King John marks a decided advance, and this notwithstanding much fidelity to an original which is far from worthy of contempt. It is in such personages as Falconbridge, Hubert, the little prince, and the two wrangling queens that we find the distinctness of characterization, the mingling of humor and pathos that came later so much more fully to distinguish our greatest dramatic poet. And in the dastard John appears, too, suggestion of a deeper study of character. But Shakespeare was not content to stop here. He turned from revision to imitation, recognizing, as who could avoid it, the masterly passion of Marlowe and filled with ambition to emulate his triumphs. Richard III, which must soon have followed King John, in 1593, is Shakespeare's one thoroughly Marlowesque tragedy. And this is patent alike in the heroic proportions of the distorted hero, monster that he is of conscious wickedness and crafty design, and in the lyric quality of the emotion which pervades many scenes. Richard III must have been to Shakespeare a tour de force much like the earlier Titus. Both are splendid followings of another man's gait and manner. Indeed, if we would realize to the full what Shakespeare could do with a popular historical portrait, his Richard Crookback should be compared with the older True Tragedy of Richard III, to which gross if strongly written play he owed very little.

Marlowe's Edward II must have been written within a twelvemonth of the date of his death in May, 1593. Whether Shakespeare's Richard III preceded Marlowe's play or not, it may be taken as almost certain that Richard II was planned in direct and daring emulation of Marlowe's successful tragedy. The subject-matter of these two later plays is as nearly identical as English history can afford; for in each a monarch who is unworthy to rule is thrown, in the contrast of circumstances, against a group of rebellious barons, and in each his problematic character with his pitiful fall holds the center of the stage. But in Richard II, though he chose Marlowe's theme, Shakespeare enfranchised himself from Marlowe's method. It seems almost as if Shakespeare had determined to rival Marlowe on his own ground but in a manner of Shakespeare's own choosing. The conception of the wayward poetical

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minded king, a poseur in fortune as well as in mischance, the contrast of his levity with the sagacity, unimaginativeness, and political effectiveness of Bolingbroke, the grasp and knowledge of the world which this tragedy presumes, and the sure touch and poetry with which it is written and embellished all of these things place Richard II not only far above King John and Richard III but disclose Shakespeare as the triumphant rival of the now dead Marlowe, even though it be confessed that the closing scene of the latter's Edward remained, in its terror and pathos, as yet unequaled by the younger dramatist.

In dramas such as these of Shakespeare and of Marlowe the tragedy of a man at odds with fate transcended the accidental circumstance that the protagonist was an English sovereign. But the average type, that in which history was staged epically and continuously, remained high in the popular esteem. Not to go too far afield here in the mention of what can be no more than mere names in a work of this scope, Peele's inferior Edward I, 1590-1591, had been of this type; and so was Heywood's Edward IV, 1594, a play of no inconsiderable merit and dramatic excellence; Munday and Chettle's Robin Hood, Earl of Huntington, 1598, and several like productions. So that when Shakespeare put forth, in 1597, the first part of his Henry IV, with its history diversified by the humors of a group of irregular humorists, headed by immortal Falstaff, he was only returning to the epic type of the chronicle play which from the very first had admittted the element of comedy. The popularity of Henry IV, with its story of the wild life of Prince Hal, the contrasted heroic Hotspur and witty, godless Falstaff and his rout, took the town by storm, and a second part was almost immediately demanded. To this Shakespeare responded in 2 Henry IV, and the following year witnessed the conclusion of the trilogy in Henry V, England's ideal king in action in triumphant warfare with England's hereditary enemy, France.

In these three dramas we have the height to which the English chronicle play attained. Shakespeare made as much of the undramatic elements of continuous history as was possible and he covered their inherent want of cohesion with his

consummate art of portraiture, character thrown into contrast, and with the incessant play of his incomparable humor. The picture of the hero king, Henry V, when all has been said, is one of the most remarkable in Shakespeare. For it is the practical, unimaginative man of action, a conformist at heart despite his youthful escapades, who may be conceived to be the most difficult for the imaginative and poetical mind to appreciate and sympathetically reproduce. But Shakespeare himself was a confident and sagacious man of affairs; and there are no limits to the catholicity of his sympathies and affections. Shakespeare is as present in the stern and inevitable repudiation of Falstaff by the regenerate young king as he is in his revels and those of his pals, royal and common, at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap.

