but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great poetic imagination. They are, as it were -I put it to suit my present comparison- - creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen-marvellous Welshmen! Benedict and Beatrice, Dogberry and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the poetically comic."

In "The Merchant of Venice" the poet finally emancipated himself from the influence of Marlowe, and struck his own note with perfect distinctness. There is a suggestion of the "Jew of Malta" in Shylock, but the tragic figure about whom the play moves bears on every feature the stamp of Shakespeare's humanizing spirit. The embodiment of his race and the product of centuries of cruel exclusion from the larger opportunities of life, Shylock appeals to us the more deeply because he makes us feel our kinship with him. Marlowe's Jew is a monster; Shakespeare's Jew is a man misshapen by the hands of those who feed his avarice.

The comedy was produced about 1596; it was entered in the Stationers' Register two years later, and was twice published in 1600. The dramatist drew freely upon several sources. There are evidences of the existence of an earlier play; the two stories of the bond, with its penalty of a pound of flesh, and of the three caskets were already known in

English literature, and had been interwoven to form a single plot. A collection of Italian novels of the fourteenth century and the well-known "Gesta Romanorum" contributed to the drama as it left Shakespeare's hands. As a play, it has obvious defects; the story is highly improbable, and, as in at least three other plays, the plot involves bad law; for the poet, although sharing the familiarity of the dramatists generally with legal terms and phrases, shows that his knowledge was second-hand, or acquired for the occasion, by his misuse of well-known words of legal import. In invention in the matter of plots and situations Shakespeare was inferior to several of his contemporaries; and he was content, therefore, to take such material as came to his hand with as much freedom as did Molière. In this case, as in every other, he at once put his private mark on the general property and made it his own. He purified the material, he put a third of the play into prose, and he imparted to the verse a beauty, a vigour, and a freedom from mannerisms which separate it at once from work of the apprentice period. He freely and boldly harmonized the tragic and comic elements; in Portia he created the first of those enchanting women for whom no adjective has yet been found save the word Shakespearean, for they are a group by themselves; and he set on the stage the first of his great tragic figures. In 1596 the Jew was contemptible in the mind of western Europe; he was the personification of greed and subtlety, and he was under suspicion of deeds of fiendish cruelty. He was robbed upon the slightest pre

text, stoned on the streets, and jeered at on the stage. His sufferings were food for mirth. In 1594, a Jew, who was acting as physician to the Queen, had been accused of attempting to poison Elizabeth, and had been hanged at Tyburn, and popular hate against the race was at fever-heat when Shakespeare put on the stage the Jew who has since been accepted as typical of his race. It is not probable that the dramatist definitely undertook to modify the popular conception of the Jew; his attention may have been directed to the dramatic possibilities of the character by the trial and execution of Dr. Lopez; and when he dealt with the material at hand, he recast it in the light of his marvellous imagination, and humanized the central figure. Shylock was a new type, and he was not understood at first. For many years the part was played in a spirit of broad and boisterous farce, and the audiences jeered at the lonely and tragic figure. At every point in "The Merchant of Venice" the poet shows clearer insight than in his earlier work, deeper wisdom, greater freedom in the use of his material, and fuller command of his art.

Shakespeare had an older play before him when he wrote "The Taming of the Shrew," and he followed its main lines of story so closely that the play as we now have it is an adaptation rather than an original work. That the dramatist was thinking of the theatre and not of the public or of posterity is shown by the readiness with which he passed from the noblest creative work to the work of revision and adaptation. The earlier play gave him the idea of the Induction and

the characteristic passages between Petruchio and Catharine, but was an inferior piece of work, full of rant, bathos, and obvious imitation of Marlowe ; the plot was followed, but the construction and style are new; the story of Bianca and her lovers was worked in as a subsidiary plot, and, although the play sometimes passes over into the region of farce, it is charged with the comedy spirit.

This comedy carries the reader back to the poet's youth, to Stratford and to Warwickshire. It is rich in local allusions, as are also "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and the second part of "Henry IV." There is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare's intercourse with Stratford was unbroken through these earlier years, though the difficulties and expense of travel may have prevented frequent visits. Now that prosperity and reputation were bringing him ease and means, his relations with his old home became more intimate and active. There are many evidences of his interest in Stratford and in his father's affairs, and it is evident that the son shared his rising fortunes with his father. The latter had known all the penalties of business failure; he was often before the local courts as a debtor. He seems to have had a fondness for litigation, which was shared by his son. In the dramatist's time the knowledge of legal phrases among intelligent men outside the legal profession was much more general than it has been at any later time, but there is reason to believe that Shakespeare knew many legal processes at first hand. He bought and sold land, brought various actions for the recovery of debts,

filed bills in chancery, made leases, and was engaged in a number of litigations.

In 1596, after an absence of ten years from Stratford, the poet reappears in his native place as a purchaser of valuable lands and a rebuilder of his father's shattered fortune. In that year his only son, Hamnet, a boy of eleven, died and was buried in Holy Trinity Churchyard. In the same year John Shakespeare made application to the College of Heralds for the privilege of using a coat of arms. The claim was based on certain services which the ancestors of the claimant were declared to have rendered "the most prudent prince King Henry the Seventh of famous memorie." The ancestral distinction put forward on behalf of John Shakespeare was not more apocryphal than the services set forth in many similar romances formally presented to the College of Arms as records of fact. The statement that the applicant's wife, Mary, heiress of Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, was the daughter of a gentleman has not been verified. The application was granted three years later, and the Garter King of Arms assigned to John Shakespeare a shield: "gold, on a bend sable, a spear of the first, and for his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, supporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid." motto, "Non Sans Droict," appears in a sketch or draft of the crest. Two years later the dramatist was styled "gentleman " in a legal document.

This effort to rehabilitate his father was followed, a year later, by the purchase of New Place

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