But there is danger of lingering too long in this region. It is too shadowy and impalpable, and it converts the poet into a dreamer, lost to the sympathies of common men. Shelley is an example of a poet who inhabited this dreamland of fancy too long. In his earliest productions Shakspeare also dwelt in this ideal world; but happily at an early period his star led him to the task of dramatizing the reigns of the sovereigns of his country. Here he was brought into close contact with the actual. The outlines of the plot were supplied to him by the record of events, and his fancy had to keep within the bounds thus prescribed. The incidents, at least in their main body and succession, had actually taken place; the dramatis persone were real men and women. Thus the young poet was kept to reality and learned to know the passions, the ambitions and the sorrows of the heart, not only as these might be conceived in the imagination but as they had actually been embodied in historical events. This was the right education for a mind like his; the fidelity with which he clung to his chosen task proves that he felt it to be so; and in the results, as they lie before us, we can still trace the rapid and marvellous development which under this discipline, his powers underwent. The English Histories are ten in number; but there is a marked difference in value between the first five and the last five. The latest of all, Henry the Eighth, 1 That is, as they are now printed. being so far separated from the rest in the time of its composition, stands by itself; and, if the first of all, King John, be also put by itself, there is a great and instructive contrast between the first four and the last four of the eight which remain. It would appear that, before Shakspeare arrived in London, to begin the work of his life, there already existed dramatizations of several portions of English history, which were popular with the public. Who their authors were is now uncertain; the manuscripts were the property of the theatre; and the proprietors, or those employed by them, could at pleasure add to or take from what had been written, to suit the exigencies of time or the tastes of their customers. Probably the very first work which Shakspeare had to do as a writer was the adaptation of some of these plays. Being himself one of the actors, he could see, as he was playing, how they might be improved; and his employers gave the requisite permission. In the three plays which appear in his works as the First, the Second and the Third Parts of Henry the Sixth, it is believed, we possess specimens of this renovating process-dramas by old hands which the young playwright remodelled-and it is a fine task for literary critics to determine how much is his and how much is old. They have not lacked confidence; and they tell us that "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding Shakspeare, 2373 by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors; and 1899 were entirely his own ".1 Of course such estimates are largely conjectural; but it is impossible to read the three parts of Henry the Sixth without feeling how inferior everything is to the Histories written later: the verse is comparatively unmusical and the thinking thin; few passages tempt to quotation; the representation lacks subtlety; and the plot plods laboriously after the details of the history. If this is Shakspeare at all, you say, it is only his "'prentice hand”. But this work had interested the young poet; the public interest may also have spurred him on; besides, the three plays represented a series of events which they left incomplete; and, accordingly, he was induced to write a new drama completing them. This was Richard the Third, which is the first of the historical plays entirely his own. It is a powerful piece and has always enjoyed a great popularity. It is the picture of a villain, who stalks through blood and crime to the object of his ambition; and in it Shakspeare for the first time handles the great subject of conscience, which was subsequently to play a marked part in his work. Everyone remembers how, on the night before the fatal battle of Bosworth, the ghosts of those whom he has murdered come, one after another, into Richard's tent and summon him, in his dreams, to 1 1 EMERSON, Representative Men. meet them on the morrow on the battlefield; and how he starts out of sleep, crying, "Give me another horse; bind up my wounds. Have mercy, Jesu," and then, as he lies trembling, confesses: My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tale condemns me for a villain. Although, however, there is a great deal of rough power in this drama, it is, in comparison with the author's later work, a crude performance. King Richard is a conscious villain and hypocrite; indeed, in the very first scene he declares to himself: I am determined to prove a villain; and, all through the play, he never attempts for a moment to mask his villainy from his own eyes. He is a monster of iniquity, such as Shakspeare would never have thought of painting in his maturity, when he had learned that even the hypocrite begins by deceiving himself. A still more unmistakable mark of juvenility is the gross manner in which woman is represented. The Lady Anne is wooed and won by Richard, the murderer of her husband, in presence of the coffin of her father-in-law, whom he has also slain; and the conduct of Queen Elizabeth is hardly less unwomanly. There could not be a greater contrast than between these representations of woman and that in the person of Queen Katharine in the latest of the Histories, Henry the Eighth. No doubt, however, Richard the Third must have brought to the young poet immense applause, for nothing equal to its best passages had ever before been witnessed on the English stage; he had probably been bitten, too, with the interest of the history; and so he was induced to go on. In the drama which he had just completed, as in the three parts of Henry the Sixth, he had been dealing with the fall of the House of Lancaster, which involved England in the miseries of the Wars of the Roses. The study of these events obtruded on his mind the question of the origin of these wars; and so he was carried back to the rise of the House of Lancaster in the usurpation of Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, who dethroned Richard II. and became Henry the Fourth. In working out this phase of the history he composed four plays-Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth (in two parts) and Henry the Fifth. These are all closely connected; and in them we see the genius of the poet coming to maturity. The music of the verse, the mastery of the material, the comprehension of human motives and the development of character all advance to perfection with astonishing rapidity. The poet is now master of a diction stately, brilliant and answerable to the dignity of history; yet he handles it with perfect freedom and can modify it to suit the peculiarities of his several |