and historical bat t les are described, and many of the incidents are of a bloodthirst iness and ghastliness tha t it takes a Renaissance mind to delight in, especially in the closing par ts where the scene is I t a ly , and Nashe breaks out into the old cry against I ta l ian vice and its cor-rupting influence on English morals.

The Universi ty Wi t s were a factor of enormous impor tance irt the development of English l i terature. They represent a more bourge-ois stream tha t absorbed what was best in the cour t ly t radi t ion of Spenser and Lyly and developed it on a broader and more realistic-basis, infusing a new vigour into the lovely bu t s l ight ly anaemic and artificial visions of the court ly poets. The roman t i c splendours of Marlowe's earlier plays are not likely to be overlooked. W h a t is more apt to be forgotten is the realist ic tendencies of the pamphle t s of Greene and Nashe, which represent the soil on which the romance throve, and which was sending up shoots of its own into the luxuri-ant overgrowth the social protest of Hieronimo, the Machiavel-lianism of Marlowe's later plays, and their terser, more kno t ty ima-gery, tendencies that burst out in full force in the succeeding period of the revol t .

Of a third and still more popular level tha t remained impervi-ous to court ly culture, represented at its best in the novels of Delo-ney (see below, J a c o b e a n P r o s e ) , but also in the last off-shoots of the moralit ies, which provided a point of depar tu re for the' Jonsonian comedy of humours, and in the jest books and broadside ballads hawked about the streets, there is no room to speak. It pro-duced l i t t le of permanent value, but its existence should be kept i a mind.

6. The Elizabethan Shakespeare

The man who most completely synthesized the achievements of t h e University Wits , who combined the tendencies of Kyd and Marlowe, and Lyly too, and brought them to perfection, was Wi l l i am Shake-speare (1564-1616). Already in 1592, on his death bed one might sayv Greene had warned his companions against a cer ta in 'ups ta r t crow,, beautified wi th our own feathers, t ha t , wi th his t iger ' s heart wrap t in a p layer ' s hide (a parody of a line from H e n r y VI), supposes, he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country . ' Wi th in a year both Greene and Mar lowe were dead, Kyd had wi thdrawn from the stage, and so had Peele, who was soon to die in misery like his fellows; Lodge had saved himself by taking to medicine, and Shakespeare, a f ter the reopening of t h e theatres was left as the one outs tanding d ramat i s t of the day, and was to remain so unti l about the turn of the century a younger gene-ration appeared on the scene, the men of the revol t .

Of Shakespeare 's life we do not know very much, and what we

do know*from various official documents and entries in archives is not' very j in teres t ing , but there is an astonishing weal th of such do-cumentary detail . He was, like his coeval Marlowe, the son of a well-to -do provincial tradesman, whose business however had begun to fall off already during Wil l iam's childhood. Nevertheless he must have attended the very good grammar school of his na t ive S t ra t fo rd , where he would obtain a fairly thorough grounding in La t in , though later he evidently preferred to read his classics in t ranslat ions. We know of his hasty marriage at the age of eighteen to a woman very consid-erably older than himself, and the bir th of his first child some six months after; of his departure about 1585 to London, leaving his wife and family behind him. A rather distinct animus against nagging wives in his earliest comedies may suggest a reason. Then comes a b lank of some seven years, during which he was probably learning his new profession, and finding his feet in the theatr ical world. By 1592 he had already writ ten a number of plays and was a name to be reckoned wi th , as Greene's acrimony shows. During the hungry plague years of 1592-3, when the London theatres were closed and most actors on tour in the provinces or on the cont inent , he was able to rely on the protection of the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his two verse tales writ ten then, and probably his sonnets too. And when the theatres reopened he appears as a shareholder in the newly or-ganized company of the Lord Chamberla in ' s Men, i. e. he was able to contr ibute capital to the undertaking. And af ter tha t the records are mainly a succession of financial operat ions. He was able to pay for a coat of arms, and to buy up property in his na t ive town, finally acquiring the finest house in the place. After about 1603 he seems to have given up acting, for which his talent was not ou ts tanding , and at last, about 1612, he abandoned the theat re complete ly and retired to live in his fine house in apparent ly Ph i l i s t ine prosperi ty without giving a further thought to the drama or even to poetry. When he was buried as an honoured citizen in his parish church, his re la t ions hint-ed at his fame as an epical writer on his monument , but there was no word to suggest that he was the greatest d ramat i s t of all t ime. That however is in complete accord with the general s t a tus of popular drama at the t ime plays were not ' l i t e ra ture ' .

It is no doubt the banal i ty of these facts tha t has inspired vari-ous romantical ly minded cranks with the idea tha t Shakespeare could not the author of his own plays, a theory for which there is not the ghost of a foundation. In the first place, even supposing they were wri t ten by a highly placed personage, there would be no reason that he should hide the fact. Play-wri t ing was not a disgrace, even if it brought no great fams; several noblemen are said to have written for the stags, a n i already before Shakespeare 's re t i rement , gentlemen like Beaumont ware certainly producing plays wi thou t losing caste. And also, what has advanced against Shakespeare as an author, tha t he took no interest in preserving his works for poster i ty , would apply even more to the supposed author who had such an i tch to see

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his plays produced that he arranged with inf ini te ingenui ty to fa ther them on someone else, but showed no desire to see them pr in ted . Be-sides, in the narrow world of the theatre such a myst i f ica t ion could not have been sustained for long. Ben Jonson in his gossip would have been sure to let something slip, but he shows not the least suspi-cion. He sneers at Shakespeare 's ' smal l Lat in and less Greek, ' wi th the natural contempt of the learned man for mere grammar-school acquirements; but the plays themselves jus t i fy the sneers they show a better acquaintance with t ranslat ions of the classics than wi th the classics themselves, though not complete ignorance of Lat in either. And further the author of these plays was obviously not an ama-teur writing for his own pleasure, but a man of the thea t re with an eye to the box office receipts, following every change, of fashion with a very wary eye. Shakespeare's knowledge was wide and above all va r -ied, but such knowledge was not the monopoly of the ar is tocracy, nor the kind that a university education would bring. In fact any theory that tries to deny Shakespeare 's ident i ty has riot got a leg to stand on, and is not worth discussing. It is a p i ty to have to waste even a page on the question, but its constant recrudescence unfor tu-nately makes it necessary.

The canon of Shakespeare 's works is mainly established by the big Folio edit ion, prepared as a memorial to him by his colleagues Heminges and Condell in 1623, seven years af ter his death , and a f te r Jonson had set an example by publishing his own plays as ' w o r k s ' . The texts used were based in the main on the prompt copies kept in the archives of the Globe theatre, and may have undergone some re-vision by others in the course of various product ions, but are on the whole fairly reliable. Two plays, P e r i c l e s and T h e T w o N o b l e K i n s m e n , were not included, possibly because Shake-speare only had a part share in them, though H e n r y V I I I, of which this is equally true, was pr inted. The remaining 35 plays are probably by Shakespeare throughout , though a t t e m p t s have been made to ascribe some of them, mainly the earlier ones, ei ther in pa r t or entirely to others. On the whole Heminges and Condell seem to have rescued the canon completely, or nearly so. A^eres mentions a comedy, L o v e's L a b o u r ' s W o n, which unless it was pre-served under another name has disappeared, and there is mention in a book-seller's catalogue of a C a r d n i o by Shakespeare and Fletcher, on which a very much altered 18th c. version appears to be based. Of the 36 plays of the First Folio, about half had appeared in Quarto editions during Shakespeare 's life t ime, some anonymous ly , some under his name, some in very bad pi ra ted versions, some in texts that may even have been set up from Shakespeare 's own rough copy. In such cases the Folio text seems generally to have been set up f rom the Quarto, but af ter it had been compared with the prompt copy and corrected by it. In a later edit ion of the Folio a number of fur-ther plays were added, which had been a t t r ibu ted either direct ly to Shakespeare, or to 'W. S. ' in earlier Quar tos , but of these only

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P e r i c l e s seems to bear any sign of Shakespeare 's hand. These, to-gether with a few others, form the so-called S h a k e s p e a r e A p o c r y p h a .

