CHAPTER IV_The Facts About Shakespeare

CHRONOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT

The value of a knowledge of the order in which an author's works were

composed no longer needs to be argued. The development of power and

skill which such knowledge reveals is an important part of biography,

and an individual work is more surely interpreted when we know the

period and the circumstances of the author's life in which it was

written, and what other works, by himself and his fellows, lie nearest

in point of time. Without a knowledge of chronology, the indebtedness of

contemporary authors to one another and the growth of literary forms

cannot be determined.

The fact, so often to be insisted upon, that at the beginning of

Shakespeare's career stage plays were hardly regarded as literature at

all and were not published by their authors, deprives us of the evidence

usually afforded by date of publication. We are thus forced to have

recourse to a variety of more or less casually recorded data, and to

indications of differences of maturity in style and matter which are

often much less clear than could be wished. Before giving the results of

the research that has been pursued for a century and a half, it will be

worth while to enumerate the most fruitful methods which have been

employed, and the sorts of evidence available.

Of purely external evidence, the chief kinds are these: records of the

performance of plays in letters, diaries, accounts, and the like;

quotation, allusion, imitation, or parody in other works; entries in the

books of the Master of the Revels at Court, and in the Register of the

Stationers' Company; dates on the title-pages of the plays themselves;

facts and traditions about the life of the author; dates in the lives of

actors and in the careers of companies known to have performed the

plays, and in the histories of theaters in which they were presented.

Instances of some of these are the manuscript which tells of a

performance of _The Comedy of Errors_ at Gray's Inn in 1594; the diary

of the quack, Dr. Simon Forman, who witnessed performances of _Macbeth,

Cymbeline_, and _The Winter's Tale_ at the Globe in 1610 and 1611; the

appreciation of Shakespeare, with a list of a dozen plays by him, in the

_Palladis Tamia_[4] of Francis Meres, 1598; and the pamphlets on

Somers's voyage to Virginia, which offered suggestions for _The

Tempest_.

[4] See Appendix A, 13.

Partly external and partly internal are the evidences derived from

allusions in the plays to current events, personal or political, such as

the reference in the Prologue to _Henry V_ to the expedition of Essex to

Ireland in 1599; references to other books, like the quotation from

Marlowe in _As You Like It_, III. v. 82; references from one play of

Shakespeare's to another, like the promise in the Epilogue to _2 Henry

IV_ to "continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with

fair Katherine of France."

[Page Heading: Kinds of Evidence]

The purely internal evidence is seldom as specific as the external, and

requires to be handled with much judgment and caution. Most difficult in

this class is the weighing of considerations of a moral or esthetic

nature; for, though these are often powerful in their effect on the

individual reader, they are usually incapable of proof to another person

with different tastes and a different point of view. Of such tests,

those afforded by a study of the methods used in the treatment of plot

and in the development of character are perhaps the least subjective.

Somewhat more palpable are the changing characteristics of style. The

number and nature of classical allusions and Latin words and quotations;

the kind and degree of elaboration of figures of speech, puns, conceits,

and the like; diffuseness or concentration in the expression of thought;

artificiality or lifelikeness in the treatment of dialogue; the use of

prose or verse; the employment of oaths, checked by statute shortly

after the accession of James I: these are the main aspects of style

which can be used in determining, not exact dates, but the period of

Shakespeare's activity within which a given work falls. More capable of

mechanical calculation than the tests of either matter or style are

those derived from changes in versification, though here too there is

often a subjective element in the reckoning. The more important metrical

tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the

heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in

alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel

lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an

extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially

at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular

iambic movement of blank verse; weak and light endings; and, most

valuable, the position of the pause in the line ("end-stopped" or "run

on"), and feminine endings or hypermetrical lines, such as

"These many summers in a sea of glor-y."

Many of these variable features were not consciously manipulated by the

author; and, even when a general drift in a certain direction is clearly

observable in his practice with regard to them, it is not to be assumed

that his progress was perfectly regular, without leaps forward and

occasional returns to an earlier usage. It is to be noted also that the

subject and atmosphere of a particular play might induce a metrical

treatment of a special kind, in which case the verse tests would yield

evidence not primarily chronological at all. Nevertheless, when all

allowances have been made and all due caution exercised, it will be

found that the indications of the versification corroborate and

supplement the external evidences in a valuable way.

