unsurpassed for abusive sarcasm and shameless impudence. Greene was further incited to this course by the preference given to Peele in this year by the Queen's Company, for whom he wrote The Old Wives' Tale, a delicate, carefully-chiselled satire on his James IV. Shakespeare up to his time had been unknown as a dramatic author he was known as a poet probably among his friends, for he had written his Venus and Adonis in 1588. He published nothing till 1593. He was as far as the stage is concerned looked on merely as an actor. But now comes a great change. His career begins, and although he did not originate any one kind of dramatic composition, it soon became evident that he would be a formidable rival in all. In 1590 Marlowe wrote Titus Andronicus for the Earl of Sussex's men; Shakespeare for Lord Strange's probably a play (now lost) on the same subject, and Peele The Troublesome Reign of King John for the Queen's. But Lord Strange's men, in spite of their late prohibition, are producing the two plays in which Greene's competitions with Peele for the favour of the Queen's company are delineated, namely, Fair Emm and The London Prodigal. Here personal satire on the stage reaches its climax. Greene is attacked, as he richly deserved, in his personal character as well as through his published writings; his aspersions on Marlowe and Peele are doubly redoubled on himself. His title to his recent prose work, "Never Too Late," is thrown back at him with a "Physician, heal thyself" kind of denunciation. Greene, in a passion, next year complains of Fair Emm in his Farewell to Folly, vilifies its author, and of all charges for Greene the profligate ex-parson to make, says it contains abusing of Scripture. He is as scurrilous against him though not as clever as his coadjutor Nash had shown himself in his preface to Menaphon (1599) in his abuse of Shakespeare. Greene also has attacked Lodge as a rustic, half-educated, strutting tragedian, under the characters of Mullidor in Never Too Late (1590), and Doron in Menaphon (1589). Nash has accused Shakespeare of being a runaway lawyer, a shifting companion, a would-be tragedian, a botcher of blank verse, a taffaty fool decked with poet's feathers, and all the terms of vituperation which could be found in an age, when that art had only been partially cultivated. Meanwhile Shakespeare was quietly doing his work, making money and gaining respect from every one by taking no part in all this controversy. In 1591 set in a rage for historical plays; Marlowe and Peele united their forces to produce The Contention of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of the Duke of York, for the Earl of Pembroke's company; in 1593 Shakespeare and Lodge (?) wrote Edward III.; in the same year Marlowe's Edward II. was acted; in 1594 Peele began Richard III., afterwards finished and elaborated by Shakespeare; some years before this I Henry VI. was written by Marlowe and Lodge, and during the same period (1590-1594) the old play of Leir and The True Tragedy of Richard III. were written by unknown writers for the Queen's players. But Greene did not allow this new turn of public favour to grow up unassailed. In his Groatsworth of Wit (1592) he endeavoured to detach the men he had so bitterly inveighed against from the novus homo, whom he hated still more. With the insincerity usually to be found in men of unbridled tongue and unrestrained passions, he put himself forward as their quondam acquaintance, and on the ground of old friendship endeavoured to injure their new and real friend in their estimation : and failed. The details are familiar and need no repetition. Notice, however, how in this work the motive of his jealousy shows up. It is the fact that the player's "properties" are worth 2007. that excites the wrath of this graceless spendthrift; it was the vain hope to do likewise that took him from his former sphere to play-writing. Hence the abuse of Shakespeare for leaving his previous profession. The old, old story. And this is the last we have to do with Robert Greene. He died the same year; he had sought to separate friends, and no friend stayed by him; no one by him but the poor outcast he had consorted with and her husband, who saved him from starving in the street. Next year died Marlowe in a brawl; his unfinished play Dido was completed by Nash for the Chapel Children in 1594. Three years after died Peele, diseased and unreformed. Shakespeare, the only one of these great rivals (for they were great), then only was beginning to show his strength. They had all preceded him in order of development; all to the outward view had excelled him; but the forest oak had withstood the frost, outbraved the lightning, and survived the canker that had killed the