of the play assails false ideas of the place of knowledge, false uses of speech, and false conceptions of life; it discloses the mind of the poet already at work on the problem which engaged him during the whole of his productive life, and in the working out of which all the plays are involved: the problem of the right relation of the individual to the moral order, to the family, and to the State. The breadth of view and sanity of temper which are at once the most striking characteristics of Shakespeare's mind and the secret of the reality and range of his art find in "Love's Labour's Lost" their earliest illustration. And in this play are to be found also the earliest examples of his free and expressive character-drawing; for Biron and Rosaline are preliminary studies for Benedict and Beatrice; the play of wit throughout the drama predicts "Much Ado About Nothing"; the love-making of Armado and Jaquenetta is the earliest example of a by-play of comedy which reaches perfection in “As You Like It." As a piece of apprentice work "Love's Labour's Lost" is quite invaluable; so clearly does it reveal the early processes of the poet's mind and his first selection of themes, motives, human interests, and artistic methods.

"The Comedy of Errors" belongs to this period of tentative work, and is interesting as showing Shakespeare's familiarity with the traditional form of comedy and as marking the point of his departure from it. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, but it was presented as early as the Christmas season of 1594, in the hall of Gray's Inn; and its production was accom

panied by considerable disorder in the audience, which must have been composed chiefly of benchers and their guests. This disturbance is mentioned by a chronicler in the same year in these words: "After much sport, a Comedy of Errors was played by the players; so that night began and continued to the end, in nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called the 'Night of Errors.' The main, although not the only, source of the plot was the Menæchmi of Plautus, in which the Latin comedian develops the almost unlimited possibility of blunders which lies in mistakes of identity — then as now a popular device with playwrights and story tellers. Shakespeare may have read the comedy in the original, or in a translation by William Warner, which was not published until the year following the presentation of "The Comedy of Errors," but which was probably in existence in manuscript much earlier. In this form many pieces of prose and verse which later became famous were passed from hand to hand; writing was practised chiefly for the pleasure of the writer and his friends, and publication was secondary, and usually an afterthought.

In turning to Plautus, Shakespeare paid tribute to the classical tradition which dominated Italy and was never without witnesses in England; a tradition which cannot be disregarded without serious loss of artistic education, nor accepted without sacrifice of original power. Whenever the classical tradition has secured complete possession of the stage, a new and vital drama has been impossible; whenever it has been entirely

discarded, unregulated individualism has degenerated into all manner of eccentricities of plot and form. With characteristic insight, Shakespeare escaped both dangers; he knew the classical manner, and was not unresponsive to its order, balance, and genius for proportion, but he refused to be enslaved or hampered by it. English tragedy had secured complete freedom, and was fast becoming the richest and most adequate expression of the English genius; English comedy had been fighting the same battle, and "The Comedy of Errors" marks the decisive triumph of the national genius. In this play Shakespeare conformed to the ancient requirements that the action should take place in a single day and within the limits of a single locality - the time-honoured unities; but he changed the classical into the romantic spirit by the introduction of greater complexity of characters and therefore of greater perplexity of plot, and by the infusion of a vein of pathos which is alien to the Latin comedy.

The ease with which the difficult plot is handled shows that Shakespeare had already gone far in his education as a playwright. A comparison with Plautus's play brings out his essential and fundamental cleanness of imagination. He was a man of his time, and his time was incredibly frank and coarse of speech; but whenever he could escape into a purer speech he rarely lost the opportunity. The coarseness and occasional obscenity in his work were the dust of the road along which he travelled; among the men of his age and vocation he was singularly refined in taste and clean in speech. Moral sanity is one of Shakespeare's

most characteristic qualities; he is ethically sound throughout the entire body of his work. His insight holds him true at all points to the inexorable play of law. He offends the taste of a more fastidious age, but he is far more wholesome than many modern writers of irreproachable vocabulary. On this whole matter Coleridge has spoken the final word:

“Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice; he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day. Shakespeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of Shakespeare be contrasted with that of the writers of his own or the succeeding age, or of those of the present day who boast of their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of Shakespeare; even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his own writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites nor flatters passion, in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carry on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out of its place; he inverts not the order of nature and propriety — does not make every magistrate a drunkard or a glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate.”

In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" another tie with the past and another point of departure are

discovered. The play seems to have been derived mainly from the Portuguese novelist and poet Montemayor, whose "Story of the Shepherdess Filismena " was well known in English through various translations of the pastoral romance of which it was part, and is reminiscent of the plays based chiefly on Italian love-stories which were popular before Shakespeare's time. This comedy of love and friendship, conceived in the romantic spirit, is slight and ineffective in construction, but full of beauty in detail. It is the work of a poet who was not yet a dramatist. There are lines in it which predict the magical verses of the later plays; Julia and Lucetta are hasty, preliminary studies of Portia and Nerissa; while Launce and Speed are the forerunners of a long succession of serving-men whose conceits, drolleries, whims, and far-fetched similes. place them among the most original of the poet's creations.

Shakespeare's apprentice work, even when it was limited to adaptation or recasting of existing materials, is clearly discriminated from his more mature work both by its structure and its style: but it is tentative rather than imitative, and full of germs which were to find perfection of growth in the dramas of a later period.