Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra, as types, generic of a class. We mean Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra themselves, portrayed in all their complexity. Your lesser writers, even of as great magnitude as Charles Dickens, deal in types. But Divinity creates the individual, and can go no farther.

From this point of view in our English literature, perhaps Chaucer alone approaches most nearly to the first great class of poets, makers or creators. The tragedy of "Troilus and Criseyde' stirred with profound pity through its story of unhappy love two hundred years before "Romeo and Juliet." For I still must adhere rather to Professor Price's delicate interpretation printed ten years ago in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, than accept the attempt of Professor Cook, of Yale, at a recent meeting of this Association, at an extreme modification of this view, where Chaucer's Criseyde was reduced to a mere wanton. It seems to me that this latter conception leaves out the very thing in dispute - the literary quality - the delicacy of insight, the interpretative power of a master-poet. I think we may accept, too, that the dramatic genius that created the Wife of Bath was not only of a high order, but not far below that which produced Falstaff himself.

In other literatures, whom shall we name? Some deny this first great position to Dante, the chief poet of medievalism, as too subjective and egoistic despite all his populating of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Many likewise deny the first of all positions to Milton, the creator of Satan; although a very good friend of mine, and a great lover of poetry, places him at the head of all English poetry. The answer depends not a little on our conception of what poetry is or should be, and the place of the made epic in its relation to the drama in literary art.

The lyric singers with their outbursts of the glorified Me are in still another class - except in the Hebrew Psalter, where the worship of Jehovah lifts the speaker and singer far beyond himself into the heights of a glorified ecstasy.

Shall we include Molière, who has best expressed the racial genius of the French people? Shall we then name the German Goethe, who a hundred years before anticipated so much of the critical and scientific intellectual habit of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries? Shall we name the lone figure of Don Quixote in Spanish literature, the contemporary of Falstaff, lingering between the eve of mediævalism and the dawn of modernity, which laughed Spain's chivalry away? Diverse answers may come from different sources.

The great difference in the present approach to Shakespeare from that of former days is the contributory light which is thrown upon him. The poet is studied not only for and in himself, but in the light of his predecessors and contemporaries, and these in view of a world movement. This does not mean any the less intimate study of the poet's work in and for itself; but a wider knowledge, a greater intelligence, and larger sympathies have become associated with that closer study. We wonder no less at the intellectual power and poetic imagination which produced the work; but we are able to trace better the normal processes by which that genius developed. Shakespeare becomes removed from the position of a fetich, and is chiefly the constructive artist working in a dramatic medium.

We do not expect to find a great mountain peak rising isolated out of a low-lying plain, but approached by a broken and undulating country. Shakespeare had his predecessors like Lyly, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe; contemporaries like Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Middleton, Heywood and Dekker; followers like Massinger and Webster. The Elizabethan age was one of intense poetic and dramatic activity. Coming after the physical and mental unrest of the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary, it was one of rich, full, pulsating life. This corresponding movement in literature found its best expression in dramatic form. Everybody seemed to be a dramatist, as in our degenerate days everybody has written fiction. And Shakespeare was the highest fulfillment of this best expression of the life and thought of his day. Or to state it differently in a sentence somewhat adapted: The greatest glory of England is her literature, and the greatest glory of her literature is its poetry, and the greatest glory of her poetry is its dramatic rather than its epic and lyric triumphs; and the greatest dramatist among this set of remarkable men who have been too far unknown to the general reader-is Shakespeare.

But let us leave externals and come to a discussion of the plays themselves. We know well that Shakespeare did not invent new forms, any more than he usually invented his plots. He merely transcended other men's work by the power, glow, and vigor of his imagination. Before Shakespeare there were comedies like Lyly's, stilted and affected though they were; there were Chronicle or History Plays like Peele's "Edward I," Greene's "James IV," Marlowe's "Edward II," and the anonymous "Edward III;" Romantic Plays, again like Greene's "James IV;" examples of bombast like Peele's "Battle of Alcazar," Greene's "Alphonsus of Arragon" and Marlowe's "Tamburlaine;" Tragedies of Blood like Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy" and Marlowe's "Jew of Malta." Before Shakespeare wrote "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece" there were narrative poems like those of Spenser, Lodge's "Glaucus and Scilla," Daniel's "Complaint of Rosamond," and Marlowe's "Hero and Leander." Before Shakespeare's essays in the Sonnet, there had been not only Wyatt and Surrey, who introduced the form to English literature, but Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," long the model for a sonnet sequence on unhappy love, with its countless imitators.