[Page Heading: Metrical Tests]

TABLE I

=========================================================================

| | | | | % | | % |

------------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+--------+--------

L. L. L. | 2789 | 1086 | 579 | 1028 | 7.7 | 18.4 | 10.0 | 3

C. of E. | 1770 | 240 | 1150 | 380 | 16.6 | 12.9 | 0.6 | 0

T. G. V. | 2060 | 409 | 1510 | 116 | 18.4 | 12.4 | 5.8 | 0

R. III | 3599 | 55 | 3374 | 170 | 19.5 | 13.1 | 2.9 | 4

K. J. | 2553 | 0 | 2403 | 150 | 6.3 | 17.7 | 12.7 | 7

R. & J. | 3002 | 405 | 2111 | 486 | 8.2 | 14.2 | 14.9 | 7

M. N. D. | 2251 | 441 | 878 | 731 | 7.3 | 13.2 | 17.3 | 1

R. II | 2644 | 0 | 2107 | 537 | 11.0 | 19.9 | 7.3 | 4

Merch. | 2705 | 673 | 1896 | 93 | 17.6 | 21.5 | 22.2 | 7

1 Hy. IV | 3170 | 1464 | 1622 | 84 | 5.1 | 22.8 | 14.2 | 7

2 Hy. IV | 3437 | 1860 | 1417 | 74 | 16.3 | 21.4 | 16.8 | 1

M. W. W. | 3018 | 2703 | 227 | 69 | 27.2 | 20.1 | 20.5 | 1

Hy. V | 3320 | 1531 | 1678 | 101 | 20.5 | 21.8 | 18.3 | 2

M. Ado. | 2823 | 2106 | 643 | 40 | 22.9 | 19.3 | 20.7 | 2

J. C. | 2440 | 165 | 2241 | 34 | 19.7 | 19.3 | 20.3 | 10

A. Y. L. I. | 2904 | 1681 | 925 | 71 | 25.5 | 17.1 | 21.6 | 2

T. N. | 2684 | 1741 | 763 | 120 | 25.6 | 14.7 | 36.3 | 4

T. & C. | 3423 | 1186 | 2025 | 196 | 23.8 | 27.4 | 31.3 | 6

A. W. W. | 2981 | 1453 | 1234 | 280 | 29.4 | 28.4 | 74.0 | 13

Hml. | 3924 | 1208 | 2490 | 81 | 22.6 | 23.1 | 51.6 | 8

Meas. | 2809 | 1134 | 1574 | 73 | 26.1 | 23.0 | 51.4 | 7

Oth. | 3324 | 541 | 2672 | 86 | 28.1 | 19.5 | 41.4 | 2

Lear. | 3298 | 903 | 2238 | 74 | 28.5 | 29.3 | 60.9 | 6

Mcb. | 1993 | 158 | 1588 | 118 | 26.3 | 36.6 | 77.2 | 23

A. & C. | 3064 | 255 | 2761 | 42 | 26.5 | 43.3 | 77.5 | 99

Cor. | 3392 | 829 | 2521 | 42 | 28.4 | 45.9 | 79.0 | 104

Cym. | 3448 | 638 | 2505 | 107 | 30.7 | 46.0 | 85.0 | 130

W. T. | 2750 | 844 | 1825 | 0 | 32.9 | 37.5 | 87.6 | 100

Tmp. | 2068 | 458 | 1458 | 2 | 35.4 | 41.5 | 84.5 | 67

=========================================================================

TABLE II

COLLABORATED PLAYS

=========================================================================

| | | | | % | | % |

------------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+--------+--------

1 Hy. VI | 2693 | 0 | 2379 | 314 | 8.2 | 10.4 | 0.5 | 4

2 Hy. VI | 3032 | 448 | 2562 | 122 | 13.7 | 11.4 | 1.1 | 3

3 Hy. VI | 2904 | 0 | 2749 | 155 | 13.7 | 9.5 | 0.9 | 3

T. And. | 2525 | 43 | 2338 | 144 | 8.6 | 12.0 | 2.5 | 5

T. of S. | 2671 | 516 | 1971 | 169 | 17.7 | 8.1 | 3.6 | 14

T. of A. | 2358 | 596 | 1560 | 184 | 24.7 | 32.5 | 62.8 | 30 (S)

Per. | 2386 | 418 | 1436 | 225 | 20.2 | 18.2 | 71.0 | 82 (S)