The problem of the order in which Shakespeare 's plays were writ-ten is an important one, in which the Folio gives no assistance: but in its general lines it can be regarded as solved. The dates of a few plays are fairly definitely established by topical references, perform-ances at court, and the like. For a great many more a lower limit can be fixed by the publication of Quar to editions, entries in the Station-ers' Register, mention by other writers and the like. One of the most important sources is Francis Meres, who in 1598 published in his P a l l a d i s T a m i a a survey of contemporary l i terature , in-cluding a list of Shakespeare's twelve best comedies and tragedies up to date. On the basis of this rough scaffolding, s ty l i s t ic criteria have been elaborated by which a fairly acceptable chronological or-der has been fixed, mainly by means of metrical tests. Shakespeare's early verse is like Marlowe's, with predominant ly end-stopped lines and masculine endings. As he progresses this metrical s t i ffness tends to loosen up more and more feminine endings increase and so do run-on lines or enjambment . The figures do not , of course, give an absolutely smooth development, the curve has its ups and downs, nor do the two points run absolutely parallel , but the general ten-dency is plain. And to these two points come fur ther ones in the early plays rhyme is still frequent, indeed it shows a fair ly steady increase up to the group of ' lyrical plays ' round about 15946, then drops abruptly, while in the late plays the increase of 'weak endings' on a proclitic that really should belong to the following line is again fairly steady. Most of these developments, it may be noted, are not peculiar to Shakespeare, but characteristic of the general development of blank verse. However the various dramat is t s do differ among them-selves considerably with regard to such figures, and metrical tests are of some help in deciding not only questions of chronology, but also of authorship when they are supported by other mater ia l .

Within the sequence of plays thus established certain groups stand out clearly as being related in mood and general stylist ic fea-tures, and so Shakespeare's work has been divided into four main periods: the period of apprenticeship s tretching from about 1588 down to the closing of the theatres in the plague years of 15923, and com-prising mainly historical plays or chronicles, and comedies, all of them rather tenta t ive and experimental. It is in th is period that the exacter chronology is most under dispute. The second period does not differ from the first in mood or in subjects, only in the complete mastery of the medium; it is the period of the great romant ic comedies and the riper historical plays, and stretches from the reopening of the theatres in 1594, down to about 1600, when Shakespeare comes under the influence of the revolt , abandons his gay romant ic comedies and turns mainly to tragedy, with a few plays that technical ly pass as comedies because of their happy endings, but have nothing of the

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gay brilliance of the t rue comedies. Tragedy, at this t ime, is not of course an entirely new genre for Shakespeare; there had been earlier attempts, but they were exceptions, now it is the tragedies that do-minate. And then about 1609 begins the last period of the romances, which reflect the new theatrical fashion inaugurated by Beaumont and Fletcher.

Formerly it used to be supposed that these periods reflected stages in Shakespeare's internal development; tha t some tremendous internal crisis or bi t ter disappointment determined the turn to pessimistic tragedies, and that the romances of the last period 'on the heights ' give the serene philosophy of the mature sage, who after wrest l ing with the demons of despair, has in the au tumn of his life won through to a belief in a benign providence, and in t ime as the u l t ima t e healer of all ills. By now the idea of a mental crisis and a period of pes-simism has for tunately been abandoned, though not perhaps for the true reason, that it is the reflection of a general change of theatr ical fashions. The belief in the ripe philosophy of the romances seems harder to kill, largely it would seem because the new fashion they reflect was so obviously introduced by Beaumont and Fletcher, and the idea that Shakespeare could have been ' inf luenced ' by his infer-iors fills the heart of many a Shakespearian scholar with indescribable rage. Of course it is not a question of ' inf luence ' in the sense of a free artist admiring and imi ta t ing the work of another , but of a man of the theatre giving his audience the sort of th ing it ev ident ly wanted while still t reat ing the new genre in his own way.

Shakespeare's first a t tempt at drama would seem to be H n-ry VI Par t I. In a way it was an extraordinari ly ambi t ious project , for the play makes no sense by itself and must have been planned from the first as part of a series, and the idea of a series was in itself something new. In another way it was rather modest, for the history plays that existed so far, like T h e F a m o u s V i c t o r i e s of H e n r y V (of which this was to some extent a cont inuat ion) , or T h T r o u b l e s o m e R e i g n o f K i n g J o h n , were very unpretentious affairs, and E d w a r d II had not yet been wr i t - ' ten. It was Shakespeare's purpose to dramat ize the nat ional cata-strophe of the Wars of the Roses as treated by Hal l , and to make of it, like G o r b o d u c, a vehicle of the poli t ical ideas of his class the necessity for national unity, for a s trong central government to check the power of the feudal aristocrats and to stress the horror of civil war and rebellion. But his concept of history was consider-ably in advance of Hal l ' s , and he saw the disaster not as God's pu-nishment for the infringement of his divine order, but as caused by human jealousies and human ambit ions. Thus while ITall t rea ts Ri-chard of York with sympathy , as the true heir to the throne done out of his b i r thr ight , and only s tepping in when Henry ' s incompetence makes it almost a duty , Shakespeare makes of him a Machiavel l ian villain, scheming against God's anointed d f a c t o depu ty . And he conceived the whole in three, or possibly four separate movements .

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The first shows how during Henry 's minori ty, owing to the jealousy and factions among the nobili ty, England loses her dominions in France. The second shows York gradual ly emerging as the dominant figure among the pack of savage wolves that the young Henry is un-able to keep in check, while in the third part the chaos of civil war engulfs the country. Whether the fourth movement , which does bring in the idea of retribution and atonement in the his tory of Richard III, was part of the original plan is less cer tain. In any case, the over-all plan shows a quite remarkable grasp of the main t ide of events and the power to shape a more definite pa t t e rn out of the chaotic mass of happenings recorded by Hall . The execution however is not as good as the plan, and this is especially t rue of the first par t .

Par t ly this seems to be because the play is not al together of a piece, and there has been some rather obvious t inker ing with it . As first planned it probably concentrated even more on the events in France, and on events rather than personalities, giving a broad, fresco-like effect. And the way the events have been telescoped and shifted about in t ime to produce a clearer uni ty is really master ly. On the French side everything has been crystallized round the figure of Joan of Arc, who in Hall represents merely a very minor incident, occupying less than a year out of the twenty that Shakespeare covers. To see in her brief tr iumph the essential turn in the fortunes of France is easy enough for a modern, but to realize her importance from Hall 's account demands sheer genius. Possibly Shakespeare had read a more glamorous account in French it is character is t ic of him that he did not rely on a single source for his histories but read widely and in various works but if so it has not been ident i f ied . And most pro-bably it was the dramatic appeal of the episode and the pa t r io t i c de-sire to ascribe the ul t imate success of the French to mere witchcraft that suggested the stress on Joan. For in his t rea tment of her he fol-lows his English sources entirely in blackening her character and even goes beyond them.

On the English side the movement is a crescendo of deaths. One after the other the great warriors of Henry V ' s generat ion are destroy-ed, leaving a younger generation of men without pa t r io t i sm and with-out s tamina, eaten up with jealousy and hatred of one another , who sacrifice the heroes to their own pet ty schemes. However this double movement has been very much weakened by a sense of patriotism that tries after all to minimize the English losses, lets every French success be followed by a more spectacular English v ic tory , and even tries to make of the final eviction a sort of English t r iumph . And further the fresco effect has been spoilt by a sequence of more personal scenes introducing York and his claims to the throne that seem to be a later addit ion and differ in style from the sur rounding matter . If we omit those three scenes we get a s t ructural line tha t makes much better sense, and a style that seems to be progressively improving with each act. It appears most clearly in the first act, marked by an excess of purely decorative inversions, a sort of s taccato abruptness,

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a use of rather learned imagery, and patches of imi ta t ion Marlowe. In the succeeding two acts these mannerisms decrease progressively, leaving something with very l i t t le ind iv idua l i ty about i t , adequate , but not obviously Shakespearian; till wi th the sequence of Ta lbo t ' s death comes a sudden rise, and we seem to be t ransported to the rhym-ing period of R i c h a r d II. These scenes were in fact probably rewritten for a later revival , for it was not unusual on such occasions to refurbish the most effective scenes, as with T h e S p a n i s h T r a g e d y . After that we drop back for a while into the more pe-destrian style, and then with the last few scenes comes something purely Shakespearian and on the level of the succceding par ts . A pos-sible explanation of this var ie ty of styles .is that Shakespeare began writing rather tentat ively, intending to keep almost exclusively to the French wars, and developing his s tyle with remarkab le rap id i ty as he wrote. That having come to J o a n ' s execution, and having des-troyed all the English leaders, he introduced York already to be her judge. And then realizing that York would need a more detai led in-troduction, he abandoned the play for a while, tu rn ing perhaps to comedy, and then after a pause in which he had developed his s ty le yet further, resumed work, introducing the first series of York scenes, and rounding the play off. Here the scene of Margare t ' s cap ture and the beginning of the love that is to prove so fatal in the succeeding play, is incredibly naive in its whole concept, but in language it al-ready shows the typical early Shakespearian imagery drawn from na ture and country life.

