monarch to his ruin.
+
+
++Authorship+.--The speeches of Hecate and the dialogue connected with
+them in III, v and IV, i, 39-47 are suspected by many to be the work of
+Thomas Middleton, a well-known contemporary playwright.  They are
+unquestionably inferior to most of the play.  Messrs. Clark and Wright
+have assigned several other passages to Middleton; but these are now
+generally regarded as Shakespeare's, and some of them are considered as
+by no means below his usual high level.
+
++Date+.--We find no copy of _Macbeth_ earlier than the First Folio.  It
+was certainly written before 1610, however; for Dr. Simon Forman saw it
+acted that year and records the fact in his _Booke of Plaies_.  The
+allusion to "two-fold balls and treble sceptres" (IV, i, 121) shows
+that the play was written after 1603 when James I became king of both
+Scotland and England.  So does the allusion to the habit of touching
+for the king's evil (IV, iii, 140-159),--a custom which James revived.
+The reference to an equivocator in the porter's soliloquy (II, iii) may
+allude to Henry Garnet, who was tried in 1606 for complicity in the
+{190} famous Gunpowder Plot, and who is said to have upheld the
+doctrine of equivocation.  The date of composition is usually placed
+1605-6.
+
++Sources+.--The plot is borrowed from Holinshed's _Historie of
+Scotland_.  Most of the material is taken from the part relating to the
+reigns of Duncan and Macbeth; but other incidents, such as the drugging
+of the grooms, are from the murder of Duncan's ancestor Duffe, which is
+described in another part of Holinshed.
+
+
++Antony and Cleopatra+.--There is no other passion in mankind which
+makes such fools of wise men, such weaklings of brave ones, as that of
+sinful love.  For this very reason it is the most tragic of all human
+passions; and from this comes the dramatic power of _Antony and
+Cleopatra_.  The ruin of a contemptible man is never impressive; but
+the ruin of an imposing character like Antony's through the one weak
+spot in his powerful nature has all the somber impressiveness of a
+burning city or some other great disaster.
+
+Like _Julius Caesar_, this play is founded on Roman history.  It begins
+in Egypt with a picture of Antony fascinated by the Egyptian queen.
+The urgent needs of the divided Roman world call him away to Italy.
+Here, once free of Cleopatra's presence, he becomes his old self, a
+reveler, yet diplomatic and self-seeking.  From motives of policy he
+marries Octavia, sister of Octavius Caesar, and for a brief space seems
+assured of a brilliant future.  But the old spell draws him back.  He
+returns to Cleopatra, and Octavius in revenge for Octavia's wrongs
+makes war upon him.  Cleopatra proves still Antony's evil genius.  Her
+seduction has already drawn him into war; now her cowardice in the
+crisis of the battle decides the war {191} against him.  From that
+point the fate of both is one headlong rush to inevitable ruin.
+
+In the character of Cleopatra, Shakespeare has made a wonderful study
+of the fascination which beauty and charm exert, even when coupled with
+moral worthlessness.  We do not love her, we do not pity her when she
+dies; but we feel that in spite of her idle love of power and pleasure,
+she has given life a richer meaning.  We are fascinated by her as by
+some beautiful poison plant, the sight of which causes an aesthetic
+thrill, its touch, disease and death.
+
+Powerful as is this play, and in many ways tragic, it by no means stirs
+our sympathies as do _Macbeth, King Lear_, and _Othello_.  Sin for
+Antony and Cleopatra is not at all the unmixed cup of woe which it
+proves for Macbeth and his lady.  Here at the end the lovers pay the
+price of lust and folly; but before paying that price, they have had
+its adequate equivalent in the voluptuous joy of life.  Moreover, death
+loses half its terrors for Antony through the very military vigor of
+his character; and for Cleopatra, because of the cunning which renders
+it painless.  What impresses us most is not the pathos of their fate,
+but rather the sublime folly with which, deliberately and open-eyed,
+they barter a world for the intoxicating joy of passion.  Impulsive as
+children, powerful as demigods, they made nations their toys, and life
+and death a game.  Prudence could not rob them of that heritage of
+delight which they considered their natural birthright, nor death, when
+it came, undo what they had already enjoyed.  Folly on so superhuman a
+scale becomes, in the highest sense of the word, dramatic.
+
+
+{192}
+
++Date+.--In May, 1608, there was entered in the Stationers' Register 'A
+Book called Antony and Cleopatra'; and this was probably the play under
+discussion.  The internal evidence agrees with this; hence the date is
+usually set at 1607-8.  In spite of the above entry, the book does not
+appear to have been printed at that time; and the first copy which has
+come down to us is that in the 1623 Folio.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare's one source appears to have been the _Life of
+Marcus Antonius_ in North's _Plutarch_; and he followed that very
+closely.  The chief changes in the play consist in the omission of
+certain events which would have clogged the dramatic action.
+
+
++Coriolanus+.--Here follows the tragedy of overweening pride.  The
+trouble with Coriolanus is not ambition, as is the case with Macbeth.
+He cares little for crowns, office, or any outward honor.
+Self-centered, self-sufficient, contemptuous of all mankind outside of
+his own immediate circle of friends, he dies at last because he refuses
+to recognize those ties of sympathy which should bind all men and all
+classes of men together.  He leads his countrymen to battle, and shows
+great courage at the siege of Corioli.  On his return he becomes a
+candidate for consul.  But to win this office, he must conciliate the
+common people whom he holds in contempt; and instead of conciliating
+them, he so exasperates them by his overbearing scorn that he is driven
+out of Rome.  With the savage vindictiveness characteristic of insulted
+pride, he joins the enemies of his country, brings Rome to the edge of
+ruin, and spares her at last only at the entreaties of his mother.
+Then he returns to Corioli to be killed there by treachery.
+
+Men like Coriolanus are not lovable, either in real life or fiction;
+but, despite his faults, he commands {193} our admiration in his
+success, and our sympathy in his death.  We must remember that ancient
+Rome had never heard our new doctrine of the freedom and equality of
+man; that the common people, as drawn by Shakespeare, were objects of
+contempt and just cause for exasperation.  Again, we must remember that
+if Coriolanus had a high opinion of himself, he also labored hard to
+deserve it.  He was full of the French spirit of _noblesse oblige_.
+Cruel, arrogant, harsh, he might be; but he was never cowardly,
+underhanded, or mean.  He was a man whose ideals were better than his
+judgment, and whose prejudiced view of life made his character seem
+much worse than it was.  The lives of such men are usually tragic.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was not printed until the appearance of the First
+Folio, and external evidence as to its date is almost worthless.  On
+the strength of internal evidence, meter, style, etc., which mark it
+unquestionably as a late play, it is usually assigned to 1609.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's _Life of Coriolanus_
+(North's translation).  As in _Julius Caesar_ and _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, he followed Plutarch closely.
+
+
++Timon of Athens+.--As _Coriolanus_ was the tragedy of a man who is too
+self-centered, so _Timon_ is the tragedy of a man who is not
+self-centered enough.  His good and bad traits alike, generosity and
+extravagance, friendship and vanity, combine to make him live and
+breathe in the attitude of other men toward him.  From this comes his
+unbounded prodigality by which in a few years he squanders an enormous
+fortune in giving pleasure to his friends.  From this lack of
+self-poise, too, comes the tremendous reaction later, {194} when he
+learns that his imagined world of love and friendship and popular
+applause was a mirage of the desert, and finds himself poverty-stricken
+and alone, the dupe of sharpers, the laughing-stock of fools.
+
+Yet in spite of his lack of balance, he is full of noble qualities.
+Apemantus has the very thing which he lacks, yet Apemantus is
+contemptible beside him.  The churlish philosopher is like some dingy
+little scow, which rides out the tempest because the small cargo which
+it has is all in its hold; Timon is like some splendid, but top-heavy,
+battleship, which turns turtle in the storm through lack of ballast.
+There is something lionlike and magnificent, despite its unreason, in
+the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, after the discovery of
+the gold, spurns away both the chance of wealth and the human jackals
+whom it attracts.  The same lordly scorn persists after him in the
+epitaph which he leaves behind:--
+
+  "Here lie I, Timon; who alive all living men did hate.
+  Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass, and stay not here thy gait."
+
+Yet this very epitaph of the dead misanthrope shows the same lack of
+self-sufficiency which characterized the living Timon.  He despises the
+opinion of men, but he must let them know that he despises it.
+Coriolanus would have laughed at them from Elysium and scorned to write
+any epitaph.
+
+No other Shakespearean play, with the exception of _Troilus and
+Cressida_, shows the human race in a light so contemptible as this.
+Aside from Timon and his faithful steward, there is not one person in
+the play {195} who seems to have a single redeeming trait.  All of the
+others are selfish, and most of them are treacherous and cowardly.
+
+
++Authorship+.--It is generally believed that some parts of the play are
+not by Shakespeare, although opinion is still somewhat divided as to
+what is and is not his.  The scenes and parts of scenes in which
+Apemantus and some of the minor characters appear are most strongly
+suspected.
+
++Date+.--This play was not printed until the publication of the First
+Folio, and the only evidence which we have for its date is in the meter
+and style and in the fact that some of the speeches show a strong
+resemblance to certain ones in _King Lear_.  The date most generally
+approved is 1607-8.
+
++Sources+.--The direct source was probably a short account of Timon in
+Plutarch's _Life of Marcus Antonius_.  The same story also appears in
+Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_, where Shakespeare may have read it.
+Both of these accounts, however, contain but a small part of the
+material found in the play.  Certain details missing in them, such as
+the discovery of the gold, etc., are found in _Timon or the
+Misanthrope_, a dialogue by Lucian, one of the later of the ancient
+Greek writers.  As far as we know, Lucian had not been translated into
+English at this time; but there were copies of his works in Latin,
+French, and Italian.  We cannot say whether Shakespeare had read them
+or not.  In 1842 a play on Timon was printed from an old manuscript
+which is supposed to have been written about 1000.  This contains a
+banquet scene, a faithful steward, and the finding of the gold.  This
+has the appearance of an academic play rather than one meant for the
+public theaters, so it is probable that Shakespeare never heard of it;
+but it is barely possible that he knew it and used it as a source.
+
+
+The most helpful book yet written on the period is: _Shakespearean
+Tragedy_, by A. C. Bradley (London, Macmillan, 1910 (1st ed. 1904)).
+
+
+
+
+{196}
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD--ROMANTIC TRAGI-COMEDY
+
+No less clear than the interest in tragic themes which attracted the
+London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the
+shifting of popular approval towards a new form of drama about 1608.
+This was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which puts a theme
+of sentimental interest into events and situations that come close to
+the tragic.  Shakespeare's plays of this type are often called
+romances, since they tell a story of the same type found in romantic
+novels of the time.  His plays contain rather less of the tragic, and
+more of fanciful and playful humor than do the plays of the other
+famous masters in this type, Beaumont and Fletcher; his characters are
+rather more lifelike and appealing.
+
+While the tragi-comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, which were written
+from 1609 to 1611, have been shown to have influenced Shakespeare in
+his romances, yet in several ways they are very different.  The work of
+Beaumont and Fletcher tells of court intrigue and exaggerated passions
+of hatred, envy, and lust; Shakespeare's plays tell of out-of-door
+adventures, and the restoration and reconciliation of families and
+friends parted by misfortune.  Fletcher contrives {197}
+well-constructed plots, depending, indeed, rather too much on incident
+and situation for effect; Shakespeare chooses for his plots stories
+which possess only slight unity of theme, and depends upon character
+and atmosphere for his appeal.  Thus the romances of Shakespeare stand
+out as a strongly marked part of his work, different in treatment from
+the plays of his rivals which perhaps suggested his use of this form.
+Here, as everywhere, Shakespeare exhibits complete mastery of the form
+in which he works.
+
+In addition to the romances of this period, Shakespeare had some share
+in the undramatic and belated chronicle play, _The Life of Henry the
+Eighth_, most of which is assigned to John Fletcher.  In looseness of
+construction, in the emphasis on character in distress, and in the
+introduction of a masque, as well as in other ways, this play resembles
+the tragi-comedies of the period rather than any earlier chronicle.
+Thus the term "romantic tragi-comedy" may be properly used to describe
+all the work of the Fourth Period.
+
++Pericles, Prince of Tyre+, was probably the earliest, as it is
+certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances.  But the story was one
+of the most popular in all fiction, and _Pericles_ was, no doubt, in
+its time what its first title-page claimed for it, a 'much-admired
+play.'  Its hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by storm
+and misfortune from one shore to another.  The five acts which tell his
+adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great
+surges of good and ill luck.  The significance of his daughter's name,
+Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea
+is not only her birthplace, but is the {198} symbol throughout of
+Fortune and Romance.  From the polluted coast of Antioch, where
+Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where
+he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis,
+where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand
+of the Princess Thaļsa, the waves of chance carry the Prince.  They
+overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives
+him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thaļsa safely to
+land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina
+from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene.  Here,
+upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter;
+and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind
+influence of Diana, their goddess.  We are never far from the sound of
+the shore, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell
+of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."
+
+_Pericles_ in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a
+dramatic romance.  The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have
+had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective.  To help out the stage
+action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval
+poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts.  He was supplemented, when his
+affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw
+clutched at by the desperate playwright.  But at the beginning of Act
+III the master's music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are
+lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles
+speaks to the storm at sea:--
+
+{199}
+
+  "Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
+  Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast
+  Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
+  Having call'd them from the deep! ...
+          The seaman's whistle
+  Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
+  Unheard."
+
+In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which anticipate the
+similar scene in _The Tempest_; in the character of Marina, girlish and
+fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are
+scarcely less potent than Prospero's; in the grieving Pericles, who,
+like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his
+wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the
+dramatic romances which are to follow.  Throughout all this Shakespeare
+is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina's misery in
+Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting
+nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's
+speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of
+her character.
+
+
++Authorship and Date+.--The play was entered to Edward Blount in the
+Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608.  It was probably written but little
+before.  Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635.  It was
+not included among Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio (1664).
+The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground
+that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the
+printing rights.  The former of these hypotheses is generally favored,
+since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work
+of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier
+speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play.  In 1608 a novel was {200}
+published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
+Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately
+presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower."  The author was
+George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability.  He is generally accepted
+as Shakespeare's collaborator.  The claims of William Rowley for a
+share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.
+
+Source.--Shakespeare used Gower's _Confessio Amantis_, and the version
+in Laurence Twine's _Pattern of Painful Adventures_, 1606.  The tale is
+also in the _Gesta Romanorum_.
+
+
++Cymbeline+.--"A father cruel, and a step-dame false,
+              A foolish suitor to a wedded lady,
+              That hath her husband banish'd."
+
+Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline,
+king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the
+story.  The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her
+fidelity under this affliction.  Neither her father's anger, nor the
+stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her
+brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous
+Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her
+own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her
+slain, shake in the least degree her true affection.  Such constancy
+cannot fail of its reward, and in the end Imogen wins back both father
+and husband.
+
+In such a story, where virtue's self is made to shine, other characters
+must of necessity suffer.  Posthumus, Imogen's husband, appears weak
+and impulsive, foolish in making his wife's constancy a matter for
+wagers, and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her.  His weakness
+is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant fight in defense of his
+native Britain, and by his {201} outburst of genuine shame and remorse
+when perception of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him.
+Cymbeline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, with none
+of his tenderness.  The wicked Queen and her son are purely wicked.
+Only the faithful servant, Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in
+this court group.
+
+But in the exiled noble Belarius, and the two sons of Cymbeline whom he
+has stolen in infancy and brought up with him in a wild life in the
+mountains, single-hearted nobility rules.  When Imogen, disguised as a
+page, in her flight from the court to Posthumus comes upon them, there
+is the instant sympathy of noble minds, and there is a brief respite
+from her misfortunes.  They rid her of the troublesome Cloten, and
+their victory over Rome brings to book the intriguing Iachimo and
+accomplishes her final recovery of love and honor.  A reading of the
+play leaves as the brightest picture upon the memory their joy at
+meeting Imogen, and their grief when the potion she drinks robs them of
+her.  In them we find expressed that noble simplicity which
+romanticists have always associated with true children of nature.
+
+To Imogen, who has a far longer part to play than any other of
+Shakespeare's heroines, the poet has also given a completer
+characterization, in which every charm of the highest type of woman is
+delineated.  The one trait which a too censorious audience might
+criticize, that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes Chaucer's
+patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to modern readers, is in
+Imogen completely redeemed by her resolution in the face of danger, and
+by a certain {202} imperiousness which well becomes the daughter of a
+king.
+
+
++Authorship+.--Some later hand probably made up the vision of Posthumus
+(V, iv, 30-90), where a series of irregular stanzas of inferior
+poetical merit are inserted to form "an apparition."
+
++Date+.--Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 1611,
+describes the performance of _Cymbeline_ at which he was present.  The
+entry occurs between those telling of _Macbeth_ (April 20, 1610) and
+_The Winter's Tale_ (May 15, 1611).  The tests of verse assign it also
+to this period.  The first print was that of the First Folio, 1623.
+
++Source+.--From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual
+historical fact in the play, that one Cunobelinus was an ancient king
+of Britain.  Cymbeline's two sons are likewise from Holinshed, as is
+the rout of an army by a countryman and his two sons; but the two
+stories are separate.  The ninth novel of the second day of the
+_Decameron_ of Boccaccio tells a story much resembling the part of the
+play which concerns Posthumus.  The play called _The Rare Triumphs of
+Love and Fortune_ (1589) contains certain characters not unlike Imogen,
+Posthumus, Belarius, and Cloten.  Fidelia, Imogen's name in disguise,
+is the heroine's name.  But direct borrowing cannot be proved.
+
+
++The Winter's Tale+.--Nowhere is Shakespeare more lavish of his powers
+of characterization and of poetic treatment of life than in this play.
+He found for his plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true
+queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband's friend, dies of
+grief at the death of her son, while her infant daughter, abandoned to
+the seas in a boat, grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the
+king of whom her father had been jealous.  Disregarding the essentially
+undramatic nature of the story, as well as its improbabilities, he
+achieved a signal {203} triumph of his art in the creation of his two
+heroines, and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh,
+joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of convention.
+
+In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme portrait of woman's
+fortitude.  Hermione is brave, not by nature, but inspired by high
+resolve for her honor and for her children.  Nobly indignant at the
+slanders uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the slanderer in
+pity for the blindness of unreason which has caused his action.
+Shakespeare's dramatic instinct made him alter Hermione's death in the
+earlier story to life in secret, with poetic justice in store.
+Artificial as the long period of waiting seems, before the final
+reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the magnificent appeal
+of the mother's love when the lost daughter kneels in joy before her.
+
+In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, depicted the true
+daughter of such a mother.  Although her nature at first seems all
+innocence, beauty, youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the
+knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king's son, and that his
+father has discovered it, her courage rises with the danger, and her
+words echo her mother's resolution:--
+
+  "I think affliction may subdue the cheek,
+  But not take in the mind."
+
+
+In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English sheepshearing,
+with its merrymaking, a pair of honest English country fellows in the
+old shepherd and his son, the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved
+vagabonds {204} in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff's,
+are more lovable than other people's virtues.  Fortune, which will not
+suffer him to be honest, makes his thieveries, in her extremity of
+whim, to be but benefits for others.
+
+Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita's lover, is that
+rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of
+soul.  Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty
+and devotion.  Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in
+the violence of his jealousy.  As the study of a mind overborne by an
+obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.
+
+
++Date+.--Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the
+Globe Theater, May 16, 1611.  It was probably written about this time.
+Jonson's _Masque of Oberon_, produced January 1, 1611, contains an
+antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance
+in IV, iv, 331 ff.  The First Folio contains the earliest print of the
+play.
+
++Source+.--The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the
+source of _The Winter's Tale_, was Robert Greene's _Pandosto: The
+Triumph of Time_, sometimes called by its later title, _The History of
+Dorastus and Fawnia_.  Fourteen editions followed one another from its
+appearance in 1588.  Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia,
+and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily.  In _The Winter's
+Tale_ two kingdoms are interchanged.  Nevertheless the "seacoast of
+Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, is found
+in Greene's story.  Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital
+importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive,
+instead of dying in grief for her son's death, to be restored again in
+the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is
+given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita;
+and the complications of {205} Dorastus's (Florizel's) destiny as the
+prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's
+(Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on
+learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted.  The characters of
+Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own
+invention.
+
+According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1
+ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in
+Robert Wilson's _Three Ladies of London_ (1584).
+
+
++The Tempest+, probably the last complete drama from Shakespeare's pen,
+differs from the other "romances" in possessing a singular unity.  It
+comes, indeed closer than any play, save the _Comedy of Errors_, to
+fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and place.  This may
+be due to the fact that the poet is here making up his own plot, not,
+as in other cases, dramatizing a novel of extended adventure.
+
+The central theme of _The Tempest_ is, like that of the other romances,
+restoration of those exiled and reconciliation of those at enmity; but
+the treatment of the story could not be more different.  Where the
+chance of fortune has hitherto brought about the happy ending, here
+magic and the supernatural in control of man are the means employed.
+Those who had plotted or connived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of
+Milan, and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his infant
+daughter and his books for company, are wrecked through his art upon
+the island of which he has become the master.  Ariel, the spirit who
+serves Prospero, a mysterious, ever changing form, now fire, now a
+Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a Harpy, striking guilt into the
+conscience (and yet apparently not interested in either vice or virtue,
+but {206} longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prospero's
+cave, and receives freedom for his toil.  His spirit pervades every
+scene, whether we view the king's son Ferdinand loving innocent
+Miranda, or the silent king mourning his son's loss, or the guilty
+conspirators plotting the king's death, or the drunken steward and
+jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the overthrow of
+Prospero.  All of them are led, by the wisdom of Prospero acting
+through Ariel, away from their own wrong impulses, and into
+reconcilement and peace.  How much of _The Tempest_ Shakespeare meant
+as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere
+the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the
+dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.
+
+There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is
+inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare's own voice.  In
+one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and
+compares life itself to the transitory play.  In the other, Prospero
+bids farewell to his magic art.  These are often interpreted as
+Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage and to his art,--with what
+justification every reader must decide for himself.
+
+In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint
+of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty.  The falling in
+love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and
+nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the
+creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge
+of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,--all these
+are the work of {207} a genius still in the full pride of power.
+Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in
+the evening."
+
+
++Date+.--Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the
+play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611.  The play certainly
+is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609.  It was acted during
+the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other
+plays were revived.
+
++Sources+.--Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey
+told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda
+Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in
+1609.  From these Shakespeare drew for many details.  His island,
+however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land.  Other
+details have been traced from various sources.  Ariel is a name of a
+spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets.  Montaigne's
+_Essays_, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's
+imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.).  Setebos has been found as a
+devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's _History of Travaile_ (1577).
+The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably
+Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose
+daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who
+through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from
+some old folk tale; since a German play, _Die Schöne Sidea_, by Jakob
+Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details.  The
+relations, if any, between the two plays are remote.
+
+
++The Life of Henry the Eighth+, the last of the historical plays, in
+date of composition as in the history it pictures, suffers from the
+very fact that it boasts in its second title, _All is True_.  The play
+might have been built around any one of the half-dozen persons which in
+turn claim our chief interest,--Buckingham, Queen Katherine, Anne
+Bullen; the King, Wolsey, or {208} Cranmer; but fidelity to history,
+while it did not hinder some slight alteration of incident and time,
+required that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a
+complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to be given.  The
+result was a complete abandonment of anything like unity of theme.
+
+It is, of course, a disappointment to one who has just read _I Henry
+IV_.  On the other hand, this play may be regarded as a kind of
+pageant, as the word is used nowadays in England and America.  It
+presents, in the manner of a modern pageant, a series of brilliant
+scenes telling of Buckingham's fall, of Wolsey's triumph and ruin, of
+Katherine's trial and death, of Anne Bullen's coronation, and of
+Cranmer's advancement, joined together by the well-drawn character of
+the King, powerful, masterful, selfish, and vindictive, but not without
+a suggestion of better qualities.  The gayety of the Masque, in the
+first act, where King Henry first meets Anne Bullen, is also in perfect
+harmony with the modern pageant, which always employs music and dancing
+as aids to the picture.
+
+In Queen Katherine we have a suffering and wronged woman, gifted with
+queenly grace and dignity, and with strong sympathies and a keen sense
+of justice.  From her first entrance, when she ventures, Esther-like,
+into the presence of the king to intercede for an oppressed people,
+through all her vain struggle against the King's wayward inclination
+and the Cardinal's wiles, up to the very moment when she is stricken
+with mortal illness, she holds our sympathy.  If in her great trial
+scene she is weaker and more impulsive than Hermione in hers, yet the
+circumstances are {209} different; she is not keyed up to so high an
+endeavor as that lady, nor in so much danger for herself or her
+children.
+
+
++Authorship+.--Differences in style and meter, and the fragmentary
+quality of the whole play have long confirmed the theory that
+Shakespeare in _Henry VIII_ engaged in a very loose sort of
+collaboration.  Only the Buckingham scene (I, i,), the scenes of
+Katherine's entrance and trial (I, ii, II, iv), a brief scene of Anne
+Bullen (II, iii), and the first half of the scene in which Wolsey's
+schemes are exposed and Henry alienated from him (III, i, 1-203) are
+confidently ascribed to Shakespeare.  The rest of the play fits best
+the style and metrical habit of John Fletcher, at this time one of the
+most popular dramatists of London.
+
++Date+.--The Globe Theater was burned on June 29, 1613, when a play
+called _Henry VIII or All is True_ was being performed.  So far as
+stylistic tests can decide, this was not long after the composition of
+the play.  Sir Henry Wotton, the antiquarian, writing from hearsay
+knowledge, says that the play being acted at the time of the fire was
+"a new play called All is True."  Shakespeare's scenes in this drama
+may thus have been his last dramatic work.  A praise of King James in
+the last scene was probably written not later than the rest of the
+play, and thus insures a date later than 1603.  The earliest print of
+the play was the First Folio, 1623.
+
++Source+.--Holinshed was the chief source.  Halle furnished certain
+details.  Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ tells the Cranmer story.
+
+
+
+
+{210}
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
+
+The mystery which enwraps so much of Shakespeare's life, combined with
+the interest which naturally centers around a great genius, is ideally
+calculated to stimulate human imagination to fantastic guess-work.  It
+is probably for this reason that a number of famous delusions about
+Shakespeare have at different times arisen.  Some of these are of
+sufficient importance to deserve attention.  Three widely different
+types of mistakes can be observed.
+
++The Shakespeare Apocrypha+.--The most excusable of these delusions was
+the belief that Shakespeare wrote a large number of plays which are now
+known to be the work of other men.  Some of these plays were printed,
+either during the poet's life or after his death, with "William
+Shakespeare" or "W. S." on the title-page.  It is now practically
+certain that the full name was a printer's forgery, and that the
+letters W. S. were either designed to deceive or else the initials of
+some contemporary dramatist (such as Wentworth Smith, for example).
+Six of these spurious dramas were included in the Third Folio of
+Shakespeare's complete works.  Since this came out forty years after
+the First Folio, when men who had known Shakespeare personally {211}
+were dead, we certainly cannot believe that its editor had better
+information than those of the First Folio, who were the poet's personal
+friends, and who did not include these plays.  The spurious dramas
+printed in the Third Folio were: _The London Prodigal, The History of
+the Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The History of Sir John
+Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _The Tragedy of
+Locrine_.
+
+Among the other plays imputed to Shakespeare at various times are:
+_Fair Em, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Feversham, The Two
+Noble Kinsmen, Edward Third_, and _Sir Thomas More_.  Some good
+critics, chiefly literary men, not scholars, still believe that
+Shakespeare wrote parts of the last three; but it is practically
+certain that he had nothing to do with the others, and his part in all
+these disputed plays is extremely doubtful.
+
++Shakespearean Forgeries+.--Men who assigned the above spurious plays
+to Shakespeare made an honest error of judgment, but other men have
+committed deliberate forgeries in regard to him.  At the end of the
+eighteenth century, W. H. Ireland forged papers which he attempted to
+impose on the public as recently discovered Mss. of the 'Swan of Avon.'
+One of these finds, a play called _Vortigern_, was actually acted by a
+prominent company.  But the unShakespearean character of these 'great
+discoveries' was soon perceived, and Ireland at length confessed.
+
+Another famous fraud of a wholly different kind was that of J. P.
+Collier.  The great services which this man has rendered to the world
+of scholarship make {212} all men reluctant to pass too severe censure
+on his conduct; but it is only fair that the public should be warned
+against deception.  He pretended to have found a folio copy of the
+plays corrected and revised on the margin in the handwriting of a
+contemporary of Shakespeare.  Some of these revisions were actual
+improvements on the carelessly printed text; but it is now known that
+they were forgeries.  Similar changes were made by him in other
+important documents, and were for some time accepted as genuine.
+
++The Bacon Controversy+.--During the latter part of the nineteenth
+century, the contention was started that Shakespeare was merely an
+obscure actor who never wrote a line, and that the Shakespearean plays
+were actually written by his great contemporary, Francis Bacon, who was
+pleased to let these products of his own genius appear under the name
+of another man.  This delusion is usually considered as beginning with
+an article by Miss Delia Bacon in _Putnam's Monthly_ (January, 1856),
+although the idea had been twice suggested during the eight years
+preceding.
+
+The Baconian arguments fall into four groups.  First, they argue that
+there is no proof to establish the identity of Shakespeare, the actor,
+with the author of the plays.  This is untrue.  We have more than one
+reference by his contemporaries, identifying the actor with the poet,
+some so strong that the Baconians themselves can explain them away only
+by assuming that the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully
+deceives the public.  By assumptions like that, any one could prove
+anything.
+
+The second point of the Baconians is that a man of {213} Shakespeare's
+limited education could not have written plays replete with so many
+kinds of learning.  This argument is weak at both ends.  It assumes as
+true that Shakespeare had a limited education and that his plays are
+full of knowledge learned from books rather than from life.  The first
+of these points rests on vague tradition only, and the second is still
+a debatable question.  But even if we admit these two points, what
+then?  Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old and had probably lived in
+London for five or six years when the first book from his hand appeared
+in its present form.  Any man capable of writing _Hamlet_ could educate
+himself during several years in the heart of a great city.
+
+Thirdly, a certain lady found in Bacon's writings a large number of
+expressions which seemed to her to resemble similar phrases in
+Shakespeare.  Except to the mind of an ardent Baconian many of these
+show no likeness whatever.  Most of those which do show any likeness
+were proverbial or stock expressions which can be found in other
+writers.
+
+Lastly, various Baconians have repeatedly asserted that they had found
+in the First Folio acrostic signatures of Bacon's name; that one could
+spell Bacon or Francis Bacon by picking out letters in the text
+according to certain rules.  But unfortunately either these acrostics
+do not work out, or else the rules are so loose that similar acrostics
+can be found anywhere, in modern books or pamphlets, and even on the
+gravestones of our ancestors.  Many of the more intelligent Baconians
+themselves have no faith in this last form of evidence.
+
+{214}
+
+On the other hand, there are certain very weighty objections to Bacon
+as author of the plays.  In the first place, it is a miracle that one
+man should produce either the works of Bacon or Shakespeare alone; it
+is a miracle past all belief that the same man in one lifetime should
+have written both.  In the second place, the little verse which Bacon
+is known to have written shows clearly how limited he was as a poet, no
+matter how great in other directions.  Moreover, his prose, though
+splendid in its kind, is wholly unlike the prose of Shakespeare.
+Finally, Bacon's contemptuous attitude toward woman and marriage was
+diametrically opposed to that found in Shakespeare.  To imagine that
+the same man wrote both sets of writings is to assume that he was one
+man one day and another the next.
+
+The advocates of this strange theory vary greatly in fairmindedness and
+ability, and it is not just to judge them all by the mad extremes of
+some; but, nevertheless, their writings, taken as a whole, form one of
+the strangest medleys of garbled facts and fallacious reasoning which
+has ever imposed on an honest and intelligent but uninformed public.
+
+
+On the _Shakespeare Apocrypha_, see C. F. Tucker Brooke's edition of
+fourteen spurious plays, under this title, Oxford, University Press,
+1908.  On the forgeries and other questions, Appendix I of Mr. Lee's
+_Life_ is the readiest place of reference.
+
+
+
+
+{215}
+
+INDEX
+
+  Aaron, 141.
+  _Abraham and Isaac_, 25.
+  _Adoration of the Wise Men_, 25.
+  Ęschylus, 20
+  Ęsop, 182.
+  Albright, V. E., 44, 50.
+  _All is True_, 207, 209.
+  Alleyn, E., 48, 49.
+  Allott, R., 124.
+  _All's Well that Ends Well_, 110, 121, _174-176_.
+  _Amphitruo_, 110, 148.
+  Amyot, J., 108.
+  Anders, H. R. D., 112.
+  Angelo, 176.
+  Antonio, 160.
+  _Antonius, Life of M._, 192, 195.
+  Antony, 178.
+  _Antony and Cleopatra_, 47, 75, 83, 102, 109, 121, _190-192_, 193.
+  Apemantus, 194.
+  _Apocrypha, Shakespeare_, 120, 210.
+  _Apollonius and Silla_, 171.
+  _Arcadia_, 111, 187.
+  _Arden of Feversham_, 211.
+  _Aren en Titus_, 142.
+  Ariel, 206.
+  Ariosto, 167.
+  Aristophanes, 20.
+  Aristotle, 30.
+  Arthur, Prince, 137.
+  Ashbies, 4, 16.
+  Aspley, W. A., 121, 124.
+  _As You Like It_, 102, 110, 121, _167-169_, 172.
+  Ayrer, J., 207.
+
+  Bacon controversy, 212-214.
+  Baker, G. P., 104.
+  Bale, J., 138.
+  Bandello, 109, 110, 144, 167, 171.
+  Bankside, 37.
+  Barksted, 76, 177.
+  Barnard, Lady, 19.
+  Bear-rings as stages, 37.
+  Beatrice, 166.
+  Beaumont, F., 57, 196.
+  Belleforest, 171, 182.
+  Bellott, Stephen, 13, 14.
+  Benedick, 166.
+  _Benedicke and Betteris_, 167.
+  Bermuda, 207.
+  Bertram, 174, 175.
+  Besant, Sir W., 59.
+  Blackfriars Theater, 14, 45-46, 49, 57, 58.
+  Blount, E., 121-123, 199.
+  Boccaccio, G., 110, 176, 202.
+  Boisteau, 144.
+  Bolingbroke, 138.
+  _Book of Martyrs_, 207.
+  _Booke of Plaies_, 189.
+  Boswell, J., 129.
+  Boy-actors, 49.
+  Bradley, A. C., 195.
+  Brodmeier, 50.
+  Brome play, 25.
+  Brooke, A., 145.
+  Brooke, C. F. T., 214.
+  Brutus, 178, 179.
+  Buckingham, 207.
+  _Building of the Arke_, 25.
+  Bullen (Boleyn), Anne, 207.
+  Burbage, James, 37.
+  Burbage, R., 12, 14, 17, 19, 37, 38, 45, 48, 49.
+  Busby, J., 118.
+  Butler, N., 120.
+
+  _Caesar, Life of J._, 193; _see also Julius_.
+  Caliban, 206.
+  Camden, R., 11.
+  Capell, E., 129.
+  Cassius, 178.
+  Caxton, W., 174.
+  Chamberlain's Company, _see_ Lord.
+  Chambers, E. K., 34.
+  Character-study, 90.
+  Charlecote, 7.
+  Chaucer, G., 67, 109, 151, 152, 174, 201.
+  Chester Plays, 24, 25.
+  Chettle, H., 9, 12, 174.
+  Chetwind, P., 125.
+  Children of Paul's, 46.
+  Children of the Chapel, 46.
+  Children's companies, 48.
+  _Chronicle_ of Holinshed, _107-108_, 187.  _See also_ Holinshed.
+  Church, Origin of drama in, 20-23
+  Cinthio, G., 109, 177, 184.
+  Citizens of London, 55.
+  City of London, 53.
+  Clark, A., 4 n.
+  Clark and Wright, 129, 189.
+  Classical drama, 29-31.
+  Claudio, 165, 177.
+  Cloten, 200.
+  Cock-pit, 46.
+  _Colin Clout_, etc., 10.
+  Collier, J. P., 112, 211.
+  _Comedy of Errors_, 10, 77, 83, 110, 121, _147-148_.
+  Condell, Henry, 12, 19, 122.
+  _Confessio Amantis_, 109, 200.
+  Constance, 137.
+  _Contention, First_, 111, 134, 135.
+  _Contention, Second_, 111, 134, 135.  _See Richard, True Tragedy of_.
+  _Contention, Whole_, 111, 120, 134.
+  Cordelia, 185.
+  _Coriolanus_, 109, 121, _192-193_.
+  Coryat, T., 39.
+  Cotes, R., 124.
+  Cotes, T., 124.
+  Cranmer, 208.
+  Creizenach, 34, 50.
+  _Cromwell, Thos., Lord_, 125, 211.
+  Curtain Theater, 37.
+  Cycles of miracle plays, 24.
+  _Cymbeline_, 41, 71, 83, 103, 108, 112, 121, _200-202_.
+
+  Danter, J., 118.
+  Dates of plays, 83.
+  Davies, Archdeacon, 7.
+  _De Clerico et Puella_, 28.
+  _Decameron_, 110, 176, 202.
+  Deer-stealing, tradition of, 7.
+  Dekker, T., 174.
+  Delius, N., 129.
+  _Deluge, The_, 25.
+  Desdemona, 184.
+  _Diana Enamorada_, 110, 149, 151.
+  Dogberry, 54, 166.
+  _Dorastus and Fawnia_, 204.
+  Dowden, E., 84.
+  Drama before Shakespeare, 20.
+  Dramatic technique, 94-100.
+  Drayton, M., 11.
+  Droeshout, M., 18.
+  Dromio, 147.
+  _Dux Moraud_, 28.
+
+  Easter drama, 22.
+  Eden, 207.
+  Editing, Problems of, 126-127.
+  Edmund, 186.
+  _Edward II_, 32, 140.
+  _Edward III_, 211.
+  _Edward IV_, 134.
+  Ely Palace portrait, 18.
+  End-stopped lines, 79-80.
+  _Endymion_, 33.
+  Essex, Earl of, 78, 159.
+  _Euphues_, 33, 140.
+  Euripides, 20.
+  _Everyman_, 26, 34.
+  _Every Man in his Humour_, 12.
+  _Every Man out of his Humour_, 158, 179.
+  External evidence, 75-77.
+
+  _Faerie Queene_, 152, 187.
+  _Fair Em_, 211.
+  Falstaff, Sir John, 7, 156-159, 164.
+  Faulconbridge, 137.
+  _Faustus_, 32.
+  _Felix and Philiomena_, 149.
+  Female parts, 48.
+  Feminine endings, 80.
+  Field, Henry, 16.
+  Field, Richard, 113.
+  Fiorentino, G., 110, 161.
+  First Folio, 11, 30, 75, 114, 119, _120-124_, 136, 137, etc.
+  Fisher, T., 120.
+  Fleay, F. L., 50, 84.
+  Fletcher, J., 2, 196, 197, 209.
+  Florio, G., 207.
+  Flower portrait, 18.
+  Fluellen, 158.
+  Folios, Second, Third, and Fourth, 124-125.
+  Forgeries, Shakespeare, 211.
+  Forman, Dr. S., 189, 202, 204.
+  Fortune Theater, 38-40.
+  Four periods, 101-104.
+  Foxe, R., 209.
+  Fuller, H. De W., 142.
+  Fuller, T., 56.
+  Furness, H. H., 127, 130.
+
+  Gamelyn, Tale of, 169.
+  _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, 29.
+  Garnett, H., 189.
+  Gascoigne, G., 163.
+  Geoffrey of Monmouth, 187.
+  German and Dutch plays like Shakespeare's, 112.
+  _Gesta Romanorum_, 200.
+  Glendower, 155.
+  Globe Theater, 1, 38, 39, 57, 58.
+  Gloucester, 186.
+  _Gorboduc_, 29.
+  Gosson, S., 161.
+  Gower, J., 109, 200.
+  Greek drama, 30.
+  Greene, R., 8, 9, 110, 115, 134, 135, 204.
+  Greene, T., 17, 31.
+  Grey, W., 50, 120.
+  _Groatsworth of Witte_, etc., 9.
+  Gunpowder Plot, 190.
+
+  Hal, Prince, 155.
+  Hall, Dr. J., 17.
+  Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., 19, 129.
+  _Hamlet_, 12, 32, 33, 34, 41, 83, 93-94, 100, 102, 111, 112,
+    116, 117, 119, 121, 128, 142, 177, _180-182_.
+  Hanmer, T., 128.
+  Harsnett, 186.
+  Hart, Joan, 19.
+  Hathaway, Anne, 5, 6.
+  Hawkins, A., 124.
+  Hazlitt, W. C., 112.
+  _Heccatommithi, Gli_, 109, 179, 184.
+  Hector, 173.
+  Hegge plays, 24.
+  Helena, 174.
+  Heminge _or_ Hemings, J., 12, 19, 122.
+  Henley Street House, 19.
+  _I Henry IV_, 6, 10, 33, 41, 83, 99, 101, 111, 117, 119, 121,
+    _154-157_, 164, 165, 208.
+  _II Henry IV_, 121, 126, _157-158_.
+  _Henry V_, 78, 83, 101, 111, 117, 119, 120, _158-159_, 165.
+  _Henry V, Famous Victories of_, 111.
+  _I Henry VI_, 111, _133-134_.
+  _II Henry VI_, 111, 117, _134-135_.
+  _III Henry VI_, 8, 83, 98, 121, _134-135_.
+  _Henry VIII_, 34, 84, 103, 112, 121, 197, _207-209_.
+  Henslowe, P., 37, 45, 48.
+  _Henslowe's Diary_, 50, 182.
+  _Heptameron of Civil Discourses_, 177.
+  Hermia, 150.
+  Hermione, 203.
+  Hero, 166.
+  Herod, 24.
+  Heywood, J., 28.
+  _Histoires Tragiques_, 182.
+  _Historia Danica_, 181.
+  Histories, 97-98.
+  Holinshed, 107-108, 134, 136, 140, 156, 159, 180, 190, 202, 209.
+  Holland (author), 184.
+  Horace, 11.
+  Hotspur, 155.
+  Hubert, 137.
+  Humphrey of Gloucester, 134.
+  Hunsdon, Lord, 48, 144.
+
+  Iachimo, 202.
+  Iago, 183.
+  Iambic pentameter, 61.
+  Imogen, 200-202.
+  _Ingannati, Gl'_, 171.
+  Ingram, 81 n.
+  Inn-yards as theaters, 35.
+  Interludes, 27-29, 48.
+  Internal evidence, 77-82.
+  Ireland, W. H., 211.
+  Isabella, 176.
+  Italian _novelle_, 109-110.
+  Italy, Influence of, on masque, 34.
+
+  Jaggard, I., 121, 124.
+  Jaggard, W., 70, 113, 120-121, 124.
+  James I, 48, 209.
+  Jaques, 169.
+  Jessica, 160.
+  _Jew of Malta_, 132.
+  Joan of Arc, 133.
+  John of Gaunt, 138, 140.
+  _John, Troublesome Reigne of_, 111, 137-138.
+  Johnson, A., 120.
+  Johnson, S., 129.
+  Jonson, Ben, 11, 12, 31, 34, 50, 56, 158, 174, 179, 204.
+  Jourdan, S., 207.
+  Julia, 149.
+  _Julius Caesar_, 44, 83, 100, 102, 109, 121, 122, 126, 172,
+    _177-180_, 184, 190, 193.
+
+  Katherine, 162, 208.
+  Kemp, W., 12.
+  _Kind-Harts Dreame_, 9.
+  _King Johan_, 27, 138.
+  _King John_, 11, 77, 83, 111, 135, _136-138_.
+  _King Lear_, 77, 83, 100, 102, 108, 117, 126, _185-187_, 195.
+  _King Leir_, etc., 111, 187.
+  _Knight's Tale_, 151.
+  Kyd, T., 31, 32, 142, 182.
+
+  Lady Macbeth, 188.
+  Lambert, D., 84.
+  Lee, S., 19, 72, 214.
+  _Legend of Good Women_, 152.
+  Leontes, 199, 204.
+  Leopold Shakespeare, 129.
+  _Locrine_, Tragedy of, 125, 211.
+  Lodge, T., 31, 111, 135, 169.
+  London, 51-59.
+  _London Prodigal, A._, 125, 211.
+  Lord Admiral's Men, 45, 48.
+  Lord Chamberlain's Company, 12, 48.
+  Lounsbury, T. R., 130.
+  _Love's Labour's Lost_, 10, 33, 77, 83, 91, 95, 99, 101, 106, 117,
+    121, 132, _145-146_.
+  _Love's Labour's Wonne_, 10, 77, 175.
+  _Lover's Complaint, A_, 70.
+  Lucian, 195.
+  _Lucrece, Rape of_, 10, _62-63_, 67, 113.
+  Lucy, Sir T., 7.
+  _Ludus Coventriae, see_ Hegge.
+  Luigi da Porto, 144.
+  Lydgate, J., 33.
+  Lyly, J., 32, 132, 135, 145-146.
+  Lysander, 150.
+
+  Macbeth, 41, 44, 83, 92, 100, 102, 103, 108, 121, _187-190_, 191, 202.
+  Malone, E., 129, 184, 207.
+  Malvolio, 170.
+  Manly, J. M., 34.
+  Manningham, J., diary, 76, 171.
+  Marina, 197, 198.
+  Marlowe, C., 2, 31-32, 132, 135, 136, 140, 153, 163.
+  Masculine endings, 80.
+  Masque, 33.
+  _Masque of Oberon_, 204.
+  Mass, Drama at, 21.
+  _Measure for Measure_, 76, 83, 109, 112, 121, _176-177_.
+  Meighen, 124.
+  _Menaechmi_, 110.
+  Menander, 20.
+  Mennes, Sir J., 3.
+  _Merchant of Venice_, 10, 42, 44, 77, 83, 96, 97, 101, 110, 112,
+    117, 120, 132, 133, _159-161_.
+  Mercutio, 144.
+  Meres, F., 10, 67 n., 76-77, 137, 142, 149, 151, 156, 161, 167,
+    169, 171, 175, 179.
+  _Merry Devil of Edmonton_, 211.
+  _Merry Wives of Windsor_, 110, 117, 118, 120, 124, _163-165_.
+  Meter, 86-87.
+  Middle Temple, 171.
+  Middleton, T., 189.
+  _Midsummer Night's Dream_, 10, 77, 83, 117, 120, 132, 133, _149-151_.
+  Milton, J., 64, 65.
+  Miracle plays, 23.
+  Miranda, 206.
+  _Mirrour for Magistrates_, 187.
+  _Mirrour of Martyrs_, 179.
+  Montaigne, _Essays_ of, 207.
+  Montemayor, J. de, 149.
+  Moralities, 26-27.
+  More, Sir T., 136.  _See under_ Sir.
+  Mountjoy, C., 13-14.
+  Mountjoy, Mary, 13.
+  _Much Ado About Nothing_, 71, 83, 101, 110, 121, _165-167_, 169.
+  _Myrrha_, 177.
+
+  Nash, T., 8, 31, 135, 182.
+  Nashe, T., 19.
+  Neilson, W. A., 129, 135, 205.
+  New Place, 16, 17.
+  _News out of Purgatorie_, 165.
+  _Nice Wanton_, 27.
+  North, Sir T., 108, 158, 179, 192, 193.
+
+  Oberon, 149.
+  Octavia, 190.
+  Oldcastle, Sir John, 120, 125, 211.
+  Olivia, 170.
+  _Orator, The_, 161.
+  Order of the plays, 83.
+  Ordish, T. F., 59.
+  Orlando, 168.
+  _Orlando Furioso_, 167.
+  _Othello_, 100, 101, 109, 117, 124, _182-185_, 191.
+  Ovid, 61, 152.
+
+  Pageants, 25.
+  Painter, W., 110, 148, 176, 195.
+  _Palace of Pleasure_, 110, 195.  _See_ Painter.
+  _Palladis Tamia_, 10, 77.
+  Pandarus, 172.
+  Pandosto, 110, 204.
+  _Passionate Pilgrim_, 70, 71, 113.
+  _Patterne of Painful Adventures_, 200.
+  Pavier, T., 120-121, 124.
+  Pavy, S., 50.
+  _Pecorone, Il_, 110.
+  Peele, G., 8, 31, 135.
+  Pembroke, Earl of, 67.
+  Perdita, 199, 203.
+  _Pericles_, 103, 109, 117, 119, 120, 128, 129, _197-200_.
+  Petrarch, 64.
+  Petruchio, 162.
+  _Phoenix and the Turtle, The_, 70.
+  Pistol, 158, 159.
+  Plautus, 10, 11, 29, 110, 148.
+  Pliny, 184.
+  Plots, 106.
+  Plutarch's _Lives_, _108-109_, 179, 192, 193, 195.
+  _Poetaster_, 174.
+  Pollard, A. W., 120.
+  Polonius, 181.
+  Pope, A., 127, 128.
+  _Popish Impostures, Declaration of_, 186.
+  Portia, 160, 179.
+  Posthumus, 200.
+  Printing, Conditions of, 114-116.
+  Private theaters, 45.
+  _Promos and Cassandra_, 112, 177.
+  Prospero, 199, 206.
+  Proteus, 149.
+  Puck (Robin Goodfellow), 149.
+  _Puritaine, The_, 125, 211.
+  Puritan Widow, _v.s._
+  Puritans, 15.
+  Pyramus and Thisbe, 150, 152.
+
+  Quartos, 114.
+  Quiney, T., 17.
+
+  _Ralph Roister Doister_, 29.
+  _Rare Triumphs_, etc., 202.
+  Reformation, 52.
+  Renaissance, 21, 29.
+  Reynolds, G. F., 50.
+  _Richard, Duke of York, True Tragedy of_, 134.  Same as _II
+    Contention, q.v._
+  _Richard II_, 10, 77, 83, 117, 119, 121, 137, _138-140_, 154.
+  _Richard III_, 10, 32, 77, 83, 91, 92, 98-99, 101, 111, 117, 119,
+    121, 133, _135-136_, 137.
+  _Richardus Tertius_, 136.
+  _Richard III, True Tragedy of_, 111, 136.
+  Riche, B., 171.
+  Rime, 81-82, 87-88.
+  Roberts, J., 120.
+  Robertson, W., 142.
+  Robin Hood, 28, 167.
+  Rome, 21.
+  _Romeo and Giulietta_, 144.
+  _Romeo and Juliet_, 11, 41, 42, 71, 77, 83, 90, 101, 112, 116,
+    117-119, 121, 122, 131, 132, _143-145_, 150, 185.
+  _Romeus and Juliet_, 145.
+  Roofs on theaters, 46.
+  Rosalind, 166.
+  _Rosalynde_, 110, 169, 171.
+  Rose Theater, 37, 135.
+  Rowe, N., 7, 127.
+  Rowley, W., 200.
+  Run on lines, 79 ff.
+  Rutland, Earl of, 17.
+
+  St. Paul's, 13, 56.
+  Salisbury Court, 46.
+  Saxo Grammaticus, 182.
+  Schelling, F. E., 34, 50, 135.
+  _School of Abuse_, 161.
+  _Second Shepherd's Play_, 25.
+  _Sejanus_, 12.
+  Seneca, 10, 20, 29, 30.
+  Sequence, _see_ Sonnet.
+  Sequence of plays, 83.
+  _Shakespeare Allusion Book_, 11 n.
+  Shakespeare, Hamnet, 5, 6, 17.
+  Shakespeare, John, 3, 4, 6, 16, 17.
+  Shakespeare, Judith, 5, 17, 18, 19.
+  Shakespeare, Richard, 4.
+  Shakespeare, Susanna, 5, 17, 19.
+  Shakespeare, William, our knowledge of his life, 1;
+    birth, 2; education, 4; marriage, 5; deer-stealing, 7;
+    life in London, 8-16; return to Stratford, 16; death, 17;
+    portraits, tomb, will, 18; descendants, 19; allusions to,
+    8-17; as an actor, 12; residence with Mountjoy, 13;
+    income, 15; grant of arms to, 16; compared with Jonson,
+    56; and _passim_.
+  _Shakespearean Tragedy_, 195.
+  Shallow, 7, 158.
+  Shottery, 6.
+  Shylock, 92-93, 159, 160.
+  _Sidea, Die Schöne_, 207.
+  Sidney, Sir P., 111, 115, 187.
+  Silvayn, A., 161.
+  Silver Street, 13.
+  Silvia, 149.
+  Sims, V., 119.
+  Sir Andrew, 170.
+  Sly, 162.
+  Smethwick, I., 121-124.
+  Somers, Sir G., 78.
+  Sonnets, 63-70, 113.
+  Sophocles, 20.
+  Southampton, Earl of, 10, 67-68.
+  _Spanish Tragedy_, 32, 182.
+  Spenser, E., 10, 187.
+  Stage, The, 40-45.
+  Stage costumes and settings, 42-44.
+  Stage, Effect of, on drama, 46.
+  Stationers' Register, 75, 114-115, 118, etc.
+  Steevens, G., 129.
+  Stephenson, H. T., 59.
+  Strachey, W., 207.
+  Strange, Lord, 48, 135.
+  Straparola, 110.
+  Stratford, 2.
+  _Supposes_, 163.
+  Surrey, Earl of, 65.
+  Swan Theater, 37.
+
+  Talbot, 133.
+  _Tamburlaine_, 32, 136.
+  _Taming of a Shrew_, 112, 121, 163.
+  _Taming of the Shrew_, 83, 111, _161-163_.
+  Tamora, 141.
+  Tarlton, 165.
+  Taste, growth of, 89-90.
+  Taverns, 56-57.
+  _Tempest, The_, 34, 41, 71, 78, 81, 84, 87, 103, 121, 136, _205-207_.
+  Terence, 29.
+  Thaļsa, 198.
+  Thames, 54.
+  Theater, The, 37.
+  Theaters, 35 ff., 57-59.
+  Theobald, L., 128.
+  _Thomas More, Sir_, 211.
+  Thorpe, T., 113.
+  _Three Ladies of London_, 205.
+  Timon (by Lucian), 195.
+  _Timon of Athens_, 109, 112, 121, 122, _193-195_.
+  Titania, 149.
+  _Tito Andronico_, 142.
+  _Tittus and Vespacia_, 142.
+  _Titus Andronicus_, 11, 32, 77, 83, 117, 119, 123, 132, _141-143_.
+  Touchstone, 166.
+  Towneley plays, 24, 25.
+  _Travaile, History of_, 207.
+  _Tredici Piacevole Notte_, 110.
+  _Troilus and Cressida_, 117, 122, _172-174_, 195.
+  _Troilus and Criseyde_, 109, 174.
+  _Troye, Recuyell of_, 174.
+  _Twelfth Night_, 6, 76, 83, 101, 110, 112, 121, _169-171_, 172, 174.
+  Twine, L., 200.
+  _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, 10, 71, 77, 83, 96, 101, 110, 112, 121,
+    _148-149_.
+  _Two Noble Kinsmen_, 211.
+  Tyrwhitt, 129.
+
+  Udall, N., 29.
+  Unities, Three dramatic, 30 n.
+
+  Valentine, 149.
+  _Venus and Adonis_, 10, 16, _61_, 63, 67, 113.
+  Viola, 170.
+  _Vortigern_, 211.
+
+  Wagner (_Death of Siegfried_), 23.
+  Wakefield, _see_ Towneley.
+  Wallace, Prof. C. W., 13, 14, 19.
+  Warburton, 128.
+  Weak endings, 81.
+  Weever, J., 11, 179.
+  Westminster, 54.
+  Whetstone, G., 112, 177.
+  White, R. G., 129.
+  Wilkins, G., 200.
+  Wilson, R., 205.
+  _Winter's Tale, The_, 34, 80, 83, 103, 110, 112, 121, _202-205_.
+  Wolsey, 208.
+  Worcester, 155.
+  Wotton, Sir H., 209.
+  Wyatt, Sir T., 65.
+
+  Yonge, B., 149.
+  York and Lancaster, 134.
+  York plays, 24.
+  _Yorkshire Tragedy, A_, 120, 125, 211.
+
+
+
+
+Printed in the United States of America.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of An Introduction to Shakespeare, by 
+H. N. MacCracken and F. E. Pierce and W. H. Durham
+
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+
+<TITLE>
+The Project Gutenberg E-text of An Introduction to Shakespeare,
+by H. N. MacCracken, F. E. Pierce, W. H. Durham
+</TITLE>
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Introduction to Shakespeare, by 
+H. N. MacCracken and F. E. Pierce and W. H. Durham
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Introduction to Shakespeare
+
+Author: H. N. MacCracken
+        F. E. Pierce
+        W. H. Durham
+
+Release Date: January 16, 2010 [EBook #30982]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST FOLIO, 1628 The first collected edition of Shakespeare's Plays (From the copy in the New York Public Library)" BORDER="2" WIDTH="495" HEIGHT="740">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 482px">
+TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST FOLIO, 1628 <BR>
+The first collected edition of Shakespeare's Plays <BR>
+(From the copy in the New York Public Library)
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H4>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+H. N. MacCRACKEN, PH.D.<BR>
+F. E. PIERCE, PH.D.<BR>
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+AND
+</H4>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+W. H. DURHAM, PH.D.<BR>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
+<BR>
+THE SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF
+<BR>
+YALE UNIVERSITY
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+New York
+<BR>
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+<BR>
+1925
+</H3>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+<I>All rights reserved</I>
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+COPYRIGHT, 1910,
+<BR>
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+</H5>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+Set up and electrotyped.  Published September, 1910.  Reprinted April,<BR>
+December, 1911; September, 1912; July, 1913; July, 1914; December,<BR>
+1915; November, 1916; May, 1918; July, 1919; November, 1920; September,<BR>
+1921; June, 1923; January, 1925.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+Norwood Press
+<BR>
+J. S. Cushing Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith Co.
+<BR>
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="Pv"></A>v}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PREFACE
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The advances made in Shakespearean scholarship within the last
+half-dozen years seem to justify the writing of another manual for
+school and college use.  The studies of Wallace in the life-records, of
+Lounsbury in the history of editions, of Pollard and Greg in early
+quartos, of Lee upon the First Folio, of Albright and others upon the
+Elizabethan Theater, as well as valuable monographs on individual plays
+have all appeared since the last Shakespeare manual was prepared.  This
+little volume aims to present what may be necessary for the majority of
+classes, as a background upon which may be begun the study and reading
+of the plays.  Critical comment on individual plays has been added, in
+the hope that it may stimulate interest in other plays than those
+assigned for study.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chapters I, VIII, IX, X, and XIII are the work of Professor MacCracken;
+chapters V, VI, VII, XII, and XIV are by Professor Pierce; and chapters
+II, III, IV, and XI are by Dr. Durham.  The authors have, however,
+united in the criticism and the revision of every chapter.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="Pvii"></A>vii}</SPAN>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS
+</H2>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%">
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+CHAPTER I
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap01">AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">
+PAGE<BR>
+1
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER II
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap02">ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE </A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+20
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER III
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap03">THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+ 35
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER IV
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap04">ELIZABETHAN LONDON</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+51
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER V
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap05">SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS </A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+ 60
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER VI
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap06">THE SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+73
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER VII
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap07">SHAKESPEARE'S DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+85
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER VIII
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap08">THE CHIEF SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+105
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="Pviii"></A>viii}</SPAN>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%">
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER IX
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap09">HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+113
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER X
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap10">THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD--IMITATION AND EXPERIMENT</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+131
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER XI
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap11">THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD--COMEDY AND HISTORY</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+153
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER XII
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap12">THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD--TRAGEDY</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+172
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER XIII
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap13">THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD--ROMANCE</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+196
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" COLSPAN="2">
+<BR>
+CHAPTER XIV
+</TD>
+</TR>
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap14">SOME FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">
+210
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P1"></A>1}</SPAN>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER I
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+<B>Our Knowledge of Shakespeare</B>.&mdash;No one in Shakespeare's day seems to
+have been interested in learning about the private lives of the
+dramatists.  The profession of play writing had scarcely begun to be
+distinguished from that of play acting, and the times were not wholly
+gone by when all actors had been classed in public estimation as
+vagabonds.  While the London citizens were constant theatergoers, and
+immensely proud of their fine plays, they were content to learn of the
+writers of plays merely from town gossip, which passed from lip to lip
+and found no resting place in memoirs.  There were other lives which
+made far more exciting reading.  English sea-men were penetrating every
+ocean, and bringing back wonderful tales.  English soldiers were aiding
+the Dutch nation towards freedom, and coming back full of stories of
+heroic deeds.  At home great political, religious, and scientific
+movements engaged the attention of the more serious readers and
+thinkers.  It is not strange, therefore, that the writers of plays,
+whose
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P2"></A>2}</SPAN>
+most exciting incidents were tavern brawls or imprisonment
+for rash satire of the government, found no biographer.  After
+Shakespeare's death, moreover, the theater rapidly fell into disrepute,
+and many a good story of the playhouse fell under the ban of polite
+conversation, and was lost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Under such conditions we cannot wonder that we know so little of
+Shakespeare, and that we must go to town records, cases at law, and
+book registers for our knowledge.  Thanks to the diligence of modern
+scholars, however, we know much more of Shakespeare than of most of his
+fellow-actors and playwrights.  The life of Christopher Marlowe,
+Shakespeare's great predecessor, is almost unknown; and of John
+Fletcher, Shakespeare's great contemporary and successor, it is not
+even known whether he was married, or when he began to write plays.
+Yet his father was Bishop of London, and in high favor with Queen
+Elizabeth.  We ought rather to wonder at the good fortune which has
+preserved for us, however scanty in details or lacking in the authority
+of its traditions, a continuous record of the life of William
+Shakespeare from birth to death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Stratford</B>.&mdash;The notice of baptism on April 26, 1564, of William, son
+of John Shakespeare, appears in the church records of Stratford-on-Avon
+in Warwickshire.  Stratford was then a market town of about fifteen
+hundred souls.  Under Stratford Market Cross the farmers of northern
+Warwickshire and of the near-lying portions of Worcestershire,
+Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire carried on a brisk trade with the
+thrifty townspeople.  The citizens were accustomed to boast
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P3"></A>3}</SPAN>
+of
+their beautiful church by the river, and of the fine Guildhall, where
+sometimes plays were given by traveling companies.  Many of their
+gable-roofed houses of timber, or timber and plaster, are still to be
+found on the pleasant old streets.  The river Avon winds round the town
+in a broad reach under the many-arched bridge to the ancient church.
+Beyond it the rich pasture land rises up to green wooded hills.  Not
+far away is the famous Warwick Castle, and a little beyond it
+Kenilworth, where Queen Elizabeth was entertained by the Earl of
+Leicester with great festivities in 1575.  Coventry and Rugby are the
+nearest towns.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Birth and Parentage</B>.&mdash;The record of baptism of April 26, 1564, is the
+only evidence we possess of the date of Shakespeare's birth.  It is
+probable that the child was baptized when only two or three days old.
+The poet's tomb states that Shakespeare was in his fifty-second year
+when he died, April 23, 1616.  Accepting this as strictly true, we
+cannot place the poet's birthday earlier than April 23, 1564.  There is
+a tradition, with no authority, that the poet died upon his birthday.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Shakespeare, the poet's father, sold the products of near-by farms
+to his fellow-townsmen.  He is sometimes described as a glover,
+sometimes as a butcher; very likely he was both.  A single reference,
+half a century later than his day, preserves for us a picture of John
+Shakespeare.  The note reads: "He [William Shakespeare] was a glover's
+son.  Sir John Mennes saw once his old father in his shop, a
+merry-cheekt old man, that said, 'Will was a good honest
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P4"></A>4}</SPAN>
+fellow,
+but he durst have crackt a jesst with him att any time.'"[<A NAME="chap01fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn1">1</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Shakespeare's father, Richard Shakespeare, was a tenant farmer,
+who was in 1550 renting his little farm at Snitterfield, four miles
+north of Stratford, from another farmer, Robert Arden of Wilmcote.
+John Shakespeare married Mary Arden, the daughter of his father's rich
+landlord, probably in 1557.  He had for over five years been a
+middleman at Stratford, dealing in the produce of his father's farm and
+other farms in the neighborhood.  In April, 1552, we first hear of him
+in Stratford records, though only as being fined a shilling for not
+keeping his yard clean.  Between 1557 and 1561 he rose to be ale tester
+(inspector of bread and malt), burgess (petty constable), affeeror
+(adjuster of fines), and finally city chamberlain (treasurer).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Eight children were born to him, the two eldest, both daughters, dying
+in infancy.  William Shakespeare was the third child, and eldest of
+those who reached maturity.  During his childhood his father was
+probably in comfortable circumstances, but not long before the son left
+Stratford for London, John Shakespeare was practically a bankrupt, and
+had lost by mortgage farms in Snitterfield and Ashbies, near by,
+inherited in 1556 by his wife.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Education</B>.&mdash;William Shakespeare probably went to the Stratford
+Grammar School, where he and his
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P5"></A>5}</SPAN>
+brothers as the sons of a town
+councilor were entitled to free tuition.  His masters, no doubt, taught
+him Lilly's Latin Grammar and the Latin classics,&mdash;Virgil, Horace,
+Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, and the rest,&mdash;and very little else.  If
+Shakespeare ever knew French or Italian, he picked it up in London
+life, where he picked up most of his amazing stock of information on
+all subjects.  Besides Latin, he must have read and memorized a good
+deal of the English Bible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Marriage</B>.&mdash;In the autumn of 1582 the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare
+married a young woman of twenty-six.  On November 28, of that year two
+farmers of Shottery, near Stratford, signed what we should call a
+guarantee bond, agreeing to pay to the Bishop's Court £40, in case the
+marriage proposed between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway should
+turn out to be contrary to the canon&mdash;or Church&mdash;law, and so invalid.
+This guarantee bond, no doubt, was issued to facilitate and hasten the
+wedding.  On May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was
+baptized.  His only other children, his son Hamnet and a twin daughter
+Judith, were baptized February 2, 1584-5[<A NAME="chap01fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn2">2</A>].  It is probable that soon
+after this date Shakespeare went to London and began his career as
+actor, and afterwards as writer of plays and owner of theaters.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P6"></A>6}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Anne Hathaway, as we have said, was eight years older than her husband.
+She was the daughter of a small farmer at Shottery, a little out of
+Stratford, whose house is still an object of pilgrimage for Shakespeare
+lovers.  We have really no just ground for inferring, from the poet's
+early departure for London, that his  married life was unhappy.  The
+Duke in <I>Twelfth Night</I> (IV, iii) advises Viola against women's
+marrying men younger than themselves, it is true; but such advice is
+conventional.  No one can tell how much the dramatist really felt of
+the thoughts which his characters utter.  Who would guess from any
+words in <I>I Henry IV</I>, for instance, a play containing some of his
+richest humor and freest joy in life, that, in the very year of its
+composition, Shakespeare was mourning the death of his little son
+Hamnet, and that his hopes of founding a family were at an end?
+Another piece of evidence, far more important, is the fact that
+Shakespeare does not mention his wife at all in  his will, except by an
+interlined bequest of his "second-best bedroom set."  But here, again,
+it is easy to misread the motives of the man who makes a will.  Such
+omissions have been made when no slight was intended, sometimes because
+of previous private settlements, sometimes because a wife is always
+entitled to her dower rights.  The evidence is thus too slight to be of
+value.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some other motive, then, than unhappiness in married life ought to be
+assigned for Shakespeare's departure to London.  No doubt, the fact
+that his father was now a discredited bankrupt, against whom suits were
+pending, had something to do with his
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P7"></A>7}</SPAN>
+decision to better his family
+fortunes in another town.  Traveling companies of players may have told
+him of London life.  Possibly some scrape, like that preserved in the
+deer-stealing tradition and the resultant persecution, made the young
+man, now only twenty-one, restive and eager to be gone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Tradition concerning Deer Stealing</B>.&mdash;Nicholas Howe, in 1709, in
+his edition of Shakespeare says: "He had by a misfortune common enough
+to young fellows fallen into bad company, and among them, some that
+made a frequent practice of deer stealing, engaged him with them more
+than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of
+Charlecote near Stratford.  For this he was persecuted by that
+gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to
+revenge that ill-usage, he made a parody upon him; and though this,
+probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have
+been so very bitter that he was obliged to leave his business and
+family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London."  Archdeacon
+Davies of Saperton, Gloucestershire, in the late seventeenth century
+testifies independently to the same tradition.  Justice Shallow in the
+<I>Merry Wives of Windsor</I> is on this latter authority to be identified
+with Sir Thomas Lucy.  He is represented in the play as having come
+from Gloucester to Windsor.  He "will make a Star Chamber matter of it"
+that Sir John Falstaff has "defied my men, killed my deer, and broke
+open my lodge."  He bears on his "old coat" (of arms) a "dozen white
+luces" (small fishes), and there is a lot of chatter about "quartering"
+this coat, which is without point unless a pun is intended.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P8"></A>8}</SPAN>
+Now
+"three luces Hauriant argent" were the arms of the Charlecote Lucys, it
+is certain.  There is some reason then, for connecting Shallow with Sir
+Thomas Lucy, and an apparent basis for the deer-stealing tradition,
+although the incident in the play may, of course, have suggested the
+myth.  Davies goes on to say that Shakespeare was whipped and
+imprisoned; for this there is no other evidence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Early Life in London</B>.&mdash;The earliest known reference to Shakespeare in
+the world of London is contained in a sarcastic allusion from the pen
+of Robert Greene, the poet and play writer, who died in 1592.  Greene
+was furiously jealous of the rapidly increasing fame of the newcomer.
+In a most extravagant style he warns his contemporaries (Marlowe, Nash,
+and Peele, probably) to beware of young men that seek fame by thieving
+from their masters.  They, too, like himself, will suffer from such
+thieves.  "Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified
+with our feathers that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide,
+supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of
+you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit
+the onely Shakescene in a countrie ... but it is pittie men of such
+rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude grooms."  The
+reference to "Shakescene" and the "Tygers heart," which is a quotation
+from <I>III Henry VI</I>,[<A NAME="chap01fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn3">3</A>] makes it almost certain that Shakespeare and
+his play are referred to.  Greene's attack was, however, an instance of
+what Shakespeare would
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P9"></A>9}</SPAN>
+have called "spleen," and not to be taken as
+a general opinion.  His hint of "Johannes Factotum"
+(Jack-of-all-Trades) probably means that Shakespeare was willing to
+undertake any sort of dramatic work.  Later on in the same letter (<I>A
+Groatsworth of Witte Bought with a Million of Repentance</I>)[<A NAME="chap01fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn4">4</A>] he calls
+the "upstart crow" and his like "Buckram gentlemen," and "peasants."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Henry Chettle, a friend of Greene's, either in December, 1592, or early
+in 1593,[<A NAME="chap01fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn5">5</A>] published an address as a preface to his <I>Kind-Harts
+Dreame</I>, making a public apology to Shakespeare for allowing Greene's
+letter to come out with this insulting attack.  He says: "With neither
+of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care
+not if I never be.  The other [generally taken to be Shakespeare] whome
+at one time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that, as
+I have moderated the heate of living writers, and might have usde my
+owne discretion&mdash;especially in such a case, the author beeing
+dead,&mdash;that I did not I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene
+my fault, because myself have seene his demeanor no lesse civill, than
+he exelent in the qualitie he professes;&mdash;besides divers of worship
+have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and
+his facetious grace in writing, that aprooves his art...."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is, then, testimony from two sources that by 1592 Shakespeare was
+an excellent actor, a graceful poet, and a writer of plays that aroused
+the envy of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P10"></A>10}</SPAN>
+one of the best dramatists of his day.  Obviously, all
+this could not have happened in a few months, and we are therefore
+justified in believing that Shakespeare came to London soon after 1585,
+very likely in 1586.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Later Allusions</B>.&mdash;In 1593 the title-page of <I>Venus and Adonis</I> shows
+that a great English earl and patron of the arts was willing to be
+godfather "to the first heyre" of Shakespeare's "invention," his first
+published poem.  In 1594 Shakespeare also dedicated to Southampton his
+<I>Lucrece</I>, in terms of greater intimacy, though no less respect.  On
+December 27, 1595, Edmund Spenser's <I>Colin Clout's Come Home Againe</I>
+contained a reference which is now generally believed to allude to
+Shakespeare.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"And there, though last not least, is Aetion;<BR>
+A gentler shepheard may nowhere be found;<BR>
+Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention,<BR>
+Doth like himselfe heroically sound."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The next important reference is from <I>Palladis Tamia</I>, by Francis Meres
+(1598):&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the
+sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued
+Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred
+Sonnets among his private friends &amp;c.  As Plautus and Seneca are
+accounted the best for comedy and Tragedy among the Latines, so
+Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for
+the stage; for comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his
+Loves Labors Lost, his Love Labours Wonne, his Midsummer Night Dreame,
+and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard the 2., Richard the
+3., Henry the 4.,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P11"></A>11}</SPAN>
+King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and
+Juliet.  As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus
+tongue, if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak
+with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.  And
+as Horace saith of his; Exegi monumentu<I>m</I> aere perennius, Regaliq<I>ue</I>
+situ pyramidum altius.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quod non imber edax: Non Aquilo impotius possit diruere: aut
+innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum: so say I severally of
+Sir Philip Sidneys Spencers Daniels Draytons Shakespeares and Warners
+workes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the earliest claim for the supremacy of Shakespeare in the
+English theater, a claim never seriously disputed from that day to
+this.  The numerous other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare's fame,
+which fill the <I>Shakespeare Allusion Book</I>,[<A NAME="chap01fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn6">6</A>] add nothing to our
+purpose; but merely confirm the statement that throughout his life his
+readers knew and admitted his worth.  The chorus of praise continued
+from people of all classes.  John Weever, the epigrammatist, and
+Richard Camden, the antiquarian, praised Shakespeare highly, and
+Michael Drayton, the poet, called him "perfection in a man."  Finally,
+Ben Jonson, his most famous competitor for public applause, crowned our
+poet's fame with his poem, prefixed to the first collected edition of
+Shakespeare's famous First Folio of 1623: "To the Memory of my beloved,
+the author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P12"></A>12}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"He was not of an age, but for all time!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Shakespeare as an Actor</B>.&mdash;The allusion quoted above of Henry Chettle
+praises Shakespeare's excellence "in the qualitie he professes."
+Stronger evidence is afforded by some of the title-pages of plays
+printed during the poet's life.  Thus Ben Jonson's <I>Every Man in his
+Humour</I> says on its title-page: "<I>Every One in his Umor</I>.  This comedie
+was first Acted in the yeere 1598 by the then L. Chamberleyne his
+servants.  The principal comedians were Will. Shakespeare, Aug.
+Philips, Hen. Condel, Will. Slye, Will. Kempe, Ric. Burbadge, Joh.
+Hemings, Tho. Pope, Chr. Beeston, Joh. Dyke, withe the allowance of the
+Master of Reuells."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before this his name had appeared between those of Kemp and Burbage
+(named in the above list), the one the chief comedian, the other the
+chief tragedian of the time, in comedies which were acted before the
+Queen on December 27 and 28, 1594, at Greenwich Palace.  The titles of
+these comedies are not given in the Treasurer's Accounts of the
+Chamber, from which we take the list of players.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1603, Shakespeare shared with Burbage the headline of the list of
+actors in Ben Jonson's tragedy <I>Sejanus</I>.  That he thoroughly
+understood the technique of his art and was interested in it, is
+evident from Hamlet's advice to the players.  Throughout his life in
+London, Shakespeare was a member of the company usually known as the
+Lord Chamberlain's Company.[<A NAME="chap01fn7text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn7">7</A>]
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P13"></A>13}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+<B>Shakespeare and the Mountjoys</B>.&mdash;The most important addition of recent
+years to the life records of Shakespeare is that made by an American
+scholar, Professor Charles William Wallace.  He has unearthed in the
+Public Record Office at London a notable bundle of
+documents&mdash;twenty-six in all.  They concern a lawsuit in which the
+family of Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord in London, was
+engaged; and in which the poet himself appeared as a witness.
+Mountjoy, it appears, was a prosperous wigmaker and hairdresser, and,
+no doubt, had good custom from the London actors.  Shakespeare had
+lodgings in Mountjoy's house in the year 1604, and at Madame Mountjoy's
+request acted as intermediary in proposing to young Stephen Bellott, a
+young French apprentice of Mountjoy's, that if he should marry his
+master's daughter Mary, he would receive £50 as dowry and "certain
+household stuff" in addition.  The marriage took place, and the quarrel
+which led to the lawsuit in 1612 was chiefly about the fulfillment&mdash;or
+non-fulfillment&mdash;of the marriage settlements.  Shakespeare's testimony
+on the matter is clear enough in regard to his services as the friend
+of both parties; but his memory leaves him when specific information is
+required touching the exact terms of the dowry.  Evidently he had no
+mind that his old landlord should suffer from the claims of his unruly
+son-in-law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mountjoy's house was situated in an ancient and most respectable
+neighborhood in Cripplegate ward, on the corner of Silver Street and
+Mugwell, or Muggle Street.  Near by dwelt many of Shakespeare's
+fellow-actors and dramatists.  St. Paul's Cathedral, the heart
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P14"></A>14}</SPAN>
+of
+London, lay five minutes' walk to the southwest.  The length of
+Shakespeare's residence with the worthy Huguenot family is not to be
+learned from the recent discoveries; but his testimony to Bellott's
+faithful service as apprentice throughout the years of
+apprenticeship&mdash;1598-1604&mdash;makes it strongly probable that during these
+years, when the poet was writing his greatest plays, he lodged with
+Mountjoy.  In 1612 Mountjoy, according to another witness, had a
+lodger&mdash;a "sojourner"&mdash;in his house; this may mean that Shakespeare was
+still in possession of his rooms in the house on Silver Street.  If it
+be so, no spot in the world has been the birthplace of a greater number
+of masterpieces.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is interesting to note, in passing, that the various witnesses in
+the Mountjoy lawsuit who have occasion to speak of Shakespeare always
+refer to him most respectfully.  The poet was evidently high in the
+esteem of his neighbors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Shakespeare's Income and Business Transactions</B>.&mdash;Shakespeare was a
+shrewd and sensible man of business.  He amassed during his career in
+London a property nearly, if not quite, as great as any made by his
+profession at the time.  In addition to profits from the sale of his
+plays to managers (he probably derived no income from their
+publication), and his salary as an actor, Shakespeare enjoyed an ample
+income from his shares in the Blackfriars and Globe theaters, of which
+he became joint owner with the Burbage brothers and other fellow-actors
+in 1597 and 1599.  Professor Wallace has discovered a document which
+helps, though very slightly, to enable us to judge what his income
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P15"></A>15}</SPAN>
+from these sources may have been.[<A NAME="chap01fn8text"></A><A HREF="#chap01fn8">8</A>]  In 1615-1616 the widow of one of
+the proprietors of the two theaters, whose share, like Shakespeare's,
+was one-seventh of the Blackfriars, one-fourteenth of the Globe,
+brought suit against her father.  She asked for £600 damages for her
+father's wrongful detention of her year's income, amounting to £300
+from each theater.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But damages asked in court are always high, and include fees of lawyers
+and other items.  The probability is that Shakespeare's yearly income
+from these sources was never over £500.  To this, though the figures
+cannot be ascertained with any degree of certainty, we might add £100
+for salary and £25 for plays yearly.  The total would amount to fully
+£600 a year from 1599 on till 1611, about which date Shakespeare
+probably retired to Stratford.  If we reckon by what money will buy in
+our days, we may say that Shakespeare's yearly income at the height of
+success was $25,000, in round numbers.  This is certainly a low
+estimate, and does not include extra court performances and the like,
+from which he must certainly have profited.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Shakespeare's Life in London</B>.&mdash;What with the composition of two plays
+a year, continual rehearsals, and performances of his own and other
+plays, Shakespeare's life must have been a busy one.  Tradition,
+however, accords him an easy enjoyment of the pleasures of the time;
+and his own sarcastic remarks against Puritans in his plays may
+indicate a hatred of puritanical restraint.  He must have joined in
+many a merry feast with the other actors and writers of the day, and
+with court gallants.  The inventory of property left by him
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P16"></A>16}</SPAN>
+at his
+death indicates that while he had accumulated a good estate, he had
+also lived generously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Stratford Affairs and Shakespeare's Return</B>.&mdash;While William
+Shakespeare was thus employed in London in building up name and fortune
+for himself, his father was in financial straits.  As early as January,
+1586, John Shakespeare had no property on which a creditor could place
+a lien.  In September of the same year, he was deprived of his
+alderman's gown for lack of attention to town business.  During the
+next year he was sued for debt, and had to produce a writ of <I>habeas
+corpus</I> to keep himself out of jail.  In 1899 he tried to recover his
+wife's mortgaged property of Ashbies from the mortgagee's heir, John
+Lambert, but the suit was not tried till eight years later.  Soon after
+this the son must have begun to send to Stratford substantial support.
+In 1592 John Shakespeare was made an appraiser of the property of Henry
+Field, a fellow-townsman.  Henry Field's son Richard published <I>Venus
+and Adonis</I> for Shakespeare in 1593, from his shop in St. Paul's
+Churchyard.  From this time John Shakespeare seems to have lived in
+comfort.  His ambition to secure the grant of a coat of arms was almost
+successful at his first application for one in October, 1596; three
+years later the grant was made, and his son and he were now "Gentlemen."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In May, 1597, William Shakespeare bought New Place, a handsome house in
+the heart of Stratford, and at once became an influential citizen.
+From that time to his death he is continually mentioned in the town
+records.  His purchases included 107 acres in
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P17"></A>17}</SPAN>
+Old Stratford (May
+1, 1602), for £320; the right to farm the Stratford tithes (July 24,
+1605), for £440; an estate of the Combe family (April 13, 1610), and
+minor properties.  In all his dealings, so far as we can tell, he seems
+to have been shrewd and business-like.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Little is known of Shakespeare's children during these years.  Hamnet,
+his only son, was buried August 11, 1596.  Susanna, the eldest
+daughter, married a physician, Dr. John Hall, of Stratford, June 5,
+1607; Judith married Thomas Quiney, son of an old Stratford friend of
+Shakespeare's, February 10, 1616, two months before her father's death.
+Shakespeare's father had died long before this, in September, 1601.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shakespeare's retirement from London to his native town is thought to
+have taken place about 1611, though there is no real evidence for this
+belief, except that his play writing probably ceased about this date.
+In 1614 a Puritan preacher stopped at New Place and was entertained
+there by the poet's family.  It is certain that Shakespeare visited
+London from time to time after 1611.  One such visit is recorded in the
+diary of his lawyer, Thomas Greene, of Stratford.  As late as March 24,
+1613, there occurs an entry in the accounts of the Earl of Rutland of a
+payment to Shakespeare and Richard Burbage of 44 shillings each in gold
+for getting up a dramatic entertainment for the Earl of Rutland.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1616 Shakespeare's health failed.  On January 25, a copy of his will
+was drawn, which was executed March 25.  On April 23, 1616, he died,
+and two days later was buried in the chancel of Stratford church.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P18"></A>18}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+<B>Shakespeare's Portraits, Tomb, and Descendants</B>.&mdash;Two portraits, the
+"Ely Palace" and the "Flower" portraits, so called from former
+possessors, are thought to have better claims to authenticity than
+others.  New discoveries are announced, periodically, of Shakespeare's
+portrait; but these turn out usually to be forgeries.  The engraving by
+Martin Droeshout prefixed to the First and later Folios, though to us
+it seems unanimated and unnatural, is still the only likeness vouched
+for by contemporaries.  It is thought by many to be a copy of the
+"Flower" portrait, which bears the date 1609, and which it certainly
+very closely resembles.  If the Stratford bust which was placed in a
+niche above Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford church before 1623 was
+accurately reproduced in Dugdale's <I>Warwickshire</I>, then the present
+bust is a later substitution, since it shows differences in detail from
+that sketch.  It is coming to be believed that the eighteenth-century
+restoration so altered the bust as to make it quite unlike its former
+appearance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shakespeare's grave is in the chancel of Stratford church.  A dark,
+flat tombstone bears the inscription, which early tradition ascribes to
+the poet:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Good frend, for Iesvs sake forbeare<BR>
+To digg the dvst enclosed heare:<BR>
+Bleste be y<SUP>e</SUP> man y<SUP>t</SUP> spares thes stones,<BR>
+And curst be he y<SUP>t</SUP> moves my bones."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The monument to Shakespeare, with the bust on the north wall, is facing
+the tomb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In his will, Shakespeare provided that much the larger portion of his
+estate should go to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall and John Hall,
+Gent., her husband, including New Place, Henley Street and Blackfriars
+houses, and his tithes in Stratford and near-by villages.  This was in
+accordance with custom.  To Judith, his younger daughter, the wife of
+Thomas Quiney, he left three hundred pounds, one hundred as a marriage
+portion, fifty more on her release of her right in a Stratford
+tenement, and the rest to be paid in three years, the principal to be
+invested, the interest paid to her, and the principal to be divided at
+her death.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P19"></A>19}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Shakespeare left his sister, Joan Hart, £20 and his wearing apparel,
+and her house in Stratford rent-free till her death, at a shilling a
+year.  His plate he divided between his daughters.  The minor bequests,
+which include £10 to the Stratford poor, are chiefly notable for the
+bequest of money (26s. 8d.) for rings to "my fellowes, John Hemynges,
+Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell."  These were fellow-actors in the
+Lord Chamberlain's Company.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Within half a century Shakespeare's line was extinct.  His wife died
+August 6, 1623.  His daughter Susanna left one daughter, Elizabeth, who
+married, April 22, 1626, Thomas Nashe, who died April 4, 1647.  On June
+5, 1649, she married John Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire,
+afterwards knighted.  She left no children by either marriage.  Her
+burial was recorded February 17, 1669-70.  Shakespeare's daughter
+Judith had three sons,&mdash;Shakespeare, baptized November 23, 1616, buried
+May 8, 1617; Richard, baptized February 9, 1617-8, buried February 16,
+1638-9; Thomas, baptized January 23, 1619-20, buried January 1638-9.
