which were really of a most startling and effective kind. Time fails me to tell you the story-you will find the play in Dodsley, an easily accessible book.1 For the moment it is sufficient to point out that the plot is a kind of Hamlet reversed. In Hamlet a son discovers a father's murder; in the Spanish Tragedy the father, old Jeronimo, discovers the murder of his son. He goes distracted in consequence, and in the end makes use of the machinery of a "play within a play' (as also in Hamlet) to bring home the crime to its true author; the play ending, again like Hamlet, with the visiting of the sins of the guilty upon the innocent, and a carnage among the principal characters as wholesale as that which so shocked Voltaire and the eighteenth-century critics of Shakspeare.

And monstrous, even to grotesqueness, as is much of this drama, poor and crude as is its language, it marked in some respects an advance in the development of English tragedy, greater even than Marlowe had attained. As poets and masters of the harmony of the English tongue, comparison between the two dramatists is idle. Marlowe was one of the greatest; Kyd one of the least. Yet it is not too much to say that there is

1 [Since this lecture was given the plays of Kyd have been edited by Prof. Boas, with elaborate prolegomena, including a memoir which contains a good many more facts than the three referred to above. Mr. Boas makes it quite certain that Kyd was the author of the Hamlet play upon which Shakspeare worked; but he is inclined to allow his protégé too much of the credit for the final result.]

more grasp of what constitutes an effective tragic story in Jeronimo than in anything Marlowe has left us; more, in short, of what goes to make the superb effect, as a whole, in Hamlet, Macbeth, or Lear. And it is to this fact, I believe, that Jonson was pointing in that memorable passage. To say that Shakspeare “outshone” Kyd as a poet would be about as absurd as to say that Mr. Browning outshone the poet Close. But to say that Shakspeare "outshone" Kyd in having followed a path that Kyd opened, and yet by virtue of imagination, poetry, profound thought, and the matured power of art, left Kyd immeasurable leagues behind, is neither impertinent nor meaningless, but such a criticism as was quite natural to one like Jonson, to whom the incidents and situations of both Jeronimo and of Hamlet were as perfectly familiar as those of the latter are to ourselves.

Coming then to this group of tragedies that mark the close of our second period of Shakspeare's art-Hamlet and Othello-we feel that what marks them above all that has gone before is maturitythat we have reached the manhood of Shakspeare's genius. Indeed, instead of that sentimental nomenclature of mine, for which I have already apologised, I might have characterised the first two periods not as spring and summer, but as youth and manhood; only, what should I have called the third, seeing that neither in his life nor in his art was Shakspeare to feel old age? And so if summer stands for ripeness, before even the

shadows of decay have begun to fall, the word may stand. Ripeness is strength, and strength is what strikes us now, in this stage of the poet's art. Mastery-mastery over his material, mastery over his gifts, and, may we not add, mastery over himself. The language in the main is changed; it loses its redundance as it has to grapple more and more closely with the problems of the life and soul of man. Shakspeare's language does not (like Marlowe's) grow in efflorescence and in magniloquence as his incidents rise in wonder or terribleness. Rather, as the incidents thus rise, his language calms into simplicity and reverence. Before the majesty of Life-its sorrows, fears, passions, yearnings-the language becomes grave and clear-and stronger because graver and clearer -till often all that differences Elizabethan English from our own seems to fall away, and the verse becomes as modern as Wordsworth or Tennyson would write.

During many, many later periods of criticism in English history, Shakspeare has passed for a "sensational" writer, and his sensationalism has given great offence to many, both at home and abroad. In a sense, it is a true charge. There are plays of Shakspeare as sensational in their incidents as Tamburlaine or Jeronimo. The situations in Hamlet or Macbeth-what could be more so? And if they had been treated by a writer wanting the quality that Shakspeare gave them, they might have been equally popular, but for how

long? As far as we can judge, the Spanish Tragedy in its own day was quite as successful, quite as popular as Hamlet. But where is Jeronimo now? And this is why a sober critic must refuse to brand Hamlet and Macbeth with the name of "sensational." The truth of the matter was pointed out long ago by Charles Lamb, in words that cannot be bettered, in commenting on a play of Webster's; and in these words he has defined for all time the essential weakness and rottenness of the thing called "sensationalism." "To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wear and weary life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments," this, Lamb says, Webster has done in his Duchess of Malfy; and he adds, " inferior geniuses may upon horror's head horrors accumulate, but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for quality; they terrify babes with painted devils-but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum." Now, we could not, if we sought far and near, find a better description of what sensationalism is, and of what Shakspeare is not, and, moreover, of the popular literary food of our own day. The mistaking “quantity for quality,” the "piling up the agony" as it is called, the skilfulness in adding horror to horror, surprise to surprise, and with it the absolute impotence to "move the human soul,”-terrors without dignity, and affright

ments without decorum-how better could we describe the works of fiction that satisfy all the imaginative requirements of whole classes? No, it is not the surprising, the supernatural, the sanguinary nature of his incidents that constitutes a writer sensational. It is the use he fails to make of these incidents. It is his having recourse to the marvellous when he has no imagination, and to the terrible when he has no real human sympathy; this that writes him down "sensationalist," and this, let me add, which causes that his writings, often the enthusiasm of one generation, are destined to become the laughingstock of the next!

In that Essay on Dramatic Poesy of Dryden's, referred to at the outset of my lecture, the writer has occasion to deliver a well-known criticism on Shakspeare: "He was the Man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive Soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. When he describes anything, you more than see it—you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike: were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid: his