The second part shows a considerable advance in most respects the writing, the poetry, the character-drawing. It is a l ready a play of conflicting personalities, not of personified forces. But again the general concept is in advance of the execution. York, who is the p lay ' s real centre, remains a very shadowy figure, though probably on the stage, his silent presence will make itself more s trongle fel t . And if in the first part Shakespeare had left him some posi t ive features, making him at times the mouthpiece of pat r io t ic laments , here he is entirely blackened. His patr iot ism is unmasked as mere egoism, his laments for England ' s losses are s imply regrets for the loss of what he regards as his own property, and in the final scenes he seems to go out of h!3 mind altogether in baffled megalomaniac rage. The figure on whom Shakespeare has concentrated all his skill is the Good Duke Humphrey, actual ly a secondary figure as far as the plot goes, and of importance only as the one upright patr iot left , the man who might have helped Henry to save his crown, and who Henry abandons to his enemies. York has no need to plot against him act ively, he joins finally with his own enemies to destroy him, but still leaves the work to the others. For at Henry ' s court dog eats dog, and York is content from the first to play a wai t ing game while his opponents destroy each other. Humphrey is in himself a tragic figure, the man who devotes himself to a master who betrays him, he might have been the hero of a very effective tragedy, but he drops out of the play too soon to be

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i ts centre. Yet while he is there it is on h im tha t all the l ight is fo-cused. He is quite a complex figure already, we see him in his sin-cerity, his force of character, his patr iot ism, heart iness and good sense. He is invested with personal trai ts tha t individual ize him, such as his love of caustic jokes. He is shown in his relat ions with his wife, his friends, his enemies, the common people, and all their various comments on him make his character stand out in still sharper relief. There is perhaps a certain artlessness in the way episodes are brought in for the purpose of exhibiting some par t icular facet of his persona-lity without forming an organic part of the plot . Something of the same kind appears in Marlowe too, and shows the dif f icul ty the play-wrights still found in elaborating a technique of por t ra i tu re in which character and plot could be developed s imul taneously . Tha t is prob-ably a part of the reason that even in later plays like R o m e o a n d J u l i e t and K i n g J o h n it is sti l l the secondary figures that are most strongly individualized.

Par t 3 marks a further advance, both in d ramat i sm and in char-acter-drawing. The first is part ly due to the subject mat te r , for the struggle of all against all in Par t 2 has now crystal l ized into the one great opposition of York and Lancaster. Yet wi th in tha t dominant movement the play of individual selfishness cont inues. It is not an opposition of loyalties, the upholding of a cause believed to be just, but a naked struggle for power, and men change sides as they change hats when moved by interest or pique. Brother turns against brother, and in one symbolical scene the very words of the famous 33rd Homily against Rebellion have been presented in act ion: 'The brother to seek and often to work the death of his brother , the son of the father, the father to seek or procure the death of his sons. ' Chaos has broken in, cruelty, slaughter, revenge and self-interest reign supreme. Only poor, saintly Harry, who once he has lost his throne is treated with more sympathy than the bigoted weakling of the preceding part , wins through to a realization of what the mad struggle for emp ty power has cost his country. But even he does not grasp the fuU measure of his responsibility, and at the very moment when he believes that his mildness and mercy must have won the people 's heart he is cast down from the throne a second t ime. What the count ry needs is, as York had told him long ago, a king who can 'act control l ing laws.'

These three plays must have been in existence by 1592 when Greene quoted from the last of them. J u s t when the four th play of the series, R i c h a r d III, was composed is not known, but there would seem to be a considerable gap between them. For though the first three show a remarkable evolution, they do not suggest the great jump in achievement that comes with the new play. It is true, the action seems to hurry on without a break, and tha t the theme of the new play was already forming in Shakespeare 's mind as he wrote Pa r t 3. One can almost see. the exact point when Richard , who till then had been the most a t t ract ive of the three brothers brave, loy-al, undaunted, the man who pumps energy into his elder brother and

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who takes the death of his father most to hear t , suddenly unmasks himself as the jealous scheming vi l la in who will destroy the whole of his kindred. It is t rue also tha t the mater ial was much more t rac t -able for a dramat is t , the scheme of rise and fall , of cr ime and punish-ment, gave in itself the basic pat tern of E l i zabe than t ragedy, and the central figure here is also the bearer of the act ion. But that does not explain the immense difference both in the s tyle and the charac-ter-drawing. The long-drawn descript ive similes of H n r VI have suddenly disappeared, the language has taken on a new flexi-bility. It seems not improbable that Shakespeare had changed compa-nies "for a while and joined Strange 's Men, for whom he must have wr i t -ten T i t u s A n d r o n i c u s , and that the complet ion of his histo-rical series was postponed till he re turned to his original company .

A comparison of two sections from Richard ' s last monologue in H n r VI 3, and his opening monologue in the new play , which repeats the sam2 themes will show a great deal of the difference.

Then , s ince the h e a v e n s h a v e s h a p ' d my b o d y so Let hel l m a k e c r o o k ' d m y m i n d t o answer i t . J h a v e no b r o t h e r , I am l ike no b r o t h e r ; A n d t h i s word ' l o v e ' , w h i c h g r e y b e a r d s cal l d i v i n e , Be r e s iden t in men l ike one a n o t h e r , A n d not in me : I a m myself a lone . C l a r e n c e , b e w a r e ; t h o u k e e p ' s t me f r o m t h e l i g h t ; But I wi l l sor t a p i t c h y day for t h e e ; For I wil l buzz ab road such p r o p h e c i e s , T h a t E d w a r d s h a l l be t e a r fu l of h i s l i f e .

Bu t 1, t h a t a m not s h a p ' d for s p o r t i v e t r i c k s , Nor m a d e to c o u r t an a m o r o u s l o o k i n g - g l a s s ; I , t h a t a m r u d e l y s t a m p ' d , and w a n t l o v e ' s m a j e s t y To s t r u t be fo re a w a n t o n a m b l i n g n y m p h ; 1, t h a t am c u r t a i l ' d of t h i s fair p r o p o r t i o n , C h e a t e d of f e a t u r e by d i s s e m b l i n g n a t u r e , D e f o r m ' d , u n f i n i s h ' d , sen t before rny t i m e I n t o t h i s b r e a t h i n g w o r l d , scarce half m a d e u p , And t h a t so l a m e l y and u n f a s h i o n a b l e T h a t dogs b a r k at me, as I h a l t by t h e m ; W h y , 1, in t h i s weak p i p i n g t i m e of peace , H a v e no de l igh t to pass away t he t i m e , Un le s s t o see my shadow in t he sun A n d desean t on m i n e own d e f o r m i t y . And the re fo re , s ince 1 c a n n o t p rove a l o v e r , T o e n t e r t a i n these fa i r w e l l - s p o k e n d a y s , 1 am d e t e r m i n e d to p rove a v i l l a i n , A n d h a t e t h e id le p leasures of t hese d a y s . P l o t s h a v e I l a i d , i n d u c t i o n s d a n g e r o u s , . By d r u n k e n p rophec ies , l ibe l s a n d d r e a m s ,

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To set m y b ro the r Cla rence and t he k ing In dead ly h a t e t he one aga ins t t h e o t h e r .

