presumed, however miraculous and inconceivable. There are no certain proofs that he enjoyed the intimacy of literary associates beyond the purlieus of the theatre and certain small writers for the stage, Ben Jonson only excepted. Some of his earlier contemporaries, like Greene, made envious attacks upon him, significantly hinting at the incongruity between him and his supposed productions; though numerous other writers and poets of later dates, following the general report, unquestionably recognized him as the admitted author of the works which were attributed to him. He certainly had the acquaintance and friendship of Ben Jonson, who was famous among the literary men of his time, received the countenance of the Court, and enjoyed the intimacy and favor of high literary characters, and particularly of Lord Bacon, in whose service he was engaged for some years. Ben Jonson did not fail to discover 66 the Star of Poets" in these works; but his description of the person, qualities, genius, and individual characteristics of William Shakespeare, not to speak of his criticisms upon him and the players, do not help to remove the manifest contradiction that exists between the man and the works. The traditions of his having been a member of Raleigh's Club, and his wit-combats at the "Mermaid" (some books say "wet-combats") with Ben Jonson and the assembled wits, will not bear the test of critical examination: they rest, at last, on mere inference from the supposed relations, character, and genius of such an author, and are as baseless in reality as the conceit of worthy old Fuller, proceeding upon the indubitable fact that " his learning was very little," and the old saw, "Poeta non fit sed nascitur," that " as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the earth, so Nature itself was all the art that was used upon him." It was a shrewd conjecture of Dr. Maginn, that the reason why we know so little of him is, that "when his

1

1 Worthies of England, III. 284.

business was over at the theatre, he did not mix with his fellow-actors, but stepped into his boat, and rowed up to Whitehall, there to spend his time with the Earl of Southampton and the gentlemen about the Court." There may be some truth in this suggestion; but it will be necessary also to suppose an invisible boat and a further passage to Gray's Inn.

If these plays had not begun to appear for a period of ten years or so after William Shakespeare came to London, it might be possible to imagine, that, even in his employments, he might have found time and means to prosecute to some extent those studies which every reasonable mind must acknowledge to have been absolutely necessary in order to fit the most luminous natural genius for the writing of these dramas. But there was no such period: the plays began to appear at least as early as the year 1588, even if it be not satisfactorily proved, that the first sketches of several of them had been upon the stage for some years previous to that date, and before Shakespeare arrived in London. There were six years after this event in which the two principal poems may have been written, and before he was twenty-nine years of age. Doubtless, many poems of great merit have been produced at an earlier age than this: nothing need be objected on the score of age merely. Nor would it be anything remarkable that an actor should correct and amend, or even write or rewrite plays. Heming, or Condell, may have done as much as this. In fact, some plays were written by other actors and members of this same company; but they appear to have been no better than such authors might reasonably be expected to produce, and they speedily passed into oblivion. It might be admitted that William Shakespeare may have altered, amended, or rewritten, old plays to adapt them to his stage, without danger to the question of this authorship. The greater plays, it is true, were not produced until more than

1 Shakes. Papers (New York, 1856), p. 10.

ten years had elapsed. Of course, any author should be expected to grow in this time; but there is exhibited, in the character and succession of these works, an order of growth quite other than any that can be ascribed to a mortal man with the personal history which must be assigned to William Shakespeare; ascending, as it does, from the very gates of the university, upward and upward, into the highest spheres of human thought and culture.

§ 6. EARLY PLAYS.

Critical researches have demonstrated that this author gathered his materials from any quarry that was at hand, suitable to his purposes. Old ballads, poems, plays, novels, tales, histories, in English, French, Italian, Latin, or Greek, translated or untranslated, were made to yield their treasures of fact and fable. There had been an old play of "King John" in the reign of Edward VI. Some critics think that the "Troublesome Reign of King John," printed in 1591, and written in two parts, was an early work of this author, and the foundation of the "King John " of the Folio of 1623; but later writers, no doubt correctly, have attributed it to Marlowe, Greene, or Peele, or some other poet, though it was reprinted in 1611, and in 1622, with the initials "W. Sh." on the title-page; doubtless a trick of the booksellers to make it sell. The "King John" of Shakespeare is first mentioned by Meres in 1598; it was first printed in the Folio; and, in the absence of any other data than the style and manner of the composition, on which to fix the date of its production, Mr. White places it in the year 1596, while admitting that the author must have had the older play before him, or in his head, when this was written,1 and that the date of it may go back to 1591. The old play called the "Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth," which was acted on the stage prior to 1588, after having undergone a marvellous transformation, seems to

1 White's Shakes., VI. 15.

have grown into the two parts of the "Henry IV." and the "Henry V." 1 The second and third parts of the "Henry VI." were first known by wholly different titles, and, according to Malone, before Shakespeare appeared in London, and certainly as early as 1587-8. These also have been attributed by some critics to Marlowe, and by Mr. White to Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, in conjunction with Shakespeare; 2 and the first part of the "Henry VI.," never printed until it appeared in the Folio, the "Taming of the Shrew," and the

Titus Andronicus," have been placed in the same category by him, though beyond question they will have to be assigned to this author; and Malone believed them all to have been upon the stage at an earlier date than 1587. Mr. White concludes, however, that Shakespeare, in his subsequent revisions of these joint works, merely reclaimed his own. That the rejected passages were inferior to the parts retained, or rewritten, and not above the powers of Marlowe, Greene, or Peele, may safely enough be admitted; nor should it be at all surprising that these earliest efforts of a young author should be found to be somewhat inferior to his later works. The use in them of a single idiom which was then growing obsolete, and which more frequently occurs in Greene than in any of his contemporaries, but which was not often used, or was carefully eliminated by this author, together with some near equality of weight, rhythm, and style, may be allowed to have some consideration; but this same idiom, on which so much stress is laid as an ear-mark of Greene, is found, five times, within twenty lines of one of Bacon's translations of the Psalms, and occasionally, though not often, in the plays, as thus:

1 Knight's Studies of Shakes.

2 Essay on the "Henry VI.," White's Shakes., VII.

3 Psalm civ.

and the whole argument would seem to be a weak foundation for so large a theory; especially, if these plays be considered as the first attempt of a young writer, and produced probably somewhere between 1582 and 1589. Mr. White believes that men have been hung on less evidence than that which he produces. It is indeed very formidable; and it might carry the jury in the absence of better testimony; it is nevertheless quite certain that men have been hung on proofs that seemed equally clear, who afterwards

turned out to be innocent.

The "Timon of Athens" has been supposed to have been founded, in some part, upon an older play of that name; but the old play of "Timon," in manuscript, and apparently written by "a scholar," which was thought by Steevens to have been transcribed about the year 1600, and which came into the hands of Mr. Dyce, according to the opinion of Mr. Knight and other critics, was evidently never written by Shakespeare at all. Even in the face of facts like these, Malone could not persuade himself that Shakespeare could have begun to write before the year 1590; nor Mr. Collier, that he could have had any reputation as an author before 1593. They suppose these older plays to have been written by other authors, and that they were only retouched by Shakespeare. Whether they were the work of this author, or another, it is certain, at least, that they were afterwards taken up by him, and carefully elaborated into the plays which we now have. The “Timon of Athens" of Shakespeare was, doubtless, an original work of a much later date.

A cloud of obscurity hangs over the origin and early history of these older plays. These conclusions would seem to be sufficiently well warranted by the facts which we know: first, that some of these old plays were original first draughts of this author, and that some of them may have been based upon older plays of other authors; and second, that, in either case, they were already upon the stage at the