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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

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Originally appearing in Volume V24, Page 798 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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WILLIAM See also:SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)  , See also:English poet, player and playwright, was baptized in the See also:parish See also:church of See also:Stratford- upon-See also:Avon in See also:Warwickshire on the 26th of See also:April See also:Birth 1564 . The exact date of his birth is not known . Two and parentage . 18th-See also:century antiquaries, See also:William See also:Oldys and See also:Joseph See also:Greene, gave it as April 23, but without quoting authority for their statements, and the fact that April 23 was the See also:day of See also:Shakespeare's See also:death in 1616 suggests a possible source of See also:error . In any See also:case his birthday cannot have been later than April 23, since the inscription upon his See also:monument is See also:evidence that on April 23, 1616, he had already begun his fifty-third See also:year . His See also:father, See also:John Shakespeare, was a See also:burgess of the recently constituted See also:corporation of Stratford, and had already filled certain See also:minor municipal offices . From 1561 to 1563 he had been one of the two chamberlains to whom the See also:finance of the See also:town was entrusted . By occupation he was a See also:glover, but he also appears to have dealt from See also:time to time in various kinds of agricultural produce, such as See also:barley, See also:timber and See also:wool . See also:Aubrey (Lives, 168o) spoke of him as a See also:butcher, and it is quite possible that he bred and even killed the calves whose skins he manipulated . He is sometimes described in formal documents as a See also:yeoman, and it is highly probable that he combined a certain amount of farming with the practice of his See also:trade . He was living in Stratford as See also:early as 1552, in which year he was fined for having a dunghill in See also:Henley See also:Street, but he does not appear to have been a native of the town, in whose records the name is not found before his time; and he may reasonably be identified with the John Shakespeare of Snitterfield, who administered the goods of his father, See also:Richard Shakespeare, in 1561 . Snitterfield is a See also:village in the immediate neighbourhood of Stratford, and here Richard Shakespeare had been settled as a See also:farmer since 1529 .

It is possible that John Shakespeare carried on the See also:

farm for some time after his father's death, and that by 1570 he had also acquired a small holding called Ingon in See also:Hampton See also:Lucy, the next village to Snitterfield . But both of these seem to have passed subsequently to his See also:brother See also:Henry, who was buried at Snitterfield in 1596 . There was also at Snitterfield a See also:Thomas Shakespeare and an See also:Anthony Shakespeare, who afterwards moved to Hampton Corley; and these may have been of the same See also:family . A John Shakespeare, -who dwelt at See also:Clifford See also:Chambers, another village See also:close to Stratford, is clearly distinct . Strenuous efforts have been made to trace Shakespeare's See also:genealogy beyond Richard of Snitterfield, but so far without success . Certain drafts of heraldic exemplifications of the Shakespeare arms speak, in one case of John Shakespeare's grandfather, in another of his See also:great-grandfather, as having been rewarded with lands and tenements in Warwickshire for service to Henry VII . No such grants, however, have been traced, and even in the 16th-century statements as to " antiquity and service " in heraldic preambles were looked upon with suspicion . The name Shakespeare is extremely widespread, and is spelt in an astonishing variety of ways . That of John Shakespeare occurs 166 times in the See also:Council See also:Book of the Stratford corporation, and appears to take 16 different forms . The See also:verdict, not altogether unanimous, of competent palaeographers is to the effect that Shakespeare himself, in the extant examples of his See also:signature, always wrote " Shakspere." In the printed signatures to the dedications of his poems, on the See also:title-pages of nearly all the contemporary See also:editions of his plays that See also:bear his name, and in many formal documents it appears as Shakespeare . This may be in See also:part due to the See also:martial derivation which the poet's See also:literary contemporaries were fond of assigning to his name, and which is acknowledged in the arms that he See also:bore . The forms in use at Stratford, however, such as Shaxpeare, by far the commonest, suggest a See also:short See also:pronunciation of the first syllable, and thus tend to support Dr Henry See also:Bradley's derivation from the Anglo-Saxon See also:personal name, Seaxberht .

It is interesting, and even amusing, to See also:

record that in 1487 See also:Hugh Shakspere of Merton See also:College, See also:Oxford, changed his name to Sawndare, because his former name vile reputatum est . The earliest record of a Shakespeare that has yet been traced is in 1248 at Clapton in See also:Gloucester-See also:shire, about seven See also:miles from Stratford . The name also occurs during the 13th century in See also:Kent, See also:Essex and See also:Surrey, and during the 14th in See also:Cumberland, See also:Yorkshire, See also:Nottinghamshire, Essex, Warwickshire and as far away as See also:Youghal in See also:Ireland . There-after it is found in See also:London and most of the English counties, particularly those of the midlands; and nowhere more freely than in Warwickshire . There were Shakespeares in See also:Warwick and in See also:Coventry, as well as around Stratford; and the See also:clan appears to have been very numerous in a See also:group of villages about twelve miles See also:north of Stratford, which includes Baddesley See also:Clinton, Wroxall, Rowington, Haseley, See also:Hatton, See also:Lapworth, Packwood, Balsall and Knowle . William was in See also:common use as a personal name, and See also:Williams from more than one other family have from time to time been confounded with the dramatist . Many Shakespeares are upon the See also:register of the gild of St See also:Anne at Knowle from about 1457 to about 1526 . Amongst these were See also:Isabella Shakespeare, prioress of the See also:Benedictine See also:convent of Wroxall, and Jane Shakespeare, a See also:nun of the same convent . Shakespeares are also found as tenants on the manors belonging to the convent, and at the time of the See also:Dissolution in 1534 one Richard Shakespeare was its See also:bailiff and See also:collector of rents . Conjectural attempts have been made on the one See also:hand to connect the ancestors of this Richard Shakespeare with a family of the same name who held See also:land by military See also:tenure at Baddesley Clinton in the 14th and 15th centuries, and on tnc other to ideal ify him with the poet's grandfather, Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield . But Shakespeares are to be traced at Wroxall nearly as far back as at Baddesley Clinton, and there is no See also:reason to suppose that Richard the bailiff, who was certainly still a See also:tenant of Wroxall in 1556, had also since 1529 been farming land ten miles off at Snitterfield . With the breaking of this See also:link, the See also:hope of giving Shakespeare anything more than a grandfather on the father's See also:side must be laid aside for the See also:present .

On the See also:

mother's side he was connected with a family of some distinction . Part at least of Richard Shakespeare's land at Snitterfield was held from See also:Robert See also:Arden of Wilmcote in the adjoining parish of See also:Aston Cantlow, a See also:cadet of the Ardens of Parkhall, who counted amongst the leading gentry of Warwickshire . Robert Arden married his second wife, See also:Agnes See also:Hill, formerly See also:Webbe, in 1548, and had then no less than eight daughters by his first wife . To the youngest of these, See also:Mary Arden, he See also:left in 1556 a See also:freehold in Aston Cantlow consisting of a farm of about fifty or sixty acres in extent, known as Asbies . At some date later than See also:November 1556, and probably before the end of 1557, Mary Arden became the wife of John Shakespeare . In See also:October 1556 John Shakespeare had bought two freehold houses, one in Greenhill Street, the other in Henley Street . The latter, known as the wool See also:shop, was the easternmost of the two tenements now combined in the so-called Shakespeare's birthplace . The western See also:tenement, the birthplace proper, was probably already in John Shakespeare's hands, as he seems to have been living in Henley Street in 1552 . It has sometimes been thought to have been one of two houses which formed a later See also:purchase in 1575, but there is no evidence that these were in Henley Street at all . William Shakespeare was not the first See also:child . A See also:Joan was baptized in 1558 and a See also:Margaret in 1562 . The latter was buried in 1563 and the former must also have died See also:young, although her See also:burial is not recorded, as a second Joan was baptized in 1569 .

A See also:

Gilbert was baptized in 1566, an Anne in 1571, a Richard in 1$74 and an See also:Edmund in 1580 . Anne died in =.579; Edmund, who like his brother became an actor, in 1607; Richard in 1613 . Tradition has it that one of Shakespeare's See also:brothers used to visit London in the 17th century as quite an old See also:man . If so, this can only have been Gilbert . During the years that followed his See also:marriage, John Shakespeare became prominent in Stratford See also:life . In 1565 he was chosen as an See also:alderman, and in 1568 he held the See also:chief municipal See also:office, that of high bailiff . This carried with it the dignity of See also:justice of the See also:peace . John Shakespeare seems to have assumed arms, and thenceforward was always entered in corporation documents as " Mr " Shakespeare, whereby he may be distinguished from another John Shakespeare, a " corviser " or shoemaker, who dwelt in Stratford about 1584-1592 . In 1571 as an ex-bailiff he began another year of office as chief alderman . One may think, therefore, of Shakespeare in his boyhood as the son of one of the leading citizens of a not unimportant Youth. provincial See also:market-town, with a vigorous life of its own, which in spite of the dunghills was probably not much unlike the life of a similar town to-day, and with See also:constant reminders of its past in the shape of the stately buildings formerly belonging to its college and its gild, both of which had been suppressed at the See also:Reformation . Stratford stands on the Avon, in the midst of an agricultural See also:country, throughout which in those days enclosed orchards and meadows alternated with open See also:fields for tillage, and not far from the wilder and wooded See also:district known as the See also:Forest of Arden . The See also:middle ages had left it an heritage in the shape of a See also:free See also:grammar-school, and here it is natural to suppose that William Shakespeare obtained a See also:sound enough See also:education,' with a working knowledge of " Mantuan72 and See also:Ovid in the See also:original, even though to such a thorough See also:scholar as See also:Ben See also:Jonson it might seem no more than " small Latin and less See also:Greek." In 1577, when Shakespeare was about thirteen, his father's fortunes began to take a turn for the worse .

He became irregular in his contributions to town levies, and had to give a See also:

mortgage on his wife's See also:property of Asbies as See also:security for a See also:loan from her brother-in-See also:law, Edmund See also:Lambert . See also:Money was raised to pay this off, partly by the See also:sale of a small See also:interest in land at Snitterfield which had come to Mary Shakespeare from her sisters, partly perhaps by that of the Greenhill Street See also:house and other property in Stratford outside Henley Street, none of which seems to have ever come into William Shakespeare's hands . Lambert, however, refused to surrender the mortgage on the plea of older debts, and an See also:attempt to recover Asbies by litigation proved ineffectual . John Shakespeare's difficulties increased . An See also:action for See also:debt was sustained against him in the See also:local See also:court, but no personal property could be found on which to distrain . He had See also:long ceased to attend the meetings of the corporation, and as a consequence he was removed in 1586 from the See also:list of aldermen . In this See also:state of domestic affairs it is not likely that Shakespeare's school life was unduly prolonged . The chances are that he was apprenticed to some local trade . Aubrey says that he killed calves for his father, and " would do it in a high See also:style, and make a speech." Whatever his circumstances, they did not deter him at the early See also:age of eighteen from the See also:adventure of marriage . Rowe Marriage recorded the name of Shakespeare's wife as Hathaway, and Joseph Greene succeeded in tracing her to a family of that name dwelling in Shottery, one of the hamlets of Stratford . Her monument gives her first name as Anne, and her age as sixty-seven in 1623 . She must, therefore, have been about eight years older than Shakespeare .

Various small trains of evidence point to her See also:

identification with the daughter Agnes mentioned in the will of a Richard Hathaway of Shottery, who died in 1581, being then in See also:possession of the farm-house now known as " Anne Hathaway's Cottage." Agnes was legally a distinct name from Anne, but there can be no doubt that See also:ordinary See also:custom treated them as identical . The See also:principal record of the It is See also:worth noting that See also:Walter See also:Roche, who in 1558 became See also:fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was See also:master of the school in 1570-1572, so that its See also:standard must have been See also:good . 2 Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), whose Latin Eclogues were translated by See also:Turberville in 1567.marriage is a See also:bond dated on November 28, 1582, and executed by See also:Fulk Sandells and John See also:Richardson, two yeomen of Stratford who also figure in Richard Hathaway's will, as a security to the See also:bishop for the issue of a See also:licence for the marriage of William Shakespeare and " Anne Hathwey of Stratford," upon the consent of her See also:friends, with one asking of the banns . There is no reason to suppose, as has been suggested, that the See also:procedure adopted was due to dislike of the marriage do the part of John Shakespeare, since, the bridegroom being a minor, it would not have been in accordance with the practice of the bishop's officials to issue the licence without evidence of the father's consent . The explanation probably lies in the fact that Anne was already with child, and in the near neighbourhood of See also:Advent within which marriages were prohibited, so that the ordinary procedure by banns would have entailed a delay until after See also:Christmas . A kindly sentiment has suggested that some See also:form of See also:civil marriage, or at least See also:contract of espousals, had already taken See also:place, so that a canonical marriage was really only required in See also:order to enable Anne to secure the See also:legacy left her by her father " at the day of her marriage." But such a theory is not rigidly required by the facts . It is singular that, upon the day before that on which the bond was executed, an entry was made in the bishop's register of the issue of a licence for a marriage between William Shakespeare and " See also:Annam Whateley de See also:Temple See also:Grafton." Of this it can only be said that the bond, as an original document, is infinitely the better authority, and that a scribal error of " Whateley " for " Hathaway "-is quite a possible See also:solution . Temple Grafton may have been the nominal place of marriage indicated in the licence, which was not always the actual place of See also:residence of either See also:bride or bridegroom . There are no contemporary registers for Temple Grafton, and there is no entry of the marriage in those for Stratford-upon-Avon . There is a tradition that such a record was seen during the 19th century in the registers for Luddington, a chapelry within the parish, which are now destroyed . Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptized on the 26th of May 1583, and was followed on the 2nd of See also:February 1585 by twins, Hamnet and See also:Judith . In or after 1584 Shakespeare's career in Stratford seems to have come to a tempestuous close .

An 18th-century See also:

story of a drinking-bout in a neighbouring village is of no obscure importance, except as indicating a local impression years, that a distinguished See also:citizen had had a wildish youth . 1584-But there is a tradition which comes from a See also:double 1594 source and which there is no reason to reject in substance, to the effect that Shakespeare got into trouble through poaching on the estates of a considerable Warwickshire See also:magnate, See also:Sir Thomas Lucy, and found it necessary to leave Stratford in order to See also:escape the results of his See also:misdemeanour . It is added that he afterwards took his revenge on Lucy by satirizing him as the Justice Shallow, with the dozen See also:white louses in his old coat, of The Merry Wives of See also:Windsor . From this event until he emerges as an actor and rising playwright in 1592 his See also:history is a See also:blank, and it is impossible to say what experience may not have helped to fill it . Much might indeed be done in eight years of crowded Elizabethan life . Conjecture has not been idle, and has assigned him in turns during this or some other See also:period to the occupations of a scrivener, an See also:apothecary, a See also:dyer, a printer, a soldier, and the like . The See also:suggestion that he saw military service rests largely on a confusion with another William Shakespeare of Rowington . Aubrey had heard that " he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country." The mention in Henry IV. of certain obscure yeomen families, See also:Visor of Woncote and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley in See also:Gloucestershire, has been thought to suggest a sojourn in that district, where indeed Shakespeares were to be found from an early date . Ultimately, of course, he drifted to London and the See also:theatre, where, according to the See also:stage tradition, he found employment in a See also:menial capacity, perhaps even as a holder of horses at the doors, before he was admitted into a See also:company as an actor and so found his way to his true vocation as a writer of plays . See also:Malone thought that he might have left Stratford with one of the travelling companies of players which from time to time visited the town . Later biographers have fixed upon See also:Leicester's men, who were at Stratford in 1587, and have held that Shakespeare remained to the end in the same company, passing with it on Leicester's death in 1588 under the patronage of Ferdinando, See also:Lord See also:Strange and afterwards See also:earl of See also:Derby, and on Derby's death in 1594 under that of the lord See also:chamberlain, Henry See also:Carey, Lord See also:Hunsdon . This theory perhaps hardly takes sufficient See also:account of the shifting combinations and recombinations of actors, especially during the disastrous See also:plague years of 1592 to 1594 .