Allowance must be made for the position of the two monologues. The second is nearly twice as long as the f irst , because it forms a pro-logue to the whole play, and can be developed more fu l ly . But it has a new emotional power, and Richard shows a feeling of bi t terness and contempt both for his own deformity and for those more fortunate than he that contrasts with the boastfulness of his earlier speech. But what s tands out most markedly is the use of the unexpected and therefore creative epithet 'amorous looking-glass ' , ' ambling n y m p h ' , 'breathing world ' , 'weak piping t ime ' . This is already the work of a man who can play with the language at wil l . And in his evocation of Richard 's character there is a new freedom. He had a f ine model to work on, for this part of Ha l l ' s Chronicle was based on More's life of Richard, in itself an interest ing psychological s tudy, based on facts that More had gleaned from his former master Cardinal Morton (the bishop of Ely in the play), and var ious i n t ima te details have been incorporated into the play,as with the arrest of Hast ings .But even here Shakespeare has altered some of the detai ls in accordance with his concept of Richard 's character , and while in the history the peers are cowed into subjection by a group of armed men bursting in on them, Shakespeare's hero puts down all opposit ion by the force of his personality. That demonic strength of will is especially strongly brought out in the scene of Anne's surrender, where, with everything

Eiled against him, over the very body of the saint who should have een her father-in-law, and whom he has murdered, he drives her with consummate agili ty of mind from position to posi t ion, bewilder-ing her and throwing her own weakness, in her face when he offers her his breast to s tab, till hypnotized by the idea tha t she can reform him she submits . That is Shakespeare 's own cont r ibut ion to the character. But from the stage Machiavel, especially from Barabas, he has borrowed many traits , especially R ichard ' s delight in his own cleverness and the gusto with which he follows the pa th of crime, his hypocrisy and actor 's abi l i ty . Richard can change his role like a chameleon, moving from heartiness and apparent frankness to unctuous religiosity, from bland kindliness to bruta l fury, all in a moment. By the merest hint he can set his tools to work, and make them feel that they are doing the p lanning when they are merely echoing his suggestions. But then, when he has reached his goal, the Elysium of an earthly crown that he had once promised his fa-ther, the strength goes out of him. The glory he had promised himself has turned to ashes, he is a prey to fears. When he tr ies to hypnotize Elizabeth as he had done Anne, it is he who is put on the defensive, and though Elizabeth seems to submit like Anne, she has in fact out-witted him. And so we come to his last great monologue on the eve of Bosworth field, when he obtains an insight into himself and real-izes that he is not himself alone, as he had boasted, that there are

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two l's within him, and the one must condemn the other , and hesinks. into the despair the ghosts of his many v ic t ims have called down upon him. It is a moment of ut ter weakness, and he st i l l has the ener-gy to pull himself out of it . He dies s tubbornly , res is t ing fate to t h e end, and in that last losing bat t le he gains the s t a tu re of a t ragic hero, bloody and unbowed. Probably he wins more of our admi ra t ion now than he did at the time, for it is as a cr iminal wi th despair in his heart that he dies, and despair was after all the crowning sin that cut man off from forgiveness, but for us he does gain in magni tude through that dogged, desperate struggle.

It is in its way a compelling por t ra i t , in sp i te of its ra ther obvious, staginess. Chiefly it is drawn from the outside, and it is only occasion-ally that we catch a glimpse of the inner man. But , especially irt the first half, the bril l iance of the outer effects, the irony, h u m o u r and gusto, and the rush of the action, carry one with them, and one does not feel that anything is lacking. And even if the elements are mostly unoriginal , they are brought out with a force tha t had never been achieved before. It is not only on the por t ra i tu re however that the sense of tragedy depends. The sense of an inev i tab le pa t t e rn t h a t the basic theme of crime and punishment suggests has been reinforced by various outward effects, again somewhat s tagy and obvious, bu t effective and br i l l i an t ly -employed . The constant use of tragic i rony, a s i n A r d e n o f F e v e r s h a m , increases this sense of a louring; fate, and so does the operation of Margare t ' s curse, again as in A r d n, which serves to draw the events together and place t h e m as steps in an inescapable development . And the fugal laments' of the women, with their strong rhetorical pa t t e rn ing , repeat ing an ef-fect that had already been evolved in the symbolical scene of t h e horrors of civil war in H n r VI 3, but now made more effect ive by their careful placing, give the play something of the grandeur of Greek tragedy. It is the most art if icial of Shakespeare ' s plays, with something of the severe order of a r i tua l , and in tha t it represents, an experiment that was not repeated Shakespeare 's development was to be in the direction of a greater looseness of s t ruc ture that gives, a more immediate impression of life itself. Nor does he build so strong-ly on the after all sl ightly cheap idea of fate again. But it a l ready marks a defini te peak of achievement .

The four early comedies show a no less impressive rap id i ty of development than the histories, but also a ra ther more conscious search for a point of departure. For ac tual ly these seem to be the f i rs t comedies ever wri t ten for the public stage, and each is an exper iment in a different genre. T h e T a m i n g o f t h e S h r e w is ob-viously the earliest of them, though this has not been general ly ad-mitted. The earlier belief that it was based on the anonymous T h e T a m i n g o f a S h r e w (Q. 1594) which is more probably an imitat ion of Shakespeare 's play led to its being regarded as a late work, and hence to desperate efforts on the par t of cri t ics to pre-sent what is really a very unpretent ious farce as a work of m a t u r e

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genius, an a t t i tude that still continues to play a par t . But the style, the passages of Marlovian imitat ion, the preponderance of simile over metaphor and of decorative classical imagery, the c rud i ty of the stage technique, al l mark it as an early work, and more or less on a level w i th H e n r y VI 1, the only other play of Shakespeare 's with such passages of Marlovian imita t ion. It is a combinat ion of native farce in the main plot, with an Italian comedy of int r igue in the sub-plot , based on the translation of Ariosto 's T h e S u p p o s e s .

T h e C o m e d y o f E r r o r s on the other hand has usu-a l ly been taken as the first experiment, and ra ther severely treated by the critics on that account. It must be admi t t ed tha t the premise of identical twins on which it is built seems ra ther far-fetched to us now, and that also accounts for much critical d isapproval . But it was 2 premise that had the sanction of Roman comedy behind it , and here Shakespeare had conceived the actually extremely ambi t ious plan of outdoing the great models of perfection. It is character is t ic too tha t he chose for his model P lau tus ' s M e n a e c h m i , practical-ly the one Roman comedy that is not based on dupery for its hila-rious misunderstandings, for Shakespeare from the first was not inter-ested in deception and trickery as the basis of comedy. And in his "treatment of his source he shows an astonishing mastery of stage craft . He gives the farce a new dimension of pathos by enclosing it in the f r ame story of the unhappy father, condemned to death an effect t ha t he borrowed again from T h e S u p p o s e s on which he had recently been working, although there it was a purely f ic t i t ious sit-ua t ion and part of the general dupery. And this f rame action also shows an advance on T h e S h r e w , which too is placed within .a frame that serves to distance the improbabi l i t ies of the act ion. There however the frame is separate from the main play, nor does in contrast wi th it in mood, while here the blending of the two opposi te moods js very subtly achieved. Then further Shakespeare has complicated P lau tus ' s rather simple plot by the addi t ion of a fur ther pair of twin servants , which greatly increases the complexity and the hi lar i ty of the misunderstandings. He gets his action under way at once almost and continues with a rising crescendo of misunders tandings till in the final scene the stage is a seething mass of people all ta lk ing at cross purposes, all maintaining a part of the t ru th , in which no two accounts tally, till the final spectacular revela t ion comes. In Plautus the real misunderstandings do not begin unti l the last act , and the final denouement is a very tame affair with only the two brothers and a slave together on the stage. For this f inale Shakespeare had his models, both Italian and even native, as in G a m m e r G u r-t o it's N e e d l e , but such a brill iant effcct had never been achieved before. And the way in which he has taken l i t t le h in ts f rom Plautus, developing them into subsidiary actions, tha t f ina l ly merge into the general chaos of the last scene, as with the episode of the goldsmith, is also beaut i ful ly done.