Hy. VIII | 2754 | 67 | 2613 | 16 | 47.3 | 46.3 | 72.4 | 84 (S)

T. N. K. | 2734 | 179 | 2468 | 54 | 43.7 | | |

=========================================================================

The accompanying Tables[5] give the detailed results of investigations

along these lines, and a study of the data therein contained will reveal

both their possibilities and their limitations. In Tables I and II the

order of the plays is approximately that of the dates of their

composition (virtually the same as the dates of first performance). The

second and third columns cannot be regarded as giving any clue to

chronology, except that they show that in the dramas written under the

influence of Marlowe prose is comparatively rare. Elsewhere Shakespeare

employed prose for a variety of purposes: for low comedy, as in the

tavern scenes in _Henry IV_, and the scenes in which Sir Toby figures in

_Twelfth Night_; for repartee, as in the wit-combats of Beatrice and

Benedick; for purely intellectual and moralizing speeches, such as

Hamlet's over the skull of Yorick. On the other hand, highly emotional

scenes are usually in verse, as are romantic passages like the

conversation of Lorenzo and Jessica in the moonlight at Belmont, or the

dialogues of Fenton and Anne Page, which contrast with the realistic

prose of the rest of the _Merry Wives_ and also the artificial

pastoralism of Silvius and Ph[oe]be in _As You Like It_. Few absolute

rules can be laid down in the matter, but study of Shakespeare's

practice reveals an admirable tact in his choice of medium.

[5] The figures here given are based in columns 1, 2, 3, and 4 on the

calculations of Fleay; in 5, 6, and 7 on those of Koenig; and in 8 on

those of Ingram. (S) = Shakespeare's scenes.

[Page Heading: Metrical Tests]

The frequency of rhyme, as shown in the fourth column, has more relation

to date. While there is no very steady gradation, it is clear that in

his earlier plays he used rhyme freely, while at the close of his career

he had practically abandoned it. The large number of rhymes in _A

Midsummer-Night's Dream_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ is accounted for mainly

by the prevailing lyrical tone of a great part of these plays, while, on

the other hand, in _All's Well_ it probably points to survivals of an

earlier first form of this comedy. It ought to be noted that, in the

figures given here, the rhyming lines in the play scene in _Hamlet_, the

vision in _Cymbeline_, the masque in _The Tempest_, and the Prologue

and Epilogue of _Henry VIII_ are not reckoned.

More significant are the percentages in columns five, six, and seven.

Before 1598, feminine endings never reach twenty per cent of the total

number of pentameter lines; after that date they are practically always

above that number, and show a fairly steady increase to the thirty-five

per cent of _The Tempest_. The variations of run-on lines (which, of

course, carry with them the frequency of pauses within the line, and

inversely the growing rarity of end-stopped lines) are closely parallel

to those of the feminine endings; while the increase in the proportion

of speeches ending within the line is still more striking. In _The

Comedy of Errors_ this phenomenon hardly occurs at all; in _The Tempest_

it happens in over eighty-four per cent of the speeches, the increase

being especially regular after 1598. Yet in some cases other causes are

operative. Thus cuts and revisions of plays were apt to leave broken

lines at the ends of speeches, and the comparatively high percentages in

_Love's Labour's Lost_, _Romeo and Juliet_, and _All's Well_ are

probably in part due to these causes.

The phenomena recorded in the last column are peculiar. Previous to the

date of _Macbeth_ it appears that Shakespeare practically avoided ending

a line with light or weak words such as prepositions, conjunctions, and

auxiliary verbs, but that from about 1606 to the end he employed them in

proportions ranging from 3.53 per cent in _Antony and Cleopatra_ to

7.14 per cent in his part of _Henry VIII_.

[Page Heading: Risks of Error]

The figures for plays not wholly written by Shakespeare are naturally

less significant, and have therefore been given separately; yet, on the

whole, they show the same general tendencies in the use of meter.