+Judith Shakespeare survived them all, and was buried February 9,
+1661-2.  Shakespeare's sister, Joan Hart, left descendants who owned
+the Henley Street House up to the time of its purchase, in 1847, by the
+nation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The best books on the life of Shakespeare: J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps,
+<I>Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare</I>, tenth edition, London, 1898 (the
+greatest collection of sources and documents); Sidney Lee, <I>A Life of
+William Shakespeare</I> (New York, Macmillan, 1909), (the best extended
+life, especially valuable for its study of the biographical value of
+the sonnets); Professor Wallace's articles referred to in the text.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap01fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="chap01fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn1text">1</A>] This reference was discovered among the Plume Mss. (1657-1663) of
+Maldon, Essex, by Dr. Andrew Clark, in October, 1904.  Sir John Mennes
+was, however, not a contemporary of John Shakespeare, but doubtless
+merely passed on the description from some eyewitness.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn2text">2</A>] The dates between January 1 and March 25, previous to 1752, are
+always thus written.  In 1752 England and its colonies decided to begin
+the year with January 1 instead of March 25, as formerly.  Thus for
+periods before that date between January 1 and March 25, we give two
+figures to indicate that the people of that time called it one year and
+we call it a year later.  Thus, Judith Shakespeare would have said she
+was baptized in 1584, while by our reckoning her baptism came in 1585.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn3text">3</A>] "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide."  This line is also in
+the source of Shakespeare's play.  See p. <A HREF="#P133">133</A>.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap01fn4"></A>
+<A NAME="chap01fn5"></A>
+<A NAME="chap01fn6"></A>
+<A NAME="chap01fn7"></A>
+<A NAME="chap01fn8"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn4text">4</A>] Printed first in 1596, but written shortly before Greene's death in
+1592.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn5text">5</A>] Registered Dec., 1592, but printed without date.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn6text">6</A>] These may be seen, as well as all others up to 1700, in the
+re-edited <I>Shakespeare Allusion Book</I>, ed. J. Munro, London, 1909.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn7text">7</A>] See p. <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap01fn8text">8</A>] See the <I>New York Times</I> for October 3, 1909.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P20"></A>20}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER II
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The history of the drama includes two periods of supreme achievement,
+that of fifth-century Greece and that of Elizabethan England.  Between
+these peaks lies a broad valley, the bottom of which is formed by the
+centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ.  From its
+culmination in the tragedies of Ęschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and
+in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the
+brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical
+tragedies of the Roman Seneca.  The decay of culture, the barbarian
+invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater
+decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were
+kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, the drama, as a
+literary form, had practically disappeared from western Europe before
+the middle of the sixth century.  For this reason the modern drama is
+commonly regarded as a new birth, as an independent creation entirely
+distinct from the art which had preceded it.  A new birth and an
+independent growth there certainly was, but it must not be forgotten
+that the love of the dramatic did not disappear with the literary
+drama, that the entertainment of mediaeval
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P21"></A>21}</SPAN>
+minstrels were not
+without dramatic elements, that dialogues continued to be written if
+not acted, and that the classical drama of Rome, eagerly studied by the
+enthusiasts of the Renaissance, had no slight influence upon the course
+which the modern drama took.  If we make these qualifications, we may
+fairly say that the old drama died and that a new drama was born.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Beginnings of Modern Drama</B>.&mdash;When we search for the origin of the
+modern drama, we find it, strangely enough, in the very institution
+which had done so much to suppress it as an invention of the devil; for
+it made its first appearance in the services of the Church.  From a
+very early period, the worship of the Church had possessed a certain
+dramatic character.  The service of the Mass recalled and represented
+by symbols, which became more and more definite and elaborate, the
+great sacrifice of Christ.  And this tendency manifested itself in
+other ways, such as the letting fall, on Good Friday, of the veil which
+had concealed the sanctuary since the first Sunday in Lent, thus
+recalling the veil of the Jewish temple rent in twain at the death of
+Christ.  But all this was rather the soil in which the drama could grow
+than the beginning itself.  The latter came in the ninth century, when
+an addition was made to the Mass which was slight in itself, but which
+was to have momentous consequences.  Among the words fitted to certain
+newly introduced melodies were those of which the following is a
+translation:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Whom seek ye, O Christians, in the sepulcher?<BR>
+Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O ye dwellers in Heaven.<BR>
+He is not here; he is risen as he foretold.<BR>
+Go and carry the tidings that he is risen from the sepulcher."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P22"></A>22}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+At first these words were sung responsively by the choir, but before
+the end of the tenth century they were put into the mouths of monks or
+clergy representing the Maries and the angel.  By this time the
+dialogue had been removed to the first services of Easter morning, and
+had been connected with the ceremonies of the Easter sepulcher.  In
+many churches it was then customary on Good Friday to carry a crucifix
+to a representation of a sepulcher which  had previously been prepared
+somewhere in the church, whence the crucifix was secretly removed
+before Easter morning.  Then, at the first Easter service, the empty
+sepulcher was solemnly visited, and this dialogue was sung.[<A NAME="chap02fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn1">1</A>]  The
+participants wore ecclesiastical vestments, and the acting was of the
+simplest character, but the amount of dialogue increased as time went
+on, and new bits of action were added; so that before the end of the
+twelfth century some churches presented what may fairly be called a
+short one-act play.  Meanwhile, around the services of Good Friday and
+the Christmas season, other dramatic ceremonies and short dialogues had
+been growing up, which gave rise to tiny plays dealing with the birth
+of Christ, the visits of the shepherds and the Wise Men, and the Old
+Testament prophecies of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P23"></A>23}</SPAN>
+Christ's coming.  Although the elaboration
+of individual plays continued, the evolution of the drama as part of
+the Church's liturgy was practically complete by the middle of the
+thirteenth century.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Earlier Miracle Plays</B>.&mdash;The next hundred years brought a number
+of important changes: the gradual substitution of English for Latin,
+the removal from the church to the churchyard or market-place, and the
+welding together of the single plays into great groups or cycles.  The
+removal from the church was made possible by the growth of the plays in
+length and dramatic interest, which rendered them independent of the
+rest of the service; and it was made inevitable by the enormous
+popularity of the plays and by the more elaborate staging which the
+developed plays required.  The formation of more or less unified cycles
+was the result of a natural tendency to supply the missing links
+between the plays already in existence, and to write new plays
+describing the events which led up to those already treated.  Just as
+Wagner in our day after writing his drama on <I>The Death of Siegfried</I>
+felt himself compelled to write other plays dealing with his hero's
+birth and the events which led to this birth, so the unknown authors of
+the great English cycles were led to write play after play until they
+had covered the significant events of Biblical history from the
+creation of the world to the Last Judgment.  This joining together of
+isolated plays necessitated taking them away from the particular
+festivals with which they had originally been connected and presenting
+them all together on a single day, or, in the case of the longer
+cycles, on successive days.  After 1264,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P24"></A>24}</SPAN>
+when the festival of
+Corpus Christi was established in honor of the sacrament of Holy
+Communion, this day was the favorite time of presentation.  Coming as
+it did in early summer on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, it was
+well suited for out-of-door performances, besides being a festival
+which the Church especially delighted to honor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Great English Cycles</B>.&mdash;Of the great cycles of miracle plays, only
+four have come down to us: those given at York and at Chester, that in
+the Towneley collection (probably given at or near Wakefield), and the
+cycle called the Ludus Coventriae or Hegge plays, of which the place of
+presentation is uncertain.  The surviving fragments of lost cycles,
+however, taken together with the records of performances, show that
+religious plays were given with more or less regularity in at least one
+hundred and twenty-five places in England.  The cycle which has been
+most completely preserved is that of York, forty-eight plays of which
+still exist.  It originally included fifty-seven plays, while the
+number of Biblical incidents known to have been treated in plays
+belonging to one cycle or another includes twenty-one based on the Old
+Testament or on legends, and sixty-eight based on the New Testament.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even while the religious plays were still a part of the Church
+services, they contained humorous elements, such as the realistically
+comic figure of the merchant who sold spices and ointment to the Maries
+on their way to the tomb of Christ.  In the later plays these
+interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce.  When Herod
+learned of the escape of the Wise Men, he would rage violently about
+the stage and even among
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P25"></A>25}</SPAN>
+the spectators.  Noah's wife, in the
+Chester play of <I>The Deluge</I>, refuses point-blank to go into the Ark,
+and has to be put in by main force.  The <I>Second Shepherds' Play</I> of
+the Towneley cycle contains an episode of sheep stealing which is a
+complete and perfect little farce.  Nor were the scenes of pathos less
+effective.  The scene in the Brome play of <I>Abraham and Isaac</I> where
+the little lad pleads for his life has not lost its pathetic appeal
+with the passage of centuries.  While many of the miracle plays seem to
+us stiff and perfunctory, the best of them possess literary merit of a
+very high order.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the development of the plays called for an increasing number of
+actors, the clergy had to call upon the laity for help, so that the
+acting fell more and more into the hands of the latter, until finally
+the whole work of presenting the plays was taken over, in most cases,
+by the guilds, organizations of the various trades which corresponded
+roughly to our modern trades unions.  Each guild had its own play of
+which it bore the expense and for which it furnished the actors.  Thus
+the shipwrights would present <I>The Building of the Ark</I>, the
+goldsmiths, <I>The Adoration of the Wise Men</I>.  Sometimes the plays would
+be presented on a number of tiny stages or scaffolds grouped in a
+rectangle or a circle; more often they were acted on floats, called
+pageants, which were dragged through the streets and stopped for
+performances at several of the larger squares.  These pageants were
+usually of two stories, the lower used for a dressing-room, the upper
+for a stage.  The localities represented were indicated in various
+ways&mdash;Heaven, for instance, by a beautiful
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P26"></A>26}</SPAN>
+pavilion; Hell, by the
+mouth of a huge dragon.  The costumes of the actors were often
+elaborate and costly, and there was some attempt at imitating reality,
+such as putting the devils into costumes of yellow and black, which
+typified the flames and darkness of Hell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fairly complete cycles were in existence as early as 1300; they reached
+the height of their perfection and popularity in the later fourteenth
+and in the fifteenth centuries; and they began to decline in the
+sixteenth century.  After 1550 the performances became more and more
+irregular, until, at the accession of King James I, they had
+practically ceased.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Moralities</B>.&mdash;Of somewhat later origin than the miracle plays, but
+existing contemporaneously with them, were the moralities.  In a
+twelfth-century miracle play characters had been introduced which were
+not the figures of Biblical story, but personified abstractions, such
+as Hypocrisy, Heresy, Pity.  By the end of the fourteenth century there
+had come into existence plays of which all the characters were of this
+type.  These, however, were probably not direct descendants of the
+miracles; but rather the application of the newly learned dramatic
+methods to another sort of subject matter, the allegory, a literary
+type much used by poets and preachers of the time.  Such plays were
+called 'moral plays' or 'moralities.'  Unlike the miracle plays, these
+remained independent of each other, and showed no tendency to grow
+together into cycles.  The most beautiful of them, written at the end
+of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, is that
+called <I>The Summoning of Everyman</I>.  It represents a typical man
+compelled to enter upon the long,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P27"></A>27}</SPAN>
+inevitable journey of death.
+Kindred and Wealth abandon him, but long-neglected Good-deeds, revived
+by Knowledge, comes to his aid.  At the edge of the grave Everyman is
+deserted by Beauty, Strength, and the Five Senses, while Good-deeds
+alone goes with him to the end.  Moralities of this type aimed at the
+cultivation of virtue in the spectators, just as the miracle plays had
+aimed at the strengthening of their faith.  Another type of morality
+dealt with controversial questions.  In one of these, <I>King Johan</I>,
+written about 1538, historical personages are put side by side with the
+allegorical abstractions, thus foreshadowing the later historical
+plays, such as Shakespeare's <I>King John</I>.  Another comparatively late
+type of morality sought to teach an ethical lesson by showing the
+effect of vice and  virtue upon  the lives of men and women.  <I>Nice
+Wanton</I> (c. 1550), for instance, represents the consequence of good and
+evil living, not only by the use of such allegorical characters as
+Iniquity  and Worldly Shame, but also by means of the human beings,
+Barnabas and Ishmael and their sister Dalila.  Thus, although the more
+abstract moralities persisted until late in the sixteenth century,
+these other types at the same time helped lead the way to the drama
+which depicts actual life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Interlude</B>.&mdash;Both miracle play and morality were written with a
+definite purpose, the teaching of a lesson, religious, moral, or
+political; the interlude, on the other hand, was a short play intended
+simply to interest or to amuse.  The original meaning of the word
+"interlude" is a matter of controversy.  It may have meant a short play
+introduced between other
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P28"></A>28}</SPAN>
+things, such as the courses of a banquet,
+or it may have meant simply a dialogue.  Be that as it may, the
+interlude seems to have had its origin in the dramatic character of
+minstrel entertainments and in the dramatic character of popular games,
+such as those, especially beloved of our English ancestors, which
+celebrated the memory of Robin Hood and his fellow-outlaws of Sherwood
+forest.  The miracle plays set the example of dramatic composition, an
+example soon followed in the interlude, which put into dramatic forms
+that became more and more elaborate popular stories and episodes, both
+serious and comic.  Although there had been comic episodes in miracle
+plays and moralities, it was as interludes that the amusing skit and
+the tiny farce achieved an independent existence.  The first real
+interlude which has come down to us is that called <I>De Clerico et
+Puella</I>, <I>Of the Cleric and the Maiden</I>, which was written not later
+than the early fourteenth century.  This is little more than a dialogue
+depicting the attempted seduction of a maiden by a wanton cleric.  The
+only other surviving fourteenth-century interlude, that of <I>Dux
+Maraud</I>, is, on the other hand, the dramatization of a tragic tale of
+incest and murder.  This is, however, somewhat exceptional, and may
+perhaps be regarded as belonging rather to a type of miracle play not
+common in England, in which the intervention of some heavenly power
+affects the lives of men.  At any rate, it is probable that the
+interlude was not often so serious an affair, and it developed rapidly
+in a way that gave us, in the sixteenth century, the interludes of John
+Heywood (1497-1577), which are really short farces,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P29"></A>29}</SPAN>
+and no bad
+ones at that.  By reason of its character and the small number of
+actors which it required, the interlude was usually given by
+professional entertainers, who were either kept by persons of high
+rank, or traveled from town to town.  We find, therefore, in the acting
+of interludes the conditions which gave rise to modern comedy and to
+the modern traveling company.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Classical Influences</B>.&mdash;In the preceding paragraphs we have considered
+the early modern drama as an independent growth, but the influence of
+the classical drama, particularly the Latin tragedies of Seneca and the
+Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, showed itself in the later
+moralities and interludes, and was to appear again and again in the
+later course of English drama.  That great revival of interest in
+classical learning which gave the Renaissance its name, was a mighty
+force in the current of English thought throughout the sixteenth
+century.  The old Latin tragedies and comedies were revived and were
+produced in the original and in translation at schools and colleges.
+It was an easy step from this to the writing of English comedies after
+Latin models.  The earliest of such attempts which we know is the
+comedy of <I>Ralph Roister Doister</I>, written by Nicholas Udall for Eton
+boys at some time between 1534 and 1541.  This, commonly called the
+first English comedy, is little more than a clever adaptation of
+Plautus to English manners and customs; but a comedy written soon
+after, <I>Gammer Gurton's Needle</I>, is really an Interlude cast in the
+Plautean mold.  The first English tragedy, <I>Gorboduc</I>, closely
+imitative of Seneca, but on
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P30"></A>30}</SPAN>
+a mythical British subject and written
+in English blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quarter of
+a century later.  Seneca's tragedies had little action, slight
+characterization, and many extremely long speeches, which often
+display, however, much brilliant rhetoric.  <I>Gorboduc</I> has all these
+qualities except the brilliance.  The history, the third of the types
+into which the editors of the First Folio were to divide Shakespeare's
+plays, was also affected by Senecan influence.  We have already seen
+how the historical figure of King John appeared in a morality, one
+which shows little trace of classical tradition; and the history, with
+its general formlessness and its mixture of the comic with the serious,
+remained a peculiarly English product.  Nevertheless, in the second
+half of the sixteenth century, subjects from English history were
+treated after the manner of Latin tragedy, and the long, rhetorical
+speeches of the later historical plays are more suggestive of Seneca
+than are most Elizabethan tragedies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The classical type of drama, with its strict observance of the three
+unities,[<A NAME="chap02fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn2">2</A>] was not congenial to the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P31"></A>31}</SPAN>
+English temperament.  Its
+fetters were soon thrown off, and, with the notable exception of Ben
+Jonson (1573-1637), few Elizabethan playwrights conformed to its rules.
+Its influence, however, was not confined to its imitators.  From the
+classical drama the Elizabethans gained a sense for form and for the
+value of dramatic technique, which did much to make the Elizabethan
+drama what it was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Three Predecessors of Shakespeare</B>.&mdash;The development of the English
+drama from the first attempts at comedy, tragedy, and history was
+extremely rapid.  When Shakespeare came to London, he found there
+dramatists who were far on the road toward mastery of dramatic form,
+and who were putting into that form both great poetry and a profound
+knowledge of human nature.  A complete list of these dramatists would
+include a number of names which have a permanent place in the history
+of English literature, such as those of Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nash,
+George Peele, and Robert Greene.  Among these names three deserve
+especial prominence, not only because of the great achievements of
+these men, but because of their influence on Shakespeare.  These men
+were Marlowe, Kyd, and Lyly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) who first gave to English blank
+verse those qualities which make it an extraordinarily perfect medium
+of expression.  Before him, blank verse had no advantages to offer in
+compensation for the abandonment of rime.  It was stiff, monotonous,
+and cold.  Marlowe began to vary the position of the pauses within the
+line, and to do away with the pause at the end of some lines by
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P32"></A>32}</SPAN>
+placing the breaks in thought elsewhere.  Thus he gave to his verse
+ease, flexibility, and movement, and he put into it the warmth and
+vividness of his own personality.  Upon such verse as this Shakespeare
+could hardly improve.  But this by no means sums up his debt to
+Marlowe.  His characterization of Richard III, for instance, was
+distinctly affected by that of Marlowe's hero Tamburlaine, a character
+to which the poet had given a passionate life and an energy that made
+him more than human.  In other ways less easy to define, Shakespeare
+must have been stimulated by Marlowe's fire.  The latter's greatest
+tragedies, <I>Tamburlaine</I>, <I>Dr. Faustus</I>, and <I>Edward II</I>, contain
+poetry so beautiful, feeling so intense, and a promise of future
+achievement so remarkable, that his early death may fairly be said to
+have deprived English literature of a genius worthy of comparison with
+that of Shakespeare himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Although Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) was far from the equal of Marlowe, he
+was a playwright of real ability and one whose tragedies were unusually
+popular.  Influenced greatly by Seneca, he brought to its climax the
+'tragedy of blood'&mdash;a type of drama in which ungovernable passions of
+lust and revenge lead to atrocious crimes and end in gruesome and
+appalling murders.  His famous <I>Spanish Tragedy</I> was the forerunner of
+many similar plays, of which <I>Titus Andronicus</I> was one.  He probably
+wrote the original play of <I>Hamlet</I>, which was elevated by Shakespeare
+out of its atmosphere of blood and horror into the highest realms of
+thought and poetry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Lyly (c. 1554-1606) was a master in an
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P33"></A>33}</SPAN>
+entirely different
+field, that of highly artificial comedy.  He brought court comedy to a
+hitherto unattained perfection of form and style, and in his best work,
+<I>Endymion</I>, he displayed a lovely delicacy of thought and expression
+which has kept his reputation secure.  He is best known, however, for
+his prose romance, <I>Euphues</I>, which gave its name to the style of which
+it was the climax.  Euphuism is a manner of writing marked by elaborate
+antithesis and alliteration, and ornamented by fantastic similes drawn
+from a mass of legendary lore concerning plants and animals.[<A NAME="chap02fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap02fn3">3</A>] This
+style, which nowadays seems labored and inartistic, was excessively
+admired by the Elizabethans.  Shakespeare imitated it to some extent in
+<I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>, and parodied it in Falstaff's speech to Prince
+Hal, <I>I Henry IV</I>, II, iv.  Several of Shakespeare's earlier comedies
+show Lyly's influence for good and ill&mdash;ill, in that it made for
+artificiality and strained conceits; good, in that it made for
+perfection of dramatic form and refinement of expression.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Masque</B>.&mdash;Somewhat apart from the main current of dramatic
+evolution is the development of the masque, which became extremely
+popular in the reign of James I.  The English masque was an
+entertainment, dramatic in character, made up of songs, dialogue, and
+dances.  It originated in masked balls given by the nobility or at
+court.  To John Lydgate, working about 1430, is probably due the credit
+for introducing into such
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P34"></A>34}</SPAN>
+disguisings a literary element, while
+the later course of the masque owes much to Italy.  In the developed
+masque there were two classes of participants: noble amateurs, who wore
+elaborate costumes and danced either among themselves or with the
+spectators; and professional entertainers, who spoke and sang.  The
+later masques had elaborate scenery and costumes, with just as much
+plot as would serve to string together the lyrics and dances.
+Sometimes an anti-masque of grotesque figures was introduced to serve
+as contrast to the beautiful figures of the masque.  The masques were
+produced with the utmost lavishness, the most extravagant one of which
+we know costing over £20,000.  Some of them, such as those written by
+Ben Jonson, contain charming poetry; but their chief interest to the
+student of Shakespeare lies in the fact that their great popularity
+caused Shakespeare to introduce short masques into some of his plays,
+notably <I>Henry VIII</I>, <I>The Winter's Tale</I>, and <I>The Tempest</I>.  In
+similar allegorical dances often given between the acts of Italian
+plays, has been sought the origin of the 'dumb-show,' which was
+occasionally introduced into English tragedies, and which appears in
+the Mouse-Trap given in <I>Hamlet</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The most useful general histories of this period are: F. E. Schelling,
+<I>Elizabethan Drama</I> (Houghton Mifflin, 1908); E. K. Chambers, <I>The
+Mediaeval Stage</I> (Oxford, 1903); and Creizenach, <I>Geschichte des
+neueren Dramas</I> (Halle, 1893-1909, and not yet complete).  Some of the
+best Miracles, Moralities, and Interludes are easily accessible in
+<I>Everyman with other Interludes</I> (Everyman's Library) and J. M. Manly's
+<I>Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama</I> (Ginn &amp; Co., 1897).
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn1"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn1text">1</A>] An extract from the Concordia Regularis, a tenth-century appendix
+to the monastic "rule" of St. Benedict, describes this ceremony.
+"While the third respond is chanted, let the remaining three follow
+[one of the brethren, vested in an alb, had before this quietly taken
+his place at the sepulcher], and let them all, vested in copes, and
+bearing in their hands thuribles with incense, and stepping delicately,
+as those who seek something, approach the sepulcher.  These things are
+done in imitation of the angel sitting in the monument, and the women
+with spices coming to anoint the body of Jesus."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn2text">2</A>] The three unities of action, place, and time are usually believed
+to have been formulated by Aristotle, who is supposed to have said that
+a tragedy should have but a single plot and that the action should be
+confined to a single day and a single place.  As a matter of fact,
+Aristotle is responsible for only the first of these, and this he
+presented as an observation on the actual condition which prevailed in
+Greek tragedy rather than as a dramatic principle for all time.  The
+other principles, which were later deduced from the general practice of
+the Greeks,&mdash;a practice arising from the manner in which their plays
+were staged,&mdash;were, together with the first, elevated by the Romans to
+the dignity of fixed dramatic laws.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap02fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap02fn3text">3</A>] The following quotation from Euphues (ed. Bond, i, 289) illustrates
+this style: "Hee that seeketh ye depth of knowledge is as it were in a
+Laborinth, in which the farther he goeth, the farther he is from the
+end: or like the bird in the limebush which the more she striveth to
+get out, ye faster she sticketh in."  With this cf. <I>Hamlet</I>, III, iii,
+69; <I>I Henry IV</I>, II, iv, 441.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P35"></A>35}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER III
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In 1575 London had no theaters; that is, no building especially
+designed for the acting of plays.  By 1600 there were at least six,
+among which were some so large and beautiful as to arouse the
+unqualified admiration of travelers from the continent.  It is the
+purpose of this chapter to give in outline the history of this rapid
+development of a new type of building; to describe, as accurately as
+may be, the general features of these theaters; and to indicate the
+influence which these features exerted upon the Shakespearean drama.
+But before doing this it is necessary to point out the causes which
+made the first Elizabethan theater what it was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Predecessors of the Elizabethan Theater</B>.[<A NAME="chap03fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn1">1</A>]&mdash;Of these, the most
+important was the innyard.  As soon as the acting of plays ceased to be
+merely a local affair, as soon as there were companies of actors which
+traveled from town to town, it became necessary to find some place for
+the public presentation of plays other than the pageants of the guilds
+or the temporary scaffolds sometimes erected for miracle plays.  Such a
+place was offered by the courtyard of an inn.  The larger inns of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P36"></A>36}</SPAN>
+this period were, for the most part, built in the form of a quadrangle
+surrounding an open court.  Opening directly off this court were the
+stables, the kitchen, and other offices of the inn; above these were
+from one to three stories of bedrooms and sitting rooms, entered from
+galleries running all round the court.  When such a courtyard was used
+for theatrical performances, the actors erected a platform at one end
+to serve as a stage; the space back of this, shut off by a curtain,
+they used as a dressing-room; and the part of the gallery immediately
+over it they employed as a second stage which could represent the walls
+of a city or the balcony of a house.  In the courtyard the poorer class
+of spectators stood; in the galleries the more wealthy sat at their
+ease.  These conditions made the innyards much better places for play
+acting than were the city squares, while they were given still another
+advantage from the actors' point of view by the fact that the easily
+controlled entrance gave an opportunity for charging a regular
+admission fee&mdash;a fee which varied with the desirability of the various
+parts of the house.  Thus the innyards made no bad playhouses, and they
+continued to be used as such even after theaters were built.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They had, however, one obvious disadvantage; their long, narrow shape
+made a large number of the seats and a large proportion of the spaces
+available for standing room distinctly bad places from which to see
+what was happening on the stage.  To remedy this defect, the builders
+of the theaters took a suggestion from the bull-baiting and
+bear-baiting rings.  These rings, of which a considerable number
+already existed
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P37"></A>37}</SPAN>
+in the outskirts of London, had been built for
+fights between dogs and bulls or bears, sports vastly enjoyed by the
+Elizabethans.  The rings, like the innyards, had galleries in which
+spectators could sit and an open yard in which they could stand, and
+they possessed the added merit of being round.  Very possibly these
+rings, like the Cornish rings used for miracle plays, originated in the
+stone amphitheaters built by the Romans during their occupation of
+Britain, buildings occasionally used, even in the sixteenth century,
+for the performance of plays.  It is hardly necessary, nevertheless, to
+look farther than the bear ring to find the cause which determined the
+shape of the Elizabethan public theater.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The History of the Public Theaters</B>.&mdash;With such models, then, James
+Burbage&mdash;the father of Richard Burbage, later the great actor manager
+of Shakespeare's company&mdash;built the first London theater in 1576.  It
+was erected not far outside the northern walls of the city, and was
+called simply the Theater.  Not far away, a second theater, the
+Curtain, was soon put up, so called not from any curtain on the stage,
+but from the name of the estate on which it was built.  The next
+theater, the Rose, was situated in another quarter, on the Surrey side
+of the Thames, where the bear-baiting rings were.  This was
+constructed, probably in 1587, by Philip Henslowe, a prominent
+theatrical manager.  Some time after 1594, a second theater, the Swan,
+was put up in this same region, commonly called the Bankside.  The
+suitability of the Bankside as a location for theaters is still further
+attested by the removal thither of the Theater in the winter of
+1598-1599.  The owner of the land on which the Theater had originally
+been
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P38"></A>38}</SPAN>
+built had merely leased it to Burbage&mdash;who had since
+died,&mdash;and, when the lease expired, he attempted to raise the rent,
+probably believing that the Burbage heirs were receiving large profits
+from the building.  Being unwilling to pay this increased rent, the
+Burbages took down the building, and reėrected it on the Bankside, this
+time calling it the Globe.  The last to be built of the great public
+theaters was the Fortune, which Henslowe erected in 1600.  The
+situation of the Fortune outside Cripplegate, although a considerable
+distance west of the Curtain, was, roughly, that of the earlier
+theaters, the northern suburbs of the city.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This list does not include all the theaters built or altered between
+1576 and 1600, nor did such building stop at the latter date,&mdash;the
+Globe, for instance, was burnt and again rebuilt in 1613,&mdash;but the
+sketch is complete enough for our purposes.  By the end of 1600 all the
+more important public theaters were open, and after that date, so far
+as we know, no important changes in construction were made.  The next
+real step&mdash;which was to do away altogether with this type of
+theater&mdash;did not come until after the Restoration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Buildings</B>.&mdash;Before describing the buildings themselves, it is
+necessary to make one qualification.  It is impossible to speak of the
+'Elizabethan theaters' or of the 'Elizabethan stage' as if there were
+one type to which all theaters and stages conformed.  The Fortune was
+undoubtedly a great improvement over the Theater, the outcome of an
+evolution which could be traced through the other theaters if we had
+the necessary documents.  If the various theaters did not differ from
+each other as some of our modern theaters do, they
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P39"></A>39}</SPAN>
+still did
+differ in important points.  For example, while the Globe and the
+Curtain were round, other theaters were hexagonal or octagonal, and the
+Fortune was square.  Likewise, there were certainly differences in
+size.  In spite of these facts, it is, however, still possible to
+describe the theaters, in general terms which are sufficiently accurate
+for our present purpose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An Elizabethan theater was a three-story building of wooden or
+half-timber construction.  The three stories formed three galleries for
+spectators.  The first of these was raised a little above the level of
+the ground, while the yard, or 'pit,' in which the lower class of
+spectators stood, seems to have been somewhat sunken.  The galleries
+were supported by oaken columns, often handsomely carved and
+ornamented.  They were roofed and ceiled, but the yard was open to the
+weather.  Although we know that the Fortune was eighty feet square
+outside, and that the yard within was fifty-five feet square, we are
+left in uncertainty about the seating capacity.  From fifteen hundred
+to eighteen hundred is, however, the most convincing estimate.  There
+were two boxes, or 'gentlemen's rooms,' presumably in the first balcony
+on either side of the stage.  Besides these, there were other, cheaper
+boxes, and the rest of the balcony space was filled with seats.  The
+better seats were most comfortably cushioned, and the whole theater
+anything but the bare rude place which people often imagine it.
+Coryat, a widely traveled Englishman of the period, writes of the
+theaters which he saw in Venice that they were "bare and beggarly in
+comparison of our stately playhouses in England; neither can their
+actors compare with us for stately apparel,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P40"></A>40}</SPAN>
+shows, or music."
+That this was no mere British prejudice is shown by the similar
+statements of foreigners traveling in England.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The most striking difference between Elizabethan and modern theaters
+was in the position of the stage, which was not back of a great
+proscenium frame, but was built out as a platform into the middle of
+the yard.  At the Fortune, the stage was forty-three feet wide,&mdash;wider,
+that is, than most modern stages.[<A NAME="chap03fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn2">2</A>]  Jutting out from the level of the
+top gallery, and extending perhaps ten feet over the stage, was a
+square structure called the 'hut,' which rose above the level of the
+outside walls.  Built out from the bottom of this, a roof, or 'shadow,'
+extended forward over a large part of the stage.  The front of this
+'shadow' was borne, in the better theaters, on two columns.  The shadow
+and the hut, taken together, are often referred to as the 'heavens.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Stage</B>.&mdash;When we turn from these general features of the theaters
+to the stage, we shall find it convenient to speak of a front and a
+rear stage, but this does not imply any permanent line of demarcation
+between the two, or that they were not often used together as a single
+field of action.  The rear stage is simply that part of the stage which
+could be shut off from the spectators by curtains; the other, that part
+which lay in front of the curtains.  In other words, the front stage is
+that portion of the stage which was built out into the yard, for the
+curtains continued the line made around the rest of the house by the
+front
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P41"></A>41}</SPAN>
+of the galleries.  In both front and rear stages were traps
+out of which ghosts or apparitions could rise and into which such
+properties as the caldron in <I>Macbeth</I> could sink.  From the 'heavens,'
+actors representing gods or spirits&mdash;as Jupiter in <I>Cymbeline</I> or Ariel
+in <I>The Tempest</I>&mdash;could be lowered by means of a mechanical contrivance.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-040"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-040.jpg" ALT="TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 4.  OUTER SCENE" BORDER="2" WIDTH="523" HEIGHT="703">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 523px">
+TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 4.  OUTER SCENE.
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<I>Trumpets sound.  Enter Alcibiades with his</I><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em"><I>Powers before Athens.</I></SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<I>Alc</I>.  "Sound to this Coward, and lascivious<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Towne.  Our terrible approach."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<I>Sounds a parly.  The Senators appeare upon the Wals.</I><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Reproduced from <I>The Shakespearean Stage</I>, by V. E. Albright, through
+the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+The arrangement of the rear stage may have differed considerably in the
+various theaters, but the typical form may best be described as an
+alcove in front of which curtains could be drawn.  This alcove was by
+no means so small as the word may seem to imply, but must have been
+about half as wide as the front stage and perhaps a quarter as deep.
+In its rear wall was a door through which the actors could enter
+without being seen when the curtains were drawn, and it seems to have
+had side doors as well.  To the right and left of it were doors for
+such entrances to the front stage as could not properly be made through
+the curtains.  This part of the stage was used for such scenes as the
+caves in <I>Cymbeline</I> or <I>The Tempest</I>, for the tomb in <I>Romeo and
+Juliet</I>, and for scenes in which characters concealed themselves behind
+the arras, as in <I>I Henry IV</I> or <I>Hamlet</I>.  Since the front stage could
+not be concealed from the spectators, most heavy properties were placed
+on the back stage, so that this part of the stage was generally used
+for scenes which required such properties.  For many of these scenes,
+however, both parts of the stage were used, the actors spreading out
+over the front stage soon after the beginning of the scene.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The space between the top of the back stage and the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P42"></A>42}</SPAN>
+heavens formed
+a balcony, like the balcony already described as part of the stage as
+arranged in the inn-yards.  This balcony could also be curtained off
+when occasion required.  To the right and left of it, over the doors
+leading to the front stage, some of the theaters had window-like
+openings, which were probably not in line with the balcony, but, like
+the doors below them, projected at an oblique angle.  At one of these
+windows Jessica appeared in the second act of <I>The Merchant of Venice</I>;
+from the balcony Romeo took leave of Juliet.  Thus the Elizabethan
+dramatist had three fields of action&mdash;a front, rear, and upper
+stage&mdash;which he could use singly, together, or in various combinations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Settings and Costumes</B>.&mdash;In order to understand the way in which this
+stage was utilized, the student must dismiss from his mind two
+widespread errors.  The Elizabethan stage was by no means a bare,
+unfurnished platform, nor did the managers substitute for a setting
+placards reading "This is a Forest," or "This is a Bedroom."  The
+difference between that age and this is not one between no settings and
+good ones; it is even possible to doubt whether Shakespeare's plays
+were not put on more effectively then than in most of our modern
+theaters.  The difference is one of principle, and even this difference
+may easily be exaggerated.  When we say that Elizabethan stagings were
+'symbolic,' whereas ours are pictorial, we mean that on the former the
+presence of a few selected objects suggested to the mind of the
+spectator all the others which go to make up the kind of scene
+presented.  When a few trees were placed upon the stage, the audience
+supplied in
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P43"></A>43}</SPAN>
+imagination the other objects that belong in a forest;
+when a throne was there, they saw with the mind's eye a room of state
+in a palace.  But our modern stage also demands the help of the
+imagination.  It is very far from presenting a completely realistic
+picture.  We see three sides of a room and accept the room as complete,
+although none of us live in rooms which lack a side.  We see a great
+cathedral painted on a back drop, and are hardly disturbed by the fact
+that an actor standing near it is twice as high as one of the doors.
+The difference between the two stages really simmers down to this: our
+symbols are of painted canvas, the Elizabethans' were of another sort.
+It is extremely unlikely that the Elizabethans used painted scenes in
+their public theaters.  If they ever did, such 'painted cloths' were of
+the simplest sort, and not pictures painted in perspective.  Instead,
+they relied for their effects upon solid properties&mdash;sometimes quite
+elaborate ones&mdash;such as trees, tombs, wells, beds, thrones, etc.
+These, as has been said, were usually set on the rear stage, although
+some of them, such as couches and banquet tables, were occasionally
+brought forward during the course of a scene.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were, however, scenes which were acted without any setting.  The
+Elizabethans did not feel it necessary to have every scene definitely
+localized.  Consequently, many scenes which are described in our modern
+editions of Shakespeare as 'A Street,' 'A Place before the Castle,'
+etc., were not definitely assigned to any place, and were usually acted
+without settings on the front stage before the closed curtains.  In
+order that no time should be lost while properties were
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P44"></A>44}</SPAN>
+being
+changed, such scenes were commonly inserted between scenes requiring
+properties, so that a certain alternation between set and unset scenes
+resulted.  The fourth act of the <I>Merchant of Venice</I>, for example,
+begins with the court-room scene, which demanded the whole stage, the
+properties for the court-room being set on the back stage, with perhaps
+some moved toward the front.  The fifth act takes place in Portia's
+garden, which also took up the whole stage, with garden properties set
+on the rear stage.  Between these two scenes comes the one in the
+street, which was acted before the closed curtains and required no
+properties.  The arrangement is somewhat like that followed in many
+modern melodramas, where a scene not requiring properties is acted in
+front of a drop scene while scenery is being set behind.  The raising
+of the drop&mdash;which corresponds to the opening of the Elizabethan
+curtains&mdash;not only reveals the setting behind, but also makes the whole
+stage, including that part which was in front of the drop, the scene of
+the action which follows.[<A NAME="chap03fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn3">3</A>]
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-044"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-044.jpg" ALT="TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 3.  INNER SCENE" BORDER="2" WIDTH="495" HEIGHT="723">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 495px">
+TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 3.  INNER SCENE.
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<I>Enter a Souldier in the Woods, seeking Timon.</I>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"<I>Sol</I>.&mdash;Timon is dead, who hath out-stretcht his span,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3.5em">Some Beast reade this; There do's not live a Man.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3.5em">Dead sure, and this his Grave, what's on this Tomb."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Reproduced from <I>The Shakespearean Stage</I>, by V. E. Albright, through
+the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.]
+</P>
+
+<HR>
+
+<P>
+The costumes on Shakespeare's stage were very elaborate, but there was
+no desire to make them characteristic of any historical period.
+Indeed, the striving after historical accuracy of costume is so much a
+modern notion that it was nearly two centuries later when Macbeth and
+Julius Caesar began to appear in costumes appropriate to their
+respective periods.  On the other hand, there probably was some attempt
+to distinguish the dress of different nationalities.  Some notion of
+how elaborate the costumes of Elizabethan actors were is given by the
+fact that Henslowe's
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P45"></A>45}</SPAN>
+diary[<A NAME="chap03fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn4">4</A>] has an entry of £4 14s. paid for a
+pair of hose, and £20 for a cloak.  In connection with this it must be
+remembered that money was worth then about eight times what it is now,
+and that a playwright of the time rarely received more than £8 for a
+play.  Another indication is given in Henslowe's list of the costumes
+belonging to the Lord Admiral's men, which included some eighty-seven
+garments, for the most part of silk or satin, ornamented with fringe
+and gold lace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Private Theater</B>.&mdash;In the preceding sections the type of theater
+described has been referred to as 'public.'  This has been done to
+distinguish it from the 'private' theater, a type which, although
+similar in so far as the general principles of staging employed are
+concerned, differed from the public theater in important particulars.
+The private theater is so called because it originated in the
+performances given before the invited guests of royalty, the nobility,
+or the universities.  Since these performances were given in great
+halls, the type of theater which resulted was completely roofed, was
+lighted by candles, and had seats in the pit as well as in the
+galleries&mdash;when there were galleries.  As soon as such theaters were
+built, admission was, of course, no longer by invitation, but the
+prices were so much higher than those of the public theaters that the
+audiences remained much more select.  The first of these theaters was
+the Blackfriars, the remodeled hall of the former monastery of the
+Blackfriars, done over by Burbage in 1596.  Others
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P46"></A>46}</SPAN>
+were those in
+which the 'Children of Paul's' acted, the Cockpit, and the Salisbury
+Court.  The Blackfriars was at first under royal patronage, the actors
+being the 'Children of the Chapel Royal.'  These choir boys were
+carefully trained in acting and dancing as well as singing, and were
+subsidized by royalty, so that their performances tended to be much
+more spectacular than those of the public theaters.  The performances
+at the Blackfriars seem to have retained this characteristic even after
+1608, when Shakespeare's company took over the theater.  Probably
+because of the patronage and interest of royalty, it was in the private
+theaters that painted scenes, already used in court masques, were first
+introduced.  Thus these roofed theaters are really the forerunners, so
+far as England is concerned, of our modern playhouses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Effect of Stage Conditions on the Drama</B>.&mdash;When studied in the light
+of Elizabethan stage conditions, many characteristics of the plays
+written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries cease to be surprising or
+puzzling.  A complete conception of all the effects which these
+conditions had upon the drama can only be gained by a careful study of
+all the plays.  Here, moreover, we are obliged to pass over many points
+of more general character, such as the impossibility of representing
+night by darkness when the performances were given by daylight in a
+theater open to the sun.  Two or three are, however, especially
+important.  For instance, since it was possible to leave many scenes
+indefinitely localized, and since there was no necessity of long pauses
+for the change of heavy scenery, the dramatists were not limited as
+ours are to a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P47"></A>47}</SPAN>
+comparatively small number of scenes.  This was an
+advantage in that it gave great freedom and variety to the action; but
+it was also a disadvantage in that it led to a scattering of effect and
+to looseness of construction.  So in <I>Antony and Cleopatra</I> there are
+forty-two scenes, some of which are only a few lines long, and in
+consequence the play loses the intense, unified effect which it might
+otherwise have produced.  Again, the absence of a front curtain made it
+impossible to end an act or play with a grand climax or an impressive
+tableau.  Instead, the scenes gradually die away; the actors leave the
+stage one by one, or go off in procession.  Whether this was gain or
+loss is a debatable question.  At any rate, this caused the Elizabethan
+plays to leave on the spectator an impression totally different from
+that left by ours.  Finally, the absence of pictorial scenery forced
+the dramatists to use verbal description far more than is customary
+to-day.  To this fact we owe some passages of poetry which are among
+the most beautiful in all dramatic literature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Theatrical Companies</B>.&mdash;During Shakespeare's lifetime there were in
+existence more or less continuously some twenty theatrical companies,
+at least four or five of which, during the greater part of this period,
+played contemporaneously in London.  We have already seen how great
+nobles, before the end of the fifteenth century, maintained small
+companies of men as players of Interludes.  When not wanted by their
+patrons, these men traveled about the country, and their example was
+followed by other groups whose legal position was a much less certain
+quantity.  As a result, a law was passed in 1572 which required that
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P48"></A>48}</SPAN>
+all companies of actors should be under the definite protection of
+some noble.  As time went on, this relation became one of merely
+nominal patronage, but the companies continued to be known by the name
+of their patron.  Thus the company to which Shakespeare belonged was
+known successively as Lord Strange's, the Earl of Derby's, first and
+second Lord Hunsdon's (or, because of the office which the Hunsdons
+held, as the Lord Chamberlain's), and as the King's company.  At
+various times it appeared at the Theater, the Curtain, the Globe, and
+the Blackfriars, its greatest triumphs being associated with the Globe.
+By 1608, if not before, it was unquestionably the most successful
+company in London.  It had the patronage of King James, and it
+controlled and acted in what were respectively the most popular public
+and private theaters, the Globe and the Blackfriars.  When not acting
+in London, it made tours to other cities.  Its number included several
+actors of well-known ability, among them Richard Burbage, the greatest
+tragic actor of the time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The most formidable rivals to this company were the Admiral's men and
+the children's companies.  The former company was managed by Richard
+Henslowe; had, after 1600, a permanent home in the Fortune theater; and
+included among its number Edward Alleyn, next to Burbage the most
+famous Elizabethan actor.  The two great children's companies were
+those made up of the choir boys of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's.
+The former had begun to give dramatic performances as early as 1506.
+They were well trained, had the advantage of royal patronage, and were
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P49"></A>49}</SPAN>
+extraordinarily popular, becoming very serious rivals of the men's
+companies.  The performances of the Children of the Chapel Royal at the
+Blackfriars between 1596 and 1608 were the most fashionable in London.
+The children's companies were finally suppressed about 1609.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The members of the men's companies were divided into four classes:
+those who had shares in the house and in the company, those who had
+shares only in the company, hired actors, and apprentices.  The third
+of these classes received a fixed salary, the last were cared for by
+the individual actors to whom they were apprenticed.  The profits of
+the theaters were derived from entrance money and the additional fees
+received for the better seats.  All of the first and half of the second
+was divided between the members of the first and second classes of
+shareholders.  The members of the first received in addition shares in
+the other half of the additional fees.[<A NAME="chap03fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap03fn5">5</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Because female parts were always taken by men or boys, it is sometimes
+assumed that Elizabethan acting must have been crude.  On the contrary,
+we have every reason to believe that most parts, particularly the less
+important ones, were acted better than they are usually acted to-day.
+Some of the actors, such as Burbage and Alleyn, were undoubtedly men of
+great genius.  All of them had the advantage of regular and consistent
+training&mdash;a thing only too often lacking in these days when an actor of
+ability is almost immediately made a 'star,' although he frequently
+knows pitifully little of the art of acting.  One of the most
+interesting testimonies to the ability of Elizabethan actors is Ben
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P50"></A>50}</SPAN>
+Jonson's tribute to the memory of the boy actor, Salathiel Pavy:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Weep with me, all you that read<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">This little story;</SPAN><BR>
+And know, for whom a tear you shed<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">Death's self is sorry.</SPAN><BR>
+'Twas a child that so did thrive<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">In grace and feature,</SPAN><BR>
+As Heaven and Nature seem'd to strive<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">Which owned the creature.</SPAN><BR>
+Years he number'd scarce thirteen<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">When Fates turn'd cruel,</SPAN><BR>
+Yet three fill'd zodiacs had he been<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">The stage's jewel;</SPAN><BR>
+And did act (what now we moan)<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">Old men so duly,</SPAN><BR>
+As sooth the Parcae thought him one,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">He play'd so truly.</SPAN><BR>
+So, by error, to his fate<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">They all consented;</SPAN><BR>
+But, viewing him since, alas, too late!<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">They have repented;</SPAN><BR>
+And have sought, to give new birth,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">In baths to steep him;</SPAN><BR>
+But, being so much too good for earth,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">Heaven vows to keep him."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Many of the points discussed in this chapter are still the subject of
+controversy.  The theories of the stage adopted here are, in general,
+those of V. E. Albright, <I>The Shakespearean Stage</I> (Macmillan, 1909).
+Among the numerous books and articles on these topics, the most useful
+are: G. F. Reynolds, <I>Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging</I> (<I>Modern
+Philology</I>, Vols. 3 and 4); Brodmeier, <I>Die Shakespeare Bühne</I> (Weimar,
+1904); Fleay, <I>Chronicle History of the London Stage</I> (London, 1890);
+Henslowe's <I>Diary</I>, ed. by W. Greg (London, 1904); and the works of
+Creizenach and Schelling referred to in the preceding chapter.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap03fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="chap03fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="chap03fn4"></A>
+<A NAME="chap03fn5"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn1text">1</A>] Another predecessor, the great hall of a noble or a university, is
+mentioned in the section on the private theaters.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn2text">2</A>] In at least some of the theaters, the stage seems to have narrowed
+toward the front.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn3text">3</A>] With this whole paragraph, cf. Albright, pp. 81 ff., and 104-105.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn4text">4</A>] This memorandum book of Philip Henslowe, the great manager, is one
+of our chief sources of information about the Elizabethan theater.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap03fn5text">5</A>] For Shakespeare's share, cf. p. <A HREF="#P15">15</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P51"></A>51}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+ELIZABETHAN LONDON
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Shortly after Shakespeare came to London, England demonstrated her new
+greatness to an astonished world; by the defeat of Spain's greatest
+fleet, the "invincible Armada," England showed herself as no longer a
+small island nation, but as Mistress of the Sea.  In this victory
+culminated the growth which had begun under Henry VII, first of Tudor
+sovereigns.  Naval supremacy was, however, but a sign of a much greater
+and more far-reaching transformation&mdash;a transformation which had
+affected science, literature, and religion, and one which filled the
+men of Shakespeare's time with such enthusiasm for the past, such
+confidence in the present, and such hope for the future, as has hardly
+been paralleled in the world's history.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the century which had elapsed since 1485, Copernicus's discovery
+that the sun and not the earth was the center of our universe, had
+revolutionized the map of the heavens, as Columbus's discovery of
+America had revolutionized the map of the world.  Thus stimulated,
+scientific investigation started afresh, working in accordance with the
+modern methods formulated by Francis Bacon, while voyage quickly
+followed voyage, each new discovery adding fuel to the fire of
+enthusiasm.  Wonderful tales of new lands and unimagined wealth spread
+from mouth to mouth.  The voyages
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P52"></A>52}</SPAN>
+of Martin Frobisher, Anthony
+Hawkins, and Francis Drake opened new worlds, not only to English
+imagination, but also to English trade.  It was they and men like them
+who gave to England her unexpected naval and commercial supremacy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The latter was partly a result of the former.  Elizabeth's victories
+over foreign enemies strengthened her power at home, and assured that
+freedom from internal discord which is essential to commercial
+prosperity.  No sovereign distracted by danger from without could have
+mastered the factions which had sprung up within.  The great religious
+movement known as the Protestant Reformation had not stopped in England
+with the separation of the English from the Roman Church under Henry
+VIII.  It had brought into existence the Puritan, austere, bigoted,
+opposed to beauty of church and ceremonial, yet filled with superb
+moral and religious enthusiasm.  It had brought about the persecution
+of Catholics and the still more merciless persecution of Protestants
+during the Catholic reaction under Queen Mary.  Its successes, which
+began again with Elizabeth's reign, gave occasion for continual
+intrigues of Catholic emissaries.  It all but plunged the nation into
+civil war, a war averted only by the victory over Spain and by the
+statesmanship of Elizabeth.  Freed from the fear of war, however,
+Puritan and Churchman, each in his own way, could apply his enthusiasm
+to the works of peace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the return of peace and security, moreover, England first felt the
+full effect of the literary Renaissance.  The revival of classical
+learning had already transformed the art and literature of the
+continent,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P53"></A>53}</SPAN>
+especially that of Italy.  When, therefore, England
+turned again to the classics, it turned also to the Italian culture and
+literature to which the Renaissance had given birth, and from these
+sources English literature received new beauty of thought and form.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was, then, in a new England that Shakespeare lived, an England
+intensely proud of the past which had made the present possible, an
+England rich enough and secure enough to have leisure and interest for
+literature, an England so vigorous, so confident, that it could not
+fail to bring out all that was latent in its greatest genius.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The City of London</B>.&mdash;All this enthusiasm and activity reached its
+highest point in London.  Even more then than now, London was the
+center of influence, the place to which the greatest abilities were
+irresistibly attracted, and in which their greatest work was done.  But
+the London of Shakespeare's time was vastly different from the London
+of to-day.  On all sides, except that washed by the Thames, the
+mediaeval walls were still standing and served as the city's actual
+boundary.  Outside them were several important suburbs, but where now
+houses extend for miles in unbroken ranks, there were then open fields
+and pleasant woods.  The total population of the city hardly exceeded a
+hundred thousand, while that of the suburbs, including the many guests
+of the numerous inns, amounted to perhaps a hundred thousand more.
+Hence, although there undoubtedly was crowding in the poorer quarters,
+London was a much more open city than it is to-day.  The great houses
+all had their gardens, and a few minutes walk in any direction brought
+one to open country.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P54"></A>54}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Westminster, now well within the greater London, was then only the most
+important suburb.  Here was the Hall in which Parliament met, and, not
+far away, Whitehall, the favorite London residence of the Queen.
+Attracted by the presence of royalty, many of the great nobles had
+built their houses in this quarter, so that the north bank of the
+Thames from Westminster to the City was lined with stately buildings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Thames was London's pleasantest highway.  It was then a clear,
+beautiful river spanned by a single bridge.  If one wished to go from
+the City to Westminster, or even eastward or westward within the City
+itself, one could go most easily by boat.  The Queen in her royal barge
+was often to be seen on the river.  The great merchant companies had
+their splendid barges, in which they made stately progresses.  One went
+by boat to the bear gardens and theaters on the south bank.  Below the
+bridge, the river was crowded with shipping.  At one of the wharves lay
+an object of universal interest, the <I>Golden Hind</I>, the ship in which
+Drake had made his famous voyage round the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Within the city, most of the streets were narrow, poorly paved, and
+worse lighted.  Those who went about by night had their servants carry
+torches, called "links," before them, or hired boys to light them home.
+Such sanitation as existed was wretched, so that plagues and other
+diseases spread rapidly and carried off an appalling number of victims.
+The ignorance and inefficiency of the police is rather portrayed than
+satirized in Shakespeare's Dogberry and Verges.  Such evils were common
+to all seventeenth-century cities, but these cities had their
+compensations in a freedom
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P55"></A>55}</SPAN>
+and picturesqueness which have
+disappeared from our modern towns.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Citizens</B>.&mdash;In Elizabethan London, as in every city, the men who
+represented extremes of wealth and poverty, the courtiers and their
+imitators, the beggars and the sharpers, are those of whom we hear
+most; but the greater part of the population, that which controlled the
+city government, was of the middle class, sober, self-respecting
+tradespeople, inclined towards Puritanism, and jealous of their
+independence.  Such people naturally distrusted and disliked the actors
+and their class, and used against them, as far as they could, the great
+authority of the city.  In spite of court favor, the actors were
+compelled by city ordinances to build their theaters outside the city
+limits or on ground which the city did not control.  Several attempts
+were made to suppress play acting altogether, ostensibly because of the
+danger that crowded audiences would spread the plague when it became
+epidemic.  In spite of this official opposition, however, the sober
+citizens formed a goodly part of theater audiences until after the
+accession of King James, when the rising tide of Puritanism led to
+increased austerity.  At no time were the majority of the citizens
+entirely free from a love for worldly pleasures.  They swelled the
+crowds at the taverns, and their wives often vied with the great ladies
+of court in extravagance of dress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>St. Paul's</B>.&mdash;The great meeting place of London was, oddly enough, the
+nave of St. Paul's Cathedral.  This superb Gothic church, later
+destroyed by the Great Fire, was used as a common passageway, as a
+place for doing business and for meeting friends.  In
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P56"></A>56}</SPAN>
+the late
+morning hours, the men-about-town promenaded there, displaying their
+gorgeous clothes and hailing those whom they wished to have known as
+their acquaintances.  If a gallant's cash were at low ebb, he loitered
+there, hoping for an invitation to dinner.  If he had had a dinner, he
+often came back for another stroll in the afternoon.  At one pillar he
+would find lawyers standing; at another, serving men seeking
+employment; at still another, public secretaries.  Here one could learn
+anything from the latest fashion to the latest political scandal.
+Meanwhile, divine worship might be going on in the chancel, unobserved
+unless some fop wished to make himself conspicuous by joking with the
+choir boys.  Thus St. Paul's was a school of life invaluable to the
+dramatist.  We know that Ben Jonson learned much there, and we can
+hardly doubt that Shakespeare did likewise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Taverns</B>.&mdash;Another center of London life was the tavern.  The man
+who would now lunch at his club then dined at an 'ordinary,' a <I>table
+d'hōte</I> in some tavern.  Men dined at noon, and then sat on over their
+wine, smoking or playing at cards or dice.  In the evening one could
+always find there music and good company.  One tradition of Shakespeare
+tells of his evenings at the Mermaid tavern.  "Many were the
+wit-combates," writes Fuller, "betwixt him [Shakespeare] and Ben
+Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great gallion, and an English
+man of War; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in
+Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances.  Shake-spear, with the
+English man-of-War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn
+with all tides,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P57"></A>57}</SPAN>
+tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the
+quickness of his Wit and Invention."  Francis Beaumont, the dramatist,
+wrote the following verses to Ben Jonson:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 7em">"What things have we seen</SPAN><BR>
+Done at the Mermaid, heard words that have been<BR>
+So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,<BR>
+As if everyone from whence they came<BR>
+Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,<BR>
+And had resolved to live a fool the rest<BR>
+Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown<BR>
+Wit able enough to justify the town<BR>
+For three days past; wit that might warrant be<BR>
+For the whole city to talk foolishly<BR>
+Till that were cancelled; and when that was gone,<BR>
+We left an air behind us, which alone<BR>
+Was able to make the two next companies<BR>
+(Right witty, though but downright fools) more wise."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>At the Theater</B>.&mdash;Having dined, the Elizabethan gentleman often
+visited one of the numerous bookshops, or else went to the theater,
+perhaps to the Globe.  In the latter case, since this theater was on
+the south bank of the Thames, he was most likely to cross the river by
+boat.  A flag, floating from a turret over the theater, announced a
+performance there.  The prices paid for admission varied, but the
+regular price for entrance to the Globe seems to have been a penny
+(about fifteen cents in the money of to-day).  This, however, gave one
+only the right to stand in the pit or, perhaps, to sit in the top
+gallery.  For a box the price was probably a shilling (equivalent to
+two dollars), the poorer seats costing less.  At the aristocratic
+Blackfriars, sixpence (one dollar) was the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P58"></A>58}</SPAN>
+lowest price.  At this
+theater, the most fashionable occupied seats on the stage, where they
+were at once extremely conspicuous and in the way of the actors; but
+this custom probably did not spread to the Globe before 1603.  At the
+Blackfriars, too, one could have a seat in the pit, while at the Globe
+the pit was filled with a standing, jostling crowd of apprentices and
+riffraff.  In the theater every one was talking, laughing, smoking,
+buying oranges, nuts, wine, or cheap books from shouting venders, just
+as is done in some music halls to-day.  Once the trumpet had sounded
+for the third time, indicating the beginning of the performance, a
+reasonable degree of quiet was restored, until a pause in the action
+let the uproar burst forth anew.  At an Elizabethan theater there were
+no pauses for shifting scenes.  Consequently the few introduced were
+determined either by convention or by breaks in the action.  At the
+Blackfriars and more aristocratic theaters, there was music between the
+acts, but at the Globe this was not customary until a comparatively
+late date, if ever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An audience like that at the Globe, made up of all sorts and conditions
+of men from the highest nobility to the lowest criminal, was, quite
+naturally, not easy to please as a whole.  Yet, after all, the
+Elizabethans were less critical in some respects than we are.  Although
+many comparatively cheap books were published, reading had not then
+become a habit, and a good plot was not the less appreciated because it
+was old.  The audiences did, however, demand constant variety, so that
+plays had short runs, and most dramatists were forced to pay more
+attention to quantity
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P59"></A>59}</SPAN>
+than to quality of production.  The
+playwrights had, nevertheless, one great advantage over ours.  Since
+the performances were given in the afternoon, and since theaters like
+the Globe were open to the weather, these men wrote for audiences which
+were fresh and wide-awake, ready to receive the best which the
+dramatist had to give.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was under such conditions as these that Shakespeare worked.  He
+wrote for all classes of people, men bound together, nevertheless, by a
+common enthusiasm for England's past and a common confidence in
+England's future; men who were constantly coming in contact with
+persons from all parts of Europe, with sailors and travelers who had
+seen the wonders of the New World and the Old; men so stimulated by new
+discoveries, by new achievements of every sort, that hardly anything,
+even the supernatural, seemed for them impossible.  Outside of ancient
+Athens, no dramatist has had a more favorable environment.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The best books on this subject for the general reader: Sir Walter
+Besant, <I>London in the Time of the Tudors</I> (London, 1904); H. T.
+Stephenson, <I>Shakespeare's London</I> (Henry Holt, 1905); T. F. Ordish,
+<I>Shakespeare's London</I> (The Temple Shakespeare Manuals, 1897).
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P60"></A>60}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER V
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+We shall later trace Shakespeare's development as a writer of plays.
+We must first, however, turn back to discuss some early productions of
+his, which were composed before most of his dramas, and which are
+wholly distinct from these in character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every young author who mixes with men notices what kinds of work other
+writers are producing, and is tempted to try his hand at every kind in
+turn.  Later he learns that he is fitted for one particular kind of
+work; and, leaving other forms of writing to other men, devotes the
+rest of his life to his chosen field.  So it was with Shakespeare.
+While a young man, he tried several different forms of poetry in
+imitation of contemporary versifiers, and thus produced the poems which
+we are to discuss in this chapter.  Later he came to realize that his
+special genius was in the field of the drama, and abandoned other types
+of poetry to turn his whole energy toward the production of plays.
+Although unquestionably inferior to the author's greatest comedies and
+tragedies, these early poems are, in their kind, masterpieces of
+literature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Venus and Adonis</B>.&mdash;The first of these poems, a verse narrative of
+some 1204 lines, called <I>Venus and Adonis</I>, was printed in the spring
+of 1593 when the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P61"></A>61}</SPAN>
+author was about twenty-nine years old.  As far
+as we have evidence, it was the first of all Shakespeare's works to
+appear in print;[<A NAME="chap05fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn1">1</A>] but it is possible that some early plays were
+composed before it although printed after it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Other poets of the day had been interested in retelling in their own
+way old stories of Greek and Roman literature, and Shakespeare, in
+<I>Venus and Adonis</I>, was engaged in the same task.  The outline of the
+poem is taken (either directly or through an imitation of previous
+borrowers) from the Latin poet Ovid,[<A NAME="chap05fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn2">2</A>] who lived in the time of
+Christ.  Venus, the goddess of love, is enamored of a beautiful boy,
+called Adonis, and tries in vain by every device to win his affection.
+He repulses all her advances, and finally runs away to go hunting, and
+is killed by a wild boar.  Venus mourns over his dead body, and causes
+a flower (the anemone or wind flower) to spring from his blood.
+Shakespeare's handling of the story shows both the virtues and the
+defects of a young writer.  It is more diffuse, more wordy, than his
+later work, and written for the taste of another time than ours; but,
+on the other hand, it is full of vivid, picturesque language of
+melodious rhythm, and of charming little touches of country life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like most of Shakespeare's verse, it is written in iambic
+pentameter.[<A NAME="chap05fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn3">3</A>]  The poem is divided into stanzas
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P62"></A>62}</SPAN>
+of six lines
+each, in which the first and third lines rime, the second and fourth,
+and the fifth and sixth.  We represent this arrangement of rimes by
+saying that the rime scheme of the stanza is <I>a, b, a, b, c, c,</I> where
+the same letter represents the same riming sound at the ends of lines.
+As a specimen stanza, the following, often quoted because of the vivid
+picture it presents, is given.  It describes a mettlesome horse.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,      (<I>a-)<BR>
+Round breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,       (</I>b-)<BR>
+High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,  (<I>a</I>)<BR>
+Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:         (<I>b</I>)<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,          (<I>c</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Save a proud rider on so proud a back."                  (<I>c</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Rape of Lucrece</B>.&mdash;A year later, in 1594, when Shakespeare was
+thirty, he published another narrative poem, <I>The Rape of Lucrece</I>.
+The story of Lucrece had also come down from Ovid.[<A NAME="chap05fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn4">4</A>]  This poem is
+about 1800 lines in length.  It tells the old legend, found at the
+beginning of all Roman histories, how Sextus Tarquin ravished Lucrece,
+the pure and beautiful wife of Collatine, one of the Roman nobles; how
+she killed herself rather than survive her shame; and how her husband
+and friends swore in revenge to dethrone the whole Tarquin family.
+This poem, as compared with <I>Venus and Adonis</I>, shows some traces of
+increasing maturity.  The author does more serious and concentrated
+thinking as he writes.  Whether or not it is a better poem is a
+question which every man must settle for himself.  Its best passages
+are probably more impressive, its poorest ones more dull.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P63"></A>63}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The form of stanza used here is known as "rime royal," which had become
+famous two centuries before as a favorite meter of the first great
+English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.  This stanza contains seven lines
+instead of six: the rime-scheme is as follows: <I>a, b, a, b, b, c, c</I>.
+The following is a specimen stanza from the poem:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Now stole upon the time the dead of night,            (<I>a</I>)<BR>
+When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes.            (<I>b</I>)<BR>
+No comfortable star did lend his light,                (<I>a</I>)<BR>
+No noise but owls' and wolves' death-boding cries;     (<I>b</I>)<BR>
+Now serves the season that they may surprise           (<I>b</I>)<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The silly lambs.  Pure thoughts are dead and still,  (<I>c</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">While lust and murder wakes to stain and kill."      (<I>c</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+A significant fact about both of these poems is that they were
+dedicated to Henry Wriothesley (pronounced Wrisley or Rot'-es-ly), Earl
+of Southampton, who has already been mentioned as a friend and patron
+of Shakespeare.  The dedication at the beginning of <I>Venus and Adonis</I>
+is conventional and almost timid in tone; that prefixed to the Lucrece
+seems to indicate a closer and more confident friendship which had
+grown up during the intervening year.  Dedications to some prominent
+man were frequently prefixed to books by Elizabethan authors, either as
+a mark of love and respect to the person addressed, or in hopes that a
+little pecuniary help would result from this acceptable form of
+flattery.  In Shakespeare's case it may possibly have fulfilled both of
+these purposes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Sonnets</B>.&mdash;Besides these two narrative poems Shakespeare wrote
+numerous sonnets.  In order to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P64"></A>64}</SPAN>
+understand his accomplishment in
+this form of poetry, some account of the type is necessary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sonnet may be briefly defined as a rimed poem in iambic pentameter,
+containing fourteen lines, divided into the octave of eight lines and
+the sextet of six.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sonnet originated in southern Europe, and reached its highest stage
+of development in the hands of the great Italian poet Petrarch, who
+lived some two centuries before Shakespeare.  As written by him it was
+characterized by a complicated rime scheme,[<A NAME="chap05fn5text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn5">5</A>]
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P65"></A>65}</SPAN>
+which gave each one
+of these short poems an atmosphere of unusual elegance and polish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sonnets were often written in groups on a single theme.  These were
+called sonnet sequences.  Each separate poem was like a single facet of
+a diamond, illuminating the subject from a new point of view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the hands of Petrarch and other great writers of his own and later
+times, the sonnet became one of the most popular forms of verse in
+Europe.  Such popularity for any particular type of literature never
+arises without a reason.  The aim of the sonnet is to embody one single
+idea or emotion, one deep thought or wave of strong feeling, to
+concentrate the reader's whole mind on this one central idea, and to
+clinch it at the end by some epigrammatic phrase which will fasten it
+firmly in the reader's memory.  For instance, in Milton's sonnet <I>On
+his Blindness</I>, the central idea is the glory of patience; and the last
+line drives this main idea home in words so pithily adapted that they
+have become almost proverbial.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the sixteenth century, rich young Englishmen were in the habit
+of traveling in Italy for education and general culture.  They brought
+home with them a great deal that they saw in this brilliant and highly
+educated country; and among other things they imported into England the
+Italian habit of writing sonnets.  The first men who composed sonnets
+in English after the Italian models were two young noblemen, Sir Thomas
+Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who wrote just before Shakespeare was
+born.  Their work called out a crowd of imitators; and in a few years
+the writing of sonnets became the fashion.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P66"></A>66}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+As a young man, Shakespeare found himself among a crowd of authors,
+with whom sonnetteering was a literary craze; and it is not surprising
+that he should follow the fashion.  Most of these were probably
+composed about 1594, when the poet was thirty years old; but in regard
+to this there is some uncertainty.  A few were certainly later.  They
+were not printed in a complete volume until 1609;[<A NAME="chap05fn6text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn6">6</A>] and then they were
+issued by a piratical publisher, apparently without the author's
+consent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the Shakespearean sonnet the complicated rime scheme of its Italian
+original has become very much simplified, being reduced to the
+following form: <I>a, b, a, b; c, d, c, d</I>; <I>e, f, e, f</I>; <I>g, g</I>.  This
+is merely three four-line stanzas with alternate rimes, plus a final
+couplet.  Such a simplified form had already been used by other English
+authors, from whom our poet borrowed it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shakespeare's sonnets, apart from some scattered ones in his plays, are
+154[<A NAME="chap05fn7text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn7">7</A>] in number.  They are usually divided into two groups or
+sequences.  The first sequence consists of numbers 1-126 (according to
+the original edition); and most of them are unquestionably addressed to
+a man.  The second sequence contains numbers 127-154, and the majority
+of these are clearly written to a woman.  There are a few in both
+groups which do not show clearly the sex of the person addressed, and
+also a few which are not addressed to any one.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P67"></A>67}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Beyond some vague guesses, we have no idea as to the identity of the
+"dark lady" who inspired most of the last twenty-eight sonnets.
+Somewhat less uncertainty surrounds the man to whom the poet speaks in
+the first sequence.  A not improbable theory is that he was the Earl of
+Southampton already mentioned, although this cannot be considered as
+proved.[<A NAME="chap05fn8text"></A><A HREF="#chap05fn8">8</A>]  The chief arguments which point to Southampton are: (<I>a</I>)
+That Shakespeare had already dedicated <I>Venus and Adonis</I> and <I>Lucrece</I>
+to him; (<I>b</I>) that he was regarded at that time as a patron of poets;
+(<I>c</I>) that the statements about this unnamed friend, his reluctance to
+marry, his fair complexion and personal beauty, his mixture of virtues
+and faults, fit Southampton better than any other man of that period
+whom we have any cause to associate with Shakespeare; and (<I>d</I>) that he
+was the only patron of Shakespeare's early years known to us, and was
+warmly interested in the poet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The literary value of the different sonnets varies considerably.  When
+an author is writing a fashionable
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P68"></A>68}</SPAN>
+form of verse, he is apt to
+become more or less imitative and artificial at times, saying things
+merely because it is the vogue to say them; and Shakespeare here cannot
+be wholly acquitted of this fault.  But at other times he speaks from
+heart to heart with a depth of real emotion and wealth of vivid
+expression which has given us some of the noblest poetry in the
+language.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another question, more difficult to settle than the literary value of
+these poems, is their value as a revelation of Shakespeare's own life.
+If we could take in earnest everything which is said in the sonnets, we
+should learn a great many facts about the man who wrote them.  But
+modern scholarship seems to feel more and more that we cannot take all
+their statements literally.  We must remember here again that
+Shakespeare says many things because it was the fashion in his day for
+sonnetteers to say them.  For example, he gives some eloquent
+descriptions of the woes of old age; but we know that contemporary
+poets lamented about old age when they had not yet reached years of
+discretion; and consequently we are not at all convinced that
+Shakespeare was either really old or prematurely aged.  Such
+considerations need not interfere with our enjoyment of the poetry, for
+the author's imagination may have made a poetical fancy seem real to
+him as he wrote; but they certainly do not lessen our doubts in regard
+to the value of the sonnets as autobiography.  The majority of the
+sonnets, at least, cannot be said to throw any light on Shakespeare's
+life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are, however, six sonnets, connected with each other in subject,
+which, more definitely than any of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P69"></A>69}</SPAN>
+the others, shadow forth a real
+event in the poet's life.  These are numbers XL, XLI, XLII, CXXXIII,
+CXXXIV, CXLIV.  They seem to show that a woman whom the poet loved had
+forsaken him for the man to whom the sonnets are written; and that the
+poet submits to this, owing to his deep friendship for the man.  Two of
+these sonnets are given below.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+SONNET CXLIV
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Two loves I have of comfort and despair,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Which like two spirits do suggest me still:</SPAN><BR>
+The better angel is a man right fair,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.</SPAN><BR>
+To win me soon to hell, my female evil<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Tempteth my better angel from my side,</SPAN><BR>
+And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Wooing his purity with her foul pride.</SPAN><BR>
+And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Suspect I may, yet not directly tell:</SPAN><BR>
+But being both from me, both to each friend,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">I guess one angel in another's hell:</SPAN><BR>
+Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,<BR>
+Till my bad angel fire my good one out."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+SONNET XLI
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"These pretty wrongs that liberty commits,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">When I am sometime absent from thy heart,</SPAN><BR>
+Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For still temptation follows where thou art.</SPAN><BR>
+Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;</SPAN><BR>
+And when a woman woos, what woman's son<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?</SPAN><BR>
+Ay me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,</SPAN><BR>
+Who lead thee in their riot even there<BR>
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P70"></A>70}</SPAN>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth,</SPAN><BR>
+Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,<BR>
+Thine, by thy beauty being false to me."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Again, in Sonnet CX, we find an allusion to the distasteful nature of
+the actor's profession which seems to ring sincere.  Thus in a few
+cases Shakespeare may be giving us glimpses into his real heart; but in
+general the sentiments expressed in his sonnets could be explained as
+due to the literary conventions of this time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Other Poems</B>.&mdash;The two narrative poems and the sonnets make up most of
+Shakespeare's nondramatic poetry.  A word may be added about some other
+scattered bits of verse which are connected with his name.  In 1599 an
+unscrupulous publisher, named William Jaggard, brought out a book of
+miscellaneous poems by various authors, called <I>The Passionate
+Pilgrim</I>.  Since Shakespeare was a popular writer, his name was sure to
+increase the sale of any book; so Jaggard, with an advertising instinct
+worthy of a later age, coolly printed the whole thing as the work of
+Shakespeare.  As a matter of fact, only a few short pieces were by him;
+and were probably stolen from some private manuscript.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1601 a poem, <I>The Phoenix and the Turtle</I>, was also printed as his
+in an appendix to a longer poem by another man.  We cannot trust the
+printer when he signs it with Shakespeare's name, and we have no other
+evidence about its authorship; but the majority of scholars believe it
+to be genuine.  Another poem, <I>A Lover's Complaint</I>, which was printed
+in the same volume with the sonnets in 1609, is of distinctly less
+merit and probably spurious.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P71"></A>71}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Lastly, the short poems incorporated in the plays deserve brief notice.
+In a way they are part of the plots in which they are embedded; but
+they may also be considered as separate lyrics.  Several sonnets and
+verses in stanza form occur in <I>Romeo and Juliet</I> and in the early
+comedies.  Three of these were printed as separate poems in <I>The
+Passionate Pilgrim</I>.  Far more important than the above, however, are
+the songs which are scattered through all the plays early and late.
+Their merit is of a supreme quality; some of the most famous musical
+composers, inspired by his works, have graced them with admirable
+music.  One of the most attractive features in his lyrics is their
+spontaneous ease of expression.  They seem to lilt into music of their
+own accord, as naturally as birds sing.  The best of these are found in
+the comedies of the Second Period and in the romantic plays of the
+Fourth.  "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more" in <I>Much Ado About
+Nothing</I>; "Blow, blow, thou winter wind" in <I>As You Like it</I>; "Hark,
+hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings" in <I>Cymbeline</I>; and "Full fathom
+five thy father lies" in <I>The Tempest</I>,&mdash;these and others like them
+show that the author, though primarily a dramatist, could be among the
+greatest of song writers when he tried.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The following lines taken from the little-read play, <I>The Two Gentlemen
+of Verona</I>, may serve to illustrate the perfection of the Shakespearean
+lyric.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+SONG<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Who is Sylvia? what is she,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">That all our swains commend her?</SPAN><BR>
+Holy, fair, and wise is she;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The heaven such grace did lend her,</SPAN><BR>
+That she might admired be.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P72"></A>72}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Is she kind as she is fair?<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For beauty lives with kindness:</SPAN><BR>
+Love doth to her eyes repair<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">To help him of his blindness,</SPAN><BR>
+And being helped, inhabits there.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Then to Sylvia let us sing,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">That Sylvia is excelling;</SPAN><BR>
+She excels each mortal thing<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Upon the dull earth dwelling;</SPAN><BR>
+To her let us garlands bring.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Such are Shakespeare's nondramatic writings.  Two narrative poems with
+the faults of youth but with many redeeming virtues; one hundred and
+fifty-four sonnets, very unequal in merit but touching at their best
+the high-water mark of English verse; a few stray fragments of disputed
+authorship and doubtful value; and finally a handful of scattered
+songs, short, but almost perfect of their kind,&mdash;this is what we have
+outside of the plays.  Neither in quantity nor quality can this work
+compare with the poetic value of the great dramas; but had it been
+written by any other man, we should have thought it wonderful enough.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+On the sonnets, the appendix to Mr. Sidney Lee's book, <I>A Life of
+William Shakespeare</I>, 1909, is particularly valuable.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap05fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="chap05fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="chap05fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn1text">1</A>] Shakespeare in his dedication calls it "the first heir of my
+invention"; but opinions differ as to what he meant by this.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn2text">2</A>] Ovid's <I>Metamorphoses</I>, Book X.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn3text">3</A>] That is, the common, or standard, line has ten syllables with an
+accent on every even syllable, as in the following line:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">&nbsp; 1 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  <B>2</B> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 3 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <B>4</B> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 5 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <B>6</B> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 7 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <B>8</B> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  9 &nbsp;&nbsp; <B>10</B></SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">The NIGHT of SORrow NOW is TURN'D to DAY.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn4text">4</A>] From his <I>Fasti</I>.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn5"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn5text">5</A>] The rime scheme of the Italian type divided each sonnet into two
+parts, the first one of eight lines, the second of six.  In the first
+eight lines the rimes usually went a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a; but
+sometimes <I>a, b, a, b, a, b, a, b</I>: in both cases using only two rimes
+for the eight lines.  In the second or six-line part there were several
+different arrangements, of which the following were the most common:
+(1) <I>c, d, e, c, d, e</I>; (2) <I>c, d, c, d, c, d</I>; (3) <I>c, d, e, d, c, e</I>.
+All of these rime-schemes alike were intended, by their constant
+repetition and interlocking of the same rimes, to give the whole poem
+an air of exquisite workmanship, like that of a finely modeled vase.
+Here is an English sonnet of Milton's, imitating the form of Petrarch's
+and illustrating its rime scheme:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+"When I consider how my light is spent                       (<I>a</I>)<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,        (<I>b</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">And that one talent which is death to hide           (<I>b</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent             (<I>a</I>)<BR>
+To serve therewith my Maker, and present                     (<I>a</I>)<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">My true account, lest He returning chide,            (<I>b</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?             (<I>b</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+I fondly ask.  But Patience, to prevent                      (<I>a</I>)<BR>
+That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need                 (<I>c</I>)<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Either man's work or his own gifts.  Who best        (<I>d</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best.  His state    (<I>e</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,                   (<I>c</I>)<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">And post o'er land and ocean without rest;           (<I>d</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">They also serve who only stand and wait."              (<I>e</I>)</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="chap05fn6"></A>
+<A NAME="chap05fn7"></A>
+<A NAME="chap05fn8"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn6text">6</A>] See p. <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn7text">7</A>] Including at least three which do not have in all respects the
+regular sonnet form.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap05fn8text">8</A>] Southampton's chief rival for this position in the opinion of
+scholars has been William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.  One point in his
+favor has been that the initials W. H. (supposed to stand for William
+Herbert) are given as those of the person to whom the dedication of the
+volume was addressed by its publisher.  Mr. Sidney Lee thinks, however,
+that this is a dedication by the printer to the printer's friend, not
+by Shakespeare to Shakespeare's friend,&mdash;a possible, though not wholly
+convincing, explanation.  The First Folio was dedicated to Herbert
+after Shakespeare's death, but we have no evidence that the two men
+were intimate friends while living.  Meres mentions the sonnets of
+Shakespeare in 1598, so part of them at least must have been written
+before that year; but Herbert did not have a permanent residence in
+London until 1598, and was then only eighteen years old.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P73"></A>73}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE's PLAYS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The most profitable method of studying any writer is to take up his
+works in the order in which they were written.  More and more this
+method is being adopted toward all authors, ancient and modern, Virgil
+or Milton, Dante or Tennyson.  We are thus enabled to trace the gradual
+growth of the poet's mind from one production to another,&mdash;his constant
+increase in skill, in judgment, in knowledge of mankind.  The great
+characteristic of the genius is, not simply that he knows more than
+other men at first, but that he has in him such vast possibilities of
+growth, of improving with time, and learning by his own mistakes.
+Consequently, it is very important to know that a certain play or poem
+is faulty because it was its author's first crude attempt; that a
+second is better because it was written five years later in the light
+of added experience; and that a third is better still because it came
+ten years after the second, at the climax of the writer's powers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Besides showing the author's growth, this method also shows his
+relation to the great literary movements of his time.  As fashions in
+dress and sports keep shifting, fashions in literature are changing
+just as constantly, and the dominant type may alter two or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P74"></A>74}</SPAN>
+three
+times during one man's life.  If an author changes to meet these
+demands, it is important to know that one of his plays was merry comedy
+because written at a time when merry comedies filled all the
+playhouses; and that another is sober tragedy because composed while
+most of the theaters were acting and demanding sober tragedy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now Shakespeare not only improved a great deal while composing his
+plays, but also conformed, to some extent at least, to the different
+tastes of his audience at different periods of his life.  Hence, a
+knowledge of the order in which his plays were written is very
+valuable, and should form the first step in a careful study of his
+writings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Unfortunately, when we attempt to arrange Shakespeare's plays in
+chronological order, we encounter many practical difficulties in
+finding just what this order is.  We know that Tennyson developed a
+great deal as a poet between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three; and
+we can show this by pointing to four successive volumes of his poems,
+published respectively at the ages of eighteen, twenty-one,
+twenty-three, and thirty-three, and each rising in merit above the one
+before it.  We know definitely in what order these volumes come, for we
+find on the title-page of each the date when it was printed.  But
+scarcely half of Shakespeare's plays were printed in this way during
+his life.  The others, some twenty in all, are found only in one big
+folio volume which gives no hint of their proper order or year of
+composition, and which bears on its title-page the date of the
+printing, 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died.  Many plays, too,
+published
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P75"></A>75}</SPAN>
+early, were written some years before publication, so
+that the date of printing on the flyleaf of the quarto, even where a
+quarto exists, simply shows that the play was written sometime before
+that year but does not tell at all <I>how long</I> before.  How, then, are
+we to trace Shakespeare's growth from year to year, through his
+successive dramas, when the quartos help us so little and when the
+majority of these dramas are piled before us in one volume by the
+editors of the First Folio, without a word of explanation as to which
+plays are early attempts and which mature work?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At first sight the above problem seems almost hopeless.  The researches
+of scholars for over a century, however, have gathered together a mass
+of evidence which determines pretty accurately the order in which these
+different plays were written.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This evidence is of two kinds, external and internal.  By external
+evidence we mean that found <I>outside</I> of the play, references to it in
+other books of the time, and similar material.  By internal evidence we
+mean that found <I>inside</I> of the play itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>External Evidence</B>.&mdash;This is of several kinds.  In the first place,
+every play which was to be printed had to be entered in the Stationers'
+Register, and all these entries are dated.  Hence we know that certain
+plays were prepared for publication by the time mentioned.  For
+instance, "A Book called Antony and Cleopatra" was entered May 20,
+1608; and although apparently the book was not finally printed at that
+time, and although our only copy of <I>Antony and Cleopatra</I> is that in
+the Folio of 1623, yet we feel reasonably certain from this entry that
+this play must have been written either
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P76"></A>76}</SPAN>
+in 1608 or earlier.  In
+addition to the record of the Stationers' Register, we have the dates
+on the title-pages of such plays as appeared in Quarto.  These
+evidences, it must be remembered, determine only the latest possible
+date for the play, as many were written long before they were printed,
+or even entered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again, other men sometimes used in their books expressions borrowed
+from Shakespeare or remarks which sound like allusions to something of
+his.  Here, if we know the date of the other man's book, we learn that
+the play of Shakespeare from which he borrowed must have been in
+existence before that date.  Thus, when the poet Barksted prints a poem
+in 1607 and borrows a passage in it from <I>Measure for Measure</I>, we
+conclude that <I>Measure for Measure</I> must have been produced before
+1607, or Barksted could not have copied from it.  This form of evidence
+has its dangers, since occasionally we cannot tell whether Shakespeare
+borrowed from the other man or the other man from him; nevertheless it
+is often valuable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Furthermore, we sometimes find in contemporary books or papers, which
+are dated, an account of the acting of some play.  A law student named
+John Manningham left a diary in which he records that on February 2,
+1602 he saw a play called <I>Twelfth Night or What You Will</I> in the Hall
+of the Middle Temple; and his account of the play shows that it was
+Shakespeare's.  Dr. Simon Forman, in a similar diary, describes the
+performance of three Shakespearean plays, two of the accounts being
+dated.  Still more important in this class is the famous allusion,
+already quoted, by Francis Meres in his <I>Palladis Tamia</I>, a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P77"></A>77}</SPAN>
+book
+published in 1598.  In this he mentions with high praise six comedies
+of Shakespeare: <I>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</I>, <I>The Comedy of Errors</I>,
+<I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>, <I>Love's Labour's Won</I>,[<A NAME="chap06fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn1">1</A>] <I>A Midsummer Night's
+Dream</I>, and <I>The Merchant of Venice</I>; and six "tragedies": <I>Richard
+II</I>, <I>Richard III</I>, <I>Henry IV</I>, <I>King John</I>, <I>Titus Andronicus</I>, and
+<I>Romeo and Juliet</I>.[<A NAME="chap06fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn2">2</A>] Hence, we know that all these plays were written
+and acted somewhere before 1598, although three of them did not appear
+in print until 1623.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The above list does not exhaust all the forms of external evidence, but
+merely shows its general nature.  External evidence, as can be seen, is
+not something mysterious and peculiar, but simply an application of
+common sense to the problem in hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Frequently two pieces of external evidence will accomplish what neither
+one could do alone.  Often one fact will show that a play came
+somewhere before a certain date, but not show how long before, and
+another will prove that the play came after another date, without
+telling how long after.  For example, <I>King Lear</I> was written before
+1606, for we have a definite statement that it was performed then.  It
+was written after 1603, for it borrowed material from a book printed in
+that year.  This method of hemming in a play between its earliest and
+its latest possible date is common and useful, both with Shakespeare
+and with other writers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Internal Evidence</B>.&mdash;By the above methods a few plays have been dated
+quite accurately, and many others confined between limits only two or
+three years
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P78"></A>78}</SPAN>
+apart.  But many plays are still dated very vaguely,
+and some are not dated at all.  For further results we must fall back
+on internal evidence.  The first, though by no means the most
+important, form of this consists of allusions <I>within the play to
+contemporary events</I>.  If a boy should read in an old diary of his
+grandmother's that she had just heard of the fight at Gettysburg, he
+would feel certain that the words were written a few days after that
+great battle, even if there were no date anywhere in the manuscript.
+In the same way, when the Prologue of Shakespeare's <I>Henry V</I> alludes
+to the fact that Elizabeth's general (the Earl of Essex) is in Ireland
+quelling a rebellion, we know that this was written between April and
+September of 1599, the period during which Essex actually was in
+Ireland.  Similarly, certain details in <I>The Tempest</I> appear to have
+been borrowed from accounts of the wreck of Sir George Somers's ship in
+1609.  As Shakespeare could not have borrowed from these accounts
+before they existed, he must have written his comedy sometime after
+1609.[<A NAME="chap06fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn3">3</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the main form of internal evidence, what is usually meant by that
+term, is the testimony in the character and style of the plays
+themselves as to the maturity of the man who wrote them.  Just as the
+stump of a tree sawn across shows its age by its successive rings of
+growth, so a poem, if carefully
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P79"></A>79}</SPAN>
+examined, shows the rings of
+growth in the author's style of thought and expression.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The simplest and most tangible form of this evidence is that which is
+found in meter.  If we read in order of composition those plays which
+we have already succeeded in dating, we shall find certain habits of
+versification steadily growing on the author, as play succeeded play.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the first place, most of the lines in the early plays are
+'end-stopped'; that is, the sense halts at the close of each line with
+a resulting pause in reading.  In the later plays the sense frequently
+runs over from one line into another, producing what is called a
+'run-on' line instead of an 'end-stopped' one.  By comparing the
+following passages, the first of which contains nothing but end-stopped
+lines and the second several run-on lines, the reader can easily see
+the difference.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+(<I>a</I>) From an early play:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"I from my mistress come to you in post:<BR>
+If I return, I shall be post indeed,<BR>
+For she will score your fault upon my pate.<BR>
+Methinks your maw, like mine, should be your clock,<BR>
+And strike you home without a messenger."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">&mdash;<I>Comedy of Errors</I>, I, ii, 63-67.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+(<I>b</I>) From a late play:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Mark your divorce, young sir,  [end-stopped]<BR>
+Whom son I dare not call.  Thou art too base  [run-on]<BR>
+To be acknowledg'd.  Thou, a sceptre's heir,  [end-stopped]<BR>
+That thus affects a sheep-hook!  Thou old traitor,  [end-stopped]<BR>
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P80"></A>80}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+I am sorry that by hanging thee I can  [run-on]<BR>
+But shorten your life one week.  And thou, fresh piece  [run-on]<BR>
+Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know  [end-stopped]<BR>
+The royal fool thou cop'st with...&mdash;"<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">&mdash;<I>Winter's Tale</I>, IV, iv, 427-434.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Since Shakespeare keeps constantly increasing his use of run-on lines
+in plays for which dates are known, it seems reasonable to assume that
+he did this in all his work, that it was a habit which grew on him from
+year to year.  Hence, if we sort out his plays in order, putting those
+with the fewest run-on lines first and those with the greatest number
+last, we shall have good reason for believing that this represents
+roughly the order in which they were written.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A second form of metrical evidence is found in the proportion of
+'masculine' and 'feminine' endings in the verse.  A line has a
+masculine ending when its last syllable is stressed; when it ends, for
+example, on words or phrases like <I>behold'</I>, <I>control'</I>, <I>no more'</I>,
+<I>begone'</I>.  On the other hand, if the last stressed syllable of the
+line is followed by an unstressed one, the two together are called a
+feminine ending.  Instances of this would be lines ending in such words
+or phrases as, <I>unho'/ly</I>, <I>forgive' /me</I>, <I>benight'/ed</I>.  Notice the
+difference between them in the following passage:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Our revels now are ended.  These our actors  [feminine]<BR>
+As I foretold you, were all spirits, and  [masculine]<BR>
+Are melted into air, into thin air;  [masculine]<BR>
+And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,  [feminine]<BR>
+The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,  [feminine]<BR>
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P81"></A>81}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  [masculine]<BR>
+Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,  [masculine]<BR>
+And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,  [feminine]<BR>
+Leave not a rack behind."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">&mdash;<I>Tempest</I>, IV, i, 147-166.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In the main, although with some exceptions, the number of feminine
+endings, like the number of run-on lines, increases as the plays become
+later in date.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A third form of ending, which practically does not appear at all in the
+early plays, and which recurs with increasing frequency in the later
+ones, is what is called a 'weak ending.'[<A NAME="chap06fn4text"></A><A HREF="#chap06fn4">4</A>]  This occurs whenever a
+run-on line ends in a word which according to the meter needs to be
+stressed, and according to the sense ought not to be.  Here there is a
+clash between meter and meaning, and the reader compromises by making a
+pause before the last syllable instead of emphasizing the syllable
+itself.  Below are two examples of weak endings:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"It should the good ship so have swallowed, and<BR>
+The fraughting souls within her."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">"I will rend an oak</SPAN><BR>
+And peg thee in his knotty entrails <I>till</I><BR>
+Thou hast howled away twelve winters."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Lastly, we have the evidence of rime.  Run-on lines, feminine endings,
+and weak endings constantly increase as Shakespeare grows older.  Rime,
+on the other hand, in general decreases.  The early plays are
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P82"></A>82}</SPAN>
+full
+of it; the later ones have very little.  It does not follow that the
+chronological order of the individual plays could be exactly determined
+by their percentage of riming lines, for subject matter makes a great
+difference.  In a staged fairy story, like <I>A Midsummer Night's Dream</I>,
+the poet would naturally fall into couplets.  But, other things being
+equal, a large amount of rime is always a sign of early work.  This is
+especially true when the rimes occur, not in pairs, but in quatrains or
+sonnet forms, or (as they sometimes do in the first comedies) in scraps
+of sing-song doggerel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such is the internal evidence from the various changes in
+versification.  Its value, as must always be remembered, lies in the
+fact that the results of these different tests in the main agree with
+each other and with such external evidence as we have.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, wholly aside from metrical details, there is a large amount of
+internal evidence of other kinds,&mdash;evidence which cannot be measured by
+the rule of thumb, but which every intelligent reader must notice.  We
+feel instinctively that one play mirrors the views and emotions of
+youth, another those of middle age.  A man's face does not change more
+between twenty-five and forty than his mind changes during the same
+interval; and the difference between his thoughts at those periods is
+as distinct often as the difference between the rounded lines of youth
+and the stern features of middle age.  This is a subject which will be
+better understood in the light of the next chapter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Order of the Plays</B>.&mdash;Upon such evidence as has been described, a
+list of Shakespeare's plays in their
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P83"></A>83}</SPAN>
+chronological order can now
+be presented.  The details of evidence on date may be found in the
+account of the plays which appears in Chapters X-XIII.
+</P>
+
+<PRE>
+Love's Labour's Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1591
+The Comedy of Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1591
+II and III Henry VI  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1592
+Richard III  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592-1593
+Two Gentlemen of Verona  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592
+King John  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592-1593
+Richard II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1594
+Titus Andronicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1594
+Midsummer Night's Dream  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1596
+Romeo and Juliet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1591, revised 1597
+The Merchant of Venice . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1594-1596
+The Taming of the Shrew  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1596-1597
+I Henry IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1597
+II Henry IV  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1598
+Henry V  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+Merry Wives of Windsor . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+Much Ado about Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+As You Like It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599-1600
+Julius Caesar  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1699-1601
+Twelfth Night  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1601
+Troilus and Cressida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1602
+All's Well That Ends Well  . . . . . . . . . . . .  1602
+Hamlet . . . . . . . . . . .  1602, 1603-1604 (two versions).
+Measure for Measure  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1603
+Othello  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1604
+King Lear  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1604-1605
+Macbeth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1605-1606
+Antony and Cleopatra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1607-1608
+Timon of Athens  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1607-1608
+Pericles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1608
+Coriolanus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1609
+Cymbeline  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1610
+The Winter's Tale  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1610-1611
+</PRE>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P84"></A>84}</SPAN>
+
+<PRE>
+The Tempest  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1611
+King Henry the Eighth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1612-1613
+</PRE>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Among the many books and articles on the subject of this chapter, the
+following may be mentioned: <I>Shakespeare Manual</I> by F. L. Fleay
+(Macmillan and Co., London, 1876); <I>Shakspere</I>, by E. Dowden (American
+Book Co., New York); <I>Cartae Shakespeariante</I> by D. Sambert.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap06fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="chap06fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="chap06fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn1text">1</A>] This play is either lost, or preserved under another title.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn2text">2</A>] Quoted in full in Chapter I, p. <A HREF="#P10">10</A>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn3text">3</A>] This form of evidence is usually weak and unreliable.  Most of the
+supposed allusions are much more vague than the two given.  Where there
+have been similar events in history, the allusion might be to one which
+we had forgotten when we thought it was to a similar one which we knew.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap06fn4text">4</A>] Mr. Ingram makes a distinction between "light" and "weak" endings.
+Both are classed together as weak endings above.  The distinction seems
+to us too subtle for any but professional students.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P85"></A>85}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+SHAKESPEARE'S DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+As the reader will remember, our main aim in attempting to date
+Shakespeare's plays was to trace through them his development as a
+dramatist and poet.  Just as the successive chambers of the nautilus
+shell show the stages of growth of its dead and vanished tenant, so the
+plays of Shakespeare show how
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Each new temple, nobler than the last,<BR>
+Shut him from heaven with a dome more vast."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The great thing which distinguishes the genius from the ordinary man,
+we repeat, is his power of constant improvement; and we can trace this
+improvement here from achievements less than those of many a modern
+writer up to the noblest masterpieces of all time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Much of the material connected with this development has already been
+discussed in another connection under Internal Evidence.  Internal
+evidence, however, that one play is later than another, is nothing else
+than the marks of intellectual growth in the poet's mind between those
+two dates.  We arrange the plays in order according to indications of
+intellectual growth, just as one could fit together again the broken
+fragments of a nautilus shell, guided by the relative size of the ever
+expanding chambers.  So, in
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P86"></A>86}</SPAN>
+discussing Shakespeare's development,
+we must bring up much old material, examining it from a different point
+of view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Meter</B>.&mdash;In the first place, the poet develops wonderfully in the
+command of his medium of expression; that is, in his mastery of meter.