Here Shakespeare was developing what was to be one of his basic

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c o m i c themes, the discrepancy between appearance and rea l i ty . He had touched on it in T h S h r e w already, mainly in the f r ame plot of the t inker Sly which actual ly contains much of the best, work in that play , to some extent too in the final cont ras t between the two sisters, when Bianca, the obedient daughter turns out to be the disobedient wife. But there the theme is not as basic as it is here. In the same way he repeats the theme of the nagging wife, which there had been basic, and here is only subsidiary . But he t rea ts it wi th a great deal more subt le ty . Adriana is not a shrew who is brought to heel by rather violent methods methods inc identa l ly tha t are ex-tremely amusing through being disguised as sol ici tude. She is a lov-ing and fa i thfu l wife, who has in fact a great deal to complain of. And there is much subt le ty in the way she is t rapped in to pu t t ing her-self in the wrong when the abbess takes her to task in the final scene. And the homily on wifely obedience that then follows gains great ly in complexity and dramat ic interest through being s l ight ly off the mark all the t ime, while Ka tha r ina ' s parallel homily is s imply preach-ing without any dramat ic interest. And there is also a change in Shakespeare's own a t t i tude . Wifely obedience is sti l l held up as the ideal, but it is held up not because God has ordained that woman should be the weaker vessel and must obey, but because she really is the weaker vessel and cannot hope to impose her will on a man who is determined, and any a t t empts for her to do so will only poison the life of the home. Above all Adriana is allowed to present her own case, and she presents it strongly, so that we are offered a choice of opinions, even though the dice are rather weighted against her.

It is not only in the greater suppleness of the thought tha t the comedy marks an advance, The var ie ty of moods is also greater . In T h e S h r e w a pair of hard-boiled lovers and of roman t i c ones are contrasted, but nothing is made of the contras t and we see no-thing of Lucentio 's actual wooing, only his d is t inc t ly inept first rap-tures. Here, placed squarely in the centre as a sort of c l imax tha t strong mark on the centre is very character is t ic of Shakespeare 's structure is a scene of romantic wooing, which is not absolute ly ne-cessary to the plot, though it will help to round off the end nicely, and it is carried off perfectly successfully, wi th a hint again of pathos in the young man 's bewilderment that his honest love should be t reat-ed with contumely. Above all the language is a l ready far beyond anything in T h e S h r e w ; simile has defini tely given way to more concentrated metaphor, and much of the imagery in its r ichness and fuller development is very close to that of the earlier sonnets .

Whether T h e T w o G e n t l e m e n o f V e r o n a is actually later than T h e C o m e d y o f E r r o r s is not per-haps very certain. It does not show any very marked advance at least , but it is probably the first of the comedies in which someth ing from Lyly appears, in the dialogue of the two servants , and also perhaps in the opposition between love and fr iendship and the be t raya l of the one by the other, the theme of so many of the sonnets . R a t h e r

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surprisingly Shakespeare seems to have begun with a dis t inct aver-sion for Lyly, whose first two comedies were cer ta in ly avai lable in pr int , even if he had not been able to see any of them acted. One would, from his decidedly romantic bent, have expected h im to feel an affin-ity from the first; but possibly Lyly ' s ra ther f l i r ta t ious t reatment of love as a childish disease inflicted by a mischievous Cupid grated on him, who had grown up in the sent imental t rad i t ion of t rue love of the popular ballads. Here however there is a l ready something of Lyly ' s mockery of the extravagances of lovers, not so much in the actual presentation of the lovers themselves, as in the speech and comments of the servants. Launce at least is perfectly acquainted with the et iquette of courtly love, and the demand for secrecy on the part of the lover. But there is also direct game with the lovers themselves, as when Ju l ia pretends disdain and tears up her lover 's let ter , only to grovel on the ground to collect the pieces the moment she is alone. The incident itself is based on the source, an episode from Monte-mayor 's pastoral romance, D i a ri a, but it has been treated in a much lighter vein which is dist inctly Lylian in effect . Basical ly however the play is not in the Lylian mood, but in tha t of the t rad i t ional ro-mances of the popular stage in which a more or less serious or at least sentimental plot is enlivened by comic episodes, the vein that Greene in particular was exploiting. And it is these comic inter ludes that are the best things in it. Launce, the comic servant , is one of Shake-speare's most delightful studies, far bet ter than the later Launcelot Gobbo for instance; but his part consists mainly of separate l i t t le turns in the manner of a modern cabaret ar t is t , the sort of th ing pro-bably that the famous clown Tarleton filled out his popular one-man shows with.

Finally with L o v e ' s L a b o u r ' s L o s t Shakespeare sub-mitted to the Lylian comedy of love, which was to remain the basis of nearly all his further comedies, unti l the new fashion of the satiri-cal comedy of town life turned him away from comedy altogether. Sometimes the play is regarded as a very early work on account of the great preponderance of rhyme, and the frequency of doggerel that seems impossibly bad. In fact it is so bad that it cannot possibly have been intended seriously by anyone capable of wr i t ing the rest of the play. It represents a special kind of sophis t icat ion, and an a t t empt , no doubt , to capture the effect of the improvised rhymes for which Tarleton was famous. We meet with it already in T h e C o m e d y o f E r r o r s .

It seems probable that L o v e 's L a b o u r ' s L o s t was writ ten for a special performance, probably by chi ldren, dur ing the time when the theatres were closed for the plague, and for an aristocratic audience, so that the turn to Lyly was more or less under compul-sion. And one of the main themes of the play, which explains the 'per-jury ' of the King of Navarre and his courtiers, who nearly all bear the names of the great Huguenot generals of the civil wars in France, is a satire on Henry of Navarre, who in 1593 had shocked the Pro-

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testant world by deciding that Par is was well worth a mass, and gone over to the Catholic fa i th . His apostasy had not however brought its hoped for reward immediate ly , and it was not unt i l the follow-ing year that he was crowned king, which would explain the s t range ending in which the king does not get the hand of the French princess after all, but is left dangling in the air together with his courtiers.

That however is only one, and by no means the most impor t an t , from a complexity of themes tha t weave in and out of the p lay . The key s i tuat ion, in which the men one after the other confess their love and the infr ingement of their oath is clearly borrowed from Ly ly ' s G a 1 1 a t h a, and with it the whole idea of love tak ing its revenge on those who try to resist i ts power, And round tha t key s i tua t ion a complex plot has been constructed, one of the very few plo ts t h a i Shakespeare invented himself. But even in tu rn ing to Lyly and court comedy Shakespeare refused Lyly ' s world of mythological make-be-lieve. It is real men and women that he places on the stage, a l though in a rather fanciful s i tuat ion, and Cupid and his arrows have been banished from the scene. And in order to account for the broken oa th , natural enough for Diana ' s nymphs, the idea of the academy, an ac t -ual Renaissance concept, had to be devised. It is a mistake however to see in the opposition of the idea of abstract scholarship and love anything very basic to the p lay ' s meaning. The theme is r a the r lack of self-knowledge. The young men's scholarship was never very se-rious, and they abandon it without any real s truggle, and devote themselves whole-heartedly to the pursuit of love. But they c lothe that love, genuine in itself, in the f l i r ta t ious forms of cour t ly love, with the result tha t the ladies accept it s imply as a game, and are taken by surprise when it ends in an offer of marr iage, sending the young men off discomfited. It is in fact a sort of sa t i re on the Ly l i an mode and on courtly ar t i f ic ia l i ty .

Various other themes also weave in and out . To the cour t ly affectations of speech other abuses of language, pedant ic and vu lgar , are added, and there are probably var ious personal ski ts to which we have lost the key. Don Armado is almost cer ta in ly a por t ra i t of the Spaniard Perez, Phi l ip II 's secretary, who had taken refuge f rom his former master and was t rying to gain the pa t ronage of var ious Eng-lish noblemen. It may be that the whole idea of the academy was a dig at Sir Walter Raleigh, the head of a rival fact ion to tha t of Es-sex, with whom Southampton was allied. Raleigh was in disgrace at the time having got one of the maids of honour with chi ld , and was consoling himself in the country with his scient if ic f r iends, who were suspected of atheism, and there would be something v e r y p i q u a n t in the idea of just such a group forswearing love. And it may be also that the black-eyed Rosalind has something to do with the dark lady of the sonnets. But such speculations are of very l i t t le impor tance . The comedy owes its effect chiefly to its elegant l ightness of mood and its kaleidoscopic shif ts and changes. It offers l i t t le scope for charac-

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ter-drawing, but the picture of the princess, with her tact and good feeling, the easy reins with which she manages her ra ther quarrelsome ladies, the ready wit with which she laughs off inconveniences, and yet makes fun of the inadequate reception offered her, is a very plea-sant picture of true good breeding, and already shows a remarkable gift for delicate, unobtrusive modelling. It is through very similar touches that glimpses of the true Hamlet are suggested behind the obscuring veil of his melancholy.

