sometimes "draws out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." And however superbly lovely that verbosity often is, it is the enemy, not the friend, of the dramatic method. Shakspeare had learned the art of making a play (as I have pointed out) in the best of all ways. He had served an apprenticeship to the stage, but as yet he had not learned how to discipline the resources of his poetic invention. This he had to teach himself, or learn for himself, by another experience. Shakspeare probably (may we not say certainly ?) never thought of posterity, never thought even of his plays being read or criticised outside the walls of the theatre. It suited his purpose to ridicule a fashion, at the same time displaying all its intellectual capabilities, without remembering that a fashion (because it is a fashion) passeth away; and that even the ridicule of a fashion may be as ephemeral as the fashion itself. Hence is it that, having no national theatre (not having even what all second-class towns have in Germany), scarcely any of us have tested on the stage the admirable effectiveness of this comedy; and perhaps in consequence we have been disheartened and repelled in the reading from one of the most human and even pathetic of Shakspeare's plays.

Other important plays belonging to this first period are the Midsummer Night's Dream, between 1591 and 1593, and Romeo and Juliet, 1595 or 1596. Of these I can speak more

briefly, for, owing to stage representations and other reasons, they are familiar to us all. On the internal evidence of style (for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear) they are as manifestly the production of Shakspeare's earliest stage as Love's Labour's Lost. The frequency of the rhymed couplet, and even of stanzas diversifying the couplet, and the lyric colouring of the poetry throughout, are in these two other plays also. But already we mark two things: that this exuberance is more subdued than in the earlier comedy; and that it is less felt by the reader, because of the more abundant incident, and the quicker movement, of the dramas. We go on to

notice that as human feeling and passion assert themselves in these plays, and the poet himself is stirred by the "pity of it," even in the dilemmas and cross-purposes of poor Hermia and Helena, rhyme drops off from his style, and the freer blank verse asserts its necessity. Though in Romeo and Juliet whole scenes are written in rhyme, yet when it comes to the mighty passion of the pleading between the lovers, or of Juliet's terrible soliloquies, rhyme disappears. We feel— and we see how Shakspeare felt that though, while the course of true love runs smooth, Friar Laurence may well deliver his fatherly counsel in smooth neat couplets, yet when once the great thoughts, the deep griefs, begin to burst and break through all that is unreal in man, the artificial adjuncts of speech are out of place. While Romeo

is yet luxuriating in his day-dream of Rosaline, we are not offended that he can remonstrate (even in stanza) with his friend Benvolio, who bids him look farther afield :

When the devout religion of mine eye

Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires;
And these, who often drown'd could never die,
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars !
One fairer than my love! the all-seeing sun
Ne'er saw her match since first the world begun.

But when Romeo appears in Capulet's orchard, beneath Juliet's window, the key of passion has changed, and the key of language has changed with it :

O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!

She speaks:

O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven

Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.

I shall have occasion to say something further on this subject in my next lecture. In the meantime, I must speak of Shakspeare's earliest prose. In both plays I have been discussing, certain portions of dialogue are in prose, and for the most part, like the verse, largely infected with the euphuistic

trick of the current fashion. The puns, and the word-quibbling and straw-splitting in the conversations of Armado with the page, or Romeo with his friends, are due not merely to the circumstance that John Lyly had set the example of writing comedy in prose, and had naturally therefore used the style that he had brought to perfection and given a name to. There was also the contributing fact that the young men of the court and society in Elizabeth's day-the Mercutios and Osrics of actual life whom Shakspeare had met in company of his friend Lord Southampton -were themselves given to use a dialectic jargon, which was in effect the argot, the slang, of the hour. It was natural in a writer of comedy, who had yet to make his name, to copy in his prose-speaking characters the idiom of the day. But happily for the development of Shakspeare's power, it fell to him to draw characters of quite other class and breeding than the Osrics and Mercutios, and in providing them with dialogue to discover in himself a faculty in which he leaves contemporaries and predecessors behind him even more rapidly and decisively than in the domain of poetry. Christopher Marlowe had written some superb dramatic blank verse before Shakspeare wrote a play at all. Greene and Peele had each written melodious and flexible verse of fine quality. And all these, in certain scenes of their plays, had short passages of comic dialogue in prose; but of these three men, one (Marlowe) a

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genius of all but the first rank, and the others endowed with real poetry and charm, it is not unjust to say that the dialogue of their comic characters never rises above buffoonery. Faustus and the Tamburlaine plays-where Marlowe's "mighty line" is at its mightiest—the incidental comic scenes are little more than ribaldry; and, as far as we can discover, this wonderful genius was all but destitute of such humour, at least, as could express itself in comic characterisation. And it is this which constitutes another of Shakspeare's immense gifts to us. Before him, the comic characters of the stage were only just emerging from their undoubted germtype the vice of the miracle and morality play. They came upon the stage, like the vice, "to make pastime," to amuse the "groundlings," who may have begun to tire of the sentimental interest. Already, in plays we have been considering, we have seen how Shakspeare was "drawing away" from this crude idea of a low-comedy personage. The clown Costard in Love's Labour's Lost is, like the rest of the characters, more or less tarred with the euphuistic brush; but there is already in him, we may say, an individuality. He is a character, and not merely a clown. And I need not say that the Midsummer Night's Dream had clearly enough shown that the comedy of low - life need not in future be but another name for buffoonery, unless indeed (a large exception!) the performer of the character chose to make it so.