It will be observed that while the developments suggested by the

different columns are fairly consistent, they do not absolutely agree in

any two cases, and can obviously be used, as has been said, only to

corroborate other evidence in placing a play in a period, not to fix a

precise year. Further, in the calculations involved, there are many

doubtful cases calling for the exercise of individual judgment,

especially as to what constitutes a run-on line, or a light or weak

ending. Thus Professor Bradley differs from Koenig in several cases as to

the figures given in the seventh column, counting the percentage of

speeches ending within the line as 57 for _Hamlet_, 54 for _Othello_, 69

for _King Lear_, and 75 for _Macbeth_. For Acts III, IV, and V of

_Pericles_, the 71 per cent is Bradley's, for which Koenig's 17.1 is

clearly a mistake. Serious as are such discrepancies, and suggestive of

a need for a general re-counting of all the more significant phenomena,

they are not so great as to shake the faith of any scholar who has

seriously studied the matter in the usefulness of metrical tests as an

aid in the settling of the chronology.

TABLE III

==========================================================================

PERIODS | COMEDIES | HISTORIES | TRAGEDIES

---------+-----------------------+-----------------+----------------------

| L. L. L. 1591 | 1 Hy. VI 1590-1 |

| C. of E. 1591 | 2 Hy. VI 1590-2 |

I | T. G. of V. 1591-2 | 3 Hy. VI 1590-2 |

| | R. III 1593 |

| | K. J. 1593 | T. And. 1593-4

---------+-----------------------+-----------------+----------------------

| M. N. D. 1594-5 | R. II 1595 | R. and J. 1594-5

| M. of V. 1595-6 | |

| T. of S. 1596-7 | 1 Hy. IV 1597 |

II | M. W. of W. 1598 | 2 Hy. IV 1598 |

| M. Ado 1599 | Hy. V 1599 | J. Caes. 1599

| A. Y. L. I. 1599-1600 | |

| Tw. N. 1601 | |

---------+-----------------------+-----------------+----------------------

| T. & C. 1601-2 | |

| A. Well 1602 | |

| Meas. 1603 | | Ham. 1602, 1603

| | | Oth. 1604

III | | | Lear 1605-6

| | | Mach. 1606

| | | T. of Ath. 1607

| Per. 1607-8 | | A. & Cl. 1607-8

| | | Cor. 1609

---------+-----------------------+-----------------+----------------------

| Cymb. 1610 | |

| W. Tale 1611 | |

IV | Temp. 1611 | |

| T. N. K. 1612-13 | Hy. VIII 1612 |

| | |

==========================================================================

[Page Heading: First Period]

Table III gives a summary of the results of all the kinds of evidence

available as recorded in the introduction to individual plays in the

Tudor Shakespeare. The classification into Comedies, Histories, and

Tragedies draws attention at once to the changes in the type of drama on

which Shakespeare concentrated his main attention, and suggests the

usual division of his activity into four periods. In the first of these,

extending from the beginning of his writing (perhaps earlier than 1590)

to the end of 1593, he attempted practically all the forms of drama then

in vogue. Plays which were given him to revise, or in which he was

invited to collaborate, may naturally be supposed to have preceded

independent efforts, and his still undetermined share in _Henry VI_ is

usually regarded as his earliest dramatic production. What he learned in

this field of tragic history from his more experienced fellows may be

seen in _Richard III_, in which he can be observed following in the

footsteps of Marlowe in the treatment of meter, in the rhetorical and

lyrical nature of the dialogue, and in the conception of the central

character. Even less of his individual quality is to be discerned in the

field of tragedy, for the most that can be claimed for him in _Titus

Andronicus_ is the re-combination of the repellent episodes of that

crude specimen of the tragedy of blood, and the rewriting of the lines

which occasionally cloak the horrors with passages of poetry. If, as is

unlikely, the first form of _Romeo and Juliet_ was written in this

period, the extant form must show it so radically revised that it leaves

us little ground for generalization as to his power in tragedy in this

first period.

It was in comedy that Shakespeare first showed originality. _Love's

Labour's Lost_ is one of the few plays whose plots seem to have been due

to his own invention; and full of sparkle and grace as it is, it bears

obvious marks of the _tour de force_, the young writer's conscious

testing of his powers in social satire, in comic situation, and most of

all in verbal mastery and the manipulation of dialogue. In _The Comedy

of Errors_ he had the advantage of a definite model in the well-defined

type of the Plautian comedy; but here again in the doubling of the twins

and the elaboration of the entanglements there are traces of the

beginner's delight in technic for its own sake. The clearly contrasted

types in the two pairs of heroes and heroines of _The Two Gentlemen of

Verona_ point to a conscious effort in characterization, as the author's

attention had been concentrated on dialogue and on situation in the

other two comedies of this group. Thus, regarding the variety of kind

and the nature of his achievement in these first eight or nine plays, we

can hardly fail to acquiesce in the general opinion that views the first

period as one of experiment.