Within these two lines of development , history and comedy, it is very difficult to find a satisfactory place for the t ragedy of T i-t u s A n d r o n i c u s . The statement on the t i t le page of the Quar to suggests that it was written for Strange 's men, apparen t ly the only play of Shakespeare's that was; and, one would suppose, in 1592. Which further seems to suggest that it was ac tua l ly the play of T i t u s a n d V e s p a s i a that they produced for the first t ime that spring. For in their very next play there is a fair ly clear allusion to Titus. And that further would explain its close connection with three of the favourites of Strange's repertoire T h e S p a -n i s h T r a g e d y , T h e J e w o f M a l t a , and Peele 's B a t t l e o f A l c a z a r supposing that Shakespeare had temporari ly joined Strange's company and was actually performing in these plays. And that further might explain why the succession of historical plays was interrupted, and the wri t ing of R i c h a r d III post-poned.

The real difficulty with T i t u s is that the s tyle does not fit with any of Shakespeare's other plays. There are. parts , especially the more highly decorated ones, that are indubi tab ly Shakespearian and point to the elaborate style of the verse epics tha t were soon to be writ ten. But great parts of the play, most especially the opening act, are not especially like Shakespeare, and they do conta in a great many of Peele's stylistic mannerisms, though otherwise the style is not really like Peele's either it lacks for instance his elaborate heaping of complex at tr ibutes. What is perhaps strangest of all is that the use of rhetorical figures, which in Shakespeare 's other plays had been increasing steadily, is very much cur ta i led , though one might expect them to be especially in evidence in such a stiff and formal tragedy. It would seem in fact that Shakespeare, ei ther con-sciously or unconsciously, was imi ta t ing T h e B a t t l e o f A l -c a z a r .

However the most important model, not for the s tyle but the theme and dramat ic t reatment, was T h e S p a n i s h T r a g e d y , though the vil lainous Aaron is modelled on Barabas . And though the play may seem crude and revolting to us, it cer ta inly was a great im-provement of Kyd ' s ; it avoids many of its weaknesses, and success-fully exploits the horrors that seem to have proved such an at t ract ion. This too is a tragedy of revenge in which both the cr ime and its pun-

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ishment are enacted, and the f rus t ra ted hero, unable to ob ta in justice for himself, again falls into a melancholy, approaching madness at times, from which he f inal ly arouses himself when the op-portunity comes. But Titus, unlike Hieronimo, is placed squarely in the centre from the first, and he is a much more impressive f igure than poor Hieronimo, who only very gradual ly a t t a ins a tragic s ta -ture through his sufferings and the doggedness with which he pursues his aims. But also he bears far more responsibi l i ty for the sorrows that overwhelm him. And that responsibil i ty is twofold, pa r t ly through his very v i r tue in rejecting the throne when it is offered him, and par t -ly through his implacabi l i ty in main ta in ing the t rad i t ion of blood sacrifice; both points are Shakespeare 's invent ion . Wi th all his s tern Roman vir tues Ti tus is a somewhat repellent figure, but he is formed on the heroic scale of tragedy. And the t ragedy unrolls itself, if not with an effect of inevi tabi l i ty the horrors are too excessive for that at least within a logical pat tern of cause and effect . The hor-rors themselves, however revolt ing they may appear , have the whole weight of classical practice and theory behind them, and are all in-cluded in the list of themes the scholar Scaliger had established murder, rape, mult i la t ion, exile; the final ca tas t rophe is a repet i t ion of the bloody banquet o f T h y e s t e s i n which the parents are giv-en their chi ldren 's flesh to eat. It is in execrable tas te , but it has the support of the approved critical opinion of the t ime. And when it is all over there is at least a sense of release and reconcil iat ion, which again is lacking in T h e S p a n i s h T r a g e d y the cycle of crimes has worked itself out, innocent people have suffered and perished along with the bad, but the bad have been wiped out ; a v is ta is opened into a brighter fu ture with a new and milder emperor on the throne, and one may feel that all the suffering has not been en-tirely in vain . That is a peculiarly Shakespearian effect , emotional rather than logical it is true, for one's mind may tell one that Lucius has not in fact given any proofs of his mildness, any more than Fort-inbras can really convince one that he will be a bet ter king than Claudius, but the emotional effect is what is impor t an t . It is not a good play, though it is more competent ly wr i t ten than T h e S p a -n i s h T r a g e d y , hut at least one can say tha t no one in Eng-land had as yet shown so firm a grasp of the essential effects of t ra-gedy.

Already many of these early plays had, as we have seen, been pointing forward to the heavily decorated s tyle of the sonnets and verse tales that were wri t ten during the plague years of 15923. L o v e 's L a b o u r ' s L o s t already includes a number of son-nets or near sonnets embedded in the text . And wi th the reopening of the theatres Shakespeare 's second period begins wi th a group of plays in which the reflection of this excursion into pure poetry is especi-ally strong R o m e o a n d J u l i e t , A M i d s u m m e r N i g h t ' s D r e a m , K i n g J o h n and R i c h a r d II in

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par t icu lar . It was to be a part of Shakespeare 's fur ther development t o purge his style of the over-ornamentat ion it had acquired at this t ime , to evolve a more restrained and more s t r ic t ly funct ional use of imagery, and to rid himself of the excess of ingenious conceits that do grate in R o m e o a n d J u l i e t . But above all wha t the new period was to bring was a much firmer grasp of character and persona-l i ty. Basically the plays that follow do not differ in subject and mood f rom the earlier ones. Even though he was probably the first to in-t roduce comedy on the public stage, Shakespeare 's genius does not seem to have lain so much in opening up new paths , as in bringing those in existence to perfection, and during the years tha t now fol-lowed, while he was the only dramatis t worthy of the name, for the University Wits had all disappeared, he can hardly be said to have introduced any essential innovations.

In comedy the period of search and exper imenta t ion was over, and the Lylian type of love comedy was to predomina te with its gentle mockery of the foolishness, blindness, and wrong-headedness of those in love. A M i d s u m m e r N i g h t ' s D r e a m (1594) con-t inues the half-rebellious acceptance of Lyly ' s scheme. The mischiev-ous Cupid has been dethroned, and in his place Shakespeare has evolv-ed a whole new mythology of love with the fairies watching benevo-lent ly over the mortals, curing them of their i r ra t ional infatuat ions, though making comical mistakes themselves, and br inging reward t o honest love. There was probably even a def in i te in tent ion behind t he choice of Athens, the true home of Cupid, for the set t ing of the play, and the introduction of English fairies on classical ground. But actually these fairies themselves were largely Shakespeare 's in-vent ion , and it was he who imposed these t iny gossamer creatures on the rest of the world. For the normal fairies of English folklore were about the size of children, and they were noted and feared for their mischievous pranks changing unbaptized babies in their cradles, leading folks astray, preventing the but ter from coming and the vari-ous other tricks that Puck relates. But they were to some extent pre-servers of the home too, punishing sluts by knot t ing their hair in elf-locks, and unchast i ty by pinching the offenders black and blue, as in E n d y m i o n and T h e M e r r y W i v e s o f W i n d -s o r , and were thus not inappropriate guardians of t rue love. How-ever besides these more normal fairies or good-folk, as they were euphemist ical ly called, there does seem in some par ts of the country to have been a vaguer tradit ion also of t iny creatures l iving in flower bells, on which Shakespeare built for his play.

On the basis of this concept Shakespeare evolved a complex plot, apparent ly his own invention, with even more levels of act ion and of mood than in normal court comedy. Again there is a sort of frame, dominated by the figures of Theseus and Hippo ly t a , representing the perfect type of lovej guided by reason, s table and res t ra ined, the f i t t ing crown to a life of heroic action, not as wi th Ly ly ' s Alexander, an aberration from the true path of glory. The heady, i r rat ional love

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of the young people, developed in a fugal pa t t e rn , dominates the three central acts; i t is i rrat ional in itself, and most of all when the young people themselves t ry to ground it in reason, but our sympa-thies are invoked for it too, even while we laugh at i t , and it is at least no more irrat ional than tha t which the old fa ther wishes to im-pose on them. There is no reason in i t , they change about , at least the young men do, under the influence of the love magic as giddi ly as when shot by Cupid ' s arrows, they cannot see where there happi-hess really lies, they could be perfectly happy in any of the permu-tations the s i tuat ion offers, but the new deit ies of love watch over them and bring them to happiness in spi te of themselves. As to what is appearance and what real i ty , we hardly know ourselves, for there is a very strong suggestion that all the mad happenings in the wood are in fact a dream, a piece of midsummer madness the act ion it-self, be it noted, takes place on May Day, not midsummer and Theseus is there to tell us tha t the mind of the lover is as unrel iable as that of the lunat ic or the poet.

