ish sources, dark, half-legendary narratives from northern Europe, and a long list of plays based on English history from the days of Arthur to those of Henry VIII. and the great Cardinal. These plays were, for the most part, without order or art; they were rude in structure, crude in form, violent in expression, full of rant and excess of feeling and action, crowded with incident, and blood-curdling in their realistic presentation of savage crime; but there was immense vitality in them. They were the raw material of literature. They were as full of colour and as boldly contemporaneous as a street ballad; there was enough history in them to make them vitally representative of EngJish life and character; but the facts were handled with such freedom as to give the widest range to the genius of the individual playwright.

This was the material which Shakespeare found ready to his hand when he began to feel the creative impulse stirring within him; and he used this material as his fellow-craftsmen used it. As an actor he knew these plays at first hand, and with a critical comprehension of their strong and weak points. He probably mended the loose and defective lines in his own rôles; all actors of any originality revised their lines freely. When he became familiar with the practical requirements of the stage, and gained confidence in his own skill and judgment, he set himself to working over some of the more popular plays which were in constant use. This was his journey-work, and in doing it he served his apprenticeship. The earlier plays which bear his name are, for this reason, his only in part.

They show his touch, as yet largely untrained, but already marvellously sure, and with something of magic in it; but they do not disclose the higher qualities of his genius, nor the large and beautiful art which he mastered after a few brief years of apprenticeship.

While it is true that the exact order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays is still uncertain, and is likely to remain undetermined, there is very little doubt regarding the general order in which they were given to the public. Evidence both external and internal has at length made possible a chronology of the plays which may be accepted as conclusive in indicating the large lines of Shakespeare's growth in thought and art. The external evidence is furnished by the dates of the earliest publication of some of the plays in quarto editions, the entries in the Register of the Stationers' Company, and the references to the plays in contemporaneous books and manuscripts; to these must be added allusions, or supposed allusions, in some of the plays to contemporaneous conditions, events, and perThe internal evidence is derived from a critical study of Shakespeare's versification; a study which has been sufficiently fruitful to make the application of what is known as the metrical or verse-test possible.

sons.

The blank verse in the early plays conforms rigidly to the rule which required a pause at the end of each line; in the early verse rhyming couplets are in constant use. As the poet gained confidence and skill he handled his verse with increasing ease and freedom, expanding metrical usage, varying the pause, discarding rhyme and introducing prose; and there is an

evident tendency to exclude the verbal conceits with which the dramatist entertained himself in his earlier work. The growing habit, revealed in the later plays, of ending a line with a preposition or conjunction furnishes material for a very minute and valuable study of what have become known as weak endings." All these variations and peculiarities of style throw light on the chronology of the plays.

The first touches of Shakespeare's hand are found in the first part of "Henry VI.," "The Comedy of Errors," "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Love's Labour's Lost," and "Romeo and Juliet." The play of "Titus Andronicus" is usually included among the Shakespearean dramas, but there is little evidence of its Shakespearean authorship, and there are many reasons for doubting Shakespeare's connection with it. It was regarded as his work by some of his contemporaries, and included in the first complete edition of the plays in 1623; but sixty years after his death, Edward Ravenscroft, who edited the play in 1678, said: "I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage that it was not originally his, but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters." This tradition is probably in accord with the fact; the repulsiveness of the plot, the violence of the tragic motive, and the absence of humour from the play are essentially foreign to Shakespeare's art and mind. He may have retouched it here and there; he can hardly have done more. And yet "Titus Andronicus," with its succession of

sanguinary scenes and massing of moral atrocities, may well find a place at the beginning of Shakespeare's work, so admirably does it illustrate the kind of tragedy which the early Elizabethan stage presented to its auditors. The theatre was then in what may be called its journalistic stage; it was reserved for Marlowe and Shakespeare to advance it to the stage of literature. It was to the last degree sensational and sanguinary, presenting feasts of horrors to the "groundlings," as the worst sort of sensational journals of to-day spread before their readers, in crudest description, the details of the most repulsive crimes and the habits of the vilest criminals. Elizabethan audiences delighted in bloody scenes and ranting declamation, and both are still to be found in the sensational press, with this differ ence the early theatre reached relatively few people, but the modern journal of the worst sort reaches an uncounted multitude. This taste for horrors and this exaggeration of speech were glorified by Marlowe's genius but remained essentially unchanged by him; it was left for Shakespeare's serene and balanced spirit, deeper insight, and larger art to discard the repulsive elements of the tragedy without sacrificing its power. In "Lear," "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "Othello there are, however, traces of the older drama. Shakespeare did not wholly escape the influence of his time in this respect. "Titus Andronicus" is not without power, but it is too gross and redolent of the shambles even for Shakespeare's most immature art; if he touched it at all, it must have been in a purely imitative way, and in the mere details of expression.

CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST FRUITS

WHETHER touched and strengthened by Shakespeare or not, "Titus Andronicus " serves as a connecting link between the drama as Shakespeare found it and his own work. It is not possible to determine the exact order in which the separate plays in the earliest group which record his period of apprenticeship appeared; but of the chronology of the group as a group there is no doubt. The first play which found its way into print appeared in 1597, when "Romeo and Juliet," "Richard II.," and "Richard III." were published; but it was not until the following year that Shakespeare's name appeared on the title-page of a drama. As early as 1592, however, lines from his hand had been heard on the stage; and he had begun the work of adaptation and revision still earlier. Among the plays which Shakespeare found in the library of The Theatre, many belonged to a class of dramas dealing with subjects and scenes in history-dramas which were probably more popular with the people who sat in the yard and in the boxes than any other plays which were presented to them. These plays appealed to the deepest instincts of men to whom the defeat of the Armada was a matter of very recent history,