for an occasion," and very often "having received a little help" have accumulated. Indeed, the industrious gentlemen of the New Shakespeare Society have unearthed so many different styles. and methods in the plays, that, to keep Shakespeare at all, they have been forced to suppose "periods" and "groups" in his workmanship; while Dowden and other esthetic critics, not satisfied with these, have gone so far as to show mental changes in Shakespeare himself; that he wrote certain plays when despondent, others when joyous, others when in deep perplexity with the problem of the future, etc., etc. The real truth is, of course, as Mr. White puts it. Plays are written, always have been and are to-day, under very different conditions from novels, histories, or poems. Managers or playwrights are often pressed for time. There is an audience on the way, and something local or timely has occurred to which a reference will win their applause. Or a change of programme is rendered necessary at the last moment; or news received has been contradicted by later advices. In short, there are a hundred contingencies. And, even when composed at leisure, a play is rarely the entire work of a single workman. One writes the plot; or selects it as all of Shakespeare's were selected in some old romance or story-book, or from some historical episode. Another hand may frame the dialogue. Still another supply the speeches, put in the localisms necessary, and introduce relieving parts. Then, at the first reading, suggestions are made and something added or taken away. It is cut or augmented at every rehearsal. Perhaps

some actor has tempered the public taste; found just where in his "length" he can bring down the house, and noted it in the margin. Such has been the history of each individual play ever since such things as theaters existed, so that when printed from the actor's copies or "lengths"-as the Shakespeare plays all were - he would be a bold man indeed who should assert - from evidence that a set of plays had been the property of this or that theatrical proprietor-that they were the verbatim monographs of stage-manager or playwright; and he would be a very artless critic who should announce anybody as their author, except under the usual theatrical conditions and stage exigencies, which are apt to be about the same in every age. The fact is, that, not because we know so little but because we know so much of William Shakespeare, his theater and his times, we have long since ceased to imagine him as actually penning all the plays so properly labeled with his honored name. It has come to be pretty widely considered that if, in those busy years of his London enterprises,-into which he embarked penniless, and from which he retired with an annual income of $25,000,- he edited or "set" them all for the stage, it was possibly the utmost he had to do with them. Without accepting that theory, is it quite safe to ignore it? Even were Bacon the playwright Mrs. Pott claims him to have been, the reasons given above would forbid our assigning them entirely to Bacon. As all sources of information seem to have been exhausted, we shall probably be obliged to remain contented with the conclusion of the New Shakespeare Society, that very many hands were employed in

them. At any rate, just as one may, if he will, disbelieve in one of Mr. Wiggins's storms without being able to supply another in its place, so one, it seems, is permitted to say that Shakespeare did not, without being obliged to predicate who did, write the always immortal Plays.

But when we come to the sonnets and poems called Shakespeare's, while there still remain the outset doubt and mystery, at least it stands by itself. All minor difficulties have been cleared away. There is nothing composite in the authorship here, and we evidently have only one man to hunt for. It is proposed in this paper to do a little hunting in the neighborhood of the poems and sonnets. If nothing is developed, the mystery is no greater than before. If anything is revealed, it can be largely used in identification of the contributors to the plays: for, whoever wrote these metrical productions had large agency in the drama we call Shakespeare; must, indeed, have been author of almost all the majestic poetry we indicate by the adjective "Shakespearean." The metrical end, I think, is the end to start from in any search for the author of Shakespeare. At present, however, we are going to explore no farther than that end itself.

Let us first glance briefly at the history of the poems and sonnets called Shakespeare's. In 1593 "Venus and Adonis" appears in print with a dedication to Lord Southampton, signed "William Shakespeare." In 1594 appears another poem, "Lucrece," also with a dedication to Lord Southampton, signed by William Shakespeare. In 1598 Francis Meres publishes a work called "Palladis Tamia," probably as fair an example of what liter

ary criticism was in Tudor English days as has come down to us. In this book Meres says that William Shakespeare was accounted for comedy and tragedy as equal at least to Plautus and Seneca, by reason of certain plays, viz., "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Comedy of Errors," "Love's Labour's Lost," "Love's Labour's Won," "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Merchant of Venice," "Titus Andronicus," "Romeo and Juliet," "Richard II.," "Richard III.," "Henry V.," and "King John." Meres adds, that Shakespeare was further credited with "the sweet wittie soul of Ovid" for "his sugred sonnets among his private friends."

In 1599 a printer named Jaggard (not the same who afterward, with his partner, published the first folio of the Shakespearean plays in 1623) issued a volume of collected verses under the title of "The Passionate Pilgrim." In 1609 appears a volume with the following title-page:

SHAKE-SPEARE'S

SONNETS.

Neuer before Imprinted.

AT LONDON

By G. Eld for T. T. and are

to be fold by John Wright, dwelling
at Christ Church gate

In some copies the imprint substitutes the name William Aspley for the name and residence of John Wright, and in 1640 another-which, doubtless by reason of the Heywood protest to be hereafter noticed, omits the xviii., xix., xliii., lvi., lxxv., lxxvi., xcvi. and cxxvi.—whose title-page reads —

POEMS

VV RITTEN

BY

WIL. SHAKE-SPEARE.

Gent.

Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, and are
to be fold by John Benfon, dwelling in
St. Dunstans Church-yard. 1640.

Now, every one of these five publications, viz., the "Venus and Adonis," "Lucrece," "Passionate Pilgrim," and the "T. T." and Tho. Cotes's "Sonnets," are said, prominently on their title-pages, to be "By William Shakespeare." But the name of an author printed on a title-page in those times was no guarantee of authorship whatever, since members of the Stationers' Company were protected by law in printing what they pleased, and since nothing except what they pleased to print could be issued at all. That there was no copy