beyond this fact we know nothing for certain until 1592, when he was an author and an actor, and of importance in both capacities to his dramatic company. A year before this, in 1591, was published Spenser's poem, The Tears of the Muses, in which Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, laments the cessation from authorship of some creator of general mirth whom Spenser names "our pleasant Willy":

And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock her selfe, and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimic shade,

Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late.

It would be pleasant to suppose that the author of the Faerie Queene here spoke of his great contemporary; but it is much more probable that Spenser's friend, the dramatist John Lyly, is meant.1 If Spenser ever refers to Shakespeare, it is in his Colin Clouts Come Home Again, in lines which describe some high poet under the name of "Aetion", the eaglet (from aerós, an eagle). Colin Couts was not published until 1594, but probably was written in whole or in part in 1591. The true name of "Aetion" had, says Spenser, a heroic sound, which agrees well with the name Shakespeare; the epithet gentle" seems to be one to which our poet had almost a peculiar right:

And there, though last not least, is Aetion,

A gentler shepheard may no where be found:
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts invention,
Doth like himselfe heroically sound.

1 Halliwell-Phillipps identifies "our pleasant Willy" with the comic actor Richard Tarlton (died 1588); Professor Minto supposes him to be Sir Philip Sidney.

These lines, if written as early as 1591, were hardly meant for Shakespeare; they may, however, be a later insertion. But it seems not unlikely that Drayton was intended, who had written under the poetical name of "Rowland", and whose Idea, as some have thought, may be pointed to (though to myself the notion appears far-fetched) by the choice of the name Aetion. (ιδεά = αἴτιον).

§ 10. There can be no mistake that Shakespeare is the object of Greene's attack in the pamphlet Greenes Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, written by the unhappy poet as he lay dying in a mean house in Dowgate, attended by a shoemaker's wife, his kind hostess and nurse. The pamphlet must have been written in August, 1592. Having warned his friends Marlowe, Peele,and "young Juvenal" (probably Lodge) against the inconstancy of the players, he proceeds: "Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie". The travestied line

Qh tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide,

is found in Richard, Duke of York, and also in the Third Part of Henry VI., which is founded on Richard, Duke of York. In the old play Marlowe and Greene had probably been collaborateurs, and it would seem that Greene bitterly resented Shakespeare's rehandling of his work, and felt indignant at the success

SHAKESPEARE AS AN ACTOR.

19

of one whom he looked on as an unlettered rival. Greene's pamphlet was seen through the press by Henry Chettle, and in December of the same year he entered on the Stationers' Books his own prose tract Kind-Hart's Dreame, in the preface to which > he apologizes to Shakespeare for Greene's unworthy attack. He expresses his regret for not having used his discretion in moderating the writer's warmth; he is as sorry, he says, as if the original fault were his own, "because my selfe have seene his [Shakespeare's] demeanour no less civil than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious [i.e. felicitous] grace in writing, that approves his Art". The word "quality" in this passage of Chettle's "Address to the Gentlemen Readers" of his pamphlet has a special reference to the profession of an actor, as it has in Hamlet's inquiry respecting the boy-performers: "Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing?" We may infer from Chettle's words that Shakespeare was at least a respectable actor. According to Rowe, "the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet," a part requiring an actor of good delivery though not a great artist. There is some ground for thinking that he played the part of Old Knowell in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, in the representation of which comedy he certainly appeared. And there is a confused tradition handed down by Oldys which makes it probable that he was the Adam of his own As You Like It. Whether he excelled or not in his practice as an actor, Shakespeare certainly had a cultivated

Knowledge of the principles of the histrionic art; the instructions given to the players by Hamlet could have come from no one who had not carefully studied the merits and the defects of the actor on the boards; the writer of the words assigned to Hamlet assuredly knew the grace of moderation and reserve in the rendering of passion, and at the same time knew the error of languor or inertness. The latest express mention of Shakespeare as having taken a part in the performance of a play is in connection with Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which was performed at the Globe Theatre in 1603 or 1604. But in a document of 1610 the Burbages speak of placing Shakespeare as an actor among others at Blackfriars Theatre. His name, however, does not appear in a list of the actors of The Alchemist (1610), in which, if he were then performing, he might naturally have taken a part among his fellows.

§ II. No doubt it was perceived at an early date in Shakespeare's dramatic company that he could aid them more by his pen than by his voice. As we learn from the charges and insinuations of Greene, part of Shakespeare's early work as a writer for the stage was that of revising and adapting the work of his predecessors or early contemporaries. It was an excellent way of apprenticeship to his dramatic craft. He learned to distinguish between what is effective and ineffective on the stage; he acquired the art of carrying on the action of a piece without falling into tedious speech-making, he studied the links and transitions of the dramatic events, he came to see how these should be manipulated, he learned how to develop a dramatic char

acter, how to regulate imagery and diction so that they should never pass into the epical; and while amending the pieces of others his own genius would have enough of play to gain in strength, and enough of restraint to save it from the waste of exuberant power.

But the poet in Shakespeare could not be content with what may be justly described as in a certain degree hackwork. The poet in Shakespeare aspired to an independent existence, and apparently he did not yet perceive that through the drama alone could his genius explore the heights and depths of passion and of song. In the passage quoted from KindHart's Dreame the author informs his readers that "divers of worship" have reported to him Shakespeare's "facetious grace in writing". Possibly Shakespeare had already earned the good opinion and good-will of the Earl of Southampton. Early in 1593 Richard Field, the son of a Stratford tanner, himself a London printer, was carrying through the press Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, which was published in that year with a dedication to Southampton, in which the author, speaking of his young patron with graceful homage and of his poem with becoming modesty, describes it as "the first heire of my invention". Doubtless several plays of merit by Shakespeare had already appeared upon the stage; but they had not been published by the press; they formed in the eyes of Shakespeare's contemporaries hardly a part of literature proper; they could not compete in dignity with such a miniature epic as this which now appeared, and in which Shakespeare first claimed his rank as poet.