ished to such a degree that his share in it grew to be a valuable property. The company made annual tours in the provinces, and thus Shakspeare may have been brought into occasional contact with his family in Warwickshire.

For us, however, the most interesting portion of his activity in London has still to be mentioned. Plays, in those days, were, as has been mentioned on an earlier page, the property of the theatres in which they were represented, being kept in manuscript under lock and key; and the management were entitled to adapt them to any occasion, adding or subtracting as the taste or temper of the audience might require. It is easy to understand how any actor who could be depended upon to perform such work when it was required would hold a secure position in the company, and at such tasks Shakspeare proved a skilful hand. There were plays by other dramatists in possession of the company, when he joined it, and these he renovated and improved. He displayed facility in collaborating; and, as Raphael, the greatest of painters, exhibited wonderful skill in borrowing hints of all kinds from other artists, so this greatest and most original of all literary artists was always ready to borrow either materials or modes of treatment from his contemporaries. From tinkering the productions of others he advanced to the composition of dramas of his own; and these he poured forth at an average rate of about

a couple in the year, till he had acquired perfect mastery, and none could match him.

In the birth-house at Stratford there hangs an engraving of London as it was when Shakspeare arrived in it, which enables the onlooker to realise how inconsiderable at that time was the city which has now swollen to such unholy dimensions. The real city then lay between the Tower and St. Paul's, with something beyond at either end. Where Hampstead now stands may be seen, on this map, only a lonely mill among the fields. There was but a thin line of habitations on the south side of the river. Yet it is a tribute to the intelligence of the infant city that it was able to appreciate the plays of Shakspeare, certain of which present no inconsiderable difficulty even to the leisurely reader at the present day. They were always popular, some of them, like Richard the Third and Macbeth, achieving instant and unqualified success. They were, however, most popular among the cultivated classes; Queen Elizabeth exhibiting marked partiality for them, and King James the First, when he ascended the English throne, having them performed in great numbers at court, in spite of his Scottish training and early prepossessions. Yet rivalry was not wanting. There were other theatres and other theatrical companies besides those in which Shakspeare played. That was the Age of the Drama in England; and, when Marlowe, Chapman, Kyd, Lyly, Peele,

Greene, Ben Jonson, Drayton, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher were matching their powers against competitors, there can be no doubt, these would have their own admirers, and no single author could claim unquestionable superiority; though time has decided on Shakspeare's side, and his fame has cast all others. into the shade.

1

His plays, like those of others, remained the property of the company in which he acted, and the text of them must have been subject to the usual alteration; so that there must still be in the text many interpolated passages, which it is now impossible to correct; and, indeed, it cannot be denied that there are plenty of passages which admirers of Shakspeare could wish to be due to other hands. Not one of the plays was published by himself during his lifetime. Some fifteen of them were issued by publishers to supply the literary appetite created by hearing them performed; but these were piratical productions, and they abounded with mistakes. Such little booklets are what are now known as the Quartos; they were sold for sixpence; but good copies now fetch hundreds of pounds. It

1 That Shakspeare suffered keenly from the tendency of the actors to add jokes of their own to the text of his plays may be gathered from the concluding lines of Hamlet's Address to the Players: "Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it ".

was not till eleven years after his death that an authoritative edition of thirty-six of the plays was given to the world by two of his fellow-actors and fellow-proprietors, Heming and Condell. This was a single volume in good print and cost a pound; but a good copy of this First Folio, as it is called, would now cost thousands of pounds. Pericles was added in the third edition, bringing the total number of plays up to thirty-seven. In the same edition were included several additional plays, ascribed to Shakspeare; but, though some of these are not without an interest of their own, as specimens of the drama of the time, not one of them is now recognised as from the master-hand.

The only productions of his genius the publication of which proceeded directly from himself were two poems, not dramatical, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared in 1593 and 1594 respectively. The first of these is a mythological story, telling how Venus, the goddess of love, pursued with unwelcome attentions the beautiful boy Adonis, who was too deeply enthralled with the pleasures of the chase to have time to spare for the tender passion, and how at length she saw him slain by the tusk of a wild boar which he was hunting. This piece may have been written some time before it was published; at anyrate it is obviously a youthful production, and in its passion it is too gross and luscious for the taste

of the present day; yet the workmanship is perfect, especially the description of the horse of Adonis, breaking loose from its tether and whinnying after a companion which has appeared in the distance.1 The other piece retells a well-known story from the early history of Rome-how to Lucrece was adjudged the prize of chastity; but how King Tarquin, inflamed thereby, coveted her beauty and stole from the camp by night to make spoil of it; and how, in consequence of this deed of cruelty and shame, kings ceased to rule at Rome, and the government became a republic. The narration is sustained with the same grace and mastery; but, as every single detail is minutely described, with long speeches between one incident and another, the reading grows tedious to a modern mind. Indeed, an American critic has gone so far as to say that wild horses could not drag readers to those poems now; but that they suited the taste of the age in which they were produced was proved in the way most gratifying to a poet by numerous editions being called for by the public.

Both of these poems were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, a patron of letters several years younger than the author; and to the same person Shakspeare

1 What does the author mean when he calls this "the first heir of his invention”? was it written earlier than the plays he had been writing for several years? or did he look on it as different sense from the handiwork of the playwright?

'poetry" in a