while there is enough in common between the two to assure us that in each there is at least something of the substance of truth. The authenticity of the celebrated Kesselstadt death-mask is very doubtful, but we could wish to believe that this noble and refined face was indeed that of Shakespeare. The Chandos, the Felton, the Jansen, and the Stratford portraits are all of questionable pedigree; many other alleged likenesses can be proved to be forgeries. We must be content to accept certain broad facts from the bust and the Droeshout print, and supply from our imagination the spirit and the life which these unfortunately lack. And if this should leave us at the last unsatisfied we may be well content to follow the counsel of Ben Jonson:

Reader, looke

Not on his Picture, but his Booke.

II.

Studying Shakespeare's Book of Might, as Jonson exhorts us to do, we assuredly make acquaintance with the man in the best possible way; we are

constantly in con

he neighbours us on our intellect, moves firms our will, ter, touches our envelops us with his wisdom, courage, We breathe his in

so effectually does hind his creation, live and move in sence, it seems as and could never Let us take heart; offspring of Shakeknows the man, more intimate with than if he were to

now and again in

tact with his mind; every side, rouses our passions, conmoulds our characspirit to finer issues, the atmosphere of mirth, benignity. fluence. And yet

he hide himself bethat even while we

his power and preif we knew him not know him aright. he who knows the speare's genius and indeed is far Shakespeare's mind meet the great poet the tiring-room of

the Globe, or the inner chamber of the Mermaid Tavern, or even in the quietude of his Stratford fields and lanes.

Shakespeare was fortunate in the moment of his advent to the stage. The English people had successfully passed through a period of probation, and now stood "upon the top of happy hours." The classical culture of the Renaissance and its passionate temper had been united in the national mind with the grave thought and the moral earnestness of the Reformation. The fires of Smithfield

were extinct; the conspiracies against the queen had been defeated; the Spanish fleet had been flung from our inviolable shores. A spirit of unbounded energy was abroad, with an exultant patriotic pride and an exhilarating consciousness of power. It was a great age of action, and men through their imagination were swift to enter into all that great deeds spring from-high thoughts, ardent desires, fierce indignation, fervent love. Life in every form and aspect was infinitely interesting to them. And if they saw and felt the tragic side of things, none the less did they enjoy the comedy of human existence. Its laughter and its tears were alike near and real for them, and one of these, as they felt, could easily pass into the other.

The moment was especially a fortunate one for a dramatic writer. The development of every art during its earlier stages is gradual and slow; the bud insensibly swells and matures, then suddenly some genial morning the calyx bursts, the bud becomes a blossom, and all its colour and fragrance are open to the day. So it was with the dramatic art in the later Elizabethan years. Its history from the earliest miracle-plays had been one of some centuries. The drama was not the creation of a few eminent individuals, but rather a product of the national mind distinguished by the features of the national character. In the Collective Mystery, which surveyed the history of the human race from the origin of man to the judgment-day, it had gained an epic breadth. In the Moralities it had acquired an ethical depth, a seriousness of moral purpose, and this didactic tendency had in a measure been saved from the aridity and abstractedness of mere allegory by the close connection of the Morality with historical passions, persons, and events. In both the Miracles and the Moralities scope had been found for the play of humour, sometimes deliberately sought as a relief from the poetry of edification, sometimes naively mingling with passages of grace, tenderness, or pathos, and enhancing the effect of these. Under the influence of a growing sense of art, aided by classical models, and Italian plays and tales of passion and of wit, the elder forms of the English drama passed away or were transmuted into regular tragedy, comedy, and history. The mirth was still often rude, but it began to be organized around some dramatic centre, and to find its sources not merely in ridiculous incidents, but in what is mirth-provoking in human character. The terror and pity were often coarsely stimulated by scenes of outrage and inexhaustible effusion of blood; but amid these scenes of horror figures which had in them at least great tragic possibilities sometimes appeared. Perhaps the most truly English of the several dramatic forms was the Chronicle History, allied at once with tragedy and comedy, but in some degree saved from the extravagances of each by the substantial matter of historical fact with which it dealt. When great deeds were actually accomplished by Englishmen they had a ready credence of the imagination for the heroic achievements of their ancestors as set forth in these Histories. They had even some of the elements of a true historic sense.