+What is meant by the fact that as Shakespeare grew older, wiser, more
+experienced, he used more run-on lines, more weak endings, more
+feminine endings?  Simply this, that by means of these devices he
+gained more variety and expressiveness in his verse.  A passage from
+his early work (in spite of much that is fine) with every ending alike
+masculine and strong, and with every line end-stopped, harps away
+tediously in the same swing, like one lonely instrument on one
+monotonous note.  His later verse, on the other hand, with masculine
+and feminine endings, weak ones and strong, end-stopped and run-on
+lines, continually relieving each other, is like the blended music of a
+great orchestra, continually varying, now stern, now soft, in harmony
+with the thought it expresses.  Below are given two passages, the first
+from an early play, the second from a late one.  In print one may look
+as well as the other; but if one reads them aloud, he will see in a
+moment how much more variety and expressiveness there is in the second,
+especially for the purposes of acting.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Urge not my father's anger, Eglamour,<BR>
+But think upon my grief, a lady's grief,<BR>
+And on the justice of my flying hence,<BR>
+To keep me from a most unholy match,<BR>
+Which heaven and fortune still rewards with plagues.<BR>
+I do desire thee, even from a heart.<BR>
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P87"></A>87}</SPAN>
+As full of sorrows as the sea of sands,<BR>
+To bear me company and go with me;<BR>
+If not, to hide what I have said to thee,<BR>
+That I may venture to depart alone."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 5em">&mdash;<I>Two Gentlemen of Verona</I>, IV, iii, 27-36.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">"By whose aid,</SPAN><BR>
+Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd<BR>
+The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,<BR>
+And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault<BR>
+Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder<BR>
+Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak<BR>
+With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory<BR>
+Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up<BR>
+The pine and cedar; graves at my command<BR>
+Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth<BR>
+By my so potent art.  But this rough magic<BR>
+I here abjure, and, when I have requir'd<BR>
+Some heavenly music, which even now I do,<BR>
+To work mine end upon their senses that<BR>
+This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,<BR>
+Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,<BR>
+And deeper than did ever plummet sound<BR>
+I'll drown my book."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 5em">&mdash;<I>Tempest</I>, V, i, 40-57.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The same reason shows why Shakespeare used less and less rime as his
+taste and experience ripened.  Rime is a valuable ornament for songs
+and lyric poetry generally; but from poetry which is actually to be
+acted on the English stage it takes away the most indispensable of all
+qualities, the natural, life-like tone of real speech.  Notice this in
+the difference between the two extracts below.  Observe how stilted and
+artificial the first one seems; and see how the second combines the
+melody and dignity of poetry with the simple naturalness of living
+language.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P88"></A>88}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease,<BR>
+And utters it again when God doth please.<BR>
+He is wit's pedler, and retails his wares<BR>
+At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs;<BR>
+And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know,<BR>
+Have not the grace to grace it with such show.<BR>
+This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve;<BR>
+Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 5em">&mdash;<I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>, V, ii, 315-321</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"I was not much afeard; for once or twice<BR>
+I was about to speak and tell him plainly<BR>
+The self-same sun that shines upon his court<BR>
+Hides not his visage from our cottage, but<BR>
+Looks on all alike.  Will't please you, sir, be gone?<BR>
+I told you what would come of this.  Beseech you,<BR>
+Of your own state take care.  This dream of mine&mdash;<BR>
+Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,<BR>
+But milk my ewes and weep."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 5em">&mdash;<I>Winter's Tale</I>, IV, iv, 452-400.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+I do not mean to imply by the above that Shakespeare's early verse is
+poor according to ordinary standards.  It is not; it contains much that
+is fine.  But it is far inferior to his later work, and it is inferior
+in those very details which time and experience alone can teach.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An important point to remember is that while Shakespeare was growing in
+metrical skill, he was not growing alone.  A crowd of other authors
+around him were developing in a similar way; and he was learning from
+them and they from him.  The use of blank verse in English when
+Shakespeare began to write was a comparatively new practice, and, like
+all new inventions, for a time it was only imperfectly understood.  Men
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P89"></A>89}</SPAN>
+had to learn by experiments and by each other's successes and
+failures, just as men in recent years have learned to fly.  Shakespeare
+surpassed all the others, as the Wright brothers in their first years
+surpassed all their fellow-aeronauts; but like the Wright brothers he
+was only part of a general movement.  No other man changed as much as
+he in one lifetime, but the whole system of dramatic versification was
+changing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Taste</B>.&mdash;But wholly aside from questions of meter, Shakespeare
+improved greatly in taste and judgment between the beginning and middle
+of his career.  This is shown especially in his humor.  To the young
+man humor means nothing but the cause for a temporary laugh; to a more
+developed mind it becomes a pleasant sunshine that lingers in the
+memory long after reading, and interprets all life in a manner more
+cheerful, sympathetic, and sane.  The early comedies give us nothing
+but the temporary laugh; and even this is produced chiefly by fantastic
+situations or plays on words, clever but far-fetched, puns and conceits
+so overworked that their very cleverness jars at times.  On the other
+hand, in the great humorous characters of his middle period, like
+Falstaff and Beatrice, the poet is opening up to us new vistas of
+quiet, lasting amusement and indulgent knowledge of our imperfect but
+lovable fellow-men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The same growth of taste is shown in the dramatist's increasing
+tendency to tone down all revolting details and avoid flowery,
+overwrought rhetoric.  Nobody knows whether Shakespeare wrote all of
+<I>Titus Andronicus</I> entire or simply revised it; but we feel sure that
+the older Shakespeare would have been unwilling, even as
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P90"></A>90}</SPAN>
+a
+reviser, to squander so much that is beautiful on such an orgy of blood
+and violence.  <I>Romeo and Juliet</I> is full of beautiful poetry; but even
+here occasional lapses show the undeveloped taste of the young writer.
+Notice the flowery and fantastic imagery in the following passage,
+where Lady Capulet is praising Paris, her daughter's intended husband:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face<BR>
+And find delight writ there with beauty's pen;<BR>
+Examine every married lineament<BR>
+And see how one another lends content,<BR>
+And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies<BR>
+Find written in the margent of his eyes.<BR>
+This precious book of love, this unbound lover,<BR>
+To beautify him, only lacks a cover.<BR>
+The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride<BR>
+For fair without the fair within to hide.<BR>
+That book in many's eyes doth share the glory,<BR>
+That in gold clasps locks in the golden story."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 5em">&mdash;<I>Romeo and Juliet</I>, I, iii, 81-92.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we try to picture to ourselves the post-wedlock edition of Paris
+described above, we shall see how a young man's imagination may run
+away with his judgment.  There are passages in this play as good,
+perhaps, as anything which the author ever wrote; but if we compare
+such fantastic imagery with the uniform excellence of the later
+masterpieces, we shall see how much Shakespeare unlearned and outgrew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Character Study</B>.&mdash;Still more significant is the poet's development in
+the conception of character.  In no other way, probably, does an
+observant mind change and expand so much as in this.  For the infant
+all men fall into two very simple categories:&mdash;people whom he likes
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P91"></A>91}</SPAN>
+and people whom he doesn't.  The boy of ten has increased these
+two classes to six or eight.  The young man of twenty finds a few more,
+and begins to suspect that men who act alike may not have the same
+motives and emotions.  But as the keen-eyed observer nears middle age,
+he begins to realize that no two souls are exact duplicates of each
+other; and that behind every human eye there lies an undiscovered
+country, as mysterious, as fascinating, as that which Alice found
+behind the looking-glass,&mdash;a country like, and yet unlike, the one we
+know, where dreams grow beautiful as tropic plants, and passions crouch
+like wild beasts in the jungle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Great as he was, Shakespeare had to learn this lesson like other men;
+but he learned it much better.  In <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>, generally
+considered his earliest play, he has not led us into the inner selves
+of his men and women at all, has not seemed to realize that they
+possess inner selves.  At the conclusion we know precisely as much of
+them as we should if we had met them at a formal reception, and no
+more.  The princess is pretty and clever on dress parade; but how does
+the real princess feel when parade is over and she is alone in her
+chamber?  The later Shakespeare might have told us, did tell us, in
+regard to more than one other princess; but the young Shakespeare has
+nothing to tell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Richard III</I>, which is supposed to have come some three years later,
+is a marked advance in characterization, but still far short of the
+goal.  Here the dramatist attempts, indeed, to analyze the tyrant's
+motives and emotions; but he does not yet understand what
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P92"></A>92}</SPAN>
+he is
+trying to explain, and for that reason the being whom he creates is
+portentous, but not human.  To understand this, you need only compare
+Richard with Macbeth.  In Macbeth we have a host of different
+forces&mdash;ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacillation,
+affection, despair&mdash;all struggling together as they might in you or me;
+and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize
+that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like
+ourselves.  But in Richard there is no human complexity.  His is the
+fearful simplicity of the lightning, the battering-ram, the earthquake,
+forces whose achievements are terrible and whose inner existence a
+blank.  Richard hammers his bloody way through life like the legendary
+Iron Man with his flail, awe-inspiring as a destructive agency, not as
+a human being.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two or three years later we find Shakespeare in his conception of
+Shylock capable of greater things as a student of character.  In this
+pathetic, lonely, vindictive figure, exiled forever from the warm
+fireside of human friendship by those inherent faults which he can no
+more change than the tiger can change his claws, the long tragedy which
+accompanies the survival of the fittest finds a voice.  Yet even in
+Shylock the dramatist has not reached his highest achievement in
+character study.  The old Jew is drawn splendidly to the life, but he
+is a comparatively easy character to draw, a man with a few simple and
+prominent traits.  Depicting such a man is like drawing a pronounced
+Roman profile, less difficult to do, and less satisfactory when done,
+than tracing the subdued curves of a more evenly rounded face.  Still
+greater will be the triumph
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P93"></A>93}</SPAN>
+when Shakespeare can draw equally true
+to life a many-sided man or woman, in whose single heart all our
+different experiences find a sympathetic echo.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And this final triumph is not long in coming.  Between his
+thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth years, in Falstaff and Hamlet the poet
+produced the greatest comic and the greatest tragic character of
+dramatic history.  The man who has read <I>Hamlet</I> understandingly has
+found in the young prince a lifelong companion.  Has he been unjustly
+treated?  Hamlet, too, had suffered and hated.  Has he loved?  So had
+Hamlet.  Has he had a bosom friend?  The most sacred and beautiful of
+college friendships was that between Hamlet and Horatio.  Has he been
+bored by some stupid old adviser?  So had Hamlet by Polonius and
+similar "tedious old fools."  Has he been thrilled by some beautiful
+landscape?  Hamlet, too, had admired "this goodly frame, the earth" and
+the sky, "that majestical roof fretted with golden fire."  Has he had a
+parent whom he loved and admired?  So had Hamlet in his father.  Has he
+had a friend for whom his love was mixed with shame?  So felt Hamlet
+toward his mother.  Has he felt the pride of a great deed bravely
+accomplished?  So did Hamlet in dying.  Has he felt the shame and
+remorse of a duty unperformed?  So did Hamlet while his father was
+still unrevenged.  Has he shuddered at the mystery of death?  So had
+Hamlet shuddered at "that undiscovered country."  Or has he been
+racked, as all good men are in practical life, by the doubt as to what
+is his duty?  So had Hamlet been racked by the same terrible
+responsibility.  And thus we might go on indefinitely.  The
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P94"></A>94}</SPAN>
+experience of a lifetime is packed into this play.  Shakespeare never
+surpassed <I>Hamlet</I>, though he wrote for nine or ten years after; but
+when he had once reached this high level, he maintained it, with only
+occasional lapses, to the end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Dramatic Technique</B>.&mdash;Lastly, Shakespeare developed greatly in
+dramatic technique.  By dramatic technique we mean the method in which
+the machinery of the story is handled.  The dramatist, to do his duty
+properly, must accomplish at least five things at once.  He must make
+his play lifelike and natural; he must keep his hearers well informed
+as to what is happening; he must bring in different events after each
+other in rapid succession to hold the interest of his audience; he must
+make the different characters influence each other so that the whole
+becomes one connected story, not several unrelated ones; and he must
+make the audience feel that the play is working toward a certain
+inevitable end, must bring it to that end, and must then stop.  The
+lack of any one of these factors may make a play either dull or
+disappointing.  It takes ability to get any one of these alone.  It
+takes years of training before even a born genius can work them all in
+together.  Of course, these details are much easier to handle in
+dramatizing some subjects than others; and we find Shakespeare
+succeeding comparatively early in easy subjects and making mistakes
+later in harder ones; but, on the whole, in dramatic technique as in
+other things, his history is one of increasing power and judgment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here, again, as in his metrical development, Shakespeare was merely one
+leading figure in a popular
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P95"></A>95}</SPAN>
+movement.  Through a long evolution
+the English drama had just come into existence when he began to write.
+There were no settled theories about this new art, no results of long
+experience such as lie at the service of the modern dramatist.  All men
+were experimenting, and Shakespeare among the rest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His early play of <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I> has already been used to
+illustrate lack of characterization.  In technique, also, in spite of
+many marks of natural brilliance, it shows the faults of the beginner.
+The story in the first three acts does not move on fast enough; there
+is a lack of that rapid series of connected events which we mentioned
+above and which adds so much to the interest of the later plays, like
+<I>Macbeth</I>.  Likewise, the characters in the prose underplot (except
+Costard) have too little connection with the story of the king and his
+friends.  In very badly constructed plays this lack of connection
+sometimes goes so far that the main and under plots seem like two
+separate serial stories in a magazine, in which the reader alternates
+from one to the other, but never thinks of them as one.  This obviously
+is bad, for just when the reader is most interested in one, he is
+interrupted and has to lay it aside for the other.  No play of
+Shakespeare's errs so far as that; but the defect in <I>Love's Labour's
+Lost</I> is similar in a very modified form.  Neither is this comedy as
+successful as the author's later plays in preparing us for a certain
+ending as the inevitable outcome and then placing that ending before
+us.  We are led to expect that all four love affairs must be
+successful, and shall feel disappointed if the sympathetic dreams which
+we have woven around that idea
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P96"></A>96}</SPAN>
+are not satisfied.  Yet the play
+ends hurriedly in a way which leaves us all in doubt, and disappointed,
+like guests who have been invited to a wedding and find it indefinitely
+postponed.  There is a wonderful amount of clever dialogue in this
+comedy, but its structure shows how much the author had yet to learn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>The Two Gentleman of Verona</I>, probably written a little later, shows
+improvement, but by no means perfect mastery.  The first two acts still
+drag, although the play moves more rapidly when it is under way.  The
+inability to lead up naturally to an inevitable end still persists.
+The young author, well as he has managed the middle of the play, does
+not wait for events to take their logical course.  He winds up
+everything abruptly like a man who has just changed his mind or become
+tired of his task, and marries the most lovable girl in the play to a
+rascal who is scarcely given time for even a pretense of reformation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>The Merchant of Venice</I>, two or three years later, shows a great
+advance in technique as in other ways.  Notice how skillfully the
+dramatist makes the different characters all influence each other's
+lives, so that the interest in one becomes the interest in all.  There
+is one story in the relations of Shylock and Antonio, another in the
+love affair of Lorenzo and Jessica, and a third in Bassanio's courtship
+of Portia.  There is also a fourth, a sequel to Bassanio's courtship,
+in the trick which his wife plays on him with regard to the rings after
+they are married.  Yet we never feel an unpleasant interruption when we
+are stopped in one story and started in one of the others, because the
+interest of the first lives on in the second,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P97"></A>97}</SPAN>
+owing to the
+interrelation of the people taking part in both.  We leave Shylock's
+story to take up Jessica's, but Jessica is Shylock's child, and our
+interest in the fate of his ducats and his daughter, which began in his
+story, goes on in hers.  We leave Antonio's story to take up
+Bassanio's; but Antonio's story was that of sacrifice for a friend, and
+in Bassanio's we see the fruit of that sacrifice in his friend's joy.
+Moreover, all four of the above threads of action are knotted together
+in one scene where Bassanio chooses the right casket.  Of the swift
+succession of exciting scenes of the natural way in which these lead up
+to the final end, of the lifelike truthfulness with which each little
+event is made to work itself out, there is no need to speak here.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Though Shakespeare was not a third through his literary career when he
+wrote <I>The Merchant of Venice</I>, he had by this time mastered the
+technique of comedy; and we need trace his course in it no farther.
+<I>Much Ado</I> and <I>Twelfth Night</I> somewhat later, and <I>The Tempest</I> long
+years after, are simply repetitions so far as technique is concerned,
+of this early triumph.  Let us turn now from comedy to those plays
+which deal with the sterner side of life.  Here the development in
+technical skill is similar, but much slower, requiring nearly a
+lifetime before it reaches perfection, for the poet is grappling with a
+problem so difficult that it taxed all the resources of his great
+genius.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before 1599 nearly all Shakespeare's plays which were not comedies were
+histories.  By a history or chronicle play we mean a play which
+pictures some epoch in the past of the English nation.  In one sense
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P98"></A>98}</SPAN>
+of the word, most of them are tragedies, since they frequently
+result in death and disaster; but they are always separated as a class
+from tragedy proper, because they represent some great event in English
+national life centering around some king or leader; while tragedy
+proper deals with the misfortunes of some one man in any country, and
+regards him as an individual rather than as a national figure.  They
+differ also in purpose, since the chronicle play was intended to appeal
+to Anglo-Saxon patriotism, the tragedy to our sympathy with human
+suffering in general.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The first and crudest of Shakespeare's histories written at about the
+same time as his first comedy is the triple play of <I>Henry VI</I>.[<A NAME="chap07fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap07fn1">1</A>]  We
+should hesitate to judge him by this, since he wrote it only in part;
+but it is a woefully rambling production in which we no sooner become
+interested in one character than we lose him, and are asked to transfer
+our sympathies to another.  <I>Richard III</I> is a great step forward in
+this respect; for the excitement and interest focuses uninterruptedly
+on the one central figure; and his influence on other men and theirs on
+him bind all the events of the drama into one coherent whole.  Also, it
+moves straight on to a definite end which we know and wish and are
+prepared for beforehand.  We feel, even in the midst of his success,
+that such a bloody tyrant cannot be tolerated forever; and like men in
+a tiger hunt we thrill beforehand at the dramatic catastrophe which we
+know is coming.  <I>Richard III</I>, though, a powerful play, is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P99"></A>99}</SPAN>
+still
+crude in many details.  The scenes where Margaret curses her enemies,
+though strong as poetry, lack action as drama.  In a wholly different
+way, they clog the onward movement of the story almost as much as some
+scenes in <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>.  Then again, one of the most
+important requirements for good technique is that everything shall be
+true to life.  When Anne, for the sake of a little bare-faced flattery,
+marries a man whom she loathes, we feel that no real woman would have
+done this.  From that moment Anne becomes a mere paper automaton to us,
+and we can no longer be interested in her as we would in a living
+woman.  The motivation, as it is called, the art of showing adequately
+why every person should act as he or she does, is sadly lacking.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Moving onward a few years, we find marked improvement in <I>I Henry IV</I>.
+It is indeed not technically perfect,&mdash;in fact, Shakespeare in the
+chronicle play never attained what seems to modern students technical
+perfection,&mdash;but its minor defects are thrown into shadow by its
+splendid virtues.  The three stories of Hotspur, the King, and the
+Falstaff group, though partially united by their common connection with
+Prince Hal, do not blend together as perfectly as the different plots
+in <I>The Merchant of Venice</I>, and there is some truth in the idea that
+the play has four heroes instead of one.  But in spite of this, its
+general impression as a great panorama of English life is remarkably
+clear and delightful; and it improves on <I>Richard III</I> in its swift
+succession of incident, and vastly surpasses it in the lifelike truth
+of its motivation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the middle of his career Shakespeare dropped
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P100"></A>100}</SPAN>
+the chronicle
+play, and instead began the writing of tragedies proper.  He carried
+into this, however, the lessons learned from his experience with
+histories, and continued to improve.  <I>Julius Caesar</I> marks the
+transition from chronicle play to tragedy.  The lack of close
+connection between the third and fourth acts and the absence of one
+central hero are characteristic defects of the chronicle play which the
+dramatist had not yet outgrown.  <I>Hamlet</I>, coming next, has shaken off
+all the lingering relics of the older type.  Of its general excellence
+there is no need to speak.  Yet even in <I>Hamlet</I> the action at times
+halts and becomes disjointed.  <I>Caesar</I> and <I>Hamlet</I> are great plays,
+the latter, perhaps, the greatest of all plays; but, transfigured as
+they are by genius, they show that in the difficult problem of tragic
+technique the author was learning still.  At the age of forty,
+approximately, and a year or two after <I>Hamlet</I>, Shakespeare produced
+<I>Othello</I>, the most perfect, although not necessarily the greatest, of
+all his great tragedies.  It is less profoundly reflective than
+<I>Hamlet</I> and less passionately imaginative than <I>King Lear</I> or
+<I>Macbeth</I>; but no other of his masterpieces shows such perfect balance
+of taste and judgment, or is so free from any jarring note.  Hence,
+through the histories and tragedies taken together, we see the same
+growth in technical skill which we have already found in his comedies,
+save that it took longer here because the poet was working in a more
+difficult field.  It would not be true to say that each play up to
+<I>Othello</I> is superior to its immediate predecessor in technique, still
+less that it is so in absolute merit; but the general upward tendency
+is there.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P101"></A>101}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Four Periods</B>.&mdash;Such was Shakespeare's development in meter, in
+taste, in conception of character, and in dramatic technique.  In line
+with this development, it has been customary to divide his literary
+career into four periods and his plays into four corresponding groups.
+These groups or periods are characterized partly by their different
+degrees of maturity, but more by the difference in the character of the
+plays during these intervals.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The First Period includes all plays which there is good reason for
+dating before 1595.  In this the great dramatist was serving his
+literary apprenticeship, learning the difficult art of play writing,
+and learning it by experiments and mistakes.  In the course of his
+experiments, he tried many different types, tragedies, histories,
+comedies, and rewrote old plays either alone or with a more experienced
+playwright to help him.  Nearly all of this work is full of promise;
+most of it is also full of faults.  Here belong the early comedies
+mentioned above&mdash;<I>Love's Labour's Lost</I> and <I>The Two Gentlemen of
+Verona</I>.  Here is the crude but powerful <I>Richard III</I>, and <I>Romeo and
+Juliet</I>, the early faults of which are redeemed by such a wealth of
+youthful poetic fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Second Period extends roughly from 1595 to 1600.  The poet has
+learned his profession now, is no longer a beginner but a master,
+though hardly yet at the summit of his powers.  Here are included three
+chronicle plays, the two parts of <I>King Henry IV</I> and <I>King Henry V</I>,
+and six comedies.  One of the earliest of these comedies was <I>The
+Merchant of Venice</I>, already mentioned.  Three others, a little
+later,&mdash;<I>Much Ado, Twelfth
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P102"></A>102}</SPAN>
+Night</I>, and <I>As You Like It</I>,&mdash;are
+usually regarded as Shakespeare's crowning achievement in the world of
+mirth and humor.  In this group of plays, whether history or comedy,
+the author is depicting chiefly the cheerful, energetic side of life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Third Period really begins about 1599, for this and the second
+overlap; and it continues to about 1608.  In the plays of this group
+the poet becomes interested in a wholly new set of themes.  The aspects
+of life which he interprets are no longer bright and cheerful, but
+stern and sad.  Here come the great tragedies, several of which we have
+mentioned above&mdash;<I>Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
+Antony and Cleopatra</I>.  Shakespeare is now at the height of his power,
+for his greatest masterpieces are included in the above list.  Mixed in
+with this wealth of splendid tragedy (though inferior to it in merit),
+there are also three comedies.  But even the comedies share in the
+somber gloom which absorbed the poet's attention during this period.
+The comedies before 1600 had been full of sunshine, brimming with
+kindly, good-natured mirth, overflowing with the genial laughter which
+makes us love the very men at whom we are laughing.  But the three
+comedies of this Third Period are bitter and sarcastic in their wit,
+making us despise the people who furnish us fun, and leaving an
+unpleasant taste in the mouth after the laugh is over.  Some have
+assumed that the dark tinge of this period was due to an unknown sorrow
+in the poet's own life, but there seems to be no need of any such
+assumption.  We may become interested in reading cheerful books one
+year and sad ones the next without being more cheerful or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P103"></A>103}</SPAN>
+more
+sad in one year than in the other; and what is true of the reader might
+reasonably be true of the writer.  But whatever the cause which
+influenced Shakespeare, the tragedies of this group are the saddest as
+well as the greatest of all his plays.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Fourth and last Period contains plays written after 1608-1609.
+There are only five of these, and since <I>Pericles</I> and <I>Henry VII</I> are
+in large part by other hands, our interest focuses chiefly on the
+remaining three&mdash;<I>The Tempest, Cymbeline</I>, and <I>The Winter's Tale</I>.
+All the plays of this period end happily and are wholly free from the
+bitterness of the Third Period comedy.  Nevertheless, they have little
+of the rollicking, uproarious fun of the earlier comedies.  Their charm
+lies rather in a subdued cheerfulness, a quiet, pure, sympathetic
+serenity of tone, less strenuous, but even more poetic, than what had
+gone before.  In some ways they are hardly equal to the great tragedies
+just mentioned, for the poet is growing older now, and the fiery vigor
+of <I>Macbeth</I> is fading out of his verse.  But in loftiness of thought
+and tenderness of feeling these later romances are equal to anything
+that the author ever gave us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whether other causes influenced him or not, Shakespeare was doubtless
+in these four periods conforming to some extent to the literary
+tendencies of the hour.  The writings of his contemporaries also show a
+larger percentage of comedies between 1595-1600 than between 1590-1595.
+Many other dramatists, too, were writing histories while he was, and
+dropped them at about the same time.  Likewise during his Fourth Period
+three-quarters of all the plays written by other men were comedies, the
+most successful of them in a similar
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P104"></A>104}</SPAN>
+romantic tone.  On the
+whole, too, other writers produced a rather larger percentage of
+tragedies during 1601-1607 than at any other time while Shakespeare was
+writing, although the change was not nearly as marked in them as in
+him.  But whether the influence of contemporaries was great or small,
+these periods exist; and the individual plays can be better understood
+if read in the light of the groups to which they belong.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps the best book on Shakespeare's development as a dramatist is:
+<I>The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist</I> by G. P. Baker (The
+Macmillan Co., New York, 1907).
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07fn1"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap07fn1text">1</A>] These plays are throughout designated as <I>I</I>, <I>II</I>, and <I>III</I> Henry
+VI.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P105"></A>105}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VIII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE CHIEF SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+<B>Shakespeare and Plagiarism</B>.&mdash;Among the curious alterations in public
+sentiment that have come in the last century or two, none is more
+striking than the change of attitude in regard to what is called
+"plagiarism."  Plagiarism may be defined as the appropriation for one's
+own use of the literary ideas of another.  The laws of patent and of
+copyright have led us into thinking that the ideas of a play must not
+be borrowed in any degree, but must originate in every detail with the
+writer.  This is as if we should say to an inventor, "Yes, you may have
+invented a safety trigger for revolvers, but you must not apply it to
+revolvers until you have invented a completely new type of revolver
+from the original matchlock."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the playwright of to-day cannot help plagiarizing his technique,
+many of his situations, and even his plots from earlier plays;
+consequently, he tries to conceal his borrowings, to placate public
+opinion by changing the names and the environment of his characters.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Elizabethan audiences were less exacting.  If a play about King
+Lear were written and acted with some success, they thought it
+perfectly honest for another dramatist to use this material in building
+up a new and better play on the story of King Lear.  They cared
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P106"></A>106}</SPAN>
+even less when the dramatist went to other dramas for hints on minor
+details.  The modern audience, if not the modern world at large, holds
+the same view.  So long as the mind of the borrower transforms and
+makes his own whatever he borrows, so long will his work be applauded
+by his audience, whatever be the existing state of the copyright laws
+or of public fastidiousness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence we do not to-day hunt up the sources of Shakespeare's plots and
+characters in order to prove plagiarism, but in order to understand
+just how great was the power of his genius in transmuting common
+elements into his fine gold.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is customary to say: "Shakespeare did not invent his plots.  He was
+not interested in plots."  So far is this from the truth that the
+amount of pains and skill spent by him in working over any one of his
+best comedies or tragedies would more than suffice for the construction
+of a very good modern plot.  It is more true to say of most of his
+work, "Shakespeare did not waste his time in inventing stories.[<A NAME="chap08fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap08fn1">1</A>]  He
+took stories where he found them, realized their dramatic
+possibilities, and spent infinite pains in weaving them together into a
+harmonious whole."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is one other point to remember.  The sources of Shakespeare's
+plays were no better literary material than the sources of most
+Elizabethan plays.  Shakespeare's practice in adapting older plays was
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P107"></A>107}</SPAN>
+the common practice of the time.  We can measure, therefore, the
+greatness of Shakespeare's achievement by a comparison with what others
+have made out of similar material.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Just as Shakespeare's plays fall into the groups of history, tragedy,
+and comedy, so his chief sources are three in number: biography, as
+found in the <I>Chronicle</I> of Holinshed and Plutarch's <I>Lives</I>; romance,
+as found in the novels of the period, which were most of them
+translations from Italian <I>novelle</I>; and dramatic material from other
+plays.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Holinshed</B>.&mdash;Raphael Holinshed (died 1580?) published in 1578 a
+history of England, Scotland, and Ireland, usually known as Holinshed's
+<I>Chronicle</I>.  The two immense folio volumes contain an account of
+Britain "from its first inhabiting" up to his own day, largely made up
+by combining the works of previous historians.  The <I>Chronicle</I> bears
+evidence, however, of enormous and painstaking research which makes it
+valuable even now.  Holinshed's style was clear, but not possessed of
+any distinctly literary quality.  Much of what Shakespeare used was
+indeed but a paraphrase of an earlier chronicler, Edward Hall.
+Holinshed was uncritical, too, since he made no attempt to separate the
+legendary from the truly historical material.  So far as drama is
+concerned, however, this was rather a help than a hindrance, since
+legend often crystallizes most truly the spirit of a career in an act
+or a saying which never had basis in fact.  The work is notable chiefly
+for its patriotic tone, of which there is certainly more than an echo
+in Shakespeare's historical plays.  But the effects of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P108"></A>108}</SPAN>
+steadfast
+continuity of national purpose, of a belief in the greatness of
+England, and of an insistent appeal to patriotism, which are such
+important elements in Shakespeare's histories, are totally wanting in
+Holinshed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not only are all of the histories of Shakespeare based either directly
+or through the medium of other plays upon Holinshed, but his two great
+tragedies, <I>Macbeth</I> and <I>King Lear</I> (the latter through an earlier
+play), and his comedy <I>Cymbeline</I> are also chiefly indebted to it.  The
+work was, moreover, the source of many plays by other dramatists.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Plutarch</B>.&mdash;Plutarch of Chaeronea, a Greek author of the first century
+A.D., wrote forty-six "parallel" Lives, of famous Greeks and Romans.
+Each famous Greek was contrasted with a famous Roman whose career was
+somewhat similar to his own.  The <I>Lives</I> have been ever since among
+the most popular of the classics, for they are more than mere
+biographies.  They are the interpretation of two worlds, with all their
+tragic history, by one who felt the fatal force of a resistless destiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A scholarly French translation of Plutarch's <I>Lives</I> was published in
+1559 by Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Bellozane.  Twenty years after (1579)
+Thomas North, later Sir Thomas, published his magnificent English
+version.[<A NAME="chap08fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap08fn2">2</A>]  The vigor and spirit which he flung into his work can only
+be compared to that of William Tyndale in his translation of the New
+Testament.  Here was very different material for drama from the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P109"></A>109}</SPAN>
+dry bones of history offered by Holinshed.  Shakespeare paid North the
+sincerest compliment by borrowing, particularly in <I>Antony and
+Cleopatra</I>, and <I>Coriolanus</I>, not only the general story, but whole
+speeches with only those changes necessary for making blank verse out
+of prose.  The last speeches of Antony and Cleopatra are indeed nearly
+as impressive in North's narrative form as in Shakespeare's play.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In addition to the tragedies already named, <I>Julius Caesar</I> and almost
+certainly the suggestion of <I>Timon of Athens</I>, though not the play as a
+whole, were taken from Plutarch's <I>Lives</I>.  Other Elizabethans were not
+slow to avail themselves of this unequaled treasure-house of story.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Italian and Other Fiction</B>.&mdash;Except for Geoffrey Chaucer (1338-1400),
+whose <I>Troilus and Criseyde</I> Shakespeare dramatized, and John Gower
+(died 1408), whose <I>Confessio Amantis</I> is one of the books out of which
+the plot of <I>Pericles</I> may have come, there was little good English
+fiction read in the Elizabethan period.  Educated people read, instead,
+Italian <I>novelle</I>, or short tales, which were usually gathered into
+some collection of a hundred or so.  Many of these were translated into
+English before Shakespeare's time; and a number of similar collections
+had been made by English authors, who had translated good stories
+whenever they found them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of these was <I>Gli Heccatommithi</I>, 1565 (The Hundred Tales), by
+Giovanni Giraldi, surnamed Cinthio, which was later translated into
+French and was the source of <I>Measure for Measure</I> and <I>Othello</I>.
+Another collection was that of Matteo Bandello, whose
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P110"></A>110}</SPAN>
+<I>Tales</I>,
+1554-1573, translated into French by Belleforest, furnished the sources
+of <I>Much Ado About Nothing</I>, and perhaps <I>Twelfth Night</I>.  The greatest
+of these collections was the <I>Decameron</I>, c. 1353, by Giovanni
+Boccaccio, one of whose stories, translated by William Painter in his
+<I>Palace of Pleasure</I>, 1564, furnished the source of <I>All's Well That
+Ends Well</I>.  Another story of the <I>Decameron</I> was probably the source
+of the romantic part of the plot of <I>Cymbeline</I>.  The <I>Merry Wives of
+Windsor</I> had a plot like the story in Straparola's <I>Tredici Piacevole
+Notte</I> (1550), <I>Thirteen Pleasant Evenings</I>; and <I>The Merchant of
+Venice</I> borrows its chief plot from Giovanni Florentine's <I>Il Pecorone</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two of Shakespeare's plays are based on English novels written somewhat
+after the Italian manner&mdash;<I>As You Like It</I> on Thomas Lodge's
+novel-poem, <I>Rosalynde</I>, and <I>The Winter's Tale</I> from Robert Greene's
+<I>Pandosto</I>.  The <I>Two Gentlemen of Verona</I> is from a Spanish story in
+the Italian style, the <I>Diana</I> of Jorge de Montemayor.  The <I>Comedy of
+Errors</I> from Plautus is his only play based on classical sources.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Italian <I>novelle</I> emphasized situation, but had little natural
+dialogue and still less characterization.  The Elizabethan dramatists
+used them only for their plots.  Never did works of higher genius
+spring from less inspired sources.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Plays used by Shakespeare</B>.&mdash;Although Shakespeare made up one of
+his plots, the <I>Comedy of Errors</I>, from two plays of Plautus (254-184
+B.C.), the <I>Menaechmi</I> and <I>Amphitruo</I>, the rest of the plays he used
+for material were contemporary work.  He borrowed from them plots and
+situations, and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P111"></A>111}</SPAN>
+occasionally even lines.  With the exception,
+however, of one of the early histories, the plays he made use of are in
+themselves of no value as literature.  Their sole claim to notice is
+that they served the need of the great playwright.  None but the
+student will ever read them.  In practically every case Shakespeare so
+developed the story that the fiction became essentially his own; while
+the poetic quality of the verse, the development of character, and the
+heightening of dramatic effect, which he built upon it, left no more of
+the old play in sight than the statue shows of the bare metal rods upon
+which the sculptor molds his clay.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Seven histories go back to the earlier plays on the kings of England.
+The Second and Third Parts of <I>Henry VI</I> are taken from two earlier
+plays often called the <I>First and Second Contentions</I> (between the two
+noble houses of York and Lancaster).  The First and Second parts of
+<I>Henry IV</I>, and <I>Henry V</I>, are all three an expansion of a cruder
+production, the <I>Famous Victories of Henry V</I>.  <I>Richard III</I> is based
+upon the <I>True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York; King John upon the
+Troublesome Reigne of John, King of England</I>, the latter undoubtedly
+the best of the sources of Shakespeare's Histories.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>King Leir and His Daughters</I> is the only extant play which is known to
+have formed the basis of a Shakespearean tragedy.  Shakespeare made
+additions in this case from other sources, borrowing Gloucester's story
+from Sidney's <I>Arcadia</I>.  The earlier play of <I>Hamlet</I>, which it is
+believed Shakespeare used, is not now in existence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Among the comedies, the <I>Taming of the Shrew</I> is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P112"></A>112}</SPAN>
+directly based
+upon the <I>Taming of a Shrew</I>.  <I>Measure for Measure</I> is less direct,
+borrowing from George Whetstone's play in two parts, <I>Promos and
+Cassandra</I> (written before 1578).
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The existence of versions in German and Dutch of plays which present
+plots similar in structure to Shakespeare's, but less highly developed,
+leads scholars to advance the theory that several lost plays may have
+been sources for some of his dramas.  Entries or mentions of plays,
+with details like Shakespeare's, dated earlier than his own plays could
+have been in existence, are also used to further the same view.  The
+<I>Two Gentlemen of Verona</I>, the <I>Merchant of Venice</I>, <I>Romeo and
+Juliet</I>, <I>Hamlet</I>, and, with less reason, <I>Timon of Athens</I>, and
+<I>Twelfth Night</I>, are thought to have been based more or less on earlier
+lost plays.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Finally, a number of plays perhaps suggested details in Shakespeare's
+plays.  Of plays so influenced, <I>Cymbeline</I>, <I>The Winter's Tale</I>, and
+<I>Henry VIII</I> are the chief.  But the debt is negligible at best, so far
+as the general student is concerned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To conclude, what Shakespeare borrowed was the raw material of drama.
+What he gave to this material was life and art.  No better way of
+appreciating the dramatist at his full worth could be pursued than a
+patient perusal and comparison of the sources of his plays with
+Shakespeare's own work.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The best books on this subject are: H. E. D. Anders, <I>Shakespeare's
+Books</I> (Berlin, 1904); <I>Shakespeare's Library</I>, ed. J. P. Collier and
+W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1875); and the new <I>Shakespeare Library</I> now
+being published by Chatto and Windus, of which several volumes are out.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap08fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap08fn1text">1</A>] There are two plays at least which have plots probably original
+with Shakespeare&mdash;<I>Love's Labour's Lost</I> and <I>The Tempest</I>.  Both of
+these draw largely, however, from contemporary history and adventure,
+and the central idea is directly borrowed from actual events.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap08fn2text">2</A>] It is not unlikely that it was the second edition published in 1595
+by Richard Field (Shakespeare's printer) that the poet read.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P113"></A>113}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IX
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The Elizabethan audiences who filled to overflowing the theaters on the
+Bankside possessed a far purer text of Shakespeare than we of this
+later day can boast.  In order to understand our own editions of
+Shakespeare, it is necessary to understand something, at least, of the
+conditions of publishing in Shakespeare's day and of the relations of
+the playhouses with the publishers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The printing of Shakespeare's poems is an easy tale, <I>Venus and Adonis</I>
+in 1593, and <I>The Rape of Lucrece</I> in 1594, were first printed in
+quarto by Richard Field, a native of Stratford, who had come to London.
+In each case a dedication accompanying the text was signed by
+Shakespeare, so that we may guess that the poet not only consented to
+the printing, but took care that the printing should be accurate.
+Twelve editions of one, eight of the other, were issued before 1660.
+The other volume of poetry, the Sonnets, was printed in 1609 by Thomas
+Thorpe, without Shakespeare's consent.  Two of them, numbers 138 and
+144, had appeared in the collection known as <I>The Passionate Pilgrim</I>,
+a pirated volume printed by W. Jaggard in 1599.  No reėdition of the
+Sonnets appeared till 1640.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With regard to the plays it is different.  It is first
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P114"></A>114}</SPAN>
+to be said
+that in no volume containing a play or plays of Shakespeare in
+existence to-day is there any evidence that Shakespeare saw it through
+the press.  All we can do is to satisfy ourselves as to how the copy of
+Shakespeare's plays may have got into the hands of the publishers, and
+as to how far that copy represents what Shakespeare must have written.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The editions of Shakespearean plays may be divided into two
+groups,&mdash;the separate plays which were printed in quarto[<A NAME="chap09fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap09fn1">1</A>] volumes
+before 1623, and the First Folio of Shakespeare, which was printed in
+1623, a collected edition of all his plays save <I>Pericles</I>.  Our text
+of Shakespeare, whatever one we read, is made up, either from the First
+Folio text, or in certain cases from the quarto volumes of certain
+plays which preceded the Folio; together with the attempts to restore
+to faulty places what Shakespeare must have written&mdash;a task which has
+engaged a long line of diligent scholars from early in the eighteenth
+century up to our own day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Stationers' Company</B>.&mdash;In the early period of English printing,
+which began about 1480 and lasted up to 1557, there was very little
+supervision over the publishing of books, and as a result the
+competition was unscrupulous.  There was a guild of publishers, called
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P115"></A>115}</SPAN>
+the Stationers' Company, in existence, but its efforts to control
+its members were only of a general character.  In 1557, however, Philip
+and Mary granted a charter to the Stationers' Company under which no
+one not a member of the Stationers' Company could legally possess a
+printing press.  Queen Mary was, of course, interested in controlling
+the press directly through the Crown.  Throughout the Elizabethan
+period the printing of books was directly under the supervision of Her
+Majesty's Government, and not under the law courts.  Every book had to
+be licensed by the company.  The Wardens of the company acted as
+licensers in ordinary cases, and in doubtful cases the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or some other dignitary appointed for
+the purpose.  When the license was granted, the permission to print was
+entered upon the Register of the company, and it is from these records
+that much important knowledge about the dates of Shakespeare's plays is
+gained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Stationers' Company was interested only in protecting its members
+from prosecution and from competition.  The author was not considered
+by them in the legal side of the transaction.  How the printer got his
+manuscript to print was his own affair, not theirs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many authors were at that time paid by printers for the privilege of
+using their manuscript; but it was not considered proper that a
+gentleman should be paid for literary work.  Robert Greene, the
+playwright and novelist, wrote regularly in the employ of printers.  On
+the other hand, Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P116"></A>116}</SPAN>
+of
+Shakespeare's, did not allow any of his writings to be printed during
+his lifetime.  Francis Bacon published his essays only in order to
+forestall an unauthorized edition, and others of the time took the same
+course.  Bacon says in his preface that to prevent their being printed
+would have been a troublesome procedure.  It was possible for an author
+to prevent the publication by prosecution, but it was scarcely a wise
+thing to do, in view of the legal difficulties in the way.
+Nevertheless, fear of the law probably acted as some sort of a check on
+unscrupulous publishers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The author of a play was, however, really less interested than the
+manager who had bought it.  The manager of a theater seems, from what
+evidence we possess, to have believed that the printing of a play
+injured the chances of success upon the stage.  The play was sold by
+the author directly to the manager, whose property it became.  Copies
+of it might be sold to some printer by some of the players in the
+company, by the manager himself, or, in rarer cases, by some
+unscrupulous copyist taking down the play in shorthand at the
+performance.  When a play had got out of date, it would be more apt to
+be sold than while it was still on the stage.  In some cases, however,
+the printing might have no bad effect upon the attendance at its
+performances.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the years before 1623, seventeen of Shakespeare's plays were
+published in quarto.  Two of these, <I>Romeo and Juliet</I> and <I>Hamlet</I>,
+were printed in two very different versions, so that we have nineteen
+texts of Shakespeare's plays altogether published before the First
+Folio.  A complete table of these
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P117"></A>117}</SPAN>
+plays with the dates in which
+the quartos appeared follows:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+1594.  Titus Andronicus.  Later quartos in 1600 and 1611.<BR>
+1597.  Richard II.  Later quartos in 1598, 1608, and 1615.<BR>
+1597.  Richard III.  Later quartos in 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, and 1622.<BR>
+1597.  Romeo and Juliet.  Later quartos in 1599 (corrected edition) and 1609.<BR>
+1598.  I Henry IV.  Later quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622.<BR>
+1598.  Love's Labour's Lost.<BR>
+1600.  Merchant of Venice.  Later quarto in 1619.  (Copying<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3.5em">on the title-page the original date of 1600, however.)</SPAN><BR>
+1600.  Henry V.  Later quartos in 1602 and 1619.  (Dated on the title-page, 1608.)<BR>
+1600.  Henry IV, Part II.<BR>
+1600.  Midsummer Night's Dream.  Later quarto in 1619.  (Dated, however, 1600.)<BR>
+1602.  Merry Wives of Windsor.  Later quarto in 1619.<BR>
+1603.  Hamlet.<BR>
+1604.  Second edition of Hamlet.  Later quartos in 1605 and 1611.<BR>
+1608.  King Lear.  Later quarto in 1619.  (Title-page date, 1608.)<BR>
+1608.  Pericles.  Later quartos in 1609, 1611, and 1619.<BR>
+1609.  Troilus and Cressida.  A second quarto in 1609.<BR>
+1622.  Othello.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+These are all the known quartos of Shakespeare's plays printed before
+the Folio.  They represent two distinct classes.  The first class
+(comprising fourteen texts) of the quartos contains good texts of the
+plays and is of great assistance to editors.  The second (comprising
+five texts), the first <I>Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives</I>, the
+first <I>Hamlet</I>, and <I>Pericles</I>,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P118"></A>118}</SPAN>
+is composed of thoroughly bad
+copies.  Two of this class were not entered on the Stationers' Register
+at all, but were pure piracies.  Two others were entered by one firm,
+but were printed by another.  The fifth was entered and transferred on
+the same day.  Of the fourteen good texts, twelve were regularly
+entered on the Stationers' Register, and the other two were evidently
+intended to take the place of a bad text.  It is evident, therefore,
+that registry upon the books of the Stationers' Company was a safeguard
+to an author in getting before the public a good text of his writings.
+It also indicates that the good copies were obtained by printers in a
+legal manner, and so probably purchased directly from the theaters,
+whether from the copy which the prompter had, or from some transcript
+of the play.  The notion that all plays were printed in Shakespeare's
+time by a process of piracy is thus not borne out by these facts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The five bad quartos deserve a moment's attention.  The first of these,
+<I>Romeo and Juliet</I>, printed and published by John Danter in 1597, omits
+over seven hundred lines of the play, and the stage directions are
+descriptions rather than definite instructions.  The book is printed in
+two kinds of type, a fact due probably to its being printed from two
+presses at once.  Danter got into trouble later on with other books
+from his dishonest ways.  The second poor quarto, <I>Henry V</I>, printed in
+1600, was less than half as long as the Folio text, and was probably
+carelessly copied by an ignorant person at a performance of the play.
+The third, the <I>Merry Wives of Windsor</I>, was pirated through the
+publisher of <I>Henry V</I>, John Busby, who assigned his
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P119"></A>119}</SPAN>
+part to
+another printer on the same day.  As in the case of <I>Romeo and Juliet</I>,
+the stage directions are mere descriptions.  No play of Shakespeare's
+was more cruelly bungled by an unscrupulous copyist.  The first edition
+of <I>Hamlet</I> in 1603 was the work of Valentine Sims.  While the copying
+is full of blunders, this quarto is considered important, as indicating
+that the play was acted at first in a much shorter and less artistic
+version than the one which we now read.  For eight months of 1603-1604
+the theaters of London were closed on account of the plague, and
+Shakespeare's revision of <I>Hamlet</I> may have been made during this time.
+At any rate, the later version appeared about the end of 1604.  The
+last of these pirated quartos, <I>Pericles</I>, was probably taken down in
+shorthand at the theater.  Here, unfortunately, as this play was not
+included in the First Folio, and as all later quartos were based on the
+First Quarto, we have to-day what is really a corrupt and difficult
+text.  Luckily, Shakespeare's share in this play is small.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The title-pages of the quartos of Shakespeare bear convincing
+testimony, not only to the genuineness of his plays, but also to his
+rise in reputation.  Only six of his plays were printed in quartos not
+bearing his name.  Of these, two&mdash;<I>Romeo and Juliet</I> and <I>Henry
+V</I>&mdash;began with pirated editions not bearing the author's name.
+Three&mdash;<I>Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV</I>&mdash;were all followed by
+quartos with the poet's name upon them.  The sixth play, <I>Titus
+Andronicus</I>, was one of his earliest works, and its authorship is even
+now not absolutely certain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since the name of a popular dramatist on the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P120"></A>120}</SPAN>
+title-page was a
+distinct source of revenue to the publisher after 1598, it was to be
+expected that anonymous plays should be ascribed in some cases to
+William Shakespeare by an unscrupulous or a misinformed printer.  Here
+arose the Shakespeare 'apocrypha,' which is discussed in a following
+chapter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A new problem in the history of Shakespearean quartos has been
+presented since 1903 by a study of the quartos of 1619.  Briefly
+summarized, the theory which is best defended at the present time is,
+that in that year Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard, two printers of
+London, decided at first to get up a collected quarto edition of
+Shakespeare's plays, but on giving up this idea, they issued nine plays
+in a uniform size and on paper bearing identical watermarks, which were
+either at that time or later bound up together as a collected set of
+Shakespeare's plays in a single volume.[<A NAME="chap09fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap09fn2">2</A>]  These plays are the <I>Whole
+Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of Lancaster and York</I>,
+"printed for T. P."; <I>A Yorkshire Tragedie</I>, "printed for T. P., 1619";
+<I>Pericles</I>, "printed for T. P. 1619"; <I>Merry Wives</I>, "printed for
+Arthur Johnson, 1619"; <I>Sir John Oldcastle</I>, "printed for T. P., 1600";
+<I>Henry V</I>, "printed for T. P., 1608"; <I>Merchant of Venice</I>, "printed by
+J. Roberts, 1600"; <I>King Lear</I>, "printed for  Nathaniel Butter, 1608";
+<I>Midsummer Night's Dream</I>, "printed for Thomas Fisher, 1600."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of these plays, the <I>Whole Contention</I>, the <I>Yorkshire
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P121"></A>121}</SPAN>
+Tragedie</I>,
+and <I>Sir John Oldcastle</I> are spurious, but had been attributed to
+Shakespeare in earlier quartos.  The five plays dated 1600 or 1608 in
+each case duplicated a quarto actually printed in the year claimed by
+the Pavier reprint; so that this earlier dating was an attempt to
+deceive the public into believing they were purchasing the original
+editions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Under the date of the 8th of November, 1623, Edward Blount and Isaac
+Jaggard entered for their copy in the Stationers' Register "Mr. William
+Shakspeers Comedyes, Histories and Tragedyes, soe manie of the said
+copyes as are not formerly entred to other men viz<SUP>t</SUP>, Comedyes, The
+Tempest.  The two gentlemen of Verona.  Measure for Measure.  The
+Comedy of Errors.  As you like it.  All's well that ends well.  Twelfth
+Night.  The winter's tale.  Histories The third parte of Henry the
+sixth.  Henry the eight.  Tragedies.  Coriolanus.  Timon of Athens.
+Julius Caesar.  Mackbeth.  Anthonie and Cleopatra.  Cymbeline."  This
+entry preluded the publication of the First Folio.  Associated with
+Blount and Jaggard were Jaggard's son Isaac, who had the contract for
+the printing of the book, I. Smethwick, and W. A. Aspley.  Smethwick
+owned at this time the rights of <I>Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and
+Juliet</I>, and <I>Hamlet</I>, and also the <I>Taming of a Shrew</I>, which latter
+right apparently carried with it the right to print Shakespeare's
+adaptation of it, the <I>Taming of the Shrew</I>.  Aspley owned the rights
+to <I>Much Ado About Nothing</I>, and to <I>II Henry IV</I>.  These four
+printers, making arrangements with other printers, such as Law, who
+apparently had the rights of <I>I Henry IV, Richard II</I>,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P122"></A>122}</SPAN>
+and
+<I>Richard III</I>, and others, were thus able to bring out an apparently
+complete edition of Shakespeare's plays.  One play, <I>Troilus and
+Cressida</I>, was evidently secured only at the last moment and printed
+very irregularly.[<A NAME="chap09fn3text"></A><A HREF="#chap09fn3">3</A>]  Blount and Jaggard apparently got the manuscripts
+of the sixteen plays on the Register from members of Shakespeare's
+company, two of whom, John Hemings and Henry Condell, affixed their
+names to the Address to the Reader which was prefixed to the volume.
+It will be remembered that these men received by Shakespeare's bequest
+a gold ring as a token of friendship.  Their intimacy with the
+dramatist must have been both strong and lasting.  Their actual share
+in the editing of the volume cannot be ascertained.  It may be that all
+the claims are true which are made above their names in the Address to
+the Reader as to their care and pains in collecting and publishing his
+works "so to have publish'd them as where before you were abused with
+diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed, the
+stealthes of injurious copyists, we expos'd them; even those are now
+offer'd to your view, crude and bereft of their limbes, and of the rest
+absolutely in their parts as he conceived them who as he was a happie
+imitator of nature was a most gentle expresser of it.  His mind and
+hand went together and what he thought he told with that easinesse that
+wee have scarse received from him a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P123"></A>123}</SPAN>
+blot in his papers."  On the
+other hand, scholarship has discovered more in the life of Edward
+Blount to justify his claim to the chief work of editing this volume.
+Whoever they were, the editors' claim to diligent care in their work
+was sincere.  Throughout the volume there are proofs that they employed
+the best text which they could get, even when others were in print.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is owing to this volume, in all probability, that we possess twenty
+of the best of Shakespeare's plays and the best texts of a number of
+the others.  We are therefore glad to hear that the edition was a
+success and was considered worth reprinting within nine years.  It is
+not improbable that this edition ran to five hundred copies.  Among the
+most interesting work of the editors of the volume was the prefixing of
+the Droeshout engraved portrait on the title-page, and an attempt to
+improve the stage directions, as well as the division of most of the
+plays, either in whole or in part, into acts and scenes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The twenty plays which appeared in print for the first time in the
+First Folio were taken in all probability directly from copies in the
+possession of Shakespeare's company.  Their texts are, upon the whole,
+excellent.  In the case of the sixteen other plays the editors
+substituted for eight of the plays already in print in quartos,
+independent texts from better manuscripts.  This act must have involved
+considerable expense and difficulty, and deserves the highest praise.
+Five of the printed quartos were used with additions and corrections.
+In the case of <I>Titus Andronicus</I> a whole scene was added.  In three
+cases only
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P124"></A>124}</SPAN>
+of the sixteen plays already printed did the editors
+follow a quarto text without correcting it from a later theatrical
+copy.  This conscientious effort to give posterity the best text of
+Shakespeare deserves our gratitude.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Second Folio, 1632, was a reprint of the First; the Third Folio,
+1663, a reprint of the Second; the Fourth Folio, 1685, a reprint of the
+Third.  This practice of copying the latest accessible edition has been
+adopted by editors down to a very late period.  Between 1629 and 1632
+six quartos of Shakespearean plays were printed,&mdash;a fact which
+indicates that the First Folio edition had been exhausted and that
+there was a continued market.  A man named Thomas Cotes acquired
+through one Richard Cotes the printing rights of the Jaggards, and
+added to them other rights derived from Pavier.  The old publishers,
+Smethwick and Aspley, were still living and were associated with him in
+publishing the Second Folio.  Robert Allott, June 26, 1629, had bought
+up Blount's title to the plays first registered in 1623, and was thus
+also concerned in the publication, while Richard Hawkins and Richard
+Meighen, who owned the rights of <I>Othello</I> and <I>Merry Wives</I>, were
+allowed to take shares.  The editors of the Second Folio made only such
+alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to
+make it more "correct."  The vast majority of the changes are
+unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously right,
+others as obviously wrong.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Five more Shakespearean quartos followed between 1634 and 1639.
+Between 1652 and 1655 two other
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P125"></A>125}</SPAN>
+quartos were published.  The
+Third Folio, 1664, was published by Philip Chetwind, who had married
+the widow of Robert Allott and thus got most of the rights in the
+Second Folio.  Chetwind's Folio is famous, not only for the addition of
+<I>Pericles</I>, which alone it was his first intention to include, but also
+for the addition of six spurious plays&mdash;<I>Sir John Oldcastle, The
+Yorkshire Tragedie, A London Prodigall, The Tragedie of Locrine,
+Thomas, Lord Cromwell</I>, and <I>The Puritaine</I>, or <I>The Widdow of Watling
+Streete</I>.  Chetwind's reason for thus adding these plays was that they
+had passed under Shakespeare's name or initials in their earliest
+prints.  The Fourth Folio, 1685, is a mere reprint of the Third.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the Fourth Folio ends the early history of how Shakespeare got
+into print.  From that time to this a long line of famous and obscure
+men, at first mostly men of letters, but afterwards, and especially in
+our own times, trained specialists in their profession, have devoted
+much of their lives to the editing of Shakespeare.  Their ideal has
+been, usually, to give readers the text of his poems and plays in their
+presumed primitive integrity.  Constant study of his works, and of
+other Elizabethan writers, has given them a certain knowledge of the
+words and grammatical usages of that day which go far to make
+Elizabethan English a foreign tongue to us.  On the other hand, more
+knowledge about the conditions of printing in Shakespeare's time has
+helped the editors very greatly in their attempts to set right a
+passage which was misprinted in the earliest printed text, or a line of
+which two early texts give different versions.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P126"></A>126}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+An example of the difficulties that still confront editors may be given
+from <I>II Henry IV</I>, IV, i, 94-96:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"<I>Archbishop</I>.  My brother general, the commonwealth,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 7em">To brother born, an household cruelty.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 7em">I make my quarrel in particular."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Nobody knows what Shakespeare meant to say in this passage, and no
+satisfactory guess has ever been made as to what has happened to these
+lines.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A knowledge of Elizabethan English has cleared up the following passage
+perfectly.  According to the First Folio, the only early print, Antony
+calls Lepidus, in <I>Julius Caesar</I>, IV, i, 36-37:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds<BR>
+On objects, arts, and imitations...."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+This has been corrected to read in the second line
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"On abjects, orts, and imitations."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Abjects here means outcasts, and orts, scraps, or leavings; but no one
+unfamiliar with the language of that time could have solved the puzzle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A different sort of problem is offered by such plays as <I>King Lear</I>, of
+which the quartos furnish three hundred lines not in the Folio, while
+the Folio has one hundred lines not in the quartos, and is, on the
+whole, much more carefully copied.  The modern editor gives all the
+lines in both versions, so that we read a <I>King Lear</I> which is probably
+longer than Shakespeare's countrymen read or ever saw acted.  The
+modern editor selects, however, when Folio and quartos differ, the
+reading which seems best.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P127"></A>127}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+FOLIO.  "Cordelia.        Was this a face<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">To be opposed against the <I>jarring</I> winds?"</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+QUARTOS.                 "Was this a face<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">To be opposed against the <I>warring</I> winds?"</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In such a difference as this, the personal taste of the editor is apt
+to govern his text.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We cannot here go farther in explaining the problems of the Shakespeare
+text.  To those who would know more of them, the <I>Variorum</I> edition of
+Dr. H. H. Furness offers a full history.  In the light of the knowledge
+which he and other scholars have thrown upon textual criticism, it is
+unlikely that there will ever be poor texts of Shakespeare reprinted.
+The work of the Shakespeare scholars has not been in vain.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Later Editions</B>.&mdash;Nicholas Rowe in 1709 produced the first edition in
+the modern sense.  He modernized the spelling frankly, repunctuated,
+corrected the grammar, made out lists of the dramatis personae,
+arranged the verse which was in disorder, and made a number of good
+emendations in difficult places.  He added also exits and entrances,
+which in earlier prints were only inserted occasionally.  Further, he
+completed the division of the plays into acts and scenes.  Perhaps his
+most important work was writing a full life of Shakespeare in which
+several valuable traditions are preserved.  The poems were not included
+in the edition, but were published in 1716 from the edition of 1640.
+He followed the Third and Fourth Folios in reprinting the spurious
+plays.  The edition was reprinted in 1714, 1725, and 1728.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1726 Alexander Pope published his famous edition of Shakespeare.
+Pope possessed a splendid lot of the old quartos and the first two
+folios, but his edition was wantonly careless.  He did, indeed, use
+some sense in excluding the seven spurious plays as well as <I>Pericles</I>
+from his edition, and he undoubtedly
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P128"></A>128}</SPAN>
+worked hard on the text.  He
+subdivided the scenes more minutely than Rowe after the fashion of the
+French stage division,&mdash;where a new scene begins with every new
+character instead of after the stage has been cleared.  Pope's
+explanations of the words which appeared difficult in Shakespeare's
+text were often laughably far from the truth.  The word 'foison,'
+meaning 'plenty,' Pope defined as the 'natural juice of grass.'  The
+word 'neif,' meaning 'fist,' Pope thought meant 'woman.'  Pistol is
+thus made to say, "Thy woman will I take."  Phrases that appeared to be
+vulgar or unpoetical he simply dropped out, or altered without notice.
+He rearranged the lines in order to give them the studied smoothness
+characteristic of the eighteenth century.  In fact, he tried to make
+Shakespeare as near like Pope's poetry as he could.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1726 Lewis Theobald published <I>Shakespeare Restored</I>, with many
+corrections of Pope's errors.  In this little pamphlet most of the
+material was devoted to <I>Hamlet</I>.  Theobald's corrections were taken by
+Pope in very bad part; and the latter tried to destroy Theobald's
+reputation by writing satires against him and by injuring him in every
+possible way in print.  The first of these publications, <I>The Dunciad</I>,
+appeared in 1728; and this, the greatest satire in the English
+language, was so effective as to have obscured Theobald's real merit
+until our own day.  Theobald's edition of Shakespeare followed in 1734,
+and was reprinted in 1740.  It is famous for his corrections and
+improvements of the text, many of which are followed by all later
+editors of Shakespeare.  The most notable of these is Mrs. Quickly's
+remark in Falstaff's deathbed scene, "His nose was as sharp as a pen
+and a' babbled of green fields."  The previous texts had given "and a
+table of green fields."  Pope had said that this nonsense crept in from
+the name of the property man who was named Greenfield, and thus there
+must have been a stage direction here,&mdash;"Bring in a table of
+Greenfield's."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by Thomes Hanmer's edition in
+six volumes.  Hanmer was a country gentleman, but not much of a scholar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Warburton's edition followed in 1747.  In 1765 appeared
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P129"></A>129}</SPAN>
+Samuel
+Johnson's long-delayed edition in eight volumes.  Aside from a few
+common-sense explanations, the edition is not of much merit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Tyrwhitt's edition in 1766 was followed by a reprint of twenty of the
+early quartos by George Steevens in the same year.  Two years later
+came the edition of Edward Capell, the greatest scholarly work since
+Theobald's.  In this edition was the first rigorous comparison between
+the readings of the folios and the quartos.  His quartos, now in the
+British Museum, are of the greatest value to Shakespeare scholars.
+With his edition begins the tendency to get back to the earliest form
+of the text and not to try to improve Shakespeare to the ideal of what
+the editor thinks Shakespeare should have said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1773 Johnson's edition was revised by Steevens, and <I>Pericles</I> was
+readmitted.  This was a valuable but crotchety edition.  In 1790 Edmund
+Malone published his famous edition in ten volumes.  No Shakespearean
+scholar ranks higher than he in reputation.  Numerous editions followed
+up to 1865, of which the most important is James Boswell's so-called
+Third <I>Variorum</I> in twenty-one volumes.  In 1855-1861 was published J.
+O. Halliwell's edition in fifteen volumes, which contains enormous
+masses of antiquarian material.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1853 appeared the forgeries of J. P. Collier, to which reference is
+made elsewhere.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1854-1861 appeared the edition in Germany of N. Delius.  The Leopold
+Shakespeare, 1876, used Delius's text.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1857-1865 appeared the first good American edition of R. G. White.
+It contained many original suggestions.  Between 1863 and 1866 appeared
+the edition of Clark and Wright, known as the Cambridge edition.  Mr.
+W. Aldis Wright, now the dean of living Shakespearean scholars, is
+chiefly responsible for this text.  It was reprinted with a few changes
+into the Globe edition, and is still the chief popular text.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Prof. W. A. Neilson's single volume in the Cambridge series, 1906, is
+the latest scholarly edition in America.  It follows in most cases the
+positions taken by Clark and Wright.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Within the last few years there has been an enormous
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P130"></A>130}</SPAN>
+stimulus to
+Shakespeare study.  The chief work of modern Shakespearean scholarship
+is the still incomplete <I>Variorum</I> edition of Dr. H. H. Furness and his
+son.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Other aids to study are reprints of the books used by Shakespeare,
+facsimile reprints of the original quartos of the plays, and, perhaps
+as useful as any one thing, the facsimile reproduction of the First
+Folio.  The few perplexing problems that the scholar still finds in the
+text of Shakespeare will probably never be solved.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the subject of this chapter, consult A. W. Pollard, <I>Shakespeare
+Folios and Quartos</I>, Methuen, London, 1910; Sidney Lee, Introduction to
+the facsimile reproduction of the First Folio by the Oxford University
+Press; T. R. Lounsbury, <I>The Text of Shakespeare</I>, New York, Scribners,
+1906.  For the remarks of critics and editors, the <I>Variorum</I> edition
+of Dr. H. H. Furness is invaluable.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap09fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="chap09fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap09fn1text">1</A>] A quarto volume, or quarto, is a book which is the size of a fourth
+of a sheet of printing paper.  The sheets are folded twice to make four
+leaves or eight pages, and the usual size is about 6x9 in.  A folio is
+a volume of the size of a half sheet of printing paper.  The paper is
+folded once and bound in the middle, the usual size being about 9 x 12
+in.  The divisions of the book made by thus folding sheets of paper are
+called quires, and may consist of four or eight leaves.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap09fn2text">2</A>] This view of the Pavier-Jaggard collection is held by A. W. Pollard
+of the British Museum and W. W. Greg of Trinity College Library,
+Cambridge.  The writers of this volume incline to accord it complete
+recognition.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap09fn3text">3</A>] It was evidently designed to fit in between <I>Romeo and Juliet</I> and
+<I>Julius Caesar</I>; but the owner of the publishing rights holding out
+till that part of the book was ready, the editors "ran in" <I>Timon of
+Athens</I> to fill up.  When <I>Troilus and Cressida</I> was finally arranged
+for, it had to be inserted between the Histories and Tragedies.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P131"></A>131}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER X
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD&mdash;IMITATION AND EXPERIMENT
+</H4>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+1587 (?)-1594
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The first period of Shakespeare's work carries him from the youthful
+efforts at dramatic construction to such mastery of dramatic technique
+and of original portrayal of life as raise him, when aided by his
+supreme poetic art, above all other living dramatists.  It was chiefly
+a period in which the young poet, full of ambition, curious of his own
+talents, and eager for success, was feeling his way among the different
+types of drama which he saw reaching success on the London stage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The longest period of experiment was in the writing of chronicle
+histories.  The experience acquired in these six plays, all derived in
+some measure from earlier work by others, made Shakespeare a master of
+this type.  Next in importance was comedy, chiefly romantic with four
+plays of widely different aim and merit.  These two types are brought
+to the highest development in the dramatist's second period.  Tragedy
+was to wait for a fuller and riper experience.  What the complete
+earlier version of <I>Romeo and Juliet</I> was like, we have only a faint
+idea; it was obviously, while
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P132"></A>132}</SPAN>
+intensely appealing, the work of a
+young and immature poet.  <I>Titus Andronicus</I> led nowhere in development.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Christopher Marlowe remained Shakespeare's master in the drama
+throughout the chronicle plays of the period.  John Lyly's court
+comedies contained most of the types of character which are to be found
+in <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>.  Throughout the period Shakespeare grows in
+mastery of plot and of his dramatic verse; but his chief growth is away
+from this imitation of others into his own creative portraiture of
+character.  The growth from the bluff soldier, Talbot, in <I>Henry VI</I> to
+the weak but appealing Richard II is no less marked than is that from
+the fantastic Armado in <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I> to the unconsciously
+ridiculous Bottom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shakespeare's greatest achievements in this period, aside from <I>Romeo
+and Juliet</I> in the unknown first draft, are the characters of Richard
+II and Richard III, the former a portrait of vanity and vacillation
+mingled with more agreeable traits, lovable gentleness and traces at
+least of kingliness, the latter a Titanic figure possessed by an
+overmastering passion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is impossible to draw a satisfactory line of division between the
+experimental period of Shakespeare's work and the period of comedy
+which follows.  Two plays, <I>A Midsummer Night's Dream</I> and <I>The
+Merchant of Venice</I>, lie really between the two.  The chief arguments
+for an early grouping seem to be that the former is in some measure an
+artificial court comedy, and is full of riming speech and end-stopped
+lines; the latter derives some help from Marlowe's treatment of <I>The
+Jew of Malta</I>.  But, on the other hand, the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P133"></A>133}</SPAN>
+mastery of original
+characterization in such groups as the delicate fairies of the <I>Dream</I>,
+or those who gather at the trial of <I>The Merchant</I>, might justify their
+position in the second period rather than in the first.  On the whole,
+it is perhaps wisest to let metrical differences govern, and so to put
+<I>Midsummer Night's Dream</I>, at the end of Imitation and Experiment;
+while <I>The Merchant of Venice</I> may safely usher in the great period of
+comedy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The three plays known as <I>The Three Parts of Henry VI</I>, together with
+<I>Richard the Third</I>, constitute the history of the Wars of the Roses,
+in which the House of York fought the House of Lancaster through the
+best part of the fifteenth century, and lost the fight and the English
+crown in 1485, a hundred years before Shakespeare came to London.
+Although these plays have but slight appeal to us as readers, they must
+have been highly popular among Elizabethan playgoers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The First Part of Henry the Sixth</B> deals chiefly with the wars of
+England and France which center about the figures of Talbot, the
+English commander, and Joan of Arc, called Joan la Pucelle (the
+maiden).  The former is a hero of battle, who dies fighting for
+England.  The latter is painted according to the traditional English
+view, which lasted long after Shakespeare's time, as a wicked and
+impure woman, in league with devils, who fight for her against the
+righteous power of England.  We are glad to think that while the Talbot
+scenes are probably Shakespeare's, the portrait of La Pucelle is not
+from his hand, as we shall see.  The deaths of these protagonists
+prepares the way for the peace which Suffolk concludes, and the
+marriage
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P134"></A>134}</SPAN>
+which he arranges between Margaret of Anjou and King
+Henry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Second Part of Henry the Sixth</B> concerns the outbreak of strife
+between York and Lancaster, but chiefly the overthrow of the uncle of
+the king, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, as Protector of the Realm, and
+the destruction of his opponent, the Duke of Suffolk, in his turn.  The
+play ends with the first battle of St. Albans (1455), resulting in the
+complete triumph of Duke Richard of York, in open rebellion against
+King Henry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth</B> tells of the further wars of
+York and Lancaster, in the course of which Richard of York is murdered,
+and his sons, Edward and Richard, keep up the struggle, while Warwick,
+styled the "Kingmaker," transfers his power to Lancaster.  In the end
+York is triumphant; and while Henry VI and his son are murdered, and
+Warwick slain in battle at Barnet, Edward is crowned as Edward IV, and
+Richard becomes the Duke of Gloucester.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship</B>.&mdash;The Three Parts of <I>Henry the Sixth</I> were first printed
+in the First Folio, 1623.  Two earlier plays, <I>The First Part of the
+Contention between the two Noble Houses of York and Lancaster</I>
+(sometimes called <I>1 Contention</I>), and <I>The True Tragedy of Richard,
+Duke of York... with the whole Contention between the two Houses of
+Lancaster and York</I> (2 <I>Contention</I>), appeared in quarto in 1594 and
+1595 respectively.  These are to be regarded as earlier versions of
+<I>II</I> and <I>III Henry VI</I>.[<A NAME="chap10fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap10fn1">1</A>] For the <I>First Part of Henry VI</I> no
+dramatic source exists.  The ultimate source is, of course, Holinshed's
+<I>Chronicles</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The authorship of these plays is not ascribed to any dramatist, until
+1623, although, as we have seen,[<A NAME="chap10fn2text"></A><A HREF="#chap10fn2">2</A>] Robert Greene accuses
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P135"></A>135}</SPAN>
+Shakespeare of authorship in a stolen play, by applying to him a line
+from <I>III Henry VI</I> which had appeared earlier in 2 <I>Contention</I>.
+Internal study of the three plays, however, has reduced the problem to
+about this state:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>The First Part of Henry VI</I> is thought to have been written by Greene,
+with George Peele and Marlowe to help.  To this Shakespeare was allowed
+to add a few scenes on a later revival of the play.  Some critics give
+to him the Talbot scenes and the quarrel in the Temple; but Professor
+Neilson warns us that the grounds for this and other assignments of
+authorship in the play "are in the highest degree precarious."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The two <I>Contentions</I> are thought to have been chiefly the work of
+Marlowe, with Greene to help him.  Others are suggested as assistants,
+such as Lodge, Peele, and Shakespeare.  In the revival of the two
+<I>Contentions</I>, Shakespeare's work amounted to a close revision, though
+the older material remained in larger part, both in text and plot.  In
+this revision, Marlowe is thought to have aided, and Greene's bitter
+attack on Shakespeare may have been caused by the fact that Shakespeare
+had so supplanted him as collaborator with Marlowe, then the greatest
+dramatist of England.  It hardly seems likely that this attack would
+have been made if Shakespeare had had any share in the first versions,
+<I>The Contentions</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;<I>The First Part of Henry VI</I> is thought to have been the play
+at the Rose Theatre on March 3, 1591-1692, by Lord Strange's company,
+since a reference by Nash about this time refers to Talbot as a stage
+figure.  The <I>Second and Third Parts</I> have no evidence other than that
+of style, but are usually assigned to the period 1590-1592.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Richard the Third</B> is best treated at this point, although in the date
+of composition <I>King John</I> may intervene between it and <I>III Henry VI</I>.
+It is the tale of a tyrant, who, by murdering everybody who stands in
+his way, including his two nephews, his brother, and his friend, wins
+the crown of England, only to be swept by
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P136"></A>136}</SPAN>
+irresistible popular
+wrath into ruin and death on Bosworth Field.  This tyrant is scarcely
+human, but rather the impersonation  of  a great  passion of ambition.
+In this respect, as well as in lack of humor, lack of development of
+character, and in other ways less easy to grasp, Shakespeare is here
+distinctly imitative of Marlowe's method in plays like <I>Tamburlaine</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;<I>Richard the Third</I> was very popular among Elizabethans, for
+quartos appeared in 1597, 1598 (then first ascribed to Shakespeare),
+1602, 1605, 1612, 1629, 1622, and 1634.  The First Folio version is
+quite different in detail from the Quarto, and is thought to have been
+a good copy of an acting version.  The date of writing can hardly be
+later than 1598.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;An anonymous play called <I>The True Tragedie of Richard III</I>
+had appeared before Shakespeare's; just when is uncertain.  A still
+earlier play, a tragedy in Latin called <I>Richardus Tertius</I>, also told
+the story.  Shakespeare's chief source was, however, Holinshed's
+<I>Chronicles</I>, which learned the tradition of Richard's wickedness from
+a life of that king written in Henry VII's time, and ascribed to Sir
+Thomas More.  In the <I>Chronicles</I> was but a bare outline of the
+character which the dramatist so powerfully developed.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>King John</B>, so far as its central theme may be said to exist, portrays
+the ineffectual struggles of a crafty and unscrupulous coward to stick
+to England's slippery throne.  At first King John is successful.
+Bribed with the rich dowry of Blanch, niece of England, as a bride for
+his son the Dauphin, King Philip of France ceases his war upon England
+in behalf of Prince Arthur, John's nephew and rival.  When the Church
+turns against John for his refusal to obey the Pope, and France and
+Austria continue the war, John is victorious, and captures Prince
+Arthur.  At this point begins his
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P137"></A>137}</SPAN>
+downfall.  His cruel treatment
+of the young prince, while not actually ending in the murder he had
+planned, drives the boy to attempted escape and to death.  The nobles
+rise and welcome the Dauphin, whose invasion of England proves
+fruitless, it is true, but the victory is not won by John, and the king
+dies ignobly at Swinstead Abbey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two characters rise above the rest in this drama of unworthy
+schemes,&mdash;Constance, the passionately devoted mother of Prince Arthur,
+who fights for her son with almost tigress-like ferocity, and
+Faulconbridge, the loyal lieutenant of King John, cynical and fond of
+bragging, but brave and patriotic, and gifted with a saving grace of
+rough humor, much needed in the sordid atmosphere he breathes.  One
+single scene contains a note of pathos otherwise foreign to the
+play,&mdash;that in which John's emissary Hubert begins his cruel task of
+blinding poor Prince Arthur, but yields to pity and forbears.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;<I>The Troublesome Raigne</I> was published in 1591, and probably
+written about that time.  Shakespeare's play did not appear in print
+until the First Folio, 1623.  Meres mentions it, however, in 1598, and
+internal evidence of meter and style, as well as of dramatic structure,
+puts the play between <I>Richard III</I> and <I>Richard II</I>, or at any rate
+close to them.  The three plays have been arranged in every order by
+critics of authority.  Perhaps 1592-1593 is a safe date.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The only source was the two parts of <I>The Troublesome Raigne
+of John, King of England</I>, a play which appeared anonymously in quarto
+in 1591.  Shakespeare compressed the two parts into one, gaining
+obvious advantages thereby, but losing also some incidents without
+which the later play is unmotivated.  The hatred felt by Faulconbridge
+for Austria was due in the earlier version to the legendary belief that
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P138"></A>138}</SPAN>
+Richard Coeur-de-Lion, his father, met death at Austria's hands.
+No reference to this is made by Shakespeare, but the hatred remains as
+a motive.  In the opening scene between the Bastard and his mother,
+Shakespeare's condensation has injured the story somewhat.  But most of
+his changes are improvements.  He cut out the pandering to religious
+prejudice which in the earlier play made John a Protestant hero to suit
+Elizabethan opinion.  He improved the exits and entrances, divided the
+scenes in more effective ways, and built up the element of comic relief
+in Faulconbridge's red-blooded humor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The numerous alterations from historical fact, such as the youth of
+Arthur, the widowhood of Constance, the character of Faulconbridge, are
+all from the earlier version, as is the suppression of the baron's wars
+and Magna Charta.  Shakespeare added practically nothing to the action
+in his source.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A still earlier play, <I>Kynge Johan</I> by Bishop John Bale (c. 1650), had
+nothing to do with later versions.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Richard the Second</B>, unlike <I>Richard the Third</I>, is not simply the
+story of one man.  While Richard III is on the stage during more than
+two-thirds of the latter play, Richard II appears during almost exactly
+half of the action.  Richard III dominates his play throughout; Richard
+II in only two or three scenes.  Richard's two uncles, John of Gaunt
+and the Duke of York, and his two cousins, Hereford (Bolingbroke, later
+Henry IV) and Aumerle, claim almost as much of our attention as does
+the central figure of the play, the light, vain, and thoughtless king.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet with all this improvement in the adjustment of the leading role
+to the whole picture, Shakespeare drew a far more real and complete
+character in Richard II than any he had yet portrayed in historical
+drama.  It is a character seen in many lights.  At first we are
+disappointed with Richard's love of the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P139"></A>139}</SPAN>
+spectacular when he
+allows Bolingbroke's challenge to Mowbray to go as far as the actual
+sounding of the trumpets in the lists before he casts down his warder
+and decrees the banishment of both.  A little later we see with disgust
+his greedy thoughtlessness, when he insults the last hour of John of
+Gaunt by his importunate visit, and without a word of regret lays hold
+of his dead uncle's property to help on his own Irish wars.  Nor does
+our respect for him rise at all when in the critical moment, upon the
+return of Bolingbroke to England, Richard's weak will vacillates
+between action and unmanly lament, and all the while his vanity
+delights to paint his misery in full-mouth'd rhetoric.  Vanity is again
+the note of his abdication, when he calls for a mirror in which to
+behold the face that has borne such sorrow as his, and then in a fit of
+almost childish rage dashes the glass upon the ground.  His whole life,
+like that one act, has been impulsive and futile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But now that misfortune and degradation have come upon King Richard,
+Shakespeare compels us to turn from disgust to pity, and finally almost
+to admiration.  We realize that after all Richard is a king, and that
+his wretched state demands compassion.  Moreover, a nobler side of
+Richard's character is portrayed.  His deeply touching farewell to his
+loving Queen, as he goes to his solitary confinement, though tinged
+with almost unmanly meekness of spirit, is yet poignant with true
+grief.  And the last scene of all, in which he dies, vainly yet bravely
+resisting his murderers, is a gallant end to a life so full of
+indecision.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P140"></A>140}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+In strong contrast with this weak and still absorbing figure are the
+two high-minded and patriotic uncles of King Richard, and the masterful
+though unscrupulous Henry.  The famous prophetic speech of dying John
+of Gaunt is committed to memory by every English schoolboy, as the
+expression of the highest patriotism in the noblest poetry.  And just
+as our attitude towards Richard changes from contempt to pity and even
+admiration, so our admiration for Henry, the man of action and, as he
+calls himself, "the true-borne Englishman," turns into indignation at
+his usurpation of the throne and his connivance, to use no stronger
+term, at the murder of his sovereign.  Throughout the play, however,
+Shakespeare makes us feel that the national cause demands Henry's
+triumph.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;Marlowe's <I>Edward II</I> is usually dated 1593; and Shakespeare's
+<I>Richard II</I> is dated the year following, in order to accommodate facts
+to theory.  The frequency of rime points to an earlier date, the
+absence of prose to a later date.  Our only certain date is 1597, when
+a quarto appeared.  Others followed in 1598, 1608, and 1615.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A play "of the deposing of Richard II" was performed by wish of the
+Earl of Essex in London streets in 1601, on the eve of his attempted
+revolt against the queen.  If this was our play, then Essex failed as
+signally in understanding the real theme of the play as he did in
+interpreting the attitude of Englishmen toward him.  Both the one and
+the other condemned usurpation in the strongest terms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;Holinshed's <I>Chronicles</I> furnished Shakespeare with but the
+bare historical outline.  It is usual to suggest that Marlowe's
+portrayal of a similarly weak figure with a similarly tragic end
+suggested Shakespeare's play; and this may be, though there is nothing
+to indicate direct influence.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P141"></A>141}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+<B>Titus Andronicus</B> has a plot so revolting to modern readers that many
+critics like to follow the seventeenth-century tradition, which tells,
+according to a writer who wanted to justify his own tinkering, that
+Shakespeare added "some master-touches to one or two of the principal
+characters," and nothing more.  But unfortunately not only the
+phraseology and the meter, but the more important external evidences
+point to Shakespeare, and, however we might wish it, we cannot find
+grounds to dismiss the theory that Shakespeare was at least responsible
+for the rewriting of an older play.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No play better deserves the type name of 'tragedy of blood.'  The
+crimes which disfigure its scenes seem to us unnecessarily wanton.
+Briefly, the struggle is between Titus, conqueror of the Goths, and
+Tamora, their captive queen, who marries the Roman emperor, and who
+would revenge Titus's sacrifice of her son to the shades of his own
+slain sons.  From the first five minutes, during which a noble Goth is
+hacked to pieces&mdash;off stage, mercifully&mdash;to the last minute of carnage,
+when the entire company go hands all round in murder, fifteen persons
+are slain, and other crimes no less horrible perpetrated.  Every one at
+some time gets his revenge; and the play is entirely made up of
+plotting, killing, gloating, and counterplotting.  The inhumanly brutal
+Aaron, the blackamoor lover of Tamora, is arch villain in all this; but
+the ungovernable passions of Titus render him scarcely more attractive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The pity of it is that the young Shakespeare apparently wasted upon
+this slaughtering much genuine
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P142"></A>142}</SPAN>
+poetic art, and no little
+elaboration of plot.  But he was writing what the public of that day
+enjoyed.  Developed by such real artists as Kyd, the tragedy of blood,
+like the modern "thriller," had about 1590 an enormous success.  It is
+well for us to remember, too, that out of one of these tragedies of
+revenge and blood sprang the great tragedy of <I>Hamlet</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The most recent authorities put the play as written not long
+before the publication of the First Quarto, 1594.  The Stationers'
+Register records it on February 6, 1593-4.  Second and Third Quartos
+followed in 1600 and 1611.  None of these ascribe the play to
+Shakespeare.  It is, however, included in the First Folio.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship and Source</B>.&mdash;Richard Henslowe, the manager, recorded in
+his Diary, April 11, 1591, the performance of a new play <I>Tittus and
+Vespacia</I>.  In a German version, <I>Tito Andronico</I>, printed in a
+collection of 1620, Lucius is called Vespasian; and thus we have a
+slight ground for belief that the entry of Henslowe refers to an early
+play about our Titus.  A Dutch version, <I>Aran en Titus</I>, appeared in
+1641.  This appears to have been based on another relation of the
+story, earlier and cruder than Shakespeare's.  The Shakespearean
+version probably came from these two earlier plays, with considerable
+additions in plot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The two latest students of the play, Dr. Fuller and Mr. Robertson,
+differ as far as they well can on the question of authorship.  The
+former believes Shakespeare wrote every line of the present play; the
+latter that he wrote none of it, and that Greene and Peele had their
+full share.  Kyd and Marlowe are assigned as authors by others.  One
+fact stands clear, that in the face of the evidence of the First Folio
+and of Meres, no conclusive internal evidence has disposed of the
+theory of Shakespearean authorship.  The play was enormously popular,
+if we may judge by contemporary references to it, and a mistake in
+attribution by Meres would therefore have been the more
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P143"></A>143}</SPAN>
+remarkable.  Incredible, too, as it may seem, the earlier versions must
+have been more revolting than Shakespeare's; so that there is really a
+lift into higher drama.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Romeo and Juliet</B> stands out from the other great tragedies of
+Shakespeare, not only in point of time, but in its central theme.  It
+deals with the power of nature in awaking youth to full manhood and
+womanhood through the sudden coming of pure and supreme love; with the
+danger which always attends the precipitate call of this awakening; and
+with the sudden storm which overcasts the brilliant day of passion.
+The enmity of the rival houses of Montague and Capulet, to which Romeo
+and Juliet belong, is but a concrete form of this danger that ever
+waits when nature prompts.  Romeo's fancied love for another disappears
+like a drop of water on a stone in the sun, when his glance meets
+Juliet's at the Capulet's ball.  Love takes equally sudden hold of her.
+Worldly and religious caution seek to stem the flood of passion, or at
+least to direct it.  The lovers are married at Friar Laurence's cell;
+but in the sudden whirl of events that follow the friar's amiable
+schemes, one slight error on his part wastes all that glorious passion
+and youth have won.  It was not his fault, after all; such is the
+eternal tragedy when Youth meets Love, and Nature leads them
+unrestrained to peril.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In perfection of dramatic technique parts of this play rank with the
+very best of Shakespeare's work.  When to this is added the
+extraordinary beauty and fire of the poetry, and the brilliancy of
+color and stage picture afforded by the setting in old Verona, it is no
+wonder that to-day no mouthing of the words, no
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P144"></A>144}</SPAN>
+tawdriness of
+setting, and no wretchedness of acting can hinder the supreme appeal of
+this play to audiences all over the world.  The chief characters are
+well contrasted by the dramatist.  Romeo, affecting sadness, but in
+reality merry by nature, becomes grave when the realization of love
+comes upon him.  Juliet, when love comes, rises gladly to meet its full
+claim.  She is the one who plans and dares, and Romeo the one who
+listens.  Contrasted with Romeo is his friend, Mercutio, gay and
+daring, loving and light-hearted; contrasted with Juliet is her old
+nurse, devoted, like the family cat, but unscrupulous, vain, and
+worldly,&mdash;a great comic figure.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;There is throughout the play, but chiefly in the rimed
+passages in the earlier parts, a great deal of verbal conceit and
+playing upon words, which mark immaturity.  The use of sonnets in two
+places, and the abundance of rime, point also to early work; but the
+dramatic technique and the development of character equal the work of
+later periods.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The First Quarto is a garbled copy taken down in the theater.  It was
+printed in 1597.  Its title claims that "it hath been often (with great
+applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon
+his servants."  The company in which Shakespeare acted was so called
+from July, 1596, to April, 1597.  The Second Quarto, "newly corrected,
+augmented, and amended," appeared in 1599, and is the basis of all
+later texts.  Three others followed&mdash;1609, one undated, and 1637.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is generally held that Shakespeare wrote much, perhaps all, of the
+play in the early nineties, and that he revised it for production about
+1597.  The play is therefore a stepping-stone between the first and
+second periods of his work.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The development of the story has been traced from Luigi da
+Porto's history of <I>Romeo and Giulietta</I> (pr. 1530 at Venice) through
+Bandello, Boisteau, and Painter's <I>Palace of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P145"></A>145}</SPAN>
+Pleasure</I>, to Arthur
+Brooke's poem <I>Romeus and Juliet</I> (1562), and to a lost English play
+which Brooke says in his address "To the Reader" he had seen on the
+stage, but is now known only through a Dutch play of 1630 based upon it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The part in which Shakespeare altered the action most notably is the
+first scene, one of the most masterly expositions of a dramatic
+situation ever written.  The nurse is borrowed from Brooke, the death
+of Mercutio from the old play.  The whole is, however, completely
+transfused by the welding fire of genius.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Love's Labour's Lost</B>.&mdash;Obviously imitative of the comedies of John
+Lyly, <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I> is a light, pleasant court comedy, with
+but a slight thread of plot.  The king of Navarre and three of his
+nobles forswear for three years the society of ladies in order to
+pursue study.  This plan is interrupted by the Princess of France, who
+with three ladies comes on an embassy to Navarre.  The inevitable
+happens; the gentlemen fall in love with the ladies, and, after
+ineffectual struggles to keep their oaths, give up the pursuit of
+learning for that of love.  This runs on merrily enough in courtly
+fashion till the announcement of the death of the king of France ends
+the embassy, and the lovers are put on a year's probation of constancy.
+In the subplot, or minor story, the play is notable for the burlesquing
+of two types of character&mdash;a pompous pedantic schoolmaster, and a
+braggart who always speaks in high-flown metaphor.  These two, happily
+contrasted with a country curate, a court page, and a country clown
+with his lass, make much good sport.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is often said, but as we believe without sufficient proof, that the
+wit combats of the lords and ladies,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P146"></A>146}</SPAN>
+and the artificial speech of
+the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque.  These
+elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention
+of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed
+this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of
+courtly repartee.  In this fashion, as well as in the handling of the
+low-comedy figures, and in other ways, Shakespeare followed in the
+steps of John Lyly, the author of the novel <I>Euphues</I> and of the seven
+court comedies written in the decade before <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>.
+Shakespeare's play, however, far surpasses those which it imitated.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The date of <I>Love's Labour's Lost</I> is entirely a matter of
+conjecture.  It may well have been the very earliest of Shakespeare's
+comedies.  Most scholars agree that the characteristics of style to
+which we have referred, together with the great use of rime (see p. 81)
+and the immaturity of the play as a whole, must indicate a very early
+date, and therefore put the play not later than 1591.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A quarto was published in 1598, "newly corrected and augmented by W.