[Page Heading: Second Period]

The chronicle history was the Elizabethan dramatic form whose

possibilities were first exhausted. _King John_ had been only a making

over of an earlier work, and perhaps the most significant single change

Shakespeare made was the excision of the anti-Romanist bias which in the

older play had made John a Protestant hero. Yet this history voices,

too, in the speeches of Faulconbridge, that patriotic enthusiasm which

finds fuller expression in the dying Gaunt's eulogy of England in

_Richard II_, and culminates in the triumphant heroics of _Henry V_.

This national enthusiasm, especially ebullient in the years following

the Great Armada, is justly to be regarded as an important condition of

the flourishing of these plays on English history; and it is natural to

suppose that the ebbing of this spirit in the closing years of

Elizabeth's reign is not unconnected with the decline of this dramatic

type. There are, however, other causes clearly perceptible. The material

was nearly exhausted. Almost every prominent national figure for the

three hundred years before the founding of the Tudor dynasty had been

put upon the stage; and to come down to more recent times was to meddle

with matters of controversy, the ashes of which were not yet cold. The

reign of Henry VIII was not touched till after the death of Elizabeth,

and the nature of the treatment given to the court of her father by

Shakespeare and Fletcher corroborates our view. Further, the growing

mastery of technic which is so clearly perceptible in the comedies of

the second period must have been accompanied by a restlessness under the

hampering conditions as to the manipulation of character and plot which

were imposed by the less plastic material of the chronicles. Some effort

towards greater freedom the dramatist made in the later histories. The

earlier plays of this class had been prevailingly tragic; but now he

supplemented and enlivened the political element with the comic scenes

which gave us Falstaff; yet these scenes, brilliant as they are in

dialogue and superb in characterization, are of necessity little more

than episodes. The form had served its purpose as an outlet for national

feeling, but it was now outgrown. So distinguished, however, is

Shakespeare's achievement in this kind that we might be almost justified

in calling this second period that of the culmination of the chronicle

history.

The main objection to this title lies in his contemporary

accomplishment in comedy. _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ and _The Merchant

of Venice_, the one in its graceful poetic fancy and dainty lyricism,

the other in its balanced treatment of all the elements of dramatic

effectiveness--action, character, and dialogue,--exhibit the dramatist

in complete control of his technical instruments, the creator of

masterpieces of romantic comedy. _The Taming of the Shrew_ is a more or

less perfunctory revision, probably in collaboration, of an older farce

comedy; _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ bears on its face corroboration of

the tradition that it was written to order in a fortnight. The power in

high comedy first fully shown in _The Merchant of Venice_ reaches its

supreme pitch in the three plays composed at the turn of the century,

_Much Ado about Nothing_, _As You Like It_, and _Twelfth Night_. In each

of these a romantic love-tale, laid in some remote holiday world, is

taken up, given a specific atmosphere, acted out by a group of

delightful creations who are endowed with intellect, wit, and natural

affection, bathed in poetic imagination, and yet handled with sufficient

naturalism to awaken and hold our human sympathies. No more purely

delightful form of dramatic art has ever been contrived; none has ever

been treated so as to yield more fully its appropriate charm; so that in

view of the completeness of the artist's success we are bound to call

the period which closed with the first year of the seventeenth century

the triumph of comedy.

[Page Heading: Third Period]