The continuity of Strange's company with Leicester's is very disputable, and while the names of many members of Strange's company in and about 1593 are on record, Shakespeare's is not amongst them . It is at least possible, as will be seen later, that he had about this time relations with the earl of See also:

Pembroke's men, or with the earl of See also:Sussex's men, or with both of these organizations . What is clear is that by the summer of 1592, when he was twenty-eight, he had begun to emerge as a playwright, and had evoked the See also:jealousy of one at least of the group of See also:nay- scholar poets who in See also:recent years had claimed a See also:weight and poet See also:monopoly of the stage . This was Robert Greene, who, in an invective on behalf of the See also:play-makers against the play-actors which forms part of his Groats-worth of Wit, speaks of " an upstart See also:Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers See also:heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke See also:verse as the best of you: and being an See also:absolute Johannes fac iotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-See also:scene in a countrie." The play upon Shake- speare's name and the See also:parody of a See also:line from Henry VI. make the reference unmistakable.' The London theatres were closed, first through riots and then through plague, from See also:June 1592 to April 1594, with the exception of about a See also:month at each Christmas during that period; and the companies were dissolved or driven to the provinces . Even if Shakespeare had been connected with Strange's men during their London seasons of 1592 and 1593, it does not seem that he travelled with them . Other activities may have been sufficient to occupy the See also:interval .. The most important of these was probably an attempt to win a reputation in the See also:world of non-dramatic See also:poetry . See also:Venus and See also:Adonis was published about April 1593, and Lucrece about May 1594 . The poems were printed by Richard See also:Field, in whom Shakespeare would have found an old Stratford acquaintance; and each has a See also:dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of See also:South- ampton, a brilliant and accomplished favourite of the court, still in his nonage . A possibly super-subtle See also:criticism discerns an increased warmth in the See also:tone of the later dedication, which is supposed to argue a marked growth of intimacy . The fact of this intimacy is vouched for by the story handed down from Sir William See also:Davenant to Rowe (who published in 1709 the first See also:regular See also:biography of Shakespeare) that See also:Southampton gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds " to enable him to go through with a purchase which he'heard he had a mind to." The date of this generosity is not specified, and there is no known purchase by Shakespeare which can have cost anything like the sum named . The mention of Southampton leads naturally to the most • difficult problem which a biographer has to handle, that of the Sonnets .

But this will be more conveniently taken up at a later point, and it is only necessary here to put on record the See also:

probability that the earliest of the sonnets belong to the period now under discussion . There is a surmise, which is not in itself other than plausible, and which has certainly been supported with a good See also:deal of ingenious See also:argument, that Shakespeare's enforced leisure enabled him to make of 1593 a Wanderjahr, and in particular that the traces of a visit to See also:northern See also:Italy may clearly be seen in the local colouring of Lucrece as compared with Venus and Adonis, and in that of the group of plays which may be dated in or about 1594 and 1595 as compared with those that preceded . It must, however, be See also:borne in mind that, while Shakespeare may perfectly well, at this or at some earlier time, have voyaged ' It is most improbable, however, that the apologetic reference in See also:Chettle's See also:Kind-See also:hart's See also:Dream (See also:December 1592) refers to Shakespeare.to Italy, and possibly See also:Denmark and even See also:Germany as well, there is no See also:direct evidence to rely upon, and that inference from See also:internal evidence is a dangerous See also:guide when a writer of so assimilative a temperament as that of Shakespeare is concerned . From the reopening of the theatres in the summer of 1594 onwards Shakespeare's status is in many ways clearer . He had certainly become a leading member of the Chamberlain's company by the following See also:winter, when his wtlh See also:theon name appears for the first and only time in the treasurer Chamber-of the chamber's accounts as one of the recipients of lain's See also:payment for their performances at court; and there is company of actors . every reason to suppose that he continued to See also:act with and write for the same associates to the close of his career . The history of the company may be briefly told . At the death of the lord chamberlain on the 22nd of See also:July 1596, it passed under the See also:protection of his successor, See also:George, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, and once more became " the Lord Chamberlain's men " when he was appointed to that office on the 17th of See also:March 1 597 . See also:James I. on his See also:accession took this company under his patronage as grooms of the chamber, and during the See also:remainder of Shakespeare's connexion with the stage they were " the See also:King's men." The records of performances at court show that they were by far the most favoured of the companies, their nearest rivals being the company known during the reign of See also:Elizabeth as " the See also:Admiral's," and afterwards as " See also:Prince Henry's men." From the summer of 1594 to March 1603 they appear to have played almost continuously in London, as the only provincial performances by them which are upon record were during the autumn of 1597, when the London theatres were for a short time closed owing to the interference of some of the players in politics . They travelled again during 1603 when the plague was in London, and during at any See also:rate portions of the summers or autumns of most years thereafter . In 1594 they were playing at Newington Butts, and probably also at the See also:Rose on Bankside, and at the See also:Cross Keys in the See also:city . It is natural to suppose that in later years they used the Theatre in See also:Shoreditch, since this was the property of James See also:Burbage, the father of their principal actor, Richard Burbage .

The Theatre was pulled down in 1598, and, after a short interval during which the company may have played at the See also:

Curtain, also in Shoreditch, Richard Burbage and his brother See also:Cuthbert rehoused them in the Globe on Bankside, built in part out of the materials of the Theatre . Here the profits of the enterprise were divided between the members of the company as such and the owners of the See also:building as " housekeepers," and shares in the " house " were held in See also:joint tenancy by Shakespeare and some of his leading " See also:fellows." About r6o8 another playhouse became available for the company in the " private " or winter house of the See also:Black Friars . This was also the property of the Burbages, but had previously been leased to a company of boy players . A somewhat similar arrangement as to profits was made . Shakespeare is reported by Aubrey to have been a good actor, but See also:Adam in As You Like It, and the See also:Ghost in See also:Hamlet indicate the type of part which he played . As a dramatist, however, he was the mainstay of the company for at least some fifteen years, during which Ben Jonson, See also:Dekker, See also:Beaumont and See also:Fletcher, and See also:Tourneur also contributed to their repertory . On an See also:average he must have written for them about two plays a year, although his rapidity of See also:production seems to have been greatest during the opening years of the period . There was also no doubt a good deal of rewriting of his own earlier See also:work, and also perhaps, at the beginning, of that of others . Occasionally he may have entered into collaboration, as, for example, at the end of his career, with Fletcher . In a worldly sense he clearly flourished, and about 1596, if not earlier, he was able to resume relations as a moneyed man with Stratford-on-Avon . There is no evidence to show whether he had visited the town in the interval, or whether he had brought his wife and family to London . His son Hamnet died and was buried at Stratford in 1596 .

During the last ten years John Shakespeare's affairs had remained unprosperous . He incurred fresh debt, partly through becoming See also:

surety for his brother Henry; and in 1592 his name was included in a list of recusants dwelling at or near Stratford-on-Avon,with a See also:note by the commissioners that in his case the cause was believed to be the fear of See also:process for debt . There is no reason to doubt this explanation, or to seek a religious See also:motive in Stratford affairs . John Shakespeare's See also:abstinence from church . William Shakespeare's See also:purse must have made a considerable difference . The prosecutions for debt ceased, and in 1597 a fresh action was brought in See also:Chancery for the recovery of Asbies from the Lamberts . Like the last, it seems to have been without result . Another step was taken to secure the dignity of the family by an application in the course of 1596 to the heralds for the See also:confirmation of a coat of arms said to have been granted to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff of Stratford . The See also:bearings were or on a See also:bend See also:sable a See also:spear or steeled argent, the See also:crest a See also:falcon his wings displayed argent supporting a spear or steeled argent, and the See also:motto Non sans droict . The See also:grant was duly made, and in 1599 there was a further application for leave to impale the arms of Arden, in right of Shakespeare's mother . No use, however, of the Arden arms by the Shakespeares can be traced . In 1597 Shakespeare made an important purchase for 0o of the house and gardens of New Place in See also:Chapel Street .

This was one of the largest houses in Stratford, and its acquisition an obvious See also:

triumph for the ex-poacher . Presumably John Shakespeare ended his days in peace . A visitor to his shop remembered him as " a merry-cheekt old man " always ready to crack a jest with his son . He died in 1601, and his wife in 1608, and the Henley Street houses passed to Shakespeare . Aubrey records that he paid See also:annual visits to Stratford, and there is evidence that he kept in See also:touch with the life of the place . The See also:correspondence of his neighbours, the Quineys, in 1598 contains an application to him for a loan to Richard See also:Quincy upon a visit to London, and a discussion of possible investments for him in the neighbourhood of Stratford . In 1602 he took, at a See also:rent of 2S . 6d. a year, a See also:copyhold cottage in Chapel See also:Lane, perhaps for the use of his gardener . In the same year he invested L320 in the purchase of an See also:estate consisting of 107 acres in the open fields of Old Stratford, together with a farm-house, See also:garden and See also:orchard, 20 acres of pasture and common rights; and in 1605 he spent another £440 in the outstanding See also:term of a See also:lease of certain great See also:tithes in Stratford parish, which brought in an income of about 06o a year . Meanwhile London remained his headquarters . Here Malone thought that he had evidence, now lost, of his residence in South- wark as early as 1596, and as See also:late as 1608 . It is London known that payments of See also:subsidy were due from him associa- tions. for 1597 and 1598 in the parish of St See also:Helen's, Bishops- See also:gate, and that an arrear was ultimately collected in the See also:liberty of the Clink .

He had no doubt migrated from Bishopsgate when the Globe upon Bankside was opened by the Chamberlain's men . There is evidence that in 1604 he " See also:

lay," temporarily or permanently, in the house_ of See also:Christopher See also:Mountjoy, a See also:tire-maker of See also:French extraction, at the corner of See also:Silver Street and Monkwell Street in Cripplegate . A recently recovered note by Aubrey, if it really refers to Shakespeare (which is not quite certain), is of value as throwing See also:light not only upon his See also:abode, but upon his See also:personality . Aubrey seems to have derived it from William Beeston the actor; and through him from John See also:Lacy, an actor of the king's company . It is as follows: " The more to be admired q[uod] he was not a company-keeper, lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched, & if invited to court, he was in See also:pain." Against this testimony to the correctness of Shakespeare's morals are to be placed an See also:anecdote of a See also:green-See also:room amour picked up by a Middle Temple student in 1602 and a Restoration See also:scandal which made him the father by the hostess of the See also:Crown See also:Inn at Oxford, where he baited on his visits to Stratford, of Sir William Davenant, who was See also:born in February 16o6 . His See also:credit at court is implied by Ben Jonson's references to his flights " that so did take Eliza and our James," and by stories of the courtesies which passed between him and Elizabeth while he was playing a kingly part in her presence, of the origin of The Merry Wives of Windsor inher See also:desire to see Falstaff in love, and of an autograph See also:letter written to See also:honour him by King James . It was noticed with some surprise by Henry Chettle that his "honied muse "dropped no " sable See also:tear " to celebrate the death of the See also:queen . Southampton's patronage may have introduced him to the brilliant circle that gathered See also:round the earl of Essex, but there is no reason to suppose that he or his company were held personally responsible for the performance of Richard II. at the command of some of the followers of Essex as a prelude to the disastrous rising of February 16or . The editors of the First See also:Folio speak also of favours received by the author in his lifetime from William See also:Herbert, earl of Pembroke, and his brother See also:Philip Herbert, earl of See also:Montgomery . He appears to have been on cordial terms with his fellows of the stage . One of them, See also:Augustine See also:Phillips, left him a small legacy in 1605, and in his own will he paid a Friends. similar compliment to Richard Burbage, and to John Heminge and Henry Condell, who afterwards edited his plays . His relations with Ben Jonson, whom he is said by Rowe to have introduced to the world as a playwright, have been much canvassed .

Jests are preserved which, even if apocryphal, indicate considerable intimacy between the two . This is not inconsistent with occasional passages of arms . The See also:

anonymous author of The Return from See also:Parnassus (2nd part; 1602), for example, makes See also:Kempe, the actor, allude to a " purge " which Shakespeare gave Jonson, in return for his attack on some of his rivals in The Poetaster.' It has been conjectured that this purge was the description of See also:Ajax and his humours in See also:Troilus and Cressida . Jonson, on the other hand, who was criticism incarnate, did not spare Shakespeare either in his prologues or in his private conversation . He told See also:Drummond of Hawthornden that " Shakspeer wanted arte." But the verses which he contributed to the First Folio are generous enough to make all amends, and in his Discoveries (pub . 1641; written c . 1624 and later), while regretting Shakespeare's excessive facility and the fact that he often " See also:fell into those things, could not escape See also:laughter," he declares him to have been " honest and of an open and free nature," and says that, for his own part, " I lov'd the man and do honour his memory (on this side See also:idolatry) as much as any." According to the memoranda-book (1661—1663) of the Rev . John See also:Ward (who became See also:vicar of Stratford in 1662), Jonson and See also:Michael See also:Drayton, himself a Warwickshire poet, had been drinking with Shakespeare when he caught the See also:fever of which he died; and Thomas See also:Fuller (1608-166r), whose Worthies was published in 1662, gives an imaginative description of the wit combats, of which many took place between the two mighty contemporaries . Of Shakespeare's literary reputation during his lifetime there is ample evidence . He is probably neither the " Willy " of See also:Spenser's Tears of the See also:Muses, nor the " Action " of Contemhis See also:Colin Clout's Come See also:Home Again . But from the Porary time of the publication of Venus and Adonis and 1eP"ta-Lucrece honorific allusions to his work both as poet tion. and dramatist, and often to himself by name, come thick and fast from writers of every kind and degree . Perhaps the most interesting of these from the See also:biographical point of view are those contained in the Palladis Tamia, a kind of literary handbook published by See also:Francis See also:Meres in 1598; for Meres not only extols him as " the most excellent in both kinds [i.e. See also:comedy and tragedy] for the stage," and one of " the most passionate among us to bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Love," but also takes the trouble to give a list of twelve plays already written, which serves as a starting-point for all See also:modern attempts at a See also:chronological arrangement of his work .

It is moreover from Meres that we first hear of " his sugred Sonnets among his private friends." Two of these sonnets were printed in 1599 ' Kempe (speaking to Burbage), " Few of the university See also:

pen plays well . They See also:smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer (sic) See also:Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and See also:Jupiter . Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and Ben Jonson too . 0 that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow . He brought up See also:Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit." in a See also:volume of See also:miscellaneous verse called The Passionate See also:Pilgrim . This was ascribed upon the title-See also:page to Shakespeare, but probably, so far as most of its contents were concerned, without See also:justification . The bulk of Shakespeare's sonnets remained unpublished until 1609 . About 16ro Shakespeare seems to have left London, and entered upon the definite occupation of his house at New Place, Stratford . Here he lived the life of a retired Last See also:gentleman, on friendly if satirical terms with the years. richest of his neighbours, the See also:Combes, and interested in local affairs, such as a See also:bill for the improvement of the highways in 1611, or a proposed enclosure of the open fields at Welcombe in 1614, which might affect his income or his comfort . He had his garden with its mulberry-See also:tree, and his farm in the immediate neighbourhood . His brothers Gilbert and Richard were still alive; the latter died in 1613 . His See also:sister Joan had married William Hart, a hatter, and in 1616 was dwelling in one of his houses in Henley Street .

