They are rather signs of an omnivorous appetite for knowledge. With a poet's delight in every novel experience, he threw himself into life. But he did not throw himself away. Keenly sensitive as he was to pleasure, he had yet the justness of judgment which enabled him to hold his spirit above the temptations and companionships which would have dragged him down. With a largeness of heart like the sand upon the seashore, he could master everything, yet be mastered by none. A Greene might drink himself to death and Marlowe might perish in a brawl, but Shakespeare never. delicacy of taste was there which revolted from the vile. A conscience yet unseared discerned between the evil and the good. The "Venus and Adonis" does not prove Shakespeare's early manhood to have been swallowed up in sensuality, any more than the "Laus Veneris" of Swinburne proved him to be a youthful reprobate. Hazardous and guilty as are these edgings toward vice, we might yet in all candor believe that the vice is, like the bacchanalian songs of our college days, rather an ideal than a real thing, a matter of theory rather than of practice. It is the ill-chosen theme for intellectual subtlety to disport itself upon. Real vice is too much absorbed in its own viciousness to be self-observant and poetical. To those who accuse him too harshly, Shakespeare may use Warwick's extenuation of Prince Hal's fondness for wild associates ("King Henry IV.," Part II., 4467): My gracious lord, you look beyond him quite : Like a strange tongue; wherein, to gain the language, A YOUTH NOT WILD AND DISSOLUTE 177 'Tis needful that the most immodest word Be looked upon, and learned; which once attained, But to be known and hated. So, like gross terms, The prince will, in the perfectness of time, Shall as a pattern or a measure live, By which his grace must mete the lives of others, Another theory, I know, is quite possible, namely, that an early manhood of license was rescued from utter disaster only by disappointment in illicit love, the treachery of chosen friends, and the death of the poet's father and son. Let us unhesitatingly accept the facts, while we reject the inference drawn from them. As to the inference, it is enough to say that it is impossible to suppose even the genius of Shakespeare to have made its steady progress toward the summit of literary and dramatic achievements through years of recklessness and dissipation. Genius needs material to work upon, and that material must be gathered by labor. Disappointment, treachery, and death taught Shakespeare many lessons; but they never turned sottishness into industry, nor passion into wisdom. Prof. Dowden, of the University of Dublin, has done more than any or all of the writers before him to give a rational and connected account of the poet's life and work. The year 1600 is marked as the middle point of his productive activity. The ten years preceding 1600 were the years that saw the rise and maturing of his genius. The ten years that followed 1600 were the years of his grandest triumphs. The twenty years between 1590 and 1610, therefore, cover the whole extent M of Shakespeare's writing for the stage. But each ten years of these twenty may be further subdivided into halves, and these minor five-year periods may be roughly yet substantially distinguished from each other. Prof. Dowden has well named these four minor periods: (1) "In the workshop"; (2) "In the world"; (3) "Out of the depths"; (4) "On the heights." Let us follow this order for a moment, and get from it what help we may toward understanding the development of Shakespeare's genius. We shall see that the poet did not attain his supremacy at once. Universality was not to be reached at a bound. First came the years of apprenticeship, in which imagination almost ran riot. In Romeo and Titania there was sweetness in excess. All was regularity and rhyme. Quips and conceits abounded. The play upon words was incessant. Shakespeare was in large part working over the dramas of others. The three parts of "King Henry VI.," and perhaps also "Richard III.," were adaptations and improvements of earlier productions, whose original authors, though they were associated with him in the business of making plays, could yet enviously speak of him as an "upstart crow, beautified with their feathers." But these playwrights live now only by virtue of the breath which Shakespeare breathed into them. While the poet used the material they gave him, he so transformed it that the authors could hardly recognize it. Even in those early days of experiment, he put into his work a vivacity, a variety, a truth, and a beauty, which were altogether new in dramatic literature. The five years "in the workshop" were succeeded by five years "in the world." He began to dispense with THE FIRST TWO PERIODS OF PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITY 179 the collaboration of others, and to do wholly independent work. Beginning to write mainly as a matter of trade, he found the trade become profitable, and the more original his productions were, the more money they brought in. The family star, which had been declining, came into the ascendant once more. In 1596 John Shakespeare, his father, who had been prosecuted for debt and had lost his estate, applied for liberty to display a coat-of-arms, and in 1597 the poet purchased New Place in Stratford for a family mansion. In 1598 Francis Meres, in his "Wit's Treasury," bore testimony to the poet's established fame, and gave him the highest place among English poets and dramatists, while declaring him equal to the greatest writers of tragedy or comedy in Greece and Rome. Success encouraged him to further and bolder effort. He flung away the traditional restrictions of dramatic poetry. End-stopped and periodic lines, with their monotonous uniformity of cadence, gave place to run-on lines, with frequent weak endings, and a wonderful variety in the location of the cæsural pause. The pro logue to "King Henry V." illustrates the new freedom and unbounded energy which Shakespeare put into his There the chorus begins: verse. O for a muse of fire, that would ascend A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraisèd spirit that hath dar'd On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth That did affright the air at Agincourt? This magnificent passage illustrates not only the new splendor and freedom which Shakespeare gave to dramatic verse; it illustrates equally well the realistic quality of his second literary period. It is as if he had said to himself: "I have done with conceits and fancies; let me deal with real life." The five years. "in the world" are represented by the "Merchant of Venice" and by the long series of English historical plays. Eight of these last follow one another in unbroken connection. From the fact that no one play is absolutely complete in itself, we may infer that Shakespeare intended them to constitute parts of one great heroic poem, in which English history, with its shame and its glory, should live again before the eyes of men. The historical plays are a mirror of kings, it has been said, and they should be a pattern for princes. But he must be a very kingly king who can live up to the dignity and strength of either Shakespeare's "Henry IV." or "Henry V." No warnings against romantic weakness in a monarch can be so impressive as a reading of "King Richard II."; no warnings against pietistic weakness so powerful as a representation of "King Henry VI." It is striking that the plays which depict royal imbecility belong to the earliest period of the poet's development, while those which depict royal greatness and strength belong to the second period of his growing maturity and larger knowledge of the world. He has |