cloister, but the study; here thought is free, and books are prizable above a dukedom. Here, too, is England, its turfy mountains and flat meadows and nibbling sheep, and furze and broom, and oak and lime; its sun-burned sicklemen; its bogs and fens and fen fires, its spongy April, its flower-trimmed river-banks. Here, too, are England's daring and enterprise, naval, commercial, colonial; her nobler constant power and will to humanize the world, her baser, fitful pilferings and greed of gold.

Here, too, in a single play are all the conditions of Elizabethan or Jacobean society from Queen and King to clown; the royal ruler and the royal rogue; the courtier who only professes to persuade, the faithful counsellor, the smooth-faced, smooth-tongued traitor, the true friend; the high-souled philosopher, the low-souled simpleton or churl, and even the soulless man-beast; here is all that is young and fair and noble in man, and young and pure and beautiful in woman. These live their very life before our eyes; they adorn the virtues of their time, or betray its follies; they discuss for our instruction its graver or its lighter themes and theories, its politics, its chivalrous devotion to a monarch, its love of law and order, of home and fatherland, its pastimes, its beliefs and its imaginings, its philosophies and its foibles; they lay bare to us the nobler and the vainer hours of its inmost life. Could any history do more?

But this is not the whole picture; what charms us most in any such masterpiece of art is the creative presence of the artist; that is the picture after all; it is Shakespeare -Shakespeare whose greatness is the measure of his age, Shakespeare, the magnificent impersonation of Elizabethan England; Shakespeare, with his chastened mirth or his mirth uncontrollable; his opulent humour, gay or grave; his practical common sense and tolerance of the inevitable facts of life; his endless delight in beauty, truth, love; his passing mood of heartache, or troubled

brain, or beating mind; his pleasure in song; his ponderings over the insubstantial pageant of drama; and his deeper ponderings over the insubstantial pageant of the drama of life.

But, finally, we have also the abiding elements of the man—the nation-humanity; a reverent faith in "Providence divine"; a fixed belief that all things work together for good; that the rarer action is in virtue; that the readiness is all: "Every third thought shall be my grave"; that the fundamental doctrine of this human existence lies not in formal creeds but in the life of Christ: "Every man shift for all the rest"; that "There's nothing we can call our own but love” (v. 20-30).

But this living picture of Shakespeare's England, "The Tempest," is a drama; and it contains within itself another example of dramatic art-the masque which graced the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda; and thus it brings to our notice two other features of the time—a delight in dramatic representation, and the magnificent drama that partly created and was partly created by that delight.

Indeed, this is for England the epoch of drama; no life was ever so dramatic as that of the Age of Drake and the Armada, and the reflection of that life in art will naturally be found in the play and the theatre. Here at least is a partial explanation of what is usually regarded as phenomenal-the rapid development of the drama in the reign of Elizabeth; and I may add that printed books were beyond the reach of the populace, who were thus happily deprived of the novel and driven to the playhouse. Here they learnt to appreciate the importance of art form, and, as it happened, the very highest form of art--the poetic dramas of Shakespeare.

But the impulse that gave rise to this poetic drama in the reign of Elizabeth, came not only from within; it was due to many causes, some of which we now briefly summarize

First among these was an external pressure, both political and religious, that made England a strong and united nation, with a new belief in its great destinies. Next, England's sovereign, the "imperial votaress" of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," drew the hearts of her people unto herself, as the moon may draw the ocean; the tradition of chivalry had not died away, and only a woman could have blinded and baffled the astute bigot and despot who then disgraced the throne of Spain.

But I must pass lightly over these political influences, however interesting and important; nor may I dwell on the new world of thought and fancy which we know as the Renaissance, nor on that other new world of land and sea and sky, nor on the new spirit of enterprise that was to found our commerce and our colonies, nor on all the other countless and restless activities that followed this great awakening of the mind, the body, and the soul of the English nation; my concluding space must be reserved for a brief notice of the literary sources of this marvellous Elizabethan drama.

First to be mentioned is the Classic Drama, whose influence was partly direct, and partly diverted; of this we name three varieties, the Latin comedy, the plays of Seneca, and the great Greek tragedy, the first two being an earlier, and the third a later determining force. Next, the Romantic Drama of Italy, some of which was classical in origin; and together with this, the Italian romance generally. Third, the Miracle Plays, Moralities, Interludes, and rough Pageants of our English forefathers prepared the soil for alien dramatic growths, while yielding not a little of their own; and lastly, the new life given to England by the New Age awakened an interest in our English annals at the moment when historic personages were being put on the stage in place of the abstract vices and virtues of the Moralities.

We now pass on to dramatic influences that were con

temporary and personal; and from Elizabethan writers of plays to whom Shakespeare was most indebted we may at once select the three names of Lyly, Greene, and Marlowe. To Lyly Shakespeare owed a good deal of his style-and that often not of the best-whether in verse or prose; from the same writer he often derived imagery, mythology, dialogue and—but less frequently--his lyric charm; some of this also he caught from Greene, together with those elements in his work that may be styled romantic, idyllic, English; but it was the mighty genius of Marlowe that gave shape if not colour to the yet mightier genius of Shakespeare. For Marlowe at least began what Shakespeare so magnificently completed-the creation of a drama absolutely ideal in its comprehensiveness; a drama that combined all the foregoing elements, the classical, the medieval, the popular; the tragic, the romantic, the farcical; furthermore it was national, and it was inspired; and something of all this was due to Marlowe. Moreover, in his "Edward II." Marlowe is not only the exemplar, but also the rival of Shakespeare in the same kind; and, most important of all, he created that powerful precedent of blank verse in drama which drew Shakespeare away from the lyric lead of Greene, and consummated for ever the strength and beauty of art. "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear" and "Macbeth" are the world's masterpieces; let us shudder as we imagine what they would have been if written in rhyme

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CHAPTER III

BIOGRAPHICAL (HISTORY AND TRADITION)

"SHA

HAKESPEARE," says Dryden, "was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul." Is this one reason why we know so little of the body '-the mere outward life of the man? So little indeed, that a biography of Shakespeare should always begin with a statement of the half dozen facts that form its meagre foundations.

We may give these meagre facts in the words of Steevens: "All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is-that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon-married and had children therewent to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays-returned to Stratford, made his will, died and was buried."

But this brief summary of Steevens should be followed by at least one important reflection; the days of Shakespeare were not the days that deal in ana; they dismissed Marlowe with still less care or courtesy; they forgot the very birthdays of Peele and Greene, of Chapman, Lodge, Nash, Kyd; and when I pointed to the meagre facts of Shakespeare's life, I meant rather a meagreness in comparison with the magnitude of his work; for his period of

1 May we conjecture that if Shakespeare had taken a more conscious interest in his art-his creations-himself-we should have heard more about him-and possibly have been none the better for it?