It is well, too, to remember the tremendous influence of the Continental literatures on the Elizabethan, for it is only by degrees that we have come to realize the importance of their study as bearing on this subject. In an age of travel accompanying the Revival of Letters and the Renaissance, England knew French and Italian literatures fairly well, and not a little of the more remote Spanish and German. Latin - however carelessly learned and used — was still the universal tongue of the school and of all education; and Greek had begun to exert its influence on the universities. Most of these influences met in greater or less degree, directly or indirectly, in Shakespeare, as the creature of his age. So vividly Italian does the dramatist seem at times that some think he must have visited Italy — the Northern Italy of Lombardy and Venetia, of Milan and Verona and Mantua and Padua and Venice. He does not describe so closely the Italy further South - Tuscany, Rome, and the Two Sicilies. The French conversations in "Henry V," and French phrases and sentences scattered through the plays, make it probable that

their author knew a sort of Anglo-French, picked up in the streets and taverns of London which still held close relations with the neighboring French coast. He did not know German. I recall now only one German expression in the plays: "Lustique, as the Dutchman says," in "All's Well," II, iii, 37.

He must have known of Lyly's Latin Accidence which he ridiculed in the "Merry Wives," and have read some of the stories of Ovid and picturesque portions of Vergil - tale-tellers who were favorites during the Middle Age and far into the period of the Renaissance. Perhaps, too, he was acquainted somewhat with Livy, the popular Latin historian, and naturally had read a play or two of Plautus and of Seneca, in a day of classical imitative impulse. A Stratford Grammar School-boy would at least know something of Latin, if he knew anything. There were then no courses to divert his attention like our present day English, History, and Higher Mathematics in American preparatory schools, the examinations in which, for entrance to college, I am sure Shakespeare could not have passed.

We can now better understand how Shakespeare entered upon his career of dramatist. Becoming connected somehow with the theatre, he practised his 'prentice hand in working over old plays. He doubtless at first attempted no more than to make a play go better and be more actable - attract a bigger public, and bring more silver into the receipt-box. He must have turned instinctively to scenes which contained dramatic possibilities and have developed those, perhaps leaving many portions of the old play as it was. At length, while still making use of older material, whether in a crude play already existing or in a storybook, he seized upon the dramatic possibilities of a situation and of a character, and wrote the play from start to finish. Yet, never did the dramatist give up his early habit of helping out an old play and making it more probable by touching up certain scenes or rewriting them entirely afresh, leaving the rest of the play to some colleague. It was a method perhaps inseparable from the theatrical exigencies of the day. This seems the best way to explain at later and very different stages of his work the inequalities and deficiencies in such a variety of plays as "The Taming of the Shrew," "Timon of Athens," "Pericles," and

perhaps "Henry VIII." It is extremely doubtful that "The Two Noble Kinsmen," the first act of which some have supposed to be Shakespeare's and the rest continued and completed by John Fletcher, is in any part Shakespeare's at all.

Not enough has yet been investigated concerning this connection of Shakespeare's plays with his predecessors and his contemporaries, and with much of the older Elizabethan and Continental material. The dramatist in the past has been studied too far by himself and for himself. A beginning, however, is being made and a better opportunity offered, by the new editions of Elizabethan dramatists and contemporary documents undertaken by the Oxford and Cambridge and other Presses.

Nearly all the first plays of Shakespeare had prototypes: a ground plan that the dramatist worked upon. There was an old play on the victories of Talbot over the French, retold in "I Henry VI." There were old plays on the bloodshedding in the Wars of the Roses, recounted in "II and III Henry VI;" more than one old play, indeed, existed on the popular conception of the hump-backed, bloody Richard III. Plautus had an old play, the Menæchmi, on the confusion of two brothers; on this seems to have been built an old Elizabethan play, "The Historie of Error;" and this in turn became the ground work for Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors." An old double play, “The Troublesome Raigne of King John" in ten acts, or two parts, was the basis of Shakespeare's single play of "King John.' There was possibly an older play on the subject of the deposed King "Richard II," and a wretched piece, "The Famous Victories of Henry V," suggested points to all three plays containing Prince Hal: both parts of "Henry IV" and "Henry V." Maybe there was an older play on Shylock, the Jew of Venice. Beyond question an older play explains much that is otherwise inexplicable in the Tragedy of Blood, "Titus Andronicus." There was an older "Hamlet" play with the ghost and all the other disturbing improbabilities, and it has been guessed, with some degree of assurance, that the writer of this old play was Thomas Kyd, the author of "The Spanish Tragedy."

I emphasize this phase of Shakespeare's early work, because it is just here that the most insoluble problems occur in connec