some of the earlier comedies must also have been brought out; and of these there is not one that would not fully suffice both a poetic and dramatic reputation. Now it is quite certain, as we shall see, that at least sixteen of Shakespeare's plays were in existence before 1598, the list including all the secondary plays and many of his masterpieces; and simple counting back upon our fingers may convince us that his commencement as a dramatist could not have been later, and might have been somewhat earlier, than 1589. It would seem, then, that Shakespeare's authorship can scarcely be considered to have commenced later than that of Marlowe, though it may have been only after lapse of a year or two that his gentle and more tempered vein even in the fury of a passion, carried off the approval of the more numerous hearers, as well as of the select and the refined.

The year 1589 furnishes a sarcastic allusion by Nash to an author of a play of Hamlet' in these terms :—

"It is a common practise now a days among a sort of shifting companions that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavours of art, that could scarcely latinize their neck-verse if they should have need; yet English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as Blood is a beggar, and so forth; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches."

This is certainly very much in the tone and style of Greene's invective, and the agreement confirms Knight's conjecture, that Nash, and not Lodge, was the youthful satirist the dying collegian addressed, as a quondam associate and ally. Nash is indignant at the success of a dramatist who meddles with art, who does not shun even classical subjects, though unqualified by university education, and helps himself out of Seneca's tragedies in an

1 It should be noted that Hamlet does not appear in the Register of the Stationers' Company" until 1602, and in its present form cannot have been written much before that date. The above extract seems to point to an early form of the play, if it may be taken as referring to Shakespeare.

English translation,—so little Latin is he master of,— a mere interloper from his original and deserted profession of the law. Noverint is the technical beginning of a bond. The satire, such as it is, evidently touches Shakespeare in several points, and the mention of Hamlet seems to prove that it was intended for him. The quarto Hamlet may easily be a badly reported copy of one of his earliest plays; and defective as it is, who shall say that the quoted phrase was not there originally; there is quite enough in Titus Andronicus to account for the reference to Seneca's Thyestes; and if Nash supposed Shakespeare had been a lawyer's clerk, it is no more than has been inferred by others in later times, on grounds, as we have seen, of high probability. The other report that has come down to us, that he had been a schoolmaster, loses in probability from not having provoked a cavil on this occasion. course an angry satirist does not sift even rumours, much less evidence; but there is a correspondence between the pique of Greene and that of Nash that would convince me that the object of it was the same, though Hamlet had not been mentioned. Nash, no doubt, in denouncing "a sort of shifting companions," may have taken a characteristic from more than one, but he certainly individualizes at last.

Of

I am strongly confirmed in my opinion that the sneer of Nash at Hamlets and handfuls of tragical speeches, was indeed a glance at Shakespeare and an early form of his great tragedy, by what appears like a manifest counterthrust in the rewritten and perfected play of a later year. Nobody supposes now that the recitations of the players in the later Hamlet either were intended to be or are ridiculous or bombastical,-how it is that they not has been well explained by Schlegel; they are acted, imitation upon a ground of imitation, and be detached and distinguished from it by heightlours and strengthened outlines, that would be

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inadmissible in the primary imitation. There is a second factitious medium interposed between them and the spectator, by which extravagance is toned into a relative sobriety; while, but for this extravagance, sobriety Iwould have been flattened into tameness. Thus these speeches became the most remarkable exemplification of the critical precepts of the Prince which touched the contemporary drama so closely, by giving rein to the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion, yet so smoothed and tempered at its very height, as to be in the directest contrast to speeches that could be only opportunities for a robustious periwig-pated fellow to tear a passion to tatters, to very rags." If this be so, it is certainly remarkable that it was from a play of Nash that Shakespeare took the theme for his introduced tragical speeches, and so rewrote them that it was impossible for an audience familiar with the model not to draw a comparison between the rude and the ideal, and by the appreciation of true tragic height, have a quickened sense for the detection of fustian, bombast, and rant, some sparks of poetry notwithstanding. The following, a speech from Dido, Queen of Carthage, written by Nash, in conjunction with Marlowe, I extract to illustrate and justify my inference: Pyrrhus has been described as striking off the hands of Priam at the sack of Troy :

"At which the frantic queen leap'd on his face,
And in his eyelids hanging by the nails,
A little while prolonged her husband's life.
At last the soldiers pull'd her by the heels,
And swung her howling in the empty air,
Which sent an echo to the wounded king:
Whereat he lifted up his bed-rid limbs,

And would have grappled with Achilles' son,
Forgetting both his want of strength and hands;
Which he disdaining, whisked his sword about,
And with the wind thereof the king falls down:
Then from the navel to the throat at once
He ripped old Priam, at whose latter gasp
Jove's marble statue 'gan to bend his brow,
As loathing Pyrrhus for this wicked act."

We may now return upon a topic designedly pretermitted, and spend a paragraph or two on the traditions that relate to Shakespeare's departure from Stratford.

There is no evidence to prove that he may not have come to London in the latter half of 1584, at the age of twenty, instead of eighteen, as reported by tradition. In 1587, the players of the Earl of Leicester, the company of James Burbage, to which he is found attached, was one of five to whom payments were made for performances by the Stratford corporation. They had frequently visited the town before, and this may easily have been the opportunity that decided the poet to attach himself to the profession, and seek for fortune and advancement where he could at the same time indulge and exercise the impulse of his genius The connection of the Earl of Leicester with Kenilworth, and the frequency of names and combinations of names agreeing with those of his players, in Warwickshire and even at Stratford and the neighbourhood, render it not unlikely that the company was closely connected with this county, which had a renown for shows and mysteries, from the celebrated displays and festivities of Coventry. Richard Burbage, the son of James, and the future friend and fellow of Shakespeare, must have been very nearly of his age; he became the chief of the original actors in his friend's plays, and the reputation that he gained proves that he must have been a genius of the very highest histrionic stamp. Nature, in giving to the world the genius of Shakespeare precisely at the time that the stage had become settled and organized, precisely at the interval between the equally inimical predominances of Catholicism and of Puritanism, and when political quarrels had not yet gained such head as to cause the destruction of courts, that were indispensable for the protection and encouragement fined, intellectual, and costly arts,-Nature did not e, besides, conducting to the very conjuncture of se favouring circumstances, in exactest coincidence me and place, the very man to give a living voice motion to the dumb and still imaginations of his

creative mind. The effect is the same whether Richard Burbage and Shakespeare encountered first at Stratford or at London; if it were at Stratford it is manifest that we are on the trace of an influence competent to have decided his course-whatever others failing this may have supplied its place. Among these would have been the crisis in his father's affairs; tradition says that another was an embroilment with Sir Thomas Lucy, through a deerstealing frolic, reprehensible enough, no doubt, for the father of a family, young as he might be, but still not impossible. The whole story may possibly be false; but it must still be noted that the tale has details that fit in remarkably with facts about this very date.

Rowe's account is to the effect that for a certain time after his marriage he continued at Stratford in a settled occupation, which he may have known from tradition or gathered by inference from the registry of his children.

"In this kind of settlement he continued for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of forced him out of his country and that way of living he had taken up..... He had by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deerstealing, engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London."

The tradition was current in the neighbourhood of Stratford about 1700, and the ballad was said to have been stuck upon the knight's park gate; and what purported to be the first verse of it came down through this channel to Oldys and Capell.

"A parliamente member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scarecrowe, at London an asse,
If lowsie is Lucy, as some folk miscall it,
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befall it:
He thinks himself great,

Yet an asse in his state,

We allow by his eares but with asses to mate