Of his daughters, the eldest, Susanna, had married in 1607 John See also:

Hall (d . 1635), a physician of some reputation . They dwelt in Stratford, and had one child, Elizabeth, afterwards See also:Lady See also:Barnard (1608-1670) . The younger, Judith, married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, also of Stratford, two months before her father's death . At Stratford the last few of the plays may have been written, but it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare's connexion with the King's company ended when the Globe was burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII. on the 29th of June 1613 . Certainly his retirement did not imply an absolute break with London life . In 1613 he devised an impresa, or See also:emblem, to be painted by Richard Burbage, and worn in the tilt on Accession day by the earl of See also:Rutland, who had been one of the old circle of Southampton and Essex . In the same year he See also:purchased for £14o a freehold house in the Black-friars, near the See also:Wardrobe . This was conveyed to trustees, apparently in order to See also:bar the right which his widow would otherwise have had to See also:dower . In 1615 this purchase involved Shakespeare in a lawsuit for the surrender of the title-deeds . Richard See also:Davies, a Gloucestershire clergyman of the end of the 17th century, reports that the poet " died a papist," and the statement deserves more See also:attention than it has received from biographers . There is indeed little to corroborate it; for an alleged " spiritual testament " of John Shakespeare is of suspected origin, and Davies's own words suggest a late See also:conversion rather than an hereditary faith .

On the other hand, there is little to refute it beyond an entry in the accounts of Stratford corporation for drink given in 1614 to " a preacher at the Newe Place." Shakespeare made his will on the 25th of March 1616, apparently in some haste, as the executed See also:

deed is a draft with many Iva erasures and interlineations . There were legacies to his daughter Judith Quiney and his sister Joan Hart, and remembrances to friends both in Warwickshire and in London; but the real estate was left to his sister Susanna Hall under a strict See also:entail which points to a desire on the part of the testator to found a family . Shakespeare's wife, for whom other See also:provision must have been made, is only mentioned in an inter-lineation, by which the " second best See also:bed with the See also:furniture " was bequeathed to her . Much nonsense has been written about this, but it seems quite natural . The best bed was an important See also:chattel, which would go with the house . The estate was after all not a large one . Aubrey's estimate of its annual value as £200 or £300 a year sounds reasonable enough, and John Ward's statement that Shakespeare spent £l000 a year must surely be an exaggeration . The sum-See also:total of his known investments amounts to £960 . Mr See also:Sidney See also:Lee calculates that his theatrical income must have reached £60o a year; but it may be doubted whether this also is not a considerable overestimate . It must be remembered that the purchasing value of money in the 17th century is generally regarded as having been about eight times its present value . Shakespeare's interest in the " houses " of the Globe and Blackfriars probably determined on his death . A month after his will was signed, on the 23rd of April 1616, Shakespeare died, and as a tithe-owner was buried in the See also:chancel of the parish church .

Some doggerel upon the See also:

stone that covers Anne Shakespeare followed her See also:husband on the 6th Death. of See also:August 1623 . The family was never founded . Shakespeare's See also:grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, made two childless marriages, the first with Thomas See also:Nash of Stratford, the second with John, afterwards Sir John, Barnard of See also:Abington See also:Manor, Northants . His daughter Judith Quiney had three sons, all of whom had died unmarried by 1639 . There were, therefore, no direct descendants of Shakespeare in existence after Lady Barnard's death in 167o . Those of his sister, Joan Hart, could however still be traced in 1864 . On Lady Barnard's death the Henley Street houses passed to the Harts, in whose family they remained until 18o6 . They were then sold, and in 1846 were bought for the public . They are now held with Anne Hathaway's Cottage at Shottery as the Birthplace See also:Trust . Lady Barnard had disposed of the Blackfriars house . The See also:rest of the property was sold under the terms of her will, and New Place passed, first to the Cloptons who rebuilt it, and then to the Rev . Francis Gastrell, who pulled it down in 1759 .

The site now forms a public recreation-ground, and hard by is a memorial building with a theatre in which performances of Shakespeare's plays are given annually in April . Both the Memorial and the Birthplace contain museums, in which books, documents and portraits of Shakespearian interest, together with See also:

relics of greater or less authenticity, are stored . No letter or other See also:writing in Shakespeare's hand can be proved to exist, with the exception of three signatures upon his will, one upon a deposition (May 11, 1612) in a lawsuit with which he was remotely concerned, and two upon deeds (March so and 11, 1613) in connexion with the purchase of his Blackfriars house . A copy of See also:Florio's See also:translation of See also:Montaigne (1603) in the See also:British Museum, a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1502) in the Bodleian, and a copy of the 1612 edition of Sir Thomas North's translation of See also:Plutarch's Lives of the See also:Noble Grecians and Romaines in the See also:Greenock Library, have all been put forward with some plausibility as bearing his autograph name or See also:initials, and, in the third case, a marginal note by him . A passage in the See also:manuscript of the play of Sir Thomas More has been ascribed to him (vide infra), and, if the play is his, might be in his See also:handwriting . Aubrey records that he was " a hand-some, well-shap't man," and the lameness attributed to him by some writers has its origin only in a too literal See also:interpretation of certain references to spiritual disabilities in the Sonnets . A collection of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies was printed at the See also:press of William and See also:Isaac Jaggard, and issued by a group of booksellers in 1623 . This volume is known as the First Folio . It has Dramas. dedications to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and to " the great Variety of Readers," both of which are signed by two of Shakespeare's " fellows " at the Globe, John Heminge and Henry Condell, and commendatory verses by Ben Jonson, Hugh See also:Holland, Leonard See also:Digges and an unidentified I . M . The Droeshout See also:engraving forms part of the title-page . The contents include, with the exception of See also:Pericles, all of the See also:thirty-seven plays now ordinarily printed in editions of Shakespeare's See also:works .

Of these eighteen were here published for the first time . The other eighteen had already appeared in one or more See also:

separate editions, known as the Quartos . The following list gives the date of the First See also:Quarto of each such play, and also that of any later Quarto which differs materially from the First . The Quarto Editions . A Midsummer See also:Night's Dream (1600) . The See also:Merchant of See also:Venice (1600) Much See also:Ado About Nothing (1600) . The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) . Hamlet (1603, 1604) . King See also:Lear (,6o8) . Troilus and Cressida (1609) . Othello (1622) . the See also:grave has been assigned by local tradition to his own pen .

A more elaborate monument, with a bust by the sculptor See also:

Gerard See also:Johnson, was in due course set up on the chancel See also:wall . See also:Titus Andronicus (1594) . 2 Henry VI . (1594)• 3 Henry VI . (1595) . Richard II . (1597, 16o8) . Richard III . (1597) . Romeo and Juliet (1597, 1599) . Love's Labour's Lost (1598) . 1 Henry IV .

(1598) . 2 Henry IV . (1600) . Henry V . (1600) . Entries in the Register of copyrights kept by the Company of Stationers indicate that editions of As You Like It and Anthony and See also:

Cleopatra were contemplated but not published in 1600 and 16o8 respectively . The Quartos differ very much in See also:character . Some of them contain texts which are practically identical with those of the First Folio; others show See also:variations so material as to suggest that some revision, either by rewriting or by shortening for stage purposes, took place . Amongst the latter are 2, 3 Henry VI., Richard III., Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet and King Lear . Many scholars doubt whether the Quarto versions of 2, 3 Henry VI., which appeared under the titles of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of See also:York and See also:Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard See also:Duke of York, are Shakespeare's work at all . It seems clear that the Quartos of The Troublesome Reign of John King of See also:England (1591) and The Taming of A See also:Shrew (I 594), although treated for See also:copyright purposes as identical with the plays of King John and The Taming of the Shrew, which he founded upon them, are not his . The First Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V., The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet seem to be mainly based, not upon written texts of the plays, but upon versions largely made up out of shorthand notes taken at the theatre by the agents of a piratical bookseller .

A similar desire to exploit the commercial value of Shakespeare's reputation probably led to the See also:

appearance of his name or initials upon the title-pages of Locrine (1595), Sir John See also:Oldcastle (1600), Thomas Lord See also:Cromwell (1602), The London Prodigal (1605), The Puritan (16o7), A Yorkshire Tragedy (16o8), and Pericles (1609) . It is not likely that, with the exception of the last three acts of Pericles, he wrote any part of these plays, some of which were not even produced by his company . They were not included in the First Folio of 1623, nor in a reprint of it in 1632, known as the Second Folio; but all seven were appended to the second issue (1664) of the Third Folio (1663), and to the See also:Fourth Folio of 1685 . Shakespeare is named as joint author with John Fletcher on the title-page of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), and with William See also:Rowley on that of The Birth of See also:Merlin (1662); there is no reason for rejecting the former ascription or for accepting the latter . Late entries in the Stationers' Register assign to him Cardenio (with Fletcher), Henry I. and Henry II . (both with Robert See also:Davenport), King See also:Stephen, Duke See also:Humphrey, and Iphis and lanthe; but none of these plays is now extant . Modern conjecture has attempted to trace his hand in other plays, of which Arden of Feversham (1592), See also:Edward III . (1596), Mucedorus (1598), and The Merry See also:Devil of See also:Edmonton (16o8) are the most important; it is quite possible that he may have had a See also:share in Edward III . A play on Sir Thomas More, which has been handed down in manuscript, contains a number of passages, interpolated in various handwritings, to meet requirements of the See also:censor; and there are those who assign one of these (ii . 4, 1-172) to Shakespeare . Unfortunately the First Folio does not give the See also:dates at which the plays contained in it were written or produced; and the endeavour to See also:supply this deficiency has been one of the Hates. See also:main preoccupations of more than a century of Shakespearian scholarship, since the See also:pioneer See also:essay of Edmund Malone in his An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were Written (1778) . The investigation is not a See also:mere piece of barren antiquarianism, for on it depends the possibility of appreciating the work of the world's greatest poet, not as if it were an articulated whole like a philosophical See also:system, but in its true aspect as the reflex of a vital and constantly developing personality .

A starting-point is afforded by the dates of the Quartos and the entries in the Stationers' Register which refer to them, and by the list of plays already in existence in 1598 which is inserted by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia of that year, and which, while not necessarily exhaustive of Shakespeare's pre-1598 writing, includes The Two Gentlemen of See also:

Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, A See also:Mid-summer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, as well as a mysterious Love's Labour's Won,which has been conjecturally identified with several plays, but most plausibly with The Taming of the Shrew . There is a See also:mass of supplementary evidence, See also:drawn partly from definite notices in other writings or in diaries, letters, account-books, and similar records, partly from allusions to contemporary persons and events in the plays themselves, partly from See also:parallels of thought and expression between each play and those near to it in point of time, and partly from considerations of style, including the so-called metrical tests, which depend upon an See also:analysis of Shakespeare's varying feeling for See also:rhythm at different stages of his career . The total result is certainly not a demonstration, but in the logical sense an See also:hypothesis which serves to colligate the facts and is consistent with itself and with the known events of Shakespeare's See also:external life . The following table, which is an attempt to arrange the original dates of production of the plays without regard to possible revisions, may be taken as fairly representing the common results of recent scholarship . It is framed on the See also:assumption that, as indeed John Ward tells us was the case, Shakespeare ordinarily wrote two plays a year; but it will be understood that neither the order in which the plays are given nor the See also:distribution of them over the years See also:lays claim to more than approximate accuracy . See also:Chronology of the Plays . 1591 . 1600 . (I, 2) The Contention of York and (21) The Merry Wives of Windsor . Lancaster (2, 3 Henry VI.) . (22) As You Like It . (3) i Henry VI.2 (The theatres were closed for See also:riot and plague from June to the end of December.) 1593 .

(4) Richard III . (5) Edward III . (part only) . (6) The Comedy of Errors . (The theatres were closed for plague from the beginning of February to the end of December.) 1594• (7) Titus Andronicus . (The theatres were closed for plague during February and March.) (8) Taming of the Shrew . (g) Love's Labour's Lost . (1o) Romeo and Juliet . 1595- (11) A Midsummer Night's Dream . (12) The Two Gentlemen of Verona . (13) King John . 1546 .

(14) Richard II . (15) The Merchant of Venice . 1597 . (The theatres were closed for misdemeanour froth the end of July to October.) (16) i Henry IV . 1598 . (17) 2 Henry IV . (18) Much Ado About Nothing . 1599 . (1g) Henry V . (20) See also:

Julius See also:Caesar . A more detailed account of the individual plays may now be attempted . The figures here prefixed correspond to those in the table above .

1, 2 . The relation of The Contention of York and Lancaster to 2, 3 Henry VI. and the extent of Shakespeare's responsibility for either or both works have long been subjects of composlcontroversy . The extremes of See also:

critical See also:opinion are to See also:don. be found in a theory which regards Shakespeare as the See also:sole author of 2, 3 Henry VI. and The Contention as a shortened and piratical version of the original plays, and in a theory which regards The Contention as written in collaboration by See also:Marlowe, Greene and possibly See also:Peele, and 2, 3 Henry VI. as a revision of 16oi . (23) Hamlet . (24) Twelfth Night . 1602 . (25) Troilus and Cressida . (26) All's Well that Ends Well . 1603 . (The theatres were closed on Elizabeth's death in March, and remained closed for plague throughout the year.) 1604 . (27) Measure for Measure . (28) Othello .

16o5 . (29) See also:

Macbeth . (30) King Lear . 16o6 . (31) Anthony and Cleopatra . (32) See also:Coriolanus . t6o7 . (33) See also:Timon of See also:Athens (unfinished) . 1608 . (34) Pericles (part only) . 1609 . (35) Cymbeline .

161o . (36) The Winter's See also:

Tale . 1611 . (37) The See also:Tempest . 1612 . 1613 . (38) The Two Noble Kinsmen (part only) . (39) Henry VIII . (part only) . The Contention written, also in collaboration, by Marlowe and Shakespeare . A comparison of the two texts leaves it hardly possible to doubt that the See also:differences between them are to be explained by revision rather than by piracy; but the question of authorship is more difficult . Greene's parody, in the " Shake-scene " passage of his Groats-worth of Wit (1592), of a line which occurs both in The Contention and in 3 Henry VI., while it clearly suggests Shakespeare's connexion with the plays, is evidence neither for nor against the participation of other men, and no sufficient criterion exists for distinguishing between Shakespeare's earliest writing and that of possible collaborators on grounds of style .

But there is nothing inconsistent between the reviser's work in 2, 3 Henry VI. and on the one hand Richard III. or on the other the original See also:

matter of The Contention, which the reviser follows and elaborates scene by scene . It is difficult to assign to any one except Shakespeare the See also:humour of the See also:Jack See also:Cade scenes, the whole substance of which is in The Contention as well as in Henry VI . Views which exclude Shakespeare altogether may be left out of account . Henry VI. is not in Meres's list of his plays, but its inclusion in the First Folio is an almost certain ground for assigning to him some share, if only as reviser, in the completed work . 3 . A very similar problem is afforded by z Henry VI., and here also it is natural, in the See also:absence of tangible evidence to the contrary, to hold by Shakespeare's substantial responsibility for the play as it stands . It is quite possible that it also may be a revised version, although in this case no earlier version exists; and if so the See also:Talbot scenes (iv . 2-7) and perhaps also the Temple Gardens scene (ii . 4), which are distinguished by certain qualities of style from the rest of the play, may date from the period of revision . Thomas Nash refers to the See also:representation of Talbot on the stage in his See also:Pierce Penilesse, his Supplication to the Divell (1592), and it is probable that r Henry VI. is to be identified with the " Harey the vj." recorded in See also:Henslowe's See also:Diary to have been acted as a new play by Lord Strange's men, probably at the Rose, on the 3rd of March 1592 . If so, it is a reasonable conjecture that the two parts of The Contention were originally written at some date before the beginning of Henslowe's record in the previous February, and were revised so as to fall into a See also:series with 1 Henry VI. in the latter end of 1592 . 4 .