+Shakespere."  The corrections, from certain mistakes of the printer,
+appear to be in the speeches of the wittiest of the lords and ladies,
+Biron and Rosaline.  The play next appeared in the Folio.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;No direct source has been discovered.  In 1586, Catherine
+de' Medici, accompanied by her ladies, visited the court of Henry of
+Navarre, and attempted to settle the disputes between that prince and
+her son, Henry III.  Other hints may also have come from French
+history.  The masque of Muscovites may have been based on the joke
+played on a Russian ambassador in York Gardens in 1582, when the
+ambassador was hoping to get a lady of Elizabeth's court as a wife for
+the Czar.  A mocking presentation of this lady was made with much
+ceremony.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P147"></A>147}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Comedy of Errors</B>.&mdash;Mistaken identity (which the Elizabethans
+called "Error") is nearly always amusing, whether on the stage or in
+actual life.  <I>The Comedy of Errors</I> is a play in which this situation
+is developed to the extreme of improbability; but we lose sight of this
+in the roaring fun which results.  Nowadays we should call a play of
+this type a farce, since most of the fun comes in this way from
+situations which are improbable, and since the play depends on these
+for success rather than on characterization or dialogue.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A merchant of Syracuse has had twin sons, and bought twin servants for
+them.  His wife with one twin son and his twin slave has been lost by
+shipwreck and has come to live in Ephesus.  The other son and slave,
+when grown, have started out to find their brothers, and the father,
+some years later, starts out to find him.  They come to Ephesus, and an
+amusing series of errors at once begins.  The wife takes the wrong twin
+for her husband, the master beats the wrong slave, the wrong son
+disowns his father, the twin at Ephesus is arrested instead of his
+brother, and the twin slave Dromio of Syracuse is claimed as a husband
+by a black kitchen girl of Ephesus.  The situation gets more and more
+mixed, until at last the real identity of the strangers from Syracuse
+is established, and all ends happily.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;There is much wordplay of a rather cheap kind, much doggerel,
+and much jingling rime in this play.  All these things point to early
+work.  A reference (III, ii, 125-127) to France "making war against her
+heir" admits the play to the period 1585-1594, when Henry of Navarre
+was received as king
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P148"></A>148}</SPAN>
+of France.  The play was probably written
+not later than 1591.  The play was first printed in the First Folio.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;Shakespeare borrowed most of his plot from the <I>Menaechmi</I>
+of Plautus.  Shakespeare added to Plautus's story the second twin-slave
+and the parents, together with the girl whom the elder twin meets and
+loves in Syracuse.  This elaboration of the plot adds much to the
+attractiveness of the whole story.  From the <I>Amphitruo</I> of Plautus,
+Shakespeare derived the doubling of slaves, and the scene in which the
+younger twin and his slave are shut out of their own home.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</B> is the first of the series of
+Shakespeare's romantic comedies.  Our interest in this play turns upon
+the purely romantic characters; two friends, one true, the other
+recreant; the true friend exiled to an outlaw's life in a forest, the
+false in favor at court; two loving girls, one fair and radiant, the
+other dark and slighted, and following her lover in boy's dress; two
+clowns, Speed and Lance, one a mere word tosser, the other of rare
+humor.  The plot is of slighter importance; a discovered elopement, and
+a maiden rescued from rude, uncivil hands, are the only incidents of
+account.  All ends happily as in romance, and the recreant friend is
+forgiven.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</I> was an experiment along certain
+directions which were later to repay the dramatist most richly.  Here
+first an exquisite lyric interprets the romantic note in the play; here
+first the production of a troth-plight ring confounds the faithless
+lover, and here we first meet one of the charming group of loving
+ladies in disguise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But as a whole the play is disappointing.  The plot is too fantastic;
+Proteus too much of a cad; Julia, though brave and modest, is yet too
+faithful; Valentine
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P149"></A>149}</SPAN>
+too easy a friend.  The illusion of romance
+throws a transitory glamour over the scene, but, save in the
+development of character, the play seems immature, when compared with
+the greater comedies that followed it.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The first mention of the play is by Meres (1598); the first
+print that in the First Folio (1623).  The presence of alternate riming
+sonnets and doggerel rime on the one hand, and of a number of double
+endings on the other, render 1592 a reasonable date.  In its
+development of character it marks a great advance over the other two
+comedies of this period.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The chief source was a story of a shepherdess, an episode in
+the Spanish novel, <I>Diana Enamorada</I>, by Jorge de Montemayor (1592).
+Shakespeare probably read it in an English translation by B. Yonge,
+which had been in Ms. about ten years.  This story gives Julia's part
+of the play, but contains no Valentine.  The Silvia of the story,
+Celia, falls in love instead with the disguised Felismena, and when
+rejected kills herself.  Whether it was Shakespeare who felt the need
+of a Valentine to support the tale, or whether this was done in the
+lost play of <I>Felix and Philiomena</I>, acted in 1584, cannot be told.
+The Valentine element may have been borrowed from another play, of
+which a German version exists (1620).
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Midsummer Night's Dream</B> is Shakespeare's experiment in the fairy
+play.  Four lovers, two young Athenians of high birth and their
+sweethearts, are almost inextricably tangled by careless Robin
+Goodfellow, who has dropped the juice of love-in-idleness upon the eyes
+of the wrong lovers.  King Oberon tricks his capricious and resentful
+little queen, by the aid of the same juice, into the absurdest
+infatuation for a clownish weaver, who has come out with his mates to
+rehearse a play to celebrate Theseus's wedding, but has fallen asleep
+and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P150"></A>150}</SPAN>
+wakened to find an ass's head planted upon him.  All comes
+right, as it ever must in fairyland; the true lovers are reunited; the
+faithful unloved lady gets her faithless lover; Titania repents and is
+forgiven; and Theseus's wedding is graced by the "mirthfullest tragedy
+that ever was seen."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We have in <I>Midsummer Night's Dream</I> three distinct groups of
+characters&mdash;the lovers, the city clowns rehearsing for the play, and
+the fairies.  These three diverse groups are combined in the most
+skillful way by an intricate interweaving of plot and by the final
+appearance of all three groups at the wedding festivities of the Duke
+of Athens and his Amazon bride Hypolita.  The characterization, light
+but delicate throughout, the mastery of the intricate story, the
+perfection of the comic parts, and the unsurpassed lyrical power of the
+poetry, are all the evidence we need that Shakespeare is now his own
+master in the drama, and can pass on to the supreme heights of his art.
+He has learned his trade for good and all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not a bad way of placing the last of the comedies in the first
+period of Shakespeare's production, to say that it is the counterpart
+in comedy of <I>Romeo and Juliet</I>.  Like Romeo, Lysander has made love to
+Hermia, has sung at her window by moonlight, and has won her heart,
+while her father has promised her hand to another.  Like the lovers in
+the tragedy, Lysander and Hermia plan flight, and an error in this plan
+would have been as fatal as it was in Romeo and Juliet, but for the
+kind interposition of the fairies.  Again, the "tedious brief scene" of
+Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the rustics at the close of the play,
+is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P151"></A>151}</SPAN>
+nothing but a delightful parody on the very theme of Romeo and
+Juliet, even to the mistaken death, and the suicide of the heroine upon
+realization of the truth.  At the end of the parody, as if in mockery
+of the Capulets and Montagues, Bottom starts up to tell us that "the
+wall is down that parted their fathers."  Finally, the whole fairy
+story is the creation of Shakespeare in a Mercutio mood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the diversity of its metrical form, <I>Midsummer Night's Dream</I> is
+also the counterpart of <I>Romeo and Juliet</I>.  The abundance of rimed
+couplet, combined wherever there is intensity of feeling with a perfect
+form of blank verse, is reminiscent of the earlier play.  Passages of
+equally splendid poetic power meet us all through, while at the same
+time we feel the very charm of youthful fervor in expression that the
+tragedy displayed.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;There is nothing certain to guide us in assigning a date to
+the play, except the mention of it in Meres's list, in 1598.  The
+absence of a uniform structure of verse, the large proportion of rime
+(partly due, of course, to the nature of the play), the unequal measure
+of characterization, and the number of passages of purely lyric beauty
+argue an earlier date than students who notice only the skillful plot
+structure are willing to assign.  Perhaps 1593-5 would indicate this
+variation in authorities.  Some evidence, of the slightest kind, is
+advanced for 1594.  A quarto was printed in 1600, another with the
+spurious date 1600, really in 1619.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The plot of the lovers has no known direct source.  The
+<I>Diana Enamorada</I> has a love potion with an effect similar to that of
+Oberon's.  The wedding of Theseus and the Amazon queen is the opening
+theme of Chaucer's <I>Knight's Tale</I>, and some minor details may also
+have been borrowed from that story.  No doubt, Shakespeare had also
+read for details North's
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P152"></A>152}</SPAN>
+account of Theseus in his translation of
+Plutarch.  Pyramus and Thisbe came originally from Ovid's
+<I>Metamorphoses</I>, which had been translated into English before this
+time.  Chaucer tells the same story in his <I>Legend of Good Women</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fairies are almost entirely Shakespeare's creation.  Titania was
+one of Ovid's names for Diana; Oberon was a common name for the fairy
+king, both in the <I>Faerie Queene</I> and elsewhere.  Robin Goodfellow was
+a favorite character among the common folks.  But fairies, as we all
+know them, are like the Twins in <I>Through the Looking-glass</I>, things of
+the fancy of one man, and that man Shakespeare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is the atmosphere of a wedding about the whole play, and this
+fact has led most scholars to think that the play was written for some
+particular wedding,&mdash;just whose has never been settled.  The flattery
+of the virgin Queen (II, i, 157 f.) and other references to purity
+might show that Queen Elizabeth was one of the wedding guests.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="chap10fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap10fn1text">1</A>] Schelling, <I>Elizabethan Drama</I> I, 264.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#chap10fn2text">2</A>] See p. <A HREF="#P8">8</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P153"></A>153}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD&mdash;COMEDY AND HISTORY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that Shakespeare was ever
+less than the greatest dramatist of his time, to think of him as the
+pupil and imitator of other dramatists.  He did, indeed, pass through
+this stage of his development with extraordinary rapidity, so that its
+traces are barely perceptible in the later plays of his First Period.
+In the plays of his Second Period even these traces disappear.  If his
+portrayal of Shylock shows the influence of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, it
+is in no sense derivative, and it is the last appearance in
+Shakespeare's work of characterization clearly dependent upon the plays
+of his predecessors.  However much Shakespeare's choice of themes may
+have been determined by the public taste or by the work of his fellows,
+in the creation of character he is henceforth his own master.  Having
+acquired this mastery, he uses it to depict life in its most joyous
+aspect.  For the time being he dwells little upon men's failures and
+sorrows.  He does not ignore life's darker side,&mdash;he loved life too
+well for that,&mdash;but he uses it merely as a background for pictures of
+youth and happiness and success.  Although among the comedies of this
+period he wrote also three historical plays, they
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P154"></A>154}</SPAN>
+have not the
+tragic character of the earlier histories.  They deal with youth and
+hope instead of crime, weakness, and failure.  In the two parts of
+<I>Henry IV</I> there is quite as much comedy as there is history; in <I>Henry
+V</I>, even though the comic interest is slighter, the theme is still one
+of youth and joy as personified in the figure of the vigorous,
+successful young king.  For convenience' sake, however, we may separate
+the histories from the comedies.  To do this we shall have to depart
+somewhat from chronological order, and, since there are fewer
+histories, we shall consider them first.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Henry IV, Part I</B>.&mdash;To the development of Henry V from the wayward
+prince to one of England's most beloved heroes, Shakespeare devoted
+three plays, <I>Henry IV</I>, <I>Parts I</I> and <I>II</I>, and <I>Henry V</I>.  The
+historical event around which the first of these centers is the
+rebellion of the Percies, which culminated in the defeat and death of
+Harry Percy, 'Hotspur,' on Shrewsbury field.  In <I>Richard II</I>,
+Shakespeare had foreshadowed what was to come.  The deposed king had
+prophesied that his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, crowned as Henry IV,
+would fall out with the great Percy family which had put him on the
+throne; that the Percies would never be satisfied with what Henry would
+do for them; and that Henry would hate and distrust them on the ground
+that those who had made a king could unmake one as well.  And this
+prophecy was fulfilled.  Uniting with the Scots under Douglas, with the
+Archbishop of York, with Glendower, who was seeking to reėstablish the
+independence of Wales, and with Mortimer, the natural successor of
+Richard,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P155"></A>155}</SPAN>
+the Percies raised the standard of revolt.  What might
+have happened had all things gone as they were planned, we can never
+know; but Northumberland, the head of the family, feigned sickness;
+Glendower and Mortimer were kept away; the Archbishop dallied; and
+failure was the result.  This situation gave Shakespeare an opportunity
+to paint a number of remarkable portraits; but the scheming, crafty
+Worcester, the vacillating Northumberland, the mystic Glendower, are
+all overshadowed by the figure of Hotspur, wrong-headed, impulsive, yet
+so aflame with young life and enthusiasm, so ready to dare all for
+honor's sake, that he is almost more attractive than the Prince
+himself.  Over against the older leaders of the rebellion stands the
+lonely figure of Henry IV, misunderstood and little loved by his sons,
+who has centered his whole existence upon getting and keeping the
+throne of England.  To this one end he bends every energy of his
+shrewd, strong, hard nature.  Such a man could never understand a
+personality like that of his older son, nor could the son understand
+the father.  Prince Hal, loving life in all its manifestations, joy in
+all its forms, could find small satisfaction in the rigid etiquette of
+a loveless court so long as it offered him an opportunity for little
+more than formal activity.  When the rebellion of the Percies showed
+him that he could do the state real service, he seized his opportunity
+gladly, gayly, modestly.  On his father's cause he centered the
+energies which he had previously scattered.  With this new demand to
+meet, he no longer had time for his old companions.  His old life was
+thrown off like a coat discarded under stress of work.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P156"></A>156}</SPAN>
+Even
+before that time came, however, Hal was not one who could enjoy
+ordinary low company; but the friends which had distracted him were far
+from ordinary.  In Falstaff, the leader of the riotous group,
+Shakespeare created one of the greatest comic figures in all
+literature.  Never at a loss, Falstaff masters alike sack,
+difficulties, and companions.  He is an incarnation of joy for whom
+moral laws do not exist.  Because he will not fight when he sees no
+chance of victory, he has been called a coward, but no coward ever had
+such superb coolness in the face of danger.  Falstaff's conduct in a
+fight is explained by his contempt for all conventions which bring no
+joy&mdash;a standard which reduces honor to a mere word.  So full of joy was
+he that he inspired it in his companions.  To be with him was to be
+merry.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, and a quarto
+was printed in 1598.  Meres mentions the play without indicating
+whether he meant one part or both.  The evidence of meter and style
+point to a date much earlier than Meres's entry, so that 1597 is the
+year to which Part I is commonly assigned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;For the serious plot of this play, Shakespeare drew upon
+Holinshed.  He had no scruples, however, against altering history for
+dramatic purposes.  Thus he brings within a much shorter period of time
+the battles in Wales and Scotland, makes Hal and Hotspur of
+approximately the same age, and unites two people in the character of
+Mortimer.  The situations in the scenes which show Hal with Falstaff
+and his fellows are largely borrowed from an old play called <I>The
+Famous Victories of Henry V</I>, but this source furnished only the barest
+and crudest outlines, and gave practically no hint of the characters as
+Shakespeare conceived them.  The reference in Act I, Sc. ii, to
+Falstaff as the 'old lad of the castle' shows that his name was
+originally
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P157"></A>157}</SPAN>
+Oldcastle, as in <I>The Famous Victories</I>.  Oldcastle
+was a historical personage quite unlike Falstaff, and it is supposed
+that the change was made to spare the feeling of Oldcastle's
+descendants.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Henry IV, Part II</B>.&mdash;This part is less a play than a series of loosely
+connected scenes.  The final suppression of the rebellion, which had
+been continued by the Archbishop of York, the sickness and death of
+Henry IV, and the accession of Prince Hal as Henry V, are matters
+essentially undramatic and incapable of unified treatment, while the
+growing separation of Hal and Falstaff deprived the underplot of that
+close connection with the main action which it had in the preceding
+play.  Feeling the weakness of the main plot, Shakespeare reduced it to
+a subordinate position, making it little more than a series of
+historical pictures inserted between the scenes in which Falstaff and
+his companions figure.  He enriched this part of the play, on the other
+hand, by the introduction of a number of superbly poetical speeches,
+the best known of which is that beginning, "O Sleep, O gentle Sleep."
+To the comic groups Shakespeare added a number of new figures, among
+them the braggart Pistol, whose speech bristles with the high-sounding
+terms he has borrowed from the theater, and old Justice Shallow, so
+fond of recalling the gay nights and days which are as much figments of
+his imagination as is his assumed familiarity with the great John of
+Gaunt.  By placing more stress upon the evil and less pleasing sides of
+Falstaff's nature, Shakespeare evidently intended to prepare his
+readers' minds for the definite break between old Jack and the new
+king; but in this wonderful man he had created a character so
+fascinating that he could not spoil it; and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P158"></A>158}</SPAN>
+the king's public
+rejection of Falstaff comes as a painful shock which, impresses one as
+much with the coldly calculating side of the Bolingbroke nature as it
+does with the sad inevitability of the rupture.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source and Date</B>.&mdash;The sources for this play are the same as those of
+its predecessor.  Although the first and only quarto was not printed
+until 1600, there is a reference to this part in Jonson's <I>Every Man
+Out of his Humour</I>, which was produced in 1599.  It must, therefore,
+have been written shortly after Part I, and it is accordingly dated
+1598.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Henry V</B>.&mdash;In this, which is really the third play of a trilogy,
+Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment quite unlike that which
+characterizes the other two.  <I>Henry V</I> is really a dramatized epic, an
+almost lyric rhapsody cast in the form of dialogue.  Falstaff has
+disappeared from view, and is recalled only by the affecting story of
+his death.  This episode, however, brief as it is, reveals the love
+which the old knight evoked from his companions, while the narrative of
+his last hours is the more pathetic for being put in the mouth of the
+comic figure of Dame Quickly.  Falstaff's place was one which could not
+be filled, and the comic scenes become comparatively insignificant,
+although the quarrels of Pistol and the Welshman Fluellen have a
+distinctive humor.  A figure which replaces the classic chorus connects
+the scattered historical scenes by means of superb narrative verse.
+Each episode glorifies a new aspect of Henry's character.  We see him
+as the valiant soldier; as the leader rising superior to tremendous
+odds; as the democratic king who, concealing his rank, talks and jests
+with a common soldier; and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P159"></A>159}</SPAN>
+as the bluff, hearty suitor of a
+foreign bride.  In thus seeing him, moreover, we see not only the
+individual man; we see him as an ideal Englishman, as the embodiment of
+the type which the men of Shakespeare's day&mdash;and of ours, too, for that
+matter&mdash;loved and admired and honored.  In celebrating Henry's
+victories, Shakespeare was also celebrating England's more recent
+victories over her enemies abroad, so that the play is a great national
+paean, the song of heroic, triumphant England.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date and Source</B>.&mdash;Like its predecessors, <I>Henry V</I> is founded on
+Holinshed, with some additions taken from the Famous Victories.  The
+allusion in the chorus which precedes Act V to the Irish expedition of
+the Earl of Essex fixes the date of composition between April 14 and
+September 28, 1599.  A quarto, almost certainly pirated, was printed in
+1600 and reprinted in 1602, 1608, and 1619 (in the latter with the
+false date of 1608).  The text of these quartos is, therefore, much
+inferior to that of the Folio.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Merchant of Venice</B>.&mdash;As usually presented on the modern stage,
+<I>The Merchant of Venice</I> appears to be a comedy, which is overshadowed
+by one tragic figure, that of the Jew Shylock, the representative of a
+down-trodden people, deprived of his money by a tricky lawyer and
+deprived of his daughter by a tricky Christian.  Students, on the other
+hand, have maintained that to the Elizabethans Shylock was merely a
+comic figure, the defeat of whose vile plot to get the life of his
+Christian debtor, Antonio, by taking a pound of his flesh in place of
+the unpaid gold, was greeted with shouts of delighted laughter.  As a
+matter of fact, Shylock, then as now, was a human being, and by virtue
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P160"></A>160}</SPAN>
+of that fact both ridiculous and pathetic.  In any case, whatever
+the dominant note of his character, he is not the dominant figure of
+the play.  If he were, the fifth act, which ends the play with
+moonlight and music and the laughter of happy lovers, would be
+distinctly out of place.  Yet it is in reality the absence of such
+defects of taste, the ability to bring everything into its proper
+place, to make a harmonious whole out of the most various tones, which
+best characterizes the Shakespearean comedy of this period.  Instead of
+being a play in which one great character is set in relief against a
+number of lesser ones, <I>The Merchant of Venice</I> is a comedy in which
+there is an unusually large number of characters of nearly equal
+importance and an unusually large number of plots of nearly equal
+interest.  There is the plot which has to do with Portia's marriage, in
+which the right lover wins this gracious merry lady by choosing the
+proper one of three locked caskets.  There is the plot which deals with
+the elopement of the Jew's daughter, Jessica.  There is the plot which
+relates the story of the bond given by Antonio to the Jew in return for
+the loan which enables Antonio's friend, Bassanio, to carry on his suit
+for Portia's hand, the bond, which, when forfeited, would have cost
+Antonio his life had not Portia, disguised as a lawyer, defeated
+Shylock's treacherous design.  There is the plot which tells how
+Bassanio and his friend Gratiano give their wedding rings as rewards to
+the pretended lawyer and his assistant, really their wives Portia and
+Nerissa in disguise,&mdash;an act which gives the wives a chance to make
+much trouble for their lords.  And all these plots are worked out with
+an abundance of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P161"></A>161}</SPAN>
+interesting detail, and are so perfectly
+interwoven that the play has all of the wonderful harmony of a Turkish
+rug, as well as its brilliant variety.  No play of Shakespeare's
+depends more for its effect on plot, on the sheer interest of the
+stories, and no one has, consequently, situations which are more
+effective on the stage.  It is, perhaps, an inevitable result that the
+individual characters have a somewhat less permanent, less deeply
+satisfying charm than do those of the comedies which follow.  None of
+these successors, however, presents a larger or more varied group of
+delightful men and women.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The later limit of the date is settled by the mention of this
+play in Meres's catalogue, and by its entry in the Stationers' Register
+of that same year.  Basing their opinion on extremely unsubstantial
+internal evidence, some scholars have dated the play as early as 1594,
+but the evidence of style and construction make a date before 1596
+unlikely.  Two quartos were printed, one in 1600; the other, though
+copying the date 1600 upon its title-page, was probably printed in 1619.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The story of the pound of flesh and that of the choice of
+caskets are extremely ancient.  The former is combined with that of the
+wedding rings in Fiorentino's <I>Il Pecorone</I> (the first novel of the
+fourth day), a story which Shakespeare probably knew and may have used.
+Alexander Silvayn's <I>The Orator</I>, printed in English translation in
+1596, has, in connection with a bond episode, speeches made by a Jew
+which may be the source of some of Shylock's lines.  The combination of
+these plots with those of Jessica and Nerissa is, so far as we can yet
+prove, original with Shakespeare; but we cannot be certain how much
+<I>The Merchant of Venice</I> resembles a lost play of the Jew mentioned in
+Gosson's <I>School of Abuse</I> (1579), "representing the greediness of
+worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of Usurers."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Taming of the Shrew</B>.&mdash;<I>The Taming of the Shrew</I> is only in part
+the work of Shakespeare.  Just how
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P162"></A>162}</SPAN>
+much he had to do with making
+over the underplot, we shall probably never know; but, in any case, he
+did not write the dialogue of this part of the play, and its
+construction is not particularly remarkable.  The winning of a girl by
+a suitor disguised as a teacher is a conventional theme of comedy, as
+is the disguising of a stranger to take the place of an absent father
+in order to confirm a young lover's suit.  The main plot Shakespeare
+certainly left as he found it.  It tells how an ungovernable, willful
+girl was made into a submissive wife by a husband who assumed for the
+purpose a manner even wilder than her own, so wild that not even she
+could endure it.  This story is presented in scenes of uproarious farce
+in which there is little opportunity for subtle characterization or the
+higher sort of comedy.  What Shakespeare did was to give to the hero
+and heroine, Petruchio and Katherine, a semblance of reality, and to
+add enormously to the life and movement of the scenes in which they
+appear.  Some of these scenes are very effective on the stage, but they
+are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities.  The
+induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite
+another matter.  The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately
+omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece.  A
+nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor
+before an inn.  The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has
+him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants who make him
+believe that he is really a lord, and finally has the play performed
+before him.  The outline of this induction was in the old play which
+Shakespeare revised; but
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P163"></A>163}</SPAN>
+he developed the crude work of his
+predecessor into scenes so delightfully realistic, into
+characterization so richly humorous, that this induction takes its
+place among the great comic episodes of literature.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;No certain evidence for the date of this play exists, even the
+metrical tests failing us because of the collaboration.  It is commonly
+assigned to the years 1596-7, but this is little more than a guess.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;As has already been indicated, this play is the revision of
+an older play entitled <I>The Taming of a Shrew</I>.  The latter was
+probably written by a disciple of Marlowe, and was first printed in
+quarto in 1594.  The chief change which the revision made in the plot
+was that which gave Katherine one sister instead of two and added the
+interest of rival suitors for this sister's hand.  Stories concerning
+the taming of a shrewish woman are both ancient and common, but no
+direct antecedent of the older play has been discovered, although some
+incidents seem to have been borrowed from Gascoigue's <I>Supposes</I>, a
+translation from the Italian of Ariosto.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship</B>.&mdash;The identity of Shakespeare's collaborator is unknown,
+nor is it possible to define exactly the limits of his work.  It is
+practically certain, however, that Shakespeare wrote the Induction; II,
+i, 169-326; III, ii, with the possible exception of 130-150; IV, i,
+iii, and v; V, ii, at least as far as 175.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Merry Wives of Windsor</B>.&mdash;<I>The Merry Wives</I> is the only comedy in
+which Shakespeare avowedly presents the middle-class people of an
+English town.  In other comedies English characters and customs appear
+through the thin disguise of Italian names; in the histories there are
+comic scenes drawn from English life; but only here does Shakespeare
+desert the city and the country for the small town and draw the larger
+number of his characters from the great middle class.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P164"></A>164}</SPAN>
+A
+tradition has come down to us, one which is supported by the nature of
+the play, that Queen Elizabeth was so fascinated by the character of
+Falstaff as he appeared in <I>Henry IV</I> that she requested Shakespeare to
+show Falstaff in love, and that Shakespeare, in obedience to this
+command, wrote the play within a fortnight.  Unless this tradition be
+true, it is difficult to explain why Shakespeare should have written a
+comedy which is, in comparison with his other work of this period, at
+once conventional and mediocre.  The subject&mdash;the intrigues of Falstaff
+with two married women, and the wooing of a commonplace girl by two
+foolish suitors and another as commonplace as herself&mdash;gave Shakespeare
+little opportunity for poetry and none for the portrayal of the types
+of character most congenial to his temperament.  The greatest blemish
+on the play, however, from the standpoint of a student of Shakespeare,
+is that the man called Falstaff is not Falstaff at all, that this
+Falstaff bears only an outward resemblance to the Falstaff of the
+historical plays.  If we may misquote the poet, Falstaff died a martyr,
+and this is not the man.  The real Falstaff would never have stooped to
+the weak devices adopted by the man who bears his name, would never
+have been three times the dupe of transparent tricks.  The task
+demanded of Shakespeare was one impossible of performance.  Falstaff
+could not have fallen in love in the way which the queen desired.  Nor
+is there much to compensate for this degradation of the greatest comic
+figure in literature.  Falstaff's companions share, although to a
+lesser degree, in their leader's fall, while the two comic figures
+which are original with this play are
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P165"></A>165}</SPAN>
+comparatively unsuccessful
+studies in French and Welsh dialect.  Judged by Shakespeare's own
+standard, this work is as middle-class as its characters; judged by any
+other, it is an amusing comedy of intrigue, realistic in type and
+abounding in comic situations which approach the borderland of farce.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;This play was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company
+January 18, 1602.  It was certainly written after the two parts of
+<I>Henry IV</I>, and if, as is most probable, the character of Nym is a
+revival and not an imperfect first sketch, the play must have succeeded
+<I>Henry V</I>.  On these grounds the play is best assigned to 1599.  It was
+first printed in quarto in 1602, but this version is extremely faulty,
+besides being considerably shorter than that of the First Folio.  The
+quarto seems to have been printed from a stenographic report of an
+acting version of the play, made by an unskillful reporter for a
+piratical publisher.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The main plot resembles a story derived from an Italian
+source which is found in Tarlton's <I>News out of Purgatorie</I>.  For the
+underplot and a number of details in the working out of the main plot,
+no source is known.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Much Ado About Nothing</B>.&mdash;In this play, as nowhere else, Shakespeare
+has given us the boon of laughter&mdash;not the smile, not the uncontrolled
+guffaw, but rippling, melodious laughter.  From the beginning to the
+end this is the dominant note.  If the great trio of which this was the
+first be classified as romantic comedies, we may perhaps say that in
+speaking of the others we should lay the stress on the word 'romantic,'
+in this, on the word 'comedy.'  As regards the main plot, <I>Much Ado</I>
+is, to be sure, the most serious of the three.  When the machinations
+of the villainous Prince John lead Claudio to believe his intended
+bride
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P166"></A>166}</SPAN>
+unfaithful, and to reject this pure-scaled Hero with
+violence and contumely at the very steps of the altar, we have a
+situation which borders on the tragic.  The mingled doubt, rage, and
+despair of Hero's father is, moreover, undoubtedly affecting.
+Nevertheless, powerful as these scenes are, they are so girt about with
+laughter that they cannot destroy our good spirits.  Even at their
+height, the manifestations of human wickedness, credulity, and weakness
+seem but the illusions of a moment, soon to be dissipated by the power
+of radiant mirth.  It is not without significance that the deep-laid
+plot should be defeated through the agency of the immortal Dogberry,
+most deliciously foolish of constables.  Nor is it mere chance that
+Hero and Claudio are so constantly accompanied by Beatrice and
+Benedick, that amazing pair to whom life is one long jest.  In the
+merry war which is constantly raging between these two, their shafts
+never fail of their mark, but neither is once wounded.  Like magnesium
+lights, their minds send forth showers of brilliant sparks which hit,
+but do not wound.  But their wit is something more than empty sparkle.
+It is the effervescence of abounding life, a life too sound and perfect
+to be devoid of feeling.  Their brilliancy does not conceal emptiness,
+but adorns abundance.  When such an occasion as Hero's undeserved
+rejection called for it, the true affection of Beatrice and the true
+manliness of Benedick appeared.  Hence, although both seem duped by the
+trick which forms the underplot, the ruse which was to make each think
+the other to be the lovelorn one, it is really they who win the day.
+Their feelings are not altered by this merry plot; they
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P167"></A>167}</SPAN>
+are
+merely given a chance to drop the mask of banter and to express without
+confusion the love which had long been theirs.  Thus the play which
+began with the silvery laughter of Beatrice ends in general mirth which
+is yet more joyous.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;Since <I>Much Ado</I> is not mentioned by Meres, it can hardly have
+been written before 1598.  Entries in the Stationers' Register for
+August 4 and 24, 1600, and the appearance of a quarto edition in this
+same year limit the possibilities at the other end.  Since the
+title-page of the quarto asserts that this play had been "sundry times
+publicly acted," we may assign the date 1599 with considerable
+confidence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The main plot was derived originally from the twentieth
+novel of Bandello, but there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare
+used either this or its French translation in Belleforest.  In this
+story Benedick and Beatrice do not appear; there is no public rejection
+of Hero; there is no discovery of the plot by Dogberry and his fellows;
+and the deception of Claudio is differently managed.  Shakespeare's
+treatment of this last detail has its source in an episode of the fifth
+book of Ariosto's <I>Orlando Furioso</I>, a work several times done into
+English before Shakespeare's play was written.  There is considerable
+reason for assuming the existence of a lost original for <I>Much Ado</I> in
+the shape of a play, known only by title, called <I>Benedicke and
+Betteris</I>; but it is, of course, impossible to say how much Shakespeare
+may have owed to this hypothetical predecessor.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>As You Like It</B>.&mdash;Of this most idyllic of all Shakespeare's comedies,
+the Forest of Arden is not merely the setting; it is the central force
+of the play, the power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony
+out of discord.  It reminds us of Sherwood forest, the home of Robin
+Hood and his merry men; but it is more than this.  Not only does it
+harbor beasts and trees never found on English soil, but its shadowy
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P168"></A>168}</SPAN>
+glades foster a life so free from care and trouble that it
+becomes to us a symbol of Nature's healing, sweetening influence.  Here
+an exiled Duke and his faithful followers have found a refuge where,
+free from the envy and bickerings of court, they "fleet the time
+carelessly, as they did in the Golden Age."  To them comes the youth
+Orlando, fleeing from the treachery of a wicked elder brother and from
+the malice of the usurping Duke.  To them comes Rosalind, daughter of
+the exiled Duke, who has lived at the usurper's court, but has, in her
+turn, been exiled, and who brings with her Celia, the usurper's
+daughter, and Touchstone, the lovable court fool.  And through these
+newcomers the Duke and his friends are brought into contact with a
+shepherd and shepherdess as unreal and as charming as those of Dresden
+china, and with other country folk who smack more strongly of the soil.
+In the forest, Rosalind, who has for safety's sake assumed man's
+attire, again meets Orlando, and the love between them, born of their
+first meeting at court, becomes stronger and truer amid scenes of
+delicate comedy and merry laughter.  Once in Arden, Orlando ceases to
+brood morosely over the wrongs done him; Rosalind's wit becomes sweeter
+while losing none of its keenness; and Touchstone feels himself no
+longer a plaything, but a man.  So we are not surprised when Oliver,
+the wicked brother, lost in the forest and rescued from mortal danger
+by the lad he has always sought to injure, awakens to his better self;
+nor when the usurping Duke, leading an armed expedition against the man
+he has deposed, is converted at the forest's edge by an old hermit,
+abandons the throne to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P169"></A>169}</SPAN>
+its rightful occupant, and enters upon the
+religious life.  Thus the old Duke comes into his own again, wiser and
+better than before; and if, among the many marriages which fill the
+last act with the chiming of marriage bells, there are some which seem
+little likely to bring lasting happiness, the magic of the woods does
+much to dissipate our doubts.  Only Jaques, the melancholy philosopher,
+fails to share in the general rejoicing and the glad return.  He has
+been too hardened by the pursuit of his own pleasure and is too shut in
+by his delightfully cynical philosophy to feel quickly the forest's
+touch.  Yet not even his brilliant perversities can sadden the joyous
+atmosphere; it is only made the more enjoyable by force of contrast.
+Since Jaques wishes no joy for himself, we wish none for him, and with
+little regret we leave him as he has lived, a lonely, fascinating
+figure.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;Like <I>Much Ado</I>, <I>As You Like It</I> is not mentioned by Meres,
+and was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4, 1600.  Some
+critics have placed this play before <I>Much Ado</I>, but, although there is
+little evidence on either side, the style and tone of the play incline
+us to place it after, dating it 1599-1600.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;<I>As You Like It</I> is a dramatization of Lodge's pastoral
+novel entitled <I>Rosalynde</I>, which was founded in its turn on the <I>Tale
+of Gamelyn</I>, incorrectly ascribed to Chaucer.  Shakespeare condensed
+his original to great advantage, leaving out many episodes and so
+changing others as to give the subject a new and higher unity.  The
+atmosphere of the forest is all of his creation, as are many of the
+characters, including Jaques and Touchstone.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Twelfth Night, or What You Will</B>.&mdash;In <I>Twelfth Night</I> romance and
+comedy are less perfectly fused than in
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P170"></A>170}</SPAN>
+the comedy which preceded
+it.  Here there are two distinct groups of characters, on the one hand
+riotous old Sir Toby and his crew leading the Puritanical steward
+Malvolio into the trap baited by his own egotism; on the other, the
+dreaming Duke, in love with love rather than with the beautiful Olivia
+whom he woos in vain, and ardently loved by Viola, whose gentle nature
+is in touching contrast with the doublet and hose which misfortune has
+compelled her to assume.  There is, however, no lack of dramatic unity.
+In Olivia the two groups meet, for Toby is Olivia's uncle, Malvolio her
+steward, the Duke her lover, Viola&mdash;later happily supplanted by her
+twin brother Sebastian&mdash;the one she loves.  Thus the romantic and comic
+forces act and react upon each other.  Yet this play, by reason of its
+setting, the court of Illyria, was bound to lack the magical atmosphere
+of the forest, which inspired kindly humor in the serious and gentle
+seriousness in the merry.  If Peste is as witty as Touchstone, he is
+less of a man; if Viola is more appealing than Rosalind, she has a less
+sparkling humor.  Here the love story is more passionate, the fun more
+uproarious.  Toby is not Falstaff; he is overcome by wine and
+difficulties as that amazing knight never was; but it is a sad soul
+which does not roar with Toby in his revels; shout with laughter over
+the duel which he arranges between the shrinking Viola and the foolish,
+vain Sir Andrew; and shake in sympathy with his glee over Malvolio's
+plight when that unlucky man is beguiled into thinking Olivia loves
+him, and into appearing before her cross-gartered and wreathed in the
+smiles
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P171"></A>171}</SPAN>
+which accord so ill with his sour visage.  All the more
+affecting in contrast to this boisterous merriment is the frail figure
+of Viola, who knows so well "what love women to men may owe."  Amid the
+perfume of flowers and the sob of violins the Duke learns to love this
+seeming boy better than he knows, and easily forgets the romantic
+melancholy which was never much more than an agreeable pose.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;In the diary of John Manningham for February 2, 1602, is a
+record of a performance of <I>Twelfth Night</I> in the Middle Temple.  The
+absence of the name from Meres's list again limits the date at the
+other end.  The internal evidence, aside from that of style and meter,
+is negligible, while the latter confirms the usually accepted date of
+1601.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The principal source of the plot was probably <I>Apolonius
+and Silla</I>, a story by Barnabe Riche, apparently an adaptation of
+Belleforest's translation of the twenty-eighth novel of Bandello.
+There was also an Italian play, <I>Gl' Ingannati</I>, acted in Latin
+translation at Cambridge in 1590 and 1598, which has a similar plot.  A
+German  play on the same subject, apparently closely connected with
+Riche, has given rise to the hypothesis that a lost English play
+preceded <I>Twelfth Night</I>; but this is only conjectural, and there is
+some evidence that Shakespeare was familiar with Riche's story.  If
+this be the original, Shakespeare improved on it as much as he did on
+<I>Rosalynde</I>, condensing the beginning,  knitting together the loose
+strands at the end, and introducing the whole of the underplot with its
+rich variety of characters.  The only hint for this known is a slight
+suggestion for Malvolio's madness found in another story of Riche's
+volume.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P172"></A>172}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD&mdash;TRAGEDY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The Second and Third periods slightly overlap; for <I>Julius Caesar</I>, the
+first play of the later group, was probably written before <I>Twelfth
+Night</I> and <I>As You Like It</I>.  But the change in the character of the
+plays in these two periods is sharp and decisive, like the change from
+day to night.  Shakespeare has studied the sunlight of human
+cheerfulness and found it a most interesting problem; now in the
+mysterious starlight and shadow of human suffering he finds a problem
+more interesting still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The three comedies of this period, partly on account of their bitter
+and sarcastic tone, are not widely read nor usually very much admired;
+but the great tragedies are the poet's finest work and scarcely equaled
+in the history of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Troilus and Cressida</B>.&mdash;Here the story centers around the siege of
+ancient Troy by the Greeks.  Its hero, Troilus, is a young son of
+Priam, high-spirited and enthusiastic, who is in love with Cressida,
+daughter of a Trojan priest.  Pandarus, Cressida's uncle, acts as
+go-between for the lovers.  Just as the suit of Troilus is crowned with
+success, Cressida, from motives of policy, is forced to join her father
+Calchas, who is in the camp of the besieging Greeks.  Here her fickle
+and sensuous nature reveals itself rapidly.  She yields to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P173"></A>173}</SPAN>
+the
+love of the Greek commander Diomed and promises to become his mistress.
+Troilus learns of this, consigns her to oblivion, and attempts, but
+unsuccessfully, to take revenge on Diomed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While this love story is progressing, meetings are going on between the
+Greek and Trojan warriors; a vivid picture is given of conditions in
+the Greek camp during the truce, and particularly of the insolent pride
+of Achilles.  The story ends with the resumption of hostilities, the
+slaying of Hector by Achilles, and the resolution of Troilus to revenge
+his brother's death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is very difficult to understand what Shakespeare meant by this play.
+If it is a tragedy, why do the hero and heroine meet with no special
+disaster at the end, and why do we feel so little sympathy for the
+misfortunes of any one in the play?  If it is a comedy, why is its
+sarcastic mirth made more bitter than tears, and why does it end with
+the death of its noblest minor character and with the violation of all
+poetic justice?  From beginning to end it is the story of disillusion,
+for it sorts all humanity into two great classes, fools who are cheated
+and knaves who cheat.  Some people think that Shakespeare wrote it in a
+gloomy, pessimistic mood, with the sardonic laughter of a disappointed,
+world-wearied man.  Others, on rather doubtful grounds, believe it a
+covert satire on some of Shakespeare's fellow dramatists.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship</B>.&mdash;It is generally agreed that a small part of this play is
+by another author.  The Prologue and most of the Fifth Act are usually
+considered non-Shakespearean.  They differ from the rest of the play in
+many details of vocabulary, meter, and style.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P174"></A>174}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;<I>Troilus and Cressida</I> must have been written before 1603, for
+in the spring of that year an entry in regard to it was made in the
+Stationers' Register.  It must have been written after 1601, for it
+alludes (Prologue, ll. 23-25) to the Prologue of Jonson's <I>Poetaster</I>,
+a play published in that year.  Hence the date of composition would
+fall during or slightly before 1602.  The First Quarto was not
+published until 1609.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;The main source of this drama was the narrative poem
+<I>Troilus and Criseyde</I> by Chaucer.  Contrary to his custom, Shakespeare
+has degraded the characters of his original, instead of ennobling them.
+The camp scenes are adapted from Caxton's <I>Recuyell of the Historyes of
+Troye</I>; and the challenge of Hector was taken from some translation of
+Homer, probably that by Chapman.  An earlier lost play on this subject
+by Dekker and Chettle is mentioned in contemporary reference.  We do
+not know whether Shakespeare drew anything from it or not.  Scattered
+hints were probably taken from other sources, as the story of Troy was
+very popular in the Middle Ages.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>All's Well That Ends Well</B>.&mdash;When a beautiful and noble-minded young
+woman falls in love with a contemptible scoundrel, forgives his
+rebuffs, compromises her own dignity to win his affection, and finally
+persuades him to let her throw herself away on him,&mdash;is the result a
+romance or a tragedy?  This is a nice question; and by the answer to it
+we must determine whether <I>All's Well That Ends Well</I> is a romantic
+comedy like <I>Twelfth Night</I> or a satirical comedy bitter as tragedy,
+like <I>Troilus and Cressida</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Helena, a poor orphan girl, has been brought up by the kindly old
+Countess of Rousillon, and cherishes a deep affection for the
+Countess's son Bertram, though he neither suspects it nor returns it.
+She saves the life of the French king, and he in gratitude allows her
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P175"></A>175}</SPAN>
+to choose her husband from among the noblest young lords of
+France.  Her choice falls on Bertram.  Being too politic to offend the
+king, he reluctantly marries her, but forsakes her on their wedding day
+to go to the wars.  At parting he tells her that he will never accept
+her as a wife until she can show him his ring on her finger and has a
+child by him.  By disguising herself as a young woman whom Bertram is
+attempting to seduce, Helena subsequently fulfills the terms of his
+hard condition.  Later, before the king of France she reminds him of
+his promise, shows his ring in her possession, and states that she is
+with child by him.  The count, outwitted, and in fear of the king's
+wrath, repentantly accepts her as his wife; and at the end Helena is
+expected to live happily forever after.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Disagreeable as the plot is when told in outline, it is redeemed in the
+actual play by the beautiful character given to the heroine.  But this,
+while it vastly tones down the disgusting side of the story, only
+increases the bitter pathos which is latent there.  The more lovely and
+admirable Helena is, the more she is unfitted for the unworthy part
+which she is forced to act and the man with whom she is doomed to end
+her days.  A modern thinker could easily read into this "comedy" the
+world-old bitterness of pearls before swine.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;No quarto of this comedy exists, nor is there any mention of
+such a play as <I>All's Well That Ends Well</I> before the publication of
+the First Folio in 1623.  A play of Shakespeare's called <I>Love's
+Labour's Won</I> is mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598; and many think
+that this was the present comedy under another name.  However, the
+meter, style, and mood of most of the play seem to indicate a later
+date.  The
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P176"></A>176}</SPAN>
+most common theory is that a first version was written
+before 1598, and that this was rewritten in the early part of the
+author's third period.  This would put the date of the play in its
+present form somewhere around 1602.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;The story is taken from Boccaccio's <I>Decameron</I> (ninth
+novel of the third day).  It was translated into English by Painter in
+his <I>Palace of Pleasure</I>, where our author probably read it.
+Shakespeare has added the Countess, Parolles, and one or two minor
+characters.  The conception of the heroine has been greatly ennobled.
+It is a question whether the bitter tone of the play is due to the
+dramatist's intention or is the unforeseen result of reducing
+Boccaccio's improbable story to a living possibility.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Measure for Measure</B>.&mdash;When Hamlet told his guilty mother that he
+would set her up a glass where she might see the inmost part of her, he
+was doing for his mother what Shakespeare in <I>Measure for Measure</I> is
+doing for the lust-spotted world.  The play is a trenchant satire on
+the evils of society.  Such realistic pictures of the things that are,
+but should not be, have always jarred on our aesthetic sense from
+Aristophanes to Zola, and <I>Measure for Measure</I> is one of the most
+disagreeable of Shakespeare's plays.  But no one can deny its power.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here, as in <I>All's Well That Ends Well</I>, we have one beautiful
+character, that of Isabella, like a light shining in corruption.  Here,
+too, the wronged Mariana, in order to win back the faithless Angelo, is
+forced to resort to the same device to which Helena had to stoop.  But
+this play is darker and more savage than its predecessor.  Angelo, as a
+governor, sentencing men to death for the very sin which he as a
+private man is trying to commit, is contemptible on a huger
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P177"></A>177}</SPAN>
+and
+more devilish scale than Bertram.  Lucio, if not more base than
+Parolles, is at least more malignant.  And Claudio, attempting to save
+his life by his sister's shame, is an incarnation of the healthy animal
+joy of life almost wholly divested of the ideals of manhood.  In a way,
+the play ends happily; but it is about as cheerful as the red gleam of
+sunset which shoots athwart a retreating thunderstorm.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The play was first published in the Folio of 1623.  It is
+generally believed, however, that it was written about 1603.  In the
+first place, the verse tests and general character of the play seem to
+fit that date; secondly, there are two passages, I, i, 68-73 and II,
+iv, 27-30, which are usually interpreted as allusions to the attitude
+of James I toward the people after he came to the throne in 1603; and,
+thirdly, there are many turns of phrase which remind one of <I>Hamlet</I>
+and which seem to indicate that the two plays were written near
+together.  Barksted's <I>Myrrha</I> (1607) contains a passage apparently
+borrowed from this comedy, which helps in determining the latest
+possible date of composition.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;Shakespeare borrowed his material from a writer named
+George Whetstone, who in 1578 printed a play, <I>Promos and Cassandra</I>,
+containing most of the story of <I>Measure for Measure</I>.  In 1582 the
+same author published a prose version of the story in his <I>Heptameron
+of Civil Discourses</I>.  Whetstone in turn borrowed his material, which
+came originally from the <I>Hecatommithi</I> of Giraldi Cinthio.
+Shakespeare ennobled the underlying thought as far as he could, and
+added the character of Mariana.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Julius Caesar</B>.&mdash;The interest in <I>Julius Caesar</I> does not focus on any
+one person as completely as in the other great tragedies.  Like the
+chronicle plays which had preceded it, it gives rather a grand panorama
+of history than the fate of any particular hero.  This
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P178"></A>178}</SPAN>
+explains
+its title.  It is not the story of Julius Caesar the man, but of that
+great political upheaval of which Caesar was cause and center.  That
+upheaval begins with his attempt at despotism and the crown; it reaches
+its climax in his death, which disturbs the political equilibrium of
+the whole nation; and at last subsides with the decline and downfall of
+Caesar's enemies.  Shakespeare has departed from history in drawing the
+character of the great conqueror, making it more weak, vain, and
+pompous than that of the real man.  Yet even in the play "the mightiest
+Julius" is an impressive figure.  Alive, he
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">"doth bestride the narrow world</SPAN><BR>
+Like a Colossus";<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+and his influence, like an unseen force, shapes the fates of the living
+after he himself is dead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In so far as the tragedy has any individual hero, that hero is Brutus
+rather than Caesar himself.  Brutus is a man of noble character, but
+deficient in practical judgment and knowledge of men.  With the best of
+motives he allows Cassius to hoodwink him and draw him into the
+conspiracy against Caesar.  Through the same short-sighted generosity
+he allows his enemy Antony to address the crowd after Caesar's death,
+with the result that Antony rouses the people against him and drives
+him and his fellow conspirators out of Rome.  Then when he and Cassius
+gather an army in Asia to fight with Antony, we find him too
+impractically scrupulous to raise money by the usual means; and for
+that reason short of cash and drawn into a quarrel with his brother
+general.  His subsequent
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P179"></A>179}</SPAN>
+death at Philippi is the logical outcome
+of his own nature, too good for so evil an age, too short-sighted for
+so critical a position.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Most of the old Roman heroes inspire respect rather than love; and
+something of their stern impressiveness lingers in the atmosphere of
+this Roman play.  Here and there it has very touching scenes, such as
+that between Brutus and his page (IV, iii); but in the main it is
+great, not through its power to elicit sympathetic tears, but through
+its dignity and grandeur.  It is one of the stateliest of tragedies,
+lofty in language, majestic in movement, logical and cogent in thought.
+We can never mourn for Brutus and Portia as we do for Romeo and Juliet,
+or for Lear and Cordelia; but we feel that we have breathed in their
+company an air which is keen and bracing, and have caught a glimpse of
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The grandeur that was Rome."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;We have no printed copy of Julius Caesar earlier than that of
+the First Folio.  Since it was not mentioned by Meres in 1598 and was
+alluded to in 1601 in John Weever's <I>Mirrour of Martyrs</I>, it probably
+appeared between those two dates.  Weever says in his dedication that
+his work "some two years ago was made fit for the print."  This
+apparently means that he wrote the allusion to <I>Julius Caesar</I> in 1599
+and that consequently the play had been produced by then.  There is a
+possible reference to it in Ben Jonson's <I>Every Man Out of His Humour</I>,
+which came out in 1599.  Metrical tests and the general character of
+the play agree with these conclusions.  Hence we can put the date
+between 1599-1601, with a preference for the former year.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;Shakespeare drew his material from North's <I>Plutarch</I>,
+using the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony.  He has
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P180"></A>180}</SPAN>
+enlarged
+the parts of Casca and Lepidus, and made Brutus much nobler than in the
+original.  This last change was a dramatic necessity in order to give
+the play a hero with whom we could sympathize.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Hamlet</B>.&mdash;On the surface the story of Hamlet is a comparatively simple
+one.  The young prince is heart-broken over the recent death of his
+father, and his mother's scandalously hasty marriage to Hamlet's uncle,
+the usurping sovereign.  In this mood he is brought face to face with
+his father's spirit, told that his uncle was his father's murderer, and
+given as a sacred duty the task of revenging the crime.  To this object
+he sacrifices all other aims in life&mdash;pleasure, ambition, and love.
+But this savage task is the last one on earth for which his
+fine-grained nature was fitted.  He wastes his energy in feverish
+efforts which fail to accomplish his purpose, just as many a man wavers
+helplessly in trying to do something for which nature never intended
+him.  Partly to deceive his enemies, partly to provide a freer
+expression for his pent-up emotions than the normal conditions of life
+would justify, he acts the role of one who is mentally deranged.
+Finally, more by chance than any plan of his own, he achieves his
+revenge on the king, but not until he himself is mortally wounded.  His
+story is the tragedy of a sensitive, refined, imaginative nature which
+is required to perform a brutal task in a brutal world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But around this story as a framework Shakespeare has woven such a
+wealth of poetry and philosophy that the play has been called the
+"tragedy of thought."  It is in Hamlet's brain that the great action of
+the drama
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P181"></A>181}</SPAN>
+takes place; the other characters are mere accessories
+and foils.  Here we are brought face to face with the fear and mystery
+of the future life and the deepest problems of this.  It is hardly true
+to say that Hamlet himself is a philosopher.  He gives some very wise
+advice to the players; but in the main he is grappling problems without
+solving them, peering into the dark, but bringing from it no definite
+addition to our knowledge.  He represents rather the eternal
+questioning of the human heart when face to face with the great
+mysteries of existence; and perhaps this accounts largely for the wide
+and lasting popularity of the play.  Side by side with this
+deep-souled, earnest man, moving in the shadow of the unseen, with his
+terrible duties and haunting fears, Shakespeare has placed in
+intentional mockery the old dotard Polonius, the incarnation of shallow
+worldly wisdom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No other play of Shakespeare's has called forth such a mass of comment
+as this or so many varied interpretations.  Neither has any other
+roused a deeper interest in its readers.  The spell which it casts over
+old and young alike is due partly to the character of the young prince
+himself, partly to the suggestive mystery with which it invests all
+problems of life and sorrow.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;'A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett' was entered in the
+Stationers' Register July, 1602.  Consequently, Shakespeare's
+Preliminary version, as represented by the First Quarto, though not
+printed until 1603, must have been written in or before the spring
+months of 1602; the second version 1603-1604.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;The plot came originally from the <I>Historia Danica</I>, a
+history of Denmark in Latin, written in the twelfth century
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P182"></A>182}</SPAN>
+by
+Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar.  About 1570 the story was retold in
+French in Belleforest's <I>Histoires Tragiques</I>.  Besides his debt to
+Belleforest, it seems almost certain that Shakespeare drew from an
+earlier English tragedy of Hamlet by another man.  This earlier play is
+lost; but Nash, a contemporary writer, alludes to it as early as 1589,
+and Henslowe's Diary records its performance in 1494.  Somewhat before
+1590, an early dramatist, Thomas Kyd, had written a play called <I>The
+Spanish Tragedy</I>, which, though far inferior to Shakespeare's <I>Hamlet</I>,
+resembled it in many ways.  This likeness has caused scholars to
+suspect that Kyd wrote the early Hamlet; and their suspicions are
+strengthened by an ambiguous and apparently punning allusion to Ęsop's
+<I>Kidde</I> in the passage by Nash mentioned above.  A crude and brutal
+German play on the subject has been discovered, which is believed by
+many to be a translation of Kyd's original tragedy.  If this is true,
+it shows how enormously Shakespeare improved on his source.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Editions</B>.&mdash;A very badly garbled and crude form of this play was
+printed in 1603, and is known as the First Quarto.  A much better one,
+which contained most of the tragedy as we read it, appeared in 1604,
+and is called the Second Quarto.  Several other quartos followed, for
+the play was exceedingly popular.  The Folio omits certain passages
+found in the Second Quarto, and introduces certain new ones.  Both the
+new passages and the omitted ones are included in modern editions; so
+that, as has often been said, our modern <I>Hamlet</I> is longer than any
+<I>Hamlet</I> which Shakespeare left us.  The First Quarto is generally
+regarded as a pirated copy of Shakespeare's scenario, or first rough
+draft, of the play.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Othello</B>.&mdash;This play has often been called the tragedy of jealousy,
+but that is a misleading statement.  Othello, as Coleridge pointed out,
+is not a constitutionally jealous man, such as Leontes in <I>The Winter's
+Tale</I>.  His distrust of his wife is the natural suspicion of a man lost
+amid new and inexplicable surroundings.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P183"></A>183}</SPAN>
+Women are proverbially
+suspicious in business, not because nature made them so, but because,
+as they are in utter ignorance of standards by which to judge, they
+feel their helplessness in the face of deceit.  Othello feels the same
+helplessness.  Trained up in wars from his cradle, he could tell a true
+soldier from a traitor at a glance, with the calm confidence of a
+veteran; but women and their motives are to him an uncharted sea.
+Suddenly a beautiful young heiress falls in love with him, and leaves
+home and friends to marry him.  He stands on the threshold of a new
+realm, happy but bewildered.  Then comes Iago, his trusted subordinate,
+&mdash;who, as Othello knows, possesses that knowledge of women and of
+civilian life which he himself lacks,&mdash;and whispers in his ear that his
+bride is false to him; that under this fair veneer lurks the eternal
+feminine as they had seen it in the common creatures of the camp; that
+she has fooled her husband as these women have so often fooled his
+soldiers; and that the rough-and-ready justice of the camp should be
+her reward.  Had Othello any knowledge or experience in such matters to
+fall back on, he might anchor to that, and become definitely either the
+trusting husband or the Spartan judge.  But as it is, he is whirled
+back and forth in a maelstrom of agonized doubt, until compass,
+bearings, and wisdom lost, he ends all in universal shipwreck.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The character of Iago is one of the subtlest studies of intelligent
+depravity ever created by man.  Ostensibly his motive is revenge; but
+in reality his wickedness seems due rather to a perverted mental
+activity, unbalanced by heart or conscience.  As Napoleon enjoyed
+manoeuvring armies or Lasker studying chess, so
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P184"></A>184}</SPAN>
+Iago enjoys the
+sense of his own mental power in handling his human pawns, in feeling
+himself master of the situation.  If he ever had natural affections,
+they have been atrophied in the pursuit of this devilish game.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With Desdemona the feminine element, which had been negligible in
+<I>Julius Caesar</I> and thrown into the background in <I>Hamlet</I>, becomes a
+prominent feature, and remains so through the later tragedies.  There
+is a pathetic contrast between the beautiful character of Desdemona and
+her undeserved fate, just as there is between the real nobility of
+Othello and the mad act by which he ruins his own happiness.  For that
+reason this is perhaps the most touching of all Shakespeare's tragedies.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The play was certainly published after 1601, for it contains
+several allusions to Holland's translation of the Latin author Pliny,
+which appeared in that year.  Malone, one of the early editors of
+Shakespeare, says that <I>Othello</I> was acted at Hallowmas, 1604.  We not
+know on what evidence he based this assertion; but since the metrical
+tests all point to the same date, his statement is generally accepted.
+The First Quarto did not appear until 1622, six years after Shakespeare
+died and one year before the appearance of the First Folio.  This was
+the only play published in quarto between Shakespeare's death and 1623.
+There are frequent oaths in the Quarto which have been very much
+modified in the Folio, and this strengthens our belief that the
+manuscript from which the Quarto was printed was written about 1604,
+for shortly after that date an act was passed against the use of
+profanity in plays.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;The plot was taken from Giraldi Cinthio's <I>Hecatommithi</I>
+(seventh novel of the third decade).  A French translation of the
+Italian was made in 1583-1584, and this Shakespeare may have used.  We
+know of no English translation until
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P185"></A>185}</SPAN>
+years after Shakespeare
+died.  Many details are changed in the play, and the whole story is
+raised to a far nobler plane.  In the original the heroine is beaten to
+death with a stocking filled with sand; Othello is tortured, but
+refuses to confess, and later is murdered by his wife's revengeful
+kinsmen.  This crude, bloody, and long-drawn-out story is in striking
+contrast with the masterly ending of the tragedy.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>King Lear</B>.&mdash;As <I>Romeo and Juliet</I> shows the tragedy of youth, so
+<I>Lear</I> shows the tragedy of old age.  King Lear has probably been a
+good and able man in his day; but now time has impaired his judgment,
+and he is made to suffer fearfully for those errors for which nature,
+and not he, is to blame.  Duped by the hypocritical smoothness of his
+two elder daughters, he gives them all his lands and power; while his
+youngest daughter Cordelia, who truly loves him, is turned away because
+she is too honest to humor an old man's whim.  The result is what might
+have been expected.  Lear has put himself absolutely into the power of
+his two older daughters, who are the very incarnation of heartlessness
+and ingratitude.  By their inhuman treatment he is driven out into the
+night and storm, exposing his white head to a tempest so fierce that
+even the wild beasts refuse to face it.  As a result of exposure and
+mental suffering, his mind becomes unhinged.  At last his daughter
+Cordelia finds him, gives him refuge, and nurses him back to reason and
+hope.  But this momentary gleam of light only makes darker by contrast
+the end which closely follows, where Cordelia is killed by treachery
+and Lear dies broken-hearted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fate of Lear finds a parallel in that of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P186"></A>186}</SPAN>
+Gloucester in the
+underplot.  Like his king, this nobleman has proved an unwise father,
+favoring the treacherous child and disowning the true.  He also is made
+to pay a fearful penalty for his mistakes, ending in his death.  But he
+is represented as more justly punished, less excusable through the
+weaknesses of age; and for this reason his grief appeals to us as an
+intensifying reflection of Lear's misery rather than as a rival for
+that in our sympathy.  The character of Edmund shows some likeness to
+that of Richard III; and a comparison of the two will show how
+Shakespeare has developed in the interval.  Both are stern, able, and
+heartless; but Edmund unites to these more complex feelings known only
+to the close student of life.  Weakness and passion mingle in his love;
+superstition and some faint, abortive motion of conscience unite to
+torment him when dying.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a strangely lyric element about this great tragedy, an element
+of heart-broken emotion hovering on the edge of passionate song.  It is
+like a great chorus in which the victims of treachery and ingratitude
+blend their denouncing cries.  The tremulous voice of Lear rises
+terrible above all the others; and to his helpless curses the plaintive
+satire of the fool answers like a mocking echo in halls of former
+enjoyment.  Thunder and lightning are the fearful accompaniment of the
+song; and like faint antiphonal responses from the underplot come the
+voices of the wronged Edgar and the outraged Gloucester.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The date of <I>King Lear</I> lies between 1603 and 1606.  In 1603
+appeared a book (Harsnett's <I>Declaration of Egregious Popish
+Impostures</I>) from which Shakespeare afterward drew
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P187"></A>187}</SPAN>
+the names of
+the devils in the pretended ravings of Edgar, together with similar
+details.  In 1606, as we know from an entry in the Stationers'
+Register, the play was performed at Whitehall at Christmas.  A late
+edition of the old <I>King Leir</I> (not Shakespeare's) was entered on the
+Register May 8, 1605; and it is very plausible that Shakespeare's
+tragedy was then having a successful run and that the old play was
+revived to take advantage of an occasion when its story was popular.
+Hence the date usually given for the composition of <I>King Lear</I> is
+1604-5.  A quarto, with a poor text, and carelessly printed, appeared
+in 1608; another, (bearing the assumed date of 1608) in 1619.  The
+First Folio text is much the best.  Three hundred lines lacking in it
+are made up for by a hundred lines absent from the quartos.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;The story of Lear in some form or another had appeared in
+many writers before Shakespeare.  The sources from which he drew
+chiefly were probably the early accounts by Geoffrey of Moumouth, a
+composite poem called <I>The Mirrour for Magistrates</I>, Holinshed's
+<I>Chronicles</I>, Spenser's <I>Faerie Queene</I>, and lastly an old play of
+<I>King Leir</I>, supposed to be the one acted in 1594.  This old play ended
+happily; Shakespeare first introduced the tragic ending.  He also
+invented Lear's madness, the banishment and disguise of Kent, and the
+characters of Burgundy and the fool.  The underplot he drew from the
+story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in <I>Arcadia</I>, a long, rambling
+novel of adventure by Sir Philip Sidney.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Macbeth</B>.&mdash;Macbeth, one of the great Scottish nobles of early times,
+is led, partly by his own ambition, partly by the instigation of evil
+supernatural powers, to murder King Duncan and usurp his place on the
+throne of Scotland.  In this bloody task he is aided and encouraged by
+his wife, a woman of powerful character, whose conscience is
+temporarily smothered by her frantic desire to advance her husband's
+career.  We are forced to sympathize with this guilty pair, wicked as
+they
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P188"></A>188}</SPAN>
+are, because we are made to feel that they are not naturally
+criminals, that they are swept into crime by the misdirection of
+energies which, if directed along happier lines, might have been
+praiseworthy.  Macbeth, vigorous and imaginative, has a poet's or
+conqueror's yearning toward a larger fullness of life, experience, joy.
+It is the woeful misdirection of this splendid energy through unlawful
+channels which makes him a murderer, not the callous, animal
+indifference of the born criminal.  Similarly, his wife is a woman of
+great executive ability, reaching out instinctively for a field large
+enough in which to make that ability gain its maximum of
+accomplishment.  Nature meant her for a queen; and it is the
+instinctive effort to find her natural sphere of action,&mdash;an effort
+common to all humanity&mdash;which blinds her conscience at the fatal
+moment.  Once entered on their career of evil, they find no chance for
+turning back.  Suspicions are aroused, and Macbeth feels himself forced
+to guard himself from the effects of the first.  The ghosts of his
+victims haunt his guilty conscience; his wife dies heart-broken with
+remorse which comes too late; and he himself is killed in battle by his
+own rebellious countrymen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Between the characters of Macbeth and his wife the dramatist has drawn
+a subtle but vital distinction.  Macbeth is an unprincipled but
+imaginative man, with a strong tincture of reverence and awe.  Hitherto
+he has been restrained in the straight path of an upright life by his
+respect for conventions.  When once that barrier is broken down, he has
+no purely moral check in his own nature to replace it, and rushes like
+a flood, with ever growing impetus, from, crime to crime.  His
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P189"></A>189}</SPAN>
+
+wife, on the other hand, has a conscience; and conscience, unlike awe
+for conventions, can be temporarily suppressed, but not destroyed.  It
+reawakes when the first great crime is over, drives the unhappy queen
+from her sleepless couch night after night, and hounds her at last to
+death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the shortest of all Shakespeare's plays in actual number of
+lines; and no other work of his reveals such condensation and
+lightning-like rapidity of movement.  It is the tragedy of eager
+ambition, which allows a man no respite after the first fatal mistake,
+but hurries him on irresistibly through crime after crime to the final
+disaster.  Over all, like a dark cloud above a landscape, hovers the
+presence of the supernatural beings who are training on the sinful but
+unfortunate monarch to his ruin.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship</B>.&mdash;The speeches of Hecate and the dialogue connected with
+them in III, v and IV, i, 39-47 are suspected by many to be the work of
+Thomas Middleton, a well-known contemporary playwright.  They are
+unquestionably inferior to most of the play.  Messrs. Clark and Wright
+have assigned several other passages to Middleton; but these are now
+generally regarded as Shakespeare's, and some of them are considered as
+by no means below his usual high level.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;We find no copy of <I>Macbeth</I> earlier than the First Folio.  It
+was certainly written before 1610, however; for Dr. Simon Forman saw it
+acted that year and records the fact in his <I>Booke of Plaies</I>.  The
+allusion to "two-fold balls and treble sceptres" (IV, i, 121) shows
+that the play was written after 1603 when James I became king of both
+Scotland and England.  So does the allusion to the habit of touching
+for the king's evil (IV, iii, 140-159),&mdash;a custom which James revived.
+The reference to an equivocator in the porter's soliloquy (II, iii) may
+allude to Henry Garnet, who was tried in 1606 for complicity in the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P190"></A>190}</SPAN>
+famous Gunpowder Plot, and who is said to have upheld the
+doctrine of equivocation.  The date of composition is usually placed
+1605-6.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;The plot is borrowed from Holinshed's <I>Historie of
+Scotland</I>.  Most of the material is taken from the part relating to the
+reigns of Duncan and Macbeth; but other incidents, such as the drugging
+of the grooms, are from the murder of Duncan's ancestor Duffe, which is
+described in another part of Holinshed.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Antony and Cleopatra</B>.&mdash;There is no other passion in mankind which
+makes such fools of wise men, such weaklings of brave ones, as that of
+sinful love.  For this very reason it is the most tragic of all human
+passions; and from this comes the dramatic power of <I>Antony and
+Cleopatra</I>.  The ruin of a contemptible man is never impressive; but
+the ruin of an imposing character like Antony's through the one weak
+spot in his powerful nature has all the somber impressiveness of a
+burning city or some other great disaster.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like <I>Julius Caesar</I>, this play is founded on Roman history.  It begins
+in Egypt with a picture of Antony fascinated by the Egyptian queen.
+The urgent needs of the divided Roman world call him away to Italy.
+Here, once free of Cleopatra's presence, he becomes his old self, a
+reveler, yet diplomatic and self-seeking.  From motives of policy he
+marries Octavia, sister of Octavius Caesar, and for a brief space seems
+assured of a brilliant future.  But the old spell draws him back.  He
+returns to Cleopatra, and Octavius in revenge for Octavia's wrongs
+makes war upon him.  Cleopatra proves still Antony's evil genius.  Her
+seduction has already drawn him into war; now her cowardice in the
+crisis of the battle decides the war
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P191"></A>191}</SPAN>
+against him.  From that
+point the fate of both is one headlong rush to inevitable ruin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the character of Cleopatra, Shakespeare has made a wonderful study
+of the fascination which beauty and charm exert, even when coupled with
+moral worthlessness.  We do not love her, we do not pity her when she
+dies; but we feel that in spite of her idle love of power and pleasure,
+she has given life a richer meaning.  We are fascinated by her as by
+some beautiful poison plant, the sight of which causes an aesthetic
+thrill, its touch, disease and death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Powerful as is this play, and in many ways tragic, it by no means stirs
+our sympathies as do <I>Macbeth, King Lear</I>, and <I>Othello</I>.  Sin for
+Antony and Cleopatra is not at all the unmixed cup of woe which it
+proves for Macbeth and his lady.  Here at the end the lovers pay the
+price of lust and folly; but before paying that price, they have had
+its adequate equivalent in the voluptuous joy of life.  Moreover, death
+loses half its terrors for Antony through the very military vigor of
+his character; and for Cleopatra, because of the cunning which renders
+it painless.  What impresses us most is not the pathos of their fate,
+but rather the sublime folly with which, deliberately and open-eyed,
+they barter a world for the intoxicating joy of passion.  Impulsive as
+children, powerful as demigods, they made nations their toys, and life
+and death a game.  Prudence could not rob them of that heritage of
+delight which they considered their natural birthright, nor death, when
+it came, undo what they had already enjoyed.  Folly on so superhuman a
+scale becomes, in the highest sense of the word, dramatic.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P192"></A>192}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;In May, 1608, there was entered in the Stationers' Register 'A
+Book called Antony and Cleopatra'; and this was probably the play under
+discussion.  The internal evidence agrees with this; hence the date is
+usually set at 1607-8.  In spite of the above entry, the book does not
+appear to have been printed at that time; and the first copy which has
+come down to us is that in the 1623 Folio.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;Shakespeare's one source appears to have been the <I>Life of
+Marcus Antonius</I> in North's <I>Plutarch</I>; and he followed that very
+closely.  The chief changes in the play consist in the omission of
+certain events which would have clogged the dramatic action.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Coriolanus</B>.&mdash;Here follows the tragedy of overweening pride.  The
+trouble with Coriolanus is not ambition, as is the case with Macbeth.
+He cares little for crowns, office, or any outward honor.
+Self-centered, self-sufficient, contemptuous of all mankind outside of
+his own immediate circle of friends, he dies at last because he refuses
+to recognize those ties of sympathy which should bind all men and all
+classes of men together.  He leads his countrymen to battle, and shows
+great courage at the siege of Corioli.  On his return he becomes a
+candidate for consul.  But to win this office, he must conciliate the
+common people whom he holds in contempt; and instead of conciliating
+them, he so exasperates them by his overbearing scorn that he is driven
+out of Rome.  With the savage vindictiveness characteristic of insulted
+pride, he joins the enemies of his country, brings Rome to the edge of
+ruin, and spares her at last only at the entreaties of his mother.
+Then he returns to Corioli to be killed there by treachery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men like Coriolanus are not lovable, either in real life or fiction;
+but, despite his faults, he commands
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P193"></A>193}</SPAN>
+our admiration in his
+success, and our sympathy in his death.  We must remember that ancient
+Rome had never heard our new doctrine of the freedom and equality of
+man; that the common people, as drawn by Shakespeare, were objects of
+contempt and just cause for exasperation.  Again, we must remember that
+if Coriolanus had a high opinion of himself, he also labored hard to
+deserve it.  He was full of the French spirit of <I>noblesse oblige</I>.
+Cruel, arrogant, harsh, he might be; but he was never cowardly,
+underhanded, or mean.  He was a man whose ideals were better than his
+judgment, and whose prejudiced view of life made his character seem
+much worse than it was.  The lives of such men are usually tragic.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The play was not printed until the appearance of the First
+Folio, and external evidence as to its date is almost worthless.  On
+the strength of internal evidence, meter, style, etc., which mark it
+unquestionably as a late play, it is usually assigned to 1609.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's <I>Life of Coriolanus</I>
+(North's translation).  As in <I>Julius Caesar</I> and <I>Antony and
+Cleopatra</I>, he followed Plutarch closely.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Timon of Athens</B>.&mdash;As <I>Coriolanus</I> was the tragedy of a man who is too
+self-centered, so <I>Timon</I> is the tragedy of a man who is not
+self-centered enough.  His good and bad traits alike, generosity and
+extravagance, friendship and vanity, combine to make him live and
+breathe in the attitude of other men toward him.  From this comes his
+unbounded prodigality by which in a few years he squanders an enormous
+fortune in giving pleasure to his friends.  From this lack of
+self-poise, too, comes the tremendous reaction later,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P194"></A>194}</SPAN>
+when he
+learns that his imagined world of love and friendship and popular
+applause was a mirage of the desert, and finds himself poverty-stricken
+and alone, the dupe of sharpers, the laughing-stock of fools.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet in spite of his lack of balance, he is full of noble qualities.
+Apemantus has the very thing which he lacks, yet Apemantus is
+contemptible beside him.  The churlish philosopher is like some dingy
+little scow, which rides out the tempest because the small cargo which
+it has is all in its hold; Timon is like some splendid, but top-heavy,
+battleship, which turns turtle in the storm through lack of ballast.
+There is something lionlike and magnificent, despite its unreason, in
+the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, after the discovery of
+the gold, spurns away both the chance of wealth and the human jackals
+whom it attracts.  The same lordly scorn persists after him in the
+epitaph which he leaves behind:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Here lie I, Timon; who alive all living men did hate.<BR>
+Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass, and stay not here thy gait."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Yet this very epitaph of the dead misanthrope shows the same lack of
+self-sufficiency which characterized the living Timon.  He despises the
+opinion of men, but he must let them know that he despises it.
+Coriolanus would have laughed at them from Elysium and scorned to write
+any epitaph.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No other Shakespearean play, with the exception of <I>Troilus and
+Cressida</I>, shows the human race in a light so contemptible as this.
+Aside from Timon and his faithful steward, there is not one person in
+the play
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P195"></A>195}</SPAN>
+who seems to have a single redeeming trait.  All of the
+others are selfish, and most of them are treacherous and cowardly.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship</B>.&mdash;It is generally believed that some parts of the play are
+not by Shakespeare, although opinion is still somewhat divided as to
+what is and is not his.  The scenes and parts of scenes in which
+Apemantus and some of the minor characters appear are most strongly
+suspected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;This play was not printed until the publication of the First
+Folio, and the only evidence which we have for its date is in the meter
+and style and in the fact that some of the speeches show a strong
+resemblance to certain ones in <I>King Lear</I>.  The date most generally
+approved is 1607-8.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;The direct source was probably a short account of Timon in
+Plutarch's <I>Life of Marcus Antonius</I>.  The same story also appears in
+Painter's <I>Palace of Pleasure</I>, where Shakespeare may have read it.
+Both of these accounts, however, contain but a small part of the
+material found in the play.  Certain details missing in them, such as
+the discovery of the gold, etc., are found in <I>Timon or the
+Misanthrope</I>, a dialogue by Lucian, one of the later of the ancient
+Greek writers.  As far as we know, Lucian had not been translated into
+English at this time; but there were copies of his works in Latin,
+French, and Italian.  We cannot say whether Shakespeare had read them
+or not.  In 1842 a play on Timon was printed from an old manuscript
+which is supposed to have been written about 1000.  This contains a
+banquet scene, a faithful steward, and the finding of the gold.  This
+has the appearance of an academic play rather than one meant for the
+public theaters, so it is probable that Shakespeare never heard of it;
+but it is barely possible that he knew it and used it as a source.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The most helpful book yet written on the period is: <I>Shakespearean
+Tragedy</I>, by A. C. Bradley (London, Macmillan, 1910 (1st ed. 1904)).
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap13"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P196"></A>196}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD&mdash;ROMANTIC TRAGI-COMEDY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+No less clear than the interest in tragic themes which attracted the
+London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the
+shifting of popular approval towards a new form of drama about 1608.
+This was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which puts a theme
+of sentimental interest into events and situations that come close to
+the tragic.  Shakespeare's plays of this type are often called
+romances, since they tell a story of the same type found in romantic
+novels of the time.  His plays contain rather less of the tragic, and
+more of fanciful and playful humor than do the plays of the other
+famous masters in this type, Beaumont and Fletcher; his characters are
+rather more lifelike and appealing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While the tragi-comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, which were written
+from 1609 to 1611, have been shown to have influenced Shakespeare in
+his romances, yet in several ways they are very different.  The work of
+Beaumont and Fletcher tells of court intrigue and exaggerated passions
+of hatred, envy, and lust; Shakespeare's plays tell of out-of-door
+adventures, and the restoration and reconciliation of families and
+friends parted by misfortune.  Fletcher contrives
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P197"></A>197}</SPAN>
+well-constructed plots, depending, indeed, rather too much on incident
+and situation for effect; Shakespeare chooses for his plots stories
+which possess only slight unity of theme, and depends upon character
+and atmosphere for his appeal.  Thus the romances of Shakespeare stand
+out as a strongly marked part of his work, different in treatment from
+the plays of his rivals which perhaps suggested his use of this form.
+Here, as everywhere, Shakespeare exhibits complete mastery of the form
+in which he works.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In addition to the romances of this period, Shakespeare had some share
+in the undramatic and belated chronicle play, <I>The Life of Henry the
+Eighth</I>, most of which is assigned to John Fletcher.  In looseness of
+construction, in the emphasis on character in distress, and in the
+introduction of a masque, as well as in other ways, this play resembles
+the tragi-comedies of the period rather than any earlier chronicle.
+Thus the term "romantic tragi-comedy" may be properly used to describe
+all the work of the Fourth Period.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Pericles, Prince of Tyre</B>, was probably the earliest, as it is
+certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances.  But the story was one
+of the most popular in all fiction, and <I>Pericles</I> was, no doubt, in
+its time what its first title-page claimed for it, a 'much-admired
+play.'  Its hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by storm
+and misfortune from one shore to another.  The five acts which tell his
+adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great
+surges of good and ill luck.  The significance of his daughter's name,
+Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea
+is not only her birthplace, but is the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P198"></A>198}</SPAN>
+symbol throughout of
+Fortune and Romance.  From the polluted coast of Antioch, where
+Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where
+he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis,
+where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand
+of the Princess Thaļsa, the waves of chance carry the Prince.  They
+overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives
+him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thaļsa safely to
+land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina
+from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene.  Here,
+upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter;
+and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind
+influence of Diana, their goddess.  We are never far from the sound of
+the shore, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell
+of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Pericles</I> in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a
+dramatic romance.  The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have
+had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective.  To help out the stage
+action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval
+poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts.  He was supplemented, when his
+affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw
+clutched at by the desperate playwright.  But at the beginning of Act
+III the master's music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are
+lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles
+speaks to the storm at sea:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P199"></A>199}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges<BR>
+Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast<BR>
+Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,<BR>
+Having call'd them from the deep! ...<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">The seaman's whistle</SPAN><BR>
+Is as a whisper in the ears of death,<BR>
+Unheard."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which anticipate the
+similar scene in <I>The Tempest</I>; in the character of Marina, girlish and
+fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are
+scarcely less potent than Prospero's; in the grieving Pericles, who,
+like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his
+wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the
+dramatic romances which are to follow.  Throughout all this Shakespeare
+is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina's misery in
+Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting
+nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's
+speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of
+her character.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship and Date</B>.&mdash;The play was entered to Edward Blount in the
+Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608.  It was probably written but little
+before.  Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635.  It was
+not included among Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio (1664).
+The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground
+that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the
+printing rights.  The former of these hypotheses is generally favored,
+since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work
+of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier
+speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play.  In 1608 a novel was
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P200"></A>200}</SPAN>
+published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
+Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately
+presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower."  The author was
+George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability.  He is generally accepted
+as Shakespeare's collaborator.  The claims of William Rowley for a
+share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Source.&mdash;Shakespeare used Gower's <I>Confessio Amantis</I>, and the version
+in Laurence Twine's <I>Pattern of Painful Adventures</I>, 1606.  The tale is
+also in the <I>Gesta Romanorum</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Cymbeline</B>.&mdash;"A father cruel, and a step-dame false,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">A foolish suitor to a wedded lady,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 6em">That hath her husband banish'd."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline,
+king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the
+story.  The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her
+fidelity under this affliction.  Neither her father's anger, nor the
+stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her
+brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous
+Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her
+own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her
+slain, shake in the least degree her true affection.  Such constancy
+cannot fail of its reward, and in the end Imogen wins back both father
+and husband.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In such a story, where virtue's self is made to shine, other characters
+must of necessity suffer.  Posthumus, Imogen's husband, appears weak
+and impulsive, foolish in making his wife's constancy a matter for
+wagers, and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her.  His weakness
+is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant fight in defense of his
+native Britain, and by his
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P201"></A>201}</SPAN>
+outburst of genuine shame and remorse
+when perception of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him.
+Cymbeline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, with none
+of his tenderness.  The wicked Queen and her son are purely wicked.
+Only the faithful servant, Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in
+this court group.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in the exiled noble Belarius, and the two sons of Cymbeline whom he
+has stolen in infancy and brought up with him in a wild life in the
+mountains, single-hearted nobility rules.  When Imogen, disguised as a
+page, in her flight from the court to Posthumus comes upon them, there
+is the instant sympathy of noble minds, and there is a brief respite
+from her misfortunes.  They rid her of the troublesome Cloten, and
+their victory over Rome brings to book the intriguing Iachimo and
+accomplishes her final recovery of love and honor.  A reading of the
+play leaves as the brightest picture upon the memory their joy at
+meeting Imogen, and their grief when the potion she drinks robs them of
+her.  In them we find expressed that noble simplicity which
+romanticists have always associated with true children of nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Imogen, who has a far longer part to play than any other of
+Shakespeare's heroines, the poet has also given a completer
+characterization, in which every charm of the highest type of woman is
+delineated.  The one trait which a too censorious audience might
+criticize, that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes Chaucer's
+patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to modern readers, is in
+Imogen completely redeemed by her resolution in the face of danger, and
+by a certain
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P202"></A>202}</SPAN>
+imperiousness which well becomes the daughter of a
+king.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship</B>.&mdash;Some later hand probably made up the vision of Posthumus
+(V, iv, 30-90), where a series of irregular stanzas of inferior
+poetical merit are inserted to form "an apparition."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 1611,
+describes the performance of <I>Cymbeline</I> at which he was present.  The
+entry occurs between those telling of <I>Macbeth</I> (April 20, 1610) and
+<I>The Winter's Tale</I> (May 15, 1611).  The tests of verse assign it also
+to this period.  The first print was that of the First Folio, 1623.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual
+historical fact in the play, that one Cunobelinus was an ancient king
+of Britain.  Cymbeline's two sons are likewise from Holinshed, as is
+the rout of an army by a countryman and his two sons; but the two
+stories are separate.  The ninth novel of the second day of the
+<I>Decameron</I> of Boccaccio tells a story much resembling the part of the
+play which concerns Posthumus.  The play called <I>The Rare Triumphs of
+Love and Fortune</I> (1589) contains certain characters not unlike Imogen,
+Posthumus, Belarius, and Cloten.  Fidelia, Imogen's name in disguise,
+is the heroine's name.  But direct borrowing cannot be proved.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Winter's Tale</B>.&mdash;Nowhere is Shakespeare more lavish of his powers
+of characterization and of poetic treatment of life than in this play.
+He found for his plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true
+queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband's friend, dies of
+grief at the death of her son, while her infant daughter, abandoned to
+the seas in a boat, grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the
+king of whom her father had been jealous.  Disregarding the essentially
+undramatic nature of the story, as well as its improbabilities, he
+achieved a signal
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P203"></A>203}</SPAN>
+triumph of his art in the creation of his two
+heroines, and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh,
+joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of convention.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme portrait of woman's
+fortitude.  Hermione is brave, not by nature, but inspired by high
+resolve for her honor and for her children.  Nobly indignant at the
+slanders uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the slanderer in
+pity for the blindness of unreason which has caused his action.
+Shakespeare's dramatic instinct made him alter Hermione's death in the
+earlier story to life in secret, with poetic justice in store.
+Artificial as the long period of waiting seems, before the final
+reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the magnificent appeal
+of the mother's love when the lost daughter kneels in joy before her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, depicted the true
+daughter of such a mother.  Although her nature at first seems all
+innocence, beauty, youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the
+knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king's son, and that his
+father has discovered it, her courage rises with the danger, and her
+words echo her mother's resolution:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"I think affliction may subdue the cheek,<BR>
+But not take in the mind."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English sheepshearing,
+with its merrymaking, a pair of honest English country fellows in the
+old shepherd and his son, the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved
+vagabonds
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P204"></A>204}</SPAN>
+in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff's,
+are more lovable than other people's virtues.  Fortune, which will not
+suffer him to be honest, makes his thieveries, in her extremity of
+whim, to be but benefits for others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita's lover, is that
+rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of
+soul.  Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty
+and devotion.  Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in
+the violence of his jealousy.  As the study of a mind overborne by an
+obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the
+Globe Theater, May 16, 1611.  It was probably written about this time.
+Jonson's <I>Masque of Oberon</I>, produced January 1, 1611, contains an
+antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance
+in IV, iv, 331 ff.  The First Folio contains the earliest print of the
+play.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the
+source of <I>The Winter's Tale</I>, was Robert Greene's <I>Pandosto: The
+Triumph of Time</I>, sometimes called by its later title, <I>The History of
+Dorastus and Fawnia</I>.  Fourteen editions followed one another from its
+appearance in 1588.  Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia,
+and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily.  In <I>The Winter's
+Tale</I> two kingdoms are interchanged.  Nevertheless the "seacoast of
+Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, is found
+in Greene's story.  Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital
+importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive,
+instead of dying in grief for her son's death, to be restored again in
+the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is
+given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita;
+and the complications of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P205"></A>205}</SPAN>
+Dorastus's (Florizel's) destiny as the
+prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's
+(Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on
+learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted.  The characters of
+Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own
+invention.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1
+ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in
+Robert Wilson's <I>Three Ladies of London</I> (1584).
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Tempest</B>, probably the last complete drama from Shakespeare's pen,
+differs from the other "romances" in possessing a singular unity.  It
+comes, indeed closer than any play, save the <I>Comedy of Errors</I>, to
+fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and place.  This may
+be due to the fact that the poet is here making up his own plot, not,
+as in other cases, dramatizing a novel of extended adventure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The central theme of <I>The Tempest</I> is, like that of the other romances,
+restoration of those exiled and reconciliation of those at enmity; but
+the treatment of the story could not be more different.  Where the
+chance of fortune has hitherto brought about the happy ending, here
+magic and the supernatural in control of man are the means employed.
+Those who had plotted or connived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of
+Milan, and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his infant
+daughter and his books for company, are wrecked through his art upon
+the island of which he has become the master.  Ariel, the spirit who
+serves Prospero, a mysterious, ever changing form, now fire, now a
+Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a Harpy, striking guilt into the
+conscience (and yet apparently not interested in either vice or virtue,
+but
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P206"></A>206}</SPAN>
+longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prospero's
+cave, and receives freedom for his toil.  His spirit pervades every
+scene, whether we view the king's son Ferdinand loving innocent
+Miranda, or the silent king mourning his son's loss, or the guilty
+conspirators plotting the king's death, or the drunken steward and
+jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the overthrow of
+Prospero.  All of them are led, by the wisdom of Prospero acting
+through Ariel, away from their own wrong impulses, and into
+reconcilement and peace.  How much of <I>The Tempest</I> Shakespeare meant
+as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere
+the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the
+dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is
+inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare's own voice.  In
+one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and
+compares life itself to the transitory play.  In the other, Prospero
+bids farewell to his magic art.  These are often interpreted as
+Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage and to his art,&mdash;with what
+justification every reader must decide for himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint
+of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty.  The falling in
+love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and
+nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the
+creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge
+of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,&mdash;all these
+are the work of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P207"></A>207}</SPAN>
+a genius still in the full pride of power.
+Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in
+the evening."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the
+play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611.  The play certainly
+is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609.  It was acted during
+the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other
+plays were revived.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Sources</B>.&mdash;Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey
+told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda
+Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in
+1609.  From these Shakespeare drew for many details.  His island,
+however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land.  Other
+details have been traced from various sources.  Ariel is a name of a
+spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets.  Montaigne's
+<I>Essays</I>, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's
+imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.).  Setebos has been found as a
+devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's <I>History of Travaile</I> (1577).
+The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably
+Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose
+daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who
+through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from
+some old folk tale; since a German play, <I>Die Schöne Sidea</I>, by Jakob
+Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details.  The
+relations, if any, between the two plays are remote.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Life of Henry the Eighth</B>, the last of the historical plays, in
+date of composition as in the history it pictures, suffers from the
+very fact that it boasts in its second title, <I>All is True</I>.  The play
+might have been built around any one of the half-dozen persons which in
+turn claim our chief interest,&mdash;Buckingham, Queen Katherine, Anne
+Bullen; the King, Wolsey, or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P208"></A>208}</SPAN>
+Cranmer; but fidelity to history,
+while it did not hinder some slight alteration of incident and time,
+required that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a
+complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to be given.  The
+result was a complete abandonment of anything like unity of theme.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is, of course, a disappointment to one who has just read <I>I Henry
+IV</I>.  On the other hand, this play may be regarded as a kind of
+pageant, as the word is used nowadays in England and America.  It
+presents, in the manner of a modern pageant, a series of brilliant
+scenes telling of Buckingham's fall, of Wolsey's triumph and ruin, of
+Katherine's trial and death, of Anne Bullen's coronation, and of
+Cranmer's advancement, joined together by the well-drawn character of
+the King, powerful, masterful, selfish, and vindictive, but not without
+a suggestion of better qualities.  The gayety of the Masque, in the
+first act, where King Henry first meets Anne Bullen, is also in perfect
+harmony with the modern pageant, which always employs music and dancing
+as aids to the picture.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Queen Katherine we have a suffering and wronged woman, gifted with
+queenly grace and dignity, and with strong sympathies and a keen sense
+of justice.  From her first entrance, when she ventures, Esther-like,
+into the presence of the king to intercede for an oppressed people,
+through all her vain struggle against the King's wayward inclination
+and the Cardinal's wiles, up to the very moment when she is stricken
+with mortal illness, she holds our sympathy.  If in her great trial
+scene she is weaker and more impulsive than Hermione in hers, yet the
+circumstances are
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P209"></A>209}</SPAN>
+different; she is not keyed up to so high an
+endeavor as that lady, nor in so much danger for herself or her
+children.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<B>Authorship</B>.&mdash;Differences in style and meter, and the fragmentary
+quality of the whole play have long confirmed the theory that
+Shakespeare in <I>Henry VIII</I> engaged in a very loose sort of
+collaboration.  Only the Buckingham scene (I, i,), the scenes of
+Katherine's entrance and trial (I, ii, II, iv), a brief scene of Anne
+Bullen (II, iii), and the first half of the scene in which Wolsey's
+schemes are exposed and Henry alienated from him (III, i, 1-203) are
+confidently ascribed to Shakespeare.  The rest of the play fits best
+the style and metrical habit of John Fletcher, at this time one of the
+most popular dramatists of London.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Date</B>.&mdash;The Globe Theater was burned on June 29, 1613, when a play
+called <I>Henry VIII or All is True</I> was being performed.  So far as
+stylistic tests can decide, this was not long after the composition of
+the play.  Sir Henry Wotton, the antiquarian, writing from hearsay
+knowledge, says that the play being acted at the time of the fire was
+"a new play called All is True."  Shakespeare's scenes in this drama
+may thus have been his last dramatic work.  A praise of King James in
+the last scene was probably written not later than the rest of the
+play, and thus insures a date later than 1603.  The earliest print of
+the play was the First Folio, 1623.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Source</B>.&mdash;Holinshed was the chief source.  Halle furnished certain
+details.  Foxe's <I>Book of Martyrs</I> tells the Cranmer story.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap14"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P210"></A>210}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The mystery which enwraps so much of Shakespeare's life, combined with
+the interest which naturally centers around a great genius, is ideally
+calculated to stimulate human imagination to fantastic guess-work.  It
+is probably for this reason that a number of famous delusions about
+Shakespeare have at different times arisen.  Some of these are of
+sufficient importance to deserve attention.  Three widely different
+types of mistakes can be observed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Shakespeare Apocrypha</B>.&mdash;The most excusable of these delusions was
+the belief that Shakespeare wrote a large number of plays which are now
+known to be the work of other men.  Some of these plays were printed,
+either during the poet's life or after his death, with "William
+Shakespeare" or "W. S." on the title-page.  It is now practically
+certain that the full name was a printer's forgery, and that the
+letters W. S. were either designed to deceive or else the initials of
+some contemporary dramatist (such as Wentworth Smith, for example).
