latest edition of Shakespeare's plays, that of Professor Neilson in the American Cambridge Poets edition just mentioned, the editor has departed from the usual folio arrangement of the Comedies and the Tragedies, and has ventured to classify these according to content and to rearrange them in their presumed chronological order. In doing so he follows the traditional opinion that "Love's Labour's Lost" is Shakespeare's earliest Comedy. It may be so; but for a long time I have not been able to escape the feeling that much may be said for the "Comedy of Errors" being the first in point of time. Professor Baker, of Harvard, in his new book on Shakespeare's Growth as a Dramatist, places "Love's Labour's Lost" first and the "Comedy of Errors" later, on the ground of advance in dramatic structure. But this may easily be accounted for by the fact that in the "Errors" he was following an older construction, while "Love's Labour's Lost" is largely his own invention, and though later is structurally feebler, but in characterization is superior. In itself, it seems to me more natural that the dramatist in a first attempt should have followed older lines rather than have cut out for himself comparatively new paths.

Two plays of Plautus suggested the central episodes — the confusion of the two brothers, and the wife's dining with a stranger while the real husband beats in vain at the door outside for admittance. Upon this material seems to have been built the old play, the "Historie of Error," which Shakespeare used. Though this old play is known only by name and has long since disapppeared, we can almost tell what it contained. It was probably originally downright crude and rough farce, some traits of which have been still retained. What Shakespeare did, as usual, even in his earliest period, was to add new elements, heighten the dramatic appeal, smooth roughnesses, and tone down violations of taste and even of morals. The shrewish wife is probably softened from a vixen; the whole courtesan business, no doubt elaborated in the original, is very much condensed, even to the point of obscurity; a stroke of genius adds another pair of twin brothers- the servants Dromio-making the laughable confusion between the two pairs, even as to one another, intricate beyond belief. I am, too, inclined to think, as everything

moves in pairs, that the charming sister, the first of Shakespeare's sensible, well-balanced women, was also created and added by the dramatist as a foil to the wife and mate for the brother. To distinguish the play further from its old form of absolute farce there is introduced the framework of the separated parents and children reunited in the end a trait curiously enough revived and elaborated in all the latest plays of the dramatist's life: "Pericles," "Cymbeline," "Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest."

For the other two beginning comedies-"Love's Labour's Lost" and the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" - no original play is known to have existed. This, however, does not preclude the possibility of such older form, following the general method of work, and I am not sure that this was here also the case. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" there remains an echo of an older play, "Felismena," on a related subject. On the other hand, it may be said that perhaps in both these cases the dramatist tried to invent his own plots. Both plays deal incidentally with theories of right education - a young man's theories that you cannot educate away from Nature, but only in recognition and in restraint of Nature's forces. Each is founded. upon methods of the predecessors of Shakespeare - John Lyly and Robert Greene, respectively. "Love's Labour's Lost" is the best example in Shakespeare of the influence of Euphuism at the same time that it ridicules the extremes of Euphuism and preciosities of speech in the verbal extravagances of the preacher, the teacher, and the fantastical Spaniard- extravagances caught up and reflected ludicrously by the clown of the play. Alliterations, balanced forms of speech, word plays in great profusion, prose dialogue - all are in the manner of John Lyly-but the play echoes, too, other modes. The Spaniard is

A man in all the world's new fashion planted

That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.

But also the more serious and poetical portions of Biron and Rosaline, in the company of the King and Princess, are characterized by affectations:

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical.

Biron declares,

I do forswear them.

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd

In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.

Such a comedy is evidently no comedy of character, but a comedy of a young man's brilliant quips and words.

Controlled by the purists in speech, it has become the right sort of thing since Professor Clarence Child's admirable dissertation on "Euphuism," to limit the term specifically to the qualities and appearances in Lyly's work. But while we may well restrict the word to this special and technical sense, this usage has brought with it a considerable loss. There is needed another term to express the movement in English speech at the time a necessary and on the whole beneficial movement both in its added refinements and in its extravagances — a vogue which Shakespeare's play illustrates as well as condemns. In the broader and more generic sense, Shakespeare's play of "Love's Labour's Lost" is at once an excellent example of the traits of a very real movement in the history of English speech at its finest, and a ridiculing of the same thing at its worst. The very consciousness of this, further inclines me to give a slightly later date to the play than is customary—and so to make it the second, or even more probably, the third, rather than the first of Shakespeare's comedies. The play is important as bearing upon the future development of Shakespeare's art; but especially so as illustrative of the dramatist's susceptibility to the influences of the times.

