nition. Davies, his contemporary, in his “ Folly," has these verses: Scourge of "TO OUR ENGLISH TERENCE, MR. WILL. SHAKESPEARE. And been a king among the meaner sort. And honesty thou sow'st, which they do reap, So to increase their stock which they do keep." Besides allusions that are obscure, but perhaps not impossible to clear up, this notice corresponds with the tradition last cited, if it did not originate it, that Shakespeare not unfrequently took the kingly part,—a part, it must be said, which, as a rule, does not make large demands on histrionic talent; in general stateliness or earnestness the part of the Ghost in Hamlet has also a certain agreement with that of old Adam, which would lead us to think that the histrionic vein of the poet was not the light and voluble or the vehemently impassioned, though probably more exalted than the dull and level line of the "heavy fathers" of the modern classification. The Shakespearian characters that Burbage is known to have represented are, Shylock, Richard III., Prince Henry, Romeo, Henry V., Brutus, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Pericles, Coriolanus; like Garrick and Kean he was below the middle height, and is thus characterized by Richard Flecknoe in a description of "an excellent actor," which he afterwards versified and applied directly to Burbage : "He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes as he never (not so much as in the 'tiring house) assumed himself again, until the play was done. He had all the parts of an excellent orator, animating his words with speaking, and speech with action, his auditors being never more delighted than when he spake, nor more sorry than when he held his peace: yet even then he was an excellent actor still, never failing in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gesture maintaining it still unto the height, &c." Will Kemp was considered not an unworthy successor of Tarlton, whose extemporising powers he emulated by those additions to his parts that Shakespeare denounces in Hamlet with so little mercy. The secret of his popularity does not appear in his original Merriments that have come down, but this is the fate of extemporisers; his contemporaries relished him highly, and have left many allusions to his wit and whim, both off the stage and on it. We have to thank the carelessness of old copyists or printers, who sometimes put the actor's name for that of his part, for knowing that he was the original Dogberry of Much Ado about Nothing, and Peter in Romeo and Juliet. We have the statement of Malone, a credible witness, that in 66 some tract," of which he had forgotten to preserve the title, John Heminge, one of the original editors of the plays, was said to have been the original performer of Falstaff. The leading members of the company so far as their wills have been traced, appear to have acquired considerable property; they are for the most part family men and householders, and take and rather rejoice in the style of gentlemen, and do not forget to leave tokens of attachment to their surviving fellows, whose kindly memory they evidently count upon and prize. On February 4, 1596, James Burbage bought of Sir William More, of Loseby, in Surrey, part of a large house in the Blackfriars, and soon after proceeded to turn it into the Blackfriars theatre. The scheme was opposed by some inhabitants of the precinct, who prayed the Privy Council "to take order that the same roomes may be converted to some other use, and that no playhouse may be used or kept there." The opposition, however, was ineffectual, and the playhouse was established. Burbage's sons tell its hisory shortly in their answer to the Lord Chamberlain, from which it appears that it was afterwards leased Evans, who first up the boyes commonly called the Queenes Majesties n of the Chappell. In processe of time the boyes grow ing up to bee men . . . . were taken to strengthen the Kings service and the more to strengthen the service. . . . [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Hemings, Condall, Shakspeare, &c." [Halliwell's "Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 90.] It is thus clear that 1603 is the earliest date at which it is possible for Shakespeare and the Burbages to have acted at Blackfriars, for there was no "King's Service" before the accession of James 1 The four years 1596-99, furnish a fuller cluster of facts for the biography of the poet than occurs in any other part of his career, and this is the more satisfactory as he had then attained the acme both of his genius and his fortune,—an acme, however, not preceding decline, for he sustained the elevation to the last. As regards the annals of his art, it is in 1597-8 that Francis Meres furnishes the celebrated notice of his works and reputation, so often referred to, in his "Palladis Tamia," "Wit's Treasury" being the second part of "Wit's Commonwealth" "As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honeytongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c. "As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for tragedy and comedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labours Lost, his Love's Labours Won, his Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet. "As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speak with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin; so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English." An Epigram by Weever, published in 1599, must have been written about the same time,-it runs thus,―nt throughout very intelligibly. AD GULIELMUM SHAKESPEARE. Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue I swore Apollo got them and none other; Their rosy-tainted features clothed in tissue, Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother. Rose-cheekt Adonis with his amber tresses, Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her, Chaste Lucretia, virgin-like her dresses, Proud lust-stung Tarquin seeking still to prove her; Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not; Their sugar'd tongues and power attractive (qy. power-attractive) beauty Say they are saints, although that saints they show not, For thousand vows (qy. thousands vow) to them subjective duty. They burn in love, thy children, Shakespeare, let them : Go, woo thy muse! more nymphish brood beget them." It is conjectured, I think with probability, that the Love's Labours Won mentioned by Meres, is to be considered as another name for All's Well that Ends Well, as we know that Henry VIII. was acted with the secondary title of All is True. Reckoning the two parts of Henry IV. as two plays, and adding the three parts of Henry VI., two of which at least had been already printed, we have proximate dates for sixteen plays, and to these we may add The Taming of the Shrew, which, from internal evidence, cannot have been written at a later date. The prologue of Henry V. dates it in 1599, and at this point, therefore, we can bring history and biography into im mediate contact with the matters of fact they aim to represent. Richard II., Richard III. and Romeo and Juliet were printed in 1597, and Henry IV., Part I., and Love's Labours Lost the following year. In 1599, Romeo and Juliet was reprinted, corrected and augmented. In 1600, Henry IV., Part II., Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Henry V.; and Much Ado about Nothing; the two latter not in Meres's list. Most of these editions are sufficient and accurate, and some have distinct signs of having been printed from play-house copies, in accidental substitutions of actors' names, as in the stage direction, "Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio, and Jack Wilson," a transcript, it may be, of hakespeare's own handwriting. From this date edins of the new plays become rare, accurate editions rarer, and the players seem to have had an interest in keeping their copies for their exclusive use, and to have attended to it more carefully. Many of these better editions are without the author's name on the title-page, and thus without the stamp of his sanction. In 1597, the tendency of the London players to bring matter seditious and scandalous on the stage, was severely checked by menaces of suppression, and it was probably because so little of the threat was performed that Thomas Nash ventured to indulge his special vein in a play called the Isle of Dogs, of which no more is known than that in the performance the players, the Lord Admiral's men, added enough to make it still more offensive. Nash was arrested with others and sent to the Fleet, his papers seized, and the piece forbidden. Two houses, the Theatre and the Curtain, in Shoreditch, seem to have been particularly adventurous on this dangerous ground, though all the companies in the numerous London theatres were occasional transgressors. The sharp competition arising from numbers, probably acted as incitement to each to season their entertainments with salt that Shakespeare could afford to dispense with altogether. The year 1598, which witnessed the extinction of one great light of Elizabethan poetry, Spenser,-the cold obstructor of his mistress's favour, Burleigh, died the same year,—is the date of the earliest play of Ben Jonson, then in his twenty-fourth year, Every Man in his Humour. Rowe relates," that Shakespeare's acquaintance with Ben Jonson began with a remarkable piece of humanity and good nature.” Mr. Jonson, who was at that time altogether unknown to the world, had offered one of his plays to the players; it would have been rejected perhaps contemptuously but for Shakespeare, who "cast his eye upon it and found something so well in it as to engage him first o read it through, and afterwards to recommend Mr. Jonson and his writings to the public;" in other words, to cause the first essay to be represented, and to encourage more. This tradition might very easily in |