registering the response of the poet's imagination to the different masters of his art. "Titus Andronicus," if it came from Shakespeare's hand, betrays the influence of Marlowe; if this sanguinary drama is excluded from the canon of Shakespeare's dramas, then the reflection of Marlowe's powerful genius is to be found in "Richard II." and "Richard III." These plays were written a little later in time, but they belong within the first period of the poet's creative activity. Marlowe was then at the height of his fame and popularity, and Shakespeare could no more have escaped the spell of his splendid genius than a sensitive young poet of romantic temper in the decade between 1820 and 1830 could have escaped the influence of Byron. The three parts of "Henry VI.," with their series of pictorial tableaux, disclose the hold which the chronicle plays had taken upon Shakespeare's imagination.

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CALLED,

The comedy "Love's Labor's Lost" betrays the influence of John Lyly, and of his famous "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit," which appeared in London about the time Shakespeare left the Grammar School at Stratford. The writer was a young man of twenty-six THE FIRST years, a member of Magdalen College, Oxford, and extremely sensitive to the subtleties and refinements of sentiment and language. His talent was neither deep nor vital, but he was one of those fortunate men who arrive on the scene at the very moment when their gifts receive the most liberal reinforcement from the passion, the conviction, or the taste of the hour. Lyly had little to say, but he was a sensitive instrument ready to the hand of his time, and his time made the most of him. He made himself the fashion of the decade by fastening as if by instinct on its affectations, excesses, and eccentricities of taste. The Renaissance had made Europe, in intellectual interests at least, a com

Imprinted at London by W.W. for Cutbert Burby. 1598.

To

TITLE-PAGE BEARING SHAKESPEARE'S NAME munity; and intellectual impulses passed rapidly from one country to another. By virtue of her recovery of classical literature and of her creative energy, Italy was the leader of culture, the exponent of the new freedom and the higher taste. Italy men turned for the models and standards of literary art as, later, they turned to France for manners and dress. The Italians were still near enough to mediaval ways and habits to find delight in wiredrawn definitions, in distinctions so fine that they were almost invisible, and in allegories and symbolism. The schoolmen were quibblers by tradition and training, and quibbling passed on into polite society when the New Learning came, and

became the pastime and amusement of the cultivated and fashionable. Directness of speech went out of fashion; affectation of the most extreme type marked the man of superior refinement. Pedantry, quibbling, verbal juggling, the use of far-fetched similes and classical allusions, allegories and conceits, became the marks of elegance and culture. England, Spain, and France, eager to emulate the Italians in the newly opened field of scholarship and art, fastened, after the manner of imitators, upon the worst mannerisms of the Italians, imported them, and made them, if possible, more artificial and extravagant.

In every age, from the time of Surrey to that of Pater, English literature has shown the presence of a tendency to preciosity an overcurious study of words and a skill in using them somewhat too esoteric. In Shakespeare's youth this tendency was both a fashion and a pas sion, and John Lyly was its most successful exponent. He caught the rising tide, and was carried to a great height of popularity. "Euphues" was a romance with a minimum of story interest and a maximum of reflections on love, manners, and morals, written in a style which was in the last degree ornate, elaborate, highflown, and affected. There were no libraries or newspapers; books were few; the modern journal of fashion and welldiluted romance had not been born; time hung heavily on the hands of many wo

men.

Lyly knew his audience, and wrote for it with singular success. "Euphues," he wrote," "had rather lie shut in a lady's casket than open in a scholar's study." It found its way into a prodigious number of such caskets. The first part, originally published in 1579, was reprinted nine times in fifty years. The word Euphuism remains a lasting memorial of a tendency which was felt by nearly all the writers of Shakespeare's time, and which has left traces in all our later literature.

The Court found in this fastidious and extravagant style a highly developed language of homage and flattery, and men of affairs used it freely as poets. When Sir Walter Raleigh was forty years old and Queen Elizabeth sixty, the brilliant but unfortunate gentleman wrote these words from his cell in the Tower to Sir Robert Cecil: "While she was yet nigher at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or

three days, my sorrows were the less; but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess; sometime singing like an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all.”