_Julius Caesar_, the first of the plays dealing with Roman history, may

have been written before 1600, but, whether it preceded _Hamlet_ by one

year or three, it forms a gradual introduction to the group of the great

tragedies. Masterly as it is in its delineation of types, rich in

political wisdom and the knowledge of human nature, splendid in

rhetoric, it still fails to rise to the intensity of passion that marks

the succeeding dramas. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and

_Macbeth_, Shakespeare at length faced the great fundamental forces that

operate in individual, family, and social life, realized especially

those that make for moral and physical disaster, took account alike of

the deepest tendencies in character and of the mystery of external fate

or accident, exhibited these in action and reaction, in their simplicity

and their complexity, and wrought out a series of spectacles of the pity

and terror of human suffering and human sin without parallel in the

modern world. In these stupendous tragedies he availed himself of all

the powers with which he was endowed and all the skill which he had

acquired. His verse has liberated itself from the formalism and monotony

that had marked it in the earlier plays, and is now free, varied,

responsive to every mood and every type of passion; the language is

laden almost to the breaking point with the weight of thought; the

dialogue ranges from the lightest irony to heart-rending pathos and

intolerable denunciation; the characters lose all semblance of

artificial creations and challenge criticism and analysis like any

personage in history; the action is pregnant with the profoundest

significance. Hardly, if at all, less powerful are the later tragedies

of the Roman group. _Antony and Cleopatra_ is unsurpassed for the

intensity of its picture of passion, for its superb mastery of language,

for its relentless truth. The more somber scenes of _Coriolanus_ convey

a tragedy which either on its personal or its political side scarcely

yields to its predecessors in poignancy and gloom. Whatever else he may

have written in these years, here is surely the period of tragedy.

Nor do the plays classed as comedies and falling in the first three

years of the new century seriously modify this impression of the

prevailing tone of the period. _Troilus and Cressida_, _All's Well that

Ends Well_, and _Measure for Measure_ present a marked contrast to the

romantic comedy of the preceding stage. The love-story of the first

deals with a coquette and ends sordidly; while in the political plot,

though it gives occasion for speeches full of weighty thinking, jealousy

and intrigue overwhelm the heroic element. The second, alone of

Shakespeare's comedies, has a hero who is a rake; and, skilful as is the

delineation of Helena, it needs all the dramatist's power to hold our

sympathy and to force us to an unwilling assent to the title. _Measure

for Measure_ has its scene laid in a city seething in moral corruption:

out of this rises the central situation of the play; and the presence of

the most idealistic of Shakespeare's heroines does not avail to

counterbalance the atmosphere of sin and death that mocks the

conventional happy ending, and makes this play, even more than the two

others, seem more in place among the tragedies than among the comedies.

[Page Heading: Fourth Period]

The plays of the last period are, in the Folio, classed with comedies,

and such no doubt they are if judged merely by the nature of their

denouements. But if we consider their characteristic note, and the fact

that through the greater part of each play the forces and passions

involved are rather those operative in tragedy than in comedy, we easily

perceive why they have been classed as tragi-comedies or dramatic

romances. _Pericles_ in many respects stands apart from the other three

in nature as well as in date, for it is a dramatization of an old Greek

romance, and in it the hand of another than Shakespeare is only too

evident. Yet it shares with the others certain common features: like

_The Tempest_ it has scenes at sea; all four deal with the separation

and reuniting of families; all show us sympathetic figures deeply

wronged and finally overcoming their injurers by forgiveness. The

abounding high spirits of the earlier comedies are here replaced by a

mood of calm assurance of the ultimate triumph of good and a placid

faith that survives a rude acquaintance with the evil that is in men's

hearts. No period has a more distinctive quality than this of the

dramatic romances, in which the dramatist, on the eve of his retirement

from London, gave his imagination free play, and in both character and

action stamped his last creations with the mark of a lofty idealism.

[Page Heading: Interpretation of Periods]

The obvious fitness of this fourfold division into periods inevitably

raises the question of its causes, and attempts at an answer have run

along two main lines. One of these has been followed out with much

eloquence and persuasiveness by Professor Dowden, whose phrases "In the

Workshop," "In the World," "In the Depths," "On the Heights," to

describe the four periods, point clearly enough to the kind of

significance which he finds in the changes in mood and type of play.

