most characteristic qualities; he is ethically sound throughout the entire body of his work. His insight holds him true at all points to the inexorable play of law. He offends the taste of a more fastidious age, but he is far more wholesome than many modern writers of irreproachable vocabulary. On this whole matter Coleridge has spoken the final word :

"Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice; he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day. Shakespeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of Shakespeare be contrasted with that of the writers of his own or the succeeding age, or of those of the present day who boast of their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of Shakespeare; even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his own writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites nor flatters passion, in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carry on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out of its place; he inverts not the order of nature and propriety - does not make every magistrate a drunkard or a glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate."

In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" another tie with the past and another point of departure are

discovered. The play seems to have been derived mainly from the Portuguese novelist and poet Montemayor, whose "Story of the Shepherdess Filismena" was well known in English through various translations of the pastoral romance of which it was part, and is reminiscent of the plays based chiefly on Italian love-stories which were popular before Shakespeare's time. This comedy of love and friendship, conceived in the romantic spirit, is slight and ineffective in construction, but full of beauty in detail. It is the work of a poet who was not yet a dramatist. There are lines in it which predict the magical verses of the later plays; Julia and Lucetta are hasty, preliminary studies of Portia and Nerissa; while Launce and Speed are the forerunners of a long succession of serving-men whose conceits, drolleries, whims, and far-fetched similes place them among the most original of the poet's creations.

Shakespeare's apprentice work, even when it was limited to adaptation or recasting of existing materials, is clearly discriminated from his more mature work both by its structure and its style: but it is tentative rather than imitative, and full of germs which were to find perfection of growth in the dramas of a later period.

CHAPTER VIII

THE POETIC PERIOD

DURING the decade between 1590 and 1600 Shakespeare's productivity was continuous, and covered a wide field of poetic expression; the nineteen or twenty plays which were written during this period included eight or nine comedies, one tragedy, and a group of historical dramas. To these must be added the two long lyrical pieces which bear his name, the few short pieces incorporated in "The Passionate Pilgrim," " "A Lover's Complaint," "The Phoenix and the Turtle," and the lyrical poem on friendship and love which took the form of a sequence of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. The apprentice work of the young dramatist may be said to end with the creation of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet," though in neither of these beautiful dramas does his genius reach full maturity. At the end of six or seven years after his arrival in London he had become sufficiently known and successful to awaken envy; he had tried various dramatic forms with success; he had learned the practical side of playwriting, and he had gone a long way towards mastering its theory; he had become an actor of intelligence, if not of marked gifts; and he had established himself in his profession.

It must have been a period of deep and eager spiritual striving and unfolding. Some of the poet's devout students in Germany, to whom his fame owes much, and who have enriched Shakespearean scholarship for all time with the fruits of loving study and of fruitful insight, find evidence that during this time the poet passed through a storm-and-stress period. There are many indications, however, that this phase of the dramatist's spiritual life came later, and was coincident with tragic events which touched him to the quick. His earlier work shows a sunny nature, a sensitive mind, a gay and eager interest in many forms of experience and art.

If "Titus Andronicus" was written by Shakespeare, and at the beginning of his career, it was so purely external and imitative, so evidently outside the dramatist's life, that it does not count as a document in his spiritual history. The extraordinary accuracy of description, the resolute and unfailing grasp of the concrete, which stamp the very earliest work from his hand, show him at the start more absorbed in seeing than in meditating, more engrossed by the marvellous spectacle of the world than concerned with its spiritual order. It is true, he could not see without thinking, and Shakespeare was always of a meditative temper; but his first contact with the world called forth his full power of observation, and the emphasis of his thought fell, for a time, outside his own personality.

As he saw many sides of experience, so he felt the charm of various masters, and was drawn toward Lyly, Peele, and Marlowe; he came under the Italian

influence, and he was not indifferent to classical models and imagery. Neither in his work nor in his consciousness had he come into full possession of himself.

The poet in him took precedence, in the order of development, of the dramatist; and it is as a poet that his earliest artistic successes were secured. From the beginning he had that freshness of feeling which is the peculiar and characteristic quality of the artist of every kind; he had also the sensitive imagination and the ear for melody. The world was reflected in his mind as in a magical mirror; its large outlines and its more delicate shadings lying clear and luminous before him. But he did not fully discern as yet the interior relations of spirit and form, the interdependence of individuality and the institutional order, the reaction of the act upon the actor, the unfolding of personality through action, the inevitable infolding of the tragic temperament by the tragic circumstance, and the final identification of character with destiny. The deeper insights, the creative grasp of the forces of life, and the masterful revelation of the laws which govern them through all the processes of history, which were to make him the first of dramatists, were growing within him, but they were not yet in possession of his spirit and his art; he was still primarily a poet.

The earlier plays do not reveal the evolution of character, the action and reaction of circumstances and forces within the circle of movement, the subordination of incident to action, and the husbanding of action in character, which give the dramas of his