torical plays which we know as the three parts of Henry VI. It is certain that the young actorplaywright learnt much from "Marlowe's mighty line." His play of Richard III., as Mr. Lee points out, follows the model of Tamburlaine, with its violent scenes of rival threatenings and cursings: his Richard II. recalls immediately Marlowe's presentment of another feeble king, vainly appealing to the majesty of a crown among his overbearing barons and their rough retainers. And the most curious of all the contemporary references to Shakespeare comes from that group of penniless University-bred playwrights whom Shakespeare succeeded and eclipsed. Robert Greene, a disreputable Bohemian and bad playwright, but a writer of exquisite and pathetic lyric verse, wrote a kind of death-bed confession called Greene's Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance. In this he addresses a public appeal to three of his fellowplaywrights, and implores them to desist from the making of plays. The first addressed is unquestionably Marlowe.

"Wonder not (for with thee I will first begin) thou famous gracer of tragedians, that Greene who hath said with thee, like the fool in his heart, There is no God, should now give glory unto his greatness.' A little further comes the warning against the treachery of actors, ("those antics garnished in our colours,") "Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapt 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 Johannes factotum is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country."

There is no reason to believe that Marlowe was jealous of the growing talent; and though Shake

speare put into Ancient Pistol's mouth a parody of Tamburlaine's ranting address to the captive kings who drew his chariot on the stage, he made amends by quoting twice explicitly from Marlowe's poems.

Dead Shepherd! now I find thy saw of might,
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?

cries Rosalind, and the line quoted comes from Hero and Leander; the phrase 'shepherd' keeping a reminiscence of the pastoral affectation, which found only its most famous instance in Spenser. And Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives sings snatches from Marlowe's lyric, Come live with me and be my love, which preserved its popularity so long, that Izaak Walton, fifty years later, makes his anglers hear a girl haymaking and her mother sing it in a field, with Sir Walter Raleigh's reply, "If all the world and love were young."

Yet although Marlowe left great examples to Shakespeare and the rest in the splendour and variety of his verse (which from the first dispensed completely with the ornament of rhyme, a stage not reached by Shakespeare till his maturity), in the great rendering of great passions, and above all in the lesson, so alien to mediaeval conventions, that besides love there are many passions fit for poetic treatment; still, it cannot be said. that Shakespeare learnt from Marlowe his greatest excellences. Marlowe's plots are poor in invention given a great situation, like that of Faustus awaiting death, he can rise to its height, but he has no skill in contriving such effects, and in all his dramas there is a tendency to repeat one situation frequently, act after act; Tamburlaine's mockery of Bajazet, Bajazet's curses upon Tamburlaine, Edward's pleading with his barons, Queen Isabel's pleadings with Edward recur disagreeably.

His range of character is limited, and he is incapable of rendering feminine charm. Again, he lacked humour; his comic scenes are merely clowning, and they are not knit into the fabric of the play. They could indeed all, or almost all, be omitted, as was done by the editor of Tamburlaine. And in the Elizabethan drama comic scenes were a necessity, since they aimed at a purely popular audience, and had not those spectacular resources nor variations of dance and song by which the intellectual strain of tragedy was mitigated to a Greek audience. It was left for Shakespeare to produce a poetry, at once popular and magnificent, in strict conformity with the conditions and requirements of that stage.

CHAPTER III.

SHAKESPEARE.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born at Stratford, in April, 1564. He was the son of a shopkeeper, who, as is common in country towns, drove a miscellaneous trade and owned farms. The dramatist, his third child and eldest son, was educated at the Stratford grammar school, where he learnt at least rudiments of the classics. But towards his thirteenth year, the growing misfortunes of his father, whose prosperity had waned rapidly, caused him to be taken from school and probably employed in the business-according to an old tradition, as a butcher. At the age of eighteen and a half, to mend matters, he married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a small yeoman at Shottery, a neighbouring hamlet, who was eight years older than himself. The marriage, contracted in December, 1582, was in all ways inauspicious. A daughter, Susanna, was born to the pair in May, 1583, and twins, Judith and Hamnet, in January or February, 1585.

Thus

Shakespeare, before he was one-and-twenty, found himself the father of three children, with a peasant wife whose attractions had passed their best day, and with no property or fixed means of livelihood.

Further, the keen taste for sport which is evinced by a hundred passages in his writings, had got him into trouble. As a poacher he had suffered, especially from Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, "who," according to a 17th century account, "had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement." Sir Thomas by this rigour contributed to two immortalities, for he himself survives imperishably as Mr. Justice Shallow.

Thus driven out to seek his fortune, Shakespeare came to London, where one fellow-townsman, Richard Field, was at work in a printing office, and before long became Shakespeare's first publisher. But it was not chiefly by the profession of letters that Shakespeare found the fortune which he sought. In some capacity, probably at first a menial one, he attached himself to the chief among five or six companies of licensed actors then existing. Each of these troops was called by the name of the nobleman through whose intervention they procured exemption from the act which classed them as rogues and vagabonds; and this company, which when Shakespeare joined it was probably the Earl of Leicester's, became first Lord Strange's, then the Lord Chamberlain's, and lastly, on James's accession, the King's players. Whether Shakespeare distinguished himself first as an actor or as a playwright, we cannot tell; but there is ample evidence that he was a successful impersonator of many parts, though never, like Molière, supreme both as dramatist and player. The two parts which we know him to have played are the Ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like Itsecondary roles, but giving a considerable chance to the actor.

The rest of what is positively known about