tic efforts rather than to the detail of the career of one of England's weakest kings. Says Hazlitt: "Edward II is drawn with historic truth, but without much dramatic effect. The management of the plot is feeble and desultory; little interest is excited in the various turns of fate; the characters are too worthless, have too little energy, and their punishment is, in general, too well deserved to excite our commiseration; so that this play will bear, on the whole, but a distant comparison with Shakespeare's Richard II in conduct, power, or effect. But the death of Edward II, in Marlowe's tragedy, is certainly superior to that of Shakespeare's king; and in heart-breaking distress, and a sense of human weakness, claiming pity for utter helplessness and conscious misery, is not surpassed by any writer whatever." "

The value of Marlowe's contribution to the drama is incontestable. He definitely stamped blank verse as the medium of the English drama and showed how great might be the assistance to a play of soaring rhetoric and striking poetry. Generally weak in characterization and frequently so in construction, he still opened as no one else had done the great founts of the imagination, and thus he challenged his great contemporary to even greater effort and still loftier achievement.

'Lecture II in "Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth."

CHAPTER V

SHAKESPEARE

27. Life.-William Shakespeare was born in Stratfordon-Avon in Warwickshire on or about April 23, 1564, the authority for this statement being the record of his baptism under date April 26, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, passed through various municipal offices, and his mother, Mary Arden before her marriage, was the daughter of a substantial farmer of Wilmcote, near Stratford. There are no records of the childhood and schooldays of the dramatist, though it is supposed that for some time he attended the grammar school at his home, learning the rudiments of such a subject as Latin. He possessed remarkable acquisitive power, however, and even if he had little regular schooling he was able to take in and use to the best advantage all the facts of language, science, or art that were to be gleaned from reading, conversation, or observation. On November 28, 1582, two farmers of Shottery, near Stratford, signed a guarantee bond "to free the bishop of responsibility in case of the subsequent discovery of any impediment rendering invalid the prospective marriage of William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway." Anne Hathaway was eight years older than her husband; her marriage doubtless took place very soon after the date of the bond; and her first child, Susanna, was born May 26, 1583. Two other children, the twins Hamnet and Judith, were baptized February 2, 1585.

These were all the children of Shakespeare, and the son Hamnet, for whom he had hoped so much, died when he was only eleven years old. About 1586, influenced somewhat possibly by the pressure upon him after a traditional deer-stealing episode, but doubtless more by the opportunities offered by the capital to a young man who was already the father of three children, Shakespeare went to London and soon became a part of the theatrical life of the day. By 1592 (as we know from the reference of Greene already cited) he was a rapidly rising playwright. He received to some extent the benefits of patronage, and he was an actor and a stockholder in the theatres of London as well as a playwright. By 1597 he seems so far to have improved his worldly station as to be able to relieve his father from pressing financial obligations and also to purchase New Place, the largest house in Stratford, though he did not return to take up his regular residence in the town for the next fourteen or fifteen years. For some years previous to 1604, when he was producing many of his greatest plays, Shakespeare seems to have lived at the home of a wigmaker and hairdresser, Christopher Mountjoy, in Cripplegate ward, just about a five-minute walk from St. Paul's. He was on pleasant terms with his literary associates, especially with such a man as Ben Jonson, but was also a man of unusual business ability, his income from all sources in his later years being computed at what would now be $25,000. About 1612 Shakespeare seems to have ceased the writing of plays and to have retired to Stratford. He died April 23, 1616, and was buried in the chancel of the Stratford church.1

1

The great authority on the biography of Shakespeare is Sidney Lee: Life of William Shakespeare; but for first study MacCracken,

28. Indebtedness to Predecessors.-It is a mistake to think of Shakespeare as a great and unheralded phenomenon who happened to be born in the reign of Elizabeth. His plays constantly reveal him as eminently of his age— representative of his age and at the same time universal in his appeal. We have seen that he was indebted to Lyly, to Greene, to Kyd, and to Marlowe for the distinctive contributions to the drama that he might utilize or not at his pleasure; he was indeed the heir of all who had preceded him in this particular form. An age of patriotism, alertness, and "curiosity" moreover had placed at his disposal all the treasures of the Renaissance. Hardly a scholar in the technical sense, he nevertheless read widely and discursively, and at the same time to good advantage. Of Latin he possessed at least an elementary knowledge; but Greek, Italian, Spanish, and French works he did not have to read in the original, as he could almost always find what he wanted in an English translation. His plays in numerous instances show him to have been familiar with the school books, Lilly's Latin Grammar and Aesop's Fables and with such a Latin author as Ovid as well. For his Roman tragedies he depended on Sir Thomas North's translation through the French of Plutarch's Lives; for Italian stories from Boccaccio, Ariosto, Bandello, and Cinthio he availed himself of such works as Painter's Palace of Pleasure and Arthur Brooke's poem, Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet; he was acquainted with early English folklore and legend; and

Pierce, and Durham: An Introduction to Shakespeare, and Neilson and Thorndike: The Facts about Shakespeare are quite sufficient. These are two excellent handbooks, admirably complementing each other, as the method of approach is somewhat different.

with the Bible, the greater works in English literature, and the plays that were being presented in his own time he was perfectly familiar. The whole matter of the sources of Shakespeare's plays is a study in itself; but at least enough has been said to show that in some measure at least the dramatist was the product of his age. He was in fact so well poised and possessed such an adequate sense of humor and human values that he even ventured upon mild satire of the conditions under which his own plays were produced (as in the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream).

29. Periods of Dramatic Work.-Shakespeare's dramatic activity is commonly divided into four periods. These, with the plays produced, are as follows:

(1) 1590-1594. Comedies: Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Tragedies: Titus Andronicus and probably the first draft of Romeo and Juliet (the play being revised 1597); Histories: Henry VI (three parts), Richard III, King John, Richard II.

(2) 1595-1600. Comedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night; Histories: Henry IV (two parts), Henry V.

(3) 1601-1609. Comedies: Troilus and Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure; Tragedies: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus.

(4) 1610-1612. Comedies: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest.

This enumeration of course takes no account of the so