is going to read Shakespeare has to face the whole facts of life, and, whether we like it or no, the record of these poems is of a piece with Shakespeare's work. Imagination is of two kinds. The one consists in presenting that which has no counterpart in life (as Spenser did when he described the Red Cross Knight's encounter with the dragon, as Milton did more gloriously in his account of Satan's journey through chaos) so vividly as to suspend the perception of its impossibility. The other consists in taking those common and familiar facts of humanity, the passions, and showing their effect in characters and circumstances so chosen as to display the full beauty and terror of which these familiar forces are capable. That is Shakespeare's method, based on the known, and no man could have brought, as he brought, the whole range of life into his work without a strong experience of the passions. Under the Shakespeare whom his contemporaries picture for us in casual phrases, gentle, urbane, and witty, there must have lain turbulent forces, capable of shaking the man's whole nature, as the men of more limited range, Milton, Scott, Tennyson, for example, were never shaken.

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What then we know of Shakespeare in addition to the scanty recorded facts of his life comes to this that we have evidence in the sonnets of a violent emotional strife through which he passed in middle life; and, further, that from the body of his plays as a whole, though they present no single character or situation which can be taken as autobiographic, emerges a broad perception of his personality. We know Shakespeare by his outlook on life, and we can trace that outlook in its different phases.

The first of his plays is, by general consent, Love's Labour's Lost, which stands in a class by

young man.

itself, being a satire on a local and contemporary affectation, the fantastic pastoralism of Sidney's Arcadia. It has the sharp, hard cleverness of a very Next come (in Mr. Lee's list, which may be accepted as nearest certainty) the Two Gentlemen of Verona, a slight and pretty comedy (much more human and less intellectual than its predecessor), and the Comedy of Errors, a broad farce. Then in 1592 we reach Romeo and Juliet. Nothing in Shakespeare is more beautiful, and it breathes the very spirit of youth. But Shakespeare was eight and twenty when he wrote it, and already the spirit of middle age stands looking through the author's eyes at the madness of lovers. Mercutio is the first of a long list of similar characters, all of them added by Shakespeare to his borrowed stories, and all of them essentially humorists and lookers-on, though interwoven with the action. Mercutio dies indeed, that you may see how a man can die with humour.

Mer. No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve; ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o' both your houses. 'Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death, a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.

But, broadly speaking, in the plays before Hamlet the humorous scenes are kept apart from tragic issues; later, humour interpenetrates and blends with the very blackness of tragedy itself.

After Romeo and Juliet comes a great series of chronicle plays; first, the three parts of Henry VI., in which Shakespeare is only seen as the reviser of other men's work; then the two Richards and King John, written in discipleship to Marlowe. 1593 also is placed Titus Andronicus, probably a

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revision, and only in part Shakesperian, but still recalling Marlowe. In 1594, perhaps before John was finished, begins the wonderful series of romantic comedies with The Merchant of Venice, Midsummer-Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, and The Taming of the Shrew follow in quick succession; and then the years from 1595 to 1598 are taken up with the still greater achievement of Henry IV. and Henry V., historical plays differentiated sharply from those which came before by the importance of the comic element. They are leavened with Falstaff's laughter.

In the middle of this period comes a comedy or farce standing in a class by itself, The Merry Wives of Windsor-a play written to order. Elizabeth, like everyone else in London probably, was enchanted with the fat knight, and Elizabeth demanded to see Falstaff in love. She could command the play, but she could not command the artist's invention: Falstaff of the Merry Wives is not the Falstaff who dominates both parts of Henry IV., though not so as to eclipse the Prince's admirable figure; and who is, up to 1600, Shakespeare's most characteristic achievement. For the most characteristic attribute of Shakespeare, at least on the masculine side of his nature, is humour, and Falstaff is the comic spirit incarnate in a vast of flesh.

It is necessary, if we are to talk about Shakespeare at all, to realise something of what is meant by humour. Humour, however indefinable, is certainly a complex habit of mind which involves always a double vision-a reference from the accepted standards to a sense of proportion which is private and personal. It can laugh when the world laughs; for instance, Falstaff the paunchy knight "larding the lean earth as he walks along,

humour of Falstaff in stands by the hacked "There's honour for The humorist has no

is laughable enough when he sweats across the field of battle. But this is not the mirth dearest to the humorist; it finds too large an outlet in laughter; it does not hang about the brain, inextricable from the processes of thought. For, as tears help to an assuaging of grief, so in a sense laughter makes an end of mirth, and the true battle shows itself when he body of Sir Walter Blunt. you! here's no vanity!" craving for "such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath"; to him "the better part of valour is discretion." So far you laugh with Falstaff, and laugh at him; that is the comic humour. But push the process a little farther, see all life through this vision with the double focus, and you come upon that strange blending of tears and laughter, in thoughts which lie too deep for either, which is the true Shakespearian humour. And it is notable that the first place where this faculty reaches its full range is in the description of Falstaff's death.

Bard. Would I were with him, wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or hell.

Host. Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. A' made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child; a' parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields. "How now, Sir John," quoth I: "what man, be o' good cheer." So a' cried out, "God, God, God," three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a' should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.

Such a faculty is not indeed inconsistent with the heroic character, and Prince Hal never loses it, not even on the throne. Nor are any of Shakespeare's personages destitute of humour, except

those like Dogberry or Polonius, specially created to be made laughable by lack of it. But the man who is humorist first and last, who can never see with the single eye, has a strange rôle when Fate casts him for the heroic part; and that is the case of Hamlet. A little thought will show that Falstaff and Hamlet are near of kin, nearer perhaps than any two characters in Shakespeare; and each of them is in his own way the man born to be looker-on and commentator at the spectacle of life. It is, perhaps, more than a fancy to say that in these two personations we come nearer than elsewhere to a presentment of Shakespeare himself; and that the plays might have been written by Hamlet and Falstaff in collaboration. At all events, once Hamlet has been created, the jester and the tragedian may at times separate, but they are never far apart; and for the very highest effects they operate together. Lear in the hovel, apostrophising the joint stool which stands to him for Goneril, might move laughter if pity were less urgent; it is the last touch of tragedy when sorrow grows grotesque.

Hamlet was not the first of the plays in which the dramatist changed his attitude towards the world. After Henry V. came a return to the "birdhaunted places" of Shakespeare's invention, thickets alive with song. He wrote in two years Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and then turned his hand to a very different theme to the austere

tragedy of Julius Caesar, the only one of his plays, apart from the English chronicles, in which love is no leading force. Then in 1602 came Hamlet, followed in 1603 by Troilus and Cressida; in 1604 Othello and Measure for Measure, in 1606 Macbeth, Lear in 1607, in 1608 Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra. 1609 closes the series at once of tragedies and historical plays with Coriolanus.