The series as revised can only be intended to See also:

lead directly up to Richard III., and this relationship, together with its style as compared with that of the plays belonging to the autumn of 1594, suggest the short winter See also:season of 1592–1593 as the most likely time for the production of Richard III . There is a difficulty in that it is not included in Henslowe's list of the plays acted by Lord Strange's men during that season . But it may quite well have been produced by the only other company which appeared at court during the Christmas festivities, Lord Pembroke's . The mere fact that Shakespeare wrote a play, or more than one play, for Lord Strange's men during 1592–1594 does not prove that he never wrote for any other company during the same period; and indeed there is plenty of room for guess-work as to the relations between Strange's and Pembroke's men . The latter are not known to have existed before 1592, and many difficulties would be solved by the assumption that they originated out of a See also:division of Strange's, whose See also:numbers, since their amalgamation with the Admiral's, may have been too much inflated to enable them to undertake as a whole the summer tour of that year . If so, Pembroke's probably took over the Henry VI. series of plays, since The Contention, or at least the True Tragedy, was published as performed by them, and completed it with Richard III. on their return to London at Christmas . It will be necessary to return to this theory in connexion with the discussion of Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew . The principal See also:historical source for Henry VI. was Edward Hall's The See also:Union of the Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1542), and for Richard III., as for all Shakespeare's later historical plays, the second edition (1587) of See also:Raphael See also:Holinshed's See also:Chronicles of England, See also:Scotland and Ireland (1577) . An earlier play, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (1594), seems to have contributed little if anything to Richard III . 5 . Many scholars think that at any rate the greater part of the first two acts of Edward III., containing the story of Edward's wooing of the countess of See also:Salisbury, are by Shakespeare; and, if so, it is to about the time of Richard III. that the style of his contribution seems to belong . The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on December 1, 1595 .

The Shakespearian scenes are based on the 46th Novel in William See also:

Paynter's See also:Palace of See also:Pleasure (1566) . The line, " Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds " (ii. z . 45,), is repeated verbatim in the 94th See also:sonnet . 6 . To the winter season of 1592–1593 may also be assigned with See also:fair probability Shakespeare's first experimental comedy, The Comedy of Errors, and if his writing at one and the same time for Pembroke's and for another company is not regarded as beyond the See also:bounds of conjecture, it becomes tempting to identify this with " the gelyous comodey " produced, probably by Strange's men, for Henslowe as a new play on See also:January 5, 1593 . The play contains a reference to the See also:wars of See also:succession in See also:France which would See also:fit any date from 1589 to 1594 . The See also:plot is taken from the Menaechmi, and to a smaller extent from the Amphitruo of See also:Plautus . William See also:Warner's translation of the Menaechmi was entered in the Stationers' Register on June ro, 1594 . A performance of The Comedy of Errors by "a company of See also:base and common fellows " (including Shakespeare?) is recorded in the Gesta Grayorum as taking place in See also:Gray's Inn hall on December 28, 1594 . 7 . Titus Andronicus is another play in which many scholars have refused to see the hand of Shakespeare, but the double testimony of its inclusion in Meres's list and in the First Folio makes it unreasonable to deny him some part in it . This may, however, only have been the part of a reviser, working, like the reviser of The Contention, upon the See also:dialogue rather than the structure of a crude tragedy of the school of See also:Kyd .

In fact a stage tradition is reported by Edward See also:

Ravenscroft, a late 17th-century adapter of the play, to the effect that Shakespeare did no more than give a few " master-touches " to the work of a " private author." The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on February 6, 1594, and was published in the same year with a title-page setting out that it had been acted by the companies of Lords Derby (i.e . Strange, who had succeeded to his father's title on See also:September 25, 1593), Pembroke and Sussex . It is natural to take this list as indicating the order in which the three companies named had to do with it, but it is probable that only Sussex's had played Shakespeare's version . Henslowe re-cords the production by this company of Titus and Andronicus as a new play on January 23, 1594, only a few days before the theatres were closed by plague . For the purposes of Henslowe's See also:financial arrangements with the company a rewritten play may have been classed as new . Two years earlier h2 had appended the same description to a play of Tittus and Vespacia, produced by Strange's men on April 11, 1592 . At first sight the title suggests a piece founded on the lives of the See also:emperor Titus and See also:Vespasian, but the identification of the play with an early version of Titus Andronicus is justified by the existence of a rough See also:German See also:adaptation, which follows the See also:general outlines of Shakespeare's play, but in which one of the sons of Titus is named Vespasian instead of See also:Lucius . The ultimate source of the plot is unknown . It cannot be traced in any of the See also:Byzantine chroniclers . Strange's men seem to have been still playing Titus in January 1593, and it was probably not transferred to Pembroke's until the companies were driven from London by the plague of that year . Pembroke's are known from a letter of Henslowe's to have been ruined by August, and it is to be suspected that Sussex's, who appeared in London for the first time at the Christmas of 1593, acquired their stock of plays and transferred these to the Chamberlain's men, when the companies were again reconstituted in the summer of 1594 . The revision of Titus and Vespasian into Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare may have been accomplished in the interval between these two transactions .

The Chamberlain's men were apparently playing Andronicus in June . The stock of Pembroke's men probably included, as well as Titus and Vespasian, both Henry VI. and Richard III., which also thus passed to the Chamberlain's company . 8 . In the same way was probably also acquired an old play of The Taming of A Shrew . This, which can be traced back as far as 1589, was published as acted by Pembroke's men in 1594 . In June of that year it was being acted by the Chamberlain's, but more probably in the revised version by Shakespeare, which bears the slightly altered title of The Taming of The Shrew . This is a much more free adaptation of its original than had been attempted in the case of Henry VI., and the Warwickshire allusions in the See also:

Induction are noteworthy . Some critics have doubted whether Shakespeare was the sole author of The Shrew, and others have assigned him a share in A Shrew, but neither theory has any very substantial See also:foundation . The origins of the play, which is to be classed as a See also:farce rather than a comedy, are to be found ultimately in widely distributed folk-tales, and more immediately in See also:Ariosto's I Suppositi (1509) as translated in George See also:Gascoigne's The Supposes (1566) . It may have been Shakespeare's first task for the newly established Chamberlain's company of 1594 to furbish up the old farce . Thenceforward there is no reason to think that he ever wrote for any other company . 9 .

Love's Labour's Lost has often been regarded as the first of Shakespeare's plays, and has sometimes been placed as early as 1589 . There is, however, no See also:

proof that Shakespeare was writing before 1592 or thereabouts . The characters of Love's Labour's Lost are evidently suggested by Henry of See also:Navarre, his followers See also:Biron and Longaville, and the See also:Catholic See also:League See also:leader, the duc de See also:Maine . These personages would have been See also:familiar at any time from 1585 onwards . The absence of the play from the lists in Henslowe's Diary does not leave it impossible that it should have preceded the formation of the Chamberlain's company, but certainly renders this less likely; and its lyric character perhaps justifies its being grouped with the series of plays that began in the autumn of 1594 . No entry of the play is found in the Stationers'Register, and it is quite possible that the present First Quarto of 1598 was not really the first edition . The title-page professes to give the play as it was " corrected and augmented " for the Christmas either of 1597 or of 1598 . It was again revived for that of 1604 . No literary source is known for its incidents . 10 . Romeo and Juliet, which was published in 1597 as played by Lord Hunsdon's men, was probably produced somewhat before A Midsummer Night's Dream, as its incidents seem to have suggested the parody of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude . An attempt to date it in 1591 is hardly justified by the See also:Nurse's references to an See also:earthquake eleven years before and the fact that there was a real earthquake in London in 1580 .

The See also:

text seems to have been partly revised before the issue of the Second Quarto in 1599 . There had been an earlier play on the subject, but the immediate source .used by Shakespeare was See also:Arthur See also:Brooke's narrative poem Romeus and Juliet (1562) . 11 . A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its masque-like scenes of fairydom and the See also:epithalamium at its close, has all the See also:air of having been written less for the public stage than for some courtly See also:wedding; and the compliment paid by See also:Oberon to the "fair vestal throned by the See also:west" makes it probable that it was a wedding at which Elizabeth was present . Two fairly plausible occasions have been suggested . The wedding of Mary countess of Southampton with Sir Thomas Heneage on the 2nd of May 1594 would fit the May-day setting of the plot; but a widowed countess hardly answers to the " little western See also:flower " of the See also:allegory, and there are allusions to events later in 1594 and in particular to the See also:rainy See also:weather of June and July, which indicate a somewhat later date . The wedding of William See also:Stanley, earl of Derby, brother of the lord Strange for whose players Shakespeare had written, and Elizabeth See also:Vere, daughter of the earl of Oxford, which took place at See also:Greenwich on the 26th of January 1595, perhaps fits the conditions best . It has been fancied that Shakespeare was present when " certain stars shot madly from their See also:spheres" in the See also:Kenilworth See also:fireworks of 1575, but if he had any such entertainment in mind it is more likely to have been the more recent one given to Elizabeth by the earl of See also:Hertford at Elvetham in 1591 . There appears to be no specialsource for the play beyond See also:Chaucer's See also:Knight's Tale and the wide-spread See also:fairy See also:lore of western See also:Europe . 12 . No very definite evidence exists for the date of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, other than the mention of it in Palladis Tamia . It is evidently a more rudimentary essay in the genre of romantic comedy than The Merchant of Venice, with which it has other See also:affinities in its See also:Italian colouring and its use of the inter-relations of love and friendship as a theme; and it may therefore be roughly assigned to the neighbourhood of 1595 .

The plot is drawn from various examples of contemporary fiction, especially from the story of the shepherdess !ilismena in Jorge de See also:

Montemayor's See also:Diana (1559) . A play of See also:Felix and Philiomena had already been given at court in 1585 . 13 . King John is another play for which 1595 seems a likely date, partly on account of its style, and partly from the improbability of a play on an See also:independent subject drawn from English history being interpolated in the middle either of the Yorkist or of the Lancastrian series . It would seem that Shakespeare had before him an old play of the Queen's men, called The Troublesome Reign of King John . This was published in 1591, and again, with " W . Sh." on the title-page, in 1611 . For copy-right purposes King John appears to have been regarded as a revision of The Troublesome Reign, and in fact the succession of incidents in the two plays is much the same . Shakespeare's dialogue, however, owes little or nothing to that of his predecessor . 14 . Richard II. can be dated with some accuracy by a comparison of the two editions of See also:Samuel See also:Daniel's narrative poem on The Civil Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, both of which bear the date of 1595 and were therefore issued between March 25, 1595 and March 24, 1596 of the modern reckoning . The second of these editions, but not the first, contains some close parallels to the play .

From the first two quartos of Richard II., published in 1597 and 1598, the deposition scene was omitted, although it was clearly part of the original structure of the play, and its removal leaves an obvious See also:

mutilation in the text . There is some reason to suppose that this was due to a popular tendency to draw seditious parallels between Richard and Elizabeth; and it became one of the charges against the earl of Essex and his fellow-conspirators in the abortive emeute of February 16os, that they had procured a performance of a play on Richard's See also:fate in order to stimulate their followers . As the actors were the Lord Chamberlain's men, this play can hardly have been any other than Shakespeare's . The deposition scene was not printed until after Elizabeth's death, in the Third Quarto of 16o8 . 15 . The Merchant of Venice, certainly earlier than July 22, 1598, on which date it was entered in the Stationers' Register, and possibly inspired by the machinations of the See also:Jew poisoner Roderigo See also:Lopez; (who was executed in June 1594, shows a considerable advance in comic and melodramatic See also:power over any of the earlier plays, and is assigned by a See also:majority of scholars to about 1596 . The various stories of which its plot is compounded are based upon common themes of folk-tales and Italian novelle . It is possible that Shakespeare may have had before him a play called The Jew, of which there are traces as early as 1579, and in which motives illustrating " the greedinesse of worldly chusers " and the " bloody mindes of usurers " appear to have been already combined . Something may also be owing to Marlowe's play of The Jew of See also:Malta . 16, 17 . The existence of Richard H. is assumed throughout in Henry IV., which probably therefore followed it after no long interval . The first part was published in 1598, the second not until 1600, but both parts must have been in existence before the entry of the first part in the Stationers' Register on February 25th 1598, since Falstaff is named in this entry, and a slip in a speech-prefix of the second part, which was not entered in the Register until August 23rd 1600, betrays that it was written when the character still bore the name of Sir John Oldcastle .

Richard James, in his dedication to The See also:

Legend of Sir John Oldcastle about 1625, and Rowe in 1709 both bear See also:witness to the substitution of the one personage for the other, which Rowe ascribes to the intervention of Elizabeth, and James to that of some descendants of Oldcastle, one of whom was probably Lord See also:Cobham . There is an allusion to the incident and an See also:acknowledgment of the wrong done to the famous Lollard See also:martyr in the See also:epilogue to 2 Henry IV. itself . Probably Shakespeare found Oldcastle, with very little else that was of service to him, in an old play called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which had been acted by See also:Tarlton and the Queen's men at least as far back as 1588, and of which an edition was.printed in 1598 . Falstaff himself is a somewhat libellous presentment of the 15th century leader, 91r John See also:Fastolf, who had already figured in Henry VI.; but presumably Fastolf has no titled descendants alive in 1598 . 18 . An entry in the Stationers' Register during 1600 shows that Much Ado About Nothing was in existence, although its publication was then directed to be " stayed." It may plausibly be regarded as the earliest play not included in Meres's list . In 1613 it was revived before James I. under the alternative title of Benedick and See also:Beatrice . Dogberry is said by Aubrey to have been taken from a See also:constable at Grendon in See also:Buckinghamshire . There is no very definite literary source for the play, although some of its incidents are to be found in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and See also:Bandello's novelle, and attempts have been made to establish relationships between it and two early German plays, See also:Jacob See also:Ayrer's See also:Die Schone Phaenicia and the Vincentius Ladiszlaus of Duke Henry Julius of See also:Brunswick . 19 . The completion of the Lancastrian series of histories by Henry V. can be safely placed in or about 1599, since there is an allusion in one of the choruses to the military operations in Ireland of the earl of Essex,who crossed on March 27 and returned on September 28, 1599 . The First Quarto, which was first " stayed " with Much Ado About Nothing and then published in 1600, is a piratical text, and does not include the choruses .

A geniune and perhaps slightly revised version was first published in the First Folio . 20 . That Julius Caesar also belongs to 1599 is shown, not only by its links with Henry V. but also by an allusion to it in John See also:

Weever's See also:Mirror of Martyrs, a work written two years before its publication in 16o1, and by a See also:notice of a performance on September 2Ist,1599 by Thomas Platter of See also:Basel in an account of a visit to London . This was the first of Shakespeare's See also:Roman plays, and, like those that followed, was based upon Plutarch's Lives as translated from the French of Jacques See also:Amyot and published by Sir Thomas North in I 580 . It was also Shakespeare's first tragedy since Romeo and Juliet . 21 . It is reported by John See also:Dennis, in the See also:preface to The Comical Gallant (1702), that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the See also:express desire of Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff in love, and was finished by Shakespeare in the space of a fortnight . A date at the end of 1599 or the beginning of repo, shortly after the completion of the historical Falstaff plays, would be the most natural one for this enterprise, and with such a date the evidence of style agrees . The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on January ,8th, 1602 . The First Quarto of the same year appears to contain an earlier version of the text than that of the First Folio . Among the passages omitted in the revision was an allusion to the adventures of the duke of See also:Wurttemberg and See also:count of Mompelgard, whose attempts to secure the Garter had brought him into notice . The Windsor setting makes it possible that The Merry Wives was produced at a Garter feast, and perhaps with the assistance of the See also:children of Windsor Chapel in the fairy parts .

