headed, passionate, even, perhaps, as a trifle lawless, as a man whose blood is warm within." In 1582, when he was only eighteen, and in spite of his father's straitened circumstances, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years older than himself. Three or four years later he left his wife and children and went to London to wrestle with Fortune; coming, "as others do," to try against the great "General Challenger" the strength of his youth. According to an old tradition, the immediate reason for Shakespeare's leaving Stratford was his quarrel with Sir Thomas Lucy, a neighboring landed proprietor, in whose park Shakespeare, with some other" young fellows," had been stealing deer. Whether this story be true or not, Shakespeare's going to London is exactly what his circumstances would lead us to expect. In 1585 he had a wife and three children to support, his father's money affairs had gone from bad to worse, and Shakespeare, strong as we may imagine in the hopes and confidence of youth and genius, had every reason to feel the country village of Stratford too cramped for his powers.

"The spirit of a youth

That means to be of note, begins betimes."

Shakespeare in London. When Shakespeare reached London (1587?) the drama was rapidly gaining in popular favor; clever young playwrights were giving it form, and Marlowe had recently produced his Tamburlaine. Shakespeare became an actor, and made a place for himself among the crowd of struggling dramatists. He became a member of a leading company of players, the "Lord Chamberlain's Company," and by 1592 had fairly entered upon a prosperous career.1

1 At this time actors of any standing were organized in companies. These companies were licensed, and many of them bore the name

Shakespeare's Work. In studying the dramas of Shakespeare it is important to realize that Shakespeare did not at once reach perfection in his art. Though he is often called the greatest of English writers, he, as other less able men have done, served an apprenticeship in his profession, and went through a gradual and normal development which can partly be traced in his plays. It is not true, as is sometimes said, that Shakespeare's work is flawless. His early dramas, naturally, lack the depth of insight and intensity of passion that are characteristic of his mature work; yet even in the first plays there are flashes of genius that give promise of his later style. Shakespeare seems to have begun his dramatic career in London by remodeling former plays, adding new scenes or rewriting old ones according to the needs of the theater. He was learning his art by practical experience, and in immediate touch with the stage. Titus Andronicus, a coarse and brutal tragedy, was probably one of the plays not his own thus touched up. But soon Shakespeare began writing entire dramas, at first on the model of the Latin or Italian comedies, as The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and afterward independently, according to his own invention. The poetic fantasy of A Midsummer Night's Dream is of this latter class. It easily rises above the other comedies of this early period in breadth of conception, imagination, beauty, and suggestiveness. The characters in it have been more carefully studied and more naturally drawn. Theseus, the Duke, has an heroic largeness of stature, a nobility which leads us to place him with Shakespeare's great men of action.

of some great nobleman. Thus there was the Earl of Leicester's Company, the Lord Admiral's Company, etc. The Queen's Company had obtained its license from the Queen herself.

Here, too, is Bully Bottom, the incarnation of arrogant, uncomprehending common sense, solidly established in the midst of Shakespeare's filmy and gossamer world of imaginations and dreams.

These early plays (not all of which have been mentioned) constitute the first period in Shakespeare's career as a playwright, the period of apprenticeship, or as Professor Dowden has called it, "in the workshop." Of this time also are the two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593), and Lucrece (1594).

Historical Plays. From this world of high imagination and homespun fact, Shakespeare turned to the story of England's past. In 1594 he produced Richard II, and the other plays of his great English historical series followed in quick succession. Begun a few years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, these plays reflect the triumphant patriotism of the time. They are not merely nobly patriotic, they are above all broadly human. They show us the usurper Henry IV sleepless in his lonely power, and the jolly roisterers in the taverns of Eastcheap; the aspiring Hotspur, who would "pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon;" and the fat, comfortable, companionable Jack Falstaff, glorified by kindliness and humor, to whom "honour" is but a word. We are shown the incapable Richard II with his strain of poetry and sentiment, and the hero-king Henry V, the doer of great deeds.

Later Comedies. After the completion of this series of historical studies, Shakespeare again turned to comedy. The witty and brilliant Much Ado About Nothing, with its inimitable Dogberry and its touch of tragedy, the woodland pastoral As you Like It, and Twelfth Night, were written during this time. In the plays of this second period the tide of youth runs full

and joyously. Life has not as yet shown to the poet its darker, more tragic side. He had, indeed, written Romeo and Juliet, that rapturous and romantic tragedy of ill-fated love, and The Merchant of Venice, with its pathetic figure of Shylock. He had composed The Rape of Lucrece, in which the brightness and joy of out-ofdoors and the ardent poetry found in the Venus and Adonis are replaced by the gloom of darker passion and crime, and by greater depth of meditation and thought. But the prevailing notes of the early work were those of free and even boisterous laughter, and unbroken, happily ending love.

Shakespeare's Tragic Period. Toward the close of the sixteenth century, however, a change begins to be apparent in the spirit of Shakespeare's work. As early probably as 1594, Shakespeare had begun to write a series of Sonnets, all of which are steeped in profound feeling. In the later of these we see a foreshadowing of Shakespeare's tragic mood. We read in them of a conflict between love and duty, of the passing of youth, of the death of friends, "hid in death's dateless night,' of a profound disgust for a world in which evil is captain over good. Twelfth Night, although written a little later than the greater part of the Sonnets, is a rollicking comedy. The solemn Malvolio is the butt of the jolly, drunken Sir Toby and the quick-witted Maria. Yet even in this play the mirth is not wholly careless. The note of warning mingles with the clown's song: "What's to come is still unsure;" love is not "hereafter," seize it now, for

"Youth's a stuff will not endure."

The words seem at least prophetic. In the same year in which he wrote Twelfth Night (1601), Shakespeare

began in Julius Cæsar that great series of plays which won him a place among the supreme tragic poets of the world. In play after play we now find him turning from the humorous and gayer side of life to face the ultimate problems of existence, and to sound the depths of human weakness, agony, and crime. How far these great tragedies were wrought out of the suffering and bitterness of Shakespeare's cwn experience, and how far they were the result merely of the deepening and strengthening of Shakespeare's character, will never, in all likelihood, be determined. The vital thing is, that, from whatever cause, Shakespeare appears to have passed through a period of spiritual conflict.

His Studies of Sin. It is evident that the thought of Shakespeare in these plays is largely occupied with the great fact of sin; sin, not in its relation to a life hereafter, but sin as it is in this present world. In Macbeth we are present at the ruin of a soul, standing irresolute at the brink of the first crime and then hurrying recklessly from guilt to guilt; in Othello we see the helplessness of a "noble nature" in the hands of fiendish ingenuity and malice; Hamlet and Ophelia, the "fair rose of May," perish with the guilty King and Queen; the outcast Lear, "more sinned against than sinning,' and his one faithful daughter, Cordelia, fall victims to a monstrous wickedness. Shakespeare views evil fearlessly and reports it honestly, and yet in the awful world of crime portrayed in these tragedies there is room for figures and examples of virtue and holiness. Our conception of the worth and dignity of life is raised, our ideals purified and ennobled, by the contemplation of the heroic in Shakespeare's world. Cordelia, Virgilia, Miranda, and Portia elevate and sanctify our thoughts of womanhood by their loveliness and purity. The