her liking for his work and her purpose to show him favour. A playwright upon whose words crowds hung in the Rose and the Globe; whose great passages were recited again and again in the palaces at Greenwich, Richmond, and Whitechapel; whose poems, having passed from hand to hand among his friends, appeared in rapidly succeeding editions; to whom many contemporary writers paid glowing tribute; and who counted among his friends some of the most brilliant and influential men of his time, can hardly be regarded as having escaped the notice of his age, or as so obscure as to raise the question of his authorship of the work which bears his name. The lyrical period in the growth of Shakespeare's mind and art culminated about 1597 or 1598, and bore its highest fruits in two dramas which hold a place by themselves; plays essentially poetic in quality and form, and singularly complete in their disclosure of the resources of his imagination and his art. The tragic story of Romeo and Juliet had attracted him at a very early date; there is evidence that he was brooding over this pathetic tale in 1591, although the play, in the form in which it has come down to us, probably did not appear before 1596. It was published in quarto form, probably without the dramatist's consent, in the following year, and the sub-title declared that it had been publicly played often and with great applause. The poet found the material for his first tragedy in several quarters, and drew upon these sources with the freedom characteristic of the time. The story has been traced as far back as the Greek romances of the early Christian centuries, but long before Shakespeare's imagination fastened upon it the congenial soil of Italy had given it new and more vigorous life. The tragic fate of the two lovers who were destined to become the typical lovers of Western literature was set forth at length by Luigi da Porto in a novel published about 1535; it had been sketched sixty years earlier by Masuccio, and it reappeared in later years in various forms; its popularity and its rich material tempting several succeeding story-tellers. Chief among these was Bandello, who made it the theme of a novelle in the decade before Shakespeare's birth. Two years before that event, an English poet, Arthur Brooke, told it in English verse, and five years later another English writer, William Painter, gave a prose version of the old story in his "Palace of Pleasure." The main line of development of the tragedy is to be found in Bandello, Brooke, and Shakespeare; the dramatist following quite closely the plot as it came to him from the English poet, but transforming and transfiguring both material and form by his insight, his dramatic skill, and, above all, by turning upon the passion of love for the first time the full splendour of his imagination. "Romeo and Juliet" is the consummate flower of Shakespeare's poetic genius, the complete disclosure of his purely poetic gifts. The dramatic insight and skill with which the materials are rearranged; the the brilliancy of characterization, as in the splendid figure of Mercutio; the rising tide of emotion which bears the ill-fated lovers to their death, do not make us blind to the fact that this beautiful and appealing play, fragrant with the breath of the young summer, bathed in the soft radiance of the Italian night, touched with the imperishable charm of youth and passion, is primarily poetic and only secondarily dramatic. The characteristics of the early work of the poet are found in it: the frequent use of rhymes and the tendency to play with words; above all, the essentially lyrical quality of the play. Passages of pure and unsurpassed singing quality abound, and several verse-forms which were familiar to the medieval poets and were in use in Shakespeare's time are found in perfection. The first meeting of the lovers in Capulet's house is described in sonnet form; Juliet's prayer in her father's orchard for the coming of night is reminiscent of the Eveningsong, and has all the qualities of the Epithalamium ; while the parting of the lovers, when Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day remains the most tender and beautiful Morning-song in the language. Caught in the tragic movement of a family feud, the lovers live out their romance in five passionate days, during which the drama steadily deepens and sweeps towards its end with tumultuous current; and at the supreme moment, with characteristic insight, death ushers in a final peace. It is this vision of reconciliation which made Shakespeare a master of human experience in its widest scope and significance. While exhibiting the fatality of individual struggle against the social order, he continually makes us aware of the deep and radical changes which spring out of tragic resistance and defiance; the searching reaction of the assertion of individuality on the social order. Shakespeare's joy in the possession of the poetic gift, and his earliest delight in life, found radiant expression in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a masterpiece of poetic fancy, and the gayest and most beautiful of poetic comedies. Rich as this drama is in humorous effects, it is so essentially lyrical in spirit that it stands alone in English poetry; an exquisite expansion of the masque or festival poem into a drama of pure fancy and daring imagination. It was probably composed for some marriage celebration, though it has not been connected as yet with any wedding among the poet's friends or in the court circle. Written about 1596, hints of the play appear to have been drawn from many sources. The modern reader finds such hints in Plutarch's "Life of Theseus," in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," in Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and in the old French romance of "Huon of Bordeaux," of which an English translation appeared in the decade between 1530 and 1540. Shakespeare's real indebtedness, however, was to the poetic imagination of the Germanic race to which he belonged, which still kept alive, in folklore and fairy tale, in every hamlet in England, the magical world of fairy folk; so near to the world of men, and so intimately associated with that world, and yet invisible to all save those who saw with the imagination. Especially were these elusive elves concerned with the mysteries of love and marriage; and in the magic mirror in which the poet shows them they not only associate Theseus and Hippolyta with the sweetest traditions of English field and fireside, but show forth, as in a parable, the magic properties of love when love touches the whole gamut of feeling and sets the whole nature vibrating from the passions to the imagination. There are evident connections in the play with the aspects of life and character which interested the poet and with which he had already dealt in "The Comedy of Errors," in "Love's Labour's Lost," and in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," while its exquisite lyrical quality affiliates it with "Romeo and Juliet"; but, both as regards older sources of incident and his own earlier work, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" stands in complete and radiant individuality. It discloses the original and spontaneous force of the poet's genius; his ability to use, fuse, and recast the most diverse materials with entire freedom and yet with unerring artistic instinct. He is equally at home with the classical tradition nobly presented in the figure of Theseus, with the most extravagant rustic humour set in the mouths of the inimitable clowns, and with the traditional lore of childhood - the buoyant play of the popular imagination-in Titania and Oberon and Puck. His mastery of the verse-form which English tragedy has adopted is equally clear and striking. The iambic pentameter, with which his genius has almost identified English blank verse, finds in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" the full development of its melodic power. The line of five feet, each accented following an |