writing plays; and in 1612 his work was done. In about twenty years he wrote the thirty-six or thirtyseven five-act plays which bear his name; "Venus and Adonis," "The Rape of Lucrece," "A Lover's Complaint," ""The Phoenix and Turtle "; the sequence of sonnets which of themselves would have put him in the front rank of lyric poets; and he made important contributions to the composite and surreptitiously printed "The Passionate Pilgrim." There is no probability that the date from which the indentures of his apprenticeship to the arts of poetry and playwriting ran will ever be known; it is known that not later than 1591 his hand was beginning to make itself felt. The time was prodigal of great men and great work. Greene, who died the following year, was starving in a garret which was in no sense traditional; Marlowe met his untimely death in 1593; the final issues of Lyly's "Euphues" were being widely read; Sidney's "Arcadia," which had been handed about in manuscript, after the fashion of a time when the publisher and the reading public were more than a century in the future, could be read from a well-printed page; the first books of the "Faerie Queene" had come out of Ireland; Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie," written in defence of the stage, appeared in 1595, eight years after his death on the bloody field of Zutphen; Webb's "Discourse of English Poetrie" had come to light in the year of Shakespeare's introduction to London, and Puttenham's "Arte of English Poesie" had followed it three years later. Criticism did not lag behind the beautiful lyrical and rich dramatic produc

tiveness of the age. Men of action and men of letters were equally astir, and the names of Spenser and Raleigh, of Drake and Sidney, of Granville and Marlowe, were heard on all sides among the men with whom Shakespeare lived. The Armada was fresh in the memory of a generation upon which a multitude of new and stimulating interests were playing; life was a vast ferment, and literature was on such intimate terms with experience that it became the confidant of life and the repository of all its secrets.

That Shakespeare felt the full force of the intoxicating vitality of the air in which he lived cannot be doubted; but his first attempts at play-writing were timid and tentative. The stages of the growth of his mind and art are distinctly marked in the form and substance of his work; he was in no sense a miracle, in no way an exception to the universal law of growth through experience, of spiritual ripening by the process of living, and of the development of skill through apprenticeship. He had to learn his trade as every man of parts had to learn it before him, and will have to learn it to the end of time. His first steps were uncertain; they did not lead him out of the greenroom where the stock of plays was kept. These plays were drawn from many sources; they were often composite; in many cases individual authorship had been forgotten, if it had ever been known; no sense of personal proprietorship attached to them; they belonged to the theatre; many of them had been revised so many times by so many hands that all semblance of their first forms had disappeared;

they were constantly changed by the actors themselves. These plays were, in some instances, not even printed; they existed only as unpublished manuscripts; in many cases a play did not exist as an entirety even in manuscript; it existed only in parts with cues for the different actors. The publication of a play was the very last thing desired by the writer, or by the theatre to which it was sold and to which it belonged, and every precaution was taken to prevent a publicity which was harmful to the interests of author and owner. The exclusive ownership of successful plays was a large part of the capital of the theatres. Shorthand writers often took down the speeches of actors, and in this way plays were stolen and surreptitiously printed; but they were full of all manner of inaccuracies, the verse passages readily becoming prose in the hands of unimaginative reporters, and the method was regarded as dishonourable. Reputable playwrights, having sold a work to a theatre, did not regard it as available for publication.

It is easy to understand, therefore, the uncertainty about the text of many of the Elizabethan dramas, including that of the Shakespearean plays. Having sold a play, the writer, as a rule, expected no further gain from it, and was chiefly concerned to protect it from mutilation by keeping it out of print. For this reason most of the plays acted in the reign of Elizabeth and in that of her successor are lost beyond recovery. In order to understand Shakespeare's attitude towards his work it is necessary to reverse

contemporary literary conditions, under which authors are constantly urged to publish and the sense of individual ownership in literary work is intensified by all the circumstances of the literary life. Plays were sometimes published in Shakespeare's time by the consent of the theatres to which they had been sold; but the privilege was rarely applied for. When Ben Jonson treated his plays as literature by publishing them in 1616 as his "Works," he was ridiculed for his pretensions; and Webster's care to secure correctness in the printing of his tragedies laid him open to a charge of pedantry. At a later time the popular interest in plays for reading purposes opened an unsuspected source of income to play-writers, and publication became customary; of the thirty-seven plays commonly credited to Shakespeare, only sixteen were published during the life of the poet, and these were probably printed without his authorization, certainly without his revision. There was no copyright law, and the author could not protect himself against imperfect reproductions of his own works. Shakespeare's income came from the sale of plays and from the patronage by the public of the theatres in which he was interested; from every point of view he was, therefore, averse to the publication of his dramas. If he had set his heart on publicity, the theatre was the most effective form of publication which the times offered.

The prices paid for plays ranged from five to ten pounds sterling, or from twenty-five to fifty dollars, Ben Jonson receiving the larger sum as a minimum. These plays, having become the absolute property

of the theatre, were treated with the utmost freedom and were made over from time to time to suit the popular taste; they were often the products of collaboration between two or more authors, and the feeling of the writer for his work was so slight that many of the plays appeared without a name.

In The Theatre or The Rose Shakespeare found a library of such plays which were the property, not of their writers, but of the owners of the theatre, and which were regarded not as literature but as the capital of the company, to be recast, rewritten, revised, and made over to fit the times and suit the audience, which was sometimes to be found at the Palace, sometimes in the Inns of Court, and regularly in the rude wooden structures in which the different group of players had finally established themselves. These plays drew freely upon history, tradition, legend, and foreign romance and tale; the soiled and tattered manuscripts bore the visible marks of the handling of many actors and prompters, and the invisible traces of a multitude of historians, poets, romancers, and dramatists whose work had been freely and frankly drawn upon; each successive playwright using what he needed, and discarding what seemed to him antiquated or ineffective. When Shakespeare became familiar with this mass of material, he found, among other themes, the story of the fall of Troy, the death of Cæsar, and various incidents in the lives of Plutarch's men, a collection of tales from Italy with the touch of the Boccaccian license and gayety on them, stories of adventure from Span