T h e M e r c h a n t o f V e n i c e (c. 1596) is a swerve away from the comedy of love, probably dictated by a wave of ant i -Jewish feeling when the Jewish doctor Lopez was condemned and executed for a supposed plot against the Queen 's life. It marks a new peak in the development of Shakespeare 's por t ra i ture . Even though the main outlines of Shylock 's character were given by Marlowe, t he touch of life that was lacking in Barabas is entirely Shakespeare 's own. For he has entered into his character , makes h im th ink and feel and speak as a man in his s i tuat ion must th ink and feel, wi th the resul t tha t the figure remains al ive and convincing from whatever s t andpoin t we regard i t . That he was intended to arouse the s y m p a t h y t ha t he does now is, I th ink , impossible. For to sympath ize wi th Shylock means inevitably to condemn his opposite Antonio, who has largely helped to make him what he is, and of that there is no h in t in the p lay . Be-sides, whenever the pathos of the figure threa tens to rise too high, there is always something, a h int of meanness or a swerve in to the grotesque, to dispel i t . Shylock is for Shakespeare not only the Jew, he is the usurer, the man who makes money increase against the law of nature, and he embodies the power and the cruel ty of weal th in the new capital is t world that was forming, of which the humanis t values of Belmont are the antipole.

After that however the comedy of love asserts itself again. M u c h A d o a b o u t N o t h i n g (1598) brings out the theme of appearance and real i ty in two contras t ing plots , in the one a pair of romantic lovers are separated through appearances and slander , in the other, of Shakespeare 's own devising, a pa i r of high-spir i ted and wi t ty rebels against love are thrown in to each o the r ' s a rms not through the arrows of an outraged Cupid bu t again by what is a form of slander, and the idea of the power of opinion is underl ined by Dog-berry's remark on the low-comedy level 'Masters, it is proved al-ready that you are l i t t le better than false knaves, and it will go near

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to be thought so shortly. ' A s Y o u L i k e I t (1599) brings to-gether all the various permutat ions of the lover 's posit ion developed in Heywood's P l a y o f L o v e , fur ther var ied by differences of a t t i tude the high-flown Petrarchist ic , the pure, the gross, the lover who cannot pierce through to real i ty , the girl who would like to play the imperious coquette but cannot bring her lover up to the mark, the proud beauty conquered by disdain , the unwanted lover fooled into playing the go-between, with scenes of wooing by innuendo and at cross purposes, as with Lyly. And against th is kaleidoscopic picture of love's waywardness appears the melancholy Jaques , nei-ther loved nor loving, a figure who already foreshadows the new pe-riod of revolt about to dawn. For he is a sa t i r ic p ic ture of the angry young man of the day, of the new group of sa t i re wri ters l ike Hall and Donne and Marston, whose violent d ia t r ibes against the times had become such a pest that they were all consigned to the flames together with the writings of Nashe and Harvey by order of Archbi-shop Whitgif t in 1599, and the further p r in t ing of all epigrams and satires interdicted. But the mood tha t these young Juvena l s were giving vent to could not be dispelled by bonfires, the revolt was al-ready under way and had found a footing on the stage too, the first humour comedies of Chapman and Jonson had been produced, and within a year or two Shakespeare himself was to present the melan-cholic on the boards, not as a figure of fun to be laughed a t , but as the young Hamlet proclaiming that the t ime is out of jo in t . The time for the romantic comedy of love was v i r tua l ly over, the new fashion of the humour comedy with its realistic pictures of town life, its col-lections of odd characters or humours, of which Jaques himself is al-ready an example, was sweeping the stage.

Shakespeare however did not qui te give up. T w e l f t h N i g h t , the swan song of his comedies of love, was an a t t empt to compromise with the new form, and on to the romant ic and slightly satirical tale o f A p o l o n i u s a n d S i l l a, which he mani-pulated so as to bring in figures who know themselves too l i t t le and whose a t t i tude to love is falsified by tha t lack of self-knowledge, together with nearly all the si tuat ions i l lus t ra t ive of the wayward-ness and irrat ionali ty of love of his earlier comedies, he engrafted his trio of Jonsonian humours: the addle-pated heir squander ing away his fortune, the parasitic hanger-on of feudal society, a s l ight ly paler reflection of his own Falstaff, and Malvolio, the man of the bour-geoisie with his self-love and sour contempt of these care-free drones whose place he longs for. And in his choice of these three types Shake-speare actually gave a much shrewder diagnosis of the social situation in his day than Jonson for all his photographic real ism. Only, while Malvolio's dreams end in discomfiture, many of Shakespeare 's-audi-ence were actual ly to see the day of his t r iumph . The play does not seem to have been well received, at least there was no quar to edition, and it remained Shakespeare's last comedy of love.

Where T h e M e r r y W i v e s o f W i n d s o r stands

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with regard to this line of development it is d i f f icul t to say, for its date is uncertain. As a. realistic bourgeois comedy of int r igue it s tands by itself, a n d . m a y either represent a fur ther a t t emp t at accommoda-tion to new theatrical fashions, or more probably it is a rather earlier a t tempt at a genre tha t had had a cer tain amount of success about 1597 or 1598, with Por ter ' s pleasant l i t t le comedy of provinc-ial life, T w o A n g r y W o m e n o f A b i n g d o n , and Haughton's E n g l i s h m e n f o r m y M o n e y , a London co-medy, with both of which T h e M e r r y W i v e s has a good deal in common. A far from trustworthy t rad i t ion has it t ha t the play was written at the express command of El izabeth , who wished to be shown Falstaff in love. It is probably only the ra t ional iza t ion of a feeling that the comedy is quite unlike Shakespeare 's other ones, and that it is ra ther a desecration of the earlier por t ra i t of Fa ls ta f f , for here he scarcely rises much above the level of the old Roister Doister type.

Shakespeare obviously did not subscribe to the theory of the classicists including Sidney , who saw in comedy above all a means of deflecting from specific vices through r idicule. Of tha t there is only l i t t le mainly in the first two comedies of shrewishness, but also in T h e M e r c h a n t o f V e n i c e (where it is hardly ri-dicule). Nor did he, any more than Lyly, follow the pract ice of clas-sical comedy in rousing laughter through dupery, ei ther successful or unsuccessful, t ha t is by encouraging our sense of super ior i ty . At the beginning there is some classical duping of parents taken from Ariosto, and at the end some Jonsonian duping and def la t ing of Mal-volio's self-love, but scarcely anything of the kind in between. The girls do not hoodwink their parents, they run away. Shakespeare is not out to cast igate vices or follies; the fail ings tha t he pokes gent le fun at are chiefly the inherent inadequacies of h u m a n na ture , tha t rouse a sigh of sympathy inabi l i ty to dis t inguish appearance from reality, insufficient self-knowledge, the absurdi ty of lovers, for which we are more inclined to envy than to blame them. And tha t which over-comes the adversit ies of life is above all an honest and a cheerful heart . The comic world of Shakespeare is not realist ic in any normal sense of the word, it is a colourful, fantas t ic world of romance, in which probability counts for nothing; yet it is a world in which, in spite of its prevail ing gaiety, tears and sorrow mingle as in ours. And its inhabitants and it is this that gives it the s t amp of au then t ic i ty are men and women like ourselves. The modell ing is for the most part only slight, but extremely delicate, and each of the heroines in particular is a very distinct individual , while the background fig-ures are given with sharp incisive strokes. Again like Lyly, Shake-speare did not s t r ive after any uni ty of mood, as in classical comedy. Scene follows scene with all the var ie ty of a modern revue: contrast-ing plots weaving in and out, contrast ing social levels, cont ras t ing characters. Yet the result is not confusion but a single prevalent atmosphere, different for each play, though s imilar in essence. The

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proportions and also the qual i ty of t he ingredients va ry . Here a strok of pathos appears, there a touch of near t r agedy . Yet each play i harmonized to a whole by its highly individual se t t ing , by t h e inter crossing of the various levels, which are not kept so s t r ic t ly separate as with Lyly, but connect up at various points and genera l ly flow together in a grand finale, by the l ight these d i f fe rent levels often cast on one another, and by the poetry and the wit t ha t play over them all . Shakespear 's verbal humour alone s t re tch ing from the despised pun or the bawdy joke to the humorous commen t t ha t reflects a whole philosophy of life is itself a subject wor thy of a separate s tudy . All tha t can be said here is that it shows a greater var ie ty of effects than with any other comic writer .