With the first of these phrases few will be disposed to quarrel. In his

period of experiment Shakespeare's style was as yet comparatively

unformed, and his attention was so much occupied with problems of

technic that even the most psychological of critics finds here little

revelation of personality, and must be content to describe the stage as

one of professional apprenticeship. In the terms used of the three later

periods, however, there is an implication that the tone and mood of the

plays in each are the direct reflection of the emotional experiences

through which the poet himself was passing at the period of their

composition. But this is to take for granted a theory of the relation

between artist and production which has against it the general testimony

of creator and critic alike. It is not at the pitch of an emotional

experience that an artist successfully transmutes his life into art, but

in retrospect, when his recollective imagination reproduces his mood in

a form capable of being expressed without being dissipated. Of course,

Shakespeare must have lived and enjoyed and suffered intensely; but this

does not commit us to a belief in an immediate turning to account of

personal experience in the writing of drama. His boy, Hamnet, died in

1596, about the time that he was writing _The Merchant of Venice_ and

the rollicking farce of _The Taming of the Shrew_, and just before he

conceived Falstaff; it was fourteen years later that he gave us the

pathetic figure of the young Mamillius in _The Winter's Tale_. From all

we know of his personal life, the years of _King Lear_ and _Othello_

were years of abounding prosperity. The _lacrimae rerum_ that touch the

mind in these stupendous tragedies are the outcome of profound

meditation and vivid imagination, not the accompaniment of a cry of

instant pain. However we are to reconstruct the spiritual biography of

Shakespeare, it is clear that it is by no such simple reading of his

life in terms of his treatment of comic or tragic themes.

The other line of explanation will suggest itself to any thoughtful

student who contemplates the facts summed up in Chapter V on the

Elizabethan drama. Whatever Shakespeare's preeminence in the quality of

his work, he was not singular for innovations in kind. Not only are the

plays of his experimental stage preceded by models easily discerned, but

throughout his career one can see him eagerly taking up and developing

varieties of drama on which less capable men had stumbled and for which

the public had shown relish. Chronicle history, romantic comedy,

tragedies of blood and revenge, dramatic romance, had all been invented

by others, and Shakespeare never hesitated to follow their trail when it

promised to lead to popular success. This does not mean that he did not

put conscience into his work, but only that the change in type of play

perceptible from period to period is more safely to be explained by

changes of theatrical fashion and public taste than by conjectures as to

the inner life of the dramatist. Nor are we prevented from finding here

too that great good fortune as to occasion and opportunity that is

needed, along with whatever natural endowment, to explain the

achievement of Shakespeare. The return of the vogue of tragedy after he

had attained maturity and seen life was indeed happy for him and for us;

as was the rise of the imaginative type of dramatic romance when the

storm and stress of his youth had gone by. Had the theatrical demand

called for tragedy when Shakespeare was in the early thirties and light

comedy when he was in the forties, it seems likely that he would have

responded to the demand, though we can hardly suppose that the result

would have been as fortunate as in the existing state of things it

proved to be.

[Page Heading: Dates of the Poems]

The foregoing discussion has been confined to Shakespeare's plays; the

poems present problems of their own. _Venus and Adonis_ (1593) and

_Lucrece_ (1594), indeed, resemble the plays of the first period, with

which they are contemporary, both in conforming to a familiar type then

much in vogue, the re-telling in ornate style of classical legends drawn

chiefly from Ovid, and in exhibiting marks of the conscious exercise of

technical dexterity. They show the Shakespeare of the dramas mainly in

their revelation of a remarkable power of detailed observation and their

richness of phrase and fluency of versification. Vivid and eloquent

though they are, they can hardly be regarded as affording a sure

prophecy of the passion and power of characterization that mark his

mature dramatic production.

The case of the _Sonnets_ is very different. From Meres's mention of

them in 1598 we know that some had been written and were being

circulated in manuscript by that date, and certain critics have sought

to assign the main body of them to the first half of the last decade of

the sixteenth century. But they were not published till 1609, and many

of the greatest strike a note of emotion more profound than can be heard

before the date of _Hamlet_. In writing them, Shakespeare was, to be

sure, following a vogue, but as Professor Alden has pointed out in his

introduction to them in the Tudor Shakespeare, they stand apart in

important respects from the ordinary sonnet sequences of the time. All

our researches have failed to tell us to whom they were addressed, if,

indeed, they were addressed to any actual person at all; it is hardly

necessary to urge that Shakespeare was capable of profound and

passionate utterance under the impulse of imagination alone. The

probability is that they were produced at intervals over a period of

perhaps a dozen years, and that they represent a great variety of moods,

impulses, and suggestions. While some of them betray signs of youth and

remind us of the apprentice workman of _Loves Labour's Lost_, others

display in their depth of thought, intensity of feeling, and superb

power of incisive and concentrated expression, the full maturity of the

man and the artist. Hardly in the great tragedies themselves is there

clearer proof of Shakespeare's supremacy in thought and language.