The plot has its analogies to various incidents in Italian novelle and in English adaptations of these . 22 . As You Like It was one of the plays "stayed" from publication in 1600, and cannot therefore be later than that year . Some trifling bits of evidence suggest that it is not earlier than 1599• The plot is based upon Thomas See also:

Lodge's See also:romance of Rosalynde (1590), and this in part upon the pseudo-Chaucerian Tale of Gamelyn . 23 . A play of Hamlet was performed, probably by the Chamberlain's men, for Henslowe at Newington Butts on the 9th of June1594 . There are other references to it as a revenge-play, and it seems to have been in existence in some shape as early as 1589 . It was doubtless on the basis of this that Shakespeare constructed his tragedy . Some features of the so-called Ur-Hamlet may perhaps be traceable in the German play of Der bestrafte Brudermord . There is an allusion in Hamlet to the rivalry between the ordinary stages and the private plays given by boy actors, which points to a date during the See also:vogue of the children of the Chapel, whose performance began late in 1600, and another to an See also:inhibition of plays on account of a " late innovation, " by which the Essex rising of February 16o1 may be meant . The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on July 26, 1602 . The First Quarto was printed in 1603 and the Second Quarto in 1604 .

These editions contain texts whose differences from each other and from that of the First Folio are so considerable as to suggest, even when See also:

allowance has been made for the fact that the First Quarto is probably a piratical venture, that the play underwent an exceptional amount of rewriting at Shakespeare's hands . The title-page of the First Quarto indicates that the earliest version was acted in the See also:universities of Oxford and See also:Cambridge and elsewhere, as well as in London . The ultimate source of the plot is to be found in Scandinavian legends preserved in the Historic Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, and transmitted to Shakespeare or his predecessor through the Histoires tragiques (1570) of See also:Francois de Belleforest (see HAMLET) . 24 . Twelfth Night may be fairly placed in 1601-1602, since it quotes part of a See also:song included in Robert See also:Jones's First Book of Songs and Airs (1600), and is recorded by John Manningham to have been seen by him at a feast in the Middle Temple hall on February 2nd, 1602 . The principal source of the plot was Barnabe Riche's " History of Apolonius and Silla " in his Fare-well to Military Profession (1581) . 25 . Few of the plays present so many difficulties as Troilus and Cressida, and it cannot be said that its literary history has as yet been thoroughly worked out . A play of the name, " as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men " was entered in the Stationers' Register on February 7th, 1603, with a note that " sufficient authority " must be got by the publisher, James See also:Roberts, before he printed it . This can hardly be any other than Shakespeare's play; but it must have been " stayed, " for the First Quarto did not appear until 1609, and on the 28th of January of that year a fresh entry had been made in the Register by another publisher . The text of the Quarto differs in certain respects from that of the Folio, but not to a greater extent than the use of different copies of the original manuscript might ex-See also:plain . Two alternative title-pages are found in copies of the Quarto .

On one, probably the earliest, is a statement that the play was printed " as it was acted by the See also:

Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe "; from the other these words are omitted, and a preface is appended which hints that the " grand possessors" of the play had made difficulties about its publication, and describes it as " never staled with the stage." Attempts have been made, mainly on grounds of style, to find another hand than Shakespeare's in the closing scenes and in the See also:prologue, and even to assign widely different dates to various parts of what is ascribed to Shakespeare . But the evidence does not really bear out these theories, and the style of the whole must be regarded as quite consistent with a date in 16o1 or 1602 . The more probable year is 5602, if, as seems not unlikely, the description of Ajax and his humours in the second scene of the first act is Shakespeare's " purge " to Jonson in reply to the Poetaster (16o1), alluded to, as already mentioned, in the Return from Parnassus, a Cambridge play acted probably at the Christmas of 1602–1603 (rather than, as is usually asserted, 1601-1602) . It is tempting to conjecture that Troilus and Cressida may have been played, like Hamlet, by the Chamberlain's men at Cambridge, but may never have been taken to London, and in this sense " never staled with the stage." The only difficulty of a date in 1602 is that a parody of a play on Troilus and Cressida is introduced into Histriomastix (c . 1599), and that in this Troilus " shakes his furious speare." But Henslowe had produced another play on the subject, by Dekker and Chettle, in 1599, and probably, therefore, no allusion to Shakespeare is really intended . The material for Troilus and Cressida was taken by Shakespeare from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, See also:Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, and See also:Chapman's See also:Homer . 26 . It is almost wholly on grounds of style that All's Well that Ends Well is placed by most critics in or about 1602, and, as in the case of Troilus and Cressida, it has been argued, though with little justification, that parts of the play are of considerably earlier date, and perhaps represent the Love's Labour's Won referred to by Meres . The story is derived from See also:Boccaccio's Decameron through the See also:medium of William Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (1566) . 27 . Measure for Measure is believed to have been played at court on the 26th of December 1604 . The evidence for this is to be found, partly in an See also:extract made for Malone from See also:official records now lost, and partly in a forged document, which may, however, rest upon genuine See also:information, placed amongst the account-books of the Office of the See also:Revels .

If this is correct the play was probably produced when the theatres were reopened after the plague in 1604 . The plot is taken from a story already used by George See also:

Whetstone, both in his play of Promos and See also:Cassandra (1578) and in his See also:prose Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), and borrowed by him from See also:Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi (1566) . 28 . A performance at court of Othello on November 1, 1604, is noted in the same records as those quoted with regard to Measure for Measure, and the play may be reasonably assigned to the same year . An alleged performance at Harefield in 1602 certainly rests upon a See also:forgery . The play was revived in 1610 and seen by Prince See also:Louis'of Wurttemberg at the Globe on April 30 of that year . It was entered in the Stationers' Register on October 6, 1621, and a First Quarto was published in 1622 . The text of this is less satisfactory than that of the First Folio, and omits a good many lines found therein and almost certainly belonging to the play as first written . It also contains some profane expressions which have been modified in the Folio, and thereby points to a date for the original production earlier than the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players passed in the See also:spring of 16o6 . The plot, like that of Measure for Measure, comes from the Hecatommithi (1566) of Giraldi Cinthio . 29 . Macbeth cannot, in view of its obvious allusions to James I., be of earlier date than 1603 .

The style and some trifling allusions point to about 16o5 or 16o6, and a hint for the theme may have been given by See also:

Matthew Gwynne's entertainment of the Tres Sibyllae, with which James was welcomed to Oxford on August 27, 1605 . The play was revived in 16ro and See also:Simon See also:Forman saw it at the Globe on April 20 . The only extant text, that of the First Folio, bears traces of shortening, and has been interpolated with additional rhymed dialogues for the witches by a second hand, probably that of Thomas See also:Middleton . But the extent of Middleton's contribution has been exaggerated; it is probably confined to act iii. sc . 5, and a few lines in act. iv. sc . 1 . A ballad of Macdobeth was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 27, 1596, but is not known . It is not likely that Shakespeare had consulted any Scottish history other than that included in Raphael Holinshed's See also:Chronicle; he may have gathered witchlore from Reginald See also:Scot's Discoverie of See also:Witchcraft (1584) or King James's own Demonologie (1599) . 30 . The entry of King Lear in the Stationers' Register on November 26, 1607, records the performance of the play at court on December 26, 16o6 . This suggests 16o5 or 16o6 as the date of production, and this is confirmed by the publication in 1605 of the older play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which Shakespeare used as his source . Two Quartos of King Lear were published in 16o8, and contain a text rather longer, but in other respects less accurate, than that of the First Folio .

The material of the play consists of fragments of See also:

Celtic myth, which found their way into history through See also:Geoffrey of Mon-mouth . It was accessible to Shakespeare in Holinshed and in Spenser's Faerie Queene, as well as in the old play . 31 . It is not quite clear whether Antony and Cleopatra was the play of that name entered in the Stationers' Register on May 20, 16o8, for no Quarto is extant, and a fresh entry was made in the Register before the issue of the First Folio . Apart fromthis entry, there is little external evidence to See also:fix the date of the play, but it is in Shakespeare's later, although not his last manner, and may very well belong to 16o6 . 32 . In the case of Coriolanus the external evidence available is even scantier, and all that can be said is that its closest affinities are to Antony and Cleopatra, which in all probability it directly followed or preceded in order of See also:composition . Both plays, like Julius Caesar, are based upon the Lives of Plutarch, as Englished by Sir Thomas North . 33 . There is no external evidence as to the date of Timon of Athens, but it may safely be grouped on the strength of its internal characteristics with the plays just named, and there is a clear gulf between it and those that follow . It may be placed provisionally in 1607 . The critical problems which it presents have never been thoroughly worked out .

The extraordinary incoherencies of its action and inequalities of its style have prevented modern scholars from accepting it as a finished production of Shakespeare, but there agreement ceases . It is some-times regarded as an incomplete draft for an intended play; sometimes as a Shakespearian fragment worked over by a second hand either for the stage or for See also:

printing in the First Folio; sometimes, but not very plausibly, as an old play by an inferior writer which Shakespeare had partly remodelled . It does not seem to have had any relations to an extant See also:academic play of Timon which remained in manuscript until .1842 . The See also:sources are to be found, partly in Plutarch's Life of See also:Marcus See also:Antonius, partly in See also:Lucian's dialogue of Timon or Misanthropos, and partly in William Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (1566) . 34 . Similar difficulties, equally unsolved, cling about Pericles . It was entered in the Stationers' Register on May 20, 16o8, and published in 1609 as " the late and much admired play " acted by the King's men at the Globe . The title-page bears Shakespeare's name, but the play was not included in the First Folio, and was only added to Shakespeare's collected works in the Third Folio, irf company. with others which, although they also had been printed under his name or initials in quarto form, are certainly not his . In 16o8 was published a prose story, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of See also:Tyre . This claims to be the history of the play as it was presented by the King's players, and is described in a dedication by George See also:Wilkins as " a See also:poore See also:infant of my braine . " The production of the play is therefore to be put in 16o8 or a little earlier . It can hardly be doubted on internal evidence that Shakespeare is the author of the verse-scenes in the last three acts, with the exception of the doggerel choruses .

It is probable, although it has been doubted, that he was also the author of the prose-scenes in those acts . To the first two acts he can at most only have contributed a touch or two . It seems reasonable to suppose that the non-Shakespearian part of the play is by Wilkins, by whom other dramatic work was produced about 1607 . The prose story quotes a line or two from Shakespeare's contribution, and it follows that this must have been made by 16o8 . The close resemblances of the style to that of Shakespeare's latest plays make it impossible to place it much earlier . But whether Shakespeare and Wilkins collaborated in the play, or Shakespeare partially rewrote Wilkins, or Wilkins completed Shakespeare, must be regarded as yet undetermined . Unless there was an earlier Shakespearian version now lost, See also:

Dryden's statement that " Shakespeare's own Muse her Pericles first bore must be held to be an error . The story is an See also:ancient one which exists in many versions . In all of these except the play, the name of the See also:hero is See also:Apollonius of Tyre . The play is directly based upon a version in See also:Gower's Confessio Amantis, and the use of Gower as a " presenter " is thereby explained . But another version in Laurence Twine's Patterne of Painefull Adventures (c . 1576), of which a new edition appeared in 1607, may also have been consulted .

35 . Cymbeline shows a further development than Pericles in the direction of Shakespeare's final style, and can hardly have come earlier . A description of it is in a note-book of Simon Forman, who died in September 161x, and describes in the same book other plays seen by him in 1610 and 1611 . But these were not.necessarily new plays, and Cymbeline may perhaps be assigned conjecturally to 16og . The See also:

mask-like dream in act v. sc . 4 must be an See also:interpolation by another hand . This play also is based upon a wide-spread story, probably known to Shakespeare in Boccaccio's Decameron (day 2, novel 9), and possibly also in an English book of tales called Westward for Smelts . The historical part is, as usual, from Holinshed . 36 . The Winter's Tale was seen by Forman on May 15, 1611, and as it clearly belongs to the latest group of plays it may well enough have been produced in the preceding year . A document amongst the Revels Accounts, which is forged, but may rest on some See also:authentic basis, gives November 5, 1611 as the date of a performance at court . The play is recorded to have been licensed by Sir George See also:Buck, who began to license plays in 1607 .

The plot is from Robert Greene's Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, or Dorastus and Fawnia (1588) . 37 . The wedding-mask in act iv. of The Tempest has suggested the possibility that it may have been composed to celebrate the marriage of the princess Elizabeth and See also:

Frederick V., the elector See also:palatine, on February 14, 1613 . But Malone appears to have had evidence, now lost, that the play was performed at court as early as 1611, and the forged document amongst the Revels Accounts gives the precise date of November r, 1611 . See also:Sylvester See also:Jourdan's A See also:Discovery of the See also:Bermudas, containing an account of the shipwreck of Sir George See also:Somers in 1609, was published about October 1610, and this or some other contemporary narrative of Virginian colonization probably furnished the hint of the plot . 38 . The tale of Shakespeare's independent dramas is now See also:complete, but an analysis of the Two Noble Kinsmen leaves no reason to doubt the accuracy of its ascription on the title-page of the First Quarto of 1634 to Shakespeare and John Fletcher . This appears to have been a case of ordinary collaboration . There is sufficient resemblance between the styles of the two writers to render the division of the play between them a matter of some difficulty; but the parts that may probably be assigned to Shakespeare are acts i. scc . 1-4; ii . 1; iii . 1, 2; V .

I, 3, 4 . Fletcher's See also:

morris-See also:dance in act iii. sc . 5 is borrowed from that in Beaumont's Mask of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, given on February 20, 1613, and the play may perhaps be dated in 1613 . It is based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale . 39 . It may now be accepted as a settled result of scholarship that Henry VIII. is also the result of collaboration, and that one of the collaborators was Fletcher . There is no good reason to doubt that the other was Shakespeare, although attempts have been made to substitute Philip See also:Massinger . The inclusion, how-ever, of the play in the First Folio must be regarded as conclusive against this theory . There is some ground for suspicion that the collaborators may have had an earlier work of Shakespeare before them, and thislwould explain the reversion to the " history" type of play which Shakespeare had long abandoned . His share appears to consist of act i. scc . 1, 2; act ii. scc . 3, 4; act iii. sc .

2, ll . 1-203; act v. sc. r . The play was probably produced in 1613, and originally bore the alternative title of All is True . It was being performed in the Globe on June 29, 1613, when the See also:

thatch caught See also:fire and the theatre was burnt . The principal source was Holinshed, but Hall's Union of Lancaster and York, See also:Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Church, and perhaps Samuel Rowley's play of When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), appear also to have contributed . Shakespeare's non-dramatic writings are not numerous . The narrative poem of Venus and Adonis was entered in the Poems . Stationers' Register on April 18, 1593, and thirteen editions, dating from 159'3 to 1636, are known . The See also:Rape of Lucrece was, entered in the Register on May 9, 1594, and the six extant editions range from 1594 to 1624 . Each poem is prefaced by a dedicatory See also:epistle from the author to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton . The subjects, taken respectively from the Metamorphoses and the See also:Fasti of Ovid, were frequent in See also:Renaissance literature . It was once supposed that Shakespeare came from Stratford-on-Avon with Venus and Adonis in his See also:pocket; but it is more likely that both poems owe their origin to the See also:comparative leisure afforded to playwrights and actorsby the plague-period of 1592-1594 .

