onwards to exhibit a new and important movement of thought and habit of reflection, congruous with much that is characteristic in the author exercising the influence proved as aforesaid, we are entitled to count it as important, and to doubt whether such a habit of reflection would have been overtly developed to anything like the same extent in the absence of the influence in question.

If my essay substantially makes out a case of this kind for the influence of Montaigne upon Shakespeare, it is so far justified. If I have failed to show more than that Shakespeare in a number of passages has parallels with Montaigne which might or might not be chance coincidences, the main thesis has broken down. I would merely beg the reader to note that the possibility of chance coincidence is repeatedly recognised by me in regard to passages which would singly count for little, but are noted for the sake of completeness of survey.

I

THE GENERAL SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM

MANY reasonable judgments convey less edification than is unwittingly set up by one of another order, put forth by the late Mr. Halliwell Phillipps in 1850. Later in his life, the same industrious student did good service in commentating Shakespeare; but it required probably the confidence of youth as well as the preevolutionary habit of thought to make possible the utterance in question. "An opinion has been gaining ground," wrote Mr. Halliwell Phillipps, "and has been encouraged by writers whose judgment is entitled to respectful consideration, that almost if not all the commentary on the works of Shakespeare of a necessary and desirable kind has already been given to the world." No critic, it may be presumed, would venture such a deliverance to-day. In an age in which all lore,

1

1 Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on The Plots of Shakspere's Plays, 1850.

down to the pre-suppositions of physics, is being sceptically reconsidered, it will not be suggested that the last word has been said on Shakespeare. Rather may it be said that the body of work labelled with his name is presenting itself to critical eyes more and more as a series of problems calling for a thoroughness of investigation never yet attained by his most zealous students. The extent and source of the non-Shakespearean matter long seen or suspected in many of the plays, their chronology, the evolution of their style, the intellectual influences undergone by the poet, his psychic and ethical cast-all these issues, to say nothing of the irrepressible Baconian controversy, and the problem of the sonnets, are more and more coming to the front in Shakespeare study, popular and academic. The most searching and persuasive æsthetic criticism of the great tragedies yet produced is the fruit of the early years of the present century;1 and if other sides of the study have been less successfully prosecuted there is the more need to attend to them.

One of the main difficulties in regard to all of the problems named is their interdependence. The nature of Shakespeare's culture-preparation and moral bias cannot be put with precision

1 I allude, of course, to Professor Bradley's work.

and comprehensiveness until we settle what is and what is not genuine in the plays ascribed to him; and in so far as points of chronology turn on points of style, it is necessary to make sure whose style we are reading at any point in the series. Nor, until that be settled, can there be certainty of judgment all along the line as to the ethical content of the dramas. Yet, thus far, the interdependence of the problems in question has hardly been realised. Questions as to Shakespeare's moral idiosyncrasy have been put and answered by critics who have not even noticed the question, What is Shakespeare; and students who work at the problem of culture-influences have either settled with unwarrantable confidence or entirely overlooked the primary problem of discrimination between genuine and spurious matter. Thus Dr. H. R. D. Anders has usefully though imperfectly collected the data as to the literary influences of every kind undergone by the author of the plays; but has never considered the difficulty of ascribing all the plays to one author. Others have made the same omission in the course of similar undertakings; and emphatic pronouncements upon the poet's mental evolution proceed upon data of the most unequal solidity as to what the poet wrote, and when he wrote it.

If progress is to be made, however, it can hardly be by a simultaneous seizure of all the problems involved. We can but hope to keep the existence of the others in view in the attempt to solve any one. And it is with a full theoretic recognition, at least, of the complexity of the general problem that the present attempt is made to reach critical conclusions upon a special problem which was long ago raised for students of Shakespeare, and which is found to implicate other issues the problem, namely, of the influence which the plays show their author to have undergone from the Essays of Montaigne.