The history plays of the second period do not demand any very detailed account. As plays they none of them have the dramatic effectiveness and outward bril l iance of R i c h a r d HI, though they are incomparably better writ ten and more deeply experienced in their details than that crude but effective work. Outward ly , with the exception of K i n g J o h n , an adap ta t ion and compression of an earlier play in two parts, they represent a second te t ra logy, pre-ceding the first in time, and s tar t ing with the original sin of Richard I l ' s deposal and murder, out of which Henry ' s la ter t roubles arose; but covering as they do a wider span of history and lacking an ult imate catastrophe towards which to move, they remain , except for the two parts of H n r IV, which form a whole together, much more independent. R i c h a r d II, the most d ramat ic of them, suffers from being obviously the second part of a play tha t ei ther has been lost, or is the anonymous T h o m a s o f W o o d s t o c k , in which is contained an account of Richard ' s own tragic faul t , the murder of his uncle, a figure rather like Shakespeare 's own Duke Humphrey. But Richard 's tragedy only arises ra ther indirect ly out of this tragic fault , and much more out of his own br i l l iant but shallow and irresponsible character; the line of action remains disappointingly ragged and desultory, and in spite of separate impressive scenes, does not build up to the tragedy it might have been. Richard himself, though he owes as much to Marlowe's Edward as Shylock does to Barahas , is an interesting study, and he gains from the contrast with his opposite Bolingbroke, who is much more effect ively given and more interesting as a concept than the Machiavel l ian Mortimer, But sti l l , compared with the bri l l iant sharpness of v is ion in the H e n r y IV plays, the characters seem sl ight ly pale and visionary. H e n r y IV is full of wonderfully conceived scenes and episodes, as good in their way as anything in Shakespeare, bu t it remains a collection of episodes rather than a drama. The preceding careful but imi ta t ive character studies had shown the way, and here figure after figure s tands out as a fully conceived personal i ty , each with his own way of speaking and of th inking. For sheer craftsmanship of portraiture the scene (Part I, III. i) in which the rebels, their nerves jangling from the incompatibi l i ty of their characters , spar with

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one another over the fu ture division of the kingdom, is a masterpiece of realistic evocation, and yet it only contains one of the more out-standing figures in the play. And besides the bluff , choleric, fire-eating Hotspur of this scene, there is his opposite, Pr ince Hal , the gay young scamp with the heart of gold, who when he must assume the responsibilities of the crown will shine forth as the ideal monarch, the heroic Henry V, but meanwhile is sadly gr ieving his f a the r ' s heart with his dissolute ways; there is the King himself , weighed down by his conscience and the worries his i l l -gotten crown has brought him, for usurpat ion has brought anarchy with it , and though, un-like his fu ture grandson, he is strong enough to deal wi th the s i tua t ion , it is slowly breaking him, Here too, as in the first series, Shakespeare keeps to his rat ional reading of history; Henry feels the hand of God weighing on him, but it is in fact the burden of his own acts, just as when in R i c h a r d II the Bishop of Carlisle prophesies all the dire ills that will spring from Henry ' s act of usurpa t ion , he envisages them not as God's punishment , but as the logically inev i tab le result of breaking the dynast ic succession. And above all there is the figure of Falstaff the real Falstaff , not the surrogate of T h e M e r r y W i v e s , the subl imat ion of the type of the vainglor ious coward of Roman comedy, who has so burst the bounds of the type tha t he hardly seems to belong to it any more, and one would say it was life itself speaking through him. Yet in spite of the f idel i ty and subt le ty of Shakespeare's portrai ture , he is not consistent in his method, and is always ready to take conventional short cuts tha t result in a some-what bewildering mixture of apparent na ive ty and complexi ty , which makes Shakespearian interpreta t ion peculiarly d i f f icul t . A notorious case in point is Ha l ' s first soliloquy in which he makes it pa inful ly clear to us that he is not as bad as he seems, tha t he despises the boon companions with whom he mixes, and will one day throw off the clouds that smother up his beauty and shine all the br ighter by con-crast. Accepted on the realistic level that would make of h im an odious hypocrite, even worse than his cold, ca lcula t ing fa ther . However that is scarcely the effect that was intended, and ac tua l ly Shake-speare is merely warning the less intel l igent of the audience not to think too badly of Ha l ' s wild oats, because he will reform. In the same way his v i l la ins in their soliloquies are most unreal is t ical ly clear-minded about themselves, and never t ry to make themselves out better than they are. Yet at other t imes Shakespeare seems to make rather heavy demands on the capaci ty of his audience, or his critics claim tha t he does, which is not perhaps the same th ing . But at least it can be said that the things he considers need explaining and what he leaves unexplained are often s t rangely at var iance , and that while a great deal of modern cri t icism is undoubted ly over-subt le in its interpretat ions and claims to discover meanings tha t could not possibly be put across in performance, it may be equal ly wrong to go to the extremes of another , and less popular school, and refuse to see any subtlet ies. But so much probably must be conceded, t ha t he

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was careful to make what was really impor tan t to him abundant ly clear.

Only two tragedies can be reckoned to this period R o m e o a n d J u l i e t (1594) at the very beginning, and J u l i u s C a e -s a r (1599) near the end. The first, like most of the work in the ly-rical group, is still somewhat experimental . It is in fact a romance that might equally well have ended happi ly, as far as the s tory itself goes, which means that it is lacking in one of the most central elements of tragedy, the sense of inevi tabi l i ty . That is a point that Renaissance theory did not stress at all part icularly, yet Shakespeare took consider-able pains to create the effect ar t i f ic ia l ly through the introductory 'choruses' to the first two acts stressing the fate of the 'star-crossed' lovers and pointing forward to the catastrophe, and by a ra ther mark-e d underlining of the series of pure accidents engineered by fa te that lead to the tragic end. These two choruses are, characters t ica l ly for this preiod, in sonnet form; and it is also character is t ic for Shake-speare as a whole that it is only the first act tha t is marked off in this way. Shakespeare's plays do not as a rule divide clearly into acts, his early quartos have no act divisions, and those in the Folio most prob-ably were introduced later, at a t ime when his company had begun to concentrate more on performances in the pr iva te house at Blackfriars rather than at the Globe. For it was an old t rad i t ion of the private theatres to have pauses filled in with music between the acts, while the public theatres played without a break, unless the author had chosen to mark his acts especially by means of prologues or dumb shows. Shakespeare certainly was aware of the Roman convention that a play should be divided into five acts, and he of ten seems to have set out with the intention of a r t icu la t ing his play into acts, but it is as a rule only the first act and occasionally the last one that represents a real structural uni t .

Another point in which R o m e o a n d J u l i e t departs from the basic type of tragedy is in the milieu. Renaissance theory, following classical practice, insisted very strongly tha t t ragedy should deal only with kings and people in high posit ion. One may say that this is merely an empty convention, but it does secure for tragedy a certain elevation, a feeling of momentousness, for the fa te of the ruler does affect the whole nation. And it is a fact tha t only a very few of the so-called domestic tragedies manage to rise above the pathetic into the truly tragic where the feeling of pity is absorbed into a more powerful sense of awe and admirat ion at something heroic. There is nothing heroic about Romeo and Ju l ie t , they belong to romance, but something of tragic awe is achieved by making of them the playthings of forces beyond them, and the central d ramat ic conflict lies really between love and hate, the age old fami ly feud tha t embodies the anarchy of the Middle Ages, the subject too of the earlier histories. The tragic error here is not so much tha t of the young people, except in as far as they have chosen to disregard those darker forces, as of their parents, and, like Antigone, they are the innocent v ic t ims . Only

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