+Six of these spurious dramas were included in the Third Folio of
+Shakespeare's complete works.  Since this came out forty years after
+the First Folio, when men who had known Shakespeare personally
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P211"></A>211}</SPAN>
+were dead, we certainly cannot believe that its editor had better
+information than those of the First Folio, who were the poet's personal
+friends, and who did not include these plays.  The spurious dramas
+printed in the Third Folio were: <I>The London Prodigal, The History of
+the Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The History of Sir John
+Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, Yorkshire Tragedy</I>, and <I>The Tragedy of
+Locrine</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Among the other plays imputed to Shakespeare at various times are:
+<I>Fair Em, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Feversham, The Two
+Noble Kinsmen, Edward Third</I>, and <I>Sir Thomas More</I>.  Some good
+critics, chiefly literary men, not scholars, still believe that
+Shakespeare wrote parts of the last three; but it is practically
+certain that he had nothing to do with the others, and his part in all
+these disputed plays is extremely doubtful.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>Shakespearean Forgeries</B>.&mdash;Men who assigned the above spurious plays
+to Shakespeare made an honest error of judgment, but other men have
+committed deliberate forgeries in regard to him.  At the end of the
+eighteenth century, W. H. Ireland forged papers which he attempted to
+impose on the public as recently discovered Mss. of the 'Swan of Avon.'
+One of these finds, a play called <I>Vortigern</I>, was actually acted by a
+prominent company.  But the unShakespearean character of these 'great
+discoveries' was soon perceived, and Ireland at length confessed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another famous fraud of a wholly different kind was that of J. P.
+Collier.  The great services which this man has rendered to the world
+of scholarship make
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P212"></A>212}</SPAN>
+all men reluctant to pass too severe censure
+on his conduct; but it is only fair that the public should be warned
+against deception.  He pretended to have found a folio copy of the
+plays corrected and revised on the margin in the handwriting of a
+contemporary of Shakespeare.  Some of these revisions were actual
+improvements on the carelessly printed text; but it is now known that
+they were forgeries.  Similar changes were made by him in other
+important documents, and were for some time accepted as genuine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<B>The Bacon Controversy</B>.&mdash;During the latter part of the nineteenth
+century, the contention was started that Shakespeare was merely an
+obscure actor who never wrote a line, and that the Shakespearean plays
+were actually written by his great contemporary, Francis Bacon, who was
+pleased to let these products of his own genius appear under the name
+of another man.  This delusion is usually considered as beginning with
+an article by Miss Delia Bacon in <I>Putnam's Monthly</I> (January, 1856),
+although the idea had been twice suggested during the eight years
+preceding.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Baconian arguments fall into four groups.  First, they argue that
+there is no proof to establish the identity of Shakespeare, the actor,
+with the author of the plays.  This is untrue.  We have more than one
+reference by his contemporaries, identifying the actor with the poet,
+some so strong that the Baconians themselves can explain them away only
+by assuming that the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully
+deceives the public.  By assumptions like that, any one could prove
+anything.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The second point of the Baconians is that a man of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P213"></A>213}</SPAN>
+Shakespeare's
+limited education could not have written plays replete with so many
+kinds of learning.  This argument is weak at both ends.  It assumes as
+true that Shakespeare had a limited education and that his plays are
+full of knowledge learned from books rather than from life.  The first
+of these points rests on vague tradition only, and the second is still
+a debatable question.  But even if we admit these two points, what
+then?  Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old and had probably lived in
+London for five or six years when the first book from his hand appeared
+in its present form.  Any man capable of writing <I>Hamlet</I> could educate
+himself during several years in the heart of a great city.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thirdly, a certain lady found in Bacon's writings a large number of
+expressions which seemed to her to resemble similar phrases in
+Shakespeare.  Except to the mind of an ardent Baconian many of these
+show no likeness whatever.  Most of those which do show any likeness
+were proverbial or stock expressions which can be found in other
+writers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lastly, various Baconians have repeatedly asserted that they had found
+in the First Folio acrostic signatures of Bacon's name; that one could
+spell Bacon or Francis Bacon by picking out letters in the text
+according to certain rules.  But unfortunately either these acrostics
+do not work out, or else the rules are so loose that similar acrostics
+can be found anywhere, in modern books or pamphlets, and even on the
+gravestones of our ancestors.  Many of the more intelligent Baconians
+themselves have no faith in this last form of evidence.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P214"></A>214}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+On the other hand, there are certain very weighty objections to Bacon
+as author of the plays.  In the first place, it is a miracle that one
+man should produce either the works of Bacon or Shakespeare alone; it
+is a miracle past all belief that the same man in one lifetime should
+have written both.  In the second place, the little verse which Bacon
+is known to have written shows clearly how limited he was as a poet, no
+matter how great in other directions.  Moreover, his prose, though
+splendid in its kind, is wholly unlike the prose of Shakespeare.
+Finally, Bacon's contemptuous attitude toward woman and marriage was
+diametrically opposed to that found in Shakespeare.  To imagine that
+the same man wrote both sets of writings is to assume that he was one
+man one day and another the next.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The advocates of this strange theory vary greatly in fairmindedness and
+ability, and it is not just to judge them all by the mad extremes of
+some; but, nevertheless, their writings, taken as a whole, form one of
+the strangest medleys of garbled facts and fallacious reasoning which
+has ever imposed on an honest and intelligent but uninformed public.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+On the <I>Shakespeare Apocrypha</I>, see C. F. Tucker Brooke's edition of
+fourteen spurious plays, under this title, Oxford, University Press,
+1908.  On the forgeries and other questions, Appendix I of Mr. Lee's
+<I>Life</I> is the readiest place of reference.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap15"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P215"></A>215}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+INDEX
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Aaron, <A HREF="#P141">141</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Abraham and Isaac</I>, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Adoration of the Wise Men</I>, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ęschylus, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ęsop, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Albright, V. E., <A HREF="#P44">44</A>, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>All is True</I>, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>, <A HREF="#P209">209</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Alleyn, E., <A HREF="#P48">48</A>, <A HREF="#P49">49</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Allott, R., <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>All's Well that Ends Well</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P174"><I>174-176</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Amphitruo</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P148">148</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Amyot, J., <A HREF="#P108">108</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Anders, H. R. D., <A HREF="#P112">112</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Angelo, <A HREF="#P176">176</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Antonio, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Antonius, Life of M.</I>, <A HREF="#P192">192</A>, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Antony, <A HREF="#P178">178</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Antony and Cleopatra</I>, <A HREF="#P47">47</A>, <A HREF="#P75">75</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P102">102</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P190"><I>190-192</I></A>, <A HREF="#P193">193</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Apemantus, <A HREF="#P194">194</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Apocrypha, Shakespeare</I>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P210">210</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Apollonius and Silla</I>, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Arcadia</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Arden of Feversham</I>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Aren en Titus</I>, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ariel, <A HREF="#P206">206</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ariosto, <A HREF="#P167">167</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Aristophanes, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Aristotle, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Arthur, Prince, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ashbies, <A HREF="#P4">4</A>, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Aspley, W. A., <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>As You Like It</I>, <A HREF="#P102">102</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P167"><I>167-169</I></A>, <A HREF="#P172">172</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ayrer, J., <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bacon controversy, <A HREF="#P212">212-214</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Baker, G. P., <A HREF="#P104">104</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bale, J., <A HREF="#P138">138</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bandello, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P144">144</A>, <A HREF="#P167">167</A>, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bankside, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Barksted, <A HREF="#P76">76</A>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Barnard, Lady, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bear-rings as stages, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Beatrice, <A HREF="#P166">166</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Beaumont, F., <A HREF="#P57">57</A>, <A HREF="#P196">196</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Belleforest, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bellott, Stephen, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>, <A HREF="#P14">14</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Benedick, <A HREF="#P166">166</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Benedicke and Betteris</I>, <A HREF="#P167">167</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bermuda, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bertram, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>, <A HREF="#P175">175</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Besant, Sir W., <A HREF="#P59">59</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Blackfriars Theater, <A HREF="#P14">14</A>, <A HREF="#P45">45-46</A>, <A HREF="#P49">49</A>, <A HREF="#P57">57</A>, <A HREF="#P58">58</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Blount, E., <A HREF="#P121">121-123</A>, <A HREF="#P199">199</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Boccaccio, G., <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P176">176</A>, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Boisteau, <A HREF="#P144">144</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bolingbroke, <A HREF="#P138">138</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Book of Martyrs</I>, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Booke of Plaies</I>, <A HREF="#P189">189</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Boswell, J., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Boy-actors, <A HREF="#P49">49</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bradley, A. C., <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Brodmeier, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Brome play, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Brooke, A., <A HREF="#P145">145</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Brooke, C. F. T., <A HREF="#P214">214</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Brutus, <A HREF="#P178">178</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Buckingham, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Building of the Arke</I>, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bullen (Boleyn), Anne, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Burbage, James, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Burbage, R., <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P14">14</A>, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>, <A HREF="#P38">38</A>, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>, <A HREF="#P49">49</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Busby, J., <A HREF="#P118">118</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Butler, N., <A HREF="#P120">120</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Caesar, Life of J.</I>, <A HREF="#P193">193</A>; <I>see also Julius</I>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Caliban, <A HREF="#P206">206</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Camden, R., <A HREF="#P11">11</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Capell, E., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cassius, <A HREF="#P178">178</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Caxton, W., <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chamberlain's Company, <I>see</I> Lord.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chambers, E. K., <A HREF="#P34">34</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Character-study, <A HREF="#P90">90</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Charlecote, <A HREF="#P7">7</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chaucer, G., <A HREF="#P67">67</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P151">151</A>, <A HREF="#P152">152</A>, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>, <A HREF="#P201">201</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chester Plays, <A HREF="#P24">24</A>, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chettle, H., <A HREF="#P9">9</A>, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chetwind, P., <A HREF="#P125">125</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Children of Paul's, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Children of the Chapel, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Children's companies, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Chronicle</I> of Holinshed, <A HREF="#P107"><I>107-108</I></A>, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>. <I>See also</I> Holinshed.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Church, Origin of drama in, <A HREF="#P20">20-23</A>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cinthio, G., <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>, <A HREF="#P184">184</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Citizens of London, <A HREF="#P55">55</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+City of London, <A HREF="#P53">53</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clark, A., <A HREF="#P4">4</A> n.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clark and Wright, <A HREF="#P129">129</A>, <A HREF="#P189">189</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Classical drama, <A HREF="#P29">29-31</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Claudio, <A HREF="#P165">165</A>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cloten, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cock-pit, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Colin Clout</I>, etc., <A HREF="#P10">10</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Collier, J. P., <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Comedy of Errors</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P147"><I>147-148</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Condell, Henry, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>, <A HREF="#P122">122</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Confessio Amantis</I>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Constance, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Contention, First</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Contention, Second</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>. <I>See Richard, True Tragedy of</I>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Contention, Whole</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cordelia, <A HREF="#P185">185</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Coriolanus</I>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P192"><I>192-193</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Coryat, T., <A HREF="#P39">39</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cotes, R., <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cotes, T., <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cranmer, <A HREF="#P208">208</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Creizenach, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Cromwell, Thos., Lord</I>, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Curtain Theater, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cycles of miracle plays, <A HREF="#P24">24</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Cymbeline</I>, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P108">108</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P200"><I>200-202</I></A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Danter, J., <A HREF="#P118">118</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dates of plays, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Davies, Archdeacon, <A HREF="#P7">7</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>De Clerico et Puella</I>, <A HREF="#P28">28</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Decameron</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P176">176</A>, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Deer-stealing, tradition of, <A HREF="#P7">7</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dekker, T., <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Delius, N., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Deluge, The</I>, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Desdemona, <A HREF="#P184">184</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Diana Enamorada</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>, <A HREF="#P151">151</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dogberry, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>, <A HREF="#P166">166</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Dorastus and Fawnia</I>, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dowden, E., <A HREF="#P84">84</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Drama before Shakespeare, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dramatic technique, <A HREF="#P94">94-100</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Drayton, M., <A HREF="#P11">11</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Droeshout, M., <A HREF="#P18">18</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dromio, <A HREF="#P147">147</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Dux Moraud</I>, <A HREF="#P28">28</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Easter drama, <A HREF="#P22">22</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Eden, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Editing, Problems of, <A HREF="#P126">126-127</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Edmund, <A HREF="#P186">186</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Edward II</I>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P140">140</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Edward III</I>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Edward IV</I>, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ely Palace portrait, <A HREF="#P18">18</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+End-stopped lines, <A HREF="#P79">79-80</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Endymion</I>, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Essex, Earl of, <A HREF="#P78">78</A>, <A HREF="#P159">159</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Euphues</I>, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>, <A HREF="#P140">140</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Euripides, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Everyman</I>, <A HREF="#P26">26</A>, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Every Man in his Humour</I>, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Every Man out of his Humour</I>, <A HREF="#P158">158</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+External evidence, <A HREF="#P75">75-77</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Faerie Queene</I>, <A HREF="#P152">152</A>, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Fair Em</I>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Falstaff, Sir John, <A HREF="#P7">7</A>, <A HREF="#P156">156-159</A>, <A HREF="#P164">164</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Faulconbridge, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Faustus</I>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Felix and Philiomena</I>, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Female parts, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Feminine endings, <A HREF="#P80">80</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Field, Henry, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Field, Richard, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fiorentino, G., <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P161">161</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+First Folio, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>, <A HREF="#P75">75</A>, <A HREF="#P114">114</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>, <A HREF="#P120"><I>120-124</I></A>, <A HREF="#P136">136</A>, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>, etc.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fisher, T., <A HREF="#P120">120</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fleay, F. L., <A HREF="#P50">50</A>, <A HREF="#P84">84</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fletcher, J., <A HREF="#P2">2</A>, <A HREF="#P196">196</A>, <A HREF="#P197">197</A>, <A HREF="#P209">209</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Florio, G., <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Flower portrait, <A HREF="#P18">18</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fluellen, <A HREF="#P158">158</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Folios, Second, Third, and Fourth, <A HREF="#P124">124-125</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Forgeries, Shakespeare, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Forman, Dr. S., <A HREF="#P189">189</A>, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fortune Theater, <A HREF="#P38">38-40</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Four periods, <A HREF="#P101">101-104</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Foxe, R., <A HREF="#P209">209</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fuller, H. De W., <A HREF="#P142">142</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fuller, T., <A HREF="#P56">56</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Furness, H. H., <A HREF="#P127">127</A>, <A HREF="#P130">130</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gamelyn, Tale of, <A HREF="#P169">169</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Gammer Gurton's Needle</I>, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Garnett, H., <A HREF="#P189">189</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gascoigne, G., <A HREF="#P163">163</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Geoffrey of Monmouth, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+German and Dutch plays like Shakespeare's, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Gesta Romanorum</I>, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Glendower, <A HREF="#P155">155</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Globe Theater, <A HREF="#P1">1</A>, <A HREF="#P38">38</A>, <A HREF="#P39">39</A>, <A HREF="#P57">57</A>, <A HREF="#P58">58</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gloucester, <A HREF="#P186">186</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Gorboduc</I>, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gosson, S., <A HREF="#P161">161</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gower, J., <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Greek drama, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Greene, R., <A HREF="#P8">8</A>, <A HREF="#P9">9</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P115">115</A>, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Greene, T., <A HREF="#P17">17</A>, <A HREF="#P31">31</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Grey, W., <A HREF="#P50">50</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Groatsworth of Witte</I>, etc., <A HREF="#P9">9</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gunpowder Plot, <A HREF="#P190">190</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hal, Prince, <A HREF="#P155">155</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hall, Dr. J., <A HREF="#P17">17</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., <A HREF="#P19">19</A>, <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Hamlet</I>, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P93">93-94</A>, <A HREF="#P100">100</A>, <A HREF="#P102">102</A>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>,
+<A HREF="#P116">116</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P128">128</A>, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>,
+<A HREF="#P177">177</A>, <I><A HREF="#P180">180-182</A></I>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hanmer, T., <A HREF="#P128">128</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Harsnett, <A HREF="#P186">186</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hart, Joan, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hathaway, Anne, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hawkins, A., <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hazlitt, W. C., <A HREF="#P112">112</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Heccatommithi, Gli</I>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>, <A HREF="#P184">184</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hector, <A HREF="#P173">173</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hegge plays, <A HREF="#P24">24</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Helena, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Heminge <I>or</I> Hemings, J., <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>, <A HREF="#P122">122</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Henley Street House, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>I Henry IV</I>, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P99">99</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>,
+<A HREF="#P154"><I>154-157</I></A>, <A HREF="#P164">164</A>, <A HREF="#P165">165</A>, <A HREF="#P208">208</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>II Henry IV</I>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P126">126</A>, <A HREF="#P157"><I>157-158</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Henry V</I>, <A HREF="#P78">78</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P158"><I>158-159</I></A>, <A HREF="#P165">165</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Henry V, Famous Victories of</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>I Henry VI</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <I>133-134</I>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>II Henry VI</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <I>134-135</I>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>III Henry VI</I>, <A HREF="#P8">8</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P98">98</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <I>134-135</I>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Henry VIII</I>, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P84">84</A>, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P197">197</A>, <A HREF="#P207"><I>207-209</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Henslowe, P., <A HREF="#P37">37</A>, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Henslowe's Diary</I>, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Heptameron of Civil Discourses</I>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hermia, <A HREF="#P150">150</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hermione, <A HREF="#P203">203</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hero, <A HREF="#P166">166</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Herod, <A HREF="#P24">24</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Heywood, J., <A HREF="#P28">28</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Histoires Tragiques</I>, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Historia Danica</I>, <A HREF="#P181">181</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Histories, <A HREF="#P97">97-98</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Holinshed, <A HREF="#P107">107-108</A>, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>, <A HREF="#P136">136</A>, <A HREF="#P140">140</A>, <A HREF="#P156">156</A>, <A HREF="#P159">159</A>, <A HREF="#P180">180</A>, <A HREF="#P190">190</A>, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>, <A HREF="#P209">209</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Holland (author), <A HREF="#P184">184</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Horace, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hotspur, <A HREF="#P155">155</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hubert, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Humphrey of Gloucester, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hunsdon, Lord, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>, <A HREF="#P144">144</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Iachimo, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Iago, <A HREF="#P183">183</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Iambic pentameter, <A HREF="#P61">61</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Imogen, <A HREF="#P200">200-202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Ingannati, Gl'</I>, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ingram, <A HREF="#P81">81</A> n.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Inn-yards as theaters, <A HREF="#P35">35</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Interludes, <A HREF="#P27">27-29</A>, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Internal evidence, <A HREF="#P77">77-82</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ireland, W. H., <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Isabella, <A HREF="#P176">176</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Italian <I>novelle</I>, <A HREF="#P109">109-110</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Italy, Influence of, on masque, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jaggard, I., <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jaggard, W., <A HREF="#P70">70</A>, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120-121</A>, <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+James I, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>, <A HREF="#P209">209</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jaques, <A HREF="#P169">169</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jessica, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Jew of Malta</I>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Joan of Arc, <A HREF="#P133">133</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+John of Gaunt, <A HREF="#P138">138</A>, <A HREF="#P140">140</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>John, Troublesome Reigne of</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P137">137-138</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Johnson, A., <A HREF="#P120">120</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Johnson, S., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jonson, Ben, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P31">31</A>, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>, <A HREF="#P56">56</A>, <A HREF="#P158">158</A>, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Jourdan, S., <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Julia, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Julius Caesar</I>, <A HREF="#P44">44</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P100">100</A>, <A HREF="#P102">102</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P122">122</A>, <A HREF="#P126">126</A>, <A HREF="#P172">172</A>,
+<A HREF="#P177"><I>177-180</I></A>, <A HREF="#P184">184</A>, <A HREF="#P190">190</A>, <A HREF="#P193">193</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Katherine, <A HREF="#P162">162</A>, <A HREF="#P208">208</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Kemp, W., <A HREF="#P12">12</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Kind-Harts Dreame</I>, <A HREF="#P9">9</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>King Johan</I>, <A HREF="#P27">27</A>, <A HREF="#P138">138</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>King John</I>, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>, <A HREF="#P136"><I>136-138</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>King Lear</I>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P100">100</A>, <A HREF="#P102">102</A>, <A HREF="#P108">108</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P126">126</A>, <A HREF="#P185"><I>185-187</I></A>, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>King Leir</I>, etc., <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Knight's Tale</I>, <A HREF="#P151">151</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Kyd, T., <A HREF="#P31">31</A>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lady Macbeth, <A HREF="#P188">188</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lambert, D., <A HREF="#P84">84</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lee, S., <A HREF="#P19">19</A>, <A HREF="#P72">72</A>, <A HREF="#P214">214</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Legend of Good Women</I>, <A HREF="#P152">152</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Leontes, <A HREF="#P199">199</A>, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Leopold Shakespeare, <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Locrine</I>, Tragedy of, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lodge, T., <A HREF="#P31">31</A>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>, <A HREF="#P169">169</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+London, <A HREF="#P51">51-59</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>London Prodigal, A.</I>, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lord Admiral's Men, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lord Chamberlain's Company, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lounsbury, T. R., <A HREF="#P130">130</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Love's Labour's Lost</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P91">91</A>, <A HREF="#P95">95</A>, <A HREF="#P99">99</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P106">106</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>,
+<A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>, <A HREF="#P145"><I>145-146</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Love's Labour's Wonne</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P175">175</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Lover's Complaint, A</I>, <A HREF="#P70">70</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lucian, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Lucrece, Rape of</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P62"><I>62-63</I></A>, <A HREF="#P67">67</A>, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lucy, Sir T., <A HREF="#P7">7</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Ludus Coventriae, see</I> Hegge.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Luigi da Porto, <A HREF="#P144">144</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lydgate, J., <A HREF="#P33">33</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lyly, J., <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>, <A HREF="#P145">145-146</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Lysander, <A HREF="#P150">150</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Macbeth, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>, <A HREF="#P44">44</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P92">92</A>, <A HREF="#P100">100</A>, <A HREF="#P102">102</A>, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P108">108</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P187"><I>187-190</I></A>, <A HREF="#P191">191</A>, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Malone, E., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>, <A HREF="#P184">184</A>, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Malvolio, <A HREF="#P170">170</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Manly, J. M., <A HREF="#P34">34</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Manningham, J., diary, <A HREF="#P76">76</A>, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Marina, <A HREF="#P197">197</A>, <A HREF="#P198">198</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Marlowe, C., <A HREF="#P2">2</A>, <A HREF="#P31">31-32</A>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>, <A HREF="#P136">136</A>, <A HREF="#P140">140</A>, <A HREF="#P153">153</A>, <A HREF="#P163">163</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Masculine endings, <A HREF="#P80">80</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Masque, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Masque of Oberon</I>, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mass, Drama at, <A HREF="#P21">21</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Measure for Measure</I>, <A HREF="#P76">76</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P176"><I>176-177</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Meighen, <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Menaechmi</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Menander, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mennes, Sir J., <A HREF="#P3">3</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Merchant of Venice</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P42">42</A>, <A HREF="#P44">44</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P96">96</A>, <A HREF="#P97">97</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>,
+<A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>, <A HREF="#P133">133</A>, <A HREF="#P159"><I>159-161</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mercutio, <A HREF="#P144">144</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Meres, F., <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P67">67</A> n., <A HREF="#P76">76-77</A>, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>, <A HREF="#P151">151</A>, <A HREF="#P156">156</A>, <A HREF="#P161">161</A>, <A HREF="#P167">167</A>,
+<A HREF="#P169">169</A>, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>, <A HREF="#P175">175</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Merry Devil of Edmonton</I>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Merry Wives of Windsor</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P118">118</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P124">124</A>, <A HREF="#P163"><I>163-165</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Meter, <A HREF="#P86">86-87</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Middle Temple, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Middleton, T., <A HREF="#P189">189</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Midsummer Night's Dream</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>, <A HREF="#P133">133</A>, <A HREF="#P149"><I>149-151</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Milton, J., <A HREF="#P64">64</A>, <A HREF="#P65">65</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Miracle plays, <A HREF="#P23">23</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Miranda, <A HREF="#P206">206</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Mirrour for Magistrates</I>, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Mirrour of Martyrs</I>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Montaigne, <I>Essays</I> of, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Montemayor, J. de, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Moralities, <A HREF="#P26">26-27</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+More, Sir T., <A HREF="#P136">136</A>. <I>See under</I> Sir.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mountjoy, C., <A HREF="#P13">13-14</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mountjoy, Mary, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Much Ado About Nothing</I>, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P165"><I>165-167</I></A>, <A HREF="#P169">169</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Myrrha</I>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nash, T., <A HREF="#P8">8</A>, <A HREF="#P31">31</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nashe, T., <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Neilson, W. A., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>, <A HREF="#P205">205</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+New Place, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>News out of Purgatorie</I>, <A HREF="#P165">165</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Nice Wanton</I>, <A HREF="#P27">27</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+North, Sir T., <A HREF="#P108">108</A>, <A HREF="#P158">158</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>, <A HREF="#P192">192</A>, <A HREF="#P193">193</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Oberon, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Octavia, <A HREF="#P190">190</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Oldcastle, Sir John, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Olivia, <A HREF="#P170">170</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Orator, The</I>, <A HREF="#P161">161</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Order of the plays, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ordish, T. F., <A HREF="#P59">59</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Orlando, <A HREF="#P168">168</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Orlando Furioso</I>, <A HREF="#P167">167</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Othello</I>, <A HREF="#P100">100</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P124">124</A>, <A HREF="#P182"><I>182-185</I></A>, <A HREF="#P191">191</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ovid, <A HREF="#P61">61</A>, <A HREF="#P152">152</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pageants, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Painter, W., <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P148">148</A>, <A HREF="#P176">176</A>, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Palace of Pleasure</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>. <I>See</I> Painter.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Palladis Tamia</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pandarus, <A HREF="#P172">172</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pandosto, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Passionate Pilgrim</I>, <A HREF="#P70">70</A>, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Patterne of Painful Adventures</I>, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pavier, T., <A HREF="#P120">120-121</A>, <A HREF="#P124">124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pavy, S., <A HREF="#P50">50</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Pecorone, Il</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Peele, G., <A HREF="#P8">8</A>, <A HREF="#P31">31</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pembroke, Earl of, <A HREF="#P67">67</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Perdita, <A HREF="#P199">199</A>, <A HREF="#P203">203</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Pericles</I>, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P128">128</A>, <A HREF="#P129">129</A>, <A HREF="#P197"><I>197-200</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Petrarch, <A HREF="#P64">64</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Petruchio, <A HREF="#P162">162</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Phoenix and the Turtle, The</I>, <A HREF="#P70">70</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pistol, <A HREF="#P158">158</A>, <A HREF="#P159">159</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Plautus, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P148">148</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pliny, <A HREF="#P184">184</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Plots, <A HREF="#P106">106</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Plutarch's <I>Lives</I>, <I>108-109</I>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>, <A HREF="#P192">192</A>, <A HREF="#P193">193</A>, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Poetaster</I>, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pollard, A. W., <A HREF="#P120">120</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Polonius, <A HREF="#P181">181</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pope, A., <A HREF="#P127">127</A>, <A HREF="#P128">128</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Popish Impostures, Declaration of</I>, <A HREF="#P186">186</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Portia, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Posthumus, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Printing, Conditions of, <A HREF="#P114">114-116</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Private theaters, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Promos and Cassandra</I>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Prospero, <A HREF="#P199">199</A>, <A HREF="#P206">206</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Proteus, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Puck (Robin Goodfellow), <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Puritaine, The</I>, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Puritan Widow, <I>v.s.</I>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Puritans, <A HREF="#P15">15</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pyramus and Thisbe, <A HREF="#P150">150</A>, <A HREF="#P152">152</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Quartos, <A HREF="#P114">114</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Quiney, T., <A HREF="#P17">17</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Ralph Roister Doister</I>, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Rare Triumphs</I>, etc., <A HREF="#P202">202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Reformation, <A HREF="#P52">52</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Renaissance, <A HREF="#P21">21</A>, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Reynolds, G. F., <A HREF="#P50">50</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Richard, Duke of York, True Tragedy of</I>, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>. Same as <I>II
+Contention, q.v.</I>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Richard II</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>, <A HREF="#P138"><I>138-140</I></A>, <A HREF="#P154">154</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Richard III</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P91">91</A>, <A HREF="#P92">92</A>, <A HREF="#P98">98-99</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>,
+<A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P133">133</A>, <A HREF="#P135"><I>135-136</I></A>, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Richardus Tertius</I>, <A HREF="#P136">136</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Richard III, True Tragedy of</I>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P136">136</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Riche, B., <A HREF="#P171">171</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rime, <A HREF="#P81">81-82</A>, <A HREF="#P87">87-88</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Roberts, J., <A HREF="#P120">120</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Robertson, W., <A HREF="#P142">142</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Robin Hood, <A HREF="#P28">28</A>, <A HREF="#P167">167</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rome, <A HREF="#P21">21</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Romeo and Giulietta</I>, <A HREF="#P144">144</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Romeo and Juliet</I>, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>, <A HREF="#P42">42</A>, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P90">90</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P116">116</A>,
+<A HREF="#P117">117-119</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P122">122</A>, <A HREF="#P131">131</A>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>, <A HREF="#P143"><I>143-145</I></A>, <A HREF="#P150">150</A>, <A HREF="#P185">185</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Romeus and Juliet</I>, <A HREF="#P145">145</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Roofs on theaters, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rosalind, <A HREF="#P166">166</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Rosalynde</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P169">169</A>, <A HREF="#P171">171</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rose Theater, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rowe, N., <A HREF="#P7">7</A>, <A HREF="#P127">127</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rowley, W., <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Run on lines, <A HREF="#P79">79</A> ff.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rutland, Earl of, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+St. Paul's, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>, <A HREF="#P56">56</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Salisbury Court, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Saxo Grammaticus, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Schelling, F. E., <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>School of Abuse</I>, <A HREF="#P161">161</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Second Shepherd's Play</I>, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Sejanus</I>, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Seneca, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sequence, <I>see</I> Sonnet.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sequence of plays, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Shakespeare Allusion Book</I>, <A HREF="#P11">11</A> n.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shakespeare, Hamnet, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shakespeare, John, <A HREF="#P3">3</A>, <A HREF="#P4">4</A>, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shakespeare, Judith, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>, <A HREF="#P18">18</A>, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shakespeare, Richard, <A HREF="#P4">4</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shakespeare, Susanna, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shakespeare, William, our knowledge of his life, <A HREF="#P1">1</A>;
+birth, <A HREF="#P2">2</A>; education, <A HREF="#P4">4</A>;
+marriage, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>; deer-stealing, <A HREF="#P7">7</A>;
+life in London, <A HREF="#P8">8-16</A>; return
+to Stratford, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>; death, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>;
+portraits, tomb, will, <A HREF="#P18">18</A>;
+descendants, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>; allusions to,
+<A HREF="#P8">8-17</A>; as an actor, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>;
+residence with Mountjoy, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>;
+income, <A HREF="#P15">15</A>; grant of arms to,
+<A HREF="#P16">16</A>; compared with Jonson,
+<A HREF="#P56">56</A>; and <I>passim</I>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Shakespearean Tragedy</I>, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shallow, <A HREF="#P7">7</A>, <A HREF="#P158">158</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shottery, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shylock, <A HREF="#P92">92-93</A>, <A HREF="#P159">159</A>, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Sidea, Die Schöne</I>, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sidney, Sir P., <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P115">115</A>, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Silvayn, A., <A HREF="#P161">161</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Silver Street, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Silvia, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sims, V., <A HREF="#P119">119</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sir Andrew, <A HREF="#P170">170</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sly, <A HREF="#P162">162</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Smethwick, I., <A HREF="#P121">121-124</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Somers, Sir G., <A HREF="#P78">78</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sonnets, <A HREF="#P63">63-70</A>, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sophocles, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Southampton, Earl of, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P67">67-68</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Spanish Tragedy</I>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Spenser, E., <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P187">187</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stage, The, <A HREF="#P40">40-45</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stage costumes and settings, <A HREF="#P42">42-44</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stage, Effect of, on drama, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stationers' Register, <A HREF="#P75">75</A>, <A HREF="#P114">114-115</A>, <A HREF="#P118">118</A>, etc.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Steevens, G., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stephenson, H. T., <A HREF="#P59">59</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Strachey, W., <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Strange, Lord, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>, <A HREF="#P135">135</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Straparola, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stratford, <A HREF="#P2">2</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Supposes</I>, <A HREF="#P163">163</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Surrey, Earl of, <A HREF="#P65">65</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Swan Theater, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Talbot, <A HREF="#P133">133</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Tamburlaine</I>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P136">136</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Taming of a Shrew</I>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P163">163</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Taming of the Shrew</I>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>, <A HREF="#P161"><I>161-163</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Tamora, <A HREF="#P141">141</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Tarlton, <A HREF="#P165">165</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Taste, growth of, <A HREF="#P89">89-90</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Taverns, <A HREF="#P56">56-57</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Tempest, The</I>, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>, <A HREF="#P78">78</A>, <A HREF="#P81">81</A>, <A HREF="#P84">84</A>, <A HREF="#P87">87</A>, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P136">136</A>, <A HREF="#P205"><I>205-207</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Terence, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Thaļsa, <A HREF="#P198">198</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Thames, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Theater, The, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Theaters, <A HREF="#P35">35</A> ff., <A HREF="#P57">57-59</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Theobald, L., <A HREF="#P128">128</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Thomas More, Sir</I>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Thorpe, T., <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Three Ladies of London</I>, <A HREF="#P205">205</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Timon (by Lucian), <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Timon of Athens</I>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P122">122</A>, <A HREF="#P193"><I>193-195</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Titania, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Tito Andronico</I>, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Tittus and Vespacia</I>, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Titus Andronicus</I>, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P119">119</A>, <A HREF="#P123">123</A>, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>, <A HREF="#P141"><I>141-143</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Touchstone, <A HREF="#P166">166</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Towneley plays, <A HREF="#P24">24</A>, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Travaile, History of</I>, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Tredici Piacevole Notte</I>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Troilus and Cressida</I>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>, <A HREF="#P122">122</A>, <A HREF="#P172"><I>172-174</I></A>, <A HREF="#P195">195</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Troilus and Criseyde</I>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Troye, Recuyell of</I>, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Twelfth Night</I>, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>, <A HREF="#P76">76</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P169"><I>169-171</I></A>, <A HREF="#P172">172</A>, <A HREF="#P174">174</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Twine, L., <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Two Gentlemen of Verona</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>, <A HREF="#P77">77</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P96">96</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>,
+<A HREF="#P148"><I>148-149</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Two Noble Kinsmen</I>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Tyrwhitt, <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Udall, N., <A HREF="#P29">29</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Unities, Three dramatic, <A HREF="#P30">30</A> n.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Valentine, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Venus and Adonis</I>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>, <A HREF="#P61"><I>61</I></A>, <A HREF="#P63">63</A>, <A HREF="#P67">67</A>, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Viola, <A HREF="#P170">170</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Vortigern</I>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wagner (<I>Death of Siegfried</I>), <A HREF="#P23">23</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wakefield, <I>see</I> Towneley.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wallace, Prof. C. W., <A HREF="#P13">13</A>, <A HREF="#P14">14</A>, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Warburton, <A HREF="#P128">128</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Weak endings, <A HREF="#P81">81</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Weever, J., <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P179">179</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Westminster, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Whetstone, G., <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+White, R. G., <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wilkins, G., <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wilson, R., <A HREF="#P205">205</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Winter's Tale, The</I>, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P80">80</A>, <A HREF="#P83">83</A>, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>, <A HREF="#P121">121</A>, <A HREF="#P202"><I>202-205</I></A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wolsey, <A HREF="#P208">208</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Worcester, <A HREF="#P155">155</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wotton, Sir H., <A HREF="#P209">209</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wyatt, Sir T., <A HREF="#P65">65</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Yonge, B., <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+York and Lancaster, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+York plays, <A HREF="#P24">24</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<I>Yorkshire Tragedy, A</I>, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+Printed in the United States of America.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of An Introduction to Shakespeare, by 
+H. N. MacCracken and F. E. Pierce and W. H. Durham
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Introduction to Shakespeare, by
+H. N. MacCracken and F. E. Pierce and W. H. Durham
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Introduction to Shakespeare
+
+Author: H. N. MacCracken
+        F. E. Pierce
+        W. H. Durham
+
+Release Date: January 16, 2010 [EBook #30982]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST FOLIO, 1628 The first collected
+edition of Shakespeare's Plays (From the copy in the New York Public
+Library)]
+
+
+
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+BY
+
+  H. N. MacCRACKEN, PH.D.
+  F. E. PIERCE, PH.D.
+
+AND
+
+  W. H. DURHAM, PH.D.
+
+
+OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
+
+THE SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF
+
+YALE UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+New York
+
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+1925
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1910,
+
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+Set up and electrotyped.  Published September, 1910.  Reprinted April,
+December, 1911; September, 1912; July, 1913; July, 1914; December,
+1915; November, 1916; May, 1918; July, 1919; November, 1920; September,
+1921; June, 1923; January, 1925.
+
+
+
+Norwood Press
+
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+{v}
+
+PREFACE
+
+The advances made in Shakespearean scholarship within the last
+half-dozen years seem to justify the writing of another manual for
+school and college use.  The studies of Wallace in the life-records, of
+Lounsbury in the history of editions, of Pollard and Greg in early
+quartos, of Lee upon the First Folio, of Albright and others upon the
+Elizabethan Theater, as well as valuable monographs on individual plays
+have all appeared since the last Shakespeare manual was prepared.  This
+little volume aims to present what may be necessary for the majority of
+classes, as a background upon which may be begun the study and reading
+of the plays.  Critical comment on individual plays has been added, in
+the hope that it may stimulate interest in other plays than those
+assigned for study.
+
+Chapters I, VIII, IX, X, and XIII are the work of Professor MacCracken;
+chapters V, VI, VII, XII, and XIV are by Professor Pierce; and chapters
+II, III, IV, and XI are by Dr. Durham.  The authors have, however,
+united in the criticism and the revision of every chapter.
+
+
+
+
+{vii}
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+                                                                PAGE
+
+AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    20
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    35
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ELIZABETHAN LONDON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    51
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    60
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS  . . . . . . . . . . . . .    73
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST . . . . . . . . . . .    85
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CHIEF SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS . . . . . . . . . . .   105
+
+
+{viii}
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   113
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD--IMITATION AND EXPERIMENT  . . .   131
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD--COMEDY AND HISTORY . . . . . .   153
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD--TRAGEDY . . . . . . . . . . . .   172
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD--ROMANCE  . . . . . . . . . . .   196
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SOME FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE . . . . .   210
+
+
+
+
+{1}
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+AN OUTLINE OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
+
++Our Knowledge of Shakespeare+.--No one in Shakespeare's day seems to
+have been interested in learning about the private lives of the
+dramatists.  The profession of play writing had scarcely begun to be
+distinguished from that of play acting, and the times were not wholly
+gone by when all actors had been classed in public estimation as
+vagabonds.  While the London citizens were constant theatergoers, and
+immensely proud of their fine plays, they were content to learn of the
+writers of plays merely from town gossip, which passed from lip to lip
+and found no resting place in memoirs.  There were other lives which
+made far more exciting reading.  English sea-men were penetrating every
+ocean, and bringing back wonderful tales.  English soldiers were aiding
+the Dutch nation towards freedom, and coming back full of stories of
+heroic deeds.  At home great political, religious, and scientific
+movements engaged the attention of the more serious readers and
+thinkers.  It is not strange, therefore, that the writers of plays,
+whose {2} most exciting incidents were tavern brawls or imprisonment
+for rash satire of the government, found no biographer.  After
+Shakespeare's death, moreover, the theater rapidly fell into disrepute,
+and many a good story of the playhouse fell under the ban of polite
+conversation, and was lost.
+
+Under such conditions we cannot wonder that we know so little of
+Shakespeare, and that we must go to town records, cases at law, and
+book registers for our knowledge.  Thanks to the diligence of modern
+scholars, however, we know much more of Shakespeare than of most of his
+fellow-actors and playwrights.  The life of Christopher Marlowe,
+Shakespeare's great predecessor, is almost unknown; and of John
+Fletcher, Shakespeare's great contemporary and successor, it is not
+even known whether he was married, or when he began to write plays.
+Yet his father was Bishop of London, and in high favor with Queen
+Elizabeth.  We ought rather to wonder at the good fortune which has
+preserved for us, however scanty in details or lacking in the authority
+of its traditions, a continuous record of the life of William
+Shakespeare from birth to death.
+
++Stratford+.--The notice of baptism on April 26, 1564, of William, son
+of John Shakespeare, appears in the church records of Stratford-on-Avon
+in Warwickshire.  Stratford was then a market town of about fifteen
+hundred souls.  Under Stratford Market Cross the farmers of northern
+Warwickshire and of the near-lying portions of Worcestershire,
+Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire carried on a brisk trade with the
+thrifty townspeople.  The citizens were accustomed to boast {3} of
+their beautiful church by the river, and of the fine Guildhall, where
+sometimes plays were given by traveling companies.  Many of their
+gable-roofed houses of timber, or timber and plaster, are still to be
+found on the pleasant old streets.  The river Avon winds round the town
+in a broad reach under the many-arched bridge to the ancient church.
+Beyond it the rich pasture land rises up to green wooded hills.  Not
+far away is the famous Warwick Castle, and a little beyond it
+Kenilworth, where Queen Elizabeth was entertained by the Earl of
+Leicester with great festivities in 1575.  Coventry and Rugby are the
+nearest towns.
+
++Birth and Parentage+.--The record of baptism of April 26, 1564, is the
+only evidence we possess of the date of Shakespeare's birth.  It is
+probable that the child was baptized when only two or three days old.
+The poet's tomb states that Shakespeare was in his fifty-second year
+when he died, April 23, 1616.  Accepting this as strictly true, we
+cannot place the poet's birthday earlier than April 23, 1564.  There is
+a tradition, with no authority, that the poet died upon his birthday.
+
+John Shakespeare, the poet's father, sold the products of near-by farms
+to his fellow-townsmen.  He is sometimes described as a glover,
+sometimes as a butcher; very likely he was both.  A single reference,
+half a century later than his day, preserves for us a picture of John
+Shakespeare.  The note reads: "He [William Shakespeare] was a glover's
+son.  Sir John Mennes saw once his old father in his shop, a
+merry-cheekt old man, that said, 'Will was a good honest {4} fellow,
+but he durst have crackt a jesst with him att any time.'"[1]
+
+John Shakespeare's father, Richard Shakespeare, was a tenant farmer,
+who was in 1550 renting his little farm at Snitterfield, four miles
+north of Stratford, from another farmer, Robert Arden of Wilmcote.
+John Shakespeare married Mary Arden, the daughter of his father's rich
+landlord, probably in 1557.  He had for over five years been a
+middleman at Stratford, dealing in the produce of his father's farm and
+other farms in the neighborhood.  In April, 1552, we first hear of him
+in Stratford records, though only as being fined a shilling for not
+keeping his yard clean.  Between 1557 and 1561 he rose to be ale tester
+(inspector of bread and malt), burgess (petty constable), affeeror
+(adjuster of fines), and finally city chamberlain (treasurer).
+
+Eight children were born to him, the two eldest, both daughters, dying
+in infancy.  William Shakespeare was the third child, and eldest of
+those who reached maturity.  During his childhood his father was
+probably in comfortable circumstances, but not long before the son left
+Stratford for London, John Shakespeare was practically a bankrupt, and
+had lost by mortgage farms in Snitterfield and Ashbies, near by,
+inherited in 1556 by his wife.
+
++Education+.--William Shakespeare probably went to the Stratford
+Grammar School, where he and his {5} brothers as the sons of a town
+councilor were entitled to free tuition.  His masters, no doubt, taught
+him Lilly's Latin Grammar and the Latin classics,--Virgil, Horace,
+Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, and the rest,--and very little else.  If
+Shakespeare ever knew French or Italian, he picked it up in London
+life, where he picked up most of his amazing stock of information on
+all subjects.  Besides Latin, he must have read and memorized a good
+deal of the English Bible.
+
++Marriage+.--In the autumn of 1582 the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare
+married a young woman of twenty-six.  On November 28, of that year two
+farmers of Shottery, near Stratford, signed what we should call a
+guarantee bond, agreeing to pay to the Bishop's Court L40, in case the
+marriage proposed between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway should
+turn out to be contrary to the canon--or Church--law, and so invalid.
+This guarantee bond, no doubt, was issued to facilitate and hasten the
+wedding.  On May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was
+baptized.  His only other children, his son Hamnet and a twin daughter
+Judith, were baptized February 2, 1584-5[2].  It is probable that soon
+after this date Shakespeare went to London and began his career as
+actor, and afterwards as writer of plays and owner of theaters.
+
+{6}
+
+Anne Hathaway, as we have said, was eight years older than her husband.
+She was the daughter of a small farmer at Shottery, a little out of
+Stratford, whose house is still an object of pilgrimage for Shakespeare
+lovers.  We have really no just ground for inferring, from the poet's
+early departure for London, that his  married life was unhappy.  The
+Duke in _Twelfth Night_ (IV, iii) advises Viola against women's
+marrying men younger than themselves, it is true; but such advice is
+conventional.  No one can tell how much the dramatist really felt of
+the thoughts which his characters utter.  Who would guess from any
+words in _I Henry IV_, for instance, a play containing some of his
+richest humor and freest joy in life, that, in the very year of its
+composition, Shakespeare was mourning the death of his little son
+Hamnet, and that his hopes of founding a family were at an end?
+Another piece of evidence, far more important, is the fact that
+Shakespeare does not mention his wife at all in  his will, except by an
+interlined bequest of his "second-best bedroom set."  But here, again,
+it is easy to misread the motives of the man who makes a will.  Such
+omissions have been made when no slight was intended, sometimes because
+of previous private settlements, sometimes because a wife is always
+entitled to her dower rights.  The evidence is thus too slight to be of
+value.
+
+Some other motive, then, than unhappiness in married life ought to be
+assigned for Shakespeare's departure to London.  No doubt, the fact
+that his father was now a discredited bankrupt, against whom suits were
+pending, had something to do with his {7} decision to better his family
+fortunes in another town.  Traveling companies of players may have told
+him of London life.  Possibly some scrape, like that preserved in the
+deer-stealing tradition and the resultant persecution, made the young
+man, now only twenty-one, restive and eager to be gone.
+
++The Tradition concerning Deer Stealing+.--Nicholas Howe, in 1709, in
+his edition of Shakespeare says: "He had by a misfortune common enough
+to young fellows fallen into bad company, and among them, some that
+made a frequent practice of deer stealing, engaged him with them more
+than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of
+Charlecote near Stratford.  For this he was persecuted by that
+gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to
+revenge that ill-usage, he made a parody upon him; and though this,
+probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have
+been so very bitter that he was obliged to leave his business and
+family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London."  Archdeacon
+Davies of Saperton, Gloucestershire, in the late seventeenth century
+testifies independently to the same tradition.  Justice Shallow in the
+_Merry Wives of Windsor_ is on this latter authority to be identified
+with Sir Thomas Lucy.  He is represented in the play as having come
+from Gloucester to Windsor.  He "will make a Star Chamber matter of it"
+that Sir John Falstaff has "defied my men, killed my deer, and broke
+open my lodge."  He bears on his "old coat" (of arms) a "dozen white
+luces" (small fishes), and there is a lot of chatter about "quartering"
+this coat, which is without point unless a pun is intended.  {8} Now
+"three luces Hauriant argent" were the arms of the Charlecote Lucys, it
+is certain.  There is some reason then, for connecting Shallow with Sir
+Thomas Lucy, and an apparent basis for the deer-stealing tradition,
+although the incident in the play may, of course, have suggested the
+myth.  Davies goes on to say that Shakespeare was whipped and
+imprisoned; for this there is no other evidence.
+
++Early Life in London+.--The earliest known reference to Shakespeare in
+the world of London is contained in a sarcastic allusion from the pen
+of Robert Greene, the poet and play writer, who died in 1592.  Greene
+was furiously jealous of the rapidly increasing fame of the newcomer.
+In a most extravagant style he warns his contemporaries (Marlowe, Nash,
+and Peele, probably) to beware of young men that seek fame by thieving
+from their masters.  They, too, like himself, will suffer from such
+thieves.  "Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified
+with our feathers that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide,
+supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of
+you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit
+the onely Shakescene in a countrie ... but it is pittie men of such
+rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude grooms."  The
+reference to "Shakescene" and the "Tygers heart," which is a quotation
+from _III Henry VI_,[3] makes it almost certain that Shakespeare and
+his play are referred to.  Greene's attack was, however, an instance of
+what Shakespeare would {9} have called "spleen," and not to be taken as
+a general opinion.  His hint of "Johannes Factotum"
+(Jack-of-all-Trades) probably means that Shakespeare was willing to
+undertake any sort of dramatic work.  Later on in the same letter (_A
+Groatsworth of Witte Bought with a Million of Repentance_)[4] he calls
+the "upstart crow" and his like "Buckram gentlemen," and "peasants."
+
+Henry Chettle, a friend of Greene's, either in December, 1592, or early
+in 1593,[5] published an address as a preface to his _Kind-Harts
+Dreame_, making a public apology to Shakespeare for allowing Greene's
+letter to come out with this insulting attack.  He says: "With neither
+of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care
+not if I never be.  The other [generally taken to be Shakespeare] whome
+at one time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that, as
+I have moderated the heate of living writers, and might have usde my
+owne discretion--especially in such a case, the author beeing
+dead,--that I did not I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene
+my fault, because myself have seene his demeanor no lesse civill, than
+he exelent in the qualitie he professes;--besides divers of worship
+have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and
+his facetious grace in writing, that aprooves his art...."
+
+There is, then, testimony from two sources that by 1592 Shakespeare was
+an excellent actor, a graceful poet, and a writer of plays that aroused
+the envy of {10} one of the best dramatists of his day.  Obviously, all
+this could not have happened in a few months, and we are therefore
+justified in believing that Shakespeare came to London soon after 1585,
+very likely in 1586.
+
++Later Allusions+.--In 1593 the title-page of _Venus and Adonis_ shows
+that a great English earl and patron of the arts was willing to be
+godfather "to the first heyre" of Shakespeare's "invention," his first
+published poem.  In 1594 Shakespeare also dedicated to Southampton his
+_Lucrece_, in terms of greater intimacy, though no less respect.  On
+December 27, 1595, Edmund Spenser's _Colin Clout's Come Home Againe_
+contained a reference which is now generally believed to allude to
+Shakespeare.
+
+  "And there, though last not least, is Aetion;
+  A gentler shepheard may nowhere be found;
+  Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention,
+  Doth like himselfe heroically sound."
+
+The next important reference is from _Palladis Tamia_, by Francis Meres
+(1598):--
+
+"As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the
+sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued
+Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred
+Sonnets among his private friends &c.  As Plautus and Seneca are
+accounted the best for comedy and Tragedy among the Latines, so
+Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for
+the stage; for comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his
+Loves Labors Lost, his Love Labours Wonne, his Midsummer Night Dreame,
+and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard the 2., Richard the
+3., Henry the 4., {11} King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and
+Juliet.  As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus
+tongue, if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak
+with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.  And
+as Horace saith of his; Exegi monumentu_m_ aere perennius, Regaliq_ue_
+situ pyramidum altius.
+
+"Quod non imber edax: Non Aquilo impotius possit diruere: aut
+innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum: so say I severally of
+Sir Philip Sidneys Spencers Daniels Draytons Shakespeares and Warners
+workes."
+
+This is the earliest claim for the supremacy of Shakespeare in the
+English theater, a claim never seriously disputed from that day to
+this.  The numerous other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare's fame,
+which fill the _Shakespeare Allusion Book_,[6] add nothing to our
+purpose; but merely confirm the statement that throughout his life his
+readers knew and admitted his worth.  The chorus of praise continued
+from people of all classes.  John Weever, the epigrammatist, and
+Richard Camden, the antiquarian, praised Shakespeare highly, and
+Michael Drayton, the poet, called him "perfection in a man."  Finally,
+Ben Jonson, his most famous competitor for public applause, crowned our
+poet's fame with his poem, prefixed to the first collected edition of
+Shakespeare's famous First Folio of 1623: "To the Memory of my beloved,
+the author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.
+
+{12}
+
+"He was not of an age, but for all time!"
+
++Shakespeare as an Actor+.--The allusion quoted above of Henry Chettle
+praises Shakespeare's excellence "in the qualitie he professes."
+Stronger evidence is afforded by some of the title-pages of plays
+printed during the poet's life.  Thus Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his
+Humour_ says on its title-page: "_Every One in his Umor_.  This comedie
+was first Acted in the yeere 1598 by the then L. Chamberleyne his
+servants.  The principal comedians were Will. Shakespeare, Aug.
+Philips, Hen. Condel, Will. Slye, Will. Kempe, Ric. Burbadge, Joh.
+Hemings, Tho. Pope, Chr. Beeston, Joh. Dyke, withe the allowance of the
+Master of Reuells."
+
+Before this his name had appeared between those of Kemp and Burbage
+(named in the above list), the one the chief comedian, the other the
+chief tragedian of the time, in comedies which were acted before the
+Queen on December 27 and 28, 1594, at Greenwich Palace.  The titles of
+these comedies are not given in the Treasurer's Accounts of the
+Chamber, from which we take the list of players.
+
+In 1603, Shakespeare shared with Burbage the headline of the list of
+actors in Ben Jonson's tragedy _Sejanus_.  That he thoroughly
+understood the technique of his art and was interested in it, is
+evident from Hamlet's advice to the players.  Throughout his life in
+London, Shakespeare was a member of the company usually known as the
+Lord Chamberlain's Company.[7]
+
+{13}
+
++Shakespeare and the Mountjoys+.--The most important addition of recent
+years to the life records of Shakespeare is that made by an American
+scholar, Professor Charles William Wallace.  He has unearthed in the
+Public Record Office at London a notable bundle of
+documents--twenty-six in all.  They concern a lawsuit in which the
+family of Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord in London, was
+engaged; and in which the poet himself appeared as a witness.
+Mountjoy, it appears, was a prosperous wigmaker and hairdresser, and,
+no doubt, had good custom from the London actors.  Shakespeare had
+lodgings in Mountjoy's house in the year 1604, and at Madame Mountjoy's
+request acted as intermediary in proposing to young Stephen Bellott, a
+young French apprentice of Mountjoy's, that if he should marry his
+master's daughter Mary, he would receive L50 as dowry and "certain
+household stuff" in addition.  The marriage took place, and the quarrel
+which led to the lawsuit in 1612 was chiefly about the fulfillment--or
+non-fulfillment--of the marriage settlements.  Shakespeare's testimony
+on the matter is clear enough in regard to his services as the friend
+of both parties; but his memory leaves him when specific information is
+required touching the exact terms of the dowry.  Evidently he had no
+mind that his old landlord should suffer from the claims of his unruly
+son-in-law.
+
+Mountjoy's house was situated in an ancient and most respectable
+neighborhood in Cripplegate ward, on the corner of Silver Street and
+Mugwell, or Muggle Street.  Near by dwelt many of Shakespeare's
+fellow-actors and dramatists.  St. Paul's Cathedral, the heart {14} of
+London, lay five minutes' walk to the southwest.  The length of
+Shakespeare's residence with the worthy Huguenot family is not to be
+learned from the recent discoveries; but his testimony to Bellott's
+faithful service as apprentice throughout the years of
+apprenticeship--1598-1604--makes it strongly probable that during these
+years, when the poet was writing his greatest plays, he lodged with
+Mountjoy.  In 1612 Mountjoy, according to another witness, had a
+lodger--a "sojourner"--in his house; this may mean that Shakespeare was
+still in possession of his rooms in the house on Silver Street.  If it
+be so, no spot in the world has been the birthplace of a greater number
+of masterpieces.
+
+It is interesting to note, in passing, that the various witnesses in
+the Mountjoy lawsuit who have occasion to speak of Shakespeare always
+refer to him most respectfully.  The poet was evidently high in the
+esteem of his neighbors.
+
++Shakespeare's Income and Business Transactions+.--Shakespeare was a
+shrewd and sensible man of business.  He amassed during his career in
+London a property nearly, if not quite, as great as any made by his
+profession at the time.  In addition to profits from the sale of his
+plays to managers (he probably derived no income from their
+publication), and his salary as an actor, Shakespeare enjoyed an ample
+income from his shares in the Blackfriars and Globe theaters, of which
+he became joint owner with the Burbage brothers and other fellow-actors
+in 1597 and 1599.  Professor Wallace has discovered a document which
+helps, though very slightly, to enable us to judge what his income {15}
+from these sources may have been.[8]  In 1615-1616 the widow of one of
+the proprietors of the two theaters, whose share, like Shakespeare's,
+was one-seventh of the Blackfriars, one-fourteenth of the Globe,
+brought suit against her father.  She asked for L600 damages for her
+father's wrongful detention of her year's income, amounting to L300
+from each theater.
+
+But damages asked in court are always high, and include fees of lawyers
+and other items.  The probability is that Shakespeare's yearly income
+from these sources was never over L500.  To this, though the figures
+cannot be ascertained with any degree of certainty, we might add L100
+for salary and L25 for plays yearly.  The total would amount to fully
+L600 a year from 1599 on till 1611, about which date Shakespeare
+probably retired to Stratford.  If we reckon by what money will buy in
+our days, we may say that Shakespeare's yearly income at the height of
+success was $25,000, in round numbers.  This is certainly a low
+estimate, and does not include extra court performances and the like,
+from which he must certainly have profited.
+
++Shakespeare's Life in London+.--What with the composition of two plays
+a year, continual rehearsals, and performances of his own and other
+plays, Shakespeare's life must have been a busy one.  Tradition,
+however, accords him an easy enjoyment of the pleasures of the time;
+and his own sarcastic remarks against Puritans in his plays may
+indicate a hatred of puritanical restraint.  He must have joined in
+many a merry feast with the other actors and writers of the day, and
+with court gallants.  The inventory of property left by him {16} at his
+death indicates that while he had accumulated a good estate, he had
+also lived generously.
+
++Stratford Affairs and Shakespeare's Return+.--While William
+Shakespeare was thus employed in London in building up name and fortune
+for himself, his father was in financial straits.  As early as January,
+1586, John Shakespeare had no property on which a creditor could place
+a lien.  In September of the same year, he was deprived of his
+alderman's gown for lack of attention to town business.  During the
+next year he was sued for debt, and had to produce a writ of _habeas
+corpus_ to keep himself out of jail.  In 1899 he tried to recover his
+wife's mortgaged property of Ashbies from the mortgagee's heir, John
+Lambert, but the suit was not tried till eight years later.  Soon after
+this the son must have begun to send to Stratford substantial support.
+In 1592 John Shakespeare was made an appraiser of the property of Henry
+Field, a fellow-townsman.  Henry Field's son Richard published _Venus
+and Adonis_ for Shakespeare in 1593, from his shop in St. Paul's
+Churchyard.  From this time John Shakespeare seems to have lived in
+comfort.  His ambition to secure the grant of a coat of arms was almost
+successful at his first application for one in October, 1596; three
+years later the grant was made, and his son and he were now "Gentlemen."
+
+In May, 1597, William Shakespeare bought New Place, a handsome house in
+the heart of Stratford, and at once became an influential citizen.
+From that time to his death he is continually mentioned in the town
+records.  His purchases included 107 acres in {17} Old Stratford (May
+1, 1602), for L320; the right to farm the Stratford tithes (July 24,
+1605), for L440; an estate of the Combe family (April 13, 1610), and
+minor properties.  In all his dealings, so far as we can tell, he seems
+to have been shrewd and business-like.
+
+Little is known of Shakespeare's children during these years.  Hamnet,
+his only son, was buried August 11, 1596.  Susanna, the eldest
+daughter, married a physician, Dr. John Hall, of Stratford, June 5,
+1607; Judith married Thomas Quiney, son of an old Stratford friend of
+Shakespeare's, February 10, 1616, two months before her father's death.
+Shakespeare's father had died long before this, in September, 1601.
+
+Shakespeare's retirement from London to his native town is thought to
+have taken place about 1611, though there is no real evidence for this
+belief, except that his play writing probably ceased about this date.
+In 1614 a Puritan preacher stopped at New Place and was entertained
+there by the poet's family.  It is certain that Shakespeare visited
+London from time to time after 1611.  One such visit is recorded in the
+diary of his lawyer, Thomas Greene, of Stratford.  As late as March 24,
+1613, there occurs an entry in the accounts of the Earl of Rutland of a
+payment to Shakespeare and Richard Burbage of 44 shillings each in gold
+for getting up a dramatic entertainment for the Earl of Rutland.
+
+In 1616 Shakespeare's health failed.  On January 25, a copy of his will
+was drawn, which was executed March 25.  On April 23, 1616, he died,
+and two days later was buried in the chancel of Stratford church.
+
+
+{18}
+
++Shakespeare's Portraits, Tomb, and Descendants+.--Two portraits, the
+"Ely Palace" and the "Flower" portraits, so called from former
+possessors, are thought to have better claims to authenticity than
+others.  New discoveries are announced, periodically, of Shakespeare's
+portrait; but these turn out usually to be forgeries.  The engraving by
+Martin Droeshout prefixed to the First and later Folios, though to us
+it seems unanimated and unnatural, is still the only likeness vouched
+for by contemporaries.  It is thought by many to be a copy of the
+"Flower" portrait, which bears the date 1609, and which it certainly
+very closely resembles.  If the Stratford bust which was placed in a
+niche above Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford church before 1623 was
+accurately reproduced in Dugdale's _Warwickshire_, then the present
+bust is a later substitution, since it shows differences in detail from
+that sketch.  It is coming to be believed that the eighteenth-century
+restoration so altered the bust as to make it quite unlike its former
+appearance.
+
+Shakespeare's grave is in the chancel of Stratford church.  A dark,
+flat tombstone bears the inscription, which early tradition ascribes to
+the poet:--
+
+  "Good frend, for Iesvs sake forbeare
+  To digg the dvst enclosed heare:
+  Bleste be y^e man y^t spares thes stones,
+  And curst be he y^t moves my bones."
+
+The monument to Shakespeare, with the bust on the north wall, is facing
+the tomb.
+
+In his will, Shakespeare provided that much the larger portion of his
+estate should go to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall and John Hall,
+Gent., her husband, including New Place, Henley Street and Blackfriars
+houses, and his tithes in Stratford and near-by villages.  This was in
+accordance with custom.  To Judith, his younger daughter, the wife of
+Thomas Quiney, he left three hundred pounds, one hundred as a marriage
+portion, fifty more on her release of her right in a Stratford
+tenement, and the rest to be paid in three years, the principal to be
+invested, the interest paid to her, and the principal to be divided at
+her death.
+
+{19}
+
+Shakespeare left his sister, Joan Hart, L20 and his wearing apparel,
+and her house in Stratford rent-free till her death, at a shilling a
+year.  His plate he divided between his daughters.  The minor bequests,
+which include L10 to the Stratford poor, are chiefly notable for the
+bequest of money (26s. 8d.) for rings to "my fellowes, John Hemynges,
+Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell."  These were fellow-actors in the
+Lord Chamberlain's Company.
+
+Within half a century Shakespeare's line was extinct.  His wife died
+August 6, 1623.  His daughter Susanna left one daughter, Elizabeth, who
+married, April 22, 1626, Thomas Nashe, who died April 4, 1647.  On June
+5, 1649, she married John Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire,
+afterwards knighted.  She left no children by either marriage.  Her
+burial was recorded February 17, 1669-70.  Shakespeare's daughter
+Judith had three sons,--Shakespeare, baptized November 23, 1616, buried
+May 8, 1617; Richard, baptized February 9, 1617-8, buried February 16,
+1638-9; Thomas, baptized January 23, 1619-20, buried January 1638-9.
+Judith Shakespeare survived them all, and was buried February 9,
+1661-2.  Shakespeare's sister, Joan Hart, left descendants who owned
+the Henley Street House up to the time of its purchase, in 1847, by the
+nation.
+
+The best books on the life of Shakespeare: J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps,
+_Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_, tenth edition, London, 1898 (the
+greatest collection of sources and documents); Sidney Lee, _A Life of
+William Shakespeare_ (New York, Macmillan, 1909), (the best extended
+life, especially valuable for its study of the biographical value of
+the sonnets); Professor Wallace's articles referred to in the text.
+
+
+
+[1] This reference was discovered among the Plume Mss. (1657-1663) of
+Maldon, Essex, by Dr. Andrew Clark, in October, 1904.  Sir John Mennes
+was, however, not a contemporary of John Shakespeare, but doubtless
+merely passed on the description from some eyewitness.
+
+[2] The dates between January 1 and March 25, previous to 1752, are
+always thus written.  In 1752 England and its colonies decided to begin
+the year with January 1 instead of March 25, as formerly.  Thus for
+periods before that date between January 1 and March 25, we give two
+figures to indicate that the people of that time called it one year and
+we call it a year later.  Thus, Judith Shakespeare would have said she
+was baptized in 1584, while by our reckoning her baptism came in 1585.
+
+[3] "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide."  This line is also in
+the source of Shakespeare's play.  See p. 133.
+
+[4] Printed first in 1596, but written shortly before Greene's death in
+1592.
+
+[5] Registered Dec., 1592, but printed without date.
+
+[6] These may be seen, as well as all others up to 1700, in the
+re-edited _Shakespeare Allusion Book_, ed. J. Munro, London, 1909.
+
+[7] See p. 48.
+
+[8] See the _New York Times_ for October 3, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+{20}
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE
+
+The history of the drama includes two periods of supreme achievement,
+that of fifth-century Greece and that of Elizabethan England.  Between
+these peaks lies a broad valley, the bottom of which is formed by the
+centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ.  From its
+culmination in the tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and
+in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the
+brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical
+tragedies of the Roman Seneca.  The decay of culture, the barbarian
+invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater
+decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were
+kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, the drama, as a
+literary form, had practically disappeared from western Europe before
+the middle of the sixth century.  For this reason the modern drama is
+commonly regarded as a new birth, as an independent creation entirely
+distinct from the art which had preceded it.  A new birth and an
+independent growth there certainly was, but it must not be forgotten
+that the love of the dramatic did not disappear with the literary
+drama, that the entertainment of mediaeval {21} minstrels were not
+without dramatic elements, that dialogues continued to be written if
+not acted, and that the classical drama of Rome, eagerly studied by the
+enthusiasts of the Renaissance, had no slight influence upon the course
+which the modern drama took.  If we make these qualifications, we may
+fairly say that the old drama died and that a new drama was born.
+
++The Beginnings of Modern Drama+.--When we search for the origin of the
+modern drama, we find it, strangely enough, in the very institution
+which had done so much to suppress it as an invention of the devil; for
+it made its first appearance in the services of the Church.  From a
+very early period, the worship of the Church had possessed a certain
+dramatic character.  The service of the Mass recalled and represented
+by symbols, which became more and more definite and elaborate, the
+great sacrifice of Christ.  And this tendency manifested itself in
+other ways, such as the letting fall, on Good Friday, of the veil which
+had concealed the sanctuary since the first Sunday in Lent, thus
+recalling the veil of the Jewish temple rent in twain at the death of
+Christ.  But all this was rather the soil in which the drama could grow
+than the beginning itself.  The latter came in the ninth century, when
+an addition was made to the Mass which was slight in itself, but which
+was to have momentous consequences.  Among the words fitted to certain
+newly introduced melodies were those of which the following is a
+translation:--
+
+  "Whom seek ye, O Christians, in the sepulcher?
+  Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O ye dwellers in Heaven.
+  He is not here; he is risen as he foretold.
+  Go and carry the tidings that he is risen from the sepulcher."
+
+
+{22}
+
+At first these words were sung responsively by the choir, but before
+the end of the tenth century they were put into the mouths of monks or
+clergy representing the Maries and the angel.  By this time the
+dialogue had been removed to the first services of Easter morning, and
+had been connected with the ceremonies of the Easter sepulcher.  In
+many churches it was then customary on Good Friday to carry a crucifix
+to a representation of a sepulcher which  had previously been prepared
+somewhere in the church, whence the crucifix was secretly removed
+before Easter morning.  Then, at the first Easter service, the empty
+sepulcher was solemnly visited, and this dialogue was sung.[1]  The
+participants wore ecclesiastical vestments, and the acting was of the
+simplest character, but the amount of dialogue increased as time went
+on, and new bits of action were added; so that before the end of the
+twelfth century some churches presented what may fairly be called a
+short one-act play.  Meanwhile, around the services of Good Friday and
+the Christmas season, other dramatic ceremonies and short dialogues had
+been growing up, which gave rise to tiny plays dealing with the birth
+of Christ, the visits of the shepherds and the Wise Men, and the Old
+Testament prophecies of {23} Christ's coming.  Although the elaboration
+of individual plays continued, the evolution of the drama as part of
+the Church's liturgy was practically complete by the middle of the
+thirteenth century.
+
++The Earlier Miracle Plays+.--The next hundred years brought a number
+of important changes: the gradual substitution of English for Latin,
+the removal from the church to the churchyard or market-place, and the
+welding together of the single plays into great groups or cycles.  The
+removal from the church was made possible by the growth of the plays in
+length and dramatic interest, which rendered them independent of the
+rest of the service; and it was made inevitable by the enormous
+popularity of the plays and by the more elaborate staging which the
+developed plays required.  The formation of more or less unified cycles
+was the result of a natural tendency to supply the missing links
+between the plays already in existence, and to write new plays
+describing the events which led up to those already treated.  Just as
+Wagner in our day after writing his drama on _The Death of Siegfried_
+felt himself compelled to write other plays dealing with his hero's
+birth and the events which led to this birth, so the unknown authors of
+the great English cycles were led to write play after play until they
+had covered the significant events of Biblical history from the
+creation of the world to the Last Judgment.  This joining together of
+isolated plays necessitated taking them away from the particular
+festivals with which they had originally been connected and presenting
+them all together on a single day, or, in the case of the longer
+cycles, on successive days.  After 1264, {24} when the festival of
+Corpus Christi was established in honor of the sacrament of Holy
+Communion, this day was the favorite time of presentation.  Coming as
+it did in early summer on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, it was
+well suited for out-of-door performances, besides being a festival
+which the Church especially delighted to honor.
+
++The Great English Cycles+.--Of the great cycles of miracle plays, only
+four have come down to us: those given at York and at Chester, that in
+the Towneley collection (probably given at or near Wakefield), and the
+cycle called the Ludus Coventriae or Hegge plays, of which the place of
+presentation is uncertain.  The surviving fragments of lost cycles,
+however, taken together with the records of performances, show that
+religious plays were given with more or less regularity in at least one
+hundred and twenty-five places in England.  The cycle which has been
+most completely preserved is that of York, forty-eight plays of which
+still exist.  It originally included fifty-seven plays, while the
+number of Biblical incidents known to have been treated in plays
+belonging to one cycle or another includes twenty-one based on the Old
+Testament or on legends, and sixty-eight based on the New Testament.
+
+Even while the religious plays were still a part of the Church
+services, they contained humorous elements, such as the realistically
+comic figure of the merchant who sold spices and ointment to the Maries
+on their way to the tomb of Christ.  In the later plays these
+interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce.  When Herod
+learned of the escape of the Wise Men, he would rage violently about
+the stage and even among {25} the spectators.  Noah's wife, in the
+Chester play of _The Deluge_, refuses point-blank to go into the Ark,
+and has to be put in by main force.  The _Second Shepherds' Play_ of
+the Towneley cycle contains an episode of sheep stealing which is a
+complete and perfect little farce.  Nor were the scenes of pathos less
+effective.  The scene in the Brome play of _Abraham and Isaac_ where
+the little lad pleads for his life has not lost its pathetic appeal
+with the passage of centuries.  While many of the miracle plays seem to
+us stiff and perfunctory, the best of them possess literary merit of a
+very high order.
+
+As the development of the plays called for an increasing number of
+actors, the clergy had to call upon the laity for help, so that the
+acting fell more and more into the hands of the latter, until finally
+the whole work of presenting the plays was taken over, in most cases,
+by the guilds, organizations of the various trades which corresponded
+roughly to our modern trades unions.  Each guild had its own play of
+which it bore the expense and for which it furnished the actors.  Thus
+the shipwrights would present _The Building of the Ark_, the
+goldsmiths, _The Adoration of the Wise Men_.  Sometimes the plays would
+be presented on a number of tiny stages or scaffolds grouped in a
+rectangle or a circle; more often they were acted on floats, called
+pageants, which were dragged through the streets and stopped for
+performances at several of the larger squares.  These pageants were
+usually of two stories, the lower used for a dressing-room, the upper
+for a stage.  The localities represented were indicated in various
+ways--Heaven, for instance, by a beautiful {26} pavilion; Hell, by the
+mouth of a huge dragon.  The costumes of the actors were often
+elaborate and costly, and there was some attempt at imitating reality,
+such as putting the devils into costumes of yellow and black, which
+typified the flames and darkness of Hell.
+
+Fairly complete cycles were in existence as early as 1300; they reached
+the height of their perfection and popularity in the later fourteenth
+and in the fifteenth centuries; and they began to decline in the
+sixteenth century.  After 1550 the performances became more and more
+irregular, until, at the accession of King James I, they had
+practically ceased.
+
++The Moralities+.--Of somewhat later origin than the miracle plays, but
+existing contemporaneously with them, were the moralities.  In a
+twelfth-century miracle play characters had been introduced which were
+not the figures of Biblical story, but personified abstractions, such
+as Hypocrisy, Heresy, Pity.  By the end of the fourteenth century there
+had come into existence plays of which all the characters were of this
+type.  These, however, were probably not direct descendants of the
+miracles; but rather the application of the newly learned dramatic
+methods to another sort of subject matter, the allegory, a literary
+type much used by poets and preachers of the time.  Such plays were
+called 'moral plays' or 'moralities.'  Unlike the miracle plays, these
+remained independent of each other, and showed no tendency to grow
+together into cycles.  The most beautiful of them, written at the end
+of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, is that
+called _The Summoning of Everyman_.  It represents a typical man
+compelled to enter upon the long, {27} inevitable journey of death.
+Kindred and Wealth abandon him, but long-neglected Good-deeds, revived
+by Knowledge, comes to his aid.  At the edge of the grave Everyman is
+deserted by Beauty, Strength, and the Five Senses, while Good-deeds
+alone goes with him to the end.  Moralities of this type aimed at the
+cultivation of virtue in the spectators, just as the miracle plays had
+aimed at the strengthening of their faith.  Another type of morality
+dealt with controversial questions.  In one of these, _King Johan_,
+written about 1538, historical personages are put side by side with the
+allegorical abstractions, thus foreshadowing the later historical
+plays, such as Shakespeare's _King John_.  Another comparatively late
+type of morality sought to teach an ethical lesson by showing the
+effect of vice and  virtue upon  the lives of men and women.  _Nice
+Wanton_ (c. 1550), for instance, represents the consequence of good and
+evil living, not only by the use of such allegorical characters as
+Iniquity  and Worldly Shame, but also by means of the human beings,
+Barnabas and Ishmael and their sister Dalila.  Thus, although the more
+abstract moralities persisted until late in the sixteenth century,
+these other types at the same time helped lead the way to the drama
+which depicts actual life.
+
++The Interlude+.--Both miracle play and morality were written with a
+definite purpose, the teaching of a lesson, religious, moral, or
+political; the interlude, on the other hand, was a short play intended
+simply to interest or to amuse.  The original meaning of the word
+"interlude" is a matter of controversy.  It may have meant a short play
+introduced between other {28} things, such as the courses of a banquet,
+or it may have meant simply a dialogue.  Be that as it may, the
+interlude seems to have had its origin in the dramatic character of
+minstrel entertainments and in the dramatic character of popular games,
+such as those, especially beloved of our English ancestors, which
+celebrated the memory of Robin Hood and his fellow-outlaws of Sherwood
+forest.  The miracle plays set the example of dramatic composition, an
+example soon followed in the interlude, which put into dramatic forms
+that became more and more elaborate popular stories and episodes, both
+serious and comic.  Although there had been comic episodes in miracle
+plays and moralities, it was as interludes that the amusing skit and
+the tiny farce achieved an independent existence.  The first real
+interlude which has come down to us is that called _De Clerico et
+Puella_, _Of the Cleric and the Maiden_, which was written not later
+than the early fourteenth century.  This is little more than a dialogue
+depicting the attempted seduction of a maiden by a wanton cleric.  The
+only other surviving fourteenth-century interlude, that of _Dux
+Maraud_, is, on the other hand, the dramatization of a tragic tale of
+incest and murder.  This is, however, somewhat exceptional, and may
+perhaps be regarded as belonging rather to a type of miracle play not
+common in England, in which the intervention of some heavenly power
+affects the lives of men.  At any rate, it is probable that the
+interlude was not often so serious an affair, and it developed rapidly
+in a way that gave us, in the sixteenth century, the interludes of John
+Heywood (1497-1577), which are really short farces, {29} and no bad
+ones at that.  By reason of its character and the small number of
+actors which it required, the interlude was usually given by
+professional entertainers, who were either kept by persons of high
+rank, or traveled from town to town.  We find, therefore, in the acting
+of interludes the conditions which gave rise to modern comedy and to
+the modern traveling company.
+
++Classical Influences+.--In the preceding paragraphs we have considered
+the early modern drama as an independent growth, but the influence of
+the classical drama, particularly the Latin tragedies of Seneca and the
+Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, showed itself in the later
+moralities and interludes, and was to appear again and again in the
+later course of English drama.  That great revival of interest in
+classical learning which gave the Renaissance its name, was a mighty
+force in the current of English thought throughout the sixteenth
+century.  The old Latin tragedies and comedies were revived and were
+produced in the original and in translation at schools and colleges.
+It was an easy step from this to the writing of English comedies after
+Latin models.  The earliest of such attempts which we know is the
+comedy of _Ralph Roister Doister_, written by Nicholas Udall for Eton
+boys at some time between 1534 and 1541.  This, commonly called the
+first English comedy, is little more than a clever adaptation of
+Plautus to English manners and customs; but a comedy written soon
+after, _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, is really an Interlude cast in the
+Plautean mold.  The first English tragedy, _Gorboduc_, closely
+imitative of Seneca, but on {30} a mythical British subject and written
+in English blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quarter of
+a century later.  Seneca's tragedies had little action, slight
+characterization, and many extremely long speeches, which often
+display, however, much brilliant rhetoric.  _Gorboduc_ has all these
+qualities except the brilliance.  The history, the third of the types
+into which the editors of the First Folio were to divide Shakespeare's
+plays, was also affected by Senecan influence.  We have already seen
+how the historical figure of King John appeared in a morality, one
+which shows little trace of classical tradition; and the history, with
+its general formlessness and its mixture of the comic with the serious,
+remained a peculiarly English product.  Nevertheless, in the second
+half of the sixteenth century, subjects from English history were
+treated after the manner of Latin tragedy, and the long, rhetorical
+speeches of the later historical plays are more suggestive of Seneca
+than are most Elizabethan tragedies.
+
+The classical type of drama, with its strict observance of the three
+unities,[2] was not congenial to the {31} English temperament.  Its
+fetters were soon thrown off, and, with the notable exception of Ben
+Jonson (1573-1637), few Elizabethan playwrights conformed to its rules.
+Its influence, however, was not confined to its imitators.  From the
+classical drama the Elizabethans gained a sense for form and for the
+value of dramatic technique, which did much to make the Elizabethan
+drama what it was.
+
++Three Predecessors of Shakespeare+.--The development of the English
+drama from the first attempts at comedy, tragedy, and history was
+extremely rapid.  When Shakespeare came to London, he found there
+dramatists who were far on the road toward mastery of dramatic form,
+and who were putting into that form both great poetry and a profound
+knowledge of human nature.  A complete list of these dramatists would
+include a number of names which have a permanent place in the history
+of English literature, such as those of Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nash,
+George Peele, and Robert Greene.  Among these names three deserve
+especial prominence, not only because of the great achievements of
+these men, but because of their influence on Shakespeare.  These men
+were Marlowe, Kyd, and Lyly.
+
+It was Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) who first gave to English blank
+verse those qualities which make it an extraordinarily perfect medium
+of expression.  Before him, blank verse had no advantages to offer in
+compensation for the abandonment of rime.  It was stiff, monotonous,
+and cold.  Marlowe began to vary the position of the pauses within the
+line, and to do away with the pause at the end of some lines by {32}
+placing the breaks in thought elsewhere.  Thus he gave to his verse
+ease, flexibility, and movement, and he put into it the warmth and
+vividness of his own personality.  Upon such verse as this Shakespeare
+could hardly improve.  But this by no means sums up his debt to
+Marlowe.  His characterization of Richard III, for instance, was
+distinctly affected by that of Marlowe's hero Tamburlaine, a character
+to which the poet had given a passionate life and an energy that made
+him more than human.  In other ways less easy to define, Shakespeare
+must have been stimulated by Marlowe's fire.  The latter's greatest
+tragedies, _Tamburlaine_, _Dr. Faustus_, and _Edward II_, contain
+poetry so beautiful, feeling so intense, and a promise of future
+achievement so remarkable, that his early death may fairly be said to
+have deprived English literature of a genius worthy of comparison with
+that of Shakespeare himself.
+
+Although Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) was far from the equal of Marlowe, he
+was a playwright of real ability and one whose tragedies were unusually
+popular.  Influenced greatly by Seneca, he brought to its climax the
+'tragedy of blood'--a type of drama in which ungovernable passions of
+lust and revenge lead to atrocious crimes and end in gruesome and
+appalling murders.  His famous _Spanish Tragedy_ was the forerunner of
+many similar plays, of which _Titus Andronicus_ was one.  He probably
+wrote the original play of _Hamlet_, which was elevated by Shakespeare
+out of its atmosphere of blood and horror into the highest realms of
+thought and poetry.
+
+John Lyly (c. 1554-1606) was a master in an {33} entirely different
+field, that of highly artificial comedy.  He brought court comedy to a
+hitherto unattained perfection of form and style, and in his best work,
+_Endymion_, he displayed a lovely delicacy of thought and expression
+which has kept his reputation secure.  He is best known, however, for
+his prose romance, _Euphues_, which gave its name to the style of which
+it was the climax.  Euphuism is a manner of writing marked by elaborate
+antithesis and alliteration, and ornamented by fantastic similes drawn
+from a mass of legendary lore concerning plants and animals.[3] This
+style, which nowadays seems labored and inartistic, was excessively
+admired by the Elizabethans.  Shakespeare imitated it to some extent in
+_Love's Labour's Lost_, and parodied it in Falstaff's speech to Prince
+Hal, _I Henry IV_, II, iv.  Several of Shakespeare's earlier comedies
+show Lyly's influence for good and ill--ill, in that it made for
+artificiality and strained conceits; good, in that it made for
+perfection of dramatic form and refinement of expression.
+
++The Masque+.--Somewhat apart from the main current of dramatic
+evolution is the development of the masque, which became extremely
+popular in the reign of James I.  The English masque was an
+entertainment, dramatic in character, made up of songs, dialogue, and
+dances.  It originated in masked balls given by the nobility or at
+court.  To John Lydgate, working about 1430, is probably due the credit
+for introducing into such {34} disguisings a literary element, while
+the later course of the masque owes much to Italy.  In the developed
+masque there were two classes of participants: noble amateurs, who wore
+elaborate costumes and danced either among themselves or with the
+spectators; and professional entertainers, who spoke and sang.  The
+later masques had elaborate scenery and costumes, with just as much
+plot as would serve to string together the lyrics and dances.
+Sometimes an anti-masque of grotesque figures was introduced to serve
+as contrast to the beautiful figures of the masque.  The masques were
+produced with the utmost lavishness, the most extravagant one of which
+we know costing over L20,000.  Some of them, such as those written by
+Ben Jonson, contain charming poetry; but their chief interest to the
+student of Shakespeare lies in the fact that their great popularity
+caused Shakespeare to introduce short masques into some of his plays,
+notably _Henry VIII_, _The Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_.  In
+similar allegorical dances often given between the acts of Italian
+plays, has been sought the origin of the 'dumb-show,' which was
+occasionally introduced into English tragedies, and which appears in
+the Mouse-Trap given in _Hamlet_.
+
+
+The most useful general histories of this period are: F. E. Schelling,
+_Elizabethan Drama_ (Houghton Mifflin, 1908); E. K. Chambers, _The
+Mediaeval Stage_ (Oxford, 1903); and Creizenach, _Geschichte des
+neueren Dramas_ (Halle, 1893-1909, and not yet complete).  Some of the
+best Miracles, Moralities, and Interludes are easily accessible in
+_Everyman with other Interludes_ (Everyman's Library) and J. M. Manly's
+_Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama_ (Ginn & Co., 1897).
+
+
+
+[1] An extract from the Concordia Regularis, a tenth-century appendix
+to the monastic "rule" of St. Benedict, describes this ceremony.
+"While the third respond is chanted, let the remaining three follow
+[one of the brethren, vested in an alb, had before this quietly taken
+his place at the sepulcher], and let them all, vested in copes, and
+bearing in their hands thuribles with incense, and stepping delicately,
+as those who seek something, approach the sepulcher.  These things are
+done in imitation of the angel sitting in the monument, and the women
+with spices coming to anoint the body of Jesus."
+
+[2] The three unities of action, place, and time are usually believed
+to have been formulated by Aristotle, who is supposed to have said that
+a tragedy should have but a single plot and that the action should be
+confined to a single day and a single place.  As a matter of fact,
+Aristotle is responsible for only the first of these, and this he
+presented as an observation on the actual condition which prevailed in
+Greek tragedy rather than as a dramatic principle for all time.  The
+other principles, which were later deduced from the general practice of
+the Greeks,--a practice arising from the manner in which their plays
+were staged,--were, together with the first, elevated by the Romans to
+the dignity of fixed dramatic laws.
+
+[3] The following quotation from Euphues (ed. Bond, i, 289) illustrates
+this style: "Hee that seeketh ye depth of knowledge is as it were in a
+Laborinth, in which the farther he goeth, the farther he is from the
+end: or like the bird in the limebush which the more she striveth to
+get out, ye faster she sticketh in."  With this cf. _Hamlet_, III, iii,
+69; _I Henry IV_, II, iv, 441.
+
+
+
+
+{35}
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER
+
+In 1575 London had no theaters; that is, no building especially
+designed for the acting of plays.  By 1600 there were at least six,
+among which were some so large and beautiful as to arouse the
+unqualified admiration of travelers from the continent.  It is the
+purpose of this chapter to give in outline the history of this rapid
+development of a new type of building; to describe, as accurately as
+may be, the general features of these theaters; and to indicate the
+influence which these features exerted upon the Shakespearean drama.
+But before doing this it is necessary to point out the causes which
+made the first Elizabethan theater what it was.
+
++The Predecessors of the Elizabethan Theater+.[1]--Of these, the most
+important was the innyard.  As soon as the acting of plays ceased to be
+merely a local affair, as soon as there were companies of actors which
+traveled from town to town, it became necessary to find some place for
+the public presentation of plays other than the pageants of the guilds
+or the temporary scaffolds sometimes erected for miracle plays.  Such a
+place was offered by the courtyard of an inn.  The larger inns of {36}
+this period were, for the most part, built in the form of a quadrangle
+surrounding an open court.  Opening directly off this court were the
+stables, the kitchen, and other offices of the inn; above these were
+from one to three stories of bedrooms and sitting rooms, entered from
+galleries running all round the court.  When such a courtyard was used
+for theatrical performances, the actors erected a platform at one end
+to serve as a stage; the space back of this, shut off by a curtain,
+they used as a dressing-room; and the part of the gallery immediately
+over it they employed as a second stage which could represent the walls
+of a city or the balcony of a house.  In the courtyard the poorer class
+of spectators stood; in the galleries the more wealthy sat at their
+ease.  These conditions made the innyards much better places for play
+acting than were the city squares, while they were given still another
+advantage from the actors' point of view by the fact that the easily
+controlled entrance gave an opportunity for charging a regular
+admission fee--a fee which varied with the desirability of the various
+parts of the house.  Thus the innyards made no bad playhouses, and they
+continued to be used as such even after theaters were built.
+
+They had, however, one obvious disadvantage; their long, narrow shape
+made a large number of the seats and a large proportion of the spaces
+available for standing room distinctly bad places from which to see
+what was happening on the stage.  To remedy this defect, the builders
+of the theaters took a suggestion from the bull-baiting and
+bear-baiting rings.  These rings, of which a considerable number
+already existed {37} in the outskirts of London, had been built for
+fights between dogs and bulls or bears, sports vastly enjoyed by the
+Elizabethans.  The rings, like the innyards, had galleries in which
+spectators could sit and an open yard in which they could stand, and
+they possessed the added merit of being round.  Very possibly these
+rings, like the Cornish rings used for miracle plays, originated in the
+stone amphitheaters built by the Romans during their occupation of
+Britain, buildings occasionally used, even in the sixteenth century,
+for the performance of plays.  It is hardly necessary, nevertheless, to
+look farther than the bear ring to find the cause which determined the
+shape of the Elizabethan public theater.
