evident tendency to exclude the verbal conceits with which the dramatist entertained himself in his earlier work. The growing habit, revealed in the later plays, of ending a line with a preposition or conjunction furnishes material for a very minute and valuable study of what have become known as "weak endings." All these variations and peculiarities of style throw light on the chronology of the plays.

The first touches of Shakespeare's hand are found in the first part of "Henry VI.," "The Comedy of Errors," ""The Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Love's Labour's Lost," and "Romeo and Juliet." The play of "Titus Andronicus" is usually included among the Shakespearean dramas, but there is little evidence of its Shakespearean authorship, and there are many reasons for doubting Shakespeare's connection with it. It was regarded as his work by some of his contemporaries, and included in the first complete edition of the plays in 1623; but sixty years after his death, Edward Ravenscroft, who edited the play in 1678, said: "I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage that it was not originally his, but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters." This tradition is probably in accord with the fact; the repulsiveness of the plot, the violence of the tragic motive, and the absence of humour from the play are essentially foreign to Shakespeare's art and mind. He may have retouched it here and there; he can hardly have done more. And yet "Titus Andronicus," with its succession of

sanguinary scenes and massing of moral atrocities, may well find a place at the beginning of Shakespeare's work, so admirably does it illustrate the kind of tragedy which the early Elizabethan stage presented to its auditors. The theatre was then in what may be called its journalistic stage; it was reserved for Marlowe and Shakespeare to advance it to the stage of literature. It was to the last degree sensational and sanguinary, presenting feasts of horrors to the "groundlings," as the worst sort of sensational journals of to-day spread before their readers, in crudest description, the details of the most repulsive crimes and the habits of the vilest criminals. Elizabethan audiences delighted in bloody scenes and ranting declamation, and both are still to be found in the sensational press, with this differ ence the early theatre reached relatively few people, but the modern journal of the worst sort reaches an uncounted multitude. This taste for horrors and this exaggeration of speech were glorified by Marlowe's genius but remained essentially unchanged by him; it was left for Shakespeare's serene and balanced spirit, deeper insight, and larger art to discard the repulsive elements of the tragedy without sacrificing its power. In "Lear," "Macbeth,” Hamlet," and "Othello" there are, however, traces of the older drama. Shakespeare did not wholly escape the influence of his time in this respect. "Titus Andronicus" is not without power, but it is too gross and redolent of the shambles even for Shakespeare's most immature art; if he touched it at all, it must have been in a purely imitative way, and in the mere details of expression.

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CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST FRUITS

WHETHER touched and strengthened by Shakespeare or not, "Titus Andronicus " serves as a connecting link between the drama as Shakespeare found it and his own work. It is not possible to determine the exact order in which the separate plays in the earliest group which record his period of apprenticeship appeared; but of the chronology of the group as a group there is no doubt. The first play which found its way into print appeared in 1597, when "Romeo and Juliet," "Richard II.," and "Richard III." were published; but it was not until the following year that Shakespeare's name appeared on the title-page of a drama. As early as 1592, however, lines from his hand had been heard on the stage; and he had begun the work of adaptation and revision still earlier. Among the plays which Shakespeare found in the library of The Theatre, many belonged to a class of dramas dealing with subjects and scenes in history-dramas which were probably more popular with the people who sat in the yard and in the boxes than any other plays which were presented to them. These plays appealed to the deepest instincts of men to whom the defeat of the Armada was a matter of very recent history,

and in whom the race-consciousness was rapidly developing into a passionate conviction of the power and greatness of England. There was much in these plays which appealed to the imagination as well as to that thirst of action which was characteristic of the time. They brought before the eye and the mind the most commanding figures among the earlier kings and king-makers, and the most exciting and dramatic. incidents in the life of the nation; there was a basis of fact ample enough to give the mimic representations that sense of reality which the English mind craves, and yet there was scope for that play of the imagination which has kept the English from the rigidity, hardness, and spiritual sterility which are the fruits of too great emphasis on the bare facts of history; there was always that touch of tragedy which invests a drama with dignity and nobility, and yet there was an abundance of that humour which is the necessity of healthy minds, because, by introducing the normal contrasts of life, it maintains that external balance which is essential to spiritual sanity.

These chronicle plays were, moreover, thoroughly representative of English society; kings, nobles, statesmen, ecclesiastics, and the lords of war were always conspicuous in the foreground, but in the middle and background there were those comic or semi-comic figures in whose boastings, blunderings, wit, and coarse vitality the common people took a perennial interest. These chronicles, crudely dramatized, were a rich mine of materials for a dramatic genius of Shakespeare's breadth and vitality, and they must

be placed, by force of the direct and indirect service they rendered him, with the three or four chief streams of influence which fed his creative activity. Their direct service was rendered in the material which they furnished him so abundantly; their indirect service was rendered in the revelation of the possibilities for dramatic use of historical records which they made clear to him, and which sent him, with marvellous insight, to read the pages of Holinshed's "Chronicles" and North's translation of Plutarch's "Lives." In the arrangement of the thirty-seven plays according to subject-matter and treatment, the Histories fill a place hardly second to the Tragedies in importance. The hold which these old plays had upon the mind of the English people was immensely deepened by Shakespeare's large and effective handling of historical characters and situations; and he must be regarded as one of the prime forces in the development of that intense and deeply practical patriotism which knits the widely scattered parts of the modern empire into a vital racial unity.

It was to this rich mass of material that Shakespeare turned at the very beginning of his career as a writer of plays. His vocation was probably not yet clear to him; he was groping his way toward free expression, but he did not find it in a day. No man of genius comes to complete self-consciousness save as the result of vital experience and a good deal of practical experimenting with such tools as are at hand. Shakespeare began, not as a creator of individual works of art, but as an adapter and reviser of the work of other