No less does the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" show a similar following of a fashion. This play is Shaksepeare's first characteristically romantic play, as the wretched, but sweetly lyrical, Robert Greene had developed it before him. The reviewer in The Nation, of Mr. Churton Collins's new edition of Greene, has questioned Mr. Collins's statement of Shakespeare's indebtedness to Greene on the ground that it was nowhere to be proved. Maybe not. And yet I have long entertained the opinion that I found Mr. Collins holds, and must beg to dissent from the reviewers who demand mathematical demonstration. The romantic tangle of Love versus Friendship, the faithlessness and the

reconciliation, the disguises of the lady as a boy page (already to be found in Lyly), the Robin Hood-like outlaws, the absurdly weak ending - not caring how the play closed and who married whom, so long as the characters stood in pairs and effective groups for the ringing down of the curtain-all these are traits. which recall qualities of Greene's work and tell of a poetical Shakespeare near the beginning of his art. Robert Greene was too positive a genius and prominent a figure for as skillful an adapter as William Shakespeare, beginner, wholly to pass by. The beginnings of Shakespearean tragedy contain an even more instructive example of these origins. The Tragedy of Blood, so offensive to our nostrils and feeling, was a favorite product of Elizabeth's time. It was the physical as well as the psychical outcome of long decades of internecine war and religious persecution preceding Henry VIII's, Edward's, Mary's, and Elizabeth's reigns. Nor has the Anglo-Saxon mind ever wholly outgrown it. Our popular melodrama to-day-the-villainstill-pursued-her sort of plot-also the violent imaginings of children, even the background of a play like the much-talked-of "Great Divide," by Mr. Moody, are direct descendants and are of a kind It is of pirates on the high seas and scalping Indians, bold banditti, they play. This sentence, already penned, has found delightful confirmation in the children's extravaganza, "Peter Pan," by Mr. Barrie, as played for two seasons in New York by Miss Maude Adams. Its appeal is essentially based upon fundamental and universal traits. A tub of water may become the ocean and a few chips and splinters rival navies afloat. This is the explanation of the success of the penny-dreadful and the old-fashioned dime novel, now adulterated and, like many other food products, marked down to a nickel.

"Titus Andronicus" is the first pure tragedy associated with Shakespeare's name. In details it is an unrelieved story of bloodshed and cruelty and horror, after the manner of the old tragedies of Seneca, so popular in the mind of the Renaissance and so abhorrent to us of to-day. There is murder, revenge, supernatural agency, and all the paraphernalia of the species. To an unprepared mind, who does not know the type, the play is simply awful-it reeks with blood, and strong tastes must

these sixteenth century Englishmen have had to accept and digest such meat. Many have doubted that Shakespeare, who later shows such rare delicacy in handling disagreeable subjects, could possibly, even in the crude period of youth, have written "Titus Andronicus." Like Falstaff, they argue, his 'instinct' would have preserved him. But contrary to former opinions, which compared the play only with Shakespeare's later work, independent of its evolution and surroundings, it is now generally believed that "Titus Andronicus" is Shakespeare's in this sense: it is an old play worked over and given new form by him. Its very extravagances bear the hallmark of his early period. Do you wish a bloody tragedy? — and sporting Kyd and Kit Marlowe had made the species a fine thing of thrill and shudder, with suicide, murder, rape, and ghosts. Do you, too, want a bloody tragedy, he seems to say to his theatre manager, and break up the rival show across the street? I shall let the blood flow in gallons.

There was more than one old play on the subject. You observe the Roman title- for Englishmen flattered themselves by locating the scenes of horrible plays in other lands than their own. The dramatist subjects this material to the process already described. An old German version and a Dutch version have been discovered for the English actors were very popular on the Continent, in Holland and Germany and Austria, and carried these plays over with them. From these two Continental plays we can tell pretty well what the old play must have been like and what were Shakespeare's personal contributions. "The main features of the Shakespearean play which cannot be proved to have existed in the earlier dramas, are the rivalry between Saturninus and Bassianus for the throne, the funeral of Titus's sons killed in war; the sacrifice of Alarbus; the kidnapping of Lavinia by Bassianus, with the death of Mutius; the sending of young Lucius with presents to the sons of Tamora; and the banquet scene in III, ii, which appears only in the first folio and is perhaps a later addition"— (Neilson).

Leave out, if you can, in imagination, the foundation of the horrible plot which is not Shakespeare's. Accepting that - and there is proof that it was popular with strong Elizabethan tastes