+
++The History of the Public Theaters+.--With such models, then, James
+Burbage--the father of Richard Burbage, later the great actor manager
+of Shakespeare's company--built the first London theater in 1576.  It
+was erected not far outside the northern walls of the city, and was
+called simply the Theater.  Not far away, a second theater, the
+Curtain, was soon put up, so called not from any curtain on the stage,
+but from the name of the estate on which it was built.  The next
+theater, the Rose, was situated in another quarter, on the Surrey side
+of the Thames, where the bear-baiting rings were.  This was
+constructed, probably in 1587, by Philip Henslowe, a prominent
+theatrical manager.  Some time after 1594, a second theater, the Swan,
+was put up in this same region, commonly called the Bankside.  The
+suitability of the Bankside as a location for theaters is still further
+attested by the removal thither of the Theater in the winter of
+1598-1599.  The owner of the land on which the Theater had originally
+been {38} built had merely leased it to Burbage--who had since
+died,--and, when the lease expired, he attempted to raise the rent,
+probably believing that the Burbage heirs were receiving large profits
+from the building.  Being unwilling to pay this increased rent, the
+Burbages took down the building, and reerected it on the Bankside, this
+time calling it the Globe.  The last to be built of the great public
+theaters was the Fortune, which Henslowe erected in 1600.  The
+situation of the Fortune outside Cripplegate, although a considerable
+distance west of the Curtain, was, roughly, that of the earlier
+theaters, the northern suburbs of the city.
+
+This list does not include all the theaters built or altered between
+1576 and 1600, nor did such building stop at the latter date,--the
+Globe, for instance, was burnt and again rebuilt in 1613,--but the
+sketch is complete enough for our purposes.  By the end of 1600 all the
+more important public theaters were open, and after that date, so far
+as we know, no important changes in construction were made.  The next
+real step--which was to do away altogether with this type of
+theater--did not come until after the Restoration.
+
++The Buildings+.--Before describing the buildings themselves, it is
+necessary to make one qualification.  It is impossible to speak of the
+'Elizabethan theaters' or of the 'Elizabethan stage' as if there were
+one type to which all theaters and stages conformed.  The Fortune was
+undoubtedly a great improvement over the Theater, the outcome of an
+evolution which could be traced through the other theaters if we had
+the necessary documents.  If the various theaters did not differ from
+each other as some of our modern theaters do, they {39} still did
+differ in important points.  For example, while the Globe and the
+Curtain were round, other theaters were hexagonal or octagonal, and the
+Fortune was square.  Likewise, there were certainly differences in
+size.  In spite of these facts, it is, however, still possible to
+describe the theaters, in general terms which are sufficiently accurate
+for our present purpose.
+
+An Elizabethan theater was a three-story building of wooden or
+half-timber construction.  The three stories formed three galleries for
+spectators.  The first of these was raised a little above the level of
+the ground, while the yard, or 'pit,' in which the lower class of
+spectators stood, seems to have been somewhat sunken.  The galleries
+were supported by oaken columns, often handsomely carved and
+ornamented.  They were roofed and ceiled, but the yard was open to the
+weather.  Although we know that the Fortune was eighty feet square
+outside, and that the yard within was fifty-five feet square, we are
+left in uncertainty about the seating capacity.  From fifteen hundred
+to eighteen hundred is, however, the most convincing estimate.  There
+were two boxes, or 'gentlemen's rooms,' presumably in the first balcony
+on either side of the stage.  Besides these, there were other, cheaper
+boxes, and the rest of the balcony space was filled with seats.  The
+better seats were most comfortably cushioned, and the whole theater
+anything but the bare rude place which people often imagine it.
+Coryat, a widely traveled Englishman of the period, writes of the
+theaters which he saw in Venice that they were "bare and beggarly in
+comparison of our stately playhouses in England; neither can their
+actors compare with us for stately apparel, {40} shows, or music."
+That this was no mere British prejudice is shown by the similar
+statements of foreigners traveling in England.
+
+The most striking difference between Elizabethan and modern theaters
+was in the position of the stage, which was not back of a great
+proscenium frame, but was built out as a platform into the middle of
+the yard.  At the Fortune, the stage was forty-three feet wide,--wider,
+that is, than most modern stages.[2]  Jutting out from the level of the
+top gallery, and extending perhaps ten feet over the stage, was a
+square structure called the 'hut,' which rose above the level of the
+outside walls.  Built out from the bottom of this, a roof, or 'shadow,'
+extended forward over a large part of the stage.  The front of this
+'shadow' was borne, in the better theaters, on two columns.  The shadow
+and the hut, taken together, are often referred to as the 'heavens.'
+
++The Stage+.--When we turn from these general features of the theaters
+to the stage, we shall find it convenient to speak of a front and a
+rear stage, but this does not imply any permanent line of demarcation
+between the two, or that they were not often used together as a single
+field of action.  The rear stage is simply that part of the stage which
+could be shut off from the spectators by curtains; the other, that part
+which lay in front of the curtains.  In other words, the front stage is
+that portion of the stage which was built out into the yard, for the
+curtains continued the line made around the rest of the house by the
+front {41} of the galleries.  In both front and rear stages were traps
+out of which ghosts or apparitions could rise and into which such
+properties as the caldron in _Macbeth_ could sink.  From the 'heavens,'
+actors representing gods or spirits--as Jupiter in _Cymbeline_ or Ariel
+in _The Tempest_--could be lowered by means of a mechanical contrivance.
+
+======================================================================
+
+[Illustration: TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 4.  OUTER SCENE.
+
+  _Trumpets sound.  Enter Alcibiades with his
+    Powers before Athens._
+
+  _Alc_.  "Sound to this Coward, and lascivious
+          Towne.  Our terrible approach."
+
+  _Sounds a parly.  The Senators appeare upon the Wals._
+
+Reproduced from _The Shakespearean Stage_, by V. E. Albright, through
+the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.]
+
+======================================================================
+
+The arrangement of the rear stage may have differed considerably in the
+various theaters, but the typical form may best be described as an
+alcove in front of which curtains could be drawn.  This alcove was by
+no means so small as the word may seem to imply, but must have been
+about half as wide as the front stage and perhaps a quarter as deep.
+In its rear wall was a door through which the actors could enter
+without being seen when the curtains were drawn, and it seems to have
+had side doors as well.  To the right and left of it were doors for
+such entrances to the front stage as could not properly be made through
+the curtains.  This part of the stage was used for such scenes as the
+caves in _Cymbeline_ or _The Tempest_, for the tomb in _Romeo and
+Juliet_, and for scenes in which characters concealed themselves behind
+the arras, as in _I Henry IV_ or _Hamlet_.  Since the front stage could
+not be concealed from the spectators, most heavy properties were placed
+on the back stage, so that this part of the stage was generally used
+for scenes which required such properties.  For many of these scenes,
+however, both parts of the stage were used, the actors spreading out
+over the front stage soon after the beginning of the scene.
+
+The space between the top of the back stage and the {42} heavens formed
+a balcony, like the balcony already described as part of the stage as
+arranged in the inn-yards.  This balcony could also be curtained off
+when occasion required.  To the right and left of it, over the doors
+leading to the front stage, some of the theaters had window-like
+openings, which were probably not in line with the balcony, but, like
+the doors below them, projected at an oblique angle.  At one of these
+windows Jessica appeared in the second act of _The Merchant of Venice_;
+from the balcony Romeo took leave of Juliet.  Thus the Elizabethan
+dramatist had three fields of action--a front, rear, and upper
+stage--which he could use singly, together, or in various combinations.
+
++Settings and Costumes+.--In order to understand the way in which this
+stage was utilized, the student must dismiss from his mind two
+widespread errors.  The Elizabethan stage was by no means a bare,
+unfurnished platform, nor did the managers substitute for a setting
+placards reading "This is a Forest," or "This is a Bedroom."  The
+difference between that age and this is not one between no settings and
+good ones; it is even possible to doubt whether Shakespeare's plays
+were not put on more effectively then than in most of our modern
+theaters.  The difference is one of principle, and even this difference
+may easily be exaggerated.  When we say that Elizabethan stagings were
+'symbolic,' whereas ours are pictorial, we mean that on the former the
+presence of a few selected objects suggested to the mind of the
+spectator all the others which go to make up the kind of scene
+presented.  When a few trees were placed upon the stage, the audience
+supplied in {43} imagination the other objects that belong in a forest;
+when a throne was there, they saw with the mind's eye a room of state
+in a palace.  But our modern stage also demands the help of the
+imagination.  It is very far from presenting a completely realistic
+picture.  We see three sides of a room and accept the room as complete,
+although none of us live in rooms which lack a side.  We see a great
+cathedral painted on a back drop, and are hardly disturbed by the fact
+that an actor standing near it is twice as high as one of the doors.
+The difference between the two stages really simmers down to this: our
+symbols are of painted canvas, the Elizabethans' were of another sort.
+It is extremely unlikely that the Elizabethans used painted scenes in
+their public theaters.  If they ever did, such 'painted cloths' were of
+the simplest sort, and not pictures painted in perspective.  Instead,
+they relied for their effects upon solid properties--sometimes quite
+elaborate ones--such as trees, tombs, wells, beds, thrones, etc.
+These, as has been said, were usually set on the rear stage, although
+some of them, such as couches and banquet tables, were occasionally
+brought forward during the course of a scene.
+
+There were, however, scenes which were acted without any setting.  The
+Elizabethans did not feel it necessary to have every scene definitely
+localized.  Consequently, many scenes which are described in our modern
+editions of Shakespeare as 'A Street,' 'A Place before the Castle,'
+etc., were not definitely assigned to any place, and were usually acted
+without settings on the front stage before the closed curtains.  In
+order that no time should be lost while properties were {44} being
+changed, such scenes were commonly inserted between scenes requiring
+properties, so that a certain alternation between set and unset scenes
+resulted.  The fourth act of the _Merchant of Venice_, for example,
+begins with the court-room scene, which demanded the whole stage, the
+properties for the court-room being set on the back stage, with perhaps
+some moved toward the front.  The fifth act takes place in Portia's
+garden, which also took up the whole stage, with garden properties set
+on the rear stage.  Between these two scenes comes the one in the
+street, which was acted before the closed curtains and required no
+properties.  The arrangement is somewhat like that followed in many
+modern melodramas, where a scene not requiring properties is acted in
+front of a drop scene while scenery is being set behind.  The raising
+of the drop--which corresponds to the opening of the Elizabethan
+curtains--not only reveals the setting behind, but also makes the whole
+stage, including that part which was in front of the drop, the scene of
+the action which follows.[3]
+
+======================================================================
+
+[Illustration: TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 3.  INNER SCENE.
+
+_Enter a Souldier in the Woods, seeking Timon._
+
+"_Sol_.--Timon is dead, who hath out-stretcht his span,
+         Some Beast reade this; There do's not live a Man.
+         Dead sure, and this his Grave, what's on this Tomb."
+
+Reproduced from _The Shakespearean Stage_, by V. E. Albright, through
+the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.]
+
+======================================================================
+
+The costumes on Shakespeare's stage were very elaborate, but there was
+no desire to make them characteristic of any historical period.
+Indeed, the striving after historical accuracy of costume is so much a
+modern notion that it was nearly two centuries later when Macbeth and
+Julius Caesar began to appear in costumes appropriate to their
+respective periods.  On the other hand, there probably was some attempt
+to distinguish the dress of different nationalities.  Some notion of
+how elaborate the costumes of Elizabethan actors were is given by the
+fact that Henslowe's {45} diary[4] has an entry of L4 14s. paid for a
+pair of hose, and L20 for a cloak.  In connection with this it must be
+remembered that money was worth then about eight times what it is now,
+and that a playwright of the time rarely received more than L8 for a
+play.  Another indication is given in Henslowe's list of the costumes
+belonging to the Lord Admiral's men, which included some eighty-seven
+garments, for the most part of silk or satin, ornamented with fringe
+and gold lace.
+
++The Private Theater+.--In the preceding sections the type of theater
+described has been referred to as 'public.'  This has been done to
+distinguish it from the 'private' theater, a type which, although
+similar in so far as the general principles of staging employed are
+concerned, differed from the public theater in important particulars.
+The private theater is so called because it originated in the
+performances given before the invited guests of royalty, the nobility,
+or the universities.  Since these performances were given in great
+halls, the type of theater which resulted was completely roofed, was
+lighted by candles, and had seats in the pit as well as in the
+galleries--when there were galleries.  As soon as such theaters were
+built, admission was, of course, no longer by invitation, but the
+prices were so much higher than those of the public theaters that the
+audiences remained much more select.  The first of these theaters was
+the Blackfriars, the remodeled hall of the former monastery of the
+Blackfriars, done over by Burbage in 1596.  Others {46} were those in
+which the 'Children of Paul's' acted, the Cockpit, and the Salisbury
+Court.  The Blackfriars was at first under royal patronage, the actors
+being the 'Children of the Chapel Royal.'  These choir boys were
+carefully trained in acting and dancing as well as singing, and were
+subsidized by royalty, so that their performances tended to be much
+more spectacular than those of the public theaters.  The performances
+at the Blackfriars seem to have retained this characteristic even after
+1608, when Shakespeare's company took over the theater.  Probably
+because of the patronage and interest of royalty, it was in the private
+theaters that painted scenes, already used in court masques, were first
+introduced.  Thus these roofed theaters are really the forerunners, so
+far as England is concerned, of our modern playhouses.
+
++Effect of Stage Conditions on the Drama+.--When studied in the light
+of Elizabethan stage conditions, many characteristics of the plays
+written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries cease to be surprising or
+puzzling.  A complete conception of all the effects which these
+conditions had upon the drama can only be gained by a careful study of
+all the plays.  Here, moreover, we are obliged to pass over many points
+of more general character, such as the impossibility of representing
+night by darkness when the performances were given by daylight in a
+theater open to the sun.  Two or three are, however, especially
+important.  For instance, since it was possible to leave many scenes
+indefinitely localized, and since there was no necessity of long pauses
+for the change of heavy scenery, the dramatists were not limited as
+ours are to a {47} comparatively small number of scenes.  This was an
+advantage in that it gave great freedom and variety to the action; but
+it was also a disadvantage in that it led to a scattering of effect and
+to looseness of construction.  So in _Antony and Cleopatra_ there are
+forty-two scenes, some of which are only a few lines long, and in
+consequence the play loses the intense, unified effect which it might
+otherwise have produced.  Again, the absence of a front curtain made it
+impossible to end an act or play with a grand climax or an impressive
+tableau.  Instead, the scenes gradually die away; the actors leave the
+stage one by one, or go off in procession.  Whether this was gain or
+loss is a debatable question.  At any rate, this caused the Elizabethan
+plays to leave on the spectator an impression totally different from
+that left by ours.  Finally, the absence of pictorial scenery forced
+the dramatists to use verbal description far more than is customary
+to-day.  To this fact we owe some passages of poetry which are among
+the most beautiful in all dramatic literature.
+
++Theatrical Companies+.--During Shakespeare's lifetime there were in
+existence more or less continuously some twenty theatrical companies,
+at least four or five of which, during the greater part of this period,
+played contemporaneously in London.  We have already seen how great
+nobles, before the end of the fifteenth century, maintained small
+companies of men as players of Interludes.  When not wanted by their
+patrons, these men traveled about the country, and their example was
+followed by other groups whose legal position was a much less certain
+quantity.  As a result, a law was passed in 1572 which required that
+{48} all companies of actors should be under the definite protection of
+some noble.  As time went on, this relation became one of merely
+nominal patronage, but the companies continued to be known by the name
+of their patron.  Thus the company to which Shakespeare belonged was
+known successively as Lord Strange's, the Earl of Derby's, first and
+second Lord Hunsdon's (or, because of the office which the Hunsdons
+held, as the Lord Chamberlain's), and as the King's company.  At
+various times it appeared at the Theater, the Curtain, the Globe, and
+the Blackfriars, its greatest triumphs being associated with the Globe.
+By 1608, if not before, it was unquestionably the most successful
+company in London.  It had the patronage of King James, and it
+controlled and acted in what were respectively the most popular public
+and private theaters, the Globe and the Blackfriars.  When not acting
+in London, it made tours to other cities.  Its number included several
+actors of well-known ability, among them Richard Burbage, the greatest
+tragic actor of the time.
+
+The most formidable rivals to this company were the Admiral's men and
+the children's companies.  The former company was managed by Richard
+Henslowe; had, after 1600, a permanent home in the Fortune theater; and
+included among its number Edward Alleyn, next to Burbage the most
+famous Elizabethan actor.  The two great children's companies were
+those made up of the choir boys of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's.
+The former had begun to give dramatic performances as early as 1506.
+They were well trained, had the advantage of royal patronage, and were
+{49} extraordinarily popular, becoming very serious rivals of the men's
+companies.  The performances of the Children of the Chapel Royal at the
+Blackfriars between 1596 and 1608 were the most fashionable in London.
+The children's companies were finally suppressed about 1609.
+
+The members of the men's companies were divided into four classes:
+those who had shares in the house and in the company, those who had
+shares only in the company, hired actors, and apprentices.  The third
+of these classes received a fixed salary, the last were cared for by
+the individual actors to whom they were apprenticed.  The profits of
+the theaters were derived from entrance money and the additional fees
+received for the better seats.  All of the first and half of the second
+was divided between the members of the first and second classes of
+shareholders.  The members of the first received in addition shares in
+the other half of the additional fees.[5]
+
+Because female parts were always taken by men or boys, it is sometimes
+assumed that Elizabethan acting must have been crude.  On the contrary,
+we have every reason to believe that most parts, particularly the less
+important ones, were acted better than they are usually acted to-day.
+Some of the actors, such as Burbage and Alleyn, were undoubtedly men of
+great genius.  All of them had the advantage of regular and consistent
+training--a thing only too often lacking in these days when an actor of
+ability is almost immediately made a 'star,' although he frequently
+knows pitifully little of the art of acting.  One of the most
+interesting testimonies to the ability of Elizabethan actors is Ben
+{50} Jonson's tribute to the memory of the boy actor, Salathiel Pavy:--
+
+  "Weep with me, all you that read
+              This little story;
+  And know, for whom a tear you shed
+              Death's self is sorry.
+  'Twas a child that so did thrive
+              In grace and feature,
+  As Heaven and Nature seem'd to strive
+              Which owned the creature.
+  Years he number'd scarce thirteen
+              When Fates turn'd cruel,
+  Yet three fill'd zodiacs had he been
+              The stage's jewel;
+  And did act (what now we moan)
+              Old men so duly,
+  As sooth the Parcae thought him one,
+              He play'd so truly.
+  So, by error, to his fate
+              They all consented;
+  But, viewing him since, alas, too late!
+              They have repented;
+  And have sought, to give new birth,
+              In baths to steep him;
+  But, being so much too good for earth,
+              Heaven vows to keep him."
+
+
+Many of the points discussed in this chapter are still the subject of
+controversy.  The theories of the stage adopted here are, in general,
+those of V. E. Albright, _The Shakespearean Stage_ (Macmillan, 1909).
+Among the numerous books and articles on these topics, the most useful
+are: G. F. Reynolds, _Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging_ (_Modern
+Philology_, Vols. 3 and 4); Brodmeier, _Die Shakespeare Buehne_ (Weimar,
+1904); Fleay, _Chronicle History of the London Stage_ (London, 1890);
+Henslowe's _Diary_, ed. by W. Greg (London, 1904); and the works of
+Creizenach and Schelling referred to in the preceding chapter.
+
+
+
+[1] Another predecessor, the great hall of a noble or a university, is
+mentioned in the section on the private theaters.
+
+[2] In at least some of the theaters, the stage seems to have narrowed
+toward the front.
+
+[3] With this whole paragraph, cf. Albright, pp. 81 ff., and 104-105.
+
+[4] This memorandum book of Philip Henslowe, the great manager, is one
+of our chief sources of information about the Elizabethan theater.
+
+[5] For Shakespeare's share, cf. p. 15.
+
+
+
+
+{51}
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ELIZABETHAN LONDON
+
+Shortly after Shakespeare came to London, England demonstrated her new
+greatness to an astonished world; by the defeat of Spain's greatest
+fleet, the "invincible Armada," England showed herself as no longer a
+small island nation, but as Mistress of the Sea.  In this victory
+culminated the growth which had begun under Henry VII, first of Tudor
+sovereigns.  Naval supremacy was, however, but a sign of a much greater
+and more far-reaching transformation--a transformation which had
+affected science, literature, and religion, and one which filled the
+men of Shakespeare's time with such enthusiasm for the past, such
+confidence in the present, and such hope for the future, as has hardly
+been paralleled in the world's history.
+
+During the century which had elapsed since 1485, Copernicus's discovery
+that the sun and not the earth was the center of our universe, had
+revolutionized the map of the heavens, as Columbus's discovery of
+America had revolutionized the map of the world.  Thus stimulated,
+scientific investigation started afresh, working in accordance with the
+modern methods formulated by Francis Bacon, while voyage quickly
+followed voyage, each new discovery adding fuel to the fire of
+enthusiasm.  Wonderful tales of new lands and unimagined wealth spread
+from mouth to mouth.  The voyages {52} of Martin Frobisher, Anthony
+Hawkins, and Francis Drake opened new worlds, not only to English
+imagination, but also to English trade.  It was they and men like them
+who gave to England her unexpected naval and commercial supremacy.
+
+The latter was partly a result of the former.  Elizabeth's victories
+over foreign enemies strengthened her power at home, and assured that
+freedom from internal discord which is essential to commercial
+prosperity.  No sovereign distracted by danger from without could have
+mastered the factions which had sprung up within.  The great religious
+movement known as the Protestant Reformation had not stopped in England
+with the separation of the English from the Roman Church under Henry
+VIII.  It had brought into existence the Puritan, austere, bigoted,
+opposed to beauty of church and ceremonial, yet filled with superb
+moral and religious enthusiasm.  It had brought about the persecution
+of Catholics and the still more merciless persecution of Protestants
+during the Catholic reaction under Queen Mary.  Its successes, which
+began again with Elizabeth's reign, gave occasion for continual
+intrigues of Catholic emissaries.  It all but plunged the nation into
+civil war, a war averted only by the victory over Spain and by the
+statesmanship of Elizabeth.  Freed from the fear of war, however,
+Puritan and Churchman, each in his own way, could apply his enthusiasm
+to the works of peace.
+
+With the return of peace and security, moreover, England first felt the
+full effect of the literary Renaissance.  The revival of classical
+learning had already transformed the art and literature of the
+continent, {53} especially that of Italy.  When, therefore, England
+turned again to the classics, it turned also to the Italian culture and
+literature to which the Renaissance had given birth, and from these
+sources English literature received new beauty of thought and form.
+
+It was, then, in a new England that Shakespeare lived, an England
+intensely proud of the past which had made the present possible, an
+England rich enough and secure enough to have leisure and interest for
+literature, an England so vigorous, so confident, that it could not
+fail to bring out all that was latent in its greatest genius.
+
++The City of London+.--All this enthusiasm and activity reached its
+highest point in London.  Even more then than now, London was the
+center of influence, the place to which the greatest abilities were
+irresistibly attracted, and in which their greatest work was done.  But
+the London of Shakespeare's time was vastly different from the London
+of to-day.  On all sides, except that washed by the Thames, the
+mediaeval walls were still standing and served as the city's actual
+boundary.  Outside them were several important suburbs, but where now
+houses extend for miles in unbroken ranks, there were then open fields
+and pleasant woods.  The total population of the city hardly exceeded a
+hundred thousand, while that of the suburbs, including the many guests
+of the numerous inns, amounted to perhaps a hundred thousand more.
+Hence, although there undoubtedly was crowding in the poorer quarters,
+London was a much more open city than it is to-day.  The great houses
+all had their gardens, and a few minutes walk in any direction brought
+one to open country.
+
+{54}
+
+Westminster, now well within the greater London, was then only the most
+important suburb.  Here was the Hall in which Parliament met, and, not
+far away, Whitehall, the favorite London residence of the Queen.
+Attracted by the presence of royalty, many of the great nobles had
+built their houses in this quarter, so that the north bank of the
+Thames from Westminster to the City was lined with stately buildings.
+
+The Thames was London's pleasantest highway.  It was then a clear,
+beautiful river spanned by a single bridge.  If one wished to go from
+the City to Westminster, or even eastward or westward within the City
+itself, one could go most easily by boat.  The Queen in her royal barge
+was often to be seen on the river.  The great merchant companies had
+their splendid barges, in which they made stately progresses.  One went
+by boat to the bear gardens and theaters on the south bank.  Below the
+bridge, the river was crowded with shipping.  At one of the wharves lay
+an object of universal interest, the _Golden Hind_, the ship in which
+Drake had made his famous voyage round the world.
+
+Within the city, most of the streets were narrow, poorly paved, and
+worse lighted.  Those who went about by night had their servants carry
+torches, called "links," before them, or hired boys to light them home.
+Such sanitation as existed was wretched, so that plagues and other
+diseases spread rapidly and carried off an appalling number of victims.
+The ignorance and inefficiency of the police is rather portrayed than
+satirized in Shakespeare's Dogberry and Verges.  Such evils were common
+to all seventeenth-century cities, but these cities had their
+compensations in a freedom {55} and picturesqueness which have
+disappeared from our modern towns.
+
++The Citizens+.--In Elizabethan London, as in every city, the men who
+represented extremes of wealth and poverty, the courtiers and their
+imitators, the beggars and the sharpers, are those of whom we hear
+most; but the greater part of the population, that which controlled the
+city government, was of the middle class, sober, self-respecting
+tradespeople, inclined towards Puritanism, and jealous of their
+independence.  Such people naturally distrusted and disliked the actors
+and their class, and used against them, as far as they could, the great
+authority of the city.  In spite of court favor, the actors were
+compelled by city ordinances to build their theaters outside the city
+limits or on ground which the city did not control.  Several attempts
+were made to suppress play acting altogether, ostensibly because of the
+danger that crowded audiences would spread the plague when it became
+epidemic.  In spite of this official opposition, however, the sober
+citizens formed a goodly part of theater audiences until after the
+accession of King James, when the rising tide of Puritanism led to
+increased austerity.  At no time were the majority of the citizens
+entirely free from a love for worldly pleasures.  They swelled the
+crowds at the taverns, and their wives often vied with the great ladies
+of court in extravagance of dress.
+
++St. Paul's+.--The great meeting place of London was, oddly enough, the
+nave of St. Paul's Cathedral.  This superb Gothic church, later
+destroyed by the Great Fire, was used as a common passageway, as a
+place for doing business and for meeting friends.  In {56} the late
+morning hours, the men-about-town promenaded there, displaying their
+gorgeous clothes and hailing those whom they wished to have known as
+their acquaintances.  If a gallant's cash were at low ebb, he loitered
+there, hoping for an invitation to dinner.  If he had had a dinner, he
+often came back for another stroll in the afternoon.  At one pillar he
+would find lawyers standing; at another, serving men seeking
+employment; at still another, public secretaries.  Here one could learn
+anything from the latest fashion to the latest political scandal.
+Meanwhile, divine worship might be going on in the chancel, unobserved
+unless some fop wished to make himself conspicuous by joking with the
+choir boys.  Thus St. Paul's was a school of life invaluable to the
+dramatist.  We know that Ben Jonson learned much there, and we can
+hardly doubt that Shakespeare did likewise.
+
++The Taverns+.--Another center of London life was the tavern.  The man
+who would now lunch at his club then dined at an 'ordinary,' a _table
+d'hote_ in some tavern.  Men dined at noon, and then sat on over their
+wine, smoking or playing at cards or dice.  In the evening one could
+always find there music and good company.  One tradition of Shakespeare
+tells of his evenings at the Mermaid tavern.  "Many were the
+wit-combates," writes Fuller, "betwixt him [Shakespeare] and Ben
+Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great gallion, and an English
+man of War; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in
+Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances.  Shake-spear, with the
+English man-of-War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn
+with all tides, {57} tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the
+quickness of his Wit and Invention."  Francis Beaumont, the dramatist,
+wrote the following verses to Ben Jonson:--
+
+                "What things have we seen
+  Done at the Mermaid, heard words that have been
+  So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
+  As if everyone from whence they came
+  Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
+  And had resolved to live a fool the rest
+  Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown
+  Wit able enough to justify the town
+  For three days past; wit that might warrant be
+  For the whole city to talk foolishly
+  Till that were cancelled; and when that was gone,
+  We left an air behind us, which alone
+  Was able to make the two next companies
+  (Right witty, though but downright fools) more wise."
+
+
++At the Theater+.--Having dined, the Elizabethan gentleman often
+visited one of the numerous bookshops, or else went to the theater,
+perhaps to the Globe.  In the latter case, since this theater was on
+the south bank of the Thames, he was most likely to cross the river by
+boat.  A flag, floating from a turret over the theater, announced a
+performance there.  The prices paid for admission varied, but the
+regular price for entrance to the Globe seems to have been a penny
+(about fifteen cents in the money of to-day).  This, however, gave one
+only the right to stand in the pit or, perhaps, to sit in the top
+gallery.  For a box the price was probably a shilling (equivalent to
+two dollars), the poorer seats costing less.  At the aristocratic
+Blackfriars, sixpence (one dollar) was the {58} lowest price.  At this
+theater, the most fashionable occupied seats on the stage, where they
+were at once extremely conspicuous and in the way of the actors; but
+this custom probably did not spread to the Globe before 1603.  At the
+Blackfriars, too, one could have a seat in the pit, while at the Globe
+the pit was filled with a standing, jostling crowd of apprentices and
+riffraff.  In the theater every one was talking, laughing, smoking,
+buying oranges, nuts, wine, or cheap books from shouting venders, just
+as is done in some music halls to-day.  Once the trumpet had sounded
+for the third time, indicating the beginning of the performance, a
+reasonable degree of quiet was restored, until a pause in the action
+let the uproar burst forth anew.  At an Elizabethan theater there were
+no pauses for shifting scenes.  Consequently the few introduced were
+determined either by convention or by breaks in the action.  At the
+Blackfriars and more aristocratic theaters, there was music between the
+acts, but at the Globe this was not customary until a comparatively
+late date, if ever.
+
+An audience like that at the Globe, made up of all sorts and conditions
+of men from the highest nobility to the lowest criminal, was, quite
+naturally, not easy to please as a whole.  Yet, after all, the
+Elizabethans were less critical in some respects than we are.  Although
+many comparatively cheap books were published, reading had not then
+become a habit, and a good plot was not the less appreciated because it
+was old.  The audiences did, however, demand constant variety, so that
+plays had short runs, and most dramatists were forced to pay more
+attention to quantity {59} than to quality of production.  The
+playwrights had, nevertheless, one great advantage over ours.  Since
+the performances were given in the afternoon, and since theaters like
+the Globe were open to the weather, these men wrote for audiences which
+were fresh and wide-awake, ready to receive the best which the
+dramatist had to give.
+
+It was under such conditions as these that Shakespeare worked.  He
+wrote for all classes of people, men bound together, nevertheless, by a
+common enthusiasm for England's past and a common confidence in
+England's future; men who were constantly coming in contact with
+persons from all parts of Europe, with sailors and travelers who had
+seen the wonders of the New World and the Old; men so stimulated by new
+discoveries, by new achievements of every sort, that hardly anything,
+even the supernatural, seemed for them impossible.  Outside of ancient
+Athens, no dramatist has had a more favorable environment.
+
+
+The best books on this subject for the general reader: Sir Walter
+Besant, _London in the Time of the Tudors_ (London, 1904); H. T.
+Stephenson, _Shakespeare's London_ (Henry Holt, 1905); T. F. Ordish,
+_Shakespeare's London_ (The Temple Shakespeare Manuals, 1897).
+
+
+
+
+{60}
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S NONDRAMATIC WORKS
+
+We shall later trace Shakespeare's development as a writer of plays.
+We must first, however, turn back to discuss some early productions of
+his, which were composed before most of his dramas, and which are
+wholly distinct from these in character.
+
+Every young author who mixes with men notices what kinds of work other
+writers are producing, and is tempted to try his hand at every kind in
+turn.  Later he learns that he is fitted for one particular kind of
+work; and, leaving other forms of writing to other men, devotes the
+rest of his life to his chosen field.  So it was with Shakespeare.
+While a young man, he tried several different forms of poetry in
+imitation of contemporary versifiers, and thus produced the poems which
+we are to discuss in this chapter.  Later he came to realize that his
+special genius was in the field of the drama, and abandoned other types
+of poetry to turn his whole energy toward the production of plays.
+Although unquestionably inferior to the author's greatest comedies and
+tragedies, these early poems are, in their kind, masterpieces of
+literature.
+
++Venus and Adonis+.--The first of these poems, a verse narrative of
+some 1204 lines, called _Venus and Adonis_, was printed in the spring
+of 1593 when the {61} author was about twenty-nine years old.  As far
+as we have evidence, it was the first of all Shakespeare's works to
+appear in print;[1] but it is possible that some early plays were
+composed before it although printed after it.
+
+Other poets of the day had been interested in retelling in their own
+way old stories of Greek and Roman literature, and Shakespeare, in
+_Venus and Adonis_, was engaged in the same task.  The outline of the
+poem is taken (either directly or through an imitation of previous
+borrowers) from the Latin poet Ovid,[2] who lived in the time of
+Christ.  Venus, the goddess of love, is enamored of a beautiful boy,
+called Adonis, and tries in vain by every device to win his affection.
+He repulses all her advances, and finally runs away to go hunting, and
+is killed by a wild boar.  Venus mourns over his dead body, and causes
+a flower (the anemone or wind flower) to spring from his blood.
+Shakespeare's handling of the story shows both the virtues and the
+defects of a young writer.  It is more diffuse, more wordy, than his
+later work, and written for the taste of another time than ours; but,
+on the other hand, it is full of vivid, picturesque language of
+melodious rhythm, and of charming little touches of country life.
+
+Like most of Shakespeare's verse, it is written in iambic
+pentameter.[3]  The poem is divided into stanzas {62} of six lines
+each, in which the first and third lines rime, the second and fourth,
+and the fifth and sixth.  We represent this arrangement of rimes by
+saying that the rime scheme of the stanza is _a, b, a, b, c, c,_ where
+the same letter represents the same riming sound at the ends of lines.
+As a specimen stanza, the following, often quoted because of the vivid
+picture it presents, is given.  It describes a mettlesome horse.
+
+  "Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,      (_a-)
+  Round breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,       (_b-)
+  High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,  (_a_)
+  Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:         (_b_)
+    Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,          (_c_)
+    Save a proud rider on so proud a back."                  (_c_)
+
+
++The Rape of Lucrece+.--A year later, in 1594, when Shakespeare was
+thirty, he published another narrative poem, _The Rape of Lucrece_.
+The story of Lucrece had also come down from Ovid.[4]  This poem is
+about 1800 lines in length.  It tells the old legend, found at the
+beginning of all Roman histories, how Sextus Tarquin ravished Lucrece,
+the pure and beautiful wife of Collatine, one of the Roman nobles; how
+she killed herself rather than survive her shame; and how her husband
+and friends swore in revenge to dethrone the whole Tarquin family.
+This poem, as compared with _Venus and Adonis_, shows some traces of
+increasing maturity.  The author does more serious and concentrated
+thinking as he writes.  Whether or not it is a better poem is a
+question which every man must settle for himself.  Its best passages
+are probably more impressive, its poorest ones more dull.
+
+{63}
+
+The form of stanza used here is known as "rime royal," which had become
+famous two centuries before as a favorite meter of the first great
+English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.  This stanza contains seven lines
+instead of six: the rime-scheme is as follows: _a, b, a, b, b, c, c_.
+The following is a specimen stanza from the poem:--
+
+  "Now stole upon the time the dead of night,            (_a_)
+  When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes.            (_b_)
+  No comfortable star did lend his light,                (_a_)
+  No noise but owls' and wolves' death-boding cries;     (_b_)
+  Now serves the season that they may surprise           (_b_)
+    The silly lambs.  Pure thoughts are dead and still,  (_c_)
+    While lust and murder wakes to stain and kill."      (_c_)
+
+
+A significant fact about both of these poems is that they were
+dedicated to Henry Wriothesley (pronounced Wrisley or Rot'-es-ly), Earl
+of Southampton, who has already been mentioned as a friend and patron
+of Shakespeare.  The dedication at the beginning of _Venus and Adonis_
+is conventional and almost timid in tone; that prefixed to the Lucrece
+seems to indicate a closer and more confident friendship which had
+grown up during the intervening year.  Dedications to some prominent
+man were frequently prefixed to books by Elizabethan authors, either as
+a mark of love and respect to the person addressed, or in hopes that a
+little pecuniary help would result from this acceptable form of
+flattery.  In Shakespeare's case it may possibly have fulfilled both of
+these purposes.
+
++The Sonnets+.--Besides these two narrative poems Shakespeare wrote
+numerous sonnets.  In order to {64} understand his accomplishment in
+this form of poetry, some account of the type is necessary.
+
+The sonnet may be briefly defined as a rimed poem in iambic pentameter,
+containing fourteen lines, divided into the octave of eight lines and
+the sextet of six.
+
+The sonnet originated in southern Europe, and reached its highest stage
+of development in the hands of the great Italian poet Petrarch, who
+lived some two centuries before Shakespeare.  As written by him it was
+characterized by a complicated rime scheme,[5] {65} which gave each one
+of these short poems an atmosphere of unusual elegance and polish.
+
+Sonnets were often written in groups on a single theme.  These were
+called sonnet sequences.  Each separate poem was like a single facet of
+a diamond, illuminating the subject from a new point of view.
+
+In the hands of Petrarch and other great writers of his own and later
+times, the sonnet became one of the most popular forms of verse in
+Europe.  Such popularity for any particular type of literature never
+arises without a reason.  The aim of the sonnet is to embody one single
+idea or emotion, one deep thought or wave of strong feeling, to
+concentrate the reader's whole mind on this one central idea, and to
+clinch it at the end by some epigrammatic phrase which will fasten it
+firmly in the reader's memory.  For instance, in Milton's sonnet _On
+his Blindness_, the central idea is the glory of patience; and the last
+line drives this main idea home in words so pithily adapted that they
+have become almost proverbial.
+
+During the sixteenth century, rich young Englishmen were in the habit
+of traveling in Italy for education and general culture.  They brought
+home with them a great deal that they saw in this brilliant and highly
+educated country; and among other things they imported into England the
+Italian habit of writing sonnets.  The first men who composed sonnets
+in English after the Italian models were two young noblemen, Sir Thomas
+Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who wrote just before Shakespeare was
+born.  Their work called out a crowd of imitators; and in a few years
+the writing of sonnets became the fashion.
+
+{66}
+
+As a young man, Shakespeare found himself among a crowd of authors,
+with whom sonnetteering was a literary craze; and it is not surprising
+that he should follow the fashion.  Most of these were probably
+composed about 1594, when the poet was thirty years old; but in regard
+to this there is some uncertainty.  A few were certainly later.  They
+were not printed in a complete volume until 1609;[6] and then they were
+issued by a piratical publisher, apparently without the author's
+consent.
+
+In the Shakespearean sonnet the complicated rime scheme of its Italian
+original has become very much simplified, being reduced to the
+following form: _a, b, a, b; c, d, c, d_; _e, f, e, f_; _g, g_.  This
+is merely three four-line stanzas with alternate rimes, plus a final
+couplet.  Such a simplified form had already been used by other English
+authors, from whom our poet borrowed it.
+
+Shakespeare's sonnets, apart from some scattered ones in his plays, are
+154[7] in number.  They are usually divided into two groups or
+sequences.  The first sequence consists of numbers 1-126 (according to
+the original edition); and most of them are unquestionably addressed to
+a man.  The second sequence contains numbers 127-154, and the majority
+of these are clearly written to a woman.  There are a few in both
+groups which do not show clearly the sex of the person addressed, and
+also a few which are not addressed to any one.
+
+{67}
+
+Beyond some vague guesses, we have no idea as to the identity of the
+"dark lady" who inspired most of the last twenty-eight sonnets.
+Somewhat less uncertainty surrounds the man to whom the poet speaks in
+the first sequence.  A not improbable theory is that he was the Earl of
+Southampton already mentioned, although this cannot be considered as
+proved.[8]  The chief arguments which point to Southampton are: (_a_)
+That Shakespeare had already dedicated _Venus and Adonis_ and _Lucrece_
+to him; (_b_) that he was regarded at that time as a patron of poets;
+(_c_) that the statements about this unnamed friend, his reluctance to
+marry, his fair complexion and personal beauty, his mixture of virtues
+and faults, fit Southampton better than any other man of that period
+whom we have any cause to associate with Shakespeare; and (_d_) that he
+was the only patron of Shakespeare's early years known to us, and was
+warmly interested in the poet.
+
+The literary value of the different sonnets varies considerably.  When
+an author is writing a fashionable {68} form of verse, he is apt to
+become more or less imitative and artificial at times, saying things
+merely because it is the vogue to say them; and Shakespeare here cannot
+be wholly acquitted of this fault.  But at other times he speaks from
+heart to heart with a depth of real emotion and wealth of vivid
+expression which has given us some of the noblest poetry in the
+language.
+
+Another question, more difficult to settle than the literary value of
+these poems, is their value as a revelation of Shakespeare's own life.
+If we could take in earnest everything which is said in the sonnets, we
+should learn a great many facts about the man who wrote them.  But
+modern scholarship seems to feel more and more that we cannot take all
+their statements literally.  We must remember here again that
+Shakespeare says many things because it was the fashion in his day for
+sonnetteers to say them.  For example, he gives some eloquent
+descriptions of the woes of old age; but we know that contemporary
+poets lamented about old age when they had not yet reached years of
+discretion; and consequently we are not at all convinced that
+Shakespeare was either really old or prematurely aged.  Such
+considerations need not interfere with our enjoyment of the poetry, for
+the author's imagination may have made a poetical fancy seem real to
+him as he wrote; but they certainly do not lessen our doubts in regard
+to the value of the sonnets as autobiography.  The majority of the
+sonnets, at least, cannot be said to throw any light on Shakespeare's
+life.
+
+There are, however, six sonnets, connected with each other in subject,
+which, more definitely than any of {69} the others, shadow forth a real
+event in the poet's life.  These are numbers XL, XLI, XLII, CXXXIII,
+CXXXIV, CXLIV.  They seem to show that a woman whom the poet loved had
+forsaken him for the man to whom the sonnets are written; and that the
+poet submits to this, owing to his deep friendship for the man.  Two of
+these sonnets are given below.
+
+
+SONNET CXLIV
+
+  "Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
+    Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
+  The better angel is a man right fair,
+    The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
+  To win me soon to hell, my female evil
+    Tempteth my better angel from my side,
+  And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
+    Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
+  And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
+    Suspect I may, yet not directly tell:
+  But being both from me, both to each friend,
+    I guess one angel in another's hell:
+  Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
+  Till my bad angel fire my good one out."
+
+SONNET XLI
+
+  "These pretty wrongs that liberty commits,
+    When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
+  Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
+    For still temptation follows where thou art.
+  Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
+    Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
+  And when a woman woos, what woman's son
+    Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?
+  Ay me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,
+    And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
+  Who lead thee in their riot even there
+
+{70}
+
+    Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth,
+  Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
+  Thine, by thy beauty being false to me."
+
+
+Again, in Sonnet CX, we find an allusion to the distasteful nature of
+the actor's profession which seems to ring sincere.  Thus in a few
+cases Shakespeare may be giving us glimpses into his real heart; but in
+general the sentiments expressed in his sonnets could be explained as
+due to the literary conventions of this time.
+
++Other Poems+.--The two narrative poems and the sonnets make up most of
+Shakespeare's nondramatic poetry.  A word may be added about some other
+scattered bits of verse which are connected with his name.  In 1599 an
+unscrupulous publisher, named William Jaggard, brought out a book of
+miscellaneous poems by various authors, called _The Passionate
+Pilgrim_.  Since Shakespeare was a popular writer, his name was sure to
+increase the sale of any book; so Jaggard, with an advertising instinct
+worthy of a later age, coolly printed the whole thing as the work of
+Shakespeare.  As a matter of fact, only a few short pieces were by him;
+and were probably stolen from some private manuscript.
+
+In 1601 a poem, _The Phoenix and the Turtle_, was also printed as his
+in an appendix to a longer poem by another man.  We cannot trust the
+printer when he signs it with Shakespeare's name, and we have no other
+evidence about its authorship; but the majority of scholars believe it
+to be genuine.  Another poem, _A Lover's Complaint_, which was printed
+in the same volume with the sonnets in 1609, is of distinctly less
+merit and probably spurious.
+
+{71}
+
+Lastly, the short poems incorporated in the plays deserve brief notice.
+In a way they are part of the plots in which they are embedded; but
+they may also be considered as separate lyrics.  Several sonnets and
+verses in stanza form occur in _Romeo and Juliet_ and in the early
+comedies.  Three of these were printed as separate poems in _The
+Passionate Pilgrim_.  Far more important than the above, however, are
+the songs which are scattered through all the plays early and late.
+Their merit is of a supreme quality; some of the most famous musical
+composers, inspired by his works, have graced them with admirable
+music.  One of the most attractive features in his lyrics is their
+spontaneous ease of expression.  They seem to lilt into music of their
+own accord, as naturally as birds sing.  The best of these are found in
+the comedies of the Second Period and in the romantic plays of the
+Fourth.  "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more" in _Much Ado About
+Nothing_; "Blow, blow, thou winter wind" in _As You Like it_; "Hark,
+hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings" in _Cymbeline_; and "Full fathom
+five thy father lies" in _The Tempest_,--these and others like them
+show that the author, though primarily a dramatist, could be among the
+greatest of song writers when he tried.
+
+The following lines taken from the little-read play, _The Two Gentlemen
+of Verona_, may serve to illustrate the perfection of the Shakespearean
+lyric.
+
+  SONG
+
+  Who is Sylvia? what is she,
+    That all our swains commend her?
+  Holy, fair, and wise is she;
+    The heaven such grace did lend her,
+  That she might admired be.
+
+{72}
+
+  Is she kind as she is fair?
+    For beauty lives with kindness:
+  Love doth to her eyes repair
+    To help him of his blindness,
+  And being helped, inhabits there.
+
+  Then to Sylvia let us sing,
+    That Sylvia is excelling;
+  She excels each mortal thing
+    Upon the dull earth dwelling;
+  To her let us garlands bring.
+
+
+Such are Shakespeare's nondramatic writings.  Two narrative poems with
+the faults of youth but with many redeeming virtues; one hundred and
+fifty-four sonnets, very unequal in merit but touching at their best
+the high-water mark of English verse; a few stray fragments of disputed
+authorship and doubtful value; and finally a handful of scattered
+songs, short, but almost perfect of their kind,--this is what we have
+outside of the plays.  Neither in quantity nor quality can this work
+compare with the poetic value of the great dramas; but had it been
+written by any other man, we should have thought it wonderful enough.
+
+
+On the sonnets, the appendix to Mr. Sidney Lee's book, _A Life of
+William Shakespeare_, 1909, is particularly valuable.
+
+
+
+[1] Shakespeare in his dedication calls it "the first heir of my
+invention"; but opinions differ as to what he meant by this.
+
+[2] Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, Book X.
+
+[3] That is, the common, or standard, line has ten syllables with an
+accent on every even syllable, as in the following line:--
+
+    1   +2+  3  +4+ 5  +6+ 7   +8+   9  +10+
+   The NIGHT of SORrow NOW is TURN'D to DAY.
+
+[4] From his _Fasti_.
+
+[5] The rime scheme of the Italian type divided each sonnet into two
+parts, the first one of eight lines, the second of six.  In the first
+eight lines the rimes usually went a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a; but
+sometimes _a, b, a, b, a, b, a, b_: in both cases using only two rimes
+for the eight lines.  In the second or six-line part there were several
+different arrangements, of which the following were the most common:
+(1) _c, d, e, c, d, e_; (2) _c, d, c, d, c, d_; (3) _c, d, e, d, c, e_.
+All of these rime-schemes alike were intended, by their constant
+repetition and interlocking of the same rimes, to give the whole poem
+an air of exquisite workmanship, like that of a finely modeled vase.
+Here is an English sonnet of Milton's, imitating the form of Petrarch's
+and illustrating its rime scheme:--
+
+  "When I consider how my light is spent                       (_a_)
+          Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,        (_b_)
+          And that one talent which is death to hide           (_b_)
+  Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent             (_a_)
+  To serve therewith my Maker, and present                     (_a_)
+          My true account, lest He returning chide,            (_b_)
+          Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?             (_b_)
+  I fondly ask.  But Patience, to prevent                      (_a_)
+  That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need                 (_c_)
+          Either man's work or his own gifts.  Who best        (_d_)
+        Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best.  His state    (_e_)
+  Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,                   (_c_)
+          And post o'er land and ocean without rest;           (_d_)
+        They also serve who only stand and wait."              (_e_)
+
+[6] See p. 113.
+
+[7] Including at least three which do not have in all respects the
+regular sonnet form.
+
+[8] Southampton's chief rival for this position in the opinion of
+scholars has been William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.  One point in his
+favor has been that the initials W. H. (supposed to stand for William
+Herbert) are given as those of the person to whom the dedication of the
+volume was addressed by its publisher.  Mr. Sidney Lee thinks, however,
+that this is a dedication by the printer to the printer's friend, not
+by Shakespeare to Shakespeare's friend,--a possible, though not wholly
+convincing, explanation.  The First Folio was dedicated to Herbert
+after Shakespeare's death, but we have no evidence that the two men
+were intimate friends while living.  Meres mentions the sonnets of
+Shakespeare in 1598, so part of them at least must have been written
+before that year; but Herbert did not have a permanent residence in
+London until 1598, and was then only eighteen years old.
+
+
+
+
+{73}
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE SEQUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE's PLAYS
+
+The most profitable method of studying any writer is to take up his
+works in the order in which they were written.  More and more this
+method is being adopted toward all authors, ancient and modern, Virgil
+or Milton, Dante or Tennyson.  We are thus enabled to trace the gradual
+growth of the poet's mind from one production to another,--his constant
+increase in skill, in judgment, in knowledge of mankind.  The great
+characteristic of the genius is, not simply that he knows more than
+other men at first, but that he has in him such vast possibilities of
+growth, of improving with time, and learning by his own mistakes.
+Consequently, it is very important to know that a certain play or poem
+is faulty because it was its author's first crude attempt; that a
+second is better because it was written five years later in the light
+of added experience; and that a third is better still because it came
+ten years after the second, at the climax of the writer's powers.
+
+Besides showing the author's growth, this method also shows his
+relation to the great literary movements of his time.  As fashions in
+dress and sports keep shifting, fashions in literature are changing
+just as constantly, and the dominant type may alter two or {74} three
+times during one man's life.  If an author changes to meet these
+demands, it is important to know that one of his plays was merry comedy
+because written at a time when merry comedies filled all the
+playhouses; and that another is sober tragedy because composed while
+most of the theaters were acting and demanding sober tragedy.
+
+Now Shakespeare not only improved a great deal while composing his
+plays, but also conformed, to some extent at least, to the different
+tastes of his audience at different periods of his life.  Hence, a
+knowledge of the order in which his plays were written is very
+valuable, and should form the first step in a careful study of his
+writings.
+
+Unfortunately, when we attempt to arrange Shakespeare's plays in
+chronological order, we encounter many practical difficulties in
+finding just what this order is.  We know that Tennyson developed a
+great deal as a poet between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three; and
+we can show this by pointing to four successive volumes of his poems,
+published respectively at the ages of eighteen, twenty-one,
+twenty-three, and thirty-three, and each rising in merit above the one
+before it.  We know definitely in what order these volumes come, for we
+find on the title-page of each the date when it was printed.  But
+scarcely half of Shakespeare's plays were printed in this way during
+his life.  The others, some twenty in all, are found only in one big
+folio volume which gives no hint of their proper order or year of
+composition, and which bears on its title-page the date of the
+printing, 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died.  Many plays, too,
+published {75} early, were written some years before publication, so
+that the date of printing on the flyleaf of the quarto, even where a
+quarto exists, simply shows that the play was written sometime before
+that year but does not tell at all _how long_ before.  How, then, are
+we to trace Shakespeare's growth from year to year, through his
+successive dramas, when the quartos help us so little and when the
+majority of these dramas are piled before us in one volume by the
+editors of the First Folio, without a word of explanation as to which
+plays are early attempts and which mature work?
+
+At first sight the above problem seems almost hopeless.  The researches
+of scholars for over a century, however, have gathered together a mass
+of evidence which determines pretty accurately the order in which these
+different plays were written.
+
+This evidence is of two kinds, external and internal.  By external
+evidence we mean that found _outside_ of the play, references to it in
+other books of the time, and similar material.  By internal evidence we
+mean that found _inside_ of the play itself.
+
++External Evidence+.--This is of several kinds.  In the first place,
+every play which was to be printed had to be entered in the Stationers'
+Register, and all these entries are dated.  Hence we know that certain
+plays were prepared for publication by the time mentioned.  For
+instance, "A Book called Antony and Cleopatra" was entered May 20,
+1608; and although apparently the book was not finally printed at that
+time, and although our only copy of _Antony and Cleopatra_ is that in
+the Folio of 1623, yet we feel reasonably certain from this entry that
+this play must have been written either {76} in 1608 or earlier.  In
+addition to the record of the Stationers' Register, we have the dates
+on the title-pages of such plays as appeared in Quarto.  These
+evidences, it must be remembered, determine only the latest possible
+date for the play, as many were written long before they were printed,
+or even entered.
+
+Again, other men sometimes used in their books expressions borrowed
+from Shakespeare or remarks which sound like allusions to something of
+his.  Here, if we know the date of the other man's book, we learn that
+the play of Shakespeare from which he borrowed must have been in
+existence before that date.  Thus, when the poet Barksted prints a poem
+in 1607 and borrows a passage in it from _Measure for Measure_, we
+conclude that _Measure for Measure_ must have been produced before
+1607, or Barksted could not have copied from it.  This form of evidence
+has its dangers, since occasionally we cannot tell whether Shakespeare
+borrowed from the other man or the other man from him; nevertheless it
+is often valuable.
+
+Furthermore, we sometimes find in contemporary books or papers, which
+are dated, an account of the acting of some play.  A law student named
+John Manningham left a diary in which he records that on February 2,
+1602 he saw a play called _Twelfth Night or What You Will_ in the Hall
+of the Middle Temple; and his account of the play shows that it was
+Shakespeare's.  Dr. Simon Forman, in a similar diary, describes the
+performance of three Shakespearean plays, two of the accounts being
+dated.  Still more important in this class is the famous allusion,
+already quoted, by Francis Meres in his _Palladis Tamia_, a {77} book
+published in 1598.  In this he mentions with high praise six comedies
+of Shakespeare: _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _The Comedy of Errors_,
+_Love's Labour's Lost_, _Love's Labour's Won_,[1] _A Midsummer Night's
+Dream_, and _The Merchant of Venice_; and six "tragedies": _Richard
+II_, _Richard III_, _Henry IV_, _King John_, _Titus Andronicus_, and
+_Romeo and Juliet_.[2] Hence, we know that all these plays were written
+and acted somewhere before 1598, although three of them did not appear
+in print until 1623.
+
+The above list does not exhaust all the forms of external evidence, but
+merely shows its general nature.  External evidence, as can be seen, is
+not something mysterious and peculiar, but simply an application of
+common sense to the problem in hand.
+
+Frequently two pieces of external evidence will accomplish what neither
+one could do alone.  Often one fact will show that a play came
+somewhere before a certain date, but not show how long before, and
+another will prove that the play came after another date, without
+telling how long after.  For example, _King Lear_ was written before
+1606, for we have a definite statement that it was performed then.  It
+was written after 1603, for it borrowed material from a book printed in
+that year.  This method of hemming in a play between its earliest and
+its latest possible date is common and useful, both with Shakespeare
+and with other writers.
+
++Internal Evidence+.--By the above methods a few plays have been dated
+quite accurately, and many others confined between limits only two or
+three years {78} apart.  But many plays are still dated very vaguely,
+and some are not dated at all.  For further results we must fall back
+on internal evidence.  The first, though by no means the most
+important, form of this consists of allusions _within the play to
+contemporary events_.  If a boy should read in an old diary of his
+grandmother's that she had just heard of the fight at Gettysburg, he
+would feel certain that the words were written a few days after that
+great battle, even if there were no date anywhere in the manuscript.
+In the same way, when the Prologue of Shakespeare's _Henry V_ alludes
+to the fact that Elizabeth's general (the Earl of Essex) is in Ireland
+quelling a rebellion, we know that this was written between April and
+September of 1599, the period during which Essex actually was in
+Ireland.  Similarly, certain details in _The Tempest_ appear to have
+been borrowed from accounts of the wreck of Sir George Somers's ship in
+1609.  As Shakespeare could not have borrowed from these accounts
+before they existed, he must have written his comedy sometime after
+1609.[3]
+
+But the main form of internal evidence, what is usually meant by that
+term, is the testimony in the character and style of the plays
+themselves as to the maturity of the man who wrote them.  Just as the
+stump of a tree sawn across shows its age by its successive rings of
+growth, so a poem, if carefully {79} examined, shows the rings of
+growth in the author's style of thought and expression.
+
+The simplest and most tangible form of this evidence is that which is
+found in meter.  If we read in order of composition those plays which
+we have already succeeded in dating, we shall find certain habits of
+versification steadily growing on the author, as play succeeded play.
+
+In the first place, most of the lines in the early plays are
+'end-stopped'; that is, the sense halts at the close of each line with
+a resulting pause in reading.  In the later plays the sense frequently
+runs over from one line into another, producing what is called a
+'run-on' line instead of an 'end-stopped' one.  By comparing the
+following passages, the first of which contains nothing but end-stopped
+lines and the second several run-on lines, the reader can easily see
+the difference.
+
+
+(_a_) From an early play:--
+
+  "I from my mistress come to you in post:
+  If I return, I shall be post indeed,
+  For she will score your fault upon my pate.
+  Methinks your maw, like mine, should be your clock,
+  And strike you home without a messenger."
+          --_Comedy of Errors_, I, ii, 63-67.
+
+
+(_b_) From a late play:--
+
+  "Mark your divorce, young sir,  [end-stopped]
+  Whom son I dare not call.  Thou art too base  [run-on]
+  To be acknowledg'd.  Thou, a sceptre's heir,  [end-stopped]
+  That thus affects a sheep-hook!  Thou old traitor,  [end-stopped]
+
+{80}
+
+  I am sorry that by hanging thee I can  [run-on]
+  But shorten your life one week.  And thou, fresh piece  [run-on]
+  Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know  [end-stopped]
+  The royal fool thou cop'st with...--"
+          --_Winter's Tale_, IV, iv, 427-434.
+
+
+Since Shakespeare keeps constantly increasing his use of run-on lines
+in plays for which dates are known, it seems reasonable to assume that
+he did this in all his work, that it was a habit which grew on him from
+year to year.  Hence, if we sort out his plays in order, putting those
+with the fewest run-on lines first and those with the greatest number
+last, we shall have good reason for believing that this represents
+roughly the order in which they were written.
+
+A second form of metrical evidence is found in the proportion of
+'masculine' and 'feminine' endings in the verse.  A line has a
+masculine ending when its last syllable is stressed; when it ends, for
+example, on words or phrases like _behold'_, _control'_, _no more'_,
+_begone'_.  On the other hand, if the last stressed syllable of the
+line is followed by an unstressed one, the two together are called a
+feminine ending.  Instances of this would be lines ending in such words
+or phrases as, _unho'/ly_, _forgive' /me_, _benight'/ed_.  Notice the
+difference between them in the following passage:--
+
+  "Our revels now are ended.  These our actors  [feminine]
+  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and  [masculine]
+  Are melted into air, into thin air;  [masculine]
+  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,  [feminine]
+  The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,  [feminine]
+
+{81}
+
+  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  [masculine]
+  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,  [masculine]
+  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,  [feminine]
+  Leave not a rack behind."
+          --_Tempest_, IV, i, 147-166.
+
+
+In the main, although with some exceptions, the number of feminine
+endings, like the number of run-on lines, increases as the plays become
+later in date.
+
+A third form of ending, which practically does not appear at all in the
+early plays, and which recurs with increasing frequency in the later
+ones, is what is called a 'weak ending.'[4]  This occurs whenever a
+run-on line ends in a word which according to the meter needs to be
+stressed, and according to the sense ought not to be.  Here there is a
+clash between meter and meaning, and the reader compromises by making a
+pause before the last syllable instead of emphasizing the syllable
+itself.  Below are two examples of weak endings:--
+
+  "It should the good ship so have swallowed, and
+  The fraughting souls within her."
+
+              "I will rend an oak
+  And peg thee in his knotty entrails _till_
+  Thou hast howled away twelve winters."
+
+
+Lastly, we have the evidence of rime.  Run-on lines, feminine endings,
+and weak endings constantly increase as Shakespeare grows older.  Rime,
+on the other hand, in general decreases.  The early plays are {82} full
+of it; the later ones have very little.  It does not follow that the
+chronological order of the individual plays could be exactly determined
+by their percentage of riming lines, for subject matter makes a great
+difference.  In a staged fairy story, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
+the poet would naturally fall into couplets.  But, other things being
+equal, a large amount of rime is always a sign of early work.  This is
+especially true when the rimes occur, not in pairs, but in quatrains or
+sonnet forms, or (as they sometimes do in the first comedies) in scraps
+of sing-song doggerel.
+
+Such is the internal evidence from the various changes in
+versification.  Its value, as must always be remembered, lies in the
+fact that the results of these different tests in the main agree with
+each other and with such external evidence as we have.
+
+Then, wholly aside from metrical details, there is a large amount of
+internal evidence of other kinds,--evidence which cannot be measured by
+the rule of thumb, but which every intelligent reader must notice.  We
+feel instinctively that one play mirrors the views and emotions of
+youth, another those of middle age.  A man's face does not change more
+between twenty-five and forty than his mind changes during the same
+interval; and the difference between his thoughts at those periods is
+as distinct often as the difference between the rounded lines of youth
+and the stern features of middle age.  This is a subject which will be
+better understood in the light of the next chapter.
+
++The Order of the Plays+.--Upon such evidence as has been described, a
+list of Shakespeare's plays in their {83} chronological order can now
+be presented.  The details of evidence on date may be found in the
+account of the plays which appears in Chapters X-XIII.
+
+  Love's Labour's Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1591
+  The Comedy of Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1591
+  II and III Henry VI  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1590-1592
+  Richard III  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592-1593
+  Two Gentlemen of Verona  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592
+  King John  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1592-1593
+  Richard II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1594
+  Titus Andronicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1594
+  Midsummer Night's Dream  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1593-1596
+  Romeo and Juliet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1591, revised 1597
+  The Merchant of Venice . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1594-1596
+  The Taming of the Shrew  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1596-1597
+  I Henry IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1597
+  II Henry IV  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1598
+  Henry V  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+  Merry Wives of Windsor . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+  Much Ado about Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599
+  As You Like It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1599-1600
+  Julius Caesar  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1699-1601
+  Twelfth Night  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1601
+  Troilus and Cressida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1602
+  All's Well That Ends Well  . . . . . . . . . . . .  1602
+  Hamlet . . . . . . . . . . .  1602, 1603-1604 (two versions).
+  Measure for Measure  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1603
+  Othello  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1604
+  King Lear  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1604-1605
+  Macbeth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1605-1606
+  Antony and Cleopatra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1607-1608
+  Timon of Athens  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1607-1608
+  Pericles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1608
+  Coriolanus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1609
+  Cymbeline  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1610
+  The Winter's Tale  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1610-1611
+
+{84}
+
+  The Tempest  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1611
+  King Henry the Eighth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1612-1613
+
+
+Among the many books and articles on the subject of this chapter, the
+following may be mentioned: _Shakespeare Manual_ by F. L. Fleay
+(Macmillan and Co., London, 1876); _Shakspere_, by E. Dowden (American
+Book Co., New York); _Cartae Shakespeariante_ by D. Sambert.
+
+
+
+[1] This play is either lost, or preserved under another title.
+
+[2] Quoted in full in Chapter I, p. 10.
+
+[3] This form of evidence is usually weak and unreliable.  Most of the
+supposed allusions are much more vague than the two given.  Where there
+have been similar events in history, the allusion might be to one which
+we had forgotten when we thought it was to a similar one which we knew.
+
+[4] Mr. Ingram makes a distinction between "light" and "weak" endings.
+Both are classed together as weak endings above.  The distinction seems
+to us too subtle for any but professional students.
+
+
+
+
+{85}
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S DEVELOPMENT AS A DRAMATIST
+
+As the reader will remember, our main aim in attempting to date
+Shakespeare's plays was to trace through them his development as a
+dramatist and poet.  Just as the successive chambers of the nautilus
+shell show the stages of growth of its dead and vanished tenant, so the
+plays of Shakespeare show how
+
+  "Each new temple, nobler than the last,
+  Shut him from heaven with a dome more vast."
+
+The great thing which distinguishes the genius from the ordinary man,
+we repeat, is his power of constant improvement; and we can trace this
+improvement here from achievements less than those of many a modern
+writer up to the noblest masterpieces of all time.
+
+Much of the material connected with this development has already been
+discussed in another connection under Internal Evidence.  Internal
+evidence, however, that one play is later than another, is nothing else
+than the marks of intellectual growth in the poet's mind between those
+two dates.  We arrange the plays in order according to indications of
+intellectual growth, just as one could fit together again the broken
+fragments of a nautilus shell, guided by the relative size of the ever
+expanding chambers.  So, in {86} discussing Shakespeare's development,
+we must bring up much old material, examining it from a different point
+of view.
+
++Meter+.--In the first place, the poet develops wonderfully in the
+command of his medium of expression; that is, in his mastery of meter.
+What is meant by the fact that as Shakespeare grew older, wiser, more
+experienced, he used more run-on lines, more weak endings, more
+feminine endings?  Simply this, that by means of these devices he
+gained more variety and expressiveness in his verse.  A passage from
+his early work (in spite of much that is fine) with every ending alike
+masculine and strong, and with every line end-stopped, harps away
+tediously in the same swing, like one lonely instrument on one
+monotonous note.  His later verse, on the other hand, with masculine
+and feminine endings, weak ones and strong, end-stopped and run-on
+lines, continually relieving each other, is like the blended music of a
+great orchestra, continually varying, now stern, now soft, in harmony
+with the thought it expresses.  Below are given two passages, the first
+from an early play, the second from a late one.  In print one may look
+as well as the other; but if one reads them aloud, he will see in a
+moment how much more variety and expressiveness there is in the second,
+especially for the purposes of acting.
+
+  "Urge not my father's anger, Eglamour,
+  But think upon my grief, a lady's grief,
+  And on the justice of my flying hence,
+  To keep me from a most unholy match,
+  Which heaven and fortune still rewards with plagues.
+  I do desire thee, even from a heart.
+
+{87}
+
+  As full of sorrows as the sea of sands,
+  To bear me company and go with me;
+  If not, to hide what I have said to thee,
+  That I may venture to depart alone."
+            --_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, IV, iii, 27-36.
+
+              "By whose aid,
+  Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
+  The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
+  And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
+  Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
+  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
+  With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory
+  Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
+  The pine and cedar; graves at my command
+  Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth
+  By my so potent art.  But this rough magic
+  I here abjure, and, when I have requir'd
+  Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
+  To work mine end upon their senses that
+  This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
+  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
+  And deeper than did ever plummet sound
+  I'll drown my book."
+            --_Tempest_, V, i, 40-57.
+
+The same reason shows why Shakespeare used less and less rime as his
+taste and experience ripened.  Rime is a valuable ornament for songs
+and lyric poetry generally; but from poetry which is actually to be
+acted on the English stage it takes away the most indispensable of all
+qualities, the natural, life-like tone of real speech.  Notice this in
+the difference between the two extracts below.  Observe how stilted and
+artificial the first one seems; and see how the second combines the
+melody and dignity of poetry with the simple naturalness of living
+language.
+
+{88}
+
+  "This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease,
+  And utters it again when God doth please.
+  He is wit's pedler, and retails his wares
+  At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs;
+  And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know,
+  Have not the grace to grace it with such show.
+  This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve;
+  Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve."
+            --_Love's Labour's Lost_, V, ii, 315-321
+
+  "I was not much afeard; for once or twice
+  I was about to speak and tell him plainly
+  The self-same sun that shines upon his court
+  Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
+  Looks on all alike.  Will't please you, sir, be gone?
+  I told you what would come of this.  Beseech you,
+  Of your own state take care.  This dream of mine--
+  Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,
+  But milk my ewes and weep."
+            --_Winter's Tale_, IV, iv, 452-400.
+
+
+I do not mean to imply by the above that Shakespeare's early verse is
+poor according to ordinary standards.  It is not; it contains much that
+is fine.  But it is far inferior to his later work, and it is inferior
+in those very details which time and experience alone can teach.
+
+An important point to remember is that while Shakespeare was growing in
+metrical skill, he was not growing alone.  A crowd of other authors
+around him were developing in a similar way; and he was learning from
+them and they from him.  The use of blank verse in English when
+Shakespeare began to write was a comparatively new practice, and, like
+all new inventions, for a time it was only imperfectly understood.  Men
+{89} had to learn by experiments and by each other's successes and
+failures, just as men in recent years have learned to fly.  Shakespeare
+surpassed all the others, as the Wright brothers in their first years
+surpassed all their fellow-aeronauts; but like the Wright brothers he
+was only part of a general movement.  No other man changed as much as
+he in one lifetime, but the whole system of dramatic versification was
+changing.
+
++Taste+.--But wholly aside from questions of meter, Shakespeare
+improved greatly in taste and judgment between the beginning and middle
+of his career.  This is shown especially in his humor.  To the young
+man humor means nothing but the cause for a temporary laugh; to a more
+developed mind it becomes a pleasant sunshine that lingers in the
+memory long after reading, and interprets all life in a manner more
+cheerful, sympathetic, and sane.  The early comedies give us nothing
+but the temporary laugh; and even this is produced chiefly by fantastic
+situations or plays on words, clever but far-fetched, puns and conceits
+so overworked that their very cleverness jars at times.  On the other
+hand, in the great humorous characters of his middle period, like
+Falstaff and Beatrice, the poet is opening up to us new vistas of
+quiet, lasting amusement and indulgent knowledge of our imperfect but
+lovable fellow-men.
+
+The same growth of taste is shown in the dramatist's increasing
+tendency to tone down all revolting details and avoid flowery,
+overwrought rhetoric.  Nobody knows whether Shakespeare wrote all of
+_Titus Andronicus_ entire or simply revised it; but we feel sure that
+the older Shakespeare would have been unwilling, even as {90} a
+reviser, to squander so much that is beautiful on such an orgy of blood
+and violence.  _Romeo and Juliet_ is full of beautiful poetry; but even
+here occasional lapses show the undeveloped taste of the young writer.
+Notice the flowery and fantastic imagery in the following passage,
+where Lady Capulet is praising Paris, her daughter's intended husband:--
+
+  "Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face
+  And find delight writ there with beauty's pen;
+  Examine every married lineament
+  And see how one another lends content,
+  And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies
+  Find written in the margent of his eyes.
+  This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
+  To beautify him, only lacks a cover.
+  The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride
+  For fair without the fair within to hide.
+  That book in many's eyes doth share the glory,
+  That in gold clasps locks in the golden story."
+            --_Romeo and Juliet_, I, iii, 81-92.
+
+If we try to picture to ourselves the post-wedlock edition of Paris
+described above, we shall see how a young man's imagination may run
+away with his judgment.  There are passages in this play as good,
+perhaps, as anything which the author ever wrote; but if we compare
+such fantastic imagery with the uniform excellence of the later
+masterpieces, we shall see how much Shakespeare unlearned and outgrew.
+
++Character Study+.--Still more significant is the poet's development in
+the conception of character.  In no other way, probably, does an
+observant mind change and expand so much as in this.  For the infant
+all men fall into two very simple categories:--people whom he likes
+{91} and people whom he doesn't.  The boy of ten has increased these
+two classes to six or eight.  The young man of twenty finds a few more,
+and begins to suspect that men who act alike may not have the same
+motives and emotions.  But as the keen-eyed observer nears middle age,
+he begins to realize that no two souls are exact duplicates of each
+other; and that behind every human eye there lies an undiscovered
+country, as mysterious, as fascinating, as that which Alice found
+behind the looking-glass,--a country like, and yet unlike, the one we
+know, where dreams grow beautiful as tropic plants, and passions crouch
+like wild beasts in the jungle.
+
+Great as he was, Shakespeare had to learn this lesson like other men;
+but he learned it much better.  In _Love's Labour's Lost_, generally
+considered his earliest play, he has not led us into the inner selves
+of his men and women at all, has not seemed to realize that they
+possess inner selves.  At the conclusion we know precisely as much of
+them as we should if we had met them at a formal reception, and no
+more.  The princess is pretty and clever on dress parade; but how does
+the real princess feel when parade is over and she is alone in her
+chamber?  The later Shakespeare might have told us, did tell us, in
+regard to more than one other princess; but the young Shakespeare has
+nothing to tell.
+
+_Richard III_, which is supposed to have come some three years later,
+is a marked advance in characterization, but still far short of the
+goal.  Here the dramatist attempts, indeed, to analyze the tyrant's
+motives and emotions; but he does not yet understand what {92} he is
+trying to explain, and for that reason the being whom he creates is
+portentous, but not human.  To understand this, you need only compare
+Richard with Macbeth.  In Macbeth we have a host of different
+forces--ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacillation,
+affection, despair--all struggling together as they might in you or me;
+and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize
+that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like
+ourselves.  But in Richard there is no human complexity.  His is the
+fearful simplicity of the lightning, the battering-ram, the earthquake,
+forces whose achievements are terrible and whose inner existence a
+blank.  Richard hammers his bloody way through life like the legendary
+Iron Man with his flail, awe-inspiring as a destructive agency, not as
+a human being.
+
+Two or three years later we find Shakespeare in his conception of
+Shylock capable of greater things as a student of character.  In this
+pathetic, lonely, vindictive figure, exiled forever from the warm
+fireside of human friendship by those inherent faults which he can no
+more change than the tiger can change his claws, the long tragedy which
+accompanies the survival of the fittest finds a voice.  Yet even in
+Shylock the dramatist has not reached his highest achievement in
+character study.  The old Jew is drawn splendidly to the life, but he
+is a comparatively easy character to draw, a man with a few simple and
+prominent traits.  Depicting such a man is like drawing a pronounced
+Roman profile, less difficult to do, and less satisfactory when done,
+than tracing the subdued curves of a more evenly rounded face.  Still
+greater will be the triumph {93} when Shakespeare can draw equally true
+to life a many-sided man or woman, in whose single heart all our
+different experiences find a sympathetic echo.
+
+And this final triumph is not long in coming.  Between his
+thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth years, in Falstaff and Hamlet the poet
+produced the greatest comic and the greatest tragic character of
+dramatic history.  The man who has read _Hamlet_ understandingly has
+found in the young prince a lifelong companion.  Has he been unjustly
+treated?  Hamlet, too, had suffered and hated.  Has he loved?  So had
+Hamlet.  Has he had a bosom friend?  The most sacred and beautiful of
+college friendships was that between Hamlet and Horatio.  Has he been
+bored by some stupid old adviser?  So had Hamlet by Polonius and
+similar "tedious old fools."  Has he been thrilled by some beautiful
+landscape?  Hamlet, too, had admired "this goodly frame, the earth" and
+the sky, "that majestical roof fretted with golden fire."  Has he had a
+parent whom he loved and admired?  So had Hamlet in his father.  Has he
+had a friend for whom his love was mixed with shame?  So felt Hamlet
+toward his mother.  Has he felt the pride of a great deed bravely
+accomplished?  So did Hamlet in dying.  Has he felt the shame and
+remorse of a duty unperformed?  So did Hamlet while his father was
+still unrevenged.  Has he shuddered at the mystery of death?  So had
+Hamlet shuddered at "that undiscovered country."  Or has he been
+racked, as all good men are in practical life, by the doubt as to what
+is his duty?  So had Hamlet been racked by the same terrible
+responsibility.  And thus we might go on indefinitely.  The {94}
+experience of a lifetime is packed into this play.  Shakespeare never
+surpassed _Hamlet_, though he wrote for nine or ten years after; but
+when he had once reached this high level, he maintained it, with only
+occasional lapses, to the end.
+
++Dramatic Technique+.--Lastly, Shakespeare developed greatly in
+dramatic technique.  By dramatic technique we mean the method in which
+the machinery of the story is handled.  The dramatist, to do his duty
+properly, must accomplish at least five things at once.  He must make
+his play lifelike and natural; he must keep his hearers well informed
+as to what is happening; he must bring in different events after each
+other in rapid succession to hold the interest of his audience; he must
+make the different characters influence each other so that the whole
+becomes one connected story, not several unrelated ones; and he must
+make the audience feel that the play is working toward a certain
+inevitable end, must bring it to that end, and must then stop.  The
+lack of any one of these factors may make a play either dull or
+disappointing.  It takes ability to get any one of these alone.  It
+takes years of training before even a born genius can work them all in
+together.  Of course, these details are much easier to handle in
+dramatizing some subjects than others; and we find Shakespeare
+succeeding comparatively early in easy subjects and making mistakes
+later in harder ones; but, on the whole, in dramatic technique as in
+other things, his history is one of increasing power and judgment.
+
+Here, again, as in his metrical development, Shakespeare was merely one
+leading figure in a popular {95} movement.  Through a long evolution
+the English drama had just come into existence when he began to write.
+There were no settled theories about this new art, no results of long
+experience such as lie at the service of the modern dramatist.  All men
+were experimenting, and Shakespeare among the rest.
+
+His early play of _Love's Labour's Lost_ has already been used to
+illustrate lack of characterization.  In technique, also, in spite of
+many marks of natural brilliance, it shows the faults of the beginner.
+The story in the first three acts does not move on fast enough; there
+is a lack of that rapid series of connected events which we mentioned
+above and which adds so much to the interest of the later plays, like
+_Macbeth_.  Likewise, the characters in the prose underplot (except
+Costard) have too little connection with the story of the king and his
+friends.  In very badly constructed plays this lack of connection
+sometimes goes so far that the main and under plots seem like two
+separate serial stories in a magazine, in which the reader alternates
+from one to the other, but never thinks of them as one.  This obviously
+is bad, for just when the reader is most interested in one, he is
+interrupted and has to lay it aside for the other.  No play of
+Shakespeare's errs so far as that; but the defect in _Love's Labour's
+Lost_ is similar in a very modified form.  Neither is this comedy as
+successful as the author's later plays in preparing us for a certain
+ending as the inevitable outcome and then placing that ending before
+us.  We are led to expect that all four love affairs must be
+successful, and shall feel disappointed if the sympathetic dreams which
+we have woven around that idea {96} are not satisfied.  Yet the play
+ends hurriedly in a way which leaves us all in doubt, and disappointed,
+like guests who have been invited to a wedding and find it indefinitely
+postponed.  There is a wonderful amount of clever dialogue in this
+comedy, but its structure shows how much the author had yet to learn.
+
+_The Two Gentleman of Verona_, probably written a little later, shows
+improvement, but by no means perfect mastery.  The first two acts still
+drag, although the play moves more rapidly when it is under way.  The
+inability to lead up naturally to an inevitable end still persists.
+The young author, well as he has managed the middle of the play, does
+not wait for events to take their logical course.  He winds up
+everything abruptly like a man who has just changed his mind or become
+tired of his task, and marries the most lovable girl in the play to a
+rascal who is scarcely given time for even a pretense of reformation.
+
+_The Merchant of Venice_, two or three years later, shows a great
+advance in technique as in other ways.  Notice how skillfully the
+dramatist makes the different characters all influence each other's
+lives, so that the interest in one becomes the interest in all.  There
+is one story in the relations of Shylock and Antonio, another in the
+love affair of Lorenzo and Jessica, and a third in Bassanio's courtship
+of Portia.  There is also a fourth, a sequel to Bassanio's courtship,
+in the trick which his wife plays on him with regard to the rings after
+they are married.  Yet we never feel an unpleasant interruption when we
+are stopped in one story and started in one of the others, because the
+interest of the first lives on in the second, {97} owing to the
+interrelation of the people taking part in both.  We leave Shylock's
+story to take up Jessica's, but Jessica is Shylock's child, and our
+interest in the fate of his ducats and his daughter, which began in his
+story, goes on in hers.  We leave Antonio's story to take up
+Bassanio's; but Antonio's story was that of sacrifice for a friend, and
+in Bassanio's we see the fruit of that sacrifice in his friend's joy.
+Moreover, all four of the above threads of action are knotted together
+in one scene where Bassanio chooses the right casket.  Of the swift
+succession of exciting scenes of the natural way in which these lead up
+to the final end, of the lifelike truthfulness with which each little
+event is made to work itself out, there is no need to speak here.
+
+Though Shakespeare was not a third through his literary career when he
+wrote _The Merchant of Venice_, he had by this time mastered the
+technique of comedy; and we need trace his course in it no farther.
+_Much Ado_ and _Twelfth Night_ somewhat later, and _The Tempest_ long
+years after, are simply repetitions so far as technique is concerned,
+of this early triumph.  Let us turn now from comedy to those plays
+which deal with the sterner side of life.  Here the development in
+technical skill is similar, but much slower, requiring nearly a
+lifetime before it reaches perfection, for the poet is grappling with a
+problem so difficult that it taxed all the resources of his great
+genius.
+
+Before 1599 nearly all Shakespeare's plays which were not comedies were
+histories.  By a history or chronicle play we mean a play which
+pictures some epoch in the past of the English nation.  In one sense
+{98} of the word, most of them are tragedies, since they frequently
+result in death and disaster; but they are always separated as a class
+from tragedy proper, because they represent some great event in English
+national life centering around some king or leader; while tragedy
+proper deals with the misfortunes of some one man in any country, and
+regards him as an individual rather than as a national figure.  They
+differ also in purpose, since the chronicle play was intended to appeal
+to Anglo-Saxon patriotism, the tragedy to our sympathy with human
+suffering in general.
+
+The first and crudest of Shakespeare's histories written at about the
+same time as his first comedy is the triple play of _Henry VI_.[1]  We
+should hesitate to judge him by this, since he wrote it only in part;
+but it is a woefully rambling production in which we no sooner become
+interested in one character than we lose him, and are asked to transfer
+our sympathies to another.  _Richard III_ is a great step forward in
+this respect; for the excitement and interest focuses uninterruptedly
+on the one central figure; and his influence on other men and theirs on
+him bind all the events of the drama into one coherent whole.  Also, it
+moves straight on to a definite end which we know and wish and are
+prepared for beforehand.  We feel, even in the midst of his success,
+that such a bloody tyrant cannot be tolerated forever; and like men in
+a tiger hunt we thrill beforehand at the dramatic catastrophe which we
+know is coming.  _Richard III_, though, a powerful play, is {99} still
+crude in many details.  The scenes where Margaret curses her enemies,
+though strong as poetry, lack action as drama.  In a wholly different
+way, they clog the onward movement of the story almost as much as some
+scenes in _Love's Labour's Lost_.  Then again, one of the most
+important requirements for good technique is that everything shall be
+true to life.  When Anne, for the sake of a little bare-faced flattery,
+marries a man whom she loathes, we feel that no real woman would have
+done this.  From that moment Anne becomes a mere paper automaton to us,
+and we can no longer be interested in her as we would in a living
+woman.  The motivation, as it is called, the art of showing adequately
+why every person should act as he or she does, is sadly lacking.
+
+Moving onward a few years, we find marked improvement in _I Henry IV_.
+It is indeed not technically perfect,--in fact, Shakespeare in the
+chronicle play never attained what seems to modern students technical
+perfection,--but its minor defects are thrown into shadow by its
+splendid virtues.  The three stories of Hotspur, the King, and the
+Falstaff group, though partially united by their common connection with
+Prince Hal, do not blend together as perfectly as the different plots
+in _The Merchant of Venice_, and there is some truth in the idea that
+the play has four heroes instead of one.  But in spite of this, its
+general impression as a great panorama of English life is remarkably
+clear and delightful; and it improves on _Richard III_ in its swift
+succession of incident, and vastly surpasses it in the lifelike truth
+of its motivation.
+
+In the middle of his career Shakespeare dropped {100} the chronicle
+play, and instead began the writing of tragedies proper.  He carried
+into this, however, the lessons learned from his experience with
+histories, and continued to improve.  _Julius Caesar_ marks the
+transition from chronicle play to tragedy.  The lack of close
+connection between the third and fourth acts and the absence of one
+central hero are characteristic defects of the chronicle play which the
+dramatist had not yet outgrown.  _Hamlet_, coming next, has shaken off
+all the lingering relics of the older type.  Of its general excellence
+there is no need to speak.  Yet even in _Hamlet_ the action at times
+halts and becomes disjointed.  _Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are great plays,
+the latter, perhaps, the greatest of all plays; but, transfigured as
+they are by genius, they show that in the difficult problem of tragic
+technique the author was learning still.  At the age of forty,
+approximately, and a year or two after _Hamlet_, Shakespeare produced
+_Othello_, the most perfect, although not necessarily the greatest, of
+all his great tragedies.  It is less profoundly reflective than
+_Hamlet_ and less passionately imaginative than _King Lear_ or
+_Macbeth_; but no other of his masterpieces shows such perfect balance
+of taste and judgment, or is so free from any jarring note.  Hence,
+through the histories and tragedies taken together, we see the same
+growth in technical skill which we have already found in his comedies,
+save that it took longer here because the poet was working in a more
+difficult field.  It would not be true to say that each play up to
+_Othello_ is superior to its immediate predecessor in technique, still
+less that it is so in absolute merit; but the general upward tendency
+is there.
+
+{101}
+
++The Four Periods+.--Such was Shakespeare's development in meter, in
+taste, in conception of character, and in dramatic technique.  In line
+with this development, it has been customary to divide his literary
+career into four periods and his plays into four corresponding groups.
+These groups or periods are characterized partly by their different
+degrees of maturity, but more by the difference in the character of the
+plays during these intervals.
+
+The First Period includes all plays which there is good reason for
+dating before 1595.  In this the great dramatist was serving his
+literary apprenticeship, learning the difficult art of play writing,
+and learning it by experiments and mistakes.  In the course of his
+experiments, he tried many different types, tragedies, histories,
+comedies, and rewrote old plays either alone or with a more experienced
+playwright to help him.  Nearly all of this work is full of promise;
+most of it is also full of faults.  Here belong the early comedies
+mentioned above--_Love's Labour's Lost_ and _The Two Gentlemen of
+Verona_.  Here is the crude but powerful _Richard III_, and _Romeo and
+Juliet_, the early faults of which are redeemed by such a wealth of
+youthful poetic fire.
+
+The Second Period extends roughly from 1595 to 1600.  The poet has
+learned his profession now, is no longer a beginner but a master,
+though hardly yet at the summit of his powers.  Here are included three
+chronicle plays, the two parts of _King Henry IV_ and _King Henry V_,
+and six comedies.  One of the earliest of these comedies was _The
+Merchant of Venice_, already mentioned.  Three others, a little
+later,--_Much Ado, Twelfth {102} Night_, and _As You Like It_,--are
+usually regarded as Shakespeare's crowning achievement in the world of
+mirth and humor.  In this group of plays, whether history or comedy,
+the author is depicting chiefly the cheerful, energetic side of life.
+
+The Third Period really begins about 1599, for this and the second
+overlap; and it continues to about 1608.  In the plays of this group
+the poet becomes interested in a wholly new set of themes.  The aspects
+of life which he interprets are no longer bright and cheerful, but
+stern and sad.  Here come the great tragedies, several of which we have
+mentioned above--_Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
+Antony and Cleopatra_.  Shakespeare is now at the height of his power,
+for his greatest masterpieces are included in the above list.  Mixed in
+with this wealth of splendid tragedy (though inferior to it in merit),
+there are also three comedies.  But even the comedies share in the
+somber gloom which absorbed the poet's attention during this period.
+The comedies before 1600 had been full of sunshine, brimming with
+kindly, good-natured mirth, overflowing with the genial laughter which
+makes us love the very men at whom we are laughing.  But the three
+comedies of this Third Period are bitter and sarcastic in their wit,
+making us despise the people who furnish us fun, and leaving an
+unpleasant taste in the mouth after the laugh is over.  Some have
+assumed that the dark tinge of this period was due to an unknown sorrow
+in the poet's own life, but there seems to be no need of any such
+assumption.  We may become interested in reading cheerful books one
+year and sad ones the next without being more cheerful or {103} more
+sad in one year than in the other; and what is true of the reader might
+reasonably be true of the writer.  But whatever the cause which
+influenced Shakespeare, the tragedies of this group are the saddest as
+well as the greatest of all his plays.
+
+The Fourth and last Period contains plays written after 1608-1609.
+There are only five of these, and since _Pericles_ and _Henry VII_ are
+in large part by other hands, our interest focuses chiefly on the
+remaining three--_The Tempest, Cymbeline_, and _The Winter's Tale_.
+All the plays of this period end happily and are wholly free from the
+bitterness of the Third Period comedy.  Nevertheless, they have little
+of the rollicking, uproarious fun of the earlier comedies.  Their charm
+lies rather in a subdued cheerfulness, a quiet, pure, sympathetic
+serenity of tone, less strenuous, but even more poetic, than what had
+gone before.  In some ways they are hardly equal to the great tragedies
+just mentioned, for the poet is growing older now, and the fiery vigor
+of _Macbeth_ is fading out of his verse.  But in loftiness of thought
+and tenderness of feeling these later romances are equal to anything
+that the author ever gave us.
+
+Whether other causes influenced him or not, Shakespeare was doubtless
+in these four periods conforming to some extent to the literary
+tendencies of the hour.  The writings of his contemporaries also show a
+larger percentage of comedies between 1595-1600 than between 1590-1595.
+Many other dramatists, too, were writing histories while he was, and
+dropped them at about the same time.  Likewise during his Fourth Period
+three-quarters of all the plays written by other men were comedies, the
+most successful of them in a similar {104} romantic tone.  On the
+whole, too, other writers produced a rather larger percentage of
+tragedies during 1601-1607 than at any other time while Shakespeare was
+writing, although the change was not nearly as marked in them as in
+him.  But whether the influence of contemporaries was great or small,
+these periods exist; and the individual plays can be better understood
+if read in the light of the groups to which they belong.
+
+
+Perhaps the best book on Shakespeare's development as a dramatist is:
+_The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist_ by G. P. Baker (The
+Macmillan Co., New York, 1907).
+
+
+
+[1] These plays are throughout designated as _I_, _II_, and _III_ Henry
+VI.
+
+
+
+
+{105}
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CHIEF SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS
+
++Shakespeare and Plagiarism+.--Among the curious alterations in public
+sentiment that have come in the last century or two, none is more
+striking than the change of attitude in regard to what is called
+"plagiarism."  Plagiarism may be defined as the appropriation for one's
+own use of the literary ideas of another.  The laws of patent and of
+copyright have led us into thinking that the ideas of a play must not
+be borrowed in any degree, but must originate in every detail with the
+writer.  This is as if we should say to an inventor, "Yes, you may have
+invented a safety trigger for revolvers, but you must not apply it to
+revolvers until you have invented a completely new type of revolver
+from the original matchlock."
+
+But the playwright of to-day cannot help plagiarizing his technique,
+many of his situations, and even his plots from earlier plays;
+consequently, he tries to conceal his borrowings, to placate public
+opinion by changing the names and the environment of his characters.
+
+The Elizabethan audiences were less exacting.  If a play about King
+Lear were written and acted with some success, they thought it
+perfectly honest for another dramatist to use this material in building
+up a new and better play on the story of King Lear.  They cared {106}
+even less when the dramatist went to other dramas for hints on minor
+details.  The modern audience, if not the modern world at large, holds
+the same view.  So long as the mind of the borrower transforms and
+makes his own whatever he borrows, so long will his work be applauded
+by his audience, whatever be the existing state of the copyright laws
+or of public fastidiousness.