There was much in Shakespeare's mind which not only made him sensitive to the attractions of Euphuism in certain of its aspects, but stimulated the play of his own ingenuity. When he gave free rein to his fancy, no writer surpassed him in quips, quibbles, conceits, puns, the use of images, allusions, and comparisons. He could be as whimsical, fantastic, and affected as the greatest literary fop of his time, and this not by way of satire but for his own pleasure. His earlier plays are often disfigured by this vicious verbal dexterity; mere jugglery with words, which has no relation to art. "Love's Labor's Lost was first published in Quarto form in 1598, with this title-page: "A Pleasant Conceited Comedy called Loues Labors Lost." Shakespeare's name appears for the first time on this title-page. The play was probably written several years earlier. It was played before the Queen during the Christmas festivities of 1597. It is a very characteristic piece of apprentice work; full of prophecy of the method of the mature dramatist, but full also of evidences of immaturity. evidences of immaturity. The young poet was trying his hand at comedy for the first time, and his keen perception of the extravagances, affectations, and foibles of London life had already supplied him with a fund of material for satiric portrayal of contemporary manners. The wealth of vitality and achievement which was characteristic of the age ran to all manner of excess and eccentricity of dress and speech. These were the most obvious aspects of the life he saw about him; its deeper issues were still beyond his experience. The quick eye of the young observer took in at a glance the brilliance and show of the age, the dress of which was rich and elaborate to the last degree. "We," says a contemporary English writer, "use many more colors than are in the rainbow; all

Queen read like fulsome flattery, but women of lesser rank received the same homage of exaggerated and high-flown tribute. This splendor of bearing, often forced and unnatural, marked the endeavor of the age to live on a level with the greatness of life as it was brought home to the imagination by heroic and romantic achievements. When she had become a wrinkled old woman, the Queen was discovered practicing a new dance-step in the solitude of her closet!

The plot of "Love Labor's Lost" is slight and of minor importance; its sources have not been discovered; the play lives in its dialogue and satire. The influence of Lyly is apparent not only in the extravagance and fastidiousness of speech which are satirized with ready skill, but in the give and take of the conversation and the quickness of repartee which first appeared in the English drama in Lyly's court plays.

In this comedy of manners Shakespeare makes admirable sport of the high-flown speech of the time, touching with a light but sure hand its ambitious pedantry in Holofernes, the fantastic excesses of the latest fashion in learning in Armado, and the perils of Euphuism, as he recognized them in his own art, in Biron, who probably speaks the poet's mind when he puts by forever

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical.

The youthfulness of the writer of the play is shown by the great preponderance of lines that rhyme, and by its marked lyrical character, which stamps it as the work of a brilliant poet rather than of an experienced dramatist. Three sonnets and a song are introduced, not because they are necessary parts of the drama, but because they are the natural forms of expression for a young poet; and Mr. Pater has called attention to the fact that the opening speech on the immortality of fame, spoken by the King, and the more striking passages spoken by Biron, have "something of the monumental style of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and are not without their conceits of thought and expression." The stock figures with which the stage was familiar are prominent in the play; the chief actors are sketched with a free hand rather than carefully drawn and

strongly individualized after the poet's later manner; and the play contains several characters which, in the light of later plays, are seen to be first studies of some of the most notable portraits of riper years. The note of youthfulness is distinct also in the extravagance of speech which runs through it, and which was not only satirical but full of attractiveness for the poet. Indeed, the comedy may be regarded as an attempt on the poet's part to free himself from artistic peril by giving his mind, on its dexterous side, full play. The early ripening of artistic instinct into artistic knowledge is evidenced by the discernment of the danger and the welldevised remedy. Biron interprets the young poet's self-consciousness as an artist clearly and decisively; he shows us Shakespeare's insight into the methods and means of securing the freest expression of his thought, and his deliberate selection of right approaches to his art and his deliberate rejection of the most seductive errors of his time. In this comedy his mind was at play; its natural agility, alertness, keenness, love of paradox, delight in the dexterous handling of words, were allowed full scope, and the disease of his time came fully to the surface and never again seriously attacked him. With his magical quickness of mental action and command of language, he might have succumbed to the temptation to be a marvelously keen and adroit manipulator of words instead of a great creative artist; he might easily have been a fastidious writer for experts in the bizarre, the curious, and the esoteric in style, instead of becoming the full-voiced, large-minded, deep-hearted poet of humanity. This peril he escaped by discerning it and, in the very act of satirizing it, giving his mind opportunity to indulge a passion which all men of artistic feeling shared. The play dealt more freely with contemporaneous events and was more deeply imbedded in contemporary conditions than any other of his dramas; for this reason it became very popular with Elizabethan audiences, but is the least interesting of Shakespeare's works to modern readers. There is in it a preponderance of the local and a minimum of the universal elements.

But Shakespeare could not satirize the extravagances and follies of his time without