gift for graceful and even elegant expression, a touch of tenderness, and a sensitiveness of imagination which showed itself in his use of the imagery of mythology. Lodge wrote dull plays and lightened them by the introduction of charming songs.

Marlowe was the creative spirit of this group of accomplished playwrights. The son of a Canterbury shoemaker, he took his Bachelor's degree at Cambridge, and arrived in London, "a boy in years, a man in genius, a god in ambition." His ardent nature, impatient of all restraint and full of Titanic impulses, found congenial society on the stage and congenial work in play-writing. His life was as passionate and lawless as his art; his plays were written in six turbulent years, and his career was one of brief but concentrated energy. The two parts of "Tamburlaine," "The Massacre at Paris," "The Jew of Malta," "Edward II.," and "Dr. Faustus," the glowing fragment of "Hero and Leander," and a few short compositions, among them the exquisite "Come live with me and be my love," evidence the depth and splendour of Marlowe's genius and the lack of balance and restraint in his art. He gave English tragedy sublimity, intensity, breadth, and order; he freed blank verse from rigidity and mechanical correctness, and gave it the freedom, harmony, variety of cadence, and compelling music which imposed it upon all later English tragedy. Neither in his life nor in his art did Marlowe accept the inevitable limitations of human power in action and in creation; he flung himself passionately against the immovable barriers, and grasped at the impossible.

But his failures were redeemed by superb successes. He breathed the breath of almost superhuman life into the English drama both as regards its content and its form; for he was even greater as a poet than as a dramatist :

his raptures were

All air and fire . . . ;

For that fine madness still he did retain

Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

He left but a single step to be taken in the full unfolding of the drama, and that step Shakespeare took : the step from the Titan to the Olympian.

CHAPTER II

BIRTH AND BREEDING

THE charm of Stratford-on-Avon is twofold; it is enfolded by some of the loveliest and most characteristic English scenery, and it is the home of the greatest English literary tradition. Lying in the very heart of the country, it seems to be guarded as a place sacred to the memory of the foremost man of expression who has yet appeared among the English-speaking peoples. It has become a town of some magnitude, with a prosperous trade in malt and corn; but its importance is due wholly to the fact that it is the custodian of Shakespeare's birthplace, of the school in which he was trained, of the house in which he courted Anne Hathaway, of the ground on which he built his own home, and of the church in which he lies buried. The place is full of Shakespearean associations; of localities which he knew in the years of his dawning intelligence, and in those later years when he returned to take his place as a householder and citizen; the old churches with which as a child he was familiar are still standing, substantially as they stood at the end of the sixteenth century; the grammar school still teaches the boys of to-day within the walls that listened to the same recitations three hundred years ago; the houses of his

children and friends are, in several instances, still secure from the destructive hand of time; there are still wide stretches of sloping hillside shaded by the ancient Forest of Arden; there are quaint half-timbered fronts upon which he must have looked; the "bank where the wild thyme blows" is still to be found by those who know the foot-path to Shottery and the road over the hill; the Warwickshire landscape has the same ripe and tender beauty which Shakespeare knew; and the Avon flows as in the days when he heard the nightingales singing in the level meadows across the river from the church, or slipped silently in his punt through the mist which softly veils it on summer nights.

When Shakespeare was born, on April twenty-second or twenty-third, in the year fifteen hundred and sixtyfour, Stratford was an insignificant hamlet, off the main highways of travel, although within reach of important towns like Coventry, and of stately old English homes like Warwick and Kenilworth castles. The streets were narrow, irregular, and, like most streets in most towns in that unsanitary age, badly kept and of an evil odour; the houses were set among gardens or in the open, with picturesque indifference to modern ideas of community orderliness; the black-oak structure showing curious designs of triangles and squares through the plaster. Thatched roofs, projecting gables, rough walls, unpaved lanes, foot-paths through the fields, the long front of the Guild Hall with the Grammar School, the Guild Chapel, the Church of the Holy Trinity, the bridge across the

Avon built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the time of Henry VII., made up the picture which Shakespeare saw when he looked upon the place of his birth. On High Street, when he came back from London to live in Stratford, he found, not far from his house in New Place, the carved half-timbered front of the house in which tradition says the mother of John Harvard was born.

The population of Stratford is now about nine thousand; in 1564 it was probably less than fifteen hundred. It was surrounded by fields which were sometimes white with grain, and were always, in the season, touched with the splendour of the scarlet poppy. The villagers were sturdy English folk with more vigour than intelligence, and with more capacity than education. Many of them were unable to sign their own names, and among these John Shakespeare, the father of the poet, has sometimes been included: documents exist, however, which bear what is believed to be his signature. There was nothing unusual in this lack of literary training; comparatively few Englishmen of the station of John Shakespeare had mastered, in that period, the art of writing. Men who could not sign their own names were often men of mark, substance, and ability.

The family name was not uncommon in Warwickshire, and was borne by a good yeoman stock. When John Shakespeare applied, in 1596, for the right to use a coat of arms, he declared that Henry VII. had made a grant of lands to his grandfather in return for services of importance. The college of heraldry has