In 1599 the stationer William Jaggard published a volume of miscellaneous verse which he called The Passionate Pilgrim, and placed Shakespeare's name on the title-page . Only two of the pieces included herein are certainly Shakespeare's, and although others may quite possibly be his, the authority of the volume is destroyed by the fact that some of its contents are without doubt the work of Marlowe, Sir Walter See also:

Raleigh, Richard See also:Barnfield and See also:Bartholomew See also:Griffin . In 16or Shakespeare contributed The See also:Phoenix and the Turtle, an See also:elegy on an unknown pair of wedded lovers, to a volume called Love's Martyr, or Rosalin's Complaint, which was collected and mainly written by Robert See also:Chester . The interest of all these poems sinks into insignificance beside that of one remaining volume . The Sonnets were entered in the Register on May 20, 1609, by the stationer Thomas See also:Thorpe, and published by him under the title Shakespeares Sonnets, never before Imprinted, in the same year . In addition to a See also:hundred and fifty-four sonnets, the volume contains the elegiac poem, probably dating from the Venus and Adonis period, of A See also:Lover's Complaint . In 1640 the Sonnets, together with other poems from The Passionate Pilgrim and elsewhere, many of them not Shakespeare's, were republished by John See also:Benson in Poems Written by Wil . Shakespeare, Gent . Here the sonnets are arranged in an altogether different order from that of 1609 and are declared by the publisher to " appeare of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then living avouched . " No Shakespearian controversy has received so much attention, especially during recent years, as that which concerns itself with the date, character, and literary history of the Sonnets . This is intelligible enough, since upon the issues raised depends the question whether these poems do or do not give a glimpse into the intimate depths of a personality which otherwise is at the most only imperfectly revealed through the plays . On the whole, the See also:balance of authority is now in favour of regarding them as in a very considerable measure autobiographical .

This view has undergone the fires of much destructive argument . The authenticity of the order in which the sonnets were printed in 1609 has been doubted; and their subject-matter has been variously explained as being of the nature of a philosophical allegory, of an effort of the dramatic See also:

imagination, or of a heartless exercise in the forms of the Petrarchan See also:convention . This last theory has been recently and strenuously maintained, and may be regarded as the only one which now holds the field in opposition to the autobiographical interpretation . But it rests upon the false psychological assumption, which is disproved by the whole history of poetry and in particular of Petrarchan poetry, that the use of conventions is inconsistent with the expression of unfeigned emotions; and it is hardly to be set against the direct conviction which the sonnets carry to the most finely critical minds of the strength and sincerity of the spiritual experience out of which they were wrought . This conviction makes due allowance for the inevitable heightening of emotion itself in the act of poetic composition; and it certainly does not carry with it a belief that all the external events which underlie the emotional development are capable at this distance of time of inferential reconstruction . But it does accept the sonnets as an actual record of a part of Shakespeare's life during the years in which they were written, and as revealing at least the outlines of a See also:drama which played itself out for once, not in his imagination but in his actual conduct in the world of men and See also:women . There is no See also:advantage to be gained by rearranging the order of the 1609 volume, even if there were any basis other than that of individual whim on which to do so . Many of the sonnets are obviously linked to those which follow or precede them; and altogether a few may conceivably be misplaced, the order as a whole does not See also:jar against the sense of emotional continuity, which is the only possible test that can be applied . The last two sonnets, however, are merely alternative versions of a Greek See also:epigram, and the rest fall into two series, which are more probably parallel than successive . The shorter of these two series (cxxvii.-clii.) appears to be the record of the poet's relations with a See also:mistress, a dark woman with See also:raven brows and See also:mourning eyes . Problems of the Sonnets . SHAKESPEARE In the earlier sonnets he undertakes the See also:half-playful See also:defence of black beauty against the blonde Elizabethan ideal; but the greater number are in a more serious vein, and are filled with a deep consciousness of the bitterness of lustful See also:passion and of the See also:slavery of the soul to the See also:body .

The woman is a wanton . She has broken her bed-See also:

vow for Shakespeare, who on his side is forsworn in loving her; and she is doubly forsworn in proving faithless to him with other men . His reason condemns her, but his heart has not the power to throw off her tyranny . Her particular offence is that she, " a woman coloured See also:ill, " has See also:cast her snares not only upon him, but upon his friend, " a man right fair," who is his "better See also:angel," and that thus his loss is double, in love and friendship . The longer series (i.-cxxvi.) is written to a man, appears to extend over a considerable period of time, and covers a wide range of sentiment . The See also:person addressed is younger than Shakespeare, and of higher See also:rank . He is lovely, and the son of a lovely mother, and has See also:hair like the See also:auburn buds of See also:marjoram . The series falls into a number of See also:groups, which are rarely separated by any See also:sharp lines of demarcation . Perhaps the first group (i.-xvii.) is the most distinct of all . These sonnets are a prolonged exhortation by Shakespeare to his friend to marry and beget children . The friend is now on the See also:top of happy See also:hours, and should make haste, before the rose of beauty See also:dies, to secure himself in his descendants against devouring time . In the next group (xviii.-See also:xxv.) a much more personal note is struck, and the writer assumes the attitudes, at once of the poet whose See also:genius is to be devoted to eternizing the beauty and the honour of his See also:patron, and of the friend whose absorbing See also:affection is always on the point of assuming an emotional See also:colour indistinguishable from that of love .

The consciousness of advancing years and that of a See also:

fortune which bars the triumph of public honour alike find their See also:consolation in this affection . A period of absence (See also:xxvi.-xxxii.) follows, in which the thought of friendship comes to remedy the daily labour of travel and the sorrows of a life that is " in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes " and filled with See also:melancholy broodings over the past . Then (xxxiii.-xlii.) comes an estrangement . The friend has committed a sensual See also:fault, which is at the same time a See also:sin against friendship . He has been wooed by a woman loved by the poet, who deeply resents the treachery, but in the end forgives it, and bids the friend take all his loves, since all are included in the love that has been freely given him . It is difficult to escape the suggestion that this See also:episode of the conflict between love and friendship is the same as that which inspired some of the " dark woman " sonnets . Another See also:journey (xliii.-lii.)isagain filled with thoughts of the friend, and its record is followed by a group of sonnets (liii.-lv.) in which the friend's beauty and the See also:immortality which this will find in the poet's verse are especially dwelt upon . Once more there is a parting (lvi.-lxi.) and the poet See also:waits as patiently as may be his friend's return to him . Again (lxii.-lxv.) he looks to his verse to give the friend immortality . He is tired of the world, but his friend redeems it (lxvi.-lxxiii.) . Then rumours of some scandal against his friend (lxix.-lxx.) reach him, and he falls (1xxi.-lxxiv.) into gloomy thoughts of coming death . The friend, however, is still (lxxv.-lxxvii.) his argument; and he is perturbed (lxxviii.-lxxxvi.) by the appearance of a See also:rival poet, who claims to be taught by See also:spirits to write " above a mortal See also:pitch," and with " the proud full See also:sail of his great verse" has already won the countenance of Shakespeare's patron .

There is another estrangement (lxxxvii.-xc.), and the poet, already crossed with the spite of fortune, is ready not only to acquiesce in the loss of friendship, but to find the fault in himself . The friend returns to him, but the relation is still clouded by doubts of his fidelity (xci.-xciii.) and by public rumours of his wantonness (xciv.-xcvi.) . For a third time the poet is absent (xcvii.-xcix.) in summer and spring . Then comes an apparent interval, after which a love already three years old is renewed (c.-civ.), with even richer praises (cv.-cviii.) . It is now the poet's turn to offer apologies (cix.-cxii.) for offences against friendship and for some See also:

brand upon his name apparently due to the conditions of his profession . He is again absent (cxiii.) and again renews his protestations of the his sugred sonnets among his private friends . imperishability of love (cxiv.-cxvi.) and of his own unworthiness (cxvii.-cxxi.), for which his only excuse is in the fact that the friend was once unkind . If the friend has suffered as Shakespeare suffered, he has " passed a See also:hell of time." The series closes with a group (cxxii.-cxxv.) in which love is pitted against time; and an envoi, not in sonnet form, warns the " lovely boy " that in the end nature must render up her treasure . Such an analysis can give no adequate See also:idea of the qualities in these sonnets, whereby the See also:appeal of universal poetry is built up on a basis of intimate self-See also:revelation . The human document is so legible, and at the same time so incomplete, that it is easy to understand the strenuous efforts which have been made to throw further light upon it by tracing the identities of those other personalities, the man and the woman, through his relations to whom the poet was brought to so fiery an See also:ordeal of soul, and even to the See also:borders of self-abasement . It must be added that the See also:search has, as a See also:rule, been conducted with more ingenuity than See also:judgment . It has generally started from the terms of a somewhat mysterious dedication prefixed by the publisher Thomas Thorpe to the volume of 1609 .

This runs as follows: " To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W . H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T . T." The natural interpretation of this is that the inspirer or " begetter " of the sonnets bore the initials W . H.; of "Air and contemporary history has accordingly been ran- w. sacked to find a W . H. whose age and circumstances might conceivably fit the conditions of the problem which the sonnets present . It is perhaps a want of historical See also:

perspective which has led to the centring of controversy around two names belonging to the highest ranks of the Elizabethan See also:nobility, those of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, earl of Pembroke . There is some evidence to connect Shakespeare with both of these . To Southampton he dedicated Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and the story that he received a See also:gift of no less than £x000 from the earl is recorded by Rowe . His acquaintance with Pembroke can only be inferred from the statement of Heminge and Condell in their preface to the First Folio of the plays, that Pembroke and his brother Montgomery had " prosequuted both them and their Authour living, with so much favour." The personal beauty of the rival claimants and of their mothers, their amours and the attempts of their families to persuade them to marry, their relations to poets and actors, and all other points in their See also:biographies which do or do not fit in with the indications of the sonnets, have been canvassed with great spirit and some erudition, but with no very conclusive result . It is in Pembroke's favour that his initials were in fact W . H., whereas Southampton's can only be turned into W . H. by a process of metathesis; and his champions have certainly been more successful than Southampton's in producing a dark woman, a certain Mary See also:Fitton, who was a mistress of Pembroke's,. and was in consequence dismissed in disgrace from her See also:post of maid of honour to Elizabeth .

Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is in favour of her having been blonde, and not " black." Moreover, a careful investigation of the sonnets, as regards their style and their relation to the plays, renders it almost impossible on chronological grounds that Pembroke can have been their subject . He was born on the 9th of April 158o, and was therefore much younger than Southampton, who was born on the 6th of October 1573 . The earliest sonnets postulate a marriageable youth, certainly not younger than eighteen, an age which Southampton reached in the autumn of 1591 and Pembroke in the spring of 1598 . The writing of the sonnets may have extended over several years, but it is impossible to doubt that as a whole it is to the years 1593—1598 rather than to the years 1598—1603 that they belong . There is not, indeed, much external evidence available . Francis Meres in hisPalladis Tamia of 1598 mentions Shakespeare's "sugred sonnets among his private friends," 1 but this allusion might come as well at 1 " The sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and See also:

honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, the beginning as at the end of the series; and the fact that two, not of the latest, sonnets are in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599 is equally inconclusive . The only reference to an external event in the sonnets them-selves, which might at first sight seem useful, is in the following lines (cvii.) " The mortal See also:moon See also:bath her See also:eclipse endured, And the sad See also:augurs See also:mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims See also:olives of endless age." This has been variously interpreted as referring to the death of Elizabeth and accession of James in 1603, to the See also:relief caused by the death of Philip II. of See also:Spain in 1598, and to the illness of Elizabeth and threatened See also:Spanish invasion in 1596 . Obviously the " mortal moon " is Elizabeth, but although "eclipse" may well mean " death," it is not quite so clear that " endure an eclipse " can mean " die." Nor do the allusions to the rival poet help much . " The proud full sail of his great verse " would fit, on critical grounds, with Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and possibly Peele, Daniel or Drayton; and the " affable familiar ghost," from whom the rival is said to obtain assistance by night, might conceivably be an See also:echo of a passage in one of Chapman's dedications . Daniel inscribed a poem to Southampton in 1603, but with this exception none of the poets named are known to have written either for Southampton or for Pembfoke, or for any other W . H. or H . W., during any year which can possibly be covered by the sonnets .

Two very minor poets, Barnabe See also:

Barnes and Gervase See also:Markham, addressed sonnets to Southampton in 1593 and 1595 respectively, and Thomas Nash composed improper verses for his delectation . But even if external guidance fails, the internal evidence for 1593–1598 as approximately the sonnet period in Shakespeare's life is very strong indeed . It has been worked out in detail by two German scholars, See also:Hermann Isaac (now See also:Conrad) in the Shakespeare-Jahrbuch for 1884, and Gregor See also:Sarrazin in William Shakespeares Lehrjahre (1897) and Aus Shakespeares Meisterwerkstatt (1906) . Isaac's work, in particular, has hardly received enough attention even from recent English scholars, probably because he makes the mistakes of taking the sonnets in See also:Bodenstedt's order instead of Shakespeare's, and of beginning his whole chronology several years too early in order to gratify a fantastic identification of W . H. with the earl of Essex . This, however, does not affect the main force of an argument by which the affinities of the great bulk of the sonnets are shown, on the ground of stylistic similarities, parallelisms of expression, and parallel-isms of theme, to be far more close with the poems and with the range of plays from Love's Labour's Lost to Henry I V. than with any earlier or later See also:section of Shakespeare's work . This dating has the further advantage of putting Shakespeare's sonnets in the full See also:tide of Elizabethan sonnet-production, which began with the publication of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella in 1591 and Daniel's See also:Delia and Constable's Diana in 1592, rather than during years for which this particular kind of poetry had already ceased to be modish . It is to the three volumes named that the See also:influence upon Shakespeare of his predecessors can most clearly be traced; while he seems in his turn to have served as a See also:model for Drayton, whose sonnets to Idea were published in a series of volumes in 1594, 1599, 1602, 1605 and 1619 . It does not of course follow that because the sonnets belong to 1593–1598 W . H. is to be identified with Southampton . On general grounds he is likely, even if above Shakespeare's own rank, to have been somewhat nearer that rank than a great earl, some young gentleman, for example, of such a family as the Sidneys, or as the Walsinghams of See also:Chislehurst . It is possible that there is an allusion to Shakespeare's romance in a poem called " See also:Willobie his Avisa," published in 1594 as from the pen of one Henry See also:Willoughby, apparently of West Knoyle in See also:Wiltshire .

In this Willoughby is introduced as taking counsel when in love with " his familiar friend W . S. who not long before had tryed the See also:

curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recovered of the like infection." But there is nothing outsidethe poem to connect Shakespeare with a family of Willoughbys or with the neighbourhood of West Knoyle . Various other identifications of W . H. have been suggested, which rarely rest upon anything except a similarity of initials . There is little plausibility in a theory broached by Mr Sidney Lee, that W . H. was not the friend of the sonnets at all, but a certain William Hall, who was himself a printer, and might, it is conjectured, have obtained the " copy " of the sonnets for Thorpe . It is, of course, just possible that the " begetter " of the title-page might mean, not the " inspirer," but the " procurer for the press " of the sonnets ; but the interpretation is shipwrecked on the obvious identity of the person to whom Thorpe " wishes " eternity with the person to whom the poet " promised " that eternity . The external history of the Sonnets must still be regarded as an unsolved problem; the most that can be said is that their subject may just possibly be Southampton, and cannot possibly be Pembroke . In order to obtain a glimmering of the man that was Shakespeare, it is necessary to consult all the records and to read the evidence of his life-work in the plays, alike in the light of the See also:simple facts of his external career and in The man that of the sudden See also:vision of his passionate and dis- and the artist . satisfied soul preserved in the sonnets . By exclusive attention to any one of these sources of information it is easy to build up a consistent and wholly false conception of a Shakespeare; of a Shakespeare struggling between his senses and his See also:conscience in the See also:artistic Bohemianism of the London taverns; of a sleek, See also:bourgeois Shakespeare to whom his See also:art was no more than a ready way to a position of respected and influential competence in his native town; of a great See also:objective artist whose personal life was passed in detached contemplation of the puppets of his imagination . Any one of these pictures has the advantage of being more vivid, and the disadvantage of being less real, than the somewhat elusive and enigmatic Shakespeare who glances at us for a perplexing moment, now behind this, now behind that, of his diverse masks .