more symmetrical rapidly developed tropical palms; he and he only attained to the fulfilment of his natural powers. Not that he was idle, however, during these years between 1590 and 1596;1 he had written Love's Labour's Won (?), Love's Labour's Lost (afterwards enlarged in 1597); Midsummer Night's Dream (probably also enlarged afterwards), The Comedy of Errors, and Richard II. Besides this he had re-written The Two Gentlemen of Verona and King John, and finished, corrected, and partly re-written Richard III. and Romeo and Juliet. Of these early works of Shakespeare nothing is so noticeable here as this. During the time his friends were alive he wrote in his own way; he ignored Marlowe's system of rejecting rhyme, and Peele's mixture of comedy in historical plays. But when he can no longer be a rival to them, when they have left the scene of competition and he can no longer hurt them even in supposition by adopting their methods, he drops his rhymes, his doggrel, his purely tragical histories unmixed with prose, and writes his Merchant of Venice to rival The Few of Malta; and his Henry IV. to rival Edward I. From this time to the end of his career he uses the plots of his predecessors, their prose stories, their characters, their metre, but he fuses all that he takes from them into such a homogeneous mass that the alloy is transmuted into the truest virgin gold. No such alchemist as Shakespeare is known in the annals of any literature. Such is a sketch of the history of these missing portions of the annals of the stage as far as we can at present make out. No doubt some details are erroneously stated, some sequences wrongly inferred. But the advantage to a student of a working hypo hesis is very great. It gives definiteness to the grouping of a mass of details otherwi-e indistinguishable; it forms a basis for future research; it relieves the monotony of what would otherwise be a sandy expanse of lifeless desert. And the hypothesis here presented has this advantage : that it is not based on or limited by the facts that we know concerning Shakespeare himself. Every detail known of his dramatic contemporaries has been ransacked; none have been knowingly neglected; and thus for the first time a consistent narrative (if not exactly true in every minutia) has been evolved. In 1594 Lord Strange's men were incorporated with the Chamberlain's, to which company Shakespeare henceforth belongs. CHAPTER XIV. ON "EDWARD THE THIRD." THIS play consists of two parts-one, which forms the main bulk of the play, relates to the foreign wars of King Edward; the other, which consists of two scenes and part of a third, contains a narrative of an attempted seduction of the Countess of Salisbury by the same monarch. These parts are distinctly different in general style and poetic power; so much so, that none but the dullest of prosaic readers could fail to note the differences; they are also clearly separated by metrical characteristics of the most pronounced kind. They are equally distinguished by the use or disuse of special words; and the personages common to the two portions of the play-for example, the Black Prince-have different characters in those portions, and are unequally developed. In my opinion, the episode is by Shakespeare; the main part of the play not. I will first consider the episode. From the entrance of the king in Act i. Sc. 2 to the end of Act ii. Sc. 2, this play is not taken from the chronicles of Holinshed, but from Painter's Palace of Pleasure. This is the part from which Mr. Collier has happened to select all his quotations given in the Athenæum to prove that the drama is Shakespeare's from end to end; that it is no doubtful play; that the three last acts are all conducted with true Shakespearian energy and vigour. To give the reader a fair chance of judging on this point, I give passages from both parts of the play. "Edw. When she would talk of peace, methinks her tongue Commanded war to prison; when of war, It waken'd Cæsar from his Roman grave Act ii. Sc. 1. (Quoted by MR. Collier.) 'John. At sea we are as puissant as the force By land with Xerxes we compare of strength, Is either to be swallow'd of the waves, Act iii. Sc. I. (Not SHAKESPEARE'S.) "Count. For where the golden ore doth buried lye, Act i. Sc. 2. (SHAKESPEARE'S.) "Cit. The sun, dread lords, that in the western fall, Salute our coming forth, when we were known; Act v. Sc. I. (Not SHAKESPEARE'S.) I might fill pages with passages like these, but these, I think, are enough; the difference is felt at once. The second and fourth are totally unlike Shakespeare; the first and third are just what he might have written between Richard II. and John. In the episode we also find expressions such as hugy, vasture, muster men, via, |