state entry into London took place, Shakespeare and his fellows appeared in the king's train: “each of them was presented with four yards and a half of scarlet cloth, the usual dress allowance to players belonging to the household. The poet and his colleagues were termed the king's servants, and took rank at court amongst the Grooms of the Chamber." We have records (copied for Malone) of the performance by the king's servants at Whitehall of Othello (Nov. I, 1604), of Measure for Measure (Dec. 26, 1604), and of King Lear (Dec. 26, 1606). The lines in Measure for Measure (ii. 4. 24-30) which describe the troubles of a king occasioned by the over-demonstrative loyalty of his admiring subjects, and those in Macbeth which tell of the cure of the king's-evil by the royal touch, are supposed to have been meant as compliments to King James.

During the summer and early autumn months the players often itinerated. Thus in the summer of 1597 Shakespeare's company travelled through Sussex and Kent; on Sept. 3rd they acted at Dover, where, as Halliwell-Phillipps has observed, the author of Lear might have seen the samphire gatherers on the cliff, which may have served as model for Edgar's imaginary precipice. They turned westward in that year, reached Bristol, and performed at Marlborough and Bath. In the autumn of 1605 they travelled to Barnstaple, and before returning to town acted before the mayor and corporation of Oxford. In that city of spires and

1 Halliwell-Phillipps: Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, vol. i. p. 212.

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colleges Shakespeare probably lodged at John D'Avenant's tavern, and knew the tavern-keeper's handsome wife. Her boy, the future dramatist, Sir William D'Avenant, born in March, 1606, was reputed to be Shakespeare's godson. The gossip which named our poet as father of the boy has no real evidence to lend it support.

§ 14. The playhouse in which Shakespeare first acted, if not "The Theatre" which belonged to James Burbage, must have been that named "The Curtain", which stood not far off in a division of the parish of Shoreditch known as the Liberty of Halliwell (holy well). Here, on the edge of the great city, the country had actually begun; we read of a prentice in the year 1584 sleeping on the grass very nere the Theatre or Curten". In 1598 The Theatre had ceased to be suitable for the requirements of the time, and in the winter of that year (Dec.-Jan. 1598-99) the timber of which it was built was removed to Southwark with a view to its forming part of a new and better structure. This building, known as The Globe, from its sign of Hercules or Atlas carrying his load, stood not far from London Bridge, a little westward, and close to the river on the Southwark side. Upon a circular substructure rose two wooden stories, which included the galleries and boxes. These and the stage were roofed with thatch; the pit or yard was open to the weather. In the profits of this theatre Shakespeare was a sharer. Blackfriars Theatre, with which also Shakespeare's name is associated, was converted into a building for dramatic performances from a large house purchased by the elder Burbage

in 1596. The inhabitants of Blackfriars petitioned the privy-council without success against the establishment of the theatre, setting forth in their memorial the various dangers and annoyances to which they would be subjected by its presence in the neighbourhood. For a time it was leased by the Burbages to one Evans for the performances of the boy-actors, Her Majesty's Children of the Chapel. When they quitted it Shakespeare's company took their place, and in the later days of his dramatic career the great poet himself may have appeared on the boards of Blackfriars. Dryden informs us that The Tempest was represented at this theatre and was well received.

§ 15. The theatrical company which produced a play in Elizabethan days had no wish to see the work in print, its publication necessarily detracting from the novelty of the piece. But from the year 1597 onwards several of Shakespeare's dramas were placed in the hands of the booksellers, and were printed, each singly, in quarto form. The first to appear was King Richard II. (1597), from which the deposition scene was omitted. It was speedily followed by King Richard III. A pirated copy of Romeo and Juliet, made up from fragments of manuscript, eked out by notes taken during the performance, and by recollected lines and speeches, appeared in the same year (1597). In 1598 King Henry IV. and the revised version of Love's Labour's Lost were published. Hardly a year, indeed, passed from this date until that of Shakespeare's death without the appearance in quarto of some new tragedy, history, or comedy, or the re

PALLADIS TAMIA.

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publication of one which had already issued from the press. The popularity of Shakespeare's two chief non-dramatic poems was of remarkable continuance, as is attested by the number of successive editions. Occasionally plays or poems by other writers were foisted on the public by unscrupulous publishers with the attractive name or initials of William Shakespeare on the title-page. A list of his works, most valuable from the light it throws on their chronology, appears in a "Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets", which is printed near the end of a little volume named Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres, a Master of Arts of both universities. The chapter was written in the summer of 1598, and it bears remarkable testimony to the high rank held by Shakespeare both as a narrative and a dramatic poet. "As the soule of Euphorbus", says Meres, "was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.—As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.-As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if

they would speak Latin; so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake English." The Love's Labour's Won which Meres names may be a lost play of Shakespeare, or possibly, as has been conjectured, All's Well that Ends Well in an earlier form may have borne this title. The "sugred Sonnets among his private friends" may be some of those printed afterwards (1609) in the quarto edition of "Shakespeare's Sonnets". Two of these sonnets, with a different text, were included among the poems of The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, a slender volume made up of pieces of verse, many of which are certainly not by Shakespeare, though his name is placed upon the fraudulent title-page. A theory most skilfully worked out by Mr. Tyler, with some assistance from Mr. Harrison, which identifies the young friend addressed in Shakespeare's Sonnets with William Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, and the raven-haired lady with Queen Elizabeth's maid of honour, Mistress Mary Fitton, places the first acquaintance of the poet with Herbert, then a youth of eighteen, in the spring of the year 1598. While several other theories of Shakespeare's Sonnets are amusing from their absurdity, this is highly interesting from its ingenuity; and yet it seems to me to remain doubtful whether Herbert and his mistress are in any way connected with these perplexing poems, which endlessly invite the reader and endlessly baffle his attempts to read their biographical meanings clear. Whether Shakespeare formed the acquaintance of William Herbert in this year or not, we may believe that it became memor