It is necessary also to lay aside Shakespeareolatry, the spirit that could wish with See also:

Hallam that Shakespeare had never written the Sonnets, or can refuse to accept Titus Andronicus on the ground that " the play declares as plainly as play can speak, ` I am not Shakespeare's; my repulsive subject, my See also:blood and horrors, are not, and never were his.' " The literary historian has no greater enemy than the sentimentalist . In Shakespeare we have to do with one who is neither beyond criticism as a man nor impeccable as an artist . He was for all time, no doubt; but also very much of an age, the age of the later Renaissance, with its See also:instinct for impetuous life, and its vigorous rather than discriminating appetite for literature . When Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare lacked " art," and when See also:Milton wrote of his " native See also:wood-notes See also:wild," they judged truly . The Shakespearian drama is magnificent and incoherent ; it belongs to the See also:adolescence of literature, to a period before the See also:instrument had been sharpened and polished, and made unerring in its touch upon the sources of laughter and of tears . Obviously nobody has such power over our laughter and our tears as Shakespeare . But it is the power of temperament rather than of art; or rather it is the power of a capricious and unsystematic artist, with a perfect dramatic instinct for the exposition of the ideas, the characters, the situations, which for the moment command his interest, and a perfect disregard for the See also:laws of dramatic See also:psychology which require the patient pruning and subordination of all material that does not make for the main exposition . This want of finish, this imperfect fusing of the literary ore, is essentially characteristic of the Renaissance, as compared with ages in which the creative impulse is weaker and leaves room for a finer concentration of the means upon the end . There is nearly always unity of purpose in a Shakespearian play, but it often requires an intellectual effort to grasp it and does not result in a unity of effect . The issues are obscured by a careless generosity which would extend to art the boundless freedom of life itself . Hence the intrusive and jarring elements which stand in such curious incongruity with the utmost reaches of which the dramatic spirit is capable; the conventional and melodramatic endings, the inconsistencies of action and even of character, the emotional confusions of tragicomedy, the complications of plot and subplot, the marring of the give-and-take of dialogue by superfluities of description and of argument, the jest and bombast lightly thrown in to suit the See also:taste of the groundlings, all the flecks that to an instructed modern criticism are only too apparent upon the Shakespearian See also:sun . It perhaps follows from this that the most fruitful way of approaching Shakespeare is by an analysis of his work rather as a process than as a completed whole .

His outstanding See also:

positive quality is a vast comprehensiveness, a capacity for growth and assimilation, which leaves no aspect of life unexplored, and allows of no finality in the nature of his judgments upon life . It is the real and sufficient explanation and justification of the pains taken to determine the chronological order of his plays, that the See also:secret of his genius lies in its power of development and that only by the study of its development can he be known . He was nearly thirty when, so far as we can tell, his career as a dramatist began; and already there lay behind him those six or seven unaccounted-for years since his marriage, passed no one knows where, and filled no one knows with what experience, but assuredly in that strenuous Elizabethan life with some experience kindling to his See also:intellect and formative of his character . To the woodcraft and the familiarity with country See also:sights and sounds which he brought with him from Stratford, and which mingle so oddly in his plays with a purely imaginary and euphuistic natural history, and to the book-learning of a provincial grammar-school boy, and perhaps, if Aubrey is right, also of a provincial school-master, he had somehow added, as he continued to add through-out his life, that curious See also:store of acquaintance with the details of the most diverse occupations which has so often perplexed and so often misled his commentators . It was the same See also:faculty of acquisition that gave him his enormous vocabulary, so far exceeding in range and variety that of any other English writer . His first group of plays is largely made up of adaptations and revisions of existing work, or at the best of essays in the conventions of stage-writing which had already achieved popularity . In the Yorkist trilogy he takes up the See also:burden of the chronicle play, in The Comedy of Errors that of the classical school drama and of the page-humour of See also:Lyly, in Titus Andronicus that of the crude revenge tragedy of Kyd, and in Richard III. that of the See also:Nemesis motive and the exaltation of the Machiavellian superman which properly belong to Marlowe . But in Richard III. be begins to come to his own with the subtle study of the actor's temperament which betrays the working of a profound interest in the technique of his chosen profession . The style of the earliest plays is essentially rhetorical; the blank verse is stiff and little varied in rhythm; and the periods are built up of parallel and antithetic sentences, and punctuated with devices of iterations, plays upon words, and other methods of securing emphasis, that derive from the See also:bad tradition of a popular stage, upon which the players are See also:bound to rant and force the note in order to hold the attention of a dull-witted See also:audience . During the plague-vacations of 1592 to 1594, Shakespeare tried his hand at the ornate descriptive poetry of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece; and the influence of this exercise, and possibly also of Italian travel, is apparent in the next group of plays, with their lyric notes, their tendency to warm See also:southern colouring, their See also:wealth of decorative imagery, and their elaborate and not rarely frigid conceits . Rhymed couplets make their appearance, side by side with blank verse, as a medium of dramatic dialogue . It is a period of experiment, in farce with The Taming of the Shrew, in satirical comedy with Love's Labour's Lost, in lyrical comedy with A-Midsummer Night's Dream, in lyrical tragedy with Romeo and Juliet, in lyrical history with Richard II., and finally in romantic tragicomedy with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and with the masterpiece of this singular genre, The Merchant of Venice .

It is also the period of the sonnets, which have their echoes both in the phrasing and in the themes of the plays; in the black-browed Rosaline of Love's Labour's Lost, and in the issue between friendship and love which is variouslyset in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in The Merchant of Venice . But in the latter play the sentiment is already one of retrospection; the tempest of spirit has given way to the See also:

tender melancholy of renunciation . The sonnets seem to bear witness, not only to the personal upheaval of passion, but also to some despondency at the spite of fate and the disgrace of the actor's calling . This See also:mood too may have cleared away in the See also:sunshine of growing popularity, of financial success, and of the possibly long-delayed return to Stratford . Certainly the series of plays written next after the travels of 1597 are light-hearted plays, less occupied with profound or vexatious searchings of spirit than with the delightful externalities of things . The histories from King John to Henry V. form a continuous study of the conditions of kingship, carrying on the See also:political speculations begun in Richard H. and culminating in the brilliant picture of triumphant efficiency, the Henry of See also:Agincourt . Meanwhile Shakespeare develops the astonishing faculty of humorous delineation of which he had given foretastes in Jack Cade, in Bottom the See also:weaver, and in Juliet's nurse; sets the creation of Falstaff in front of his vivid pictures of contemporary England; and passes through the half-comedy, half See also:melodrama, of Much Ado About Nothing to the joyous farce of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and to his two perfectly sunny comedies the sylvan comedy of As You Like It and the See also:urban comedy of Twelfth Night . Then there comes a See also:change of mood, already heralded by Julius Caesar, which stands beside Henry V. as a reminder that efficiency has its seamy as well as its brilliant side . The tragedy of political See also:idealism in See also:Brutus is followed by the tragedy of in 'tellectual idealism in Hamlet; and this in its turn by the three See also:bitter and cynical pseudo-comedies, All's Well That Ends Well, in which the creator of Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind and See also:Viola drags the honour of womanhood in the dust—Troilus and Cressida, in which the ideals of heroism and of romance are confounded in the portraits of a wanton and a See also:poltroon—and Measure for Measure, in which the searchlight of See also:irony is thrown upon the paths of See also:Providence itself . Upon the causes of this new perturbation in the soul of Shakespeare it is perhaps idle to speculate . The evidence of his profound disillusion and discouragement of spirit is plain enough; and for some years the tide of his pessimistic thought advances, swelling through the pathetic tragedy of Othello to the See also:cosmic tragedies of Macbeth and King Lear, with their Titan-like indictments not of man alone, but of the heavens by whom man was made . Meanwhile Shakespeare's style undergoes changes no less notable than those of his subject-matter .

The ease and lucidity characteristic of the histories and comedies of his middle period give way to a more troubled beauty, and the phrasing and rhythm often tend to become elliptic and obscure, as if the thoughts were hurrying faster than speech can give them utterance . The period closes with Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, in which the ideals of the love of woman and the honour of man are once more stripped See also:

bare to display the skeletons of lust and See also:egoism, and in the latter of which signs of exhaustion are already perceptible; and with Timon of Athens, in which the dramatist whips himself to an almost incoherent expression of a general loathing and detestation of humanity . Then the stretched See also:cord suddenly snaps . Timon is apparently unfinished, and the next play, Pericles, is in an entirely different vein, and is apparently finished but not begun . At this point only in the whole course of Shakespeare's development there is a complete See also:breach of continuity . One can only conjecture the occurrence of some spiritual crisis, an illness perhaps, or some process akin to what in the See also:language of See also:religion is called conversion, which left him a new man, with the fever of See also:pessimism behind him, and at peace once more with See also:Heaven and the world . The final group of plays, the Shakespearian part of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, all belong to the class of what may be called idyllic romances . They are happy dreams, in which all troubles and sorrows are ultimately resolved into fortunate endings, and which stand therefore as so many symbols of an optimistic faith in the beneficent dispositions of an ordering Providence . In See also:harmony with this change of See also:temper the style has likewise undergone another change, and the tense structure and marmoreal phrasing of Antony and Cleopatra have given way to relaxed cadences and easy and unaccentuated rhythms . It is possible that these plays, Shakespeare's last plays, with the unimportant exceptions of his contributions to Fletcher's Henry VIII. and The Two Noble Kinsmen, were written in retirement at Stratford . At any rate the See also:call of the country is See also:sounding through them; and it is with no regret that in the last pages of The Tempest the weary magician drowns his book, and buries his See also:staff certain fathoms deep in the See also:earth . (E .

K . C.) The Shakespeare-See also:

Bacon Theory . In view of the continued promulgation of the sensational theory that the plays, and presumably the poems also, so long associated with the name of Shakespeare, were not written by the man whose biography is sketched above, but by somebody else who used this See also:pseudonym—and especially that the writer was Lord See also:Chancellor Francis Bacon, See also:Viscount St Albans (1561–1626)—it appears desirable to deal here briefly with this question . No such idea seems to have occurred to anybody till the middle of the 19th century (see Bibliography below), but having once been started it has been elaborated in certain quarters by a variety of appeals, both to internal evidence as disclosed by the knowledge displayed in Shakespeare's works and by their vocabulary and style, and to external evidence as represented by the problems connected with the facts of Shakespeare's known life and of the publication of the plays . To what may be called ingenious inferences from data of this sort have even been added attempts to show that a secret See also:confession exists which may be detected in a See also:cipher or cryptogram in the printing of the plays . It must suffice here to say that the contentions of the Americans, Mr Donnelly and Mrs Gallup, on this See also:score are not only opposed to the opinion of authoritative bibliographers, who deny the existence of any such cipher, but have carried their supporters to lengths which are obviously absurd and impossible . Lord See also:Penzance, a great lawyer whose support of the Baconian theory may be found in his " judicial summing-up," published in 1902, expressly admits that " the attempts to establish a cipher totally failed; there was not indeed the semblance of a cipher." Sir See also:Edwin Durning-See also:Lawrence, in his Bacon is Shakespeare (1910), goes still farther in an attempt to prove the point by cryptographic evidence . According to him the classical " long word " cited in Love's Labour's Lost, " honorificabilitudinitatibus," is an See also:anagram for " hi !udi F . Baconis nati tuiti orbi " (these plays F . Bacon's offspring preserved for the world) ; and he juggles very curiously with the numbers of the words and lines in the page of the First Folio containing this alleged anagram . He also cites the evidence of (more or less) contemporary illustrations to books, which he explains as cryptographic, in confirmation . These interpretations are in the highest degree speculative .

But perhaps his argument is exposed in its full See also:

depth of incredibility when he See also:counts up the letters in Ben Jonson's verses " To the Reader," describing the Droeshout portrait in the First Folio, and, finding them to be 287 (taking each " w " as two " v's "), concludes (by adding 287 to 1623, i.e. the date of the First Folio) that Bacon intended to reveal himself as the author in the year 1910 ! This sort of argument makes the plain man's See also:head See also:reel . On similar principles anything might prove anything . What may be considered the more reasonable way of approaching the question is shown in Mr G . See also:Greenwood's Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908), in which the alleged difficulties of the Shakespearian authorship are competently presented without recourse to any such extravagances . The plausibility of many of the arguments used by Mr Greenwood and those whom he follows depends a good deal upon the real obscurity which, for lack of positive evidence, shrouds the biography of Shakespeare and our knowledge of the precise facts as to the publication of the works associated with his name ; and it has been assisted by the dogmatism of some modern biographers, or the differences of opinion between them, when they attempt to interpret the known facts of Shakespeare's life so as to account for his authorship . But it must be remembered that, if Shakespeate (or Shakspere) wrote Shakespeare's works, it is only possible to reconcile our view of his biography with our knowledge of the works by giving some interpretation to the known facts or accepting some explanation of what may have occurred in the obscure parts of his life which will be consistent with such an identification . That different hypotheses are favoured by different orthodox critics is therefore no real objection, nor that some may appear exceedingly speculative, for the very reason that positive evidence is irrecoverable and that See also:speculation—consistent with what is possible—is the only resource . In so far as evidence is to be See also:twisted and strained at all, it is right, in view of the long tradition and the prima facie presumptive evidence, to See also:strain it in any possible direction which can reasonably make the Shakespearian authorship intelligible . As a matter of fact the evidence is strained alike by one side and the other; but as between the two it has to be remembered that the onus lies. on the opponent of the Shakespearian authorship to show, first that there is no possible explanation whichwould justify the tradition, and secondly that there is positive evidence which can upset it and which will See also:saddle the authorship of Shakespeare's works on Bacon or some one else . The contempt indiscriminately thrown on supporters of the Baconian theory by orthodox critics is See also:apt to be expressed in terms which are occasionally unwarranted . But even if we leave out of account the lunatics and fabricators who have been so prominently connected with it, the adventurous See also:amateur—however eminent as a lawyer or however acute as a critic of everyday affairs—may easily be too ingenious in his endeavours to solve a literary problem in which judgment largely depends on a highly trained and subtle sense of literary style and a See also:special knowledge of the conditions of Elizabethan England and of the early drama .

In such an exposition of what may be called the " See also:

anti-Shaksperian " case as Mr Greenwood's, many points appear to make for his conclusion which are really not more than doubtful interpretations of evidence; and though these interpretations may be derived from orthodox Shakespearians—orthodox, that is to say, so far at all events as their view of Shakespearian authorship is concerned—there have been a good many such interpreters whose zeal has outrun their knowledge . The fact remains that the most competent special students of Shakespeare, however they may differ as to details, and also the most authoritative special students of Bacon, are unanimous in upholding the traditional view . The Baconian theory simply stands as a curious See also:illustration of the dangers which, even in the hands of fair See also:judges of ordinary evidence, attend certain methods of literary investigation . There is one simple reason for this: in order to establish even a prima facie case against the identification of the man Shakespeare (however the name be spelt) with the author of Shakespeare's works, the Baconian must clearly account for the positive contemporary evidence in its favour, and this cannot well be done; it is highly significant that it was not attempted or thought of for centuries . It is comparatively easy to point to certain difficulties, which are due to the gaps in our knowledge . As already explained, the orthodox biographer, armed with the results of accurate scholarship and See also:pro-longed historical See also:research, attempts to reconstruct the life of the period so as to offer possible or probable explanations of these difficulties . But he does so backed by the unshaken tradition and the positive contemporary evidence that the Stratford boy and man, the London actor, the author of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and the dramatist (so far at least as criticism upholds the See also:canon of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare), were one and the same . It may be useful here to add to what has been written in the pre-ceding See also:article some of the positive contemporary allusions to Shakespeare which establish this presumption . The evidence of Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) has already been referred to . It is incredible that Ben Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon intimately, who himself dubbed Shakespeare the " See also:swan of Avon," and who survived Bacon for eleven years, could have died without revealing the alleged secret, at a time when there was no reason for concealing it . Much has been made of Jonson's varying references to Shakespeare, and of certain inconsistencies in his references to both Shakespeare and Bacon; but these can be twisted in more than one direction and their explanation is purely speculative . His positive allusions to Shakespeare are inexplicable except as the most authoritative evidence of his identification of the man and his works .

Richard Barnfield (1598) speaks of Shakespeare as " honey-flowing," and says that his Venus and Lucrece have placed his name " in Fame's immortal book." John Weever (1599) speaks of " honey-tongued Shakespeare," admired for " rose-cheeked Adonis," and " Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not." John Davies of See also:

Hereford (1610) calls him " our English See also:Terence, Mr Will Shakespeare." Thomas See also:Freeman (1614) writes " to Master W . Shakespeare : "—" Who loves chaste life, there's Lucrece for a teacher Who list read lust there's Venus and Adonis 1 . . . ~ Besides in plays thy wit winds like Meander." Other contemporary allusions, all treating Shakespeare as a great poet and tragedian, are also on record . Finally, it may be remarked that although many problems in connexion with Shakespeare's authorship can only be solved by the See also:answer that he was a " genius," the Baconian view that " genius " by itself could not confer on Shakespeare, the supposed Stratford rustic," the positive knowledge of law, &c., which is revealed in his works, depends on a theory of his upbringing. and career which strains the evidence quite as much as anything put forward by orthodox biographers, if not more . As shown in the preceding article, it is by no means improbable that the Stratford " rustic " was quite well educated, and that his rusticity is a See also:gross exaggeration . We know very little about his early years, and, in so far as we are ignorant, it is legitimate to draw inferences in favour of what makes the remainder of his career and achievements intelligible . The Baconian theory entirely depends on straining every assumption in favour of Shakespeare's not having had any opportunity to acquire knowledge which in any case it would require " genius ' . to absorb and utilize; and this method of argument is directly opposed to the legitimate procedure in approaching the undoubted difficulties . Isolated phrases, such as Ben Jonson's dictum as to his small knowledge of Latin and Greek, which may well be purely comparative, the contemptuous expression of a university scholar for one who had no academic training, can easily be made too much of . The extreme inferences as to his illiteracy, drawn from his handwriting, depend on the most meagre data . The preface to the First Folio says that " what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers "; whereas Ben Jonson, in his Discoveries, says, " I remember the players often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted a line . My answer had been, would he had blotted a thousand!—which they thought a malevolent speech." Reams have been written about these two sayings, but we do not know the real circumstances which prompted either, and the non-existence of any of the Shakespeare See also:manuscripts leaves us open, unfortunately, to the wildest conjectures .

That there were such manuscripts (unless Ben Jonson and the editors of the First Folio were liars) is certain ; but there is nothing See also:

peculiar in their not having survived, though persons unacquainted with the history of the manuscripts of printed works of the period sometimes seem to think so . We know so little of the composition of Shakespeare's works, and the stages they went through, or the influence of other persons on him, that, so far as technical knowledge is concerned (especially the legal knowledge, which has given so much colour to the Baconian theory), various speculations are possible concerning the means which a dramatic genius may have had to inform his mind or acquire his vocabulary . The theatrical and social milieu of those days was small and close; the influence of culture was immediate and mainly oral . We have no positive knowledge indeed of any relations between Shakespeare and Bacon; but, after all, Bacon was a great See also:con-temporary, personally interested in the drama, and one would expect the contents of his mind and the same sort of literary expression that we find in his writings to be reflected in the mirror of the stage; the same phenomenon would be detected in the drama of to-day were any critic to take the trouble to inquire . Assuming the genius of Shakespeare, such a poet and playwright would naturally be full of just the sort of matter that'would represent the culture of the day and the interests of his patrons . In the purlieus of the Temple and in literary circles so closely connected with the lawyers and the court, it is just the dramatic " genius " who would be familiar with any-thing that could be turned to account, and whose works, especially plays, the vocabulary of which was open to embody countless sources, in the different stages of composition, See also:rehearsal, production and revision, would show the imagination of a poet working upon ideas culled from the brains of others . Resemblances between phrases used by Shakespeare and by Bacon, therefore, carry one no farther than the fact that they were contemporaries . We cannot even say which, if either, originated the echo . So far as vocabulary is concerned, in every age it is the writer whose record remains and who by degrees becomes its representative; the truth as to the extent to which the intellectual milieu contributed to the education of the writer, or his genius was assisted by association with others, is hard to recover in after years, and only possible in proportion to our knowledge of the period and of the individual factors in operation . . (H . CH.) THE PORTRAITS OF SHAKESPEARE The See also:mystery that surrounds much in the life and work of Shakespeare extends also to his See also:portraiture . The fact that the only two likenesses of the poet that can be regarded as carrying the authority of his co-workers, his friends, and relations—yet neither of them a life-portrait—differ in certain essential points, has opened the See also:door to controversy and encouraged the advance and See also:acceptance of numerous wholly different types .

The result has been a swarm of portraits which may be classed as follows: (1) the genuine portraits of persons not Shakespeare but not unlike the various conceptions of him; (2) memorial portraits often based on one or other of accepted originals, whether those originals are worthy of acceptance or not; (3) portraits of persons known or unknown, which have been fraudulently " faked " into a resemblance of Shakespeare; and (4) See also:

spurious fabrications especially manufactured for See also:imposition upon the public, whether with or without See also:mercenary motive . It is curious that some of the crudest and most easily demonstrable frauds have been among those which have from time to time been, and still are, most eagerly accepted and most ardently championed . There are few subjects which have so imposed upon the credulous, especially those whose intelligence might be supposed proof against the chicanery practised upon them . Thus, in the past, a See also:president of the Royal See also:Academy in England, and many of the leading artists and Shakespearian students of the time, were found to support the genuineness, as a contemporary portrait of the poet, of a picture which, in its faked Shakespeare state, a few months before was not even in existence . This, at least, proves the intense interest taken by the world in the personality of Shakespeare, and the almost passionate desire to know his features . It isdesirable, therefore, to describe those portraits which have chief claim to recollection by reason either of their inherent interest or of the notoriety which they have at some time enjoyed; it is to be remarked that such notoriety once achieved never entirely dies away, if only because the art of the engraver, which has usually perpetuated them either as large plates, or as illustrations to reputable editions of the works, or to commentaries or biographies, sustains their undeserved credit as likenesses more or less authentic . Exhaustive study of the subject, extended over a series of years, has brought the present writer to the conclusion—identical with that entertained by leading Shakespearian authorities—that two portraits only can be accepted without question as authentic likenesses: the bust (really a half-length statue) with its structural wall-monument in the See also:choir of See also:Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, and the See also:copper-See also:plate engraved by See also:Martin Droeshout as See also:frontispiece to the First Folio of Shakespeare's works (and used for three subsequent issues) published in 1623, although first printed in the previous year . The Stratford bust and monument must have been erected on the N. wall of the chancel or choir within six years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, as it is mentioned in the prefatory memorial lines by Leonard Digges in the First Folio . The See also:design in its general aspect was one often adopted by the " tombe-makers " of the period, though not originated by them, and according to See also:Dugdale was executed by a See also:Fleming See also:resident in London since 1567, Garratt Johnson (Gerard See also:Janssen), a See also:denizen, who was occasionally a collaborator with See also:Nicholas Stone . The bust is believed to have been commissioned by the poet's son-in-law, Dr John Hall, and, like the Droeshout See also:print, must have been seen by and likely enough had the approval of Mrs Shakespeare, who did not die until August 1623 . It is thought to have been modelled from either a life or death mask, and inartistic as it is has the marks of facial individuality; that is to say, it is a portrait and not a generalization such as was common in funereal See also:sculpture . According to the practice of the day, especially at the hands of Flemish sculptors of memorial figures, the bust was coloured; this is sufficient to account for the technical summariness of the modelling and of the forms .

Thus the eyebrows are scarcely more than indicated by the See also:

chisel, and a solid See also:surface represents the See also:teeth of the open mouth; the See also:brush was evoked to supply effect and detail . To the colour, as reapplied after the removal of the white paint with which Malone had the bust covered in 1793, must be attributed a good deal of the wooden appearance which is now a See also:shock to many . The bust is of soft stone (not See also:alabaster, as incorrectly stated by " the accurate Dugdale "), but a careful examination of the work reveals no sign of the alleged breakage and restoration or reparation to which some writers have attributed the apparently inordinate length of the upper See also:lip . As a matter of fact the lip is not long; it is less than seven-eighths of an See also:inch: the appearance is to a great extent an See also:optical illusion, the result partly of the smallness of the See also:nose and, especially, of the thinness of the See also:moustache that shows the flesh above and below . Some repair was made to the monument in 1649, and again in 1748, but there is no mention in the church records of any meddling with the bust itself . Owing, however, to the characteristic inaccuracy of the print by one of Hollars' assistants in the illustration of Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire (p . 688), the first edition of which was published in 1636, certain writers have been misled into the belief that the whole Monument and bust were not merely restored but replaced by those which we see to-day . As other prints in the volume depart grossly from the See also:objects represented, and as Dugdale, like See also:Vertue (whose punctilious accuracy has also been baselessly extolled by See also:Walpole), was at times demonstrably loose in his descriptions and presentments, there is no reason to believe that the bust and the figures above it are other than those originally placed in position . Other engravers, following the Dugdale print, have further stultified the original, but as they (Vertue, Grignion, Foudrinier, and others) differ among themselves, little importance need be attached to the circumstance . A warning should be uttered against many of the so-called " casts " of the busts . George See also:Bullock took a cast in 1814 and Signor A . Michele another about See also:forty years after, but those attributed to W .

R . See also:

Kite, W . Scoular, and others, are really copies, departing from the original in important details as well as in general effect . It is from these that many persons derive incorrect impressions of the bust itself . Mention should here be made of the "Kesselstadt Death Mask, " now at See also:Darmstadt, as that has been claimed as the true death-mask of Shakespeare, and by it the authenticity of other portraits has been gauged . It is not in fact a death-mask at all, but a cast from one and probably not even a direct cast . In three places on the back of it is the inscription—+ADi 1616: and this is the sole actual link with Shakespeare . Among the many rapturous adherents of the theory was William Page, the See also:American painter, who made many measurements of the mask and found that nearly half of them agreed with those of the Stratford bust; the greater number which do not he conveniently attributed to error in the sculptor . The cast first came to light in 1849, having been searched for by Dr . See also:Ludwig See also:Becker, the owner of a See also:miniature in oil or See also:parchment representing a See also:corpse crowned with a See also:wreath, lying in bed, while on the background, next to a burning See also:candle, is the date —Ao 1637 . This little picture was by tradition asserted to be Shakespeare, although the likeness, the death-date, and the wreath all point unmistakably to the poet-See also:laureate Ben Jonson . Dr Becker had purchased it at the death-sale at See also:Mainz of Count Kesselstadt in 1847, in which also " a See also:plaster of See also:Paris cast " (with no suggestion of Shakespeare then attached to it) had appeared .

This he found in a See also:

broker's rag-shop, assumed it to be the same, recognized in it a resemblance to the picture (which most persons cannot see) and so came to attribute to it the enormous historical value which it would, were his hypothesis correct, unquestionably possess . In searching for the link of evidence necessary to be established, through the Kesselstadt line to England and Shakespeare, a theory has been elaborated, but nothing has been proved or carried beyond the point of bare conjecture . The arguments against the authenticity of the cast are strong and cogent—the chief of which is the fact that the See also:skull reproduced is fundamentally of a different form and type from that shown in the Droeshout print—the forehead is receding instead of upright . Other important divergencies occur . The handsome, refined, and pleasing aspect of the mask accounts for much of the favour in which it has been held . It was believed in by Sir Richard See also:Owen and was long on view in the British Museum, and was shown in the Stratford See also:Centenary See also:Exhibition in 1864 . The " Droeshout print " derives its importance from its having been executed at the order of Heminge and Condell to represent, as a frontispiece to the Plays, and put forth as his portrait, the man and friend to whose memory they paid the See also:homage of their risky enterprise . The volume was to be his real monument, and the work was regarded by them as a memorial erected in a spirit of love, piety, and veneration . Mrs Shakespeare must have seen the print; Ben Jonson extolled it . His dedicatory verses, however, must be regarded in the light of conventional approval as commonly expressed in that age of the performances of portrait-engravers and habitually inscribed beneath them . It is obvious, therefore, that in the circumstances an authentic portrait must necessarily have been the basis of the engraving; and Sir George See also:Scharf, judging from the contradictory See also:lights and shadows in the head, concluded that the original must have been a limning—more or less an outline See also:drawing—which the youthful engraver was required to put into See also:chiaroscuro, achieving his task with but very partial success . That this is the case is proved by the so-called " unique proof " discovered by Halliwell-Phillips, and now in See also:America .

Another copy of it, also an early proof but not in quite the same " state, " is in the Bodleian Library . No other example is known . In this plate the head is far more human . The nose is here longer than in the bust, but the bony structure corresponds . In the proof, moreover, there is a thin, wiry moustache, much widened in the print as used; and in several other details there areimportant divergencies . In this engraving by Droeshout the head is far too large for the body, and the See also:

dress—the See also:costume of well-to-do persons of the time—is absurdly out of perspective: an additional argument that the unpractised engraver had only a drawing of a head to work from, for while the head shows the individuality of portraiture the body is as clearly done de See also:chic . The first proof is conclusive evidence against the contention that the " Flower Portrait "at the Shakespeare Memorial Museum, Stratford-on-Avon—the gift of Mrs See also:Charles Flower (1895) and boldly entitled the "Droeshout original "— is the original See also:painting from which the engraving was made, and is therefore the actual life-portrait for which Shakespeare sat . This view was entertained by many connoisseurs of repute until it was pointed out that had that been the case the first proof, if it had been engraved from it, would have resembled it in all particulars, for the engraver would have merely copied the picture before him . Instead of that, we find that several details in the proof—the incorrect See also:illumination, the small moustache, the shape of the eyebrow and of the deformed See also:ear, &c.—have been corrected in the painting, in which further improvements are also imported . The conclusion is therefore irresistible . At the same time the picture may possibly be the earliest painted portrait in existence of the poet, for so far as we can See also:judge of it in its present See also:condition —(it was to some extent injured by fire at the Alexandra Palace) —it was probably executed in the earlier half of the 17th century . The inscription—Willn Shakespeare, 1609— is suspect on account of being written in cursive script, the only known example at the date to which it professes to belong .

If it were authentic it might be taken as showing us Shakespeare's appearance seven years before his death, and fourteen years before the publication of the Droeshout print . The former attribution of it to Cornelis Janssen's brush has been abandoned—it is the work of a comparatively unskilful craftsman . The picture's See also:

pedigree cannot definitely be traced far back, but that is of little importance, as plausible pedigrees have often been manufactured to bolster up the most obvious impostures . The most interesting of the copies or adaptations of this portrait is perhaps that by William See also:Blake now in the See also:Manchester Corporation Art See also:Gallery . One of the cleverest imitations, if such it be, of an old picture is the " See also:Buttery " or " See also:Ellis portrait, " acquired by an American collector in 190.2 . This small picture, on See also:panel, is very poor judged as a work of art, but it has all the appearance of age . In this case the perspective of the dress has been corrected, and Shakespeare's