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higher sense of that word, and but slightly, if at all, acquainted at first hand with Italian literature, his early plays and poems exhibit the Renaissance influences derived from classical themes, Latin models in tragedy and comedy, and the gladcoloured or sad-coloured literature of the south. "Titus Andronicus," writes an excellent critic, "in many of its characteristic features, reflects the form of Roman tragedy almost universally accepted and followed in the earlier period of the drama. . . . The Medea and Thyestes of Seneca are crowded with Pagan horrors of the most revolting kind. It is true these horrors are usually related, not represented, although in the Medea the maddened heroine kills her children on the stage. But from these tragedies the conception of the physically horrible as an element of tragedy was imported into the early English drama, and intensified by the realistic tendency which the events of the time and the taste of their ruder audiences had impressed upon the common stages." With respect to Titus Andronicus, however, we must remember that, in all probability, Shakespeare is not responsible for its horrors and shames. He may possibly have begun his worldly career as a butcher's apprentice at Stratford-on-Avon. We are not

compelled to believe that his dramatic career opened in the slaughter-house. If, to aid his theatrical fellows, he retouched the old play of Titus Andronicus, he certainly took no pleasure in lopped limbs and the reek of blood. If for an hour he was brought into contact with the tragedy of gross and material horror, it was only that he

might turn away from it for ever. Whether he wrote a few lines of the play here and a few lines there, or wrote them not, concerns us but little; the play taken as a whole may justly be described as of the pre-Shakespearian school.

The influence of Latin comedy is seen in the Comedy of Errors. While the main subject was derived from the Menæchmi of Plautus, some hints were also taken from his Amphitruo. But if Seneca was too heavy for Shakespeare, Plautus was somewhat too light. Our dramatist, indeed, complicates the plot and diversifies the mirthful entanglements, making the fun fly faster by adding to the twinbrothers Antipholus their twin-attendants Dromio. But he adds also a serious background, and towards the close he rises for a little space from mirth to pathos. The ingenious construction of the play, its skilful network of incidents, its bright intricacy which never falls into confusion are remarkable, for Shakespeare is commonly credited with having paid but little attention to his plots.

Love's Labour's Lost may be earlier in date than the Comedy of Errors. It was perhaps the first independent play of Shakespeare's authorship, but, as we have received it, the work, considerably altered from the original version, is a recast of the year 1598. Gervinus has remarked that the tone of the Italian school prevails here more than in any other play: "In the burlesque parts of Love's Labour's Lost we meet with two favourite characters or caricatures of the Italian comedy; the Pedant, that is the schoolmaster and grammarian, and the military Braggart, the Thraso of the Latin, the 'Captain

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Spavento' of the Italian stage". Shakespeare, however, did not merely reproduce dramatic types or stock figures; he had his eye on the affectations and mannerisms of his own day. It is as if someone of our generation were to make his début by a theatrical satire on the so-called æsthetes of a few years since, with skits at our fashionable scientific pedantry, our woman's-rights movement, and other admired modes of the time. There is in Love's Labour's Lost an impatience of folly, dulness, and ineptitude which is a happy symptom of youth. Something of the writer's youthful philosophy also appears in the play; it is a dramatic plea against shaping our lives by narrow rules and artificial systems. Let us not confine ourselves within a pale of petty regulations-such is Shakespeare's teaching-but rather launch forth into the world, and have faith in that broad wisdom or good sense which comes by natural methods, a wisdom won through joy and pain, through frank dealing with our fellows, through the lore of life and love. In certain speeches of Biron we seem to hear the authentic voice of the youthful Shakespeare.

The Comedy of Errors is a comedy of incidents -almost a farce; Love's Labour's Lost is a comedy of dialogue; in The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare made his first essay in what we may call romantic narrative comedy. The scene is Italy, the land of romance for the imagination of Elizabethan England. Some of the incidents seem to be derived from a Spanish pastoral romance and some from a tale by Bandello. Love and friendship and their mutual relations form the general

theme. The play is the harbinger of some of the most exquisite of the later comedies, and contains a series of sketches which were afterwards worked up into finished pictures. Julia in her male disguise announces, as it were, the more graceful disguisers Viola and Rosalind, Portia and Imogen. The wit combats of clowns have a fascination for Shakespeare or for his audience, but in Launce appears something better-the first of those vulgar humorists who enrich the stage with so much of mirth and the wisdom of mirth, and lacking whom the garden in Illyria and the glades of Arden would appear halfdesolate. The Two Gentlemen of Verona would seem to have been written with careful elaboration; the characters are arranged so as to balance each other with a somewhat artificial regularity; the imagery and versification are studiously wrought. The defects of the plot arise perhaps from the fact that it was the author's first experiment in what I have termed romantic narrative comedy. He was not yet a master in the art of construction; if the subject favoured him the plot of a play might be excellent; if it did not favour him, the scenes might hang somewhat loosely together.

Another experiment, and in an altogether different direction, was made in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is in part a perfect piece of lyrical poetry, in part a very imperfect drama. The characterization of the lovers is faint and pale; their quarrels and reconciliations interest us little; they are indeed invented to be the sport of accident, and so cannot be strongly drawn. But the fairy poetry was a new and exquisite creation in English literature; and

the English stage had previously possessed no group of humorous figures to compare with that formed by "sweet bully Bottom" and his compeers. The scene is again classic ground, and the time is that of classical antiquity; but the spirit of the play is essentially romantic. Theseus is a great mediæval knight or an Elizabethan noble; his Amazonian bride Hippolyta might as well be some gracious English châtelaine. Everything in the play mingles with its opposite in dream-like fashion -the modern and the antique, London and Athens, the moonlight elves and the rude mechanicals, the jests of fairyland and the vexations of mortal lovers, fancy and frolic, magnificence and grotesqueness, drollery and romance.

LS28. Of these early comedies in which Shakespeare was experimenting in various directions, no one is quite a dramatic masterpiece. Evidences of the 'prentice hand appear in each-here in tediousness of dialogue, here in artificial arrangement of the figures, here in faulty construction of the plot, here in feebleness of characterization, here in languor of style, and here in undramatic development of the imagery. But each of these plays contains something admirable, something which no writer of the time except Shakespeare could have created; taken together they make up a great achievement for a poet's early years, and give unmistakable prediction of the higher work which is to follow. It is worth noting how often in this first group of comedies the mirth is derived not from the deeper things of the spirit, but from odd surprises, mistakes of identity, disguisings, bewilderments, and confusion; in a