+
+Hence we do not to-day hunt up the sources of Shakespeare's plots and
+characters in order to prove plagiarism, but in order to understand
+just how great was the power of his genius in transmuting common
+elements into his fine gold.
+
+It is customary to say: "Shakespeare did not invent his plots.  He was
+not interested in plots."  So far is this from the truth that the
+amount of pains and skill spent by him in working over any one of his
+best comedies or tragedies would more than suffice for the construction
+of a very good modern plot.  It is more true to say of most of his
+work, "Shakespeare did not waste his time in inventing stories.[1]  He
+took stories where he found them, realized their dramatic
+possibilities, and spent infinite pains in weaving them together into a
+harmonious whole."
+
+There is one other point to remember.  The sources of Shakespeare's
+plays were no better literary material than the sources of most
+Elizabethan plays.  Shakespeare's practice in adapting older plays was
+{107} the common practice of the time.  We can measure, therefore, the
+greatness of Shakespeare's achievement by a comparison with what others
+have made out of similar material.
+
+Just as Shakespeare's plays fall into the groups of history, tragedy,
+and comedy, so his chief sources are three in number: biography, as
+found in the _Chronicle_ of Holinshed and Plutarch's _Lives_; romance,
+as found in the novels of the period, which were most of them
+translations from Italian _novelle_; and dramatic material from other
+plays.
+
++Holinshed+.--Raphael Holinshed (died 1580?) published in 1578 a
+history of England, Scotland, and Ireland, usually known as Holinshed's
+_Chronicle_.  The two immense folio volumes contain an account of
+Britain "from its first inhabiting" up to his own day, largely made up
+by combining the works of previous historians.  The _Chronicle_ bears
+evidence, however, of enormous and painstaking research which makes it
+valuable even now.  Holinshed's style was clear, but not possessed of
+any distinctly literary quality.  Much of what Shakespeare used was
+indeed but a paraphrase of an earlier chronicler, Edward Hall.
+Holinshed was uncritical, too, since he made no attempt to separate the
+legendary from the truly historical material.  So far as drama is
+concerned, however, this was rather a help than a hindrance, since
+legend often crystallizes most truly the spirit of a career in an act
+or a saying which never had basis in fact.  The work is notable chiefly
+for its patriotic tone, of which there is certainly more than an echo
+in Shakespeare's historical plays.  But the effects of {108} steadfast
+continuity of national purpose, of a belief in the greatness of
+England, and of an insistent appeal to patriotism, which are such
+important elements in Shakespeare's histories, are totally wanting in
+Holinshed.
+
+Not only are all of the histories of Shakespeare based either directly
+or through the medium of other plays upon Holinshed, but his two great
+tragedies, _Macbeth_ and _King Lear_ (the latter through an earlier
+play), and his comedy _Cymbeline_ are also chiefly indebted to it.  The
+work was, moreover, the source of many plays by other dramatists.
+
++Plutarch+.--Plutarch of Chaeronea, a Greek author of the first century
+A.D., wrote forty-six "parallel" Lives, of famous Greeks and Romans.
+Each famous Greek was contrasted with a famous Roman whose career was
+somewhat similar to his own.  The _Lives_ have been ever since among
+the most popular of the classics, for they are more than mere
+biographies.  They are the interpretation of two worlds, with all their
+tragic history, by one who felt the fatal force of a resistless destiny.
+
+A scholarly French translation of Plutarch's _Lives_ was published in
+1559 by Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Bellozane.  Twenty years after (1579)
+Thomas North, later Sir Thomas, published his magnificent English
+version.[2]  The vigor and spirit which he flung into his work can only
+be compared to that of William Tyndale in his translation of the New
+Testament.  Here was very different material for drama from the {109}
+dry bones of history offered by Holinshed.  Shakespeare paid North the
+sincerest compliment by borrowing, particularly in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, and _Coriolanus_, not only the general story, but whole
+speeches with only those changes necessary for making blank verse out
+of prose.  The last speeches of Antony and Cleopatra are indeed nearly
+as impressive in North's narrative form as in Shakespeare's play.
+
+In addition to the tragedies already named, _Julius Caesar_ and almost
+certainly the suggestion of _Timon of Athens_, though not the play as a
+whole, were taken from Plutarch's _Lives_.  Other Elizabethans were not
+slow to avail themselves of this unequaled treasure-house of story.
+
++Italian and Other Fiction+.--Except for Geoffrey Chaucer (1338-1400),
+whose _Troilus and Criseyde_ Shakespeare dramatized, and John Gower
+(died 1408), whose _Confessio Amantis_ is one of the books out of which
+the plot of _Pericles_ may have come, there was little good English
+fiction read in the Elizabethan period.  Educated people read, instead,
+Italian _novelle_, or short tales, which were usually gathered into
+some collection of a hundred or so.  Many of these were translated into
+English before Shakespeare's time; and a number of similar collections
+had been made by English authors, who had translated good stories
+whenever they found them.
+
+One of these was _Gli Heccatommithi_, 1565 (The Hundred Tales), by
+Giovanni Giraldi, surnamed Cinthio, which was later translated into
+French and was the source of _Measure for Measure_ and _Othello_.
+Another collection was that of Matteo Bandello, whose {110} _Tales_,
+1554-1573, translated into French by Belleforest, furnished the sources
+of _Much Ado About Nothing_, and perhaps _Twelfth Night_.  The greatest
+of these collections was the _Decameron_, c. 1353, by Giovanni
+Boccaccio, one of whose stories, translated by William Painter in his
+_Palace of Pleasure_, 1564, furnished the source of _All's Well That
+Ends Well_.  Another story of the _Decameron_ was probably the source
+of the romantic part of the plot of _Cymbeline_.  The _Merry Wives of
+Windsor_ had a plot like the story in Straparola's _Tredici Piacevole
+Notte_ (1550), _Thirteen Pleasant Evenings_; and _The Merchant of
+Venice_ borrows its chief plot from Giovanni Florentine's _Il Pecorone_.
+
+Two of Shakespeare's plays are based on English novels written somewhat
+after the Italian manner--_As You Like It_ on Thomas Lodge's
+novel-poem, _Rosalynde_, and _The Winter's Tale_ from Robert Greene's
+_Pandosto_.  The _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ is from a Spanish story in
+the Italian style, the _Diana_ of Jorge de Montemayor.  The _Comedy of
+Errors_ from Plautus is his only play based on classical sources.
+
+The Italian _novelle_ emphasized situation, but had little natural
+dialogue and still less characterization.  The Elizabethan dramatists
+used them only for their plots.  Never did works of higher genius
+spring from less inspired sources.
+
++The Plays used by Shakespeare+.--Although Shakespeare made up one of
+his plots, the _Comedy of Errors_, from two plays of Plautus (254-184
+B.C.), the _Menaechmi_ and _Amphitruo_, the rest of the plays he used
+for material were contemporary work.  He borrowed from them plots and
+situations, and {111} occasionally even lines.  With the exception,
+however, of one of the early histories, the plays he made use of are in
+themselves of no value as literature.  Their sole claim to notice is
+that they served the need of the great playwright.  None but the
+student will ever read them.  In practically every case Shakespeare so
+developed the story that the fiction became essentially his own; while
+the poetic quality of the verse, the development of character, and the
+heightening of dramatic effect, which he built upon it, left no more of
+the old play in sight than the statue shows of the bare metal rods upon
+which the sculptor molds his clay.
+
+Seven histories go back to the earlier plays on the kings of England.
+The Second and Third Parts of _Henry VI_ are taken from two earlier
+plays often called the _First and Second Contentions_ (between the two
+noble houses of York and Lancaster).  The First and Second parts of
+_Henry IV_, and _Henry V_, are all three an expansion of a cruder
+production, the _Famous Victories of Henry V_.  _Richard III_ is based
+upon the _True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York; King John upon the
+Troublesome Reigne of John, King of England_, the latter undoubtedly
+the best of the sources of Shakespeare's Histories.
+
+_King Leir and His Daughters_ is the only extant play which is known to
+have formed the basis of a Shakespearean tragedy.  Shakespeare made
+additions in this case from other sources, borrowing Gloucester's story
+from Sidney's _Arcadia_.  The earlier play of _Hamlet_, which it is
+believed Shakespeare used, is not now in existence.
+
+Among the comedies, the _Taming of the Shrew_ is {112} directly based
+upon the _Taming of a Shrew_.  _Measure for Measure_ is less direct,
+borrowing from George Whetstone's play in two parts, _Promos and
+Cassandra_ (written before 1578).
+
+The existence of versions in German and Dutch of plays which present
+plots similar in structure to Shakespeare's, but less highly developed,
+leads scholars to advance the theory that several lost plays may have
+been sources for some of his dramas.  Entries or mentions of plays,
+with details like Shakespeare's, dated earlier than his own plays could
+have been in existence, are also used to further the same view.  The
+_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, the _Merchant of Venice_, _Romeo and
+Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and, with less reason, _Timon of Athens_, and
+_Twelfth Night_, are thought to have been based more or less on earlier
+lost plays.
+
+Finally, a number of plays perhaps suggested details in Shakespeare's
+plays.  Of plays so influenced, _Cymbeline_, _The Winter's Tale_, and
+_Henry VIII_ are the chief.  But the debt is negligible at best, so far
+as the general student is concerned.
+
+To conclude, what Shakespeare borrowed was the raw material of drama.
+What he gave to this material was life and art.  No better way of
+appreciating the dramatist at his full worth could be pursued than a
+patient perusal and comparison of the sources of his plays with
+Shakespeare's own work.
+
+
+The best books on this subject are: H. E. D. Anders, _Shakespeare's
+Books_ (Berlin, 1904); _Shakespeare's Library_, ed. J. P. Collier and
+W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1875); and the new _Shakespeare Library_ now
+being published by Chatto and Windus, of which several volumes are out.
+
+
+
+[1] There are two plays at least which have plots probably original
+with Shakespeare--_Love's Labour's Lost_ and _The Tempest_.  Both of
+these draw largely, however, from contemporary history and adventure,
+and the central idea is directly borrowed from actual events.
+
+[2] It is not unlikely that it was the second edition published in 1595
+by Richard Field (Shakespeare's printer) that the poet read.
+
+
+
+
+{113}
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT INTO PRINT
+
+The Elizabethan audiences who filled to overflowing the theaters on the
+Bankside possessed a far purer text of Shakespeare than we of this
+later day can boast.  In order to understand our own editions of
+Shakespeare, it is necessary to understand something, at least, of the
+conditions of publishing in Shakespeare's day and of the relations of
+the playhouses with the publishers.
+
+The printing of Shakespeare's poems is an easy tale, _Venus and Adonis_
+in 1593, and _The Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, were first printed in
+quarto by Richard Field, a native of Stratford, who had come to London.
+In each case a dedication accompanying the text was signed by
+Shakespeare, so that we may guess that the poet not only consented to
+the printing, but took care that the printing should be accurate.
+Twelve editions of one, eight of the other, were issued before 1660.
+The other volume of poetry, the Sonnets, was printed in 1609 by Thomas
+Thorpe, without Shakespeare's consent.  Two of them, numbers 138 and
+144, had appeared in the collection known as _The Passionate Pilgrim_,
+a pirated volume printed by W. Jaggard in 1599.  No reedition of the
+Sonnets appeared till 1640.
+
+With regard to the plays it is different.  It is first {114} to be said
+that in no volume containing a play or plays of Shakespeare in
+existence to-day is there any evidence that Shakespeare saw it through
+the press.  All we can do is to satisfy ourselves as to how the copy of
+Shakespeare's plays may have got into the hands of the publishers, and
+as to how far that copy represents what Shakespeare must have written.
+
+The editions of Shakespearean plays may be divided into two
+groups,--the separate plays which were printed in quarto[1] volumes
+before 1623, and the First Folio of Shakespeare, which was printed in
+1623, a collected edition of all his plays save _Pericles_.  Our text
+of Shakespeare, whatever one we read, is made up, either from the First
+Folio text, or in certain cases from the quarto volumes of certain
+plays which preceded the Folio; together with the attempts to restore
+to faulty places what Shakespeare must have written--a task which has
+engaged a long line of diligent scholars from early in the eighteenth
+century up to our own day.
+
++The Stationers' Company+.--In the early period of English printing,
+which began about 1480 and lasted up to 1557, there was very little
+supervision over the publishing of books, and as a result the
+competition was unscrupulous.  There was a guild of publishers, called
+{115} the Stationers' Company, in existence, but its efforts to control
+its members were only of a general character.  In 1557, however, Philip
+and Mary granted a charter to the Stationers' Company under which no
+one not a member of the Stationers' Company could legally possess a
+printing press.  Queen Mary was, of course, interested in controlling
+the press directly through the Crown.  Throughout the Elizabethan
+period the printing of books was directly under the supervision of Her
+Majesty's Government, and not under the law courts.  Every book had to
+be licensed by the company.  The Wardens of the company acted as
+licensers in ordinary cases, and in doubtful cases the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or some other dignitary appointed for
+the purpose.  When the license was granted, the permission to print was
+entered upon the Register of the company, and it is from these records
+that much important knowledge about the dates of Shakespeare's plays is
+gained.
+
+The Stationers' Company was interested only in protecting its members
+from prosecution and from competition.  The author was not considered
+by them in the legal side of the transaction.  How the printer got his
+manuscript to print was his own affair, not theirs.
+
+Many authors were at that time paid by printers for the privilege of
+using their manuscript; but it was not considered proper that a
+gentleman should be paid for literary work.  Robert Greene, the
+playwright and novelist, wrote regularly in the employ of printers.  On
+the other hand, Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary {116} of
+Shakespeare's, did not allow any of his writings to be printed during
+his lifetime.  Francis Bacon published his essays only in order to
+forestall an unauthorized edition, and others of the time took the same
+course.  Bacon says in his preface that to prevent their being printed
+would have been a troublesome procedure.  It was possible for an author
+to prevent the publication by prosecution, but it was scarcely a wise
+thing to do, in view of the legal difficulties in the way.
+Nevertheless, fear of the law probably acted as some sort of a check on
+unscrupulous publishers.
+
+The author of a play was, however, really less interested than the
+manager who had bought it.  The manager of a theater seems, from what
+evidence we possess, to have believed that the printing of a play
+injured the chances of success upon the stage.  The play was sold by
+the author directly to the manager, whose property it became.  Copies
+of it might be sold to some printer by some of the players in the
+company, by the manager himself, or, in rarer cases, by some
+unscrupulous copyist taking down the play in shorthand at the
+performance.  When a play had got out of date, it would be more apt to
+be sold than while it was still on the stage.  In some cases, however,
+the printing might have no bad effect upon the attendance at its
+performances.
+
+During the years before 1623, seventeen of Shakespeare's plays were
+published in quarto.  Two of these, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_,
+were printed in two very different versions, so that we have nineteen
+texts of Shakespeare's plays altogether published before the First
+Folio.  A complete table of these {117} plays with the dates in which
+the quartos appeared follows:--
+
+  1594.  Titus Andronicus.  Later quartos in 1600 and 1611.
+  1597.  Richard II.  Later quartos in 1598, 1608, and 1615.
+  1597.  Richard III.  Later quartos in 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612,
+         and 1622.
+  1597.  Romeo and Juliet.  Later quartos in 1599 (corrected
+         edition) and 1609.
+  1598.  I Henry IV.  Later quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613,
+         and 1622.
+  1598.  Love's Labour's Lost.
+  1600.  Merchant of Venice.  Later quarto in 1619.  (Copying
+         on the title-page the original date of 1600, however.)
+  1600.  Henry V.  Later quartos in 1602 and 1619.  (Dated on
+         the title-page, 1608.)
+  1600.  Henry IV, Part II.
+  1600.  Midsummer Night's Dream.  Later quarto in 1619.
+         (Dated, however, 1600.)
+  1602.  Merry Wives of Windsor.  Later quarto in 1619.
+  1603.  Hamlet.
+  1604.  Second edition of Hamlet.  Later quartos in 1605 and 1611.
+  1608.  King Lear.  Later quarto in 1619.  (Title-page date, 1608.)
+  1608.  Pericles.  Later quartos in 1609, 1611, and 1619.
+  1609.  Troilus and Cressida.  A second quarto in 1609.
+  1622.  Othello.
+
+
+These are all the known quartos of Shakespeare's plays printed before
+the Folio.  They represent two distinct classes.  The first class
+(comprising fourteen texts) of the quartos contains good texts of the
+plays and is of great assistance to editors.  The second (comprising
+five texts), the first _Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives_, the
+first _Hamlet_, and _Pericles_, {118} is composed of thoroughly bad
+copies.  Two of this class were not entered on the Stationers' Register
+at all, but were pure piracies.  Two others were entered by one firm,
+but were printed by another.  The fifth was entered and transferred on
+the same day.  Of the fourteen good texts, twelve were regularly
+entered on the Stationers' Register, and the other two were evidently
+intended to take the place of a bad text.  It is evident, therefore,
+that registry upon the books of the Stationers' Company was a safeguard
+to an author in getting before the public a good text of his writings.
+It also indicates that the good copies were obtained by printers in a
+legal manner, and so probably purchased directly from the theaters,
+whether from the copy which the prompter had, or from some transcript
+of the play.  The notion that all plays were printed in Shakespeare's
+time by a process of piracy is thus not borne out by these facts.
+
+The five bad quartos deserve a moment's attention.  The first of these,
+_Romeo and Juliet_, printed and published by John Danter in 1597, omits
+over seven hundred lines of the play, and the stage directions are
+descriptions rather than definite instructions.  The book is printed in
+two kinds of type, a fact due probably to its being printed from two
+presses at once.  Danter got into trouble later on with other books
+from his dishonest ways.  The second poor quarto, _Henry V_, printed in
+1600, was less than half as long as the Folio text, and was probably
+carelessly copied by an ignorant person at a performance of the play.
+The third, the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, was pirated through the
+publisher of _Henry V_, John Busby, who assigned his {119} part to
+another printer on the same day.  As in the case of _Romeo and Juliet_,
+the stage directions are mere descriptions.  No play of Shakespeare's
+was more cruelly bungled by an unscrupulous copyist.  The first edition
+of _Hamlet_ in 1603 was the work of Valentine Sims.  While the copying
+is full of blunders, this quarto is considered important, as indicating
+that the play was acted at first in a much shorter and less artistic
+version than the one which we now read.  For eight months of 1603-1604
+the theaters of London were closed on account of the plague, and
+Shakespeare's revision of _Hamlet_ may have been made during this time.
+At any rate, the later version appeared about the end of 1604.  The
+last of these pirated quartos, _Pericles_, was probably taken down in
+shorthand at the theater.  Here, unfortunately, as this play was not
+included in the First Folio, and as all later quartos were based on the
+First Quarto, we have to-day what is really a corrupt and difficult
+text.  Luckily, Shakespeare's share in this play is small.
+
+The title-pages of the quartos of Shakespeare bear convincing
+testimony, not only to the genuineness of his plays, but also to his
+rise in reputation.  Only six of his plays were printed in quartos not
+bearing his name.  Of these, two--_Romeo and Juliet_ and _Henry
+V_--began with pirated editions not bearing the author's name.
+Three--_Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV_--were all followed by
+quartos with the poet's name upon them.  The sixth play, _Titus
+Andronicus_, was one of his earliest works, and its authorship is even
+now not absolutely certain.
+
+Since the name of a popular dramatist on the {120} title-page was a
+distinct source of revenue to the publisher after 1598, it was to be
+expected that anonymous plays should be ascribed in some cases to
+William Shakespeare by an unscrupulous or a misinformed printer.  Here
+arose the Shakespeare 'apocrypha,' which is discussed in a following
+chapter.
+
+A new problem in the history of Shakespearean quartos has been
+presented since 1903 by a study of the quartos of 1619.  Briefly
+summarized, the theory which is best defended at the present time is,
+that in that year Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard, two printers of
+London, decided at first to get up a collected quarto edition of
+Shakespeare's plays, but on giving up this idea, they issued nine plays
+in a uniform size and on paper bearing identical watermarks, which were
+either at that time or later bound up together as a collected set of
+Shakespeare's plays in a single volume.[2]  These plays are the _Whole
+Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of Lancaster and York_,
+"printed for T. P."; _A Yorkshire Tragedie_, "printed for T. P., 1619";
+_Pericles_, "printed for T. P. 1619"; _Merry Wives_, "printed for
+Arthur Johnson, 1619"; _Sir John Oldcastle_, "printed for T. P., 1600";
+_Henry V_, "printed for T. P., 1608"; _Merchant of Venice_, "printed by
+J. Roberts, 1600"; _King Lear_, "printed for  Nathaniel Butter, 1608";
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_, "printed for Thomas Fisher, 1600."
+
+Of these plays, the _Whole Contention_, the _Yorkshire {121} Tragedie_,
+and _Sir John Oldcastle_ are spurious, but had been attributed to
+Shakespeare in earlier quartos.  The five plays dated 1600 or 1608 in
+each case duplicated a quarto actually printed in the year claimed by
+the Pavier reprint; so that this earlier dating was an attempt to
+deceive the public into believing they were purchasing the original
+editions.
+
+Under the date of the 8th of November, 1623, Edward Blount and Isaac
+Jaggard entered for their copy in the Stationers' Register "Mr. William
+Shakspeers Comedyes, Histories and Tragedyes, soe manie of the said
+copyes as are not formerly entred to other men viz^t, Comedyes, The
+Tempest.  The two gentlemen of Verona.  Measure for Measure.  The
+Comedy of Errors.  As you like it.  All's well that ends well.  Twelfth
+Night.  The winter's tale.  Histories The third parte of Henry the
+sixth.  Henry the eight.  Tragedies.  Coriolanus.  Timon of Athens.
+Julius Caesar.  Mackbeth.  Anthonie and Cleopatra.  Cymbeline."  This
+entry preluded the publication of the First Folio.  Associated with
+Blount and Jaggard were Jaggard's son Isaac, who had the contract for
+the printing of the book, I. Smethwick, and W. A. Aspley.  Smethwick
+owned at this time the rights of _Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and
+Juliet_, and _Hamlet_, and also the _Taming of a Shrew_, which latter
+right apparently carried with it the right to print Shakespeare's
+adaptation of it, the _Taming of the Shrew_.  Aspley owned the rights
+to _Much Ado About Nothing_, and to _II Henry IV_.  These four
+printers, making arrangements with other printers, such as Law, who
+apparently had the rights of _I Henry IV, Richard II_, {122} and
+_Richard III_, and others, were thus able to bring out an apparently
+complete edition of Shakespeare's plays.  One play, _Troilus and
+Cressida_, was evidently secured only at the last moment and printed
+very irregularly.[3]  Blount and Jaggard apparently got the manuscripts
+of the sixteen plays on the Register from members of Shakespeare's
+company, two of whom, John Hemings and Henry Condell, affixed their
+names to the Address to the Reader which was prefixed to the volume.
+It will be remembered that these men received by Shakespeare's bequest
+a gold ring as a token of friendship.  Their intimacy with the
+dramatist must have been both strong and lasting.  Their actual share
+in the editing of the volume cannot be ascertained.  It may be that all
+the claims are true which are made above their names in the Address to
+the Reader as to their care and pains in collecting and publishing his
+works "so to have publish'd them as where before you were abused with
+diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed, the
+stealthes of injurious copyists, we expos'd them; even those are now
+offer'd to your view, crude and bereft of their limbes, and of the rest
+absolutely in their parts as he conceived them who as he was a happie
+imitator of nature was a most gentle expresser of it.  His mind and
+hand went together and what he thought he told with that easinesse that
+wee have scarse received from him a {123} blot in his papers."  On the
+other hand, scholarship has discovered more in the life of Edward
+Blount to justify his claim to the chief work of editing this volume.
+Whoever they were, the editors' claim to diligent care in their work
+was sincere.  Throughout the volume there are proofs that they employed
+the best text which they could get, even when others were in print.
+
+It is owing to this volume, in all probability, that we possess twenty
+of the best of Shakespeare's plays and the best texts of a number of
+the others.  We are therefore glad to hear that the edition was a
+success and was considered worth reprinting within nine years.  It is
+not improbable that this edition ran to five hundred copies.  Among the
+most interesting work of the editors of the volume was the prefixing of
+the Droeshout engraved portrait on the title-page, and an attempt to
+improve the stage directions, as well as the division of most of the
+plays, either in whole or in part, into acts and scenes.
+
+The twenty plays which appeared in print for the first time in the
+First Folio were taken in all probability directly from copies in the
+possession of Shakespeare's company.  Their texts are, upon the whole,
+excellent.  In the case of the sixteen other plays the editors
+substituted for eight of the plays already in print in quartos,
+independent texts from better manuscripts.  This act must have involved
+considerable expense and difficulty, and deserves the highest praise.
+Five of the printed quartos were used with additions and corrections.
+In the case of _Titus Andronicus_ a whole scene was added.  In three
+cases only {124} of the sixteen plays already printed did the editors
+follow a quarto text without correcting it from a later theatrical
+copy.  This conscientious effort to give posterity the best text of
+Shakespeare deserves our gratitude.
+
+The Second Folio, 1632, was a reprint of the First; the Third Folio,
+1663, a reprint of the Second; the Fourth Folio, 1685, a reprint of the
+Third.  This practice of copying the latest accessible edition has been
+adopted by editors down to a very late period.  Between 1629 and 1632
+six quartos of Shakespearean plays were printed,--a fact which
+indicates that the First Folio edition had been exhausted and that
+there was a continued market.  A man named Thomas Cotes acquired
+through one Richard Cotes the printing rights of the Jaggards, and
+added to them other rights derived from Pavier.  The old publishers,
+Smethwick and Aspley, were still living and were associated with him in
+publishing the Second Folio.  Robert Allott, June 26, 1629, had bought
+up Blount's title to the plays first registered in 1623, and was thus
+also concerned in the publication, while Richard Hawkins and Richard
+Meighen, who owned the rights of _Othello_ and _Merry Wives_, were
+allowed to take shares.  The editors of the Second Folio made only such
+alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to
+make it more "correct."  The vast majority of the changes are
+unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously right,
+others as obviously wrong.
+
+Five more Shakespearean quartos followed between 1634 and 1639.
+Between 1652 and 1655 two other {125} quartos were published.  The
+Third Folio, 1664, was published by Philip Chetwind, who had married
+the widow of Robert Allott and thus got most of the rights in the
+Second Folio.  Chetwind's Folio is famous, not only for the addition of
+_Pericles_, which alone it was his first intention to include, but also
+for the addition of six spurious plays--_Sir John Oldcastle, The
+Yorkshire Tragedie, A London Prodigall, The Tragedie of Locrine,
+Thomas, Lord Cromwell_, and _The Puritaine_, or _The Widdow of Watling
+Streete_.  Chetwind's reason for thus adding these plays was that they
+had passed under Shakespeare's name or initials in their earliest
+prints.  The Fourth Folio, 1685, is a mere reprint of the Third.
+
+With the Fourth Folio ends the early history of how Shakespeare got
+into print.  From that time to this a long line of famous and obscure
+men, at first mostly men of letters, but afterwards, and especially in
+our own times, trained specialists in their profession, have devoted
+much of their lives to the editing of Shakespeare.  Their ideal has
+been, usually, to give readers the text of his poems and plays in their
+presumed primitive integrity.  Constant study of his works, and of
+other Elizabethan writers, has given them a certain knowledge of the
+words and grammatical usages of that day which go far to make
+Elizabethan English a foreign tongue to us.  On the other hand, more
+knowledge about the conditions of printing in Shakespeare's time has
+helped the editors very greatly in their attempts to set right a
+passage which was misprinted in the earliest printed text, or a line of
+which two early texts give different versions.
+
+{126}
+
+An example of the difficulties that still confront editors may be given
+from _II Henry IV_, IV, i, 94-96:--
+
+"_Archbishop_.  My brother general, the commonwealth,
+                To brother born, an household cruelty.
+                I make my quarrel in particular."
+
+Nobody knows what Shakespeare meant to say in this passage, and no
+satisfactory guess has ever been made as to what has happened to these
+lines.
+
+A knowledge of Elizabethan English has cleared up the following passage
+perfectly.  According to the First Folio, the only early print, Antony
+calls Lepidus, in _Julius Caesar_, IV, i, 36-37:--
+
+  "A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds
+  On objects, arts, and imitations...."
+
+This has been corrected to read in the second line
+
+  "On abjects, orts, and imitations."
+
+Abjects here means outcasts, and orts, scraps, or leavings; but no one
+unfamiliar with the language of that time could have solved the puzzle.
+
+A different sort of problem is offered by such plays as _King Lear_, of
+which the quartos furnish three hundred lines not in the Folio, while
+the Folio has one hundred lines not in the quartos, and is, on the
+whole, much more carefully copied.  The modern editor gives all the
+lines in both versions, so that we read a _King Lear_ which is probably
+longer than Shakespeare's countrymen read or ever saw acted.  The
+modern editor selects, however, when Folio and quartos differ, the
+reading which seems best.
+
+{127}
+
+FOLIO.  "Cordelia.        Was this a face
+        To be opposed against the _jarring_ winds?"
+
+QUARTOS.                 "Was this a face
+        To be opposed against the _warring_ winds?"
+
+
+In such a difference as this, the personal taste of the editor is apt
+to govern his text.
+
+We cannot here go farther in explaining the problems of the Shakespeare
+text.  To those who would know more of them, the _Variorum_ edition of
+Dr. H. H. Furness offers a full history.  In the light of the knowledge
+which he and other scholars have thrown upon textual criticism, it is
+unlikely that there will ever be poor texts of Shakespeare reprinted.
+The work of the Shakespeare scholars has not been in vain.
+
+
++Later Editions+.--Nicholas Rowe in 1709 produced the first edition in
+the modern sense.  He modernized the spelling frankly, repunctuated,
+corrected the grammar, made out lists of the dramatis personae,
+arranged the verse which was in disorder, and made a number of good
+emendations in difficult places.  He added also exits and entrances,
+which in earlier prints were only inserted occasionally.  Further, he
+completed the division of the plays into acts and scenes.  Perhaps his
+most important work was writing a full life of Shakespeare in which
+several valuable traditions are preserved.  The poems were not included
+in the edition, but were published in 1716 from the edition of 1640.
+He followed the Third and Fourth Folios in reprinting the spurious
+plays.  The edition was reprinted in 1714, 1725, and 1728.
+
+In 1726 Alexander Pope published his famous edition of Shakespeare.
+Pope possessed a splendid lot of the old quartos and the first two
+folios, but his edition was wantonly careless.  He did, indeed, use
+some sense in excluding the seven spurious plays as well as _Pericles_
+from his edition, and he undoubtedly {128} worked hard on the text.  He
+subdivided the scenes more minutely than Rowe after the fashion of the
+French stage division,--where a new scene begins with every new
+character instead of after the stage has been cleared.  Pope's
+explanations of the words which appeared difficult in Shakespeare's
+text were often laughably far from the truth.  The word 'foison,'
+meaning 'plenty,' Pope defined as the 'natural juice of grass.'  The
+word 'neif,' meaning 'fist,' Pope thought meant 'woman.'  Pistol is
+thus made to say, "Thy woman will I take."  Phrases that appeared to be
+vulgar or unpoetical he simply dropped out, or altered without notice.
+He rearranged the lines in order to give them the studied smoothness
+characteristic of the eighteenth century.  In fact, he tried to make
+Shakespeare as near like Pope's poetry as he could.
+
+In 1726 Lewis Theobald published _Shakespeare Restored_, with many
+corrections of Pope's errors.  In this little pamphlet most of the
+material was devoted to _Hamlet_.  Theobald's corrections were taken by
+Pope in very bad part; and the latter tried to destroy Theobald's
+reputation by writing satires against him and by injuring him in every
+possible way in print.  The first of these publications, _The Dunciad_,
+appeared in 1728; and this, the greatest satire in the English
+language, was so effective as to have obscured Theobald's real merit
+until our own day.  Theobald's edition of Shakespeare followed in 1734,
+and was reprinted in 1740.  It is famous for his corrections and
+improvements of the text, many of which are followed by all later
+editors of Shakespeare.  The most notable of these is Mrs. Quickly's
+remark in Falstaff's deathbed scene, "His nose was as sharp as a pen
+and a' babbled of green fields."  The previous texts had given "and a
+table of green fields."  Pope had said that this nonsense crept in from
+the name of the property man who was named Greenfield, and thus there
+must have been a stage direction here,--"Bring in a table of
+Greenfield's."
+
+Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by Thomes Hanmer's edition in
+six volumes.  Hanmer was a country gentleman, but not much of a scholar.
+
+Warburton's edition followed in 1747.  In 1765 appeared {129} Samuel
+Johnson's long-delayed edition in eight volumes.  Aside from a few
+common-sense explanations, the edition is not of much merit.
+
+Tyrwhitt's edition in 1766 was followed by a reprint of twenty of the
+early quartos by George Steevens in the same year.  Two years later
+came the edition of Edward Capell, the greatest scholarly work since
+Theobald's.  In this edition was the first rigorous comparison between
+the readings of the folios and the quartos.  His quartos, now in the
+British Museum, are of the greatest value to Shakespeare scholars.
+With his edition begins the tendency to get back to the earliest form
+of the text and not to try to improve Shakespeare to the ideal of what
+the editor thinks Shakespeare should have said.
+
+In 1773 Johnson's edition was revised by Steevens, and _Pericles_ was
+readmitted.  This was a valuable but crotchety edition.  In 1790 Edmund
+Malone published his famous edition in ten volumes.  No Shakespearean
+scholar ranks higher than he in reputation.  Numerous editions followed
+up to 1865, of which the most important is James Boswell's so-called
+Third _Variorum_ in twenty-one volumes.  In 1855-1861 was published J.
+O. Halliwell's edition in fifteen volumes, which contains enormous
+masses of antiquarian material.
+
+In 1853 appeared the forgeries of J. P. Collier, to which reference is
+made elsewhere.
+
+In 1854-1861 appeared the edition in Germany of N. Delius.  The Leopold
+Shakespeare, 1876, used Delius's text.
+
+In 1857-1865 appeared the first good American edition of R. G. White.
+It contained many original suggestions.  Between 1863 and 1866 appeared
+the edition of Clark and Wright, known as the Cambridge edition.  Mr.
+W. Aldis Wright, now the dean of living Shakespearean scholars, is
+chiefly responsible for this text.  It was reprinted with a few changes
+into the Globe edition, and is still the chief popular text.
+
+Prof. W. A. Neilson's single volume in the Cambridge series, 1906, is
+the latest scholarly edition in America.  It follows in most cases the
+positions taken by Clark and Wright.
+
+Within the last few years there has been an enormous {130} stimulus to
+Shakespeare study.  The chief work of modern Shakespearean scholarship
+is the still incomplete _Variorum_ edition of Dr. H. H. Furness and his
+son.
+
+Other aids to study are reprints of the books used by Shakespeare,
+facsimile reprints of the original quartos of the plays, and, perhaps
+as useful as any one thing, the facsimile reproduction of the First
+Folio.  The few perplexing problems that the scholar still finds in the
+text of Shakespeare will probably never be solved.
+
+On the subject of this chapter, consult A. W. Pollard, _Shakespeare
+Folios and Quartos_, Methuen, London, 1910; Sidney Lee, Introduction to
+the facsimile reproduction of the First Folio by the Oxford University
+Press; T. R. Lounsbury, _The Text of Shakespeare_, New York, Scribners,
+1906.  For the remarks of critics and editors, the _Variorum_ edition
+of Dr. H. H. Furness is invaluable.
+
+
+
+[1] A quarto volume, or quarto, is a book which is the size of a fourth
+of a sheet of printing paper.  The sheets are folded twice to make four
+leaves or eight pages, and the usual size is about 6x9 in.  A folio is
+a volume of the size of a half sheet of printing paper.  The paper is
+folded once and bound in the middle, the usual size being about 9 x 12
+in.  The divisions of the book made by thus folding sheets of paper are
+called quires, and may consist of four or eight leaves.
+
+[2] This view of the Pavier-Jaggard collection is held by A. W. Pollard
+of the British Museum and W. W. Greg of Trinity College Library,
+Cambridge.  The writers of this volume incline to accord it complete
+recognition.
+
+[3] It was evidently designed to fit in between _Romeo and Juliet_ and
+_Julius Caesar_; but the owner of the publishing rights holding out
+till that part of the book was ready, the editors "ran in" _Timon of
+Athens_ to fill up.  When _Troilus and Cressida_ was finally arranged
+for, it had to be inserted between the Histories and Tragedies.
+
+
+
+
+{131}
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FIRST PERIOD--IMITATION AND EXPERIMENT
+
+1587 (?)-1594
+
+The first period of Shakespeare's work carries him from the youthful
+efforts at dramatic construction to such mastery of dramatic technique
+and of original portrayal of life as raise him, when aided by his
+supreme poetic art, above all other living dramatists.  It was chiefly
+a period in which the young poet, full of ambition, curious of his own
+talents, and eager for success, was feeling his way among the different
+types of drama which he saw reaching success on the London stage.
+
+The longest period of experiment was in the writing of chronicle
+histories.  The experience acquired in these six plays, all derived in
+some measure from earlier work by others, made Shakespeare a master of
+this type.  Next in importance was comedy, chiefly romantic with four
+plays of widely different aim and merit.  These two types are brought
+to the highest development in the dramatist's second period.  Tragedy
+was to wait for a fuller and riper experience.  What the complete
+earlier version of _Romeo and Juliet_ was like, we have only a faint
+idea; it was obviously, while {132} intensely appealing, the work of a
+young and immature poet.  _Titus Andronicus_ led nowhere in development.
+
+Christopher Marlowe remained Shakespeare's master in the drama
+throughout the chronicle plays of the period.  John Lyly's court
+comedies contained most of the types of character which are to be found
+in _Love's Labour's Lost_.  Throughout the period Shakespeare grows in
+mastery of plot and of his dramatic verse; but his chief growth is away
+from this imitation of others into his own creative portraiture of
+character.  The growth from the bluff soldier, Talbot, in _Henry VI_ to
+the weak but appealing Richard II is no less marked than is that from
+the fantastic Armado in _Love's Labour's Lost_ to the unconsciously
+ridiculous Bottom.
+
+Shakespeare's greatest achievements in this period, aside from _Romeo
+and Juliet_ in the unknown first draft, are the characters of Richard
+II and Richard III, the former a portrait of vanity and vacillation
+mingled with more agreeable traits, lovable gentleness and traces at
+least of kingliness, the latter a Titanic figure possessed by an
+overmastering passion.
+
+It is impossible to draw a satisfactory line of division between the
+experimental period of Shakespeare's work and the period of comedy
+which follows.  Two plays, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _The
+Merchant of Venice_, lie really between the two.  The chief arguments
+for an early grouping seem to be that the former is in some measure an
+artificial court comedy, and is full of riming speech and end-stopped
+lines; the latter derives some help from Marlowe's treatment of _The
+Jew of Malta_.  But, on the other hand, the {133} mastery of original
+characterization in such groups as the delicate fairies of the _Dream_,
+or those who gather at the trial of _The Merchant_, might justify their
+position in the second period rather than in the first.  On the whole,
+it is perhaps wisest to let metrical differences govern, and so to put
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_, at the end of Imitation and Experiment;
+while _The Merchant of Venice_ may safely usher in the great period of
+comedy.
+
+The three plays known as _The Three Parts of Henry VI_, together with
+_Richard the Third_, constitute the history of the Wars of the Roses,
+in which the House of York fought the House of Lancaster through the
+best part of the fifteenth century, and lost the fight and the English
+crown in 1485, a hundred years before Shakespeare came to London.
+Although these plays have but slight appeal to us as readers, they must
+have been highly popular among Elizabethan playgoers.
+
++The First Part of Henry the Sixth+ deals chiefly with the wars of
+England and France which center about the figures of Talbot, the
+English commander, and Joan of Arc, called Joan la Pucelle (the
+maiden).  The former is a hero of battle, who dies fighting for
+England.  The latter is painted according to the traditional English
+view, which lasted long after Shakespeare's time, as a wicked and
+impure woman, in league with devils, who fight for her against the
+righteous power of England.  We are glad to think that while the Talbot
+scenes are probably Shakespeare's, the portrait of La Pucelle is not
+from his hand, as we shall see.  The deaths of these protagonists
+prepares the way for the peace which Suffolk concludes, and the
+marriage {134} which he arranges between Margaret of Anjou and King
+Henry.
+
++The Second Part of Henry the Sixth+ concerns the outbreak of strife
+between York and Lancaster, but chiefly the overthrow of the uncle of
+the king, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, as Protector of the Realm, and
+the destruction of his opponent, the Duke of Suffolk, in his turn.  The
+play ends with the first battle of St. Albans (1455), resulting in the
+complete triumph of Duke Richard of York, in open rebellion against
+King Henry.
+
++The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth+ tells of the further wars of
+York and Lancaster, in the course of which Richard of York is murdered,
+and his sons, Edward and Richard, keep up the struggle, while Warwick,
+styled the "Kingmaker," transfers his power to Lancaster.  In the end
+York is triumphant; and while Henry VI and his son are murdered, and
+Warwick slain in battle at Barnet, Edward is crowned as Edward IV, and
+Richard becomes the Duke of Gloucester.
+
+
++Authorship+.--The Three Parts of _Henry the Sixth_ were first printed
+in the First Folio, 1623.  Two earlier plays, _The First Part of the
+Contention between the two Noble Houses of York and Lancaster_
+(sometimes called _1 Contention_), and _The True Tragedy of Richard,
+Duke of York... with the whole Contention between the two Houses of
+Lancaster and York_ (2 _Contention_), appeared in quarto in 1594 and
+1595 respectively.  These are to be regarded as earlier versions of
+_II_ and _III Henry VI_.[1] For the _First Part of Henry VI_ no
+dramatic source exists.  The ultimate source is, of course, Holinshed's
+_Chronicles_.
+
+The authorship of these plays is not ascribed to any dramatist, until
+1623, although, as we have seen,[2] Robert Greene accuses {135}
+Shakespeare of authorship in a stolen play, by applying to him a line
+from _III Henry VI_ which had appeared earlier in 2 _Contention_.
+Internal study of the three plays, however, has reduced the problem to
+about this state:--
+
+_The First Part of Henry VI_ is thought to have been written by Greene,
+with George Peele and Marlowe to help.  To this Shakespeare was allowed
+to add a few scenes on a later revival of the play.  Some critics give
+to him the Talbot scenes and the quarrel in the Temple; but Professor
+Neilson warns us that the grounds for this and other assignments of
+authorship in the play "are in the highest degree precarious."
+
+The two _Contentions_ are thought to have been chiefly the work of
+Marlowe, with Greene to help him.  Others are suggested as assistants,
+such as Lodge, Peele, and Shakespeare.  In the revival of the two
+_Contentions_, Shakespeare's work amounted to a close revision, though
+the older material remained in larger part, both in text and plot.  In
+this revision, Marlowe is thought to have aided, and Greene's bitter
+attack on Shakespeare may have been caused by the fact that Shakespeare
+had so supplanted him as collaborator with Marlowe, then the greatest
+dramatist of England.  It hardly seems likely that this attack would
+have been made if Shakespeare had had any share in the first versions,
+_The Contentions_.
+
++Date+.--_The First Part of Henry VI_ is thought to have been the play
+at the Rose Theatre on March 3, 1591-1692, by Lord Strange's company,
+since a reference by Nash about this time refers to Talbot as a stage
+figure.  The _Second and Third Parts_ have no evidence other than that
+of style, but are usually assigned to the period 1590-1592.
+
+
++Richard the Third+ is best treated at this point, although in the date
+of composition _King John_ may intervene between it and _III Henry VI_.
+It is the tale of a tyrant, who, by murdering everybody who stands in
+his way, including his two nephews, his brother, and his friend, wins
+the crown of England, only to be swept by {136} irresistible popular
+wrath into ruin and death on Bosworth Field.  This tyrant is scarcely
+human, but rather the impersonation  of  a great  passion of ambition.
+In this respect, as well as in lack of humor, lack of development of
+character, and in other ways less easy to grasp, Shakespeare is here
+distinctly imitative of Marlowe's method in plays like _Tamburlaine_.
+
+
++Date+.--_Richard the Third_ was very popular among Elizabethans, for
+quartos appeared in 1597, 1598 (then first ascribed to Shakespeare),
+1602, 1605, 1612, 1629, 1622, and 1634.  The First Folio version is
+quite different in detail from the Quarto, and is thought to have been
+a good copy of an acting version.  The date of writing can hardly be
+later than 1598.
+
++Source+.--An anonymous play called _The True Tragedie of Richard III_
+had appeared before Shakespeare's; just when is uncertain.  A still
+earlier play, a tragedy in Latin called _Richardus Tertius_, also told
+the story.  Shakespeare's chief source was, however, Holinshed's
+_Chronicles_, which learned the tradition of Richard's wickedness from
+a life of that king written in Henry VII's time, and ascribed to Sir
+Thomas More.  In the _Chronicles_ was but a bare outline of the
+character which the dramatist so powerfully developed.
+
+
++King John+, so far as its central theme may be said to exist, portrays
+the ineffectual struggles of a crafty and unscrupulous coward to stick
+to England's slippery throne.  At first King John is successful.
+Bribed with the rich dowry of Blanch, niece of England, as a bride for
+his son the Dauphin, King Philip of France ceases his war upon England
+in behalf of Prince Arthur, John's nephew and rival.  When the Church
+turns against John for his refusal to obey the Pope, and France and
+Austria continue the war, John is victorious, and captures Prince
+Arthur.  At this point begins his {137} downfall.  His cruel treatment
+of the young prince, while not actually ending in the murder he had
+planned, drives the boy to attempted escape and to death.  The nobles
+rise and welcome the Dauphin, whose invasion of England proves
+fruitless, it is true, but the victory is not won by John, and the king
+dies ignobly at Swinstead Abbey.
+
+Two characters rise above the rest in this drama of unworthy
+schemes,--Constance, the passionately devoted mother of Prince Arthur,
+who fights for her son with almost tigress-like ferocity, and
+Faulconbridge, the loyal lieutenant of King John, cynical and fond of
+bragging, but brave and patriotic, and gifted with a saving grace of
+rough humor, much needed in the sordid atmosphere he breathes.  One
+single scene contains a note of pathos otherwise foreign to the
+play,--that in which John's emissary Hubert begins his cruel task of
+blinding poor Prince Arthur, but yields to pity and forbears.
+
+
++Date+.--_The Troublesome Raigne_ was published in 1591, and probably
+written about that time.  Shakespeare's play did not appear in print
+until the First Folio, 1623.  Meres mentions it, however, in 1598, and
+internal evidence of meter and style, as well as of dramatic structure,
+puts the play between _Richard III_ and _Richard II_, or at any rate
+close to them.  The three plays have been arranged in every order by
+critics of authority.  Perhaps 1592-1593 is a safe date.
+
++Source+.--The only source was the two parts of _The Troublesome Raigne
+of John, King of England_, a play which appeared anonymously in quarto
+in 1591.  Shakespeare compressed the two parts into one, gaining
+obvious advantages thereby, but losing also some incidents without
+which the later play is unmotivated.  The hatred felt by Faulconbridge
+for Austria was due in the earlier version to the legendary belief that
+{138} Richard Coeur-de-Lion, his father, met death at Austria's hands.
+No reference to this is made by Shakespeare, but the hatred remains as
+a motive.  In the opening scene between the Bastard and his mother,
+Shakespeare's condensation has injured the story somewhat.  But most of
+his changes are improvements.  He cut out the pandering to religious
+prejudice which in the earlier play made John a Protestant hero to suit
+Elizabethan opinion.  He improved the exits and entrances, divided the
+scenes in more effective ways, and built up the element of comic relief
+in Faulconbridge's red-blooded humor.
+
+The numerous alterations from historical fact, such as the youth of
+Arthur, the widowhood of Constance, the character of Faulconbridge, are
+all from the earlier version, as is the suppression of the baron's wars
+and Magna Charta.  Shakespeare added practically nothing to the action
+in his source.
+
+A still earlier play, _Kynge Johan_ by Bishop John Bale (c. 1650), had
+nothing to do with later versions.
+
+
++Richard the Second+, unlike _Richard the Third_, is not simply the
+story of one man.  While Richard III is on the stage during more than
+two-thirds of the latter play, Richard II appears during almost exactly
+half of the action.  Richard III dominates his play throughout; Richard
+II in only two or three scenes.  Richard's two uncles, John of Gaunt
+and the Duke of York, and his two cousins, Hereford (Bolingbroke, later
+Henry IV) and Aumerle, claim almost as much of our attention as does
+the central figure of the play, the light, vain, and thoughtless king.
+
+And yet with all this improvement in the adjustment of the leading role
+to the whole picture, Shakespeare drew a far more real and complete
+character in Richard II than any he had yet portrayed in historical
+drama.  It is a character seen in many lights.  At first we are
+disappointed with Richard's love of the {139} spectacular when he
+allows Bolingbroke's challenge to Mowbray to go as far as the actual
+sounding of the trumpets in the lists before he casts down his warder
+and decrees the banishment of both.  A little later we see with disgust
+his greedy thoughtlessness, when he insults the last hour of John of
+Gaunt by his importunate visit, and without a word of regret lays hold
+of his dead uncle's property to help on his own Irish wars.  Nor does
+our respect for him rise at all when in the critical moment, upon the
+return of Bolingbroke to England, Richard's weak will vacillates
+between action and unmanly lament, and all the while his vanity
+delights to paint his misery in full-mouth'd rhetoric.  Vanity is again
+the note of his abdication, when he calls for a mirror in which to
+behold the face that has borne such sorrow as his, and then in a fit of
+almost childish rage dashes the glass upon the ground.  His whole life,
+like that one act, has been impulsive and futile.
+
+But now that misfortune and degradation have come upon King Richard,
+Shakespeare compels us to turn from disgust to pity, and finally almost
+to admiration.  We realize that after all Richard is a king, and that
+his wretched state demands compassion.  Moreover, a nobler side of
+Richard's character is portrayed.  His deeply touching farewell to his
+loving Queen, as he goes to his solitary confinement, though tinged
+with almost unmanly meekness of spirit, is yet poignant with true
+grief.  And the last scene of all, in which he dies, vainly yet bravely
+resisting his murderers, is a gallant end to a life so full of
+indecision.
+
+{140}
+
+In strong contrast with this weak and still absorbing figure are the
+two high-minded and patriotic uncles of King Richard, and the masterful
+though unscrupulous Henry.  The famous prophetic speech of dying John
+of Gaunt is committed to memory by every English schoolboy, as the
+expression of the highest patriotism in the noblest poetry.  And just
+as our attitude towards Richard changes from contempt to pity and even
+admiration, so our admiration for Henry, the man of action and, as he
+calls himself, "the true-borne Englishman," turns into indignation at
+his usurpation of the throne and his connivance, to use no stronger
+term, at the murder of his sovereign.  Throughout the play, however,
+Shakespeare makes us feel that the national cause demands Henry's
+triumph.
+
+
++Date+.--Marlowe's _Edward II_ is usually dated 1593; and Shakespeare's
+_Richard II_ is dated the year following, in order to accommodate facts
+to theory.  The frequency of rime points to an earlier date, the
+absence of prose to a later date.  Our only certain date is 1597, when
+a quarto appeared.  Others followed in 1598, 1608, and 1615.
+
+A play "of the deposing of Richard II" was performed by wish of the
+Earl of Essex in London streets in 1601, on the eve of his attempted
+revolt against the queen.  If this was our play, then Essex failed as
+signally in understanding the real theme of the play as he did in
+interpreting the attitude of Englishmen toward him.  Both the one and
+the other condemned usurpation in the strongest terms.
+
++Source+.--Holinshed's _Chronicles_ furnished Shakespeare with but the
+bare historical outline.  It is usual to suggest that Marlowe's
+portrayal of a similarly weak figure with a similarly tragic end
+suggested Shakespeare's play; and this may be, though there is nothing
+to indicate direct influence.
+
+{141}
+
++Titus Andronicus+ has a plot so revolting to modern readers that many
+critics like to follow the seventeenth-century tradition, which tells,
+according to a writer who wanted to justify his own tinkering, that
+Shakespeare added "some master-touches to one or two of the principal
+characters," and nothing more.  But unfortunately not only the
+phraseology and the meter, but the more important external evidences
+point to Shakespeare, and, however we might wish it, we cannot find
+grounds to dismiss the theory that Shakespeare was at least responsible
+for the rewriting of an older play.
+
+No play better deserves the type name of 'tragedy of blood.'  The
+crimes which disfigure its scenes seem to us unnecessarily wanton.
+Briefly, the struggle is between Titus, conqueror of the Goths, and
+Tamora, their captive queen, who marries the Roman emperor, and who
+would revenge Titus's sacrifice of her son to the shades of his own
+slain sons.  From the first five minutes, during which a noble Goth is
+hacked to pieces--off stage, mercifully--to the last minute of carnage,
+when the entire company go hands all round in murder, fifteen persons
+are slain, and other crimes no less horrible perpetrated.  Every one at
+some time gets his revenge; and the play is entirely made up of
+plotting, killing, gloating, and counterplotting.  The inhumanly brutal
+Aaron, the blackamoor lover of Tamora, is arch villain in all this; but
+the ungovernable passions of Titus render him scarcely more attractive.
+
+The pity of it is that the young Shakespeare apparently wasted upon
+this slaughtering much genuine {142} poetic art, and no little
+elaboration of plot.  But he was writing what the public of that day
+enjoyed.  Developed by such real artists as Kyd, the tragedy of blood,
+like the modern "thriller," had about 1590 an enormous success.  It is
+well for us to remember, too, that out of one of these tragedies of
+revenge and blood sprang the great tragedy of _Hamlet_.
+
+
++Date+.--The most recent authorities put the play as written not long
+before the publication of the First Quarto, 1594.  The Stationers'
+Register records it on February 6, 1593-4.  Second and Third Quartos
+followed in 1600 and 1611.  None of these ascribe the play to
+Shakespeare.  It is, however, included in the First Folio.
+
++Authorship and Source+.--Richard Henslowe, the manager, recorded in
+his Diary, April 11, 1591, the performance of a new play _Tittus and
+Vespacia_.  In a German version, _Tito Andronico_, printed in a
+collection of 1620, Lucius is called Vespasian; and thus we have a
+slight ground for belief that the entry of Henslowe refers to an early
+play about our Titus.  A Dutch version, _Aran en Titus_, appeared in
+1641.  This appears to have been based on another relation of the
+story, earlier and cruder than Shakespeare's.  The Shakespearean
+version probably came from these two earlier plays, with considerable
+additions in plot.
+
+The two latest students of the play, Dr. Fuller and Mr. Robertson,
+differ as far as they well can on the question of authorship.  The
+former believes Shakespeare wrote every line of the present play; the
+latter that he wrote none of it, and that Greene and Peele had their
+full share.  Kyd and Marlowe are assigned as authors by others.  One
+fact stands clear, that in the face of the evidence of the First Folio
+and of Meres, no conclusive internal evidence has disposed of the
+theory of Shakespearean authorship.  The play was enormously popular,
+if we may judge by contemporary references to it, and a mistake in
+attribution by Meres would therefore have been the more {143}
+remarkable.  Incredible, too, as it may seem, the earlier versions must
+have been more revolting than Shakespeare's; so that there is really a
+lift into higher drama.
+
+
++Romeo and Juliet+ stands out from the other great tragedies of
+Shakespeare, not only in point of time, but in its central theme.  It
+deals with the power of nature in awaking youth to full manhood and
+womanhood through the sudden coming of pure and supreme love; with the
+danger which always attends the precipitate call of this awakening; and
+with the sudden storm which overcasts the brilliant day of passion.
+The enmity of the rival houses of Montague and Capulet, to which Romeo
+and Juliet belong, is but a concrete form of this danger that ever
+waits when nature prompts.  Romeo's fancied love for another disappears
+like a drop of water on a stone in the sun, when his glance meets
+Juliet's at the Capulet's ball.  Love takes equally sudden hold of her.
+Worldly and religious caution seek to stem the flood of passion, or at
+least to direct it.  The lovers are married at Friar Laurence's cell;
+but in the sudden whirl of events that follow the friar's amiable
+schemes, one slight error on his part wastes all that glorious passion
+and youth have won.  It was not his fault, after all; such is the
+eternal tragedy when Youth meets Love, and Nature leads them
+unrestrained to peril.
+
+In perfection of dramatic technique parts of this play rank with the
+very best of Shakespeare's work.  When to this is added the
+extraordinary beauty and fire of the poetry, and the brilliancy of
+color and stage picture afforded by the setting in old Verona, it is no
+wonder that to-day no mouthing of the words, no {144} tawdriness of
+setting, and no wretchedness of acting can hinder the supreme appeal of
+this play to audiences all over the world.  The chief characters are
+well contrasted by the dramatist.  Romeo, affecting sadness, but in
+reality merry by nature, becomes grave when the realization of love
+comes upon him.  Juliet, when love comes, rises gladly to meet its full
+claim.  She is the one who plans and dares, and Romeo the one who
+listens.  Contrasted with Romeo is his friend, Mercutio, gay and
+daring, loving and light-hearted; contrasted with Juliet is her old
+nurse, devoted, like the family cat, but unscrupulous, vain, and
+worldly,--a great comic figure.
+
+
++Date+.--There is throughout the play, but chiefly in the rimed
+passages in the earlier parts, a great deal of verbal conceit and
+playing upon words, which mark immaturity.  The use of sonnets in two
+places, and the abundance of rime, point also to early work; but the
+dramatic technique and the development of character equal the work of
+later periods.
+
+The First Quarto is a garbled copy taken down in the theater.  It was
+printed in 1597.  Its title claims that "it hath been often (with great
+applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon
+his servants."  The company in which Shakespeare acted was so called
+from July, 1596, to April, 1597.  The Second Quarto, "newly corrected,
+augmented, and amended," appeared in 1599, and is the basis of all
+later texts.  Three others followed--1609, one undated, and 1637.
+
+It is generally held that Shakespeare wrote much, perhaps all, of the
+play in the early nineties, and that he revised it for production about
+1597.  The play is therefore a stepping-stone between the first and
+second periods of his work.
+
++Source+.--The development of the story has been traced from Luigi da
+Porto's history of _Romeo and Giulietta_ (pr. 1530 at Venice) through
+Bandello, Boisteau, and Painter's _Palace of {145} Pleasure_, to Arthur
+Brooke's poem _Romeus and Juliet_ (1562), and to a lost English play
+which Brooke says in his address "To the Reader" he had seen on the
+stage, but is now known only through a Dutch play of 1630 based upon it.
+
+The part in which Shakespeare altered the action most notably is the
+first scene, one of the most masterly expositions of a dramatic
+situation ever written.  The nurse is borrowed from Brooke, the death
+of Mercutio from the old play.  The whole is, however, completely
+transfused by the welding fire of genius.
+
+
++Love's Labour's Lost+.--Obviously imitative of the comedies of John
+Lyly, _Love's Labour's Lost_ is a light, pleasant court comedy, with
+but a slight thread of plot.  The king of Navarre and three of his
+nobles forswear for three years the society of ladies in order to
+pursue study.  This plan is interrupted by the Princess of France, who
+with three ladies comes on an embassy to Navarre.  The inevitable
+happens; the gentlemen fall in love with the ladies, and, after
+ineffectual struggles to keep their oaths, give up the pursuit of
+learning for that of love.  This runs on merrily enough in courtly
+fashion till the announcement of the death of the king of France ends
+the embassy, and the lovers are put on a year's probation of constancy.
+In the subplot, or minor story, the play is notable for the burlesquing
+of two types of character--a pompous pedantic schoolmaster, and a
+braggart who always speaks in high-flown metaphor.  These two, happily
+contrasted with a country curate, a court page, and a country clown
+with his lass, make much good sport.
+
+It is often said, but as we believe without sufficient proof, that the
+wit combats of the lords and ladies, {146} and the artificial speech of
+the sonneteering courtiers, were also introduced for burlesque.  These
+elements appear, however, in other plays than this, with no intention
+of burlesque; and it seems probable that Shakespeare greatly enjoyed
+this display of his power as a master in the prevailing fashion of
+courtly repartee.  In this fashion, as well as in the handling of the
+low-comedy figures, and in other ways, Shakespeare followed in the
+steps of John Lyly, the author of the novel _Euphues_ and of the seven
+court comedies written in the decade before _Love's Labour's Lost_.
+Shakespeare's play, however, far surpasses those which it imitated.
+
+
++Date+.--The date of _Love's Labour's Lost_ is entirely a matter of
+conjecture.  It may well have been the very earliest of Shakespeare's
+comedies.  Most scholars agree that the characteristics of style to
+which we have referred, together with the great use of rime (see p. 81)
+and the immaturity of the play as a whole, must indicate a very early
+date, and therefore put the play not later than 1591.
+
+A quarto was published in 1598, "newly corrected and augmented by W.
+Shakespere."  The corrections, from certain mistakes of the printer,
+appear to be in the speeches of the wittiest of the lords and ladies,
+Biron and Rosaline.  The play next appeared in the Folio.
+
++Source+.--No direct source has been discovered.  In 1586, Catherine
+de' Medici, accompanied by her ladies, visited the court of Henry of
+Navarre, and attempted to settle the disputes between that prince and
+her son, Henry III.  Other hints may also have come from French
+history.  The masque of Muscovites may have been based on the joke
+played on a Russian ambassador in York Gardens in 1582, when the
+ambassador was hoping to get a lady of Elizabeth's court as a wife for
+the Czar.  A mocking presentation of this lady was made with much
+ceremony.
+
+
+{147}
+
++The Comedy of Errors+.--Mistaken identity (which the Elizabethans
+called "Error") is nearly always amusing, whether on the stage or in
+actual life.  _The Comedy of Errors_ is a play in which this situation
+is developed to the extreme of improbability; but we lose sight of this
+in the roaring fun which results.  Nowadays we should call a play of
+this type a farce, since most of the fun comes in this way from
+situations which are improbable, and since the play depends on these
+for success rather than on characterization or dialogue.
+
+A merchant of Syracuse has had twin sons, and bought twin servants for
+them.  His wife with one twin son and his twin slave has been lost by
+shipwreck and has come to live in Ephesus.  The other son and slave,
+when grown, have started out to find their brothers, and the father,
+some years later, starts out to find him.  They come to Ephesus, and an
+amusing series of errors at once begins.  The wife takes the wrong twin
+for her husband, the master beats the wrong slave, the wrong son
+disowns his father, the twin at Ephesus is arrested instead of his
+brother, and the twin slave Dromio of Syracuse is claimed as a husband
+by a black kitchen girl of Ephesus.  The situation gets more and more
+mixed, until at last the real identity of the strangers from Syracuse
+is established, and all ends happily.
+
+
++Date+.--There is much wordplay of a rather cheap kind, much doggerel,
+and much jingling rime in this play.  All these things point to early
+work.  A reference (III, ii, 125-127) to France "making war against her
+heir" admits the play to the period 1585-1594, when Henry of Navarre
+was received as king {148} of France.  The play was probably written
+not later than 1591.  The play was first printed in the First Folio.
+
++Source+.--Shakespeare borrowed most of his plot from the _Menaechmi_
+of Plautus.  Shakespeare added to Plautus's story the second twin-slave
+and the parents, together with the girl whom the elder twin meets and
+loves in Syracuse.  This elaboration of the plot adds much to the
+attractiveness of the whole story.  From the _Amphitruo_ of Plautus,
+Shakespeare derived the doubling of slaves, and the scene in which the
+younger twin and his slave are shut out of their own home.
+
+
++The Two Gentlemen of Verona+ is the first of the series of
+Shakespeare's romantic comedies.  Our interest in this play turns upon
+the purely romantic characters; two friends, one true, the other
+recreant; the true friend exiled to an outlaw's life in a forest, the
+false in favor at court; two loving girls, one fair and radiant, the
+other dark and slighted, and following her lover in boy's dress; two
+clowns, Speed and Lance, one a mere word tosser, the other of rare
+humor.  The plot is of slighter importance; a discovered elopement, and
+a maiden rescued from rude, uncivil hands, are the only incidents of
+account.  All ends happily as in romance, and the recreant friend is
+forgiven.
+
+_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ was an experiment along certain
+directions which were later to repay the dramatist most richly.  Here
+first an exquisite lyric interprets the romantic note in the play; here
+first the production of a troth-plight ring confounds the faithless
+lover, and here we first meet one of the charming group of loving
+ladies in disguise.
+
+But as a whole the play is disappointing.  The plot is too fantastic;
+Proteus too much of a cad; Julia, though brave and modest, is yet too
+faithful; Valentine {149} too easy a friend.  The illusion of romance
+throws a transitory glamour over the scene, but, save in the
+development of character, the play seems immature, when compared with
+the greater comedies that followed it.
+
+
++Date+.--The first mention of the play is by Meres (1598); the first
+print that in the First Folio (1623).  The presence of alternate riming
+sonnets and doggerel rime on the one hand, and of a number of double
+endings on the other, render 1592 a reasonable date.  In its
+development of character it marks a great advance over the other two
+comedies of this period.
+
++Source+.--The chief source was a story of a shepherdess, an episode in
+the Spanish novel, _Diana Enamorada_, by Jorge de Montemayor (1592).
+Shakespeare probably read it in an English translation by B. Yonge,
+which had been in Ms. about ten years.  This story gives Julia's part
+of the play, but contains no Valentine.  The Silvia of the story,
+Celia, falls in love instead with the disguised Felismena, and when
+rejected kills herself.  Whether it was Shakespeare who felt the need
+of a Valentine to support the tale, or whether this was done in the
+lost play of _Felix and Philiomena_, acted in 1584, cannot be told.
+The Valentine element may have been borrowed from another play, of
+which a German version exists (1620).
+
+
++Midsummer Night's Dream+ is Shakespeare's experiment in the fairy
+play.  Four lovers, two young Athenians of high birth and their
+sweethearts, are almost inextricably tangled by careless Robin
+Goodfellow, who has dropped the juice of love-in-idleness upon the eyes
+of the wrong lovers.  King Oberon tricks his capricious and resentful
+little queen, by the aid of the same juice, into the absurdest
+infatuation for a clownish weaver, who has come out with his mates to
+rehearse a play to celebrate Theseus's wedding, but has fallen asleep
+and {150} wakened to find an ass's head planted upon him.  All comes
+right, as it ever must in fairyland; the true lovers are reunited; the
+faithful unloved lady gets her faithless lover; Titania repents and is
+forgiven; and Theseus's wedding is graced by the "mirthfullest tragedy
+that ever was seen."
+
+We have in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ three distinct groups of
+characters--the lovers, the city clowns rehearsing for the play, and
+the fairies.  These three diverse groups are combined in the most
+skillful way by an intricate interweaving of plot and by the final
+appearance of all three groups at the wedding festivities of the Duke
+of Athens and his Amazon bride Hypolita.  The characterization, light
+but delicate throughout, the mastery of the intricate story, the
+perfection of the comic parts, and the unsurpassed lyrical power of the
+poetry, are all the evidence we need that Shakespeare is now his own
+master in the drama, and can pass on to the supreme heights of his art.
+He has learned his trade for good and all.
+
+It is not a bad way of placing the last of the comedies in the first
+period of Shakespeare's production, to say that it is the counterpart
+in comedy of _Romeo and Juliet_.  Like Romeo, Lysander has made love to
+Hermia, has sung at her window by moonlight, and has won her heart,
+while her father has promised her hand to another.  Like the lovers in
+the tragedy, Lysander and Hermia plan flight, and an error in this plan
+would have been as fatal as it was in Romeo and Juliet, but for the
+kind interposition of the fairies.  Again, the "tedious brief scene" of
+Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the rustics at the close of the play,
+is {151} nothing but a delightful parody on the very theme of Romeo and
+Juliet, even to the mistaken death, and the suicide of the heroine upon
+realization of the truth.  At the end of the parody, as if in mockery
+of the Capulets and Montagues, Bottom starts up to tell us that "the
+wall is down that parted their fathers."  Finally, the whole fairy
+story is the creation of Shakespeare in a Mercutio mood.
+
+In the diversity of its metrical form, _Midsummer Night's Dream_ is
+also the counterpart of _Romeo and Juliet_.  The abundance of rimed
+couplet, combined wherever there is intensity of feeling with a perfect
+form of blank verse, is reminiscent of the earlier play.  Passages of
+equally splendid poetic power meet us all through, while at the same
+time we feel the very charm of youthful fervor in expression that the
+tragedy displayed.
+
+
++Date+.--There is nothing certain to guide us in assigning a date to
+the play, except the mention of it in Meres's list, in 1598.  The
+absence of a uniform structure of verse, the large proportion of rime
+(partly due, of course, to the nature of the play), the unequal measure
+of characterization, and the number of passages of purely lyric beauty
+argue an earlier date than students who notice only the skillful plot
+structure are willing to assign.  Perhaps 1593-5 would indicate this
+variation in authorities.  Some evidence, of the slightest kind, is
+advanced for 1594.  A quarto was printed in 1600, another with the
+spurious date 1600, really in 1619.
+
++Source+.--The plot of the lovers has no known direct source.  The
+_Diana Enamorada_ has a love potion with an effect similar to that of
+Oberon's.  The wedding of Theseus and the Amazon queen is the opening
+theme of Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and some minor details may also
+have been borrowed from that story.  No doubt, Shakespeare had also
+read for details North's {152} account of Theseus in his translation of
+Plutarch.  Pyramus and Thisbe came originally from Ovid's
+_Metamorphoses_, which had been translated into English before this
+time.  Chaucer tells the same story in his _Legend of Good Women_.
+
+The fairies are almost entirely Shakespeare's creation.  Titania was
+one of Ovid's names for Diana; Oberon was a common name for the fairy
+king, both in the _Faerie Queene_ and elsewhere.  Robin Goodfellow was
+a favorite character among the common folks.  But fairies, as we all
+know them, are like the Twins in _Through the Looking-glass_, things of
+the fancy of one man, and that man Shakespeare.
+
+There is the atmosphere of a wedding about the whole play, and this
+fact has led most scholars to think that the play was written for some
+particular wedding,--just whose has never been settled.  The flattery
+of the virgin Queen (II, i, 157 f.) and other references to purity
+might show that Queen Elizabeth was one of the wedding guests.
+
+
+
+[1] Schelling, _Elizabethan Drama_ I, 264.
+
+[2] See p. 8.
+
+
+
+
+{153}
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE SECOND PERIOD--COMEDY AND HISTORY
+
+It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that Shakespeare was ever
+less than the greatest dramatist of his time, to think of him as the
+pupil and imitator of other dramatists.  He did, indeed, pass through
+this stage of his development with extraordinary rapidity, so that its
+traces are barely perceptible in the later plays of his First Period.
+In the plays of his Second Period even these traces disappear.  If his
+portrayal of Shylock shows the influence of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, it
+is in no sense derivative, and it is the last appearance in
+Shakespeare's work of characterization clearly dependent upon the plays
+of his predecessors.  However much Shakespeare's choice of themes may
+have been determined by the public taste or by the work of his fellows,
+in the creation of character he is henceforth his own master.  Having
+acquired this mastery, he uses it to depict life in its most joyous
+aspect.  For the time being he dwells little upon men's failures and
+sorrows.  He does not ignore life's darker side,--he loved life too
+well for that,--but he uses it merely as a background for pictures of
+youth and happiness and success.  Although among the comedies of this
+period he wrote also three historical plays, they {154} have not the
+tragic character of the earlier histories.  They deal with youth and
+hope instead of crime, weakness, and failure.  In the two parts of
+_Henry IV_ there is quite as much comedy as there is history; in _Henry
+V_, even though the comic interest is slighter, the theme is still one
+of youth and joy as personified in the figure of the vigorous,
+successful young king.  For convenience' sake, however, we may separate
+the histories from the comedies.  To do this we shall have to depart
+somewhat from chronological order, and, since there are fewer
+histories, we shall consider them first.
+
++Henry IV, Part I+.--To the development of Henry V from the wayward
+prince to one of England's most beloved heroes, Shakespeare devoted
+three plays, _Henry IV_, _Parts I_ and _II_, and _Henry V_.  The
+historical event around which the first of these centers is the
+rebellion of the Percies, which culminated in the defeat and death of
+Harry Percy, 'Hotspur,' on Shrewsbury field.  In _Richard II_,
+Shakespeare had foreshadowed what was to come.  The deposed king had
+prophesied that his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, crowned as Henry IV,
+would fall out with the great Percy family which had put him on the
+throne; that the Percies would never be satisfied with what Henry would
+do for them; and that Henry would hate and distrust them on the ground
+that those who had made a king could unmake one as well.  And this
+prophecy was fulfilled.  Uniting with the Scots under Douglas, with the
+Archbishop of York, with Glendower, who was seeking to reestablish the
+independence of Wales, and with Mortimer, the natural successor of
+Richard, {155} the Percies raised the standard of revolt.  What might
+have happened had all things gone as they were planned, we can never
+know; but Northumberland, the head of the family, feigned sickness;
+Glendower and Mortimer were kept away; the Archbishop dallied; and
+failure was the result.  This situation gave Shakespeare an opportunity
+to paint a number of remarkable portraits; but the scheming, crafty
+Worcester, the vacillating Northumberland, the mystic Glendower, are
+all overshadowed by the figure of Hotspur, wrong-headed, impulsive, yet
+so aflame with young life and enthusiasm, so ready to dare all for
+honor's sake, that he is almost more attractive than the Prince
+himself.  Over against the older leaders of the rebellion stands the
+lonely figure of Henry IV, misunderstood and little loved by his sons,
+who has centered his whole existence upon getting and keeping the
+throne of England.  To this one end he bends every energy of his
+shrewd, strong, hard nature.  Such a man could never understand a
+personality like that of his older son, nor could the son understand
+the father.  Prince Hal, loving life in all its manifestations, joy in
+all its forms, could find small satisfaction in the rigid etiquette of
+a loveless court so long as it offered him an opportunity for little
+more than formal activity.  When the rebellion of the Percies showed
+him that he could do the state real service, he seized his opportunity
+gladly, gayly, modestly.  On his father's cause he centered the
+energies which he had previously scattered.  With this new demand to
+meet, he no longer had time for his old companions.  His old life was
+thrown off like a coat discarded under stress of work.  {156} Even
+before that time came, however, Hal was not one who could enjoy
+ordinary low company; but the friends which had distracted him were far
+from ordinary.  In Falstaff, the leader of the riotous group,
+Shakespeare created one of the greatest comic figures in all
+literature.  Never at a loss, Falstaff masters alike sack,
+difficulties, and companions.  He is an incarnation of joy for whom
+moral laws do not exist.  Because he will not fight when he sees no
+chance of victory, he has been called a coward, but no coward ever had
+such superb coolness in the face of danger.  Falstaff's conduct in a
+fight is explained by his contempt for all conventions which bring no
+joy--a standard which reduces honor to a mere word.  So full of joy was
+he that he inspired it in his companions.  To be with him was to be
+merry.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, and a quarto
+was printed in 1598.  Meres mentions the play without indicating
+whether he meant one part or both.  The evidence of meter and style
+point to a date much earlier than Meres's entry, so that 1597 is the
+year to which Part I is commonly assigned.
+
++Source+.--For the serious plot of this play, Shakespeare drew upon
+Holinshed.  He had no scruples, however, against altering history for
+dramatic purposes.  Thus he brings within a much shorter period of time
+the battles in Wales and Scotland, makes Hal and Hotspur of
+approximately the same age, and unites two people in the character of
+Mortimer.  The situations in the scenes which show Hal with Falstaff
+and his fellows are largely borrowed from an old play called _The
+Famous Victories of Henry V_, but this source furnished only the barest
+and crudest outlines, and gave practically no hint of the characters as
+Shakespeare conceived them.  The reference in Act I, Sc. ii, to
+Falstaff as the 'old lad of the castle' shows that his name was
+originally {157} Oldcastle, as in _The Famous Victories_.  Oldcastle
+was a historical personage quite unlike Falstaff, and it is supposed
+that the change was made to spare the feeling of Oldcastle's
+descendants.
+
+
++Henry IV, Part II+.--This part is less a play than a series of loosely
+connected scenes.  The final suppression of the rebellion, which had
+been continued by the Archbishop of York, the sickness and death of
+Henry IV, and the accession of Prince Hal as Henry V, are matters
+essentially undramatic and incapable of unified treatment, while the
+growing separation of Hal and Falstaff deprived the underplot of that
+close connection with the main action which it had in the preceding
+play.  Feeling the weakness of the main plot, Shakespeare reduced it to
+a subordinate position, making it little more than a series of
+historical pictures inserted between the scenes in which Falstaff and
+his companions figure.  He enriched this part of the play, on the other
+hand, by the introduction of a number of superbly poetical speeches,
+the best known of which is that beginning, "O Sleep, O gentle Sleep."
+To the comic groups Shakespeare added a number of new figures, among
+them the braggart Pistol, whose speech bristles with the high-sounding
+terms he has borrowed from the theater, and old Justice Shallow, so
+fond of recalling the gay nights and days which are as much figments of
+his imagination as is his assumed familiarity with the great John of
+Gaunt.  By placing more stress upon the evil and less pleasing sides of
+Falstaff's nature, Shakespeare evidently intended to prepare his
+readers' minds for the definite break between old Jack and the new
+king; but in this wonderful man he had created a character so
+fascinating that he could not spoil it; and {158} the king's public
+rejection of Falstaff comes as a painful shock which, impresses one as
+much with the coldly calculating side of the Bolingbroke nature as it
+does with the sad inevitability of the rupture.
+
+
++Source and Date+.--The sources for this play are the same as those of
+its predecessor.  Although the first and only quarto was not printed
+until 1600, there is a reference to this part in Jonson's _Every Man
+Out of his Humour_, which was produced in 1599.  It must, therefore,
+have been written shortly after Part I, and it is accordingly dated
+1598.
+
+
++Henry V+.--In this, which is really the third play of a trilogy,
+Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment quite unlike that which
+characterizes the other two.  _Henry V_ is really a dramatized epic, an
+almost lyric rhapsody cast in the form of dialogue.  Falstaff has
+disappeared from view, and is recalled only by the affecting story of
+his death.  This episode, however, brief as it is, reveals the love
+which the old knight evoked from his companions, while the narrative of
+his last hours is the more pathetic for being put in the mouth of the
+comic figure of Dame Quickly.  Falstaff's place was one which could not
+be filled, and the comic scenes become comparatively insignificant,
+although the quarrels of Pistol and the Welshman Fluellen have a
+distinctive humor.  A figure which replaces the classic chorus connects
+the scattered historical scenes by means of superb narrative verse.
+Each episode glorifies a new aspect of Henry's character.  We see him
+as the valiant soldier; as the leader rising superior to tremendous
+odds; as the democratic king who, concealing his rank, talks and jests
+with a common soldier; and {159} as the bluff, hearty suitor of a
+foreign bride.  In thus seeing him, moreover, we see not only the
+individual man; we see him as an ideal Englishman, as the embodiment of
+the type which the men of Shakespeare's day--and of ours, too, for that
+matter--loved and admired and honored.  In celebrating Henry's
+victories, Shakespeare was also celebrating England's more recent
+victories over her enemies abroad, so that the play is a great national
+paean, the song of heroic, triumphant England.
+
+
++Date and Source+.--Like its predecessors, _Henry V_ is founded on
+Holinshed, with some additions taken from the Famous Victories.  The
+allusion in the chorus which precedes Act V to the Irish expedition of
+the Earl of Essex fixes the date of composition between April 14 and
+September 28, 1599.  A quarto, almost certainly pirated, was printed in
+1600 and reprinted in 1602, 1608, and 1619 (in the latter with the
+false date of 1608).  The text of these quartos is, therefore, much
+inferior to that of the Folio.
+
+
++The Merchant of Venice+.--As usually presented on the modern stage,
+_The Merchant of Venice_ appears to be a comedy, which is overshadowed
+by one tragic figure, that of the Jew Shylock, the representative of a
+down-trodden people, deprived of his money by a tricky lawyer and
+deprived of his daughter by a tricky Christian.  Students, on the other
+hand, have maintained that to the Elizabethans Shylock was merely a
+comic figure, the defeat of whose vile plot to get the life of his
+Christian debtor, Antonio, by taking a pound of his flesh in place of
+the unpaid gold, was greeted with shouts of delighted laughter.  As a
+matter of fact, Shylock, then as now, was a human being, and by virtue
+{160} of that fact both ridiculous and pathetic.  In any case, whatever
+the dominant note of his character, he is not the dominant figure of
+the play.  If he were, the fifth act, which ends the play with
+moonlight and music and the laughter of happy lovers, would be
+distinctly out of place.  Yet it is in reality the absence of such
+defects of taste, the ability to bring everything into its proper
+place, to make a harmonious whole out of the most various tones, which
+best characterizes the Shakespearean comedy of this period.  Instead of
+being a play in which one great character is set in relief against a
+number of lesser ones, _The Merchant of Venice_ is a comedy in which
+there is an unusually large number of characters of nearly equal
+importance and an unusually large number of plots of nearly equal
+interest.  There is the plot which has to do with Portia's marriage, in
+which the right lover wins this gracious merry lady by choosing the
+proper one of three locked caskets.  There is the plot which deals with
+the elopement of the Jew's daughter, Jessica.  There is the plot which
+relates the story of the bond given by Antonio to the Jew in return for
+the loan which enables Antonio's friend, Bassanio, to carry on his suit
+for Portia's hand, the bond, which, when forfeited, would have cost
+Antonio his life had not Portia, disguised as a lawyer, defeated
+Shylock's treacherous design.  There is the plot which tells how
+Bassanio and his friend Gratiano give their wedding rings as rewards to
+the pretended lawyer and his assistant, really their wives Portia and
+Nerissa in disguise,--an act which gives the wives a chance to make
+much trouble for their lords.  And all these plots are worked out with
+an abundance of {161} interesting detail, and are so perfectly
+interwoven that the play has all of the wonderful harmony of a Turkish
+rug, as well as its brilliant variety.  No play of Shakespeare's
+depends more for its effect on plot, on the sheer interest of the
+stories, and no one has, consequently, situations which are more
+effective on the stage.  It is, perhaps, an inevitable result that the
+individual characters have a somewhat less permanent, less deeply
+satisfying charm than do those of the comedies which follow.  None of
+these successors, however, presents a larger or more varied group of
+delightful men and women.
+
+
++Date+.--The later limit of the date is settled by the mention of this
+play in Meres's catalogue, and by its entry in the Stationers' Register
+of that same year.  Basing their opinion on extremely unsubstantial
+internal evidence, some scholars have dated the play as early as 1594,
+but the evidence of style and construction make a date before 1596
+unlikely.  Two quartos were printed, one in 1600; the other, though
+copying the date 1600 upon its title-page, was probably printed in 1619.
+
++Source+.--The story of the pound of flesh and that of the choice of
+caskets are extremely ancient.  The former is combined with that of the
+wedding rings in Fiorentino's _Il Pecorone_ (the first novel of the
+fourth day), a story which Shakespeare probably knew and may have used.
+Alexander Silvayn's _The Orator_, printed in English translation in
+1596, has, in connection with a bond episode, speeches made by a Jew
+which may be the source of some of Shylock's lines.  The combination of
+these plots with those of Jessica and Nerissa is, so far as we can yet
+prove, original with Shakespeare; but we cannot be certain how much
+_The Merchant of Venice_ resembles a lost play of the Jew mentioned in
+Gosson's _School of Abuse_ (1579), "representing the greediness of
+worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of Usurers."
+
+
++The Taming of the Shrew+.--_The Taming of the Shrew_ is only in part
+the work of Shakespeare.  Just how {162} much he had to do with making
+over the underplot, we shall probably never know; but, in any case, he
+did not write the dialogue of this part of the play, and its
+construction is not particularly remarkable.  The winning of a girl by
+a suitor disguised as a teacher is a conventional theme of comedy, as
+is the disguising of a stranger to take the place of an absent father
+in order to confirm a young lover's suit.  The main plot Shakespeare
+certainly left as he found it.  It tells how an ungovernable, willful
+girl was made into a submissive wife by a husband who assumed for the
+purpose a manner even wilder than her own, so wild that not even she
+could endure it.  This story is presented in scenes of uproarious farce
+in which there is little opportunity for subtle characterization or the
+higher sort of comedy.  What Shakespeare did was to give to the hero
+and heroine, Petruchio and Katherine, a semblance of reality, and to
+add enormously to the life and movement of the scenes in which they
+appear.  Some of these scenes are very effective on the stage, but they
+are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities.  The
+induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite
+another matter.  The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately
+omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece.  A
+nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor
+before an inn.  The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has
+him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants who make him
+believe that he is really a lord, and finally has the play performed
+before him.  The outline of this induction was in the old play which
+Shakespeare revised; but {163} he developed the crude work of his
+predecessor into scenes so delightfully realistic, into
+characterization so richly humorous, that this induction takes its
+place among the great comic episodes of literature.
+
+
++Date+.--No certain evidence for the date of this play exists, even the
+metrical tests failing us because of the collaboration.  It is commonly
+assigned to the years 1596-7, but this is little more than a guess.
+
++Source+.--As has already been indicated, this play is the revision of
+an older play entitled _The Taming of a Shrew_.  The latter was
+probably written by a disciple of Marlowe, and was first printed in
+quarto in 1594.  The chief change which the revision made in the plot
+was that which gave Katherine one sister instead of two and added the
+interest of rival suitors for this sister's hand.  Stories concerning
+the taming of a shrewish woman are both ancient and common, but no
+direct antecedent of the older play has been discovered, although some
+incidents seem to have been borrowed from Gascoigue's _Supposes_, a
+translation from the Italian of Ariosto.
+
++Authorship+.--The identity of Shakespeare's collaborator is unknown,
+nor is it possible to define exactly the limits of his work.  It is
+practically certain, however, that Shakespeare wrote the Induction; II,
+i, 169-326; III, ii, with the possible exception of 130-150; IV, i,
+iii, and v; V, ii, at least as far as 175.
+
+
++The Merry Wives of Windsor+.--_The Merry Wives_ is the only comedy in
+which Shakespeare avowedly presents the middle-class people of an
+English town.  In other comedies English characters and customs appear
+through the thin disguise of Italian names; in the histories there are
+comic scenes drawn from English life; but only here does Shakespeare
+desert the city and the country for the small town and draw the larger
+number of his characters from the great middle class.  {164} A
+tradition has come down to us, one which is supported by the nature of
+the play, that Queen Elizabeth was so fascinated by the character of
+Falstaff as he appeared in _Henry IV_ that she requested Shakespeare to
+show Falstaff in love, and that Shakespeare, in obedience to this
+command, wrote the play within a fortnight.  Unless this tradition be
+true, it is difficult to explain why Shakespeare should have written a
+comedy which is, in comparison with his other work of this period, at
+once conventional and mediocre.  The subject--the intrigues of Falstaff
+with two married women, and the wooing of a commonplace girl by two
+foolish suitors and another as commonplace as herself--gave Shakespeare
+little opportunity for poetry and none for the portrayal of the types
+of character most congenial to his temperament.  The greatest blemish
+on the play, however, from the standpoint of a student of Shakespeare,
+is that the man called Falstaff is not Falstaff at all, that this
+Falstaff bears only an outward resemblance to the Falstaff of the
+historical plays.  If we may misquote the poet, Falstaff died a martyr,
+and this is not the man.  The real Falstaff would never have stooped to
+the weak devices adopted by the man who bears his name, would never
+have been three times the dupe of transparent tricks.  The task
+demanded of Shakespeare was one impossible of performance.  Falstaff
+could not have fallen in love in the way which the queen desired.  Nor
+is there much to compensate for this degradation of the greatest comic
+figure in literature.  Falstaff's companions share, although to a
+lesser degree, in their leader's fall, while the two comic figures
+which are original with this play are {165} comparatively unsuccessful
+studies in French and Welsh dialect.  Judged by Shakespeare's own
+standard, this work is as middle-class as its characters; judged by any
+other, it is an amusing comedy of intrigue, realistic in type and
+abounding in comic situations which approach the borderland of farce.
+
+
++Date+.--This play was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company
+January 18, 1602.  It was certainly written after the two parts of
+_Henry IV_, and if, as is most probable, the character of Nym is a
+revival and not an imperfect first sketch, the play must have succeeded
+_Henry V_.  On these grounds the play is best assigned to 1599.  It was
+first printed in quarto in 1602, but this version is extremely faulty,
+besides being considerably shorter than that of the First Folio.  The
+quarto seems to have been printed from a stenographic report of an
+acting version of the play, made by an unskillful reporter for a
+piratical publisher.
+
++Source+.--The main plot resembles a story derived from an Italian
+source which is found in Tarlton's _News out of Purgatorie_.  For the
+underplot and a number of details in the working out of the main plot,
+no source is known.
+
+
++Much Ado About Nothing+.--In this play, as nowhere else, Shakespeare
+has given us the boon of laughter--not the smile, not the uncontrolled
+guffaw, but rippling, melodious laughter.  From the beginning to the
+end this is the dominant note.  If the great trio of which this was the
+first be classified as romantic comedies, we may perhaps say that in
+speaking of the others we should lay the stress on the word 'romantic,'
+in this, on the word 'comedy.'  As regards the main plot, _Much Ado_
+is, to be sure, the most serious of the three.  When the machinations
+of the villainous Prince John lead Claudio to believe his intended
+bride {166} unfaithful, and to reject this pure-scaled Hero with
+violence and contumely at the very steps of the altar, we have a
+situation which borders on the tragic.  The mingled doubt, rage, and
+despair of Hero's father is, moreover, undoubtedly affecting.
+Nevertheless, powerful as these scenes are, they are so girt about with
+laughter that they cannot destroy our good spirits.  Even at their
+height, the manifestations of human wickedness, credulity, and weakness
+seem but the illusions of a moment, soon to be dissipated by the power
+of radiant mirth.  It is not without significance that the deep-laid
+plot should be defeated through the agency of the immortal Dogberry,
+most deliciously foolish of constables.  Nor is it mere chance that
+Hero and Claudio are so constantly accompanied by Beatrice and
+Benedick, that amazing pair to whom life is one long jest.  In the
+merry war which is constantly raging between these two, their shafts
+never fail of their mark, but neither is once wounded.  Like magnesium
+lights, their minds send forth showers of brilliant sparks which hit,
+but do not wound.  But their wit is something more than empty sparkle.
+It is the effervescence of abounding life, a life too sound and perfect
+to be devoid of feeling.  Their brilliancy does not conceal emptiness,
+but adorns abundance.  When such an occasion as Hero's undeserved
+rejection called for it, the true affection of Beatrice and the true
+manliness of Benedick appeared.  Hence, although both seem duped by the
+trick which forms the underplot, the ruse which was to make each think
+the other to be the lovelorn one, it is really they who win the day.
+Their feelings are not altered by this merry plot; they {167} are
+merely given a chance to drop the mask of banter and to express without
+confusion the love which had long been theirs.  Thus the play which
+began with the silvery laughter of Beatrice ends in general mirth which
+is yet more joyous.
+
+
++Date+.--Since _Much Ado_ is not mentioned by Meres, it can hardly have
+been written before 1598.  Entries in the Stationers' Register for
+August 4 and 24, 1600, and the appearance of a quarto edition in this
+same year limit the possibilities at the other end.  Since the
+title-page of the quarto asserts that this play had been "sundry times
+publicly acted," we may assign the date 1599 with considerable
+confidence.
