Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother. Rose-cheekt Adonis with his amber tresses,

Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her,

Chaste Lucretia, virgin-like her dresses,

Proud lust-stung Tarquin seeking still to prove her;

Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not;

Their sugar'd tongues and power attractive (qy. power-attractive) beauty

Say they are saints, although that saints they show not,

For thousand vows (qy. thousands vow) to them subjective duty. They burn in love, thy children, Shakespeare, let them : Go, woo thy muse! more nymphish brood beget them."

It is conjectured, I think with probability, that the Love's Labours Won mentioned by Meres, is to be considered as another name for All's Well that Ends Well, as we know that Henry VIII. was acted with the secondary title of All is True. Reckoning the two parts of Henry IV. as two plays, and adding the three parts of Henry VI., two of which at least had been already printed, we have proximate dates for sixteen plays, and to these we may add The Taming of the Shrew, which, from internal evidence, cannot have been written at a later date. The prologue of Henry V. dates it in 1599, and at this point, therefore, we can bring history and biography into immediate contact with the matters of fact they aim to represent

Richard II., Richard III. and Romeo and Juliet were printed in 1597, and Henry IV., Part I., and Love's Labours Lost the following year. In 1599, Romeo and Juliet was reprinted, corrected and augmented. In 1600, Henry IV., Part II., Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Henry V.; and Much Ado about Nothing; the two latter not in Meres's list.

Most of these editions are sufficient and accurate, and some have distinct signs of having been printed from play-house copies, in accidental substitutions of actors' names, as in the stage direction, "Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio, and Jack Wilson," a transcript, it may be, of Shakespeare's own handwriting. From this date editions of the new plays become rare, accurate editions

rarer, and the players seem to have had an interest in keeping their copies for their exclusive use, and to have attended to it more carefully. Many of these better editions are without the author's name on the title-page, and thus without the stamp of his sanction,

In 1597, the tendency of the London players to bring matter seditious and scandalous on the stage, was severely checked by menaces of suppression, and it was probably because so little of the threat was performed that Thomas Nash ventured to indulge his special vein in a play called the Isle of Dogs, of which no more is known than that in the performance the players, the Lord Admiral's men, added enough to make it still more offensive. Nash was arrested with others and sent to the Fleet, his papers seized, and the piece forbidden. Two houses, the Theatre and the Curtain, in Shoreditch, seem to have been particularly adventurous on this dangerous ground, though all the companies in the numerous London theatres were occasional transgressors. The sharp competition arising from numbers, probably acted as incitement to each to season their entertainments with salt that Shakespeare could afford to dispense with altogether.

The year 1598, which witnessed the extinction of one great light of Elizabethan poetry, Spenser,-the cold obstructor of his mistress's favour, Burleigh, died the same year,—is the date of the earliest play of Ben Jonson, then in his twenty-fourth year, Every Man in his Humour. Rowe relates," that Shakespeare's acquaintance with Ben Jonson began with a remarkable piece of humanity and good nature." Mr. Jonson, who was at that time altogether unknown to the world, had offered one of his plays to the players; it would have been rejected perhaps contemptuously but for Shakespeare, who "cast his eye upon it and found something so well in it as to engage him first to read it through, and afterwards to recommend Mr. Jonson and his writings to the public;" in other words, to cause the first essay to be represented, and to encourage more. This tradition might very easily in

deed have come down to Rowe through the many intimates of Ben Jonson, and it is confirmed by the notice in Jonson's own edition, that the play was first acted in 1598, and by the Lord Chamberlain's servants, Shakespeare's company, he himself taking one of the principal parts. It is one of many that cannot be positively proved, but can be readily believed; the existence of the tradition is probably proof enough that the act is one that Shakespeare was capable of, nay, that if he did not do precisely this he did some other kindness to Jonson very much like it, however indifferently reported. Jonson had need this year of all the friendship at his call, for in September he had a duel with Gabriel Spencer, a player in Henslowe's company, and slew him, receiving himself a wound in the arm from his adversary's sword, "ten inches longer" than his own.

The ill-starred absence of Essex in Ireland, in 1599, extended from March to September, and it was in the summer comprised in this interval that Henry V. was first brought out at the Globe, and the chorus expressed the national hopes for the success of the popular favourite. Later in the year, after his return and disgrace, we meet in a private letter with an allusion to the occupation of his friend Lord Southampton, the patron also, if not rather, friend of Shakespeare." My Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland come not to the court (it was then at Nonsuch); the one doth but very seldom. They pass away the time in London, merely in going to plays every day. 11th October, 1599." The two noblemen were connected by marriage with Essex, and were under a cloud with him.

In this year a small collection of poems was published under the title of "The Passionate Pilgrim," with William Shakespeare's name on the title-page, though many of them, it may be most, were notoriously by other poets. Ileywood, in claiming his own, referred to Shakespeare's displeasure; "but as I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage under whom he hath published them, so the author I know much offended with M

Jaggard, that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name."

66

We have seen that in the previous year Meres alluded to "sugared sonnets" by Shakespeare circulated among his private friends, and it is probable, that at this date he had already written the series that did not get into print until 1609, when they came out with the "Lover's Complaint." Jaggard's collection includes two, which with slight variations correspond with two in the larger collection, numbered 138 and 144. The first of these is addressed to a mistress by a lover, who speaks of himself as old," as "past the best." The other alludes to a friend, and also a mistress,—a fair youth, a dark woman, and expresses mistrust of a design of the latter to seduce the friend. These themes recur in the larger collection, of which the origin to this extent is carried up to the year 1599 at latest, and probably to a year before the mention of them by Meres, when Shakespeare was thirtythree. This is not too early for his allusions to age to be applicable to himself, considering that he speaks of the fortieth year as confirmed old age.

The first nineteen sonnets are addressed to a youthful friend, and their common purport is to urge his personal beauty as a motive for him to marry: the argument is pursued in much the same terms which Viola addresses to Olivia, Theseus to Hermia, Parolles to Helena, even we may say, Venus to Adonis,-the provident anticipation of beauteous offspring, to succeed and continue existing but transitory beauty. There is, however, something very remote and constrained in the anxiety of a friend, as it comes forward here, and hence a forced artificiality pervades the verses, ingenious as they are, and the effect is far from congenial. I presume the expla nation of this must be, that the tone as well as the form of the sonnet was accepted as conventional; this is pretty clear from comparison of the sonnets of the time: subtlety and ingenuity in varying and wire-drawing a sentiment, and art in completing an idea within the settled limits, in making it quite fill them and but just

fill them, these were achievements of more consequence than the subject itself, and most esteemed when most independent of subject. Sonnet writers for gencrations had sacrificed primary interest to dexterity in plaiting and twining and interlacing the motives of a very restricted subject, and hence it was natural, indeed was fitting, for him who would write sonnets, to choose a theme that would not suffer by, and would rather assist, such treatment; whether it were worth while attempting such theme or style at all may be a question, but the attempt prescribed the conditions, and whims will have their vent as well as stronger impulses. Felicities of expression, fantasies of imagery, flutter among the lines of the sonnet as various-feathered birds among the tanglement of a summer thicket.

In another series, more or less continuous, but for very disorderly arrangement, this theme is dropt, and the beauty of the youth is celebrated with his moral excellence and the affectionate regard of the poet, and the perishableness of beauty is placed in contrast with the persistence of affection. This series is much more profound and genuine than the former, but still not so much so as to forfeit the charter of sonneteers, which forbids that sentiment should ever extricate itself quite from sentimentality. Neither is sentimentalism wanting, though it stoops its very lowest in the other sonnets that upbraid the friend for robbing him of his mistress, and forgive him in the same breath. Had we a full biography of the poet with all its surroundings, we might explain much that is obscure in these remarkable effusions, but by no process that I can conceive, may we hope to recover from them allusions to facts and gain assistance to illustrate and reanimate the life.

The publication of 1609 was dedicated by the publisher to "Mr. W. H. as the only begetter of the sonnets," -the cause and occasion of them, we interpret,—with wish for the eternity promised by the poet, an allusion to the eighty-first sonnet. The sonnets 134 and 135 have been understood rather rashly as showing that the friend's