unmistakable; it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that they express, if they do not literally report, a prolonged emotional experience culminating in a crisis which shook the very bases of his nature; which brought him in the beginning an intense and passionate joy, slowly dissolving into a great and bitter agony of spirit; and issuing at last, through the moralization of a searching insight, in a larger and deeper harmony with the order of life. This experience, in which friendship and love contended for supremacy in his soul; in which he entered into a new and humiliating consciousness of weakness in his own spirit, and in which he knew, apparently for the first time, that bitterness of disenchantment and disillusion which to a nature of such sensitiveness and emotional capacity as his is the bitterest cup ever held to the lips, found him gay, light-hearted, buoyant, full of creative energy, and radiant with the charm and the dreams of youth; it left him saddened in spirit, burdened with the consciousness of weakness, face to face with those tragic collisions which seem at times to disclose the play of the irony of fate, but out of which, in agony and apparent defeat, the larger and more inclusive harmony of the individual with the divine and the human order of society is secured and disclosed.

Shakespeare drank deep of the cup of suffering before he set in the order of art, with a hand at once stern and tender, the colossal sorrows of his kind. Like all artists of the deepest insight, the keenest sensitiveness to beauty, and that subtle and elusive but magical spiritual sympathy which we call genius,

which puts its possessor in command of the secret experience of his kind, Shakespeare's art waited upon his experience for its full capacity of thought and feeling, and touched its highest points of achievement only when his own spirit had sounded the depths of selfknowledge and of self-surrender. In the great Tragedies life and art are so completely merged that they are no longer separable in thought; these dramas disclose the ultimate harmony between spirit and form.

This searching inward experience was contemporaneous in Shakespeare's life at the beginning of the seventeenth century with fierce dissensions between his personal friends in his own profession, with growing bitterness of feeling and sharper antagonism between the two great parties in England, and with a gradual but unmistakable overshadowing of the splendours of the "spacious days of great Elizabeth." What is known as "The War of the Theatres" was at its height between 1598 and 1602; the chief combatants being Ben Jonson on one side, and Dekker and Marston on the other; the weapons of warfare, satirical plays. Thirteen or fourteen dramas are enumerated as having their origin in the antagonism between the rival playwrights, the best known and most important of these plays being Jonson's striking and characteristic comedy "Every Man in His Humour," and his "Poetaster." Dekker's "Satiromastrix" and Marston's "What You Will" are chiefly interesting as forming part of the record of this vociferous war, and "The Return from Parnassus" on account of one interesting but obscure reference to Shakespeare which it con

tains: "Few of the University pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Juppiter. Why, heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Jonson too. O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him betray his credit." These words were put into the mouth of the actor Kempe and spoken to the well-known actor Burbage, and Mr. Ward suggests that their meaning may be put into plain speech: "Our fellow, Shakespeare, ay, and Ben Jonson, too, puts down all the university playwriters."

The reference to a purge administered by Shakespeare to Jonson has led to much speculation regarding Shakespeare's part in this professional quarrel, and "Troilus and Cressida" has sometimes been placed among the plays which contributed either light or heat to the discussion; many of Shakespeare's characters have been identified by different critics with the leading combatants and with others among his contemporaries; in no case, however, has any speculation in this field secured a proper basis of proof. This very fact, taken in connection with Shakespeare's long and cordial relations with Jonson, make it more than probable that the dramatist stood outside the arena, maintaining a friendly attitude toward both parties to the -strife.

The relations between Jonson and Shakespeare are in the highest degree creditable to both; but it is

probable that Shakespeare's sweetness of nature was the chief element in holding them on so high a plane. By gifts, temperament, difference of early opportunity, methods of work, conceptions of art, the two were for many years rivals for supremacy in the playwright's field. The contrast between them could hardly have been more marked. Jonson was nine years the junior of Shakespeare, having been born in 1573. His grandfather had been a clergyman, and he was the descendant of men of gentle blood. He was city born and bred; at Westminster he came under the teaching of a man of great learning, William Camden, who made him a student and put the stamp of the scholar on his mind. He became a devout lover of the classics and a patient and thorough intellectual worker. Poverty forced him to work with his hands for a time, and when the War of the Theatres was at its height, his antagonists did not hesitate to remind him that he had been a bricklayer in his stepfather's employ. From this uncongenial occupation he found escape by taking service in the Netherlands, where he proved his courage by at least one notable exploit. He returned to London, and married at about the age at which Shakespeare took the same important step. He was a loyal and affectionate father, and a constant if not an adoring husband; he described his wife many years after his marriage as "a shrew, yet honest."

Like Shakespeare, he turned to the theatre as a means of support; appeared as an actor; revised and, in part, rewrote older plays; collaborated with other playwrights. He lacked the faculty of adaptation, the

capacity for practical affairs, and the personal charm which made Shakespeare successful as a man of business; but, through persistent and intelligent work, he placed himself at the head of his profession.

He was of massive build; his face strong rather than sensitive or expressive; his mind vigorous, orderly, and logical, rather than creative, vital, and spontaneous; he was, by instinct, habit, and conviction, a scholar; saturated with the classical spirit, absolutely convinced of the fixed and final value of the classical conceptions and methods in art; with a touch of the scholar's contempt for inaccuracy, grace, ease, flexibility. He was a poet by intention, as Shakespeare was a poet by nature; a follower and expounder of the classic tradition, as Shakespeare was essentially a romanticist; he achieved with labour what Shakespeare seemed to accomplish by magic; he wrought out his plots with the most scrupulous care for unity and consistency, while Shakespeare appeared to take whatever material came to hand with easy-going indifference to the niceties of craftsmanship. To a man of Jonson's rugged and somewhat sombre temper, the success and love which Shakespeare evoked with such ease must have seemed out of proportion to his desert; while Shakespeare's methods of work must have seemed to him fundamentally defective and superficial. It was a case of great dramatic intelligence matched against great dramatic genius. When it is remembered that the two men were working in the same field and for the same audience, the intensity of their rivalry, and