+
++Source+.--The main plot was derived originally from the twentieth
+novel of Bandello, but there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare
+used either this or its French translation in Belleforest.  In this
+story Benedick and Beatrice do not appear; there is no public rejection
+of Hero; there is no discovery of the plot by Dogberry and his fellows;
+and the deception of Claudio is differently managed.  Shakespeare's
+treatment of this last detail has its source in an episode of the fifth
+book of Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, a work several times done into
+English before Shakespeare's play was written.  There is considerable
+reason for assuming the existence of a lost original for _Much Ado_ in
+the shape of a play, known only by title, called _Benedicke and
+Betteris_; but it is, of course, impossible to say how much Shakespeare
+may have owed to this hypothetical predecessor.
+
+
++As You Like It+.--Of this most idyllic of all Shakespeare's comedies,
+the Forest of Arden is not merely the setting; it is the central force
+of the play, the power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony
+out of discord.  It reminds us of Sherwood forest, the home of Robin
+Hood and his merry men; but it is more than this.  Not only does it
+harbor beasts and trees never found on English soil, but its shadowy
+{168} glades foster a life so free from care and trouble that it
+becomes to us a symbol of Nature's healing, sweetening influence.  Here
+an exiled Duke and his faithful followers have found a refuge where,
+free from the envy and bickerings of court, they "fleet the time
+carelessly, as they did in the Golden Age."  To them comes the youth
+Orlando, fleeing from the treachery of a wicked elder brother and from
+the malice of the usurping Duke.  To them comes Rosalind, daughter of
+the exiled Duke, who has lived at the usurper's court, but has, in her
+turn, been exiled, and who brings with her Celia, the usurper's
+daughter, and Touchstone, the lovable court fool.  And through these
+newcomers the Duke and his friends are brought into contact with a
+shepherd and shepherdess as unreal and as charming as those of Dresden
+china, and with other country folk who smack more strongly of the soil.
+In the forest, Rosalind, who has for safety's sake assumed man's
+attire, again meets Orlando, and the love between them, born of their
+first meeting at court, becomes stronger and truer amid scenes of
+delicate comedy and merry laughter.  Once in Arden, Orlando ceases to
+brood morosely over the wrongs done him; Rosalind's wit becomes sweeter
+while losing none of its keenness; and Touchstone feels himself no
+longer a plaything, but a man.  So we are not surprised when Oliver,
+the wicked brother, lost in the forest and rescued from mortal danger
+by the lad he has always sought to injure, awakens to his better self;
+nor when the usurping Duke, leading an armed expedition against the man
+he has deposed, is converted at the forest's edge by an old hermit,
+abandons the throne to {169} its rightful occupant, and enters upon the
+religious life.  Thus the old Duke comes into his own again, wiser and
+better than before; and if, among the many marriages which fill the
+last act with the chiming of marriage bells, there are some which seem
+little likely to bring lasting happiness, the magic of the woods does
+much to dissipate our doubts.  Only Jaques, the melancholy philosopher,
+fails to share in the general rejoicing and the glad return.  He has
+been too hardened by the pursuit of his own pleasure and is too shut in
+by his delightfully cynical philosophy to feel quickly the forest's
+touch.  Yet not even his brilliant perversities can sadden the joyous
+atmosphere; it is only made the more enjoyable by force of contrast.
+Since Jaques wishes no joy for himself, we wish none for him, and with
+little regret we leave him as he has lived, a lonely, fascinating
+figure.
+
+
++Date+.--Like _Much Ado_, _As You Like It_ is not mentioned by Meres,
+and was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4, 1600.  Some
+critics have placed this play before _Much Ado_, but, although there is
+little evidence on either side, the style and tone of the play incline
+us to place it after, dating it 1599-1600.
+
++Source+.--_As You Like It_ is a dramatization of Lodge's pastoral
+novel entitled _Rosalynde_, which was founded in its turn on the _Tale
+of Gamelyn_, incorrectly ascribed to Chaucer.  Shakespeare condensed
+his original to great advantage, leaving out many episodes and so
+changing others as to give the subject a new and higher unity.  The
+atmosphere of the forest is all of his creation, as are many of the
+characters, including Jaques and Touchstone.
+
+
++Twelfth Night, or What You Will+.--In _Twelfth Night_ romance and
+comedy are less perfectly fused than in {170} the comedy which preceded
+it.  Here there are two distinct groups of characters, on the one hand
+riotous old Sir Toby and his crew leading the Puritanical steward
+Malvolio into the trap baited by his own egotism; on the other, the
+dreaming Duke, in love with love rather than with the beautiful Olivia
+whom he woos in vain, and ardently loved by Viola, whose gentle nature
+is in touching contrast with the doublet and hose which misfortune has
+compelled her to assume.  There is, however, no lack of dramatic unity.
+In Olivia the two groups meet, for Toby is Olivia's uncle, Malvolio her
+steward, the Duke her lover, Viola--later happily supplanted by her
+twin brother Sebastian--the one she loves.  Thus the romantic and comic
+forces act and react upon each other.  Yet this play, by reason of its
+setting, the court of Illyria, was bound to lack the magical atmosphere
+of the forest, which inspired kindly humor in the serious and gentle
+seriousness in the merry.  If Peste is as witty as Touchstone, he is
+less of a man; if Viola is more appealing than Rosalind, she has a less
+sparkling humor.  Here the love story is more passionate, the fun more
+uproarious.  Toby is not Falstaff; he is overcome by wine and
+difficulties as that amazing knight never was; but it is a sad soul
+which does not roar with Toby in his revels; shout with laughter over
+the duel which he arranges between the shrinking Viola and the foolish,
+vain Sir Andrew; and shake in sympathy with his glee over Malvolio's
+plight when that unlucky man is beguiled into thinking Olivia loves
+him, and into appearing before her cross-gartered and wreathed in the
+smiles {171} which accord so ill with his sour visage.  All the more
+affecting in contrast to this boisterous merriment is the frail figure
+of Viola, who knows so well "what love women to men may owe."  Amid the
+perfume of flowers and the sob of violins the Duke learns to love this
+seeming boy better than he knows, and easily forgets the romantic
+melancholy which was never much more than an agreeable pose.
+
+
++Date+.--In the diary of John Manningham for February 2, 1602, is a
+record of a performance of _Twelfth Night_ in the Middle Temple.  The
+absence of the name from Meres's list again limits the date at the
+other end.  The internal evidence, aside from that of style and meter,
+is negligible, while the latter confirms the usually accepted date of
+1601.
+
++Source+.--The principal source of the plot was probably _Apolonius and
+Silla_, a story by Barnabe Riche, apparently an adaptation of
+Belleforest's translation of the twenty-eighth novel of Bandello.
+There was also an Italian play, _Gl' Ingannati_, acted in Latin
+translation at Cambridge in 1590 and 1598, which has a similar plot.  A
+German  play on the same subject, apparently closely connected with
+Riche, has given rise to the hypothesis that a lost English play
+preceded _Twelfth Night_; but this is only conjectural, and there is
+some evidence that Shakespeare was familiar with Riche's story.  If
+this be the original, Shakespeare improved on it as much as he did on
+_Rosalynde_, condensing the beginning,  knitting together the loose
+strands at the end, and introducing the whole of the underplot with its
+rich variety of characters.  The only hint for this known is a slight
+suggestion for Malvolio's madness found in another story of Riche's
+volume.
+
+
+
+
+{172}
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE THIRD PERIOD--TRAGEDY
+
+The Second and Third periods slightly overlap; for _Julius Caesar_, the
+first play of the later group, was probably written before _Twelfth
+Night_ and _As You Like It_.  But the change in the character of the
+plays in these two periods is sharp and decisive, like the change from
+day to night.  Shakespeare has studied the sunlight of human
+cheerfulness and found it a most interesting problem; now in the
+mysterious starlight and shadow of human suffering he finds a problem
+more interesting still.
+
+The three comedies of this period, partly on account of their bitter
+and sarcastic tone, are not widely read nor usually very much admired;
+but the great tragedies are the poet's finest work and scarcely equaled
+in the history of the world.
+
++Troilus and Cressida+.--Here the story centers around the siege of
+ancient Troy by the Greeks.  Its hero, Troilus, is a young son of
+Priam, high-spirited and enthusiastic, who is in love with Cressida,
+daughter of a Trojan priest.  Pandarus, Cressida's uncle, acts as
+go-between for the lovers.  Just as the suit of Troilus is crowned with
+success, Cressida, from motives of policy, is forced to join her father
+Calchas, who is in the camp of the besieging Greeks.  Here her fickle
+and sensuous nature reveals itself rapidly.  She yields to {173} the
+love of the Greek commander Diomed and promises to become his mistress.
+Troilus learns of this, consigns her to oblivion, and attempts, but
+unsuccessfully, to take revenge on Diomed.
+
+While this love story is progressing, meetings are going on between the
+Greek and Trojan warriors; a vivid picture is given of conditions in
+the Greek camp during the truce, and particularly of the insolent pride
+of Achilles.  The story ends with the resumption of hostilities, the
+slaying of Hector by Achilles, and the resolution of Troilus to revenge
+his brother's death.
+
+It is very difficult to understand what Shakespeare meant by this play.
+If it is a tragedy, why do the hero and heroine meet with no special
+disaster at the end, and why do we feel so little sympathy for the
+misfortunes of any one in the play?  If it is a comedy, why is its
+sarcastic mirth made more bitter than tears, and why does it end with
+the death of its noblest minor character and with the violation of all
+poetic justice?  From beginning to end it is the story of disillusion,
+for it sorts all humanity into two great classes, fools who are cheated
+and knaves who cheat.  Some people think that Shakespeare wrote it in a
+gloomy, pessimistic mood, with the sardonic laughter of a disappointed,
+world-wearied man.  Others, on rather doubtful grounds, believe it a
+covert satire on some of Shakespeare's fellow dramatists.
+
+
++Authorship+.--It is generally agreed that a small part of this play is
+by another author.  The Prologue and most of the Fifth Act are usually
+considered non-Shakespearean.  They differ from the rest of the play in
+many details of vocabulary, meter, and style.
+
+{174}
+
++Date+.--_Troilus and Cressida_ must have been written before 1603, for
+in the spring of that year an entry in regard to it was made in the
+Stationers' Register.  It must have been written after 1601, for it
+alludes (Prologue, ll. 23-25) to the Prologue of Jonson's _Poetaster_,
+a play published in that year.  Hence the date of composition would
+fall during or slightly before 1602.  The First Quarto was not
+published until 1609.
+
++Sources+.--The main source of this drama was the narrative poem
+_Troilus and Criseyde_ by Chaucer.  Contrary to his custom, Shakespeare
+has degraded the characters of his original, instead of ennobling them.
+The camp scenes are adapted from Caxton's _Recuyell of the Historyes of
+Troye_; and the challenge of Hector was taken from some translation of
+Homer, probably that by Chapman.  An earlier lost play on this subject
+by Dekker and Chettle is mentioned in contemporary reference.  We do
+not know whether Shakespeare drew anything from it or not.  Scattered
+hints were probably taken from other sources, as the story of Troy was
+very popular in the Middle Ages.
+
+
++All's Well That Ends Well+.--When a beautiful and noble-minded young
+woman falls in love with a contemptible scoundrel, forgives his
+rebuffs, compromises her own dignity to win his affection, and finally
+persuades him to let her throw herself away on him,--is the result a
+romance or a tragedy?  This is a nice question; and by the answer to it
+we must determine whether _All's Well That Ends Well_ is a romantic
+comedy like _Twelfth Night_ or a satirical comedy bitter as tragedy,
+like _Troilus and Cressida_.
+
+Helena, a poor orphan girl, has been brought up by the kindly old
+Countess of Rousillon, and cherishes a deep affection for the
+Countess's son Bertram, though he neither suspects it nor returns it.
+She saves the life of the French king, and he in gratitude allows her
+{175} to choose her husband from among the noblest young lords of
+France.  Her choice falls on Bertram.  Being too politic to offend the
+king, he reluctantly marries her, but forsakes her on their wedding day
+to go to the wars.  At parting he tells her that he will never accept
+her as a wife until she can show him his ring on her finger and has a
+child by him.  By disguising herself as a young woman whom Bertram is
+attempting to seduce, Helena subsequently fulfills the terms of his
+hard condition.  Later, before the king of France she reminds him of
+his promise, shows his ring in her possession, and states that she is
+with child by him.  The count, outwitted, and in fear of the king's
+wrath, repentantly accepts her as his wife; and at the end Helena is
+expected to live happily forever after.
+
+Disagreeable as the plot is when told in outline, it is redeemed in the
+actual play by the beautiful character given to the heroine.  But this,
+while it vastly tones down the disgusting side of the story, only
+increases the bitter pathos which is latent there.  The more lovely and
+admirable Helena is, the more she is unfitted for the unworthy part
+which she is forced to act and the man with whom she is doomed to end
+her days.  A modern thinker could easily read into this "comedy" the
+world-old bitterness of pearls before swine.
+
+
++Date+.--No quarto of this comedy exists, nor is there any mention of
+such a play as _All's Well That Ends Well_ before the publication of
+the First Folio in 1623.  A play of Shakespeare's called _Love's
+Labour's Won_ is mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598; and many think
+that this was the present comedy under another name.  However, the
+meter, style, and mood of most of the play seem to indicate a later
+date.  The {176} most common theory is that a first version was written
+before 1598, and that this was rewritten in the early part of the
+author's third period.  This would put the date of the play in its
+present form somewhere around 1602.
+
++Sources+.--The story is taken from Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (ninth
+novel of the third day).  It was translated into English by Painter in
+his _Palace of Pleasure_, where our author probably read it.
+Shakespeare has added the Countess, Parolles, and one or two minor
+characters.  The conception of the heroine has been greatly ennobled.
+It is a question whether the bitter tone of the play is due to the
+dramatist's intention or is the unforeseen result of reducing
+Boccaccio's improbable story to a living possibility.
+
+
++Measure for Measure+.--When Hamlet told his guilty mother that he
+would set her up a glass where she might see the inmost part of her, he
+was doing for his mother what Shakespeare in _Measure for Measure_ is
+doing for the lust-spotted world.  The play is a trenchant satire on
+the evils of society.  Such realistic pictures of the things that are,
+but should not be, have always jarred on our aesthetic sense from
+Aristophanes to Zola, and _Measure for Measure_ is one of the most
+disagreeable of Shakespeare's plays.  But no one can deny its power.
+
+Here, as in _All's Well That Ends Well_, we have one beautiful
+character, that of Isabella, like a light shining in corruption.  Here,
+too, the wronged Mariana, in order to win back the faithless Angelo, is
+forced to resort to the same device to which Helena had to stoop.  But
+this play is darker and more savage than its predecessor.  Angelo, as a
+governor, sentencing men to death for the very sin which he as a
+private man is trying to commit, is contemptible on a huger {177} and
+more devilish scale than Bertram.  Lucio, if not more base than
+Parolles, is at least more malignant.  And Claudio, attempting to save
+his life by his sister's shame, is an incarnation of the healthy animal
+joy of life almost wholly divested of the ideals of manhood.  In a way,
+the play ends happily; but it is about as cheerful as the red gleam of
+sunset which shoots athwart a retreating thunderstorm.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was first published in the Folio of 1623.  It is
+generally believed, however, that it was written about 1603.  In the
+first place, the verse tests and general character of the play seem to
+fit that date; secondly, there are two passages, I, i, 68-73 and II,
+iv, 27-30, which are usually interpreted as allusions to the attitude
+of James I toward the people after he came to the throne in 1603; and,
+thirdly, there are many turns of phrase which remind one of _Hamlet_
+and which seem to indicate that the two plays were written near
+together.  Barksted's _Myrrha_ (1607) contains a passage apparently
+borrowed from this comedy, which helps in determining the latest
+possible date of composition.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare borrowed his material from a writer named
+George Whetstone, who in 1578 printed a play, _Promos and Cassandra_,
+containing most of the story of _Measure for Measure_.  In 1582 the
+same author published a prose version of the story in his _Heptameron
+of Civil Discourses_.  Whetstone in turn borrowed his material, which
+came originally from the _Hecatommithi_ of Giraldi Cinthio.
+Shakespeare ennobled the underlying thought as far as he could, and
+added the character of Mariana.
+
+
++Julius Caesar+.--The interest in _Julius Caesar_ does not focus on any
+one person as completely as in the other great tragedies.  Like the
+chronicle plays which had preceded it, it gives rather a grand panorama
+of history than the fate of any particular hero.  This {178} explains
+its title.  It is not the story of Julius Caesar the man, but of that
+great political upheaval of which Caesar was cause and center.  That
+upheaval begins with his attempt at despotism and the crown; it reaches
+its climax in his death, which disturbs the political equilibrium of
+the whole nation; and at last subsides with the decline and downfall of
+Caesar's enemies.  Shakespeare has departed from history in drawing the
+character of the great conqueror, making it more weak, vain, and
+pompous than that of the real man.  Yet even in the play "the mightiest
+Julius" is an impressive figure.  Alive, he
+
+          "doth bestride the narrow world
+  Like a Colossus";
+
+and his influence, like an unseen force, shapes the fates of the living
+after he himself is dead.
+
+In so far as the tragedy has any individual hero, that hero is Brutus
+rather than Caesar himself.  Brutus is a man of noble character, but
+deficient in practical judgment and knowledge of men.  With the best of
+motives he allows Cassius to hoodwink him and draw him into the
+conspiracy against Caesar.  Through the same short-sighted generosity
+he allows his enemy Antony to address the crowd after Caesar's death,
+with the result that Antony rouses the people against him and drives
+him and his fellow conspirators out of Rome.  Then when he and Cassius
+gather an army in Asia to fight with Antony, we find him too
+impractically scrupulous to raise money by the usual means; and for
+that reason short of cash and drawn into a quarrel with his brother
+general.  His subsequent {179} death at Philippi is the logical outcome
+of his own nature, too good for so evil an age, too short-sighted for
+so critical a position.
+
+Most of the old Roman heroes inspire respect rather than love; and
+something of their stern impressiveness lingers in the atmosphere of
+this Roman play.  Here and there it has very touching scenes, such as
+that between Brutus and his page (IV, iii); but in the main it is
+great, not through its power to elicit sympathetic tears, but through
+its dignity and grandeur.  It is one of the stateliest of tragedies,
+lofty in language, majestic in movement, logical and cogent in thought.
+We can never mourn for Brutus and Portia as we do for Romeo and Juliet,
+or for Lear and Cordelia; but we feel that we have breathed in their
+company an air which is keen and bracing, and have caught a glimpse of
+
+  "The grandeur that was Rome."
+
+
++Date+.--We have no printed copy of Julius Caesar earlier than that of
+the First Folio.  Since it was not mentioned by Meres in 1598 and was
+alluded to in 1601 in John Weever's _Mirrour of Martyrs_, it probably
+appeared between those two dates.  Weever says in his dedication that
+his work "some two years ago was made fit for the print."  This
+apparently means that he wrote the allusion to _Julius Caesar_ in 1599
+and that consequently the play had been produced by then.  There is a
+possible reference to it in Ben Jonson's _Every Man Out of His Humour_,
+which came out in 1599.  Metrical tests and the general character of
+the play agree with these conclusions.  Hence we can put the date
+between 1599-1601, with a preference for the former year.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare drew his material from North's _Plutarch_,
+using the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony.  He has {180} enlarged
+the parts of Casca and Lepidus, and made Brutus much nobler than in the
+original.  This last change was a dramatic necessity in order to give
+the play a hero with whom we could sympathize.
+
+
++Hamlet+.--On the surface the story of Hamlet is a comparatively simple
+one.  The young prince is heart-broken over the recent death of his
+father, and his mother's scandalously hasty marriage to Hamlet's uncle,
+the usurping sovereign.  In this mood he is brought face to face with
+his father's spirit, told that his uncle was his father's murderer, and
+given as a sacred duty the task of revenging the crime.  To this object
+he sacrifices all other aims in life--pleasure, ambition, and love.
+But this savage task is the last one on earth for which his
+fine-grained nature was fitted.  He wastes his energy in feverish
+efforts which fail to accomplish his purpose, just as many a man wavers
+helplessly in trying to do something for which nature never intended
+him.  Partly to deceive his enemies, partly to provide a freer
+expression for his pent-up emotions than the normal conditions of life
+would justify, he acts the role of one who is mentally deranged.
+Finally, more by chance than any plan of his own, he achieves his
+revenge on the king, but not until he himself is mortally wounded.  His
+story is the tragedy of a sensitive, refined, imaginative nature which
+is required to perform a brutal task in a brutal world.
+
+But around this story as a framework Shakespeare has woven such a
+wealth of poetry and philosophy that the play has been called the
+"tragedy of thought."  It is in Hamlet's brain that the great action of
+the drama {181} takes place; the other characters are mere accessories
+and foils.  Here we are brought face to face with the fear and mystery
+of the future life and the deepest problems of this.  It is hardly true
+to say that Hamlet himself is a philosopher.  He gives some very wise
+advice to the players; but in the main he is grappling problems without
+solving them, peering into the dark, but bringing from it no definite
+addition to our knowledge.  He represents rather the eternal
+questioning of the human heart when face to face with the great
+mysteries of existence; and perhaps this accounts largely for the wide
+and lasting popularity of the play.  Side by side with this
+deep-souled, earnest man, moving in the shadow of the unseen, with his
+terrible duties and haunting fears, Shakespeare has placed in
+intentional mockery the old dotard Polonius, the incarnation of shallow
+worldly wisdom.
+
+No other play of Shakespeare's has called forth such a mass of comment
+as this or so many varied interpretations.  Neither has any other
+roused a deeper interest in its readers.  The spell which it casts over
+old and young alike is due partly to the character of the young prince
+himself, partly to the suggestive mystery with which it invests all
+problems of life and sorrow.
+
+
++Date+.--'A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett' was entered in the
+Stationers' Register July, 1602.  Consequently, Shakespeare's
+Preliminary version, as represented by the First Quarto, though not
+printed until 1603, must have been written in or before the spring
+months of 1602; the second version 1603-1604.
+
++Sources+.--The plot came originally from the _Historia Danica_, a
+history of Denmark in Latin, written in the twelfth century {182} by
+Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar.  About 1570 the story was retold in
+French in Belleforest's _Histoires Tragiques_.  Besides his debt to
+Belleforest, it seems almost certain that Shakespeare drew from an
+earlier English tragedy of Hamlet by another man.  This earlier play is
+lost; but Nash, a contemporary writer, alludes to it as early as 1589,
+and Henslowe's Diary records its performance in 1494.  Somewhat before
+1590, an early dramatist, Thomas Kyd, had written a play called _The
+Spanish Tragedy_, which, though far inferior to Shakespeare's _Hamlet_,
+resembled it in many ways.  This likeness has caused scholars to
+suspect that Kyd wrote the early Hamlet; and their suspicions are
+strengthened by an ambiguous and apparently punning allusion to AEsop's
+_Kidde_ in the passage by Nash mentioned above.  A crude and brutal
+German play on the subject has been discovered, which is believed by
+many to be a translation of Kyd's original tragedy.  If this is true,
+it shows how enormously Shakespeare improved on his source.
+
++Editions+.--A very badly garbled and crude form of this play was
+printed in 1603, and is known as the First Quarto.  A much better one,
+which contained most of the tragedy as we read it, appeared in 1604,
+and is called the Second Quarto.  Several other quartos followed, for
+the play was exceedingly popular.  The Folio omits certain passages
+found in the Second Quarto, and introduces certain new ones.  Both the
+new passages and the omitted ones are included in modern editions; so
+that, as has often been said, our modern _Hamlet_ is longer than any
+_Hamlet_ which Shakespeare left us.  The First Quarto is generally
+regarded as a pirated copy of Shakespeare's scenario, or first rough
+draft, of the play.
+
+
++Othello+.--This play has often been called the tragedy of jealousy,
+but that is a misleading statement.  Othello, as Coleridge pointed out,
+is not a constitutionally jealous man, such as Leontes in _The Winter's
+Tale_.  His distrust of his wife is the natural suspicion of a man lost
+amid new and inexplicable surroundings.  {183} Women are proverbially
+suspicious in business, not because nature made them so, but because,
+as they are in utter ignorance of standards by which to judge, they
+feel their helplessness in the face of deceit.  Othello feels the same
+helplessness.  Trained up in wars from his cradle, he could tell a true
+soldier from a traitor at a glance, with the calm confidence of a
+veteran; but women and their motives are to him an uncharted sea.
+Suddenly a beautiful young heiress falls in love with him, and leaves
+home and friends to marry him.  He stands on the threshold of a new
+realm, happy but bewildered.  Then comes Iago, his trusted subordinate,
+--who, as Othello knows, possesses that knowledge of women and of
+civilian life which he himself lacks,--and whispers in his ear that his
+bride is false to him; that under this fair veneer lurks the eternal
+feminine as they had seen it in the common creatures of the camp; that
+she has fooled her husband as these women have so often fooled his
+soldiers; and that the rough-and-ready justice of the camp should be
+her reward.  Had Othello any knowledge or experience in such matters to
+fall back on, he might anchor to that, and become definitely either the
+trusting husband or the Spartan judge.  But as it is, he is whirled
+back and forth in a maelstrom of agonized doubt, until compass,
+bearings, and wisdom lost, he ends all in universal shipwreck.
+
+The character of Iago is one of the subtlest studies of intelligent
+depravity ever created by man.  Ostensibly his motive is revenge; but
+in reality his wickedness seems due rather to a perverted mental
+activity, unbalanced by heart or conscience.  As Napoleon enjoyed
+manoeuvring armies or Lasker studying chess, so {184} Iago enjoys the
+sense of his own mental power in handling his human pawns, in feeling
+himself master of the situation.  If he ever had natural affections,
+they have been atrophied in the pursuit of this devilish game.
+
+With Desdemona the feminine element, which had been negligible in
+_Julius Caesar_ and thrown into the background in _Hamlet_, becomes a
+prominent feature, and remains so through the later tragedies.  There
+is a pathetic contrast between the beautiful character of Desdemona and
+her undeserved fate, just as there is between the real nobility of
+Othello and the mad act by which he ruins his own happiness.  For that
+reason this is perhaps the most touching of all Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was certainly published after 1601, for it contains
+several allusions to Holland's translation of the Latin author Pliny,
+which appeared in that year.  Malone, one of the early editors of
+Shakespeare, says that _Othello_ was acted at Hallowmas, 1604.  We not
+know on what evidence he based this assertion; but since the metrical
+tests all point to the same date, his statement is generally accepted.
+The First Quarto did not appear until 1622, six years after Shakespeare
+died and one year before the appearance of the First Folio.  This was
+the only play published in quarto between Shakespeare's death and 1623.
+There are frequent oaths in the Quarto which have been very much
+modified in the Folio, and this strengthens our belief that the
+manuscript from which the Quarto was printed was written about 1604,
+for shortly after that date an act was passed against the use of
+profanity in plays.
+
++Sources+.--The plot was taken from Giraldi Cinthio's _Hecatommithi_
+(seventh novel of the third decade).  A French translation of the
+Italian was made in 1583-1584, and this Shakespeare may have used.  We
+know of no English translation until {185} years after Shakespeare
+died.  Many details are changed in the play, and the whole story is
+raised to a far nobler plane.  In the original the heroine is beaten to
+death with a stocking filled with sand; Othello is tortured, but
+refuses to confess, and later is murdered by his wife's revengeful
+kinsmen.  This crude, bloody, and long-drawn-out story is in striking
+contrast with the masterly ending of the tragedy.
+
+
++King Lear+.--As _Romeo and Juliet_ shows the tragedy of youth, so
+_Lear_ shows the tragedy of old age.  King Lear has probably been a
+good and able man in his day; but now time has impaired his judgment,
+and he is made to suffer fearfully for those errors for which nature,
+and not he, is to blame.  Duped by the hypocritical smoothness of his
+two elder daughters, he gives them all his lands and power; while his
+youngest daughter Cordelia, who truly loves him, is turned away because
+she is too honest to humor an old man's whim.  The result is what might
+have been expected.  Lear has put himself absolutely into the power of
+his two older daughters, who are the very incarnation of heartlessness
+and ingratitude.  By their inhuman treatment he is driven out into the
+night and storm, exposing his white head to a tempest so fierce that
+even the wild beasts refuse to face it.  As a result of exposure and
+mental suffering, his mind becomes unhinged.  At last his daughter
+Cordelia finds him, gives him refuge, and nurses him back to reason and
+hope.  But this momentary gleam of light only makes darker by contrast
+the end which closely follows, where Cordelia is killed by treachery
+and Lear dies broken-hearted.
+
+The fate of Lear finds a parallel in that of {186} Gloucester in the
+underplot.  Like his king, this nobleman has proved an unwise father,
+favoring the treacherous child and disowning the true.  He also is made
+to pay a fearful penalty for his mistakes, ending in his death.  But he
+is represented as more justly punished, less excusable through the
+weaknesses of age; and for this reason his grief appeals to us as an
+intensifying reflection of Lear's misery rather than as a rival for
+that in our sympathy.  The character of Edmund shows some likeness to
+that of Richard III; and a comparison of the two will show how
+Shakespeare has developed in the interval.  Both are stern, able, and
+heartless; but Edmund unites to these more complex feelings known only
+to the close student of life.  Weakness and passion mingle in his love;
+superstition and some faint, abortive motion of conscience unite to
+torment him when dying.
+
+There is a strangely lyric element about this great tragedy, an element
+of heart-broken emotion hovering on the edge of passionate song.  It is
+like a great chorus in which the victims of treachery and ingratitude
+blend their denouncing cries.  The tremulous voice of Lear rises
+terrible above all the others; and to his helpless curses the plaintive
+satire of the fool answers like a mocking echo in halls of former
+enjoyment.  Thunder and lightning are the fearful accompaniment of the
+song; and like faint antiphonal responses from the underplot come the
+voices of the wronged Edgar and the outraged Gloucester.
+
+
++Date+.--The date of _King Lear_ lies between 1603 and 1606.  In 1603
+appeared a book (Harsnett's _Declaration of Egregious Popish
+Impostures_) from which Shakespeare afterward drew {187} the names of
+the devils in the pretended ravings of Edgar, together with similar
+details.  In 1606, as we know from an entry in the Stationers'
+Register, the play was performed at Whitehall at Christmas.  A late
+edition of the old _King Leir_ (not Shakespeare's) was entered on the
+Register May 8, 1605; and it is very plausible that Shakespeare's
+tragedy was then having a successful run and that the old play was
+revived to take advantage of an occasion when its story was popular.
+Hence the date usually given for the composition of _King Lear_ is
+1604-5.  A quarto, with a poor text, and carelessly printed, appeared
+in 1608; another, (bearing the assumed date of 1608) in 1619.  The
+First Folio text is much the best.  Three hundred lines lacking in it
+are made up for by a hundred lines absent from the quartos.
+
++Sources+.--The story of Lear in some form or another had appeared in
+many writers before Shakespeare.  The sources from which he drew
+chiefly were probably the early accounts by Geoffrey of Moumouth, a
+composite poem called _The Mirrour for Magistrates_, Holinshed's
+_Chronicles_, Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, and lastly an old play of
+_King Leir_, supposed to be the one acted in 1594.  This old play ended
+happily; Shakespeare first introduced the tragic ending.  He also
+invented Lear's madness, the banishment and disguise of Kent, and the
+characters of Burgundy and the fool.  The underplot he drew from the
+story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in _Arcadia_, a long, rambling
+novel of adventure by Sir Philip Sidney.
+
+
++Macbeth+.--Macbeth, one of the great Scottish nobles of early times,
+is led, partly by his own ambition, partly by the instigation of evil
+supernatural powers, to murder King Duncan and usurp his place on the
+throne of Scotland.  In this bloody task he is aided and encouraged by
+his wife, a woman of powerful character, whose conscience is
+temporarily smothered by her frantic desire to advance her husband's
+career.  We are forced to sympathize with this guilty pair, wicked as
+they {188} are, because we are made to feel that they are not naturally
+criminals, that they are swept into crime by the misdirection of
+energies which, if directed along happier lines, might have been
+praiseworthy.  Macbeth, vigorous and imaginative, has a poet's or
+conqueror's yearning toward a larger fullness of life, experience, joy.
+It is the woeful misdirection of this splendid energy through unlawful
+channels which makes him a murderer, not the callous, animal
+indifference of the born criminal.  Similarly, his wife is a woman of
+great executive ability, reaching out instinctively for a field large
+enough in which to make that ability gain its maximum of
+accomplishment.  Nature meant her for a queen; and it is the
+instinctive effort to find her natural sphere of action,--an effort
+common to all humanity--which blinds her conscience at the fatal
+moment.  Once entered on their career of evil, they find no chance for
+turning back.  Suspicions are aroused, and Macbeth feels himself forced
+to guard himself from the effects of the first.  The ghosts of his
+victims haunt his guilty conscience; his wife dies heart-broken with
+remorse which comes too late; and he himself is killed in battle by his
+own rebellious countrymen.
+
+Between the characters of Macbeth and his wife the dramatist has drawn
+a subtle but vital distinction.  Macbeth is an unprincipled but
+imaginative man, with a strong tincture of reverence and awe.  Hitherto
+he has been restrained in the straight path of an upright life by his
+respect for conventions.  When once that barrier is broken down, he has
+no purely moral check in his own nature to replace it, and rushes like
+a flood, with ever growing impetus, from, crime to crime.  His {189}
+wife, on the other hand, has a conscience; and conscience, unlike awe
+for conventions, can be temporarily suppressed, but not destroyed.  It
+reawakes when the first great crime is over, drives the unhappy queen
+from her sleepless couch night after night, and hounds her at last to
+death.
+
+This is the shortest of all Shakespeare's plays in actual number of
+lines; and no other work of his reveals such condensation and
+lightning-like rapidity of movement.  It is the tragedy of eager
+ambition, which allows a man no respite after the first fatal mistake,
+but hurries him on irresistibly through crime after crime to the final
+disaster.  Over all, like a dark cloud above a landscape, hovers the
+presence of the supernatural beings who are training on the sinful but
+unfortunate monarch to his ruin.
+
+
++Authorship+.--The speeches of Hecate and the dialogue connected with
+them in III, v and IV, i, 39-47 are suspected by many to be the work of
+Thomas Middleton, a well-known contemporary playwright.  They are
+unquestionably inferior to most of the play.  Messrs. Clark and Wright
+have assigned several other passages to Middleton; but these are now
+generally regarded as Shakespeare's, and some of them are considered as
+by no means below his usual high level.
+
++Date+.--We find no copy of _Macbeth_ earlier than the First Folio.  It
+was certainly written before 1610, however; for Dr. Simon Forman saw it
+acted that year and records the fact in his _Booke of Plaies_.  The
+allusion to "two-fold balls and treble sceptres" (IV, i, 121) shows
+that the play was written after 1603 when James I became king of both
+Scotland and England.  So does the allusion to the habit of touching
+for the king's evil (IV, iii, 140-159),--a custom which James revived.
+The reference to an equivocator in the porter's soliloquy (II, iii) may
+allude to Henry Garnet, who was tried in 1606 for complicity in the
+{190} famous Gunpowder Plot, and who is said to have upheld the
+doctrine of equivocation.  The date of composition is usually placed
+1605-6.
+
++Sources+.--The plot is borrowed from Holinshed's _Historie of
+Scotland_.  Most of the material is taken from the part relating to the
+reigns of Duncan and Macbeth; but other incidents, such as the drugging
+of the grooms, are from the murder of Duncan's ancestor Duffe, which is
+described in another part of Holinshed.
+
+
++Antony and Cleopatra+.--There is no other passion in mankind which
+makes such fools of wise men, such weaklings of brave ones, as that of
+sinful love.  For this very reason it is the most tragic of all human
+passions; and from this comes the dramatic power of _Antony and
+Cleopatra_.  The ruin of a contemptible man is never impressive; but
+the ruin of an imposing character like Antony's through the one weak
+spot in his powerful nature has all the somber impressiveness of a
+burning city or some other great disaster.
+
+Like _Julius Caesar_, this play is founded on Roman history.  It begins
+in Egypt with a picture of Antony fascinated by the Egyptian queen.
+The urgent needs of the divided Roman world call him away to Italy.
+Here, once free of Cleopatra's presence, he becomes his old self, a
+reveler, yet diplomatic and self-seeking.  From motives of policy he
+marries Octavia, sister of Octavius Caesar, and for a brief space seems
+assured of a brilliant future.  But the old spell draws him back.  He
+returns to Cleopatra, and Octavius in revenge for Octavia's wrongs
+makes war upon him.  Cleopatra proves still Antony's evil genius.  Her
+seduction has already drawn him into war; now her cowardice in the
+crisis of the battle decides the war {191} against him.  From that
+point the fate of both is one headlong rush to inevitable ruin.
+
+In the character of Cleopatra, Shakespeare has made a wonderful study
+of the fascination which beauty and charm exert, even when coupled with
+moral worthlessness.  We do not love her, we do not pity her when she
+dies; but we feel that in spite of her idle love of power and pleasure,
+she has given life a richer meaning.  We are fascinated by her as by
+some beautiful poison plant, the sight of which causes an aesthetic
+thrill, its touch, disease and death.
+
+Powerful as is this play, and in many ways tragic, it by no means stirs
+our sympathies as do _Macbeth, King Lear_, and _Othello_.  Sin for
+Antony and Cleopatra is not at all the unmixed cup of woe which it
+proves for Macbeth and his lady.  Here at the end the lovers pay the
+price of lust and folly; but before paying that price, they have had
+its adequate equivalent in the voluptuous joy of life.  Moreover, death
+loses half its terrors for Antony through the very military vigor of
+his character; and for Cleopatra, because of the cunning which renders
+it painless.  What impresses us most is not the pathos of their fate,
+but rather the sublime folly with which, deliberately and open-eyed,
+they barter a world for the intoxicating joy of passion.  Impulsive as
+children, powerful as demigods, they made nations their toys, and life
+and death a game.  Prudence could not rob them of that heritage of
+delight which they considered their natural birthright, nor death, when
+it came, undo what they had already enjoyed.  Folly on so superhuman a
+scale becomes, in the highest sense of the word, dramatic.
+
+
+{192}
+
++Date+.--In May, 1608, there was entered in the Stationers' Register 'A
+Book called Antony and Cleopatra'; and this was probably the play under
+discussion.  The internal evidence agrees with this; hence the date is
+usually set at 1607-8.  In spite of the above entry, the book does not
+appear to have been printed at that time; and the first copy which has
+come down to us is that in the 1623 Folio.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare's one source appears to have been the _Life of
+Marcus Antonius_ in North's _Plutarch_; and he followed that very
+closely.  The chief changes in the play consist in the omission of
+certain events which would have clogged the dramatic action.
+
+
++Coriolanus+.--Here follows the tragedy of overweening pride.  The
+trouble with Coriolanus is not ambition, as is the case with Macbeth.
+He cares little for crowns, office, or any outward honor.
+Self-centered, self-sufficient, contemptuous of all mankind outside of
+his own immediate circle of friends, he dies at last because he refuses
+to recognize those ties of sympathy which should bind all men and all
+classes of men together.  He leads his countrymen to battle, and shows
+great courage at the siege of Corioli.  On his return he becomes a
+candidate for consul.  But to win this office, he must conciliate the
+common people whom he holds in contempt; and instead of conciliating
+them, he so exasperates them by his overbearing scorn that he is driven
+out of Rome.  With the savage vindictiveness characteristic of insulted
+pride, he joins the enemies of his country, brings Rome to the edge of
+ruin, and spares her at last only at the entreaties of his mother.
+Then he returns to Corioli to be killed there by treachery.
+
+Men like Coriolanus are not lovable, either in real life or fiction;
+but, despite his faults, he commands {193} our admiration in his
+success, and our sympathy in his death.  We must remember that ancient
+Rome had never heard our new doctrine of the freedom and equality of
+man; that the common people, as drawn by Shakespeare, were objects of
+contempt and just cause for exasperation.  Again, we must remember that
+if Coriolanus had a high opinion of himself, he also labored hard to
+deserve it.  He was full of the French spirit of _noblesse oblige_.
+Cruel, arrogant, harsh, he might be; but he was never cowardly,
+underhanded, or mean.  He was a man whose ideals were better than his
+judgment, and whose prejudiced view of life made his character seem
+much worse than it was.  The lives of such men are usually tragic.
+
+
++Date+.--The play was not printed until the appearance of the First
+Folio, and external evidence as to its date is almost worthless.  On
+the strength of internal evidence, meter, style, etc., which mark it
+unquestionably as a late play, it is usually assigned to 1609.
+
++Sources+.--Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's _Life of Coriolanus_
+(North's translation).  As in _Julius Caesar_ and _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, he followed Plutarch closely.
+
+
++Timon of Athens+.--As _Coriolanus_ was the tragedy of a man who is too
+self-centered, so _Timon_ is the tragedy of a man who is not
+self-centered enough.  His good and bad traits alike, generosity and
+extravagance, friendship and vanity, combine to make him live and
+breathe in the attitude of other men toward him.  From this comes his
+unbounded prodigality by which in a few years he squanders an enormous
+fortune in giving pleasure to his friends.  From this lack of
+self-poise, too, comes the tremendous reaction later, {194} when he
+learns that his imagined world of love and friendship and popular
+applause was a mirage of the desert, and finds himself poverty-stricken
+and alone, the dupe of sharpers, the laughing-stock of fools.
+
+Yet in spite of his lack of balance, he is full of noble qualities.
+Apemantus has the very thing which he lacks, yet Apemantus is
+contemptible beside him.  The churlish philosopher is like some dingy
+little scow, which rides out the tempest because the small cargo which
+it has is all in its hold; Timon is like some splendid, but top-heavy,
+battleship, which turns turtle in the storm through lack of ballast.
+There is something lionlike and magnificent, despite its unreason, in
+the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, after the discovery of
+the gold, spurns away both the chance of wealth and the human jackals
+whom it attracts.  The same lordly scorn persists after him in the
+epitaph which he leaves behind:--
+
+  "Here lie I, Timon; who alive all living men did hate.
+  Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass, and stay not here thy gait."
+
+Yet this very epitaph of the dead misanthrope shows the same lack of
+self-sufficiency which characterized the living Timon.  He despises the
+opinion of men, but he must let them know that he despises it.
+Coriolanus would have laughed at them from Elysium and scorned to write
+any epitaph.
+
+No other Shakespearean play, with the exception of _Troilus and
+Cressida_, shows the human race in a light so contemptible as this.
+Aside from Timon and his faithful steward, there is not one person in
+the play {195} who seems to have a single redeeming trait.  All of the
+others are selfish, and most of them are treacherous and cowardly.
+
+
++Authorship+.--It is generally believed that some parts of the play are
+not by Shakespeare, although opinion is still somewhat divided as to
+what is and is not his.  The scenes and parts of scenes in which
+Apemantus and some of the minor characters appear are most strongly
+suspected.
+
++Date+.--This play was not printed until the publication of the First
+Folio, and the only evidence which we have for its date is in the meter
+and style and in the fact that some of the speeches show a strong
+resemblance to certain ones in _King Lear_.  The date most generally
+approved is 1607-8.
+
++Sources+.--The direct source was probably a short account of Timon in
+Plutarch's _Life of Marcus Antonius_.  The same story also appears in
+Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_, where Shakespeare may have read it.
+Both of these accounts, however, contain but a small part of the
+material found in the play.  Certain details missing in them, such as
+the discovery of the gold, etc., are found in _Timon or the
+Misanthrope_, a dialogue by Lucian, one of the later of the ancient
+Greek writers.  As far as we know, Lucian had not been translated into
+English at this time; but there were copies of his works in Latin,
+French, and Italian.  We cannot say whether Shakespeare had read them
+or not.  In 1842 a play on Timon was printed from an old manuscript
+which is supposed to have been written about 1000.  This contains a
+banquet scene, a faithful steward, and the finding of the gold.  This
+has the appearance of an academic play rather than one meant for the
+public theaters, so it is probable that Shakespeare never heard of it;
+but it is barely possible that he knew it and used it as a source.
+
+
+The most helpful book yet written on the period is: _Shakespearean
+Tragedy_, by A. C. Bradley (London, Macmillan, 1910 (1st ed. 1904)).
+
+
+
+
+{196}
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PLAYS OF THE FOURTH PERIOD--ROMANTIC TRAGI-COMEDY
+
+No less clear than the interest in tragic themes which attracted the
+London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the
+shifting of popular approval towards a new form of drama about 1608.
+This was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which puts a theme
+of sentimental interest into events and situations that come close to
+the tragic.  Shakespeare's plays of this type are often called
+romances, since they tell a story of the same type found in romantic
+novels of the time.  His plays contain rather less of the tragic, and
+more of fanciful and playful humor than do the plays of the other
+famous masters in this type, Beaumont and Fletcher; his characters are
+rather more lifelike and appealing.
+
+While the tragi-comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, which were written
+from 1609 to 1611, have been shown to have influenced Shakespeare in
+his romances, yet in several ways they are very different.  The work of
+Beaumont and Fletcher tells of court intrigue and exaggerated passions
+of hatred, envy, and lust; Shakespeare's plays tell of out-of-door
+adventures, and the restoration and reconciliation of families and
+friends parted by misfortune.  Fletcher contrives {197}
+well-constructed plots, depending, indeed, rather too much on incident
+and situation for effect; Shakespeare chooses for his plots stories
+which possess only slight unity of theme, and depends upon character
+and atmosphere for his appeal.  Thus the romances of Shakespeare stand
+out as a strongly marked part of his work, different in treatment from
+the plays of his rivals which perhaps suggested his use of this form.
+Here, as everywhere, Shakespeare exhibits complete mastery of the form
+in which he works.
+
+In addition to the romances of this period, Shakespeare had some share
+in the undramatic and belated chronicle play, _The Life of Henry the
+Eighth_, most of which is assigned to John Fletcher.  In looseness of
+construction, in the emphasis on character in distress, and in the
+introduction of a masque, as well as in other ways, this play resembles
+the tragi-comedies of the period rather than any earlier chronicle.
+Thus the term "romantic tragi-comedy" may be properly used to describe
+all the work of the Fourth Period.
+
++Pericles, Prince of Tyre+, was probably the earliest, as it is
+certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances.  But the story was one
+of the most popular in all fiction, and _Pericles_ was, no doubt, in
+its time what its first title-page claimed for it, a 'much-admired
+play.'  Its hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by storm
+and misfortune from one shore to another.  The five acts which tell his
+adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great
+surges of good and ill luck.  The significance of his daughter's name,
+Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea
+is not only her birthplace, but is the {198} symbol throughout of
+Fortune and Romance.  From the polluted coast of Antioch, where
+Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where
+he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis,
+where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand
+of the Princess Thaisa, the waves of chance carry the Prince.  They
+overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives
+him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thaisa safely to
+land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina
+from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene.  Here,
+upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter;
+and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind
+influence of Diana, their goddess.  We are never far from the sound of
+the shore, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell
+of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."
+
+_Pericles_ in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a
+dramatic romance.  The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have
+had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective.  To help out the stage
+action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval
+poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts.  He was supplemented, when his
+affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw
+clutched at by the desperate playwright.  But at the beginning of Act
+III the master's music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are
+lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles
+speaks to the storm at sea:--
+
+{199}
+
+  "Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
+  Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast
+  Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
+  Having call'd them from the deep! ...
+          The seaman's whistle
+  Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
+  Unheard."
+
+In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which anticipate the
+similar scene in _The Tempest_; in the character of Marina, girlish and
+fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are
+scarcely less potent than Prospero's; in the grieving Pericles, who,
+like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his
+wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the
+dramatic romances which are to follow.  Throughout all this Shakespeare
+is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina's misery in
+Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting
+nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's
+speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of
+her character.
+
+
++Authorship and Date+.--The play was entered to Edward Blount in the
+Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608.  It was probably written but little
+before.  Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635.  It was
+not included among Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio (1664).
+The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground
+that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the
+printing rights.  The former of these hypotheses is generally favored,
+since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work
+of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier
+speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play.  In 1608 a novel was {200}
+published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
+Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately
+presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower."  The author was
+George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability.  He is generally accepted
+as Shakespeare's collaborator.  The claims of William Rowley for a
+share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.
+
+Source.--Shakespeare used Gower's _Confessio Amantis_, and the version
+in Laurence Twine's _Pattern of Painful Adventures_, 1606.  The tale is
+also in the _Gesta Romanorum_.
+
+
++Cymbeline+.--"A father cruel, and a step-dame false,
+              A foolish suitor to a wedded lady,
+              That hath her husband banish'd."
+
+Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline,
+king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the
+story.  The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her
+fidelity under this affliction.  Neither her father's anger, nor the
+stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her
+brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous
+Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her
+own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her
+slain, shake in the least degree her true affection.  Such constancy
+cannot fail of its reward, and in the end Imogen wins back both father
+and husband.
+
+In such a story, where virtue's self is made to shine, other characters
+must of necessity suffer.  Posthumus, Imogen's husband, appears weak
+and impulsive, foolish in making his wife's constancy a matter for
+wagers, and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her.  His weakness
+is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant fight in defense of his
+native Britain, and by his {201} outburst of genuine shame and remorse
+when perception of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him.
+Cymbeline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, with none
+of his tenderness.  The wicked Queen and her son are purely wicked.
+Only the faithful servant, Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in
+this court group.
+
+But in the exiled noble Belarius, and the two sons of Cymbeline whom he
+has stolen in infancy and brought up with him in a wild life in the
+mountains, single-hearted nobility rules.  When Imogen, disguised as a
+page, in her flight from the court to Posthumus comes upon them, there
+is the instant sympathy of noble minds, and there is a brief respite
+from her misfortunes.  They rid her of the troublesome Cloten, and
+their victory over Rome brings to book the intriguing Iachimo and
+accomplishes her final recovery of love and honor.  A reading of the
+play leaves as the brightest picture upon the memory their joy at
+meeting Imogen, and their grief when the potion she drinks robs them of
+her.  In them we find expressed that noble simplicity which
+romanticists have always associated with true children of nature.
+
+To Imogen, who has a far longer part to play than any other of
+Shakespeare's heroines, the poet has also given a completer
+characterization, in which every charm of the highest type of woman is
+delineated.  The one trait which a too censorious audience might
+criticize, that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes Chaucer's
+patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to modern readers, is in
+Imogen completely redeemed by her resolution in the face of danger, and
+by a certain {202} imperiousness which well becomes the daughter of a
+king.
+
+
++Authorship+.--Some later hand probably made up the vision of Posthumus
+(V, iv, 30-90), where a series of irregular stanzas of inferior
+poetical merit are inserted to form "an apparition."
+
++Date+.--Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 1611,
+describes the performance of _Cymbeline_ at which he was present.  The
+entry occurs between those telling of _Macbeth_ (April 20, 1610) and
+_The Winter's Tale_ (May 15, 1611).  The tests of verse assign it also
+to this period.  The first print was that of the First Folio, 1623.
+
++Source+.--From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual
+historical fact in the play, that one Cunobelinus was an ancient king
+of Britain.  Cymbeline's two sons are likewise from Holinshed, as is
+the rout of an army by a countryman and his two sons; but the two
+stories are separate.  The ninth novel of the second day of the
+_Decameron_ of Boccaccio tells a story much resembling the part of the
+play which concerns Posthumus.  The play called _The Rare Triumphs of
+Love and Fortune_ (1589) contains certain characters not unlike Imogen,
+Posthumus, Belarius, and Cloten.  Fidelia, Imogen's name in disguise,
+is the heroine's name.  But direct borrowing cannot be proved.
+
+
++The Winter's Tale+.--Nowhere is Shakespeare more lavish of his powers
+of characterization and of poetic treatment of life than in this play.
+He found for his plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true
+queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband's friend, dies of
+grief at the death of her son, while her infant daughter, abandoned to
+the seas in a boat, grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the
+king of whom her father had been jealous.  Disregarding the essentially
+undramatic nature of the story, as well as its improbabilities, he
+achieved a signal {203} triumph of his art in the creation of his two
+heroines, and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh,
+joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of convention.
+
+In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme portrait of woman's
+fortitude.  Hermione is brave, not by nature, but inspired by high
+resolve for her honor and for her children.  Nobly indignant at the
+slanders uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the slanderer in
+pity for the blindness of unreason which has caused his action.
+Shakespeare's dramatic instinct made him alter Hermione's death in the
+earlier story to life in secret, with poetic justice in store.
+Artificial as the long period of waiting seems, before the final
+reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the magnificent appeal
+of the mother's love when the lost daughter kneels in joy before her.
+
+In Perdita, Shakespeare, with incredible skill, depicted the true
+daughter of such a mother.  Although her nature at first seems all
+innocence, beauty, youth, and joy, yet when trial comes to her in the
+knowledge that she, a shepherdess, has loved a king's son, and that his
+father has discovered it, her courage rises with the danger, and her
+words echo her mother's resolution:--
+
+  "I think affliction may subdue the cheek,
+  But not take in the mind."
+
+
+In the pastoral scenes, the poet gives us an English sheepshearing,
+with its merrymaking, a pair of honest English country fellows in the
+old shepherd and his son, the Clown, and the greatest of all beloved
+vagabonds {204} in the rogue Autolycus, whose vices, like Falstaff's,
+are more lovable than other people's virtues.  Fortune, which will not
+suffer him to be honest, makes his thieveries, in her extremity of
+whim, to be but benefits for others.
+
+Of the other characters, Prince Florizel, Perdita's lover, is that
+rarest of all dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of
+soul.  Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty
+and devotion.  Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in
+the violence of his jealousy.  As the study of a mind overborne by an
+obsession, it is a strong yet repulsive picture.
+
+
++Date+.--Simon Forman narrates in his diary how he saw the play at the
+Globe Theater, May 16, 1611.  It was probably written about this time.
+Jonson's _Masque of Oberon_, produced January 1, 1611, contains an
+antimasque of satyrs which may bear some relation to the similar dance
+in IV, iv, 331 ff.  The First Folio contains the earliest print of the
+play.
+
++Source+.--The romance, to which reference has been made above, as the
+source of _The Winter's Tale_, was Robert Greene's _Pandosto: The
+Triumph of Time_, sometimes called by its later title, _The History of
+Dorastus and Fawnia_.  Fourteen editions followed one another from its
+appearance in 1588.  Greene made the jealous Pandosto king in Bohemia,
+and Egistus (Polixenes in the play) king of Sicily.  In _The Winter's
+Tale_ two kingdoms are interchanged.  Nevertheless the "seacoast of
+Bohemia," so often ridiculed as Shakespeare's stage direction, is found
+in Greene's story.  Three alterations by Shakespeare are of vital
+importance in improving the plot: the slandered queen is kept alive,
+instead of dying in grief for her son's death, to be restored again in
+the famous but theatrical statue scene; Autolycus is created and is
+given, with Camillo, an important share in the restoration of Perdita;
+and the complications of {205} Dorastus's (Florizel's) destiny as the
+prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's
+(Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on
+learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted.  The characters of
+Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own
+invention.
+
+According to Professor Neilson, Autolycus and his song in IV iii, 1
+ff., may have been partly based on the character of Tom Beggar in
+Robert Wilson's _Three Ladies of London_ (1584).
+
+
++The Tempest+, probably the last complete drama from Shakespeare's pen,
+differs from the other "romances" in possessing a singular unity.  It
+comes, indeed closer than any play, save the _Comedy of Errors_, to
+fulfilling the demands of unity of action, time, and place.  This may
+be due to the fact that the poet is here making up his own plot, not,
+as in other cases, dramatizing a novel of extended adventure.
+
+The central theme of _The Tempest_ is, like that of the other romances,
+restoration of those exiled and reconciliation of those at enmity; but
+the treatment of the story could not be more different.  Where the
+chance of fortune has hitherto brought about the happy ending, here
+magic and the supernatural in control of man are the means employed.
+Those who had plotted or connived at the expulsion of Prospero, Duke of
+Milan, and his being set adrift in an open boat, with his infant
+daughter and his books for company, are wrecked through his art upon
+the island of which he has become the master.  Ariel, the spirit who
+serves Prospero, a mysterious, ever changing form, now fire, now a
+Nymph, now an invisible musician, now a Harpy, striking guilt into the
+conscience (and yet apparently not interested in either vice or virtue,
+but {206} longing only for free idleness), guides all to Prospero's
+cave, and receives freedom for his toil.  His spirit pervades every
+scene, whether we view the king's son Ferdinand loving innocent
+Miranda, or the silent king mourning his son's loss, or the guilty
+conspirators plotting the king's death, or the drunken steward and
+jester plotting with the servant monster Caliban the overthrow of
+Prospero.  All of them are led, by the wisdom of Prospero acting
+through Ariel, away from their own wrong impulses, and into
+reconcilement and peace.  How much of _The Tempest_ Shakespeare meant
+as a symbol can never be told; but here, perhaps, as much as anywhere
+the temptation to read the philosophy of the poet into the story of the
+dramatist comes strongly upon the reader.
+
+There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is
+inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare's own voice.  In
+one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and
+compares life itself to the transitory play.  In the other, Prospero
+bids farewell to his magic art.  These are often interpreted as
+Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage and to his art,--with what
+justification every reader must decide for himself.
+
+In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint
+of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty.  The falling in
+love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and
+nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the
+creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge
+of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,--all these
+are the work of {207} a genius still in the full pride of power.
+Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in
+the evening."
+
+
++Date+.--Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the
+play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611.  The play certainly
+is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609.  It was acted during
+the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other
+plays were revived.
+
++Sources+.--Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey
+told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda
+Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in
+1609.  From these Shakespeare drew for many details.  His island,
+however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land.  Other
+details have been traced from various sources.  Ariel is a name of a
+spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets.  Montaigne's
+_Essays_, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's
+imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.).  Setebos has been found as a
+devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's _History of Travaile_ (1577).
+The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably
+Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose
+daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who
+through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from
+some old folk tale; since a German play, _Die Schoene Sidea_, by Jakob
+Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details.  The
+relations, if any, between the two plays are remote.
+
+
++The Life of Henry the Eighth+, the last of the historical plays, in
+date of composition as in the history it pictures, suffers from the
+very fact that it boasts in its second title, _All is True_.  The play
+might have been built around any one of the half-dozen persons which in
+turn claim our chief interest,--Buckingham, Queen Katherine, Anne
+Bullen; the King, Wolsey, or {208} Cranmer; but fidelity to history,
+while it did not hinder some slight alteration of incident and time,
+required that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a
+complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to be given.  The
+result was a complete abandonment of anything like unity of theme.
+
+It is, of course, a disappointment to one who has just read _I Henry
+IV_.  On the other hand, this play may be regarded as a kind of
+pageant, as the word is used nowadays in England and America.  It
+presents, in the manner of a modern pageant, a series of brilliant
+scenes telling of Buckingham's fall, of Wolsey's triumph and ruin, of
+Katherine's trial and death, of Anne Bullen's coronation, and of
+Cranmer's advancement, joined together by the well-drawn character of
+the King, powerful, masterful, selfish, and vindictive, but not without
+a suggestion of better qualities.  The gayety of the Masque, in the
+first act, where King Henry first meets Anne Bullen, is also in perfect
+harmony with the modern pageant, which always employs music and dancing
+as aids to the picture.
+
+In Queen Katherine we have a suffering and wronged woman, gifted with
+queenly grace and dignity, and with strong sympathies and a keen sense
+of justice.  From her first entrance, when she ventures, Esther-like,
+into the presence of the king to intercede for an oppressed people,
+through all her vain struggle against the King's wayward inclination
+and the Cardinal's wiles, up to the very moment when she is stricken
+with mortal illness, she holds our sympathy.  If in her great trial
+scene she is weaker and more impulsive than Hermione in hers, yet the
+circumstances are {209} different; she is not keyed up to so high an
+endeavor as that lady, nor in so much danger for herself or her
+children.
+
+
++Authorship+.--Differences in style and meter, and the fragmentary
+quality of the whole play have long confirmed the theory that
+Shakespeare in _Henry VIII_ engaged in a very loose sort of
+collaboration.  Only the Buckingham scene (I, i,), the scenes of
+Katherine's entrance and trial (I, ii, II, iv), a brief scene of Anne
+Bullen (II, iii), and the first half of the scene in which Wolsey's
+schemes are exposed and Henry alienated from him (III, i, 1-203) are
+confidently ascribed to Shakespeare.  The rest of the play fits best
+the style and metrical habit of John Fletcher, at this time one of the
+most popular dramatists of London.
+
++Date+.--The Globe Theater was burned on June 29, 1613, when a play
+called _Henry VIII or All is True_ was being performed.  So far as
+stylistic tests can decide, this was not long after the composition of
+the play.  Sir Henry Wotton, the antiquarian, writing from hearsay
+knowledge, says that the play being acted at the time of the fire was
+"a new play called All is True."  Shakespeare's scenes in this drama
+may thus have been his last dramatic work.  A praise of King James in
+the last scene was probably written not later than the rest of the
+play, and thus insures a date later than 1603.  The earliest print of
+the play was the First Folio, 1623.
+
++Source+.--Holinshed was the chief source.  Halle furnished certain
+details.  Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ tells the Cranmer story.
+
+
+
+
+{210}
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
+
+The mystery which enwraps so much of Shakespeare's life, combined with
+the interest which naturally centers around a great genius, is ideally
+calculated to stimulate human imagination to fantastic guess-work.  It
+is probably for this reason that a number of famous delusions about
+Shakespeare have at different times arisen.  Some of these are of
+sufficient importance to deserve attention.  Three widely different
+types of mistakes can be observed.
+
++The Shakespeare Apocrypha+.--The most excusable of these delusions was
+the belief that Shakespeare wrote a large number of plays which are now
+known to be the work of other men.  Some of these plays were printed,
+either during the poet's life or after his death, with "William
+Shakespeare" or "W. S." on the title-page.  It is now practically
+certain that the full name was a printer's forgery, and that the
+letters W. S. were either designed to deceive or else the initials of
+some contemporary dramatist (such as Wentworth Smith, for example).
+Six of these spurious dramas were included in the Third Folio of
+Shakespeare's complete works.  Since this came out forty years after
+the First Folio, when men who had known Shakespeare personally {211}
+were dead, we certainly cannot believe that its editor had better
+information than those of the First Folio, who were the poet's personal
+friends, and who did not include these plays.  The spurious dramas
+printed in the Third Folio were: _The London Prodigal, The History of
+the Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The History of Sir John
+Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _The Tragedy of
+Locrine_.
+
+Among the other plays imputed to Shakespeare at various times are:
+_Fair Em, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Feversham, The Two
+Noble Kinsmen, Edward Third_, and _Sir Thomas More_.  Some good
+critics, chiefly literary men, not scholars, still believe that
+Shakespeare wrote parts of the last three; but it is practically
+certain that he had nothing to do with the others, and his part in all
+these disputed plays is extremely doubtful.
+
++Shakespearean Forgeries+.--Men who assigned the above spurious plays
+to Shakespeare made an honest error of judgment, but other men have
+committed deliberate forgeries in regard to him.  At the end of the
+eighteenth century, W. H. Ireland forged papers which he attempted to
+impose on the public as recently discovered Mss. of the 'Swan of Avon.'
+One of these finds, a play called _Vortigern_, was actually acted by a
+prominent company.  But the unShakespearean character of these 'great
+discoveries' was soon perceived, and Ireland at length confessed.
+
+Another famous fraud of a wholly different kind was that of J. P.
+Collier.  The great services which this man has rendered to the world
+of scholarship make {212} all men reluctant to pass too severe censure
+on his conduct; but it is only fair that the public should be warned
+against deception.  He pretended to have found a folio copy of the
+plays corrected and revised on the margin in the handwriting of a
+contemporary of Shakespeare.  Some of these revisions were actual
+improvements on the carelessly printed text; but it is now known that
+they were forgeries.  Similar changes were made by him in other
+important documents, and were for some time accepted as genuine.
+
++The Bacon Controversy+.--During the latter part of the nineteenth
+century, the contention was started that Shakespeare was merely an
+obscure actor who never wrote a line, and that the Shakespearean plays
+were actually written by his great contemporary, Francis Bacon, who was
+pleased to let these products of his own genius appear under the name
+of another man.  This delusion is usually considered as beginning with
+an article by Miss Delia Bacon in _Putnam's Monthly_ (January, 1856),
+although the idea had been twice suggested during the eight years
+preceding.
+
+The Baconian arguments fall into four groups.  First, they argue that
+there is no proof to establish the identity of Shakespeare, the actor,
+with the author of the plays.  This is untrue.  We have more than one
+reference by his contemporaries, identifying the actor with the poet,
+some so strong that the Baconians themselves can explain them away only
+by assuming that the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully
+deceives the public.  By assumptions like that, any one could prove
+anything.
+
+The second point of the Baconians is that a man of {213} Shakespeare's
+limited education could not have written plays replete with so many
+kinds of learning.  This argument is weak at both ends.  It assumes as
+true that Shakespeare had a limited education and that his plays are
+full of knowledge learned from books rather than from life.  The first
+of these points rests on vague tradition only, and the second is still
+a debatable question.  But even if we admit these two points, what
+then?  Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old and had probably lived in
+London for five or six years when the first book from his hand appeared
+in its present form.  Any man capable of writing _Hamlet_ could educate
+himself during several years in the heart of a great city.
+
+Thirdly, a certain lady found in Bacon's writings a large number of
+expressions which seemed to her to resemble similar phrases in
+Shakespeare.  Except to the mind of an ardent Baconian many of these
+show no likeness whatever.  Most of those which do show any likeness
+were proverbial or stock expressions which can be found in other
+writers.
+
+Lastly, various Baconians have repeatedly asserted that they had found
+in the First Folio acrostic signatures of Bacon's name; that one could
+spell Bacon or Francis Bacon by picking out letters in the text
+according to certain rules.  But unfortunately either these acrostics
+do not work out, or else the rules are so loose that similar acrostics
+can be found anywhere, in modern books or pamphlets, and even on the
+gravestones of our ancestors.  Many of the more intelligent Baconians
+themselves have no faith in this last form of evidence.
+
+{214}
+
+On the other hand, there are certain very weighty objections to Bacon
+as author of the plays.  In the first place, it is a miracle that one
+man should produce either the works of Bacon or Shakespeare alone; it
+is a miracle past all belief that the same man in one lifetime should
+have written both.  In the second place, the little verse which Bacon
+is known to have written shows clearly how limited he was as a poet, no
+matter how great in other directions.  Moreover, his prose, though
+splendid in its kind, is wholly unlike the prose of Shakespeare.
+Finally, Bacon's contemptuous attitude toward woman and marriage was
+diametrically opposed to that found in Shakespeare.  To imagine that
+the same man wrote both sets of writings is to assume that he was one
+man one day and another the next.
+
+The advocates of this strange theory vary greatly in fairmindedness and
+ability, and it is not just to judge them all by the mad extremes of
+some; but, nevertheless, their writings, taken as a whole, form one of
+the strangest medleys of garbled facts and fallacious reasoning which
+has ever imposed on an honest and intelligent but uninformed public.
+
+
+On the _Shakespeare Apocrypha_, see C. F. Tucker Brooke's edition of
+fourteen spurious plays, under this title, Oxford, University Press,
+1908.  On the forgeries and other questions, Appendix I of Mr. Lee's
+_Life_ is the readiest place of reference.
+
+
+
+
+{215}
+
+INDEX
+
+  Aaron, 141.
+  _Abraham and Isaac_, 25.
+  _Adoration of the Wise Men_, 25.
+  AEschylus, 20
+  AEsop, 182.
+  Albright, V. E., 44, 50.
+  _All is True_, 207, 209.
+  Alleyn, E., 48, 49.
+  Allott, R., 124.
+  _All's Well that Ends Well_, 110, 121, _174-176_.
+  _Amphitruo_, 110, 148.
+  Amyot, J., 108.
+  Anders, H. R. D., 112.
+  Angelo, 176.
+  Antonio, 160.
+  _Antonius, Life of M._, 192, 195.
+  Antony, 178.
+  _Antony and Cleopatra_, 47, 75, 83, 102, 109, 121, _190-192_, 193.
+  Apemantus, 194.
+  _Apocrypha, Shakespeare_, 120, 210.
+  _Apollonius and Silla_, 171.
+  _Arcadia_, 111, 187.
+  _Arden of Feversham_, 211.
+  _Aren en Titus_, 142.
+  Ariel, 206.
+  Ariosto, 167.
+  Aristophanes, 20.
+  Aristotle, 30.
+  Arthur, Prince, 137.
+  Ashbies, 4, 16.
+  Aspley, W. A., 121, 124.
+  _As You Like It_, 102, 110, 121, _167-169_, 172.
+  Ayrer, J., 207.
+
+  Bacon controversy, 212-214.
+  Baker, G. P., 104.
+  Bale, J., 138.
+  Bandello, 109, 110, 144, 167, 171.
+  Bankside, 37.
+  Barksted, 76, 177.
+  Barnard, Lady, 19.
+  Bear-rings as stages, 37.
+  Beatrice, 166.
+  Beaumont, F., 57, 196.
+  Belleforest, 171, 182.
+  Bellott, Stephen, 13, 14.
+  Benedick, 166.
+  _Benedicke and Betteris_, 167.
+  Bermuda, 207.
+  Bertram, 174, 175.
+  Besant, Sir W., 59.
+  Blackfriars Theater, 14, 45-46, 49, 57, 58.
+  Blount, E., 121-123, 199.
+  Boccaccio, G., 110, 176, 202.
+  Boisteau, 144.
+  Bolingbroke, 138.
+  _Book of Martyrs_, 207.
+  _Booke of Plaies_, 189.
+  Boswell, J., 129.
+  Boy-actors, 49.
+  Bradley, A. C., 195.
+  Brodmeier, 50.
+  Brome play, 25.
+  Brooke, A., 145.
+  Brooke, C. F. T., 214.
+  Brutus, 178, 179.
+  Buckingham, 207.
+  _Building of the Arke_, 25.
+  Bullen (Boleyn), Anne, 207.
+  Burbage, James, 37.
+  Burbage, R., 12, 14, 17, 19, 37, 38, 45, 48, 49.
+  Busby, J., 118.
+  Butler, N., 120.
+
+  _Caesar, Life of J._, 193; _see also Julius_.
+  Caliban, 206.
+  Camden, R., 11.
+  Capell, E., 129.
+  Cassius, 178.
+  Caxton, W., 174.
+  Chamberlain's Company, _see_ Lord.
+  Chambers, E. K., 34.
+  Character-study, 90.
+  Charlecote, 7.
+  Chaucer, G., 67, 109, 151, 152, 174, 201.
+  Chester Plays, 24, 25.
+  Chettle, H., 9, 12, 174.
+  Chetwind, P., 125.
+  Children of Paul's, 46.
+  Children of the Chapel, 46.
+  Children's companies, 48.
+  _Chronicle_ of Holinshed, _107-108_, 187.  _See also_ Holinshed.
+  Church, Origin of drama in, 20-23
+  Cinthio, G., 109, 177, 184.
+  Citizens of London, 55.
+  City of London, 53.
+  Clark, A., 4 n.
+  Clark and Wright, 129, 189.
+  Classical drama, 29-31.
+  Claudio, 165, 177.
+  Cloten, 200.
+  Cock-pit, 46.
+  _Colin Clout_, etc., 10.
+  Collier, J. P., 112, 211.
+  _Comedy of Errors_, 10, 77, 83, 110, 121, _147-148_.
+  Condell, Henry, 12, 19, 122.
+  _Confessio Amantis_, 109, 200.
+  Constance, 137.
+  _Contention, First_, 111, 134, 135.
+  _Contention, Second_, 111, 134, 135.  _See Richard, True Tragedy of_.
+  _Contention, Whole_, 111, 120, 134.
+  Cordelia, 185.
+  _Coriolanus_, 109, 121, _192-193_.
+  Coryat, T., 39.
+  Cotes, R., 124.
+  Cotes, T., 124.
+  Cranmer, 208.
+  Creizenach, 34, 50.
+  _Cromwell, Thos., Lord_, 125, 211.
+  Curtain Theater, 37.
+  Cycles of miracle plays, 24.
+  _Cymbeline_, 41, 71, 83, 103, 108, 112, 121, _200-202_.
+
+  Danter, J., 118.
+  Dates of plays, 83.
+  Davies, Archdeacon, 7.
+  _De Clerico et Puella_, 28.
+  _Decameron_, 110, 176, 202.
+  Deer-stealing, tradition of, 7.
+  Dekker, T., 174.
+  Delius, N., 129.
+  _Deluge, The_, 25.
+  Desdemona, 184.
+  _Diana Enamorada_, 110, 149, 151.
+  Dogberry, 54, 166.
+  _Dorastus and Fawnia_, 204.
+  Dowden, E., 84.
+  Drama before Shakespeare, 20.
+  Dramatic technique, 94-100.
+  Drayton, M., 11.
+  Droeshout, M., 18.
+  Dromio, 147.
+  _Dux Moraud_, 28.
+
+  Easter drama, 22.
+  Eden, 207.
+  Editing, Problems of, 126-127.
+  Edmund, 186.
+  _Edward II_, 32, 140.
+  _Edward III_, 211.
+  _Edward IV_, 134.
+  Ely Palace portrait, 18.
+  End-stopped lines, 79-80.
+  _Endymion_, 33.
+  Essex, Earl of, 78, 159.
+  _Euphues_, 33, 140.
+  Euripides, 20.
+  _Everyman_, 26, 34.
+  _Every Man in his Humour_, 12.
+  _Every Man out of his Humour_, 158, 179.
+  External evidence, 75-77.
+
+  _Faerie Queene_, 152, 187.
+  _Fair Em_, 211.
+  Falstaff, Sir John, 7, 156-159, 164.
+  Faulconbridge, 137.
+  _Faustus_, 32.
+  _Felix and Philiomena_, 149.
+  Female parts, 48.
+  Feminine endings, 80.
+  Field, Henry, 16.
+  Field, Richard, 113.
+  Fiorentino, G., 110, 161.
+  First Folio, 11, 30, 75, 114, 119, _120-124_, 136, 137, etc.
+  Fisher, T., 120.
+  Fleay, F. L., 50, 84.
+  Fletcher, J., 2, 196, 197, 209.
+  Florio, G., 207.
+  Flower portrait, 18.
+  Fluellen, 158.
+  Folios, Second, Third, and Fourth, 124-125.
+  Forgeries, Shakespeare, 211.
+  Forman, Dr. S., 189, 202, 204.
+  Fortune Theater, 38-40.
+  Four periods, 101-104.
+  Foxe, R., 209.
+  Fuller, H. De W., 142.
+  Fuller, T., 56.
+  Furness, H. H., 127, 130.
+
+  Gamelyn, Tale of, 169.
+  _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, 29.
+  Garnett, H., 189.
+  Gascoigne, G., 163.
+  Geoffrey of Monmouth, 187.
+  German and Dutch plays like Shakespeare's, 112.
+  _Gesta Romanorum_, 200.
+  Glendower, 155.
+  Globe Theater, 1, 38, 39, 57, 58.
+  Gloucester, 186.
+  _Gorboduc_, 29.
+  Gosson, S., 161.
+  Gower, J., 109, 200.
+  Greek drama, 30.
+  Greene, R., 8, 9, 110, 115, 134, 135, 204.
+  Greene, T., 17, 31.
+  Grey, W., 50, 120.
+  _Groatsworth of Witte_, etc., 9.
+  Gunpowder Plot, 190.
+
+  Hal, Prince, 155.
+  Hall, Dr. J., 17.
+  Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., 19, 129.
+  _Hamlet_, 12, 32, 33, 34, 41, 83, 93-94, 100, 102, 111, 112,
+    116, 117, 119, 121, 128, 142, 177, _180-182_.
+  Hanmer, T., 128.
+  Harsnett, 186.
+  Hart, Joan, 19.
+  Hathaway, Anne, 5, 6.
+  Hawkins, A., 124.
+  Hazlitt, W. C., 112.
+  _Heccatommithi, Gli_, 109, 179, 184.
+  Hector, 173.
+  Hegge plays, 24.
+  Helena, 174.
+  Heminge _or_ Hemings, J., 12, 19, 122.
+  Henley Street House, 19.
+  _I Henry IV_, 6, 10, 33, 41, 83, 99, 101, 111, 117, 119, 121,
+    _154-157_, 164, 165, 208.
+  _II Henry IV_, 121, 126, _157-158_.
+  _Henry V_, 78, 83, 101, 111, 117, 119, 120, _158-159_, 165.
+  _Henry V, Famous Victories of_, 111.
+  _I Henry VI_, 111, _133-134_.
+  _II Henry VI_, 111, 117, _134-135_.
+  _III Henry VI_, 8, 83, 98, 121, _134-135_.
+  _Henry VIII_, 34, 84, 103, 112, 121, 197, _207-209_.
+  Henslowe, P., 37, 45, 48.
+  _Henslowe's Diary_, 50, 182.
+  _Heptameron of Civil Discourses_, 177.
+  Hermia, 150.
+  Hermione, 203.
+  Hero, 166.
+  Herod, 24.
+  Heywood, J., 28.
+  _Histoires Tragiques_, 182.
+  _Historia Danica_, 181.
+  Histories, 97-98.
+  Holinshed, 107-108, 134, 136, 140, 156, 159, 180, 190, 202, 209.
+  Holland (author), 184.
+  Horace, 11.
+  Hotspur, 155.
+  Hubert, 137.
+  Humphrey of Gloucester, 134.
+  Hunsdon, Lord, 48, 144.
+
+  Iachimo, 202.
+  Iago, 183.
+  Iambic pentameter, 61.
+  Imogen, 200-202.
+  _Ingannati, Gl'_, 171.
+  Ingram, 81 n.
+  Inn-yards as theaters, 35.
+  Interludes, 27-29, 48.
+  Internal evidence, 77-82.
+  Ireland, W. H., 211.
+  Isabella, 176.
+  Italian _novelle_, 109-110.
+  Italy, Influence of, on masque, 34.
+
+  Jaggard, I., 121, 124.
+  Jaggard, W., 70, 113, 120-121, 124.
+  James I, 48, 209.
+  Jaques, 169.
+  Jessica, 160.
+  _Jew of Malta_, 132.
+  Joan of Arc, 133.
+  John of Gaunt, 138, 140.
+  _John, Troublesome Reigne of_, 111, 137-138.
+  Johnson, A., 120.
+  Johnson, S., 129.
+  Jonson, Ben, 11, 12, 31, 34, 50, 56, 158, 174, 179, 204.
+  Jourdan, S., 207.
+  Julia, 149.
+  _Julius Caesar_, 44, 83, 100, 102, 109, 121, 122, 126, 172,
+    _177-180_, 184, 190, 193.
+
+  Katherine, 162, 208.
+  Kemp, W., 12.
+  _Kind-Harts Dreame_, 9.
+  _King Johan_, 27, 138.
+  _King John_, 11, 77, 83, 111, 135, _136-138_.
+  _King Lear_, 77, 83, 100, 102, 108, 117, 126, _185-187_, 195.
+  _King Leir_, etc., 111, 187.
+  _Knight's Tale_, 151.
+  Kyd, T., 31, 32, 142, 182.
+
+  Lady Macbeth, 188.
+  Lambert, D., 84.
+  Lee, S., 19, 72, 214.
+  _Legend of Good Women_, 152.
+  Leontes, 199, 204.
+  Leopold Shakespeare, 129.
+  _Locrine_, Tragedy of, 125, 211.
+  Lodge, T., 31, 111, 135, 169.
+  London, 51-59.
+  _London Prodigal, A._, 125, 211.
+  Lord Admiral's Men, 45, 48.
+  Lord Chamberlain's Company, 12, 48.
+  Lounsbury, T. R., 130.
+  _Love's Labour's Lost_, 10, 33, 77, 83, 91, 95, 99, 101, 106, 117,
+    121, 132, _145-146_.
+  _Love's Labour's Wonne_, 10, 77, 175.
+  _Lover's Complaint, A_, 70.
+  Lucian, 195.
+  _Lucrece, Rape of_, 10, _62-63_, 67, 113.
+  Lucy, Sir T., 7.
+  _Ludus Coventriae, see_ Hegge.
+  Luigi da Porto, 144.
+  Lydgate, J., 33.
+  Lyly, J., 32, 132, 135, 145-146.
+  Lysander, 150.
+
+  Macbeth, 41, 44, 83, 92, 100, 102, 103, 108, 121, _187-190_, 191, 202.
+  Malone, E., 129, 184, 207.
+  Malvolio, 170.
+  Manly, J. M., 34.
+  Manningham, J., diary, 76, 171.
+  Marina, 197, 198.
+  Marlowe, C., 2, 31-32, 132, 135, 136, 140, 153, 163.
+  Masculine endings, 80.
+  Masque, 33.
+  _Masque of Oberon_, 204.
+  Mass, Drama at, 21.
+  _Measure for Measure_, 76, 83, 109, 112, 121, _176-177_.
+  Meighen, 124.
+  _Menaechmi_, 110.
+  Menander, 20.
+  Mennes, Sir J., 3.
+  _Merchant of Venice_, 10, 42, 44, 77, 83, 96, 97, 101, 110, 112,
+    117, 120, 132, 133, _159-161_.
+  Mercutio, 144.
+  Meres, F., 10, 67 n., 76-77, 137, 142, 149, 151, 156, 161, 167,
+    169, 171, 175, 179.
+  _Merry Devil of Edmonton_, 211.
+  _Merry Wives of Windsor_, 110, 117, 118, 120, 124, _163-165_.
+  Meter, 86-87.
+  Middle Temple, 171.
+  Middleton, T., 189.
+  _Midsummer Night's Dream_, 10, 77, 83, 117, 120, 132, 133, _149-151_.
+  Milton, J., 64, 65.
+  Miracle plays, 23.
+  Miranda, 206.
+  _Mirrour for Magistrates_, 187.
+  _Mirrour of Martyrs_, 179.
+  Montaigne, _Essays_ of, 207.
+  Montemayor, J. de, 149.
+  Moralities, 26-27.
+  More, Sir T., 136.  _See under_ Sir.
+  Mountjoy, C., 13-14.
+  Mountjoy, Mary, 13.
+  _Much Ado About Nothing_, 71, 83, 101, 110, 121, _165-167_, 169.
+  _Myrrha_, 177.
+
+  Nash, T., 8, 31, 135, 182.
+  Nashe, T., 19.
+  Neilson, W. A., 129, 135, 205.
+  New Place, 16, 17.
+  _News out of Purgatorie_, 165.
+  _Nice Wanton_, 27.
+  North, Sir T., 108, 158, 179, 192, 193.
+
+  Oberon, 149.
+  Octavia, 190.
+  Oldcastle, Sir John, 120, 125, 211.
+  Olivia, 170.
+  _Orator, The_, 161.
+  Order of the plays, 83.
+  Ordish, T. F., 59.
+  Orlando, 168.
+  _Orlando Furioso_, 167.
+  _Othello_, 100, 101, 109, 117, 124, _182-185_, 191.
+  Ovid, 61, 152.
+
+  Pageants, 25.
+  Painter, W., 110, 148, 176, 195.
+  _Palace of Pleasure_, 110, 195.  _See_ Painter.
+  _Palladis Tamia_, 10, 77.
+  Pandarus, 172.
+  Pandosto, 110, 204.
+  _Passionate Pilgrim_, 70, 71, 113.
+  _Patterne of Painful Adventures_, 200.
+  Pavier, T., 120-121, 124.
+  Pavy, S., 50.
+  _Pecorone, Il_, 110.
+  Peele, G., 8, 31, 135.
+  Pembroke, Earl of, 67.
+  Perdita, 199, 203.
+  _Pericles_, 103, 109, 117, 119, 120, 128, 129, _197-200_.
+  Petrarch, 64.
+  Petruchio, 162.
+  _Phoenix and the Turtle, The_, 70.
+  Pistol, 158, 159.
+  Plautus, 10, 11, 29, 110, 148.
+  Pliny, 184.
+  Plots, 106.
+  Plutarch's _Lives_, _108-109_, 179, 192, 193, 195.
+  _Poetaster_, 174.
+  Pollard, A. W., 120.
+  Polonius, 181.
+  Pope, A., 127, 128.
+  _Popish Impostures, Declaration of_, 186.
+  Portia, 160, 179.
+  Posthumus, 200.
+  Printing, Conditions of, 114-116.
+  Private theaters, 45.
+  _Promos and Cassandra_, 112, 177.
+  Prospero, 199, 206.
+  Proteus, 149.
+  Puck (Robin Goodfellow), 149.
+  _Puritaine, The_, 125, 211.
+  Puritan Widow, _v.s._
+  Puritans, 15.
+  Pyramus and Thisbe, 150, 152.
+
+  Quartos, 114.
+  Quiney, T., 17.
+
+  _Ralph Roister Doister_, 29.
+  _Rare Triumphs_, etc., 202.
+  Reformation, 52.
+  Renaissance, 21, 29.
+  Reynolds, G. F., 50.
+  _Richard, Duke of York, True Tragedy of_, 134.  Same as _II
+    Contention, q.v._
+  _Richard II_, 10, 77, 83, 117, 119, 121, 137, _138-140_, 154.
+  _Richard III_, 10, 32, 77, 83, 91, 92, 98-99, 101, 111, 117, 119,
+    121, 133, _135-136_, 137.
+  _Richardus Tertius_, 136.
+  _Richard III, True Tragedy of_, 111, 136.
+  Riche, B., 171.
+  Rime, 81-82, 87-88.
+  Roberts, J., 120.
+  Robertson, W., 142.
+  Robin Hood, 28, 167.
+  Rome, 21.
+  _Romeo and Giulietta_, 144.
+  _Romeo and Juliet_, 11, 41, 42, 71, 77, 83, 90, 101, 112, 116,
+    117-119, 121, 122, 131, 132, _143-145_, 150, 185.
+  _Romeus and Juliet_, 145.
+  Roofs on theaters, 46.
+  Rosalind, 166.
+  _Rosalynde_, 110, 169, 171.
+  Rose Theater, 37, 135.
+  Rowe, N., 7, 127.
+  Rowley, W., 200.
+  Run on lines, 79 ff.
+  Rutland, Earl of, 17.
+
+  St. Paul's, 13, 56.
+  Salisbury Court, 46.
+  Saxo Grammaticus, 182.
+  Schelling, F. E., 34, 50, 135.
+  _School of Abuse_, 161.
+  _Second Shepherd's Play_, 25.
+  _Sejanus_, 12.
+  Seneca, 10, 20, 29, 30.
+  Sequence, _see_ Sonnet.
+  Sequence of plays, 83.
+  _Shakespeare Allusion Book_, 11 n.
+  Shakespeare, Hamnet, 5, 6, 17.
+  Shakespeare, John, 3, 4, 6, 16, 17.
+  Shakespeare, Judith, 5, 17, 18, 19.
+  Shakespeare, Richard, 4.
+  Shakespeare, Susanna, 5, 17, 19.
+  Shakespeare, William, our knowledge of his life, 1;
+    birth, 2; education, 4; marriage, 5; deer-stealing, 7;
+    life in London, 8-16; return to Stratford, 16; death, 17;
+    portraits, tomb, will, 18; descendants, 19; allusions to,
+    8-17; as an actor, 12; residence with Mountjoy, 13;
+    income, 15; grant of arms to, 16; compared with Jonson,
+    56; and _passim_.
+  _Shakespearean Tragedy_, 195.
+  Shallow, 7, 158.
+  Shottery, 6.
+  Shylock, 92-93, 159, 160.
+  _Sidea, Die Schoene_, 207.
+  Sidney, Sir P., 111, 115, 187.
+  Silvayn, A., 161.
+  Silver Street, 13.
+  Silvia, 149.
+  Sims, V., 119.
+  Sir Andrew, 170.
+  Sly, 162.
+  Smethwick, I., 121-124.
+  Somers, Sir G., 78.
+  Sonnets, 63-70, 113.
+  Sophocles, 20.
+  Southampton, Earl of, 10, 67-68.
+  _Spanish Tragedy_, 32, 182.
+  Spenser, E., 10, 187.
+  Stage, The, 40-45.
+  Stage costumes and settings, 42-44.
+  Stage, Effect of, on drama, 46.
+  Stationers' Register, 75, 114-115, 118, etc.
+  Steevens, G., 129.
+  Stephenson, H. T., 59.
+  Strachey, W., 207.
+  Strange, Lord, 48, 135.
+  Straparola, 110.
+  Stratford, 2.
+  _Supposes_, 163.
+  Surrey, Earl of, 65.
+  Swan Theater, 37.
+
+  Talbot, 133.
+  _Tamburlaine_, 32, 136.
+  _Taming of a Shrew_, 112, 121, 163.
+  _Taming of the Shrew_, 83, 111, _161-163_.
+  Tamora, 141.
+  Tarlton, 165.
+  Taste, growth of, 89-90.
+  Taverns, 56-57.
+  _Tempest, The_, 34, 41, 71, 78, 81, 84, 87, 103, 121, 136, _205-207_.
+  Terence, 29.
+  Thaisa, 198.
+  Thames, 54.
+  Theater, The, 37.
+  Theaters, 35 ff., 57-59.
+  Theobald, L., 128.
+  _Thomas More, Sir_, 211.
+  Thorpe, T., 113.
+  _Three Ladies of London_, 205.
+  Timon (by Lucian), 195.
+  _Timon of Athens_, 109, 112, 121, 122, _193-195_.
+  Titania, 149.
+  _Tito Andronico_, 142.
+  _Tittus and Vespacia_, 142.
+  _Titus Andronicus_, 11, 32, 77, 83, 117, 119, 123, 132, _141-143_.
+  Touchstone, 166.
+  Towneley plays, 24, 25.
+  _Travaile, History of_, 207.
+  _Tredici Piacevole Notte_, 110.
+  _Troilus and Cressida_, 117, 122, _172-174_, 195.
+  _Troilus and Criseyde_, 109, 174.
+  _Troye, Recuyell of_, 174.
+  _Twelfth Night_, 6, 76, 83, 101, 110, 112, 121, _169-171_, 172, 174.
+  Twine, L., 200.
+  _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, 10, 71, 77, 83, 96, 101, 110, 112, 121,
+    _148-149_.
+  _Two Noble Kinsmen_, 211.
+  Tyrwhitt, 129.
+
+  Udall, N., 29.
+  Unities, Three dramatic, 30 n.
+
+  Valentine, 149.
+  _Venus and Adonis_, 10, 16, _61_, 63, 67, 113.
+  Viola, 170.
+  _Vortigern_, 211.
+
+  Wagner (_Death of Siegfried_), 23.
+  Wakefield, _see_ Towneley.
+  Wallace, Prof. C. W., 13, 14, 19.
+  Warburton, 128.
+  Weak endings, 81.
+  Weever, J., 11, 179.
+  Westminster, 54.
+  Whetstone, G., 112, 177.
+  White, R. G., 129.
+  Wilkins, G., 200.
+  Wilson, R., 205.
+  _Winter's Tale, The_, 34, 80, 83, 103, 110, 112, 121, _202-205_.
+  Wolsey, 208.
+  Worcester, 155.
+  Wotton, Sir H., 209.
+  Wyatt, Sir T., 65.
+
+  Yonge, B., 149.
+  York and Lancaster, 134.
+  York plays, 24.
+  _Yorkshire Tragedy, A_, 120, 125, 211.
+
+
+
+
+Printed in the United States of America.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of An Introduction to Shakespeare, by
+H. N. MacCracken and F. E. Pierce and W. H. Durham
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