Falstaff is more frequently mentioned in contemporary allusion than any other character of Shakespeare; and the first part of Henry IV (with Richard III, for other reasons) reached a larger number of editions within the period of Shakespeare's lifetime than any other one of his plays. This popularity led also to imitation. Four poets in the employ of Henslowe Munday, Drayton, Wilson the younger and Hathway - set to work on a hurry order to write a rival play and produced two plays on the life of Sir John Oldcastle, under which name Shakespeare seems at first to have figured Sir John Falstaff. Only one of these plays remains extant and it is far from deficient either in humor or dramatic spirit; although, it must be confessed, that the thievish hedge-priest, Sir John of Wrotham, is a petty and futile attempt to rival the unparalleled wit of Falstaff. A tradition relates that, delighted with these plays of Henry IV, Queen Elizabeth expressed a wish to see Falstaff depicted in love and that the Merry Wives of Windsor, 1598, was Shakespeare's reply. Clever and diverting comedy that it is, it is also notable as the only one of Shakespeare's frankly to accept an English scene. The buffeted and defeated Falstaff of the Merry Wives is but a shadow in silhouette in comparison with the robust lover of Doll Tearsheet in 2 Henry IV.

Although Henry VIII is a chronicle play, consideration

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of it may be deferred for the present because of its affiliations, by reason of Fletcher's hand in it, with the later plays of Shakespeare. Of the chronicle play in general it may be sufficient to say that it flourished in great variety of combination with other dramatic elements especially throughout the last ten years of Elizabeth's reign. In tragedy it begot such productions as Thomas of Woodstock, 1591, an exceedingly able anonymous play on events in the reign of Richard II which preceded Shakespeare's tragedy of that sovereign; it mingled with drama of domestic type in Heywood's Edward IV, with comedy of disguise in Look About You, 1594, and the Robin Hood plays of Munday and Chettle; and continued in the dramatic biographies of lesser historical personages such as Sir Thomas Moore, Cromwell, Stukeley (ranging from 1590 to 1596), and many more. On the death of the queen a series of obituary plays were staged, detailing the principal events of her life, directly as in Heywood's If You Know Me Not You Know Nobody; allegorically in Dekker's Whore of Babylon; or dealing with the history of her immediate predecessors, as in Sir Thomas Wyatt, the scene of which is laid in the reign of Queen Mary; or in Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, which describes events in the reign of Henry VIII. It is best to place Shakespeare's play on this monarch in this group, which falls within the first three years of James, whatever may have been its subsequent history.

Still another variation from the usual type of the chronicle play was that which dealt chronicle wise with the legendary history of England. Among Elizabethan annalists and writers of plays little distinction was drawn between the deeds of Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, Macbeth, and Henry V; for all were fish to the historical drag-nets of the time. Gorboduc and Jocasta first levied on material of the mythical historical type, although inspired primarily by Seneca. Peele apparently was the first to transfer this species of tragedy to the popular stage in Locrine, 1586, and the older King Leir, staged about 1594, and perhaps by Lodge, is another example. The Birth of Merlin, 1597, by William Rowley and several like productions soon followed. It was this type of

drama in its tragic form that Shakespeare soon glorified in Macbeth and King Lear. The final absorption of the chronicle play was romantic and in this, too, Shakespeare shared in such a play as Cymbeline, the scene of which is legendary ancient Britain, although its interest is purely romantic.

In 1598 Francis Meres included in his Palladis Tamia, "A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin and Italian Poets," recognizing Shakespeare therein as the greatest dramatist and poet of his day and declaring him "most excellent in both kinds [that is, comedy and tragedy] for the stage." His sonnets, as yet unpublished, his narrative poems, and twelve plays are mentioned by name; and the list includes all the plays named in this chapter except one, Henry V, which had not yet been staged. Meres further names a comedy under title of Love's Labor's Won. Some have thought this a lost play, others have identified it with Much Ado About Nothing or with All's Well that Ends Well. If (as still others have surmised), it was an earlier name for the Taming of the Shrew, that play, also, may have been among the experiments of Shakespeare in comedy, though its known. derivation from two earlier plays, The Taming of a Shrew and Gascoigne's Supposes, leaves it not improbable that Shakespeare, whatever the period of his work, was only the reviser.

Six comedies of Shakespeare remain above those already mentioned to attest the height of his dramatic genius in this kind of play within the remaining years of Elizabeth's reign. Of these Much Ado About Nothing is usually supposed to have been staged soon after the appearance in print of Meres' "comparative discourse." The story of Hero and Claudio was derived by Shakespeare from a novel of Bandello, though probably not without the intervention of an English play. The delightful courtship of Beatrice and Benedick seems an amplification of the relations of Rosaline and Biron in Love's Labor's Lost, and in its sheer comedy affords a happy contrast to the somber elements of the major plot of Don John's machinations. Dogberry and Verges, though their originals might well have kept the peace in any hamlet in England, were discernible in all their unmitigated absurdity only by the eye of