Shakespeare's immediate predecessors in the drama were scholar-poets, who yet, with one exception-that of John Lyly-may be said to have used popular methods, and to have made their appeal not to scholarly or courtly spectators, but to the people. As poets of the Renaissance they delighted in classical allusion and classical imagery, but these served chiefly as a colour and varnish of their art; in conception it was essentially romantic and English of the Elizabethan days. The tragedies of Marlowe in their plots are pure melodrama, but the melodrama is glorified by the genius of a poet who was a lofty idealist in art, and whose imagination hungered and thirsted after beauty. In each of his earlier plays a great protagonist stands forth who is the incarnation of some supreme passion; Tamburlaine, embodying the mere lust of sway in its crudest form; Barrabas, the passion of avarice with attendant power; Faustus, the desire of boundless knowledge with the empire that knowledge brings. In Edward II. the dramatist gave the model of a noble historical play, from which Shakespeare perhaps made studies in writing scenes of his own Richard II. Comedy owed nearly as much to Greene and Peele as tragedy owed to Marlowe. They first lifted comedy out of its mean surroundings and made it poetical. Not that they despised buffooneries and horseplay as modes of raising a laugh, but they did not rest content with these. Amid the sordid haunts and coarse excesses of his London life Greene had an imagination which delighted in the beauty and innocence of the countryside and rural pleasures, real or Arcadian; in the company of knaves and trulls he could conceive, as no other dramatist of his time, the purity and sweetness of English wife and maiden. From each of his predecessors Shakespeare gained something for his art, and he quickly surpassed them all. From Marlowe he learnt the use of that majestic measure, blank verse, first heard on a public stage in the tragedy of Tamburlaine; and it became ductile in his hands and capable of infinite variety. From Greene he learnt the use of the rhymed couplet, which he employed with such happy facility in his earlier plays. Kyd it may have been who instructed him in various pieces of rhetorical sleight of hand in verse, which could be adapted to the expression of dramatic passion or to the control of that expression. The prose of lively dialogue, with quick turns of wit and repartee, which we find in the first comedies of Shakespeare, was in large measure derived from Lyly.

In all that is external and mechanical the theatre was still comparatively rude. During Shakespeare's connection with the stage the buildings used for dramatic entertainments were of two classes-public theatres, and those which were called private. The private theatres were the smaller in size, and were wholly roofed in, whereas the public theatres, except over the stage and boxes, were open to the sky. In private theatres the performances commonly took place by the light of candles or cressets; in public theatres, by daylight. In both the play began in the afternoon, often at three o'clock, and ended at five or between five and six o'clock. The spectators who occupied the pit or "yard" were obliged

in public theatres to stand; in private theatres they were seated. The interior form of theatres was usually circular or oval, and the boxes or “rooms” and galleries or "scaffolds" rose above one another in tiers as they do at present. The prices for admittance to various houses and to various parts of the house ranged from one penny or twopence to two shillings or half-a-crown. In public theatres young men of rank and fashion were accommodated with stools on each side of the rush-strewn stage, where their attendants waited upon them and supplied them with their pipes of tobacco. Ladies visiting the theatre sometimes wore masks. Movable painted scenery had not yet been devised; but stage properties, some of which served as elements of scenery, were numerous; rocks and tombs, stairs and steeples, banks and bay-trees, are enumerated in an old inventory. Costumes were often rich and costly. In front of the stage ran curtains which could be drawn and withdrawn as was needful, and at the back of the stage similar curtains, named "traverses," occupied the place of our scenery, and could be used for exits and entrances of actors. When a tragedy was represented the stage was sometimes hung with black. Towards the rear of the stage rose an upper stage, from which, when it seemed suitable, part of the dialogue could be spoken. This upper stage might be imagined the walls of a besieged city as in King John, or a balcony as in Romeo and Juliet, or a stage within the stage as in the play-scene of Hamlet. The opening of the play was announced by three soundings or flourishes of the trumpet; during its performance a flag displayed from the roof informed the public in the streets that entertainment was provided for them within. A player wearing a black velvet cloak delivered the prologue. In the intervals of acting the band, stationed below at the side of the stage, helped to beguile the time. Occasionally an epilogue was pronounced; we find that such was the case with As You Like It, where the epilogue is spoken by Rosalind in prose, and the Tempest, where it is spoken by Prospero in verse. A prayer for the reigning monarch, recited by the actors kneeling on the stage, closed the piece. But this devout exercise was often immediately preceded or followed by the clown's "jig," a humorous or burlesque effusion in verse, often rhymed, which the merryman sang, sometimes dancing while he sang, to the accompaniment of pipe and tabor. It must be remembered as one of the most important differences between the Elizabethan stage and the stage subsequent to the Restoration of King Charles II., that in the earlier period female parts were taken by boys. "By 'r lady," says Hamlet to the growing youth who acted the Player Queen, "your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God, your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring." And among the possible indignities on which the imagination of the Egyptian queen dwells is that of being presented by the comedians on the stage, where some "squeaking Cleopatra" might "boy her greatness." We can well believe that Shakespeare would have rejoiced if it were possible to intrust such parts as those of Cleo

patra, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Rosalind, Viola, Imogen, to an actress of genius, capable of entering into all his meanings, instead of to a performer of the other sex, "not old enough for a man, nor young enough for à boy; as a squash is before 't is a peascod, or a codling when 't is almost an apple." Nor can we suppose that he was contented with the scanty resources of the Elizabethan theatre,

or thought its poverty an advantage to his art. In the Prologue to King Henry V. he apologizes for the very inadequate representation of great historical events, and appeals to the imagination of the spectators to supply the deficiencies of the stage.

A rude sketch of the interior of the Swan Theatre, London, as it was about the year 1596, was not long since brought to light in the University Library, Utrecht. It is from the hand of a learned Dutchman, Johannes de Witt, who