that belongs to the Shakspearian drama as a whole; and far more, I believe, than many persons are aware of, accounts for his supremacy even with those who know him from the book, and little, or not at all, from the stage. We have not much opportunity in England of knowing Shakspeare as a whole (on all sides of him) from the theatre. Only a select few of his plays are ever acted at all. And even when they are thus given, it is generally because of certain leading actors wishing to play leading parts, the remainder of the dramatis persona being left to play themselves anyhow. Some educated persons resent this state of things and abstain from the theatre, and their knowledge of Shakspeare is accordingly derived in chief from the pages of their favourite edition. And perhaps when they are in full enjoyment of the master's poetry, humour, pathos, imagination, wisdom, and matchless gift of characterisation, they imagine that this is all they are indebted to; but there is yet something else in the background—or rather above them all-controlling, manipulating, guiding, and restraining all the other great faculties the dramatist's faculty. It is misleading to speak of that which is effective on the stage and that which is effective "in the closet." The source of the dramatist's effectiveness is the same in both. A play that would stage (as we express

have "

no chance" upon the

it) will have not much better chance with us

sitting in our library. It may be full of poetry and cleverness, and even of a certain kind of interest. But it is not, we feel, a drama.

Experience as an actor and the companion of actors was therefore "making" William Shakspeare in one way. In another way he was being "made" by the building up of plays in conjunction with other men. "Hack-work," no doubt, but of the utmost value. In those days of his apprenticeship to to his craft he was employed in adding to, or altering and adapting, the crude productions of men much his inferiors. Some even of his own acknowledged plays bear indisputable marks of the presence up and down of an inferior hand, or hands. By no surer method could he have mastered the secret of dramatic effectiveness, as he watched the effect of experiment after experiment upon audiences, and took to heart his failures and successes alike.

Meantime, by another path, he was training his genius for that of which the dramatic form is after all but the skeleton-he was training his poetic gift and bringing it to maturity. In the year 1593 there was published his long narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, and in the year following its pendant, the Rape of Lucrece. How much earlier than the date of publication these were written we cannot say. But the former poem cannot be earlier than 1589, for in that year had appeared Thomas Lodge's poem, in the same metre, and on another famous

myth of the Greek and Roman world, Glaucus and Scylla. The appearance of Lodge's poem suggested to Shakspeare a parallel experiment. But however suggested by its predecessor, Shakspeare's "first heir of his invention " (so he phrased it) bore no sign of imitation, or of that weak echoing of the mannerisms of the original which mark the host of copyists who, in our own day, spring up on the appearance of a new form of art. There is no weakness, no vagueness, in the versification of Venus and Adonis. On the contrary, it came to the world, then as now, bearing on its face the indisputable mark of genius, boundless invention, and that evident "unfailingness" of power-the power "of going on and still to be"-the hand as strong at the end as at the beginning, as if it need never leave off-always the sign of imaginative genius of the great, first, order. The stream runs through well-ordered banks, but as it flows it brims-infallible proof of a source that is going to supply yet greater and greater things in the future.

It was so that the young Shakspeare, unknown as yet to the general public, save as actor and play-compiler; looked on with something of contempt, if mingled with a dash of apprehensive envy, by the poets and scholars for he had "small Latin and less Greek "-challenged comparison, at one bold dash, with the poets and wits, and was not discomfited. For the poem at once

was acknowledged a masterpiece, and took a position from which it has never been dislodged. And yet its author little dreamed that in a quite other field his supremacy among poets was to come to him.

And yet by this time he had written at least one masterpiece for the stage, although it did not. see the light of print until 1598.1 I think most critics are agreed in placing Love's Labour's Lost as the very earliest of those plays which as a whole are Shakspeare's, and have that unity and completeness that follow therefrom. It stands almost alone among Shakspeare's comedies in this respect, that no original or germ of the plot has been found in any contemporary Italian romance or traditional story. But we may be sure that there was something of the sort among the hundreds of such novelettes that were current in Shakspeare's day. It has perished, but we cannot doubt that in some or other chap-book, foreign or native, he had found the story of the King of Navarre and his noble fellow-students.

I believe that to many readers of Shakspeare in England this exquisite comedy is practically unknown; partly, no doubt, because it has hardly ever been acted on a public stage. It is there

1 [This first quarto of Love's Labour's Lost which gives the play as we now have it, was a revised and augmented version; prepared for acting at court in the Christmas festivities of 1597, and very different from the poet's first draft. The reader who desires further information on this and other critical questions arising out of the lecture should consult the prefaces to the plays in Professor Herford's edition (Eversley series).]

fore concerning readers of the play that I speak when I ask why it is that this play on its very surface deters so many. Well, I think it is the very superabundance of its imaginative energy and the prodigality with which it is used. How natural in a young poet just become aware of the vastness of his poetic resources! Wordsworth once said finely of Shakspeare that "he could not have written an epic-he would have died of a plethora of thought"; and we feel that if Shakspeare had begun an epic at this stage of his life, before he had attained the art to manage and to restrain, he might well thus have perished. At this very moment another great poet had given to the world a work in which the same characteristic was found. It was in 1590 that Edmund Spenser published the first three books -the first half-of his Faery Queene. And here, too, with all its amazing beauty, invention, and resource, one is aware of a prodigality that at first repels instead of attracting. "Wading through unmown grass" has been an image well invented to describe the reader's experience. But the prodigality of Spenser differs from that of Shakspeare. In the long stretches of description and of detail (often repeated, with slight variation) in the Faery Queene, the grass remains the same grass, and the weariness felt is the weariness of monotony. Not so in Shakspeare's early plays. The prodigality is that of quality rather than quantity, of boundless variety rather than sameness. The