earlier for certain than 1593 and 1594, at which dates he must have been at least twenty-eight and twenty-nine years of age. In 1593 he published his poem of Venus and Adonis; which, in the dedication addressed to Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, he terms " the first heir of my invention " (some critics suppose it to have been written years before): and in 1594 the Rape of Lucrece, dedicated to the same nobleman. The latter entertained a warm friendship for Shakespeare: one anecdote (which greatly needs verification however) is that the Earl on one occasion gave the actor £1000. Venus and Adonis made an impression, running rapidly through several editions: the seventh (or perhaps sixth) appeared in 1602. The date when the greatest dramatist of the world first wrote a play cannot be fixed; but it must have been not later at any rate than 1597, when the texts of his Richard II., Richard III., and Romeo and Juliet, were published. He himself had nothing apparently to do with the publication in this instance, or in the instance of any other of his plays whatsoever : he wrote for the stage, acted in his own plays, pleased the audience as dramatist and player, distanced all writing competitors in this form of public favour, excited little notice and less enthusiasm among brother authors, knew his own worth, and (seemingly with the most reckless indifference) abandoned his poetic offspring to their fate. Perhaps he had gone to the cuckoo's school for policy, and felt pretty sure that the eggs deposited by the cuckoo in the sparrow's nest would be hatched, if not by itself, by the sparrow. It remains none the less astonishing to all lovers of art that any such artist as Shakespeare should have tolerated the haphazard and harumscarum mode of publication of his dramas which alone he lived to see effected. In 1598 were published Love's Labour's Lost, and Henry IV., Part I.; in 1600 Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Henry IV., Part II., Henry V., Much Ado about Nothing, and (in a second edition) Titus Andronicus'; in 1602 the Merry Wives of Windsor ; in 1603 Hamlet, an unauthorised edition, followed in 1604 by a more correct one; in 1608 King Lear; in 1609 Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles. Moreover before 1598 the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Won (which is probably identical with All's Well that Ends Well), and King John had been produced on the stage. The other plays not distinctly accounted for as to year of writing and first representation, are As You Like It (towards 1600), Julius Cæsar, and Twelfth Night (towards 1602), Measure for Measure, and Othello (towards 1604), Macbeth (towards 1610), Winter's Tale (towards 1611), the Taming of the Shrew, Henry VI., Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VIII, and The Tempest. The last-named play, or else the Winter's Tale, is generally regarded as the latest of all in date. Then there are the sonnets published in the

1 Some play under this title, not then ascribed to Shakespeare, was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1593.

2 Parts II. and III. of Henry VI., in their original form, which was probably not the work of Shakespeare, appeared in 1504 and 1595. Part I. is suspected not to be his at all.

Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, and the general body of the sonnets in 1609. These compositions, or some not now definable portion of them, were spoken of as "his sugared sonnets among his private friends" in the Palladis Tamia of Meres, published in 1598, and must therefore be assigned to a date much earlier than 1609. The particular form of the sonnet adopted by Shakespeare had been exemplified by Samuel Daniel in a work issued in 1592, and before him by Lord Surrey and others.

When we speak of those greatest dramatic and intellectual master-strokes of the world's literature, we should not forget the material condition, to modern notions ludicrously primitive, of the theatres in which they were presented. That the female characters were all acted by boys is not so much to the purpose; though we can hardly doubt that such immaturely juvenile actors were always mediocre actors, and we must think accordingly of the Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Rosalind, Juliet, or Desdemona, of those days. A pair of crossed swords, or sometimes two lathes, symbolised a battle; the shirt worn outside the dress showed a knight; the housekeeper's petticoat over a broomstick stood for a caparisoned horse. In 1598 one theatre possessed as its properties the limbs of a Moor, a dragon, a large horse with its legs, a cage, a rock, four heads of Turks and one of Mahound, a wheel, and hell's mouth. Another owned a sun, a target, the triple plume of the Prince of Wales with motto, six devils, and the pope astride of a mule.

Shakespeare's supreme genius, and the hearty public acceptance of his dramas, were not likely to pass unbespattered by envy; Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit (already referred to), in enforcing the general text that play-writing had become a work unfit for gentlemen, and that actors were presumptuous and un grateful, adverted malignantly to "an upstart crow beautified in our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast-out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johanues Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country." This was confuted, however, by Greene's own editor Chettle, who is the earliest known eulogist of Shakespeare, and who speaks (among other more strictly personal merits), of his " facetious grace in writing." Here "facetious" is probably not to be taken in its modern meaning of "witty" or "humorous," but rather in a more general sense-" ingenious, felicitous; " nevertheless it might seem that contemporaries were more especially struck, in the earlier work of Shakespeare at any rate, with his brilliancy in wit and repartee. His plays became the towntalk; Queen Elizabeth had them represented at court, and, being charmed with the Falstaff of Henry IV., is said to have wished to see the carnal knight on the boards in love-which gave the hint for writing the Merry Wives of Windsor. Her successor was not less discerning, and Shakespeare was the favourite playwright of James I. Ward's Diary (dating from 1648 to 1679) records a report that Shakespeare, living in his later days at Stratford, supplied the stage with

two plays every year, and for this received an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £1000 per annnm. The diarist was vicar of Stratford, and not unlikely to have some knowledge of his facts; yet the statement can hardly be accepted in detail.

The richness of Shakespeare's vocabulary is partly the richness of his mind • it has been computed that he uses about 15,000 words, while even so great a poetic successor as Milton numbers only about 8000. We find in him the technical phraseology, not alone of law as previously mentioned, but equally of medicine, surgery, chemistry, war, navigation, field-sports, music, necromancy, printing. He seems to have known French and Italian: some of his plays are founded on Italian originals whereof no contemporary translation can be traced. 3. Shaksepeare the Man. Beyond the few matter-of-fact details that we know concerning the dramatist's life after he came to the capital, we must turn to his sonnets for information. We know, for instance, that he had not been many years in London before he began providing for his ultimate re-settlement in Stratford-on-Avon. Early in 1597 he bought for £60 (a sum which may be roughly computed as equal to £600 at the present day) the house named New Place, about the very best in Stratford. In 1602 he bought for £320 some arable land, 107 acres, in the parish of Old Stratford; and in the same year some property in the town. In 1605 ensued his largest purchase-£440 for the remainder of a lease, thirty-one years, of the tithes of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. In 1604, when he must still have been a London actor, he prosecuted one Rogers, who had bought a quantity of malt from him, and left the debt unpaid; and in 1608 he sued John Addenbrooke for a small debt, and, on Addenbrooke's absconding, proceeded against his security: trivial facts which have been cited, and no doubt truly so as far as they go, as showing that the author of Julius Cæsar and King Lear was a business-man looking sharply, like others, after his own material interests. Some other facts of similar bearing will be mentioned in the sequel. He was in the practice of visiting Stratford regularly, perhaps even once every year, during his London career. The exact state of his family relations is open to conjecture. It is presumed that, on first coming to the capital, he left his wife and three children in Stratford: they may or may not have rejoined him at a later date. He lived near the Bear Garden, Sonthwark, in 1596: in 1609 he occupied a good house within the Liberty of the Clink, He frequented the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, close to Bread Street, as a member of a club founded by Sir Walter Raleigh: here he waged his famous "wit-combats" with Ben Jonson (ten years his junior), graphically described by Fuller. "Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